[Exploring Life] We are immersed in a culture that confuses education with learning. More precisely, we ritually submit ourselves to courses that have been prepared by someone else and trust that the instructional delivery these courses will inspire learning. In a bizarre twist, we sometimes incorrectly think of education as being synonymous with learning. Learning is a phenomenon; education is a technology. This is one example of how we tend to denigrate human capacities and qualities to that of machine metaphors. Education is not a program for learning, it is in fact an assembly-line in which the design of the prerequisite prevails over our own individual and unique experiences in life. In the spiritual realm authentic learning, not education, is essential.
One of the addictions that emerges from our obsession with education is dependence. That is to say, we lose our self-reliance with respect to learning and instead broker it out to curricula, instructional design, degrees, courses, teachers, and inept forms of assessment and evaluation. We falsely believe that greater expertise lies beyond ourselves. More simply, we come to believe that the location of learning is exterior, or outside ourselves, and in the process lose our connection to the interior world. We desperately look to the exterior for solace and are constantly disappointed; we avoid the messy untamed interior world of our our mind and emotions where true discovery resides. This bias toward the exterior is a significant problem for those interested in expanding and deepening their spiritual presence on Earth. There is no form of education that can assist us in this journey; to embrace spirituality in life means to be absolutely self-reliant in learning.
Obsessing the Exterior: In Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom,John O’Donohue declares that, “There is no spiritual program.” By this he means that there is no form of education, curriculum, or instruction that can expand and deepen an individual’s sense of spiritual presence. That is not to say that reading, writing, and having animated discussion about spiritual content does not matter. Through reading, writing and sensitive conversation we can expand the information we are aware of, but that does not equate to expanding our own individual spirituality. It is entirely possible to be able to compare and contrast everything ever written about spirituality without in any way being more spiritual as an individual. Education is often a form of observation that avoids direct participation.
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]
Religions promote specific kinds of doctrine that have been formulated by groups of people that have anointed themselves as having superior insight and understanding. In other words, people create the silent assumptions that lie at the source of a religious style. These assumptions are activated through the creation of services that ritualize worship and enforce a specific kind of educational program on its followers. Like education, religions serve to externalize experience and encourage dependence and blind faith is its dogma. Perhaps we feel as though a burden has been lifted in making this submission, that is, we relieve ourselves from pursuing the essential questions of life and instead externalize our belief and faith in what we are being told by outside “experts.”
Just as education attempts to persuade us that it promotes learning, religion attempts to persuade us that it promotes spirituality. Spirituality is something significantly different from religion. It is possible to be spiritual yet not religious; it is possible to be religious yet not spiritual. The spiritual realm of experience is a highly individualized and artistic realm; the religious realm of experience is a mass distributed technological realm. In spite of the obvious exaggerations here, this extreme polarization does help to reveal the differences. Spirituality means we embrace artistry as a way of life, that how we live and the experiences we manifest in life is the pursuit of art. As John O’Donohue notes: If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us [Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom]. Religion, like education, is external.
Artistry of the Interior: Artistry is the learning environment of spirituality. That is, when the essential questions of life and living inhabit our soul we have crossed a critical threshold, a point of no return. We may attempt to push these questions aside, to avoid their intensity and presence within, but they never quite leave us. We may expand our reach into the external and look for programs and courses that can help guide us into the spiritual realm. While we increase our informational awareness of spirituality in this we, we still feel the struggle and suffering deep within our being. Eventually, whether we like it or not, we are faced with questions of purpose, meaning, essence, source, origin, consciousness, interconnectedness, relationship, and belonging. More than questions, these spiritual elements inhabit our being and their presence takes on an unrelenting air.
Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.
- John O’Donohue in Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Spirituality is the way in which we artistically explore the landscape of out interior world in search of these spiritual elements. When we are living life artistically, we are fully engaged and motivated by the spiritual elements within. We continue to read, to listen, to write, to discuss with the full understanding that spiritual learning means to journey through the uncharted landscape of our own mind, emotions, and consciousness. In the midst of this journey we navigate using our intuitive capacities for improvisation and bricolage, the essence of artistry. There is no linear progression through this space, just as there is no logical progression through the unknown. Spirituality immerses us in the artistry of interior navigation as a means to evolve our presence in the world around us. We look out into the world through the same eyes, but we no longer see the world in the way we once did.
Learning as Trust: Learning in the spiritual realm is deeply intimate and secret. No one experiences this realm in the same way. We all do experience it, however, even if the experience of it is avoidance. Our interior realm is an generative space permeated by creative qualities we refer to as intuition, visualizing, imagination, improvisation, and dreaming. 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 in which solitude in unavoidable. Spirituality requires that we feel the precise resonance of our aloneness in the world. No one can reach in to assist us in this place. In it we are alone in the sense that no other person can join us; there is no possibility of human companionship there. And yet we feel the presence of life.
…we have lost touch with these primal thresholds of nature… You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm.
- John O’Donohue in Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Excelentes palabras, no debemos olvidar que la unidad es la fuerza, la luz ah de brilla sobre tanta oscuridad.
[Google Translation: "Excellent words, we must not forget that unity is strength, ah light shine on this darkness."]
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Great article
Thank you Doris. Kind regards, Brian.