We start our lives trying to be teachers; it is very hard to learn to be a pupil.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
The principal teaching of Sufism is that of learning to become pupils, for it is pupils who have a chance of becoming teachers, and once people consider that they are teachers, their responsiveness is gone. The greatest teachers of the world have been the greatest pupils.
We often start our lives as teachers, and then it is hard to become a pupil. From childhood on we start to teach our parents. There are seldom souls who have more inclination for pupilship than for teaching, and there are many whose only difficulty in life is that they are teachers already. Humanity thinks that perhaps their reading or study of different religions and doctrines has qualified them and made them capable to understand the Truth and to have the Knowledge of God, but they forget that there is only One Teacher, and that is God. We all are pupils, and what we can do in life is to qualify ourselves to become true pupils.
It should be remembered that all the great teachers of humanity, such as Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad and Zarathushtra, have been great pupils; they have learned from the innocent child, they have learned from everyone, from every person that came near them. They have learned from every situation and every condition of the world. They have understood and they have learned. It is the desire to learn continually that makes one a teacher, and not the desire to become a teacher. As soon as we think, ‘I am something of a teacher,’ we have lost ground. For there is only One Teacher: God alone is the Teacher, and all others are God’s pupils. We all learn from life what life teaches us. When a soul begins to think that it has learned all it had to learn and that now it is a teacher, it is very much mistaken. The greatest teachers of humanity have learned from humanity more than they have taught.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Because being a pupil is not a kind of learning, it is a surrender. Until self is surrendered one cannot learn from another. So long as one holds on to self, the door is shut before all other selves, whether it is the nufs of a human, animal, plant, rock, thought of anything in the heavens above or in the earth below. All this is shut out beyond a certain point.
When this nufs is restrained, all vibrations convey to the heart all that the heart needs. This is the beginning of being a pupil, yet after years of meditation and prayer, one does not always attain to the heart condition or sustain it. At the same time, pain or love or sorrow can bring it all in an instant.