joe.. thank you. .i am not an ordinary run of the mill art teacher joe... my teaching of art is zen like...you better believe me.. .did you take me to be some ordinary run of the mill art teacher? how many art teacher have you experienced? i had swedish exchange students one time for a year from sweden.. they were amazed the way i taught art...and delighted.. let us say i showed then the way to golden flower..art is about seeing and then seeing again take care cousin joe..lest my blood "boileth" over and i rise in fury and clap you over the head make no assumption of me i am not as you suspected my zen my zen... i will not be told you assume i had no teacher? what if i say to you i am my own teacher..in art and in zen so take it easy cousin joe sleep easy and stick to what you know in the night sky would i dare to question your observations : no i respect you i know less about the night sky however art especially art teaching that is all zen in my books and as edgar says reality merle
Merle, Why a Duck? The miracles of Nature include miracles of People. Some people who have realized their nature are remarkably, miraculously, good at assisting others to do as they have done, even if not in exactly the same way. They may have worked on koans, but they can still teach you shikantaza, for example. Or bowing. Did you ever help students in painting? Maybe you did not have them do EXACTLY what you did to get to your peak capability. It's not that there are "instructions", as you put it. But experience carries a lot of value in guiding neophytes, and the neophytes recognize the real thing when they see it. So do old-timers. A zen teacher is not quite the same as an art teacher: the art teacher teaches you how to DO (if you are lucky); the Zen teacher teaches how to DO, but then takes away your pride in doing, and has you do again. Before you know it, you realize that the teacher has enabled your candle to melt all the way down to your feet and touch the ground, and suddenly, I mean SUDDENLY, you wake up, and there's no pride, but everything is yours, everything is you. You may give the teacher a good slap, for treating you as a child, and not TELLING! you about this, and then you take your licking, too, because fair's fair. All you both can do then is laugh, ...and greet each other for the first time. Had she told you about this, it would not have happened. You then have nothing but gratitude, and you devote your life to being honest about this, always. You are not stingy about helping others practice or continue, but you don't spill the beans. This is not an Intellectual endowment that we are born with. But we come from the womb fully formed, fully endowed. A teacher helps the many-years'-worth of accumulated trail-dust and road-tar to drop away, when we are ready, if we meet such a teacher. We still need lots of luck, and that luck improves by our investing a lot of sweat. The teacher does so, too. Funny, that the most natural thing and original thing should take the most sincere, pitched effort to realize or awaken to; but it would appear that that's only natural, too. And so it is. Such are Human beings. And they make good teachers. your own Cousin, --Joe > Merle Lester <merlewiitpom@...> wrote: > > bill!..you are obsessed with instructions from some one else: why? because > that is the way you did this..so we all flow with you? > > why a teacher?.... are we not all teachers unto to ourselves?...
