Mr Adie and a School Teacher

This is from a meeting of Thursday 19 March 1986. Amy was a school teacher. She said that on Tuesday she had had an intention and a plan. She was marking students’ books, which always makes her tense, and although she remembered some of the stops, she was still often tense at the stop.

“Did you recall at the time that you had appointed?” asked Mr Adie.

“Sometimes”, Amy replied. “But I get very tense at having to read the students’ work, and I am thinking: “Why can’t they make an effort?” But then I decided to try and put myself in the position of the students, and that allowed me to be calmer, while I was marking. In the afternoon, I was marking an untidy book, and I came to myself, and found a lot of tension in my stomach – ”

Amy stopped in mid-sentence. There was a pause, before Mr Adie enquired: “What from this? Did it bring you anything?”

There was another pause.

“It brought you this,” said Adie: “that when you were doing it, you remembered. Something. Intermittently. That’s a big thing, not little. You were actually encouraged to be present, to a certain extent. Not enough to stop your being negative, but enough so that you could notice, at least. Very important to keep a track of what really happens. If I don’t see that then I really haven’t learnt anything, I haven’t really been there. You were there to that extent. There was a sort of chorus going on, but again, this has been seen, and the more you see, the more you can taste it.”

“You’ll still have to make an effort at understanding, too. Otherwise you lose everything. Now you have to go on.”

Amy added that one particular class had been irritating. “They seem vile to me”, were her very words, “because they can’t learn”.

“Yes, but now what is important about that? What is important about what you said?”

“Just the fact that I dismissed them as being hopeless?” Amy was tentative.

“Just the fact that you are taken by something negative. That is what you become. In that state, with that talk going on in your head: “they’re just vile”, you are nothing better than a sort of criticism. You are in this world, and you have a job to help them, but you cannot help them in that way, with negative criticism. From their point of view, that costs them everything. They are damaged by this sullen criticism.”

“See what the matter is: you expect them to do work which they cannot do.”

“They are not in a position to change what they are.”

“You cannot discharge your job properly, so how can you expect them to learn?”

“Try and understand the position: your negative criticism is a part of the reality. If that were different perhaps they could be different, too. You need two perspectives simultaneously. There is a level which is free from that rubbish, a level above formatory thought, in which feeling can enter, and thought and feeling are closer together. Then, you might be able to drop the negative emotions, and even use a little beneficial influence.”

“If you had your feeling of yourself, then rather than justifying this dislike, you would be free to try different ways, to adopt different strategies. See? This would be incidental to your inner work. It is not your primary aim: your primary aim, the first thing, is your being-state, knowing that if you do that, the education of the children will be a good second, and a good second will be much better than when you try and put it first and forget yourself.”

 

To me, this was a truly great response: Mr Adie put the emphasis exactly where something in us is forever unwilling to place it – on ourselves. As he said: “You cannot discharge your job properly, so how can you expect them to learn?” And again, you cannot teach if: “you try and put it first and forget yourself.”

Another thing to emphasise is the truth that these criticisms go on in the lower part of the head only: in the higher faculties, there is light.

Joseph Azize, 1 April 2017 

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