It is needful for you to understand that a philosophic teacher never really wants anyone to follow him but only to follow Truth. Socrates humorously described himself as practising the same vocation as his mother who was a midwife--the only difference between them being that whereas she helped women to deliver themselves of infants, he helped men to deliver themselves of the true ideas with which their minds were in labour. His business, like that of all genuine teachers, was not to impart truth as something new and foreign but to assist the student to elicit it from within himself. Every genuine teacher tries in his work to lead the student's mind in such a way that his thinking gradually changes without his becoming conscious of the fact at the time, although he will recognize it in retrospect later. He makes students think for themselves; stimulates them to solve their own metaphysical, personal, and emotional problems; periodically gives an inner mystical impetus to their meditation practice; and points out the pitfalls and fallacies which lie in their life-path. Because his outlook is so disinterested, because his primary purpose is to liberate and not limit them, to give and not get, such a teacher's services can never be bought by anyone--although they may be claimed by those who are prepared to cast off the shoes of conventional prejudice at his door and who are willing to refrain loyally from imposing upon him their preconceived notions of what characteristics the teaching, the teacher, and the quest should possess. Thus if he will not shackle them, they in their turn must not shackle him. Such would-be disciples are rare, but such teachers who practise what they preach are rarer still.
-- Notebooks Category 1: Overview of the Quest > Chapter 6 : Student-Teacher > # 498
