Trusting Experience as a Teacher

I have talked about the metaphor of "life as teacher" in my previous blog entries, but I have hardly mentioned the aspect of trust. This is perhaps because it seems rather evident that life "teaches" the very obvious lessons of working hard, mastering certain ways of socializing and getting along in the world, cultivating the virtues of patience and diligence etc. The problem, I think, is that even with these latter 'lessons', it's so easy to get attached to forms. "Patience" always looks a certain way, then takes on an almost stereotypical pattern of behavior, to the point where it even becomes an unconscious habit. But the problem with attachment to familiar forms of being is that it leads to a kind of sleepwalking. A person waiting in a long line up in the supermarket certainly looks the part of "being patient" (he or she hasn't screamed or tried to jump the line), but is this really patience, or is it just a habit that lulls a person int sleep?
  Sometimes pure experience, without form, is an ultimate teacher, but it can only come to a person when familiar patterns of comprehension, "call and response", etc. are subverted. This is truly an ultimate truth which takes people beyond form altogether, and yet it can be so unbearably painful in the face of attachment to forms. A person who is attached to form wants all too badly to find a role within the experience that they can call "themselves" and play out that habitual pattern. It even takes the form of an addiction to feeling certain and standing on a certain ground. But what if there is simply no foundation upon which to be--and one can see that those truth games are just agreed upon roles that are supported by the society?
   Patience is more than just following the pattern of a "patient" person. It means being able to work playfully with something that really doesn't quite have a form. The classic example of this patience is the process of learning itself, which starts in a sea of unknowns, only to later surface into familiar patterns over time. Can this sense of being lost in a sea of learning be borne with equanimity, if not embraced?