Serge Benhayon – restoring truth to the term teacher
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Serge Benhayon – restoring truth to the term teacher
When did the term ‘to teach’ turn from ‘to reflect, point out or demonstrate’, to ‘impart knowledge upon, deliver what is not known or improve someone’?
When did a ‘teacher’ turn from ‘one who holds all as equal, reflects what is already known and inspires one to remember through living example’, to ‘one who knows more, one who has what you have not, one you must follow’?
This said with all due respect to teachers, for they must feel the pressure of the expectations of a student’s demand of the teaching. To know and deliver more than what the student knows; the student thirsty for knowledge, hungry to be filled with what they think they need to know and believe they don’t know. Just like doctors feeling the pressure from patients that demand the doctor know more about their body and state of wellbeing than they do themselves, even though it is the patients who live in their body 24/7, and not the doctor. These two pairs complicit in the same deceptive dance of disempowerment – a game that promotes and justifies divisiveness, comparison and competition.
Teaching and adding something more
As a teacher you are bound by the syllabus, but there is another essential ingredient that your students need.
There have been many teachers in my life. They fell into one or more of the following: those who challenged me to question, beckoned me to follow, tried to persuade me of their beliefs, enticed me with flattery, tantalized me with their mystic knowledge, played on my sympathy for the downtrodden, fed off my craving to know more, convinced me to see life their way, exploited my self doubts, and dined on my willingness to put them above me. And I lapped it up. Just as the aforementioned pairs, I was just as complicit in this game, feasting equally on the comforts and justifications it brought.
I honed this game most explicitly during my 5 years in Japan under a Japanese Master. I was firmly instructed during my studies that no matter how far I rose, from kouhai (junior) to senpai (senior), I was always to remain one skin under the sensei (teacher). Know your place, your senior always knows more and your teacher always knows most. There was comfort in this system of relationships; your position was known, it satisfied the need to belong. There was a mutual understanding of what your role required, whether it was to look up and give reverence to, or alternately look upon as in need of guidance. You didn’t need to worry about where you stood, you needn’t worry about losing your position should you stray, these relationship positions were for the duration that you were in contact, and you were to honour them without question.
But in all those years under teachers, leading up to and during that experience in Japan, I dealt with nothing and buried much, under a suppression of expression required to maintain your place that eventually led to blind reverence and unquestioning subservience.
I gave myself over in the end to what I was convinced was a dissolving of self, but in fact I came to later discover I had been fortifying my ‘self’ as an island the more I took on the role of a ‘good’ student.
Then the most uncomfortable, incredible and exposing blessings in my life occurred; I was introduced to Serge Benhayon, and through him the Ageless Wisdom. And when I say through him, I mean a wisdom reflected through his very living way. The discomfort was nothing of the kind that previous teachers had imposed with their assertions, whether subtle or blatant, that they knew and would always know more than me. This discomfort came from standing with someone who stood ‘with’ you as an equal and accepted nothing less of you. He did not play the game.
I recall so desperately seeking to impose upon this Teacher, whose calibre I had never witnessed the likes of before, the roles I was so entrenched in... “You teacher, you more”, “Me student, me less”. Serge was having none of it then, and he has none of it now, 10 years on, not from me, not from anyone seeking to place him upon a pedestal, seeking to submit themselves as his follower, nor as his devotee or devoted Senpai (senior student). He refuses all of it – he refuses to condone any state of less or contraction you attempt to place yourself in. He does not play the game.
How easy it would be for Serge as a Teacher of an Ageless Wisdom that reminds you of the expansive, all-encompassing love that you are and are held in, to take advantage of one’s increased vulnerability and awe of someone choosing to live this love so consistently. But that has never been his way.
Instead this Teacher – the World Teacher in the true sense of the word – has chosen to live the ultimate responsibility of remaining steadfast in his commitment to reflect who we truly are, where we are from, the purpose of why we are here and where we are going. And he does this regardless of the contracted, protective, defensive reactions his reflection exposes in our choices.
Serge Benhayon has restored truth to the term teacher once more. He lives his words, walks his talk and loves with a beholding love that is endless and all encompassing.
The true intelligence of the great teachers is an alignment
Sharing the true intelligence and energetic responsibility that is known and lived by the great teachers.
His presence melts any sense of hierarchical system of better and less than. He is beyond patient, rather he holds an understanding so vast and timeless he reminds you of how much more than human we are. He always reflects that the reverence you pay him is the same as paying reverence to yourself, or paying reverence to God.
He teaches, he reflects, he reminds, he inspires that we are all One, are from the One, are all The One and are all knowing Masters returning to a conscious awareness of who we always have been. Now that is a True Teacher.
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Teachers, Education, Empowerment
