The Link #25 - In the Light of Learning

What is learning? How does one respond to such a question?

It would seem that one responds either from previous knowledge or from uncertainty, from not knowing. What one doesn’t seem to do is find out for oneself what learning is. In other words, one doesn’t begin with learning as an actuality. Instead one begins somewhere else and hopes to get to learning, to arrive at an understanding of it as though it were an abstract concept. One begins either with what someone else has said about learning, or in the dark, looking out from there. My question is: Why don’t we put aside both the second-hand opinion and the darkness of ignorance? Why don’t we begin in the light of learning itself?

Now, it may be that there is nowhere else to start but in the darkness of not knowing. That is part of what I want to find out. The other part, which I feel is far more interesting, is to stay in that darkness long enough to learn what it is. For there is usually a strong urge to create some artificial light, to offer an idea, to borrow a theory, to make a guess in the dark. The darkness is a frightening place full of whispers and fear. Yet our not knowing how to learn in this place may be the factor that creates the sense of darkness. We fear the darkness – ignorance, not saying the right thing, not knowing what to do – and that is what causes us to rush into a more dangerous darkness, the darkness of ideas, of theories, of hypotheses. But by virtue of this illusory power of ideation we can call this new darkness light, enlightenment or whatever else takes our fancy.

But what happens if we don’t move at all from the original state of not knowing? We start to see something that has not been created out of our panic, embarrassment or inadequacy. Staying in the darkness of ignorance, we start to learn about the darkness. Out of that darkness, there is a possibility of real light, not merely a temporary man-made light.

We always start from the state of not knowing – otherwise, why are we trying to learn? But that state of not knowing is moved away from very quickly because thought has very little power there. Thought has nothing to latch on to, nothing to compare back to, nothing to bolster it, confirm it, or even to contradict it – which is another form of confirmation. So the state of not knowing is skipped over in the blinking of an eye. Thought cannot remain in a state of not knowing so it moves to a state of knowing. It understands knowing, it recognises it as the lesser of two evils. And from there it refers back to not knowing as ‘darkness’ while still working very much in the dark. But it believes it is now working in the light because it is working in the light of previous knowledge or memory, which is the basis, however faulty or unfounded, of thought.

Now, I say there is no truth in previous knowledge and there is no truth in the darkness as viewed from the perspective of confused thought. There is only a light of truth in the original state of darkness, in the reality of not knowing. This state cannot be invited. The demand to know will happily accept a convenient substitute for the real thing, which is confusion. I cannot invite it for I am the confusion. I am the activity of thought. I am the inviting party. And in that original state I do not yet exist, thought does not yet exist. So the question remains: Why don’t we begin in the light of learning itself? And is there anything to learn at all?

Let’s say that I am learning about myself in my relationship with another. The relationship begins without a previous history. Why is there then a need to build up a record of what has happened between us? I don’t mean the practical information but psychological knowledge, based on judgements and comparisons, which leads to attachment, dependency and conflict. If I want to have power and influence over that person, then I might deem the collection and retention of certain pieces of information quite important, but otherwise, what is there to accumulate? And is my collecting, recording and remembering, learning or is it an activity of self-protection, self-aggrandisement and so forth? The knowledge that I collect is what leads to the perpetuation of division and conflict – the outer darkness, if you like. But this is what we traditionally think of as learning: the accumulation and processing of information that can be used for our future benefit. Learning, therefore, is traditionally time-based, time-fixed, and time-limited. So is it possible to learn without the collection of information? Is learning possible without a content of learning?

When I am confused, does my confusion arise from knowing or from not knowing? Does my confusion about what to do arise from knowing what might happen to me or not knowing what might happen to me? I am suggesting that confusion only arises from the field of the known, that from the field of the unknown, confusion is impossible. When I am confused about what to do, because I know what has happened to me before, then my present confusion arises from that past field, from the memories, the unfortunate experiences, the previous failures and the previous successes. I say to myself: ‘I am confused because I do not know.’ Whereas the reality is that I am confused only because of what I know. Knowledge, with its naming and labelling, is the prime factor of confusion.

The light of learning is the desire to learn. We don’t care what we learn about along the way, what corners we look into, what we find. We don’t have a goal in our learning, an exam to pass, a fixed and finite aim. We don’t want to learn in order to feel better about ourselves, to become famous or powerful or clever, to change the world. We want to learn – that’s all. And we see that everything from the past is entirely useless, leading to confusion. So we have no foundation whatsoever. We are floating on air, in fact. And this too is the light of learning: we are not burdened with substance, with the heaviness of content, with labels that we have attached out of ignorance. Can we do it?

The only way to find out is to try it. That demands that all assumptions about it be left behind. But because we want to learn about ourselves, about living in relationship with other human beings, we don’t mind what will happen or what we will find out. And it may be that envy or some other conflict arises in the relationship. Can I see envy, anger, impatience, greed, irritation, or whatever else arises and do nothing with it except to see it? To see these things as they arise is to see the centre of consciousness at work. And why is there a centre at all, a controller, a censor with its ideational and emotional motives?

I want to find out for myself what my life is all about, to discover what significance this existence has or doesn’t have. So I investigate what it means to learn, and in this enquiry I find that, although it is sometimes important to memorise certain facts, mathematical formulae, methodology and so forth, in the most important area of my life memory is actually a hindrance, a block to learning. In other words, I cannot learn and accumulate knowledge at the same time. This runs counter to the accepted social and educational pattern of learning. It contradicts every traditional notion of progress, of spiritual growth, of personal development. But now that I have found this amazing secret, I am not going to drop it. I can’t drop it. I test it in relationship, for without this factor of relationship with the rest of society, learning has absolutely no meaning at all. Our whole life is relationship and yet we don’t really know the full beauty of it.

This quality of learning needs no model, theory or standard to follow. There’s no need for instructions and methods or any arcane, esoteric nonsense. For we are no longer dealing with ideas or with abstractions – we are in it. Or, if we are not in it, we continue questioning and finding out what the truth is. And the moment we share this together, we have already changed relationship, which includes society and education.