Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Living Reality

The mass media would like us to believe that unless we can get everybody else to do something, we can’t do it ourselves -- so before anybody can embark on their own self-improvement, they have to convince everybody else to jump on that bandwagon first -- and then for them to do so themselves, would not be narcissistic, but merely doing what everybody else is doing, going along with the crowd -- as the peculiar reversal this society and culture has taken -- in which formerly, those who took the initiative and leadership were regarded in high esteem, rather than chastised, for not following the crowd.

And of course, the crowd was going where the mass media’s polls, studies and anointed experts were going -- of which they had exclusive rights to. Then by copyright laws, their articles could not be reproduced faithfully so that those claims could be challenged by those who didn’t have the right to read them -- and reproduce them for accuracy. Under those conditions, anything can be said -- without challenge -- because to do so is a violation of federal copyright laws, or so they would have us believe.

Many publications would even insist that no new information could be brought to the discussion except that which was previously brought up in that journal. They were the exclusive keepers of the truth -- as knowledge was that which was apart from life, and not discovered daily living one’s life.

Knowledge was simply that which could be separated, divided, categorized, stored away, and taught apart from the living of it, discovering of it -- until finally, that kind of knowledge was realized to be irrelevant and actually a hindrance to living and discovering the truth. Discovering the truth doesn’t require past knowledge -- as a prerequisite to learning anything new. That was just the old academic tradition.

The modern version of learning is that the new supplants the old -- and implies the old, but it is not necessary to learn the old before one can learn the new -- just as for instance, one doesn’t need to learn how to operate a crank-up phone of the 19th century, to learn how to use today’s latest (cellphone) models. In fact, many will resist adopting the new technologies, BECAUSE they already know how to operate the obsolete models -- and so feel they have no need to learn anything further.

Clearly, that kind of education is really learning to resist learning -- by conditioning one to think one already knows the truth, rather than being open to its discovery -- freshly. This is a very important distinction in learning anything -- what what is being learned is the limits of what the teacher knows, or is the limits of that which can be known. This distinction is what the true student seeks to discover -- and the true teacher, wishes to know also.

It wasn’t always the case that there was a fragmentation in one’s learning and living; there was a time in which most learned by doing -- and not simply theoretically, academically, rhetorically, and at least knowing the difference.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home