Corresponding Manual for Teachers Section
Chapter 1: The Plan of the Teachers
3. What Are the Levels of the Divine’s Teacher-Student Relationship?
The Teachers of the Divine have no set teaching levels. Each awakening teaching-learning situation involves a different relationship at the beginning, although the ultimate goal is always the same: to allow the relationship to become a holy relationship, in which everyone involved can behold the Children of the Divine as innocent and perfect.
A Teacher of the Divine can learn from everyone, so they can teach everyone. However, from a practical point of view they cannot meet everyone, nor can everyone find them. Therefore, the Plan includes very specific contacts to be made for each Teacher of the Divine. There are no accidents in the Divine’s Plan of Awakening. Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship. They are ready for each other.
The simplest level of teaching appears to be quite superficial. It consists of what seem to be very casual encounters, such as a “chance” meeting of two apparent strangers in an elevator; a child who is not looking where they are going running into an adult “by accident;” or students who happen to walk home from class together. These are not random encounters. Each of them has the potential for becoming an awakening teaching-learning situation. Perhaps the seeming strangers in the elevator will smile to one another. Perhaps the adult will not scold the child for bumping into them. Perhaps the students will become friends. Even at the level of the most casual encounter, it is possible for two people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment. That moment will be enough. The Light of awakening has come.
It may be difficult to understand that actual levels of teaching and learning the universal Curriculum of awakening, as if such levels are fundamentally different from each other, is a concept as meaningless in Reality as is time. The illusion of the latter permits the illusion of the former. In time, the Teacher of the Divine seems to begin to fundamentally change their mind about the world with a single decision, and then they learn more and more about the new direction as they teach it. This Manual has discussed the illusion of time already, but the illusion of levels of teaching and learning may seem to be something different. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate that such levels cannot exist in truth is simply to say that every aspect of an awakening teaching-learning situation is part of the Divine’s Plan for Atonement, and Its Plan can have no levels, being a Reflection of the Divine’s Will. Awakening is always ready and always there. The Divine’s Teachers seem to work at different levels, but the result is always the same.
Each teaching-learning situation toward awakening is maximal in the sense that each person involved will learn the most that they can from the other person at that time. In this sense, and in this sense only, we can speak of levels of teaching. Using the term in this way, the second level of the teaching and learning of awakening’s lessons is a more sustained relationship, in which, for a time, two people enter into a fairly intense teaching-learning situation, and then appear to separate. As with the first level, these meetings are not random, nor is what appears to be the end of the relationship a real ending. Again, each has learned the most they can at the time. Yet all who meet will someday meet again, for it is the destiny of all relationships to become holy. The Divine makes no mistakes about Its Children.
The third level of teaching occurs in relationships that, once they are formed, are lifelong. These are teaching-learning situations in which each person is brought together with a chosen learning partner who presents them with unlimited opportunities for learning awakening. These relationships are generally few, because their existence implies that those involved have simultaneously reached a stage in which the teaching-learning balance is actually ideal. This does not mean that they necessarily recognize this. In fact, they generally do not. They may even be quite hostile to each other for some time, and perhaps for life. Yet should they decide to learn it, the perfect Atonement Lesson is before them and can be learned. And if they decide to learn that Lesson, they become the awakeners of the teachers who falter and may even seem to fail. Every Teacher of the Divine must succeed in finding the Help they need.
