01 January 2018

To be a student

(We begin the year, as is our tradition, with a discussion of how to be a student of the path.)

The difficulty on the path is what comes from ourselves. People do not like to be pupils, they like to be teachers. If they only knew that the greatness and perfection of the great ones, who have come to this world, was in their pupilship and not in teaching! The greater the teacher, the better pupil he was. Such a teacher learned from everyone.


No idea can be called one's own. All ideas have been learned from one source or another, but in time one comes to think they are one's own, yet all the time they keep one's cup covered up from further knowledge. The first thing to be learned is to understand how to uncover one's cup, that is, how to become a pupil. What are one's (preconceived) ideas? They are just collected knowledge. This should be unlearned.

-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

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