"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." - T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"
I couldn't agree more with Mr. White. I've often called we humans 'learning machines,' although that doesn't apply to every human, but certainly the vast majority on one level or another.
We begin learning from our first breath into our new world and we continue learning, hopefully, until our final breath. To do otherwise would be cheating ourselves our of the pleasure on Mind.
"Look what a lot of things there are to learn." Indeed! The world may be physically smaller than 100 years ago, but from what we've learned it has been reduced through transportation and immediate long distance communications. Look at what Hubble revealed to us... what the Mars exploration robots have revealed... from what we have learned we have gone farther with that information... and with the information learned from those discoveries we will have the ability to answer more of our questions. It's a wonderful process and should never be slighted.
The only slight given should be with the methodology of learning... teaching does not reach the masses as efficiently as a one-on-one personalized learning process. This is unrealistic for the modern times and not because we're 'modern' but rather we are overpopulated - too many people wanting to learn overcrowds institutions of learning, drastically minimizing any chance at one-on-one.
But there are alternatives... self-teaching yourself - reading, observing, calculating... practices such as these are almost mandatory in today's world if one has a desire to know, to understand.
Learning is on multiple levels, not only math and sciences, not only knitting or bowling, not only history or literature... the world is made up of multiple subjects and each has a place for each of us to better our understanding of not only our world but ourselves.
Learning can be a bombardment of information, but that is not for most. There is where the one-on-one process is important. How many people just need one piece of information to fit into their puzzle of life? Maybe two pieces or three... seldom the whole puzzle for that puzzle is but yet another piece of an even larger puzzle.
The large puzzle is but a fraction of what learning is capable of. The universe, life, ourselves will always be a big mystery yet to be discovered. There is no reason to grow bored with learning. The only boring thing is being asked to learn something at a time when you are not interested... force feeding you - a horrible experience.
Beware of anyone who claims to know all the answers. There is no such being. There are masters of subjects - those that have learned and continue learning about any given subject. There are those that have mastered many subjects and can give discourses on them in a very informative manner. But nobody can know everything. We can at best only know what fits into our individual mind, i.e., know what our mind will allow or needs to know at that time and space.
Even though 'pure consciousness' does contain the every thing and no thing, mind is limited by it's ability to communicate the Alpha/Omega. Being 'learning machines' is an on going process, an evolution of mind, body and spirit. Perhaps someday there will be, if not a human, a life-form that will have the ability to posses all knowledge. This is one vast and mysterious universe - that life-form may be part of it now.
We will never know if we stop learning. If we put limits upon our desire to discover the mysteries we will limit our social and individual evolution to become that which we don't yet understand. Mind insists upon learning. Feed your head. Go beyond the limits. Challenge the knowers.. be a seeker. It is the responsibility to 'Know Thy Self' in any way mind can imagine.
<center>To go beyond Mind one must go with Mind.</center>
Cecil
22 January 2006
<center>Even individualist trees must sometimes stand alone</center>
[Photo taken on I-10 West, Texas, 11/05]
