The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the
thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if
the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something
to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is
regarded as a special activity in which one engages only a relatively
small proportion of one’s time. The course, on the other hand,
emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are
the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it
goes on every moment of the day and continues into sleeping thoughts as
well.

To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you
demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From
your demonstration others learn and so do you. The question is not
whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of
the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what
you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot
give to someone else, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is
but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of
conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you
a chance to teach others what you are and what they are to you. No more
than that, but also never less.

The curriculum that you set up is therefore determined exclusively by
what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others
is to you. In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be
totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is
impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you
really teach and therefore learn. To this the verbal content of your
teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it or it may not. It
is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. Teaching but
reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is
to diminish self doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying
to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is
what you teach.

This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be
otherwise? Everyone who follows the world’s curriculum, and everyone
here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to
convince himself that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the
world. What else, then, would its curriculum be? Into this hopeless and
closed learning situation which teaches nothing but despair and death,
God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope,
their learning finally becomes complete.

Except for God’s teachers there would be no hope of salvation for the
world of sin would seem forever “real”. The self-deceiving must deceive,
for they must teach deception. And what else is hell? This is a manual
for the teachers of God. They are not perfect or they would not be
here. Yet it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach
perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until they have learned
it. And then they are seen no more, although their thoughts remain a
source of strength and truth forever. Who are they? How are they chosen?
What do they do? How can they work out their own salvation and the
salvation of the world? This manual attempts to answer these questions.