In one form of
Buddhism, Realisation is one of the four highest of ten states of
life available to humans.
People un-awakened to
their potential for enlightenment, never reach these four higher
states. They reel through the four eternal sufferings of birth,
illness, old age and death, tumbling between the lower worlds of
hell, hunger, animality, anger, rapture and tranquillity, from moment
to moment, year to year, decade to decade.
The stage just before,
or in some reckoning, lower than realisation is learning.
To realise is to grasp
or understand clearly or to make real; as in making a hope, fear,
plan occurring in reality, The synonyms make the meanings of the word
easier to grasp. To realise is to conceive, to comprehend and/or to
accomplish. So within the one word is to think of something,
understand it and carry it out.
It is said to be
impossible to enter the world of realisation, I would say it is very
difficult to realise anything without first learning.
The world above or
following Realisation is that of Bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a
person who has attained Enlightenment, but who postpones entering
Nirvana in order to help others to attain the same state. You could
also call it the ability of perpetual selfless action.
I was taught that being
educated meant that you knew where to go to find out information
that you wanted or needed. Education should be about finding
knowledge. After a certain amount of time trying to do research on
the internet it is clear that if you want to find out what something
is really about, books are still the best way to do it. Everyone
raves about the Ted lectures but to my mind they are just another way
of indoctrinating people into Americanising themselves. That means
dumbing down as much as possible, doing as you're told, believing
their lying hype and hatred for difference.
Learning is what takes
us out of our narrow, mundane and ordinary lives, into a whole
universe of possibilities. This is one of the reasons that access to
education has been (for such a huge amount of our presented history),
and is still, being denied to women and other perceived lower orders
of people.
There are no lower
orders of people as there are no better types of people. There are
just humans, animals, bodhisattva's and buddhas. If you're not trying
to learn, then the chances are you are an animal with moments of
humanity.
The education system
that we now have is a cryptic manner of keeping people ignorant or as
animals. As I have said before, much of what is presented as learning
and/or education are the narrow ideas of a group of European men
whose forefathers burned and destroyed the greatest libraries the
world has even known. Then add a thousand and more years of burning,
torturing, suppressing and brutalising anyone and everyone who
disagreed with their ideas. Murdering nay sayers is one of the best
ways to make sure that everyone agrees with you.
I think it is clear
that general academia is a load of crap because it is based on saying
things as cryptically as possible. Real learning, real education is
something that is accessible to anyone. If you have to say it in a
way that only those of you in the 'in crowd' can understand, you can
pretty much guarantee that a lot of it would be soundly contested
when presented to those not of the chosen few. This has certainly
been my experience in higher education.
Much of the foundation
of our current knowledge and education system, certainly in the soft
sciences, is based and decided on ideas which are a) unscientific and
b) utter rubbish.
Higher education is the
biased opinions of a group of people with access to every privilege
possessing little common intelligence.
Up until very recently
in Europe and to this day in many parts of the world a belief in the
one man god is a necessity. Not believing in that restrictive and
destructive idea means that any ideas, information or knowledge that
one tries to present is immediately disqualified.
The determination to
perpetuate - keep in place - a non humanistic society that uses the
majority to provide unlimited wealth to 1% at the cost of the planet;
through exploitation of people, animals and the physical attributes
of the earth. This is all presented in our education systems as
unavoidable, reasonable and/or necessary even in subjects which are
supposed to be about being environmentally responsible.
Our responsibility as
thinking human beings is to learn, to keep on learning and to find
ways to act upon that which we learn. Only through consciously
learning, not only what is presented to us as the truth ,but also by
learning to hear and listen to our own internal truth and being
prepared to follow that truth to action do we have any chance of
realising a world that follows the planet's intention and
intelligence, which is to provide enough for all to enjoy.
