True Education

The child in utero dreams its way through human evolution. Biology recapitulates Phylogeny.

When it's born it has no sense of 'you and me', it is a pure, appetival being. It is all 'me'. Its mother is 'me', and it wants what it wants when it wants it, and after it has got it, it sinks back happily into its essential self.

Soon after birth however, it is drawn into the external world. It loses itself into the world of accident, of contingency. It becomes reliant on contingent relations, which change with time. The stuff of time changes. It learns tricks by which it seeks to control the external world. It may learn that please and thank you can be used to great effect. As it evolves it may learn ever more ways with which to get what it wants ... a clever smile, the raising of an eyebrow, a pleading expression or maybe emotional blackmail. Persevering along the line of verbal diplomacy, it may even aspire to the dizzying heights of being an MP.

What it has forgotten in all this time stuff is its essential being. It has been led out of its essential Self (e-ducted, educated), into the prevailing paradigm (accepted pattern) of its environment.

These paradigms change with each succeeding generation. It might look back less than 50 years with a condescending chuckle at some earlier 'cutting edge discoveries'. But even so, it now has a firm belief that all the answers that it has been taught, are ultimate and true.

Because there is still a deep insecurity, it continues to seek control over its environment, including the other people in it.

What happens when its control is taken away? The diagnosis of a serious illness creates an even greater whirlwind of uncertainty in the being. When the initial storm dies down, this illness can be seen as something which can only be cured by external aid, or it can be seen as an opportunity for looking internally to find out just what forces are bringing about this illness.

Headaches don't come about because of a deficiency of aspirin, just as cancer doesn't come about because of a lack of chemotherapy drugs.

 In its quest to overcome the disease, if the now adult child perseveres in its research, it will discover that its education hasn't been a true one. The child has always tried to control its external world. But it now discovers that other beings seek their own form of control.  Beings with more mental clarity, but perhaps with very little compassion. And its education has been trickled down from these other power seekers.

Abandoning its reliance on externals and connecting with its inner Self, the child, if it's wilful enough and intelligent enough, now analyses what's been fed into the body, materially, mentally and emotionally, and proceeds to make corrective adjustments.