When the Student is Ready . . .

This is a lesson that took me a long time to figure out. Hopefully, this post will save you the time and effort and you can learn on my dime.

There is an old Zen saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

I always thought that this meant that there was something extra-special about guru-like teachers, that they would somehow magically sense when a student on the path of spiritual wisdom was ready and and then they would just appear and bestow their words of wisdom.

I was wrong. What this saying really means is that, when the student is ready, then he/she will recognize the teacher that was always there.

We hear instructional or guiding words everyday, from people we know, from the radio or TV, from the Internet, from books we read, and so forth. And most of the time our brains go "yeah, heard it before" or "that's so stupid" or "whatever!"

But then there comes a time when we hear an expression or phrase that we've heard 1,000 times before, and our brains go, "Whoa! Wait a second! Now I understand what that really means! Gee, that changes my whole level of understanding."

And we get a little paradigm shift.

The teacher has "appeared."