on being self-taught

The ancient architecture of learning

If we look back at many of the ancient eastern schools of education, there seem to be 3 key elements to it:

a. The teacher: The teacher or master represents the entire gamut of knowledge and the ability to distill it into wisdom.

b. The student: The vessel - empty, ready - the one who has taken themselves to the edge of their understanding and is surrendered to the possibilities that can arise moving forward. Surrendered not as resignation, but as a radical openness - the way a cupped hand receives water only when it stops gripping. This is the seeker.

c. The teacher's knowing of the student: The teacher sees the student - not the form, but through him. The teacher can perceive the exact step where the student stands in their journey of evolution and the nature of their presence. This helps the teacher provide the student with exactly what they need for getting to the next step - advice, knowledge, direction, an obstacle to overcome, a koan. Crucially, this knowing also includes the deliberate placing of friction. A wise teacher does not always smooth the path - sometimes they deepen the difficulty, because they can see that it is precisely resistance that will catalyse the next opening in the student.

A link broken: What changed

This construct has changed in the contemporary world. Unlike ancient times where access to knowledge was a function of being able to get into a school or the right school, 'the teacher' - or the knowledge that he/she represents - has now been democratised. With books, the internet, and the general distributed nature of knowledge, mostly everyone has the ability to access it. In fact, the challenge may be that there is so much information that one needs to weed through it to arrive at what is truly relevant.

Second, the student and their willingness to learn continues to remains similar to the past.

Third, the nature of the teacher's knowing of the student, however has vastly changed. A direct form is extremely rare given that systems today seldom carry the residential, immersive nature of ancient schools. The student could still get access to an extremely wise teacher for a small part of their overall learning, but the teacher's ability to have a full insight into the student's evolution may be difficult.

So how does this student, this seeker accelerate their growth?

Becoming your own teacher

The first step is a continuous, deep, and objective self-reflection. The one person who knows you best - without any filters or facades - is you. This is the best coach you will ever find, present every moment, missing nothing. And yet, this observation is harder than it sounds. The ego is not a neutral witness - it edits, flatters, and defends. It will dress up a pattern as a virtue and call a fear a preference. The practice of objective self-observation therefore also involves noticing if the witness becomes the advocate. Once this quality of observation is cultivated, it can be brutally sharp in identifying where one stands - in understanding one's nature, and where one's compass points, or at least hinting at the direction.

This is half the battle won.

Now the second part: armed with an understanding of oneself and a sense of which direction to look, one can begin to scope for sources of knowledge. This is not a casual or short process. It demands years of genuine searching - moving across books, ideas, teachers, disciplines - casting a wide net with honest curiosity. This breadth is not wasted effort; it is the necessary ground-clearing. One cannot know what resonates deeply without first knowing what does not. The search itself is part of the education. 

And here the two practices begin to speak to each other. Self-reflection is not a one-time act of stock-taking - it is an ongoing compass. As one's understanding of oneself sharpens, so does the ability to recognise what is actually needed. The search narrows not because curiosity shrinks, but because one is looking with greater precision -knowing not just what is interesting, but what is relevant to where one actually stands.

But how does one get the right input at the right time?

It is ever so often now that something I have already known before makes tremendous sense at this moment - almost as if I viscerally understand it through experience rather than just through intellect. Is this how it feels when a teacher guides you to the next step? Like the difference between knowing a word and knowing its weight. Like the same sentence read at different points in life is, in a deep sense, a different sentence.

This has made me revisit many of the sources which have been most meaningful, rather than endlessly seeking new inputs. This slow revisiting of sources seems to be fueling growth at a much higher density.

There is also a third element that the self-taught must make peace with: the role of friction itself. Without a teacher to administer the well-timed obstacle, life steps in. Confusion, failure, and the disorientation of not-knowing are not interruptions to the self-taught journey - they are its pedagogy. The question is whether one meets them with the awareness of a student or the resistance of someone who believes they should already know.

There is also one caveat - the self-taught path carries a quiet risk. Without external correction, one can construct elaborate and internally consistent frameworks that do little more than confirm what one already believes. The mirror of self-reflection, however clear, has a blind spot - and that blind spot is the self doing the reflecting. The antidote is not to abandon the path, but to hold its conclusions lightly, and to remain genuinely open to being wrong about oneself. That openness, in fact, may help one become a true seeker.

This whole process - the reflective knowing of where one stands, the selective return to sources that now carry new meaning, the willingness to be taught by difficulty itself - I now understand as being self-taught. Not the absence of a teacher, but the cultivation of the conditions in which teaching can happen - from anywhere, at any time, to one who is paying attention.