Comment by maroonblazer
Comment by maroonblazer 3 days ago
I've become convinced that, in the end, no one really teaches you anything, you end up teaching yourself. That phrasing is a bit hyperbolic. It's more accurate to say a good teacher only gets you 50%, 60%, maybe 70% of the way there, and it's up to you to get you to 100%.
To be able to truly learn any given concept means being capable of answering a practically infinite number of different questions about that topic. The process of teaching is essentially trying to uncover which questions the student can't answer. The challenge, of course, is that the student doesn't know what questions they can't answer, because the questions haven't occurred to them. That is, until they start testing themselves, to see if they really do understand the concept.
Problem sets in textbooks are the canonical way of addressing this teaching challenge, but there are only so many pages in a textbook, and there are other concepts that need to be taught, so the scope of the problem sets are necessarily finite.
How many times have you nailed all the problems in a book, only to discover that there was some aspect of the topic you didn't understand, despite getting all the right answers?
The following two quotes from Martial Arts have been quite helpful to me in motivating my study efforts;
The Master shows the Gate, but it is the Student who has to walk through it.
To show one the Right Direction and Right Path, Oral Instructions from a Master are necessary but Mastery of the Subject only comes from one's own Incessant Self-Cultivation.
There is also a great inspirational story in the Mahabharata of "Ekalavya" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekalavya) who became an exceptional archer through self-training.
Eklavya inspires a life-long learning philosophy and his presence seems to be a celebration for the masses. In this EklavyaParv, the motto is 'You Create Yourself" and the legend of Eklavya is a testimony that is forwarded by many thinkers as well. The discipleship that Eklavya represents is the best for a student and enables one to be the creator of one's own destiny.
Adapting to current times, "The Master" can be a "Good Book" and you can have "Many Masters" but the effort and learning has to happen within the Student.
Source: I self-taught myself Martial Arts (JKD, Karate, Taijiquan) from books when i was young. Decades later when i did join a dojo to study under a Master, i was one of the top students with good skill and power.