Dear Friend

The week has progressed and the Letter I was writing to you never felt good to me! I am continuing the topic of knowledge vs truth from last week, and I just could not be satisfied with what I had written. I’ve ditched it.

Now I’m getting stressed about it!

So, rather than send nothing this week, I’m now just going to come out with a stream of consciousness for you. What I write I will send, whether I like it or not!

So with that said, let the fingers tap away at my keyboard…

The big thing for me is that our schooling experience damages us all, far more than one might even think, if one is even thinking about such things.

The school system’s whole focus is on three things:

1. teaching us ‘knowledge’

2. conditioning us with the idea that knowledge and all important information comes from ‘out there’, from the external authority on such things

3. training us to conform and comply with this external authority.

As I mentioned last week, it is a jug and mug approach. The teacher holds the jug of knowledge and pours it into our mug (brain) as we sit there passively receiving it.

Little work is required by both teacher and children. Creativity is banished, curiosity falls into the same sinkhole, and question-asking or reflecting thinking is frowned upon or just simply blocked.

Understanding is of little relevance to the school systems, much more important is that children learn the ‘knowledge’ from the authority, the teacher, and then manage to spit it out correctly in hundreds of tests over the years. Oh, and that we ‘learn’ how to obey, conform to a small society-mandated box of uniformity, and to comply with the adults - the external authority.

The adults—teachers and parents—take on this role as the external authority because that’s what they ‘learned’ when they were at school, themselves conforming and complying.

The teacher has little to no say on what is taught, nor even how it is taught (teacher training ignores this, just as medical school training ignores nutrition), and in fact defers to external authority too. The whole education system cultivates a hierarchy of external authority, where each level is telling the level below it what to do. Not based on competence or being a role model, but purely on their position or role within the society.

Roles are given the power, not human beings. We are not empowered, so we instead enforce things on those below us in the pecking order. The system rules, the system is the big boss in town.

This is absolutely crucifying humankind, snuffing out our humanity and our human essence, hiding our spirit from us, and blocking us from developing any kind of inner authority. We have been trained to depend on external authority for what the knowledge is, and to get it from them.

Not from ourselves. We were never taught this during our schooling. Critical thinking, creative thinking, doing research, doing action research (research on your own life), becoming skilled in discussions and articulating one’s thoughts were all blocked, so how do you suppose as adults we can have those skills to help us navigate life?

Well, we can’t. Not unless as an adult we find somebody to help us acquire such skills, or focus on developing them ourselves.

Understanding is crucial! Understanding reconnects you to Mother Earth and the web of life and the whole universe out there. Schooling and its obsession with knowledge disconnected us, and it is understanding who you are, how life works, what this means, what that does, which will undo the terrible harm done to you, to every single one of us, by these rotten anti-human school systems.

Understanding is liberating.

Understanding gives you personal possession of knowledge and information. You can’t just receive it like knowledge, you’ve got to proactively engage your mind with it, play with it, apply it, verify it, learn more about it, talk about it, ask questions etc etc.

Become your own teacher! Become your own scientist! Become your own guru!

Become YOU.

Understanding asks you to connect with this knowledge, to take your rightful place in this world. Understanding is you making use of the knowledge for your own life in your own context, for your own purposes. Understanding means you cannot be manipulated, indoctrinated, brainwashed by others. Dogma, ideology, beliefs won’t cut the mustard with you.

Understanding asks you to challenge what you know. Everything. This means it will start cutting through beliefs, ideology, dogma, rigid political thinking and so on that are conditioned into you, usually as wolves of the beliefs and opinions of others masquerading as sheep of facts and knowledge.

Understanding asks you to never accept anything at face value, unless you are consciously aware that you are accepting it on condition that it’s not knowledge, but merely what somebody else claims to be knowledge. This is especially important in the area of politics, marketing and other aspects of life where people express so much certainty about things.

I often ‘file way’ in my mind what people tell me to be true into the ‘not sure’ folder If I’m unable to verify it for myself.

Understanding involves not just your mind, but your heart, and your whole consciousness. Understanding has its liberating effect on us in great part because it necessarily opens up our hearts. Which were all but clamped shut during schooling.

Understanding is your human essence, understanding gives you inner authority, understanding puts you in charge of your own life and health.

And now we get to it: understanding is truth.

Your understanding is your truth. You may be wrong, or somewhat wrong about something, but as soon as you realise this, you will adapt your understanding so that you are correct. In this way you can evolve and grow.

But, crucially, you will always speak truly about things. You will share your truth of life. You will express yourself according to your understanding. This is integrity and true speaking. Understanding breeds understanding, truth begets truth! But it’s not THE truth, it’s YOUR truth. So you won’t be indoctrinating anybody, and nor they you.

Because you are always in pursuit of understanding, you will have no agenda or vested interest in hiding your truth, in telling lies, or in misleading others because then you damage or block your own ability to understand. Remember, to understand knowledge or information means you have to do something with it, and one of the best and fastest ways to check out your understanding of something is to express it to other people and get their reaction.

Bearing in mind, though, that many people in the world cannot handle questions coming their way, and are certain that they already know everything, so there’s nothing new to learn! You will have to relearn your relationships with others.

Also, with a life based on understanding, you won’t be able to unintentionally mislead somebody with misinformation or disinformation or third-hand propaganda or dogma that you imbibed and took in to be true, factual, knowledge. I am always telling people that what I’m sharing is my own understanding, my own truth, not any cast iron facts or ‘the truth’, and that in the spirit of sharing we can mutually explore if the other wishes to do so. That is always happening in my classrooms, which is why I love being there!

Those fact-checkers in social media - complete denial of understanding, and just a consequence of a knowledge-based society. This or that self-declared authority deciding for you what is fact, what you can see or hear or read, and what will be censored from you.

An abomination against the human being and our human spirit!

Knowledge-based societies turn their back on truth, on being honest, on living with integrity, on connecting with our fellow human beings through our own amazing human essence. Stagnation, decay and death will come.

Understanding-based people want truth, embrace truth, love integrity, speak honestly, say they don’t know when they don’t know, and never push their truths and information on others.

Quite the opposite: they want others to embrace this approach to life!

If we all nurture and nourish understanding, we all but drop conflict, hatred, division, distrust, intolerance, and at national level, war. We are focused on our own evolution and self-growth, while helping others do the same.

Understanding needs active, creative, productive, inquisitive learning to make it happen

Knowledge needs no such thing.

Just to be sure, knowledge is fantastic, essential for us, but not when this is the highest objective in human life, because then it’s destructive. Understanding is simply making knowledge and information come alive, AND making ourselves come alive.

Our whole world, thanks to the system, and the education systems it spawned, is in serious trouble because we cannot get on with each other because we don’t even know each other because we don’t know ourselves because we have no inner authority and our human essence was so badly repressed while we were young and unable to fend for ourselves.

So a 2020 comes along, and nobody has the knowledge, never mind the understanding, to make informed decisions for themselves. External authority decides for us, but the external authority themselves knows little about it. Only rotten mad psychopathic ‘scientists’ know what they are doing, but they are possessed by darkness.

Such is the problem with a hierarchical humankind based on teaching, compelling, telling, yelling, force, coercion, and with knowledge posing interchangeably with misinformation.

When understanding becomes the default approach to human life, we all gain, we all activate and cultivate our human essence and inner authority. Our health blooms, our relationships blossom!

You may find it timely to reread Letter #26 on external and inner authority.

Human essence is the human spirit in action: peace, love, joy, fun, connection, empathy, trust, and, most of all, allowing ourselves and each other to make mistakes, be wrong, do silly things, without being negatively judged and/or made to feel small, a nobody, or simply humiliated.

Understanding is truth is the human being.

Understanding connects you to the whole web of life, enables you to live and be your natural unique self, and empowers you. It is precisely what the universe wants of you.

Understanding helps you offload the emotional and psychological burdens you’ve carried your entire life, thanks to living in a state of perpetual stress, against your nature.

Knowledge carries potential power, but without understanding, it leads to the human world we have today, one that is on hellbent on our own self-destruction and heading for our extinction.

Our intelligence has been perverted by the system, and when each individual adult proactively chooses to pursue understanding in life—an understanding of themselves, their mind, their body, their soul, the environment and world around them, and how everything is completely interconnected and interdependent, then that is one more added to what is a rapidly growing minority of humankind. At the critical number, whatever that may be, our whole human family will stop destroying itself.

This is A Spiritual Revolution, a revolution of learning, your personal revolution in learning. I suggest you MUST make this your life!

Post-Reading Task

Now I’m just about to finish my stream of consciousness, but not before setting you a contingent task, one that you should think about putting into your life regularly.

If you feel that this Letter was useful to your own life and evolution and learning, then the task is twofold and it is this:

1. write down or type up a summary of what you have just read and understood (yes, understood!)

2. then read it all again and add to your written summary at the end.

You will discover that reading useful information twice, or listening to a video twice (or more than twice even) gives you so much more understanding than just the one time.

And don’t forget, understanding is liberating! Understanding is our liberation from the ignorance born from our culture of certainty and a shockingly anti-human education system.

Until next week, I bid you a liberating rest of the week!

Philip

Addendum

Just as I’m about to send you my Letter, this quote came my way, and I’d like to share it and add a brief comment after it.

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

—Hannah Arendt, German historian and philosopher (1906–1975)

So, consider that in relation to what you have just read in this week’s Letter. What I want to say is this:

It doesn’t matter what those in power are saying or doing, in so far as we cannot do anything about them directly. They work for their benefit, not ours. Our constant belief, hopes, expectations that one day they will do what they’re supposed to do is wasting our life. It’s up to us. We have to create our own hope, dreams and goals, and then engage in actions to get results.

What we perhaps must do first is get beliefs, a belief system, ideology out of our own life. We don’t need to believe or disbelieve what others say, because that comes from our conditioning as knowledge-seekers, instead of life-understanders. Politics sucks our blood and energy from us, even if we don’t follow it. The whole of mainstream society and politics mirror each other. And it is based on many lies, lies to others, lies to oneself.

With an understanding-focused world the lies disappear because now we’re not believing or disbelieving things, we are seeking to understand what they mean. We are not opening ourselves up to the world of lies.

What we need to do is learn how to discern the information that does come our way. This we do by asking questions of it, and challenging what we think we know already. But perhaps most of all, we have to get rid of this idea that others know more about this world than we do. They don’t. They went to the same disempowering schools as we did.

If we learn about ourselves, give ourselves much more credit, tap into our innate intelligence, intuition and instinct, then we can begin trusting ourselves.

We just need to ask ourselves questions and create time and space to reflect upon them. I think next week I shall write about questions. Bye for now.