The new conversation and the dangers of circulation energy
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The new conversation and the dangers of circulation energy
What is our education for the future really about?
When we look at our current education system it appears to be primarily concerned with providing us with some of the temporal skills we will need to get through life, and to make sure that we will be safe and secure in earning a living.
Nothing much wrong with that we might say – and yes it is certainly very helpful to learn some needed skills. However, the system as it stands neglects to educate our children in the very thing that is most valuable for them – and that is to learn to be, and stay, true to themselves, the amazing loving beings that they already are: a state of being which has been dismissed, sabotaged, and undercut by the linear and competitive world of thinking and expression championed not only by schools, but by our society as a whole.
Competition, which underpins the very foundations of our current education process, is not natural to us, and works to grow the cancer of self-interest for me and mine. The cult of the ‘individual’, which dominates our way of life, has had the effect of shrinking our outlook and our capacity to access space, which is a stupendous love and intelligence available to us all, to think for all. The competitive way of thinking is designed to keep this individuality well in place – it is specifically designed to compress, suppress and discourage students’ natural connection to brotherhood, their true relationship with one another, and their God-given universality in thinking.
This loveless way of thinking and operating, which is based entirely on competition and the recall of knowledge from the past, is actively fostered in schools. It destroys children’s confidence and natural expression, bludgeoning them so that they either withdraw and give up, or seize upon the imposed, unnatural way of thinking and acting, directing all their energy into succeeding with and mimicking its ways. And that is all we can ever do with it – mimic this reduced copy of the real thing (which is to live according to our true nature). Inevitably all of us end up as casualties of such brutal competitive interaction and are left dead-ended in the cul-de-sac of existence, always hoping that something better might turn up. And what are our satisfactions in such a life? Mere crumbs of occasional, fleeting moments of happiness, which are as nothing compared to the glorious joy we are all capable of living. Our current education is not leading us to our future, it is condemning us to a round of an ever-repeating past that has clearly proved a debacle and a lie.
We as teachers need to be educating kids to feel things for themselves and to openly explore this mode of being, because through feeling we first learn to discern what is true and what is not: if we discard the sense of feeling whereby energetic truth is known we can be easily fooled by the unfeeling mind.
We need to be supporting kids to honour themselves, to honour their sensitivity, to back themselves and express from there, and not educate them to give away their power and voice to a curriculum that circulates a way of thinking that does not belong to us or our future as a race. Our future is glorious and is ever presenting to us a way forward out of the hole we have dug. In future times expression will eventually be no longer dominated by the cruel thrust of ‘right and wrong’, but instead be one of nurturing, sharing, building, expansion and truth.
As children we were taught, not only in our school-day but through the ever-present bombardment of reflection provided by the adults all around us, to architect and construct our expression in order to suppress our astute powers of observation, our natural wisdom, and our words bringing the vibration of Heaven. We instead have been encouraged to re-direct our expression to please others, to dazzle others, to distract others, to defeat others, to give the ‘right’ answer, to follow the permissible polite conventions around what it is okay to say and do.
We reduce our grandness to get good marks in school, to appear smart and get approval – a very poor substitute indeed for the riches of Love that we innately know and are. We adopt and express ideals and beliefs and ways of filtering life that are circulated around and through us continually as we walk our day, in an effort to conform and protect ourselves from the onslaught of this loveless force... but such misguided protection does not actually work, and the next thing we know we are lost in the labyrinth of a lesser creation expressing in the required, reduced way.
Ka-boom, we are gone!
The question is, why aren’t the words that come out of our mouths spoken fresh from the truth of our hearts, bodies and natural intelligence, and why do we keep repeating and re-circulating words, thoughts, and phrases that come from a collective reservoir of acceptable, ‘safe’ terminology dictated by the controlling force that determines the status quo?
Have you ever felt that deadening moment of participating in gossip or hearsay, or partaking of the drug of consent between yourself and another as you both agree upon an old, spent cliché... such as ‘sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you’. The truth is that words can be the most deceitful and cruel of weapons, and we all know it, so why go around repeating this saying?
We have a propensity to want to agree together upon these old ‘safe’ maxims and statements endlessly repeated and circulated in society. Such a repetition of untrue, outmoded thought keeps humanity on the back foot, constantly confirming what is untrue and having a toxic effect on our systems – both corporate and corporeal! These thoughts and expressions are designed to keep us ‘safe’ and comfortable in life, but in effect they dig us into a hobbit-hole where we stagnate in the past and indulge in an endless round of ‘teas and cakes’ and conversations to anaesthetise our day... because deep down we know how awesome we are and it is anguish not to be living it.
Additionally, we have the strangulation of natural expression in universities where one cannot simply speak the truth about a subject but must have the ball-and-chain of a footnoted quote and reference from some past ‘authority’ to back up and justify our offering. This is a setup which forces us to leave and vacate our innate connection within ourselves to find a quote from somewhere else ‘out there’ – in the library or on Google – to justify our thought with some ‘Authority’ or another. This ingrained and habitual way of researching, presenting and writing means we constantly place ourselves second to the accepted expert, so abnegating our own lived authority. And so, over the centuries, we become apologetic about delivering truth – our very own birthright. In truth we do not need to be apologetic about truth, nor justify our work – we simply need to claim it. We need to be educating our young to claim their truth, their lived and known authority.
It all looks harmless enough, having to put in a footnote here and there, but is it?
Take an example experienced a couple of weeks back: I was talking to a friend just as the sun was rising gold in the east and said that it was feeling like spring-time. I almost added ‘The only pretty ring time’ – quoting a line from a ‘song’ in Shakespeare’s As you Like it. But in that moment I realised that I didn’t need to draw Renaissance poetry from the past into a conversation that was in fact a fresh expression about the feel of the sunrise, the new day, and I was acutely aware of the false comfort in wanting to construct a mental world around me, a world of familiar, recirculated and known literary lines instead of expressing anew. As I said ‘no’ to the offered line of poetry, the phrase dissolved in front of my eyes like snow. This was a moment which was super magnified to me and allowed me to clearly witness how circulated thoughts and phrases are continually being offered to us as we speak, to lower the original joy we have just felt, effectively blocking out the completely fresh feeling, or knowing, in that moment that could be expressed and shared with another.
This led me to remember how I was first hit in the face by the falsity of the university education I was subjected to, laid out in a book called The Glittering Prizes by Frederic Raphael (a book I could never finish reading) about a group of the brightest and best young Cambridge graduates in the 1950s. This was the generation of elite graduates who would go on to run British media 20 years on. The conversation and witty repartee that is exchanged between the students consists almost entirely of a tissue of quotes from a stream of past poets, playwrights, novelists, statesmen, and other historical figures. And whoever it is that recalls and utters the most and the cleverest of quotes, ‘winning’ the conversation, is thought to be the smartest and most desirable of the group. But in reality such a conversation is an exercise in futility when it comes to true connection and loving, evolving relationship between them. They are not only continually stuck repeating the past by re-iterating and keeping ‘alive’ a configuration of speech that has already been uttered, but, in their exchange, the sword-edge of ‘winning the prize’ is also being ever-sharpened, keeping at bay all true depth and intimacy, with each other and with their universal origin.
Such a conversational skill is considered to be the pinnacle of the educated, sophisticated ‘literary’ mind in our society, but isn’t it really programming the student to re-circulate only those thoughts that have been expressed in the past, many many times before? And do we ever question whether those thoughts have actually led to a truly successful society?
What happens to the group’s lives post-Cambridge in Raphael’s novel reveals the educational lie of the ‘glittering prizes’. Despite the brilliance and the outstanding success, the protagonist ends up living a life of utter discontent.
We find him unable to free himself of the tyranny of his discontent and the sense of anti-climax that the glory which was promised by his elite and expensive education was never delivered. True success would have been the liberation from the dream-life he had craved and won, the dream life we have all consented to, the constructed life engendered by the exigencies of discontent. We could have instead a life that is truly worth living.
We have most certainly been highly educated, but educated for what?
A society that willingly sustains corruption in business and law, that is rarely without a war going on, that sustains an Internet populated by porn, the interchange of bullying, slandering and the denigration of one another, that publishes sites of utterly false histories and ‘facts’, that proliferates a social media which consists almost entirely of re-circulated utterances and lies, that produces an index of health and exhaustion which is at crisis point... and an education system that has entirely failed our beautiful children – a system based entirely on grading the cleverest and the stupidest. There is in fact no such thing as a ‘stupid’ child – everyone’s expression is vital for the whole and for our future.
What will it take for us to claim back our voices and our bodies from this travesty of circulation energy and speak at least honestly, if not from an alignment to our deeply known truth? Education for the future does not entail more sophisticated computer programs nor more scientific or space age technology, it requires the opening up to the exploration of our inner space and our re-connection to our Soul, the universal teacher for all.
Filed under
Truth, Expression, Joy, Soul, Raising children, Education, School
