No higher teachings

My teacher once said

There are no higher teachings, just deeper understandings.

For a mind that is cultivated on the ideals of scientific progress, it might be a bit difficult to fully grasp the implications of this. It means that once you've seen something, look again, and once you have understood something, re-learn it. It simply implies, for me at least, that patient perseverance and humiliation are good teachers.

There is, for example, a certain humiliation in attending beginner's meditation classes. I find myself silently protesting, saying I know this stuff, how to sit, how to breathe, how to meditate, or how I'm no beginner, that I've been doing this more or less daily for five years now.

But I haven't got a clue, really. I know I don't actually know very much, but on a much deeper level there's this silly and arrogant mind of mine that believes it does, and could it have the higher teaching now, please?

By patiently subjecting me to to the well known experience of breathing I find that I don't have any grasp of it at all. Experience is a shape-shifting drama, always just out of reach. When seeing this, when I accept that I've lost my foothold, that there wasn't ever a solid foundation to start with, that's when I finally may start to let go.

From The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava, Canto 93. His final departing advice:

Let these three expressions:

I do not have,
I do not understand,
I do not know

Be repeated over and over again.
This is the heart of my advice.