How do you recognize an authentic spiritual teacher?

I had to be in question while responding to the question.

[…]

I was quietly choosing to have faith in the act of simultaneously accepting both my incapacity and my inescapable duty to respond with honesty to the genuine inquiry of another mind.

[…]

I continued, speaking exactly as my thoughts came to me, without weighing my words: “We want to know how to recognize a real teacher, but do we ever ask ourselves in what way we are searching for a teacher, in what way we are searching for truth? Could it be that we can only recognize a teacher when we are in a state of need, when real need pours through us and sensitizes our powers of perception?”

[…]

“Just as it is only the real Self that can see the real world behind the appearances, so it may be that it is only the real seeker who can recognize a genuine man or woman of wisdom.”

[…]

“But suppose we don’t have such a sense of need? Suppose it is too buried? What should we do? The question is still there—how can we know who to trust?”

“Can we stay with that?”

[…]

“I stay with my uncertainty, which is now sensed as a need. It is not only he or she about whom I now have a question; it is myself who is in question. Perhaps I see something else as well—an impatience, a kind of pressure inclining me to close the question, to get on with it all, to come to a judgment about this person before me. But if I stay with the truth of the situation, the truth that I don’t know …

[And THEN?]

—Jacob Needleman, in conversation with his students in a course on the nature of religious experience

Science Is Not About Certainty. Science is about overcoming our own ideas and a continuous challenge of common sense

[I]n some religions, or in some ways of being religious, [there’s] an idea that there should be truth that one can hold and not be questioned. This way of thinking is naturally disturbed by a way of thinking which is based on continuous revision, not of the theories, of even the core ground of the way in which we think.

— Carlo Rovelli in Science Is Not About Certainty: A Philosophy Of Physics, Edge, May 24, 2012

Thank you aminotes. I really appreciate the qualifying language here. There are indeed many religious people who share a commitment to not knowing, uncertainty, doubt, and, in more theological terms, via negativa (see also, various entries in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Too bad the minority, who seem to approach belief in a dogmatic way, shapes what it means to be religious for those who don’t identify as such.

No-knowing is what we do

To have some degree of enlightenment is wonderful; to think about it is terrible. “No-knowing” is what we do, as in the famous phrase of Bodhidharma. When the emperor of China asked, “Who is this who stands before me?” Bodhidharma replied, “No-knowing.” No-knowing. There is no way that we can take this intuitive mind and quantify it. We can’t say, “Here it is, I’m going to give you one month’s worth, or two months’ worth, and now your course is finished.” That’s not it. We may see it in an instant, or it may take several lifetimes. This is a practice of endurance and patience. Forgetting all about gaining anything, we are simply trying to see clearly.

—Maurine Stuart

(via Our One and Only Commandment | Tricycle)

Fu Shiki (I know not), from Zen Word, Zen Calligraphy, text by Eido Tai Shimano, calligraphy by Kogetsu Tani.