[Exploring Life] What is the essence of spiritual learning? Is there an ideal program, course of study, or methodology? In Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Donohue declares: “There is no spiritual program.” This means that spiritual learning is not something that can be meaningfully approached through the cultural technology of education. In other words, the concept of the prerequisite as expressed through curriculum, instruction and evaluation, is ineffective with respect to spiritual learning. Is the idea of spiritual education non-sensical?
In our time, there is much obsession with spiritual programs. Such spiritual programs tend to be very linear. The spiritual life is imagined as a journey with a sequence of stages… Such a program often becomes an end in itself. It weighs out our natural presence against us. [O’Donohue, 1997]
Education has become an end unto itself and is largely irrelevant with respect to learning. All education proceeds from the concept of the prerequisite, that is to say, the assumption that knowledge, skills and behaviors can be predetermined by some individual or outside agency (i.e. — curriculum) and then “delivered” (i.e. — instruction or teaching) to students in a manner that can be measured (i.e. –evaluation and assessment) against a norm or standard of performance. While this approach may has some relevance with respect to the memorization and recall of information, O’Donohue wisely concludes that it has no connection to the interior world that is the home and true presence of spirituality.
The prerequisites for spiritual learning are all innately present within. Our interior world is not linear; thoughts do not proceed in specified series, nor do emotions flow along a line of predetermined sequences. There is no possibility of analyzing, isolating, classifying, and labeling spiritual experiences into a predetermined scope and sequence of content. There are no stages of spiritual growth that we all travel through in order to reach an ideal destination. Our interior realm is an generative space permeated by creative qualities we refer to as intuition, visualizing, imagination, improvisation, and dreaming. This is the place of spiritual learning, and it is a place that education cannot penetrate.
The most effective way to ignore something is to turn it into information and then make it familiar.
The interior world of the individual, that vast confluence of thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and addictions that comprise what we refer to as mind or consciousness, is a place avoided and ignored by education. Why is this? I believe because it is a world in which lower levels of thought such as analysis cannot easily penetrate since the environment is in a perpetual state of motion. Analysis, as an end unto itself, is a form of insecurity. It provides a false sense of security, and we hide behind our systems of categories and labels all the while sensing deep within ourselves that the categories and labels are a fool’s paradise.
When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge, and excitement of it… “Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known… Behind the facade of the familiar, strange things await us.[O’Donohue, 1997]
Education is the institutionalization and mass communication of the it’s own self-imposed and predetermined version of the familiar. By remaining focused on imposing the familiar on all of its participants it robs the experience of education of any meaningful form of creativity, mystery, or insight. For this reason, education is completely irrelevant with respect to lifelong learning. Without the presence of creativity and mystery, there is no place for learning. Since spirituality originates in the mystery of our own being, there is no possibility for spiritual program.
