This is the fourth piece in The Gifts of Separate Realities. The last one was about the place in you that doesn’t know. This one is about who you expect to learn from.
You are in the front row of a talk by someone you admire. You have a notebook open, and you write down nearly every sentence, because each one sounds like it might be the one that changes everything.
On the way home, someone says something in passing. A child, a neighbour, the person behind the counter. Nothing profound, just a remark. And something falls into place that the whole talk didn’t touch.
Nothing is wrong with you for the notebook, or for being surprised. It is what anyone would expect who believes that insight comes from where someone stands.
It doesn’t. And once that is seen, two habits turn out to be one. Putting someone on a pedestal and dismissing someone as having nothing to teach you are the same mistake. Both rank people by how much they could give you.
Nobody can give you an insight. It comes up inside you, from the same place in everyone. So there is nobody above you, nobody below you, and you never know who it will be.
The same mistake twice
The pedestal says: she has more of it than I do, so I had better stay close.
The dismissal says: he has nothing I need, so I can stop listening.
They feel like opposites, one generous and one cold. But look at what they share. Both measure people by level. Both assume the insight is somewhere inside the other person, more of it in some and less in others, and that the job is to get near the ones who have the most.
The pedestal and the dismissal are the same mistake.
And both cost the same thing. While you are busy ranking, you are listening to your idea of where someone stands instead of to what is actually happening in you.
A level playing field
Every reality, the teacher’s and the beginner’s and the one belonging to someone who has never heard of any of this, is made the same way. Through Thought, from the same formless source, moment by moment. Nobody is standing closer to it. Nobody has a better connection.
What differs is only what people happen to be seeing right now. And that can change for anyone, at any moment, without warning and without qualifications.
That is the whole basis of the level ground. Not that everyone is equally wise in every moment. They clearly aren’t. It is that wisdom has the same address in every human being, and nobody holds a key the rest of us lack. Their health is the same health as yours, under whatever they are living.
You never know who it will be
You can’t see inside anyone’s reality. You have never once been in one. So you never know what is in there, and you never know what their words are about to set off in you.
That is why the remark on the way home worked. Not because the neighbour secretly knew more than the speaker. Because the insight was never going to come from either of them. It came up in you, the way every insight has, and a passing remark happened to be the moment it did.
Anyone can be the occasion. Nobody has ever been the source.
So the most useful thing anyone has ever said to you might come from the colleague you avoid, or your youngest child, or a stranger you will never see again. There is no way to know in advance, and no need to.
What you can know is where it will happen when it does. Inside you, where wisdom has always been. That never changes, whoever is talking.
Your own pedestal too
The same thing works in the other direction.
If people have put you on a pedestal, you can step off it. There is nothing to live up to, because you were never the source of anything anyone saw.
And if you have been standing at the bottom, waiting to catch up with people who seem further along, there is nothing to catch up on. You are standing on the same ground they are. You always were.
But some people really do know more
If you need an operation, you want the surgeon who trained for fifteen years, not the person behind the counter. That is not a pedestal. It is common sense.
Knowledge and skill are real, and they differ enormously between people. A good teacher knows a great deal, and some point far more clearly than others. Respecting that is sound.
What is level is not what people know. It is where insight comes from. Knowledge can be handed over, written down, passed on. Insight can’t. And insight is the thing the pedestal was always about.
What this is not
It isn’t disrespect for teachers, or a reason to stop going to talks, or a claim that every opinion is as good as every other. You can sit in the front row and be deeply grateful to the person speaking. Gratitude needs no pedestal.
And it isn’t something to practice, like reminding yourself that everyone is equal. It follows from seeing where insight comes from. Once that is seen, the ranking simply stops having anything to rank.
The notebook is still in your bag, full of sentences.
The remark is still with you too, the one nobody meant to say.
They came from different people. They landed in the same place.
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The small book is The Gifts of Separate Realities, and it is free. The long way round, where the fact under all of this is laid out in full, is Reality Is an Inside Job.