The teacher has an immense task when he is asked by the ordinary seeker to accept him as a personal pupil. For the latter unconsciously seeks confirmation of what he already believes and therefore has come to teach the teacher! Consequently the master is compelled to refuse him. For the seeker comes to him filled with his own ideas of what constitutes truth and in what direction the path leads, what the teacher ought to say and how behave. All these modes of thought are mere encumbrances from the teacher's standpoint, and all these prejudices are heavy shackles. To ask the seeker to abandon these obsessions with the past immediately will meet with failure in almost every case--only in the rarest type of seeker is there likely to be an immediate obedience. With others there is not even the desire for release from these intellectual and emotional patterns which imprison the man, these habit-mechanisms in which he has allowed himself to be caught.
-- Notebooks Category 1: Overview of the Quest > Chapter 6 : Student-Teacher > # 678
