From my personal experience, and from my long term experience as a tutor, I find that education itself can be a forgotten trauma in every person’s life. It is rarely that school and college education has been uniformly a pleasant experience. Normally, many other things are going on in adult life to think about one’s education. But past education has been the source of most of a person’s conditioning. It may, therefore, be necessary to run out the trauma of education at some point in one’s life.
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Levels of Education
The most basic level of education is through direct perception. We perceive through the physical senses of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. These perceptions then get absorbed or assimilated in our mind and become a part of our being.
The second level of education is learning of a common language through which one can express and communicate to another what one is observing and feeling. It is the means through which one may flow out one’s beingness.
The third level of education is inflowing through that same language the beingness and experience of another. That experience then gets absorbed or assimilated in our mind to become part of our beingness. At this level beingness and experience are almost synonymous. Beingness builds up through layers of experience from the environment and others.
Higher levels of education are simply an expansion of these three basic levels in other dimensions. Education expands from the dimension of speech to the dimensions of reading and writing. Most education starts to become indirect through the medium of language and its symbols. This indirect education, however, requires translation into “direct perceptions” through the faculty of visualization for proper absorption and assimilation in the mind.
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The Deeper Level of Abstraction
Another interesting dimension that starts to enter into picture at this stage is ABSTRACTION. It sort of develops as an intuitive sense because it is mostly “under the radar”. Abstraction requires physical perceptions to be broken down into finer “pixels” for deeper assimilation in the mind.
Abstraction is a dimension most peculiar to the human mind. It puts the human mind in a class of its own, way above the minds found in other species. The human mind starts to appear like an incredible matrix of “mental pixels” that are interconnected with each other in an extremely large number of intricate ways. The total number of “mental pixels” may be quite large and the relations among them may easily be infinite.
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Self-Learning
A person has control over his mind to the degree it is assimilated to the deepest level. To the degree the mind is not assimilated, the effect appears in the form of conditioning. It is the conditioned part of mind that is out of one’s control.
We shall be introducing the concept of Self-learning in the next issue. Self-learning is the process of assimilating perceptions and symbolic data in one’s mind. It helps one overcome past conditioning by fully assimilating the past experience one has been exposed to. Self-learning is the most vital part of one’s continuing education.
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