25 UPBRINGING and EDUCATION
It has been shown already that intellation is the true activity of higher minds; that we, as a species having the power of intellect, ought to be supraconscious and find humantruth. But there is evidenly little or no intellation going on in our world and we are presently firmly fixed in the conscious state. Human states of mind range between extremes - from the ignorance of unstimulated illiteracy to the excessive and specialised knowledge and limited general conscious reasoning, but little reasoning in genuine pursuit of truth, of the academic. This applies to the most advanced countries of the world, which pride themselves on extremely comprehensive institutions of education which their young are obliged to attend for at least eleven years or for as much as twenty years. The institution of education is an integral part of civilised reality. Since that reality is humanly false and continues to be so, and since humanity has failed to achieve supraconsciousness and continues so to fail, it follows that our system of education is also false in that it has failed to help us accomplish our true potential.
The reason for this, of course, is that we are harnessed to the automaton, governed by the Machine, and as yet unawakened. Consequently our concept of education is to raise the young in accordance with automatic reality; to familiarise them with its past and present; to adjust to it, survive in it, and continue it into the future. For us as children the process begins with parental upbringing. Parents are individuals who themselves may differ in their various views of reality, on whom we are wholly dependent, and who treat us and influence us according to their values and circumstances, largely behind closed doors. So the early formation of each generation of human minds mirrors the inequalities of the previous generation, ranging from zero to 100% stimulation and from one extreme to the other of knowledge, bias of reason or opinion, and emotional attitude. All parents have this in common - that they live in and have borne us into automatic reality. However much they may deplore it, almost all bring up their children according to automatic concepts.
When we enter school we carry our own peculiarities of character, the result of home conditioning, and come into contact with teachers and other children, all with different constructions of character. These are not just natural variations of temperament, but of belief, attitude, expectation, valuation, estimation, ambition, and capacity for understanding. We are joined by a hotch-potch of others in a remarkable kind of conspiracy, which all are poised to continue, as in the past, and which few have so far tumbled to. The childrens' differences, widened by teachers who have passed through the same experience, reflect those of their parents who are themselves made different by the parts they play in the competitive conflicts of the Machine. But we all commonly share one and the same acceptance of this existing reality, incultated in us because our forebears believed it inescapable and made it their duty to prepare us for the inevitable. Schools cater for our different qualities, abilities and aspirations because this fits in with automatic reality, but it gives the false impression that our troubled world is the result of conflict between chaotic human nature and the attempts of responsible authority to harness and control it. In the sphere of education volatile human nature is represented by the disunity of teachers and pupils, authority is represented by the school and its curriculum, and the pattern of automatic reality by the common denominators of behaviour to which teachers and children gravitate. The whole process shackles our true intellect and innately kind and co-operative nature, and brings the instinctive drives to the fore.
As a race we may well achieve almost full understanding of physical reality yet we have hardly begun to understand the true significance of the human mind. We still confine and limit the human self to the closed sphere of consciousness, like the animals, but whilst animals are guided by a strictly appropriate instinct, we follow many conflicting automatic paths with the aid of the instinctive and calculated application of intellect. We should be intellating, and accepting the consequently true guidance of intellect, because whole correlation is necessary to true understanding of anything and until we understand everything essential we are lost. Education as it exists merely plays a part in forming our automated understanding of existing reality of which it is a practiced part. It fills minds with knowledge in sequence according to its own programme of essential learning, but not in a sequence which a mind's whole and true understanding requires. It expects us to use our minds, like computers, programmed by the Machine and used by our conscious selves for successful performance in automatic reality. Our schools and colleges divide us into categories, ranging from the superfluous unemployed to the highly specialised employed, resulting in imbalanced intellects in none of which is more than a minor proportion of essential factors fully correlated.
The institution of education is allied to the Machine but the teachers it employs are thinking humans who might well feel responsible for informing and forming young minds truly. So education might be placed between two stools were its teachers awarded that freedom by its institution, but they are not. Being an established institution, education is barred from revealing the truth about present reality and standing against it. This is not only because it cannot conceive of opposing the reality that spawned it, or of biting the hand that feeds it, but also because its job is to prepare individuals for taking part in that reality - individuals who, as a normal rule, expect to profit from this preparation. So the institution of education has to compromise. It contrives to provide 'true' information but does so by concentrating only on certain parts of the whole picture and interpreting them in certain preconceived ways. These are the parts which describe our entire past experience with interpretations that give it meaning in terms of the present, i.e. the factual history of the Machine as though inevitably pre-ordained rather than as the pursuit of narrow automatic concepts, contrary to reasoned human morality, which have accumulated to form our existing reality. So education upholds fundamentally false facts and concepts of this reality, whereas intellation would surely oppose them in favour of the ideal to which most of the experiences, and perhaps all of the supposed lessons of history are irrelevant.
An uncritical early experience of automatic reality, including its education, makes it extremely difficult, but not impossible, later to become supraconscious. That few if any become so may be because they need help to break down years of conditioning as well as requiring a strong wish to be supraconscious, and such help is almost nonexistent. Our best hope of breaking through is to begin, almost before the automaton can apply the pressures of its conditioning, with a highly critical attitude to reality and a determination to accept nothing that is not clearly true. This means not receiving teaching in the normally required way of taking in what authority considers to be good and necessary for you. It means not falling into the temptation to conform for the sake of future self-interest. It means reading between the lines of that which you are given to study - even mathematical and scientific fact - and of sacrificing the automatic advantages of having such facts at your finger-tips for the sake of a vital prior necessity for putting these facts into a humantrue context. It means using teaching as stimulation rather than instruction in order to keep the mind free from manipulative conditioning.
The education process measures mental maturity on a realistic time-scale, based on the time it normally takes a mind to reach a level of achievement suitable to its employment by the Machine, and a degree of understanding in tune with the automated human world. The supraconscious mind must construct itself, in its own time and by a very different sequence. The essential basis of its construction must be completed before it can judge the need for, critically assess, and put into true perspective much of the factual information normally absorbed during the formative years. Whole reason is hard to come by in this unreasonable reality because the formative years are not initially devoted in this way to making the mind a platform of true reason from which knowledge can then be rightly gauged. Such a process is discouraged by the fact that a humantrue mind would embody ideals which the world almost wholly ignores, and, as already pointed out, would be uncomfortably alien to the reality in which it must presently live. Conventionally educated minds are programmed like computers to get the automatic answers and solutions required by the Machine to the realistic questions and problems it poses. The automated mind accepts 'real' facts uncritically, such as the autoprogressive development of the micro-chip. A supraconscious mind would have foreseen the inhuman effects of the micro-chip and opposed its unbridled development.
As the result of its upbringing a child enters school with certain aptitudes and certain incapacities. Further educational conditioning tends to develop the aptitudes and confirm the incapacities. Individuals who were quite unable to master arithmetic in childhood often discover latent mathematical ability later in life. The normal effect of home and school or university education is that the mind is persuaded that it is unable to deviate from firmly laid tramlines - incapable of totally independent thought. Such a mind appears unable to think of anything other than what it has been given to think about, employing that which it has been given to think with. This gives the intellectually myopic individual a sense of personal reality that fits the chaos of entrenched world reality, and may furnish survival locally but threatens it worldwide. Such persons may resist the prospect of true awareness because it looks like ruining their otherwise secure position, promising to be a long and difficult process which would disturb the realistic concentration they require for local automatic success.
The slogan of the present system of education is - EDUCATION IS TO PREPARE US FOR LIFE. This requires to be changed to - EDUCATION IS TO LEARN THE FOLLY OF THIS LIFE AND PREPARE FOR A BETTER ONE. If it is thought too difficult a thing to do, consider that people already study extremely difficult subjects of far less importance (I predict that one day, if we survive, it shall be unthinkable that we were once as we now are - separated from our supreme faculty of mind, living apart from our truth.) If we are looking for a new and better reality clearly we should throw off the bad practices of the old, such as dividing our collective understanding into exclusive subjects when the aim of every mind should be to embrace complete understanding. We need a sphere of study of everything, with as little specialist learning as is required to impart its true essence. Our target should be total reason, which is the aim of this book. We are entirely mistaken in believing that the generally existing forms of education are beneficial to humanity. The evidence of our existing world reality proves the opposite.
It seems to me that the basic task of education is to help the young to understand the structure of life on Earth; to acquire a strong consciousness of our dependence on our biosphere - the soil and its mechanisms, plants and the sun, the minerals, the seas, all that provides the air we breathe and the food we eat, our clothing, warmth, shelter, furniture - the need to respect and preserve it all. Most of all we should be conscious of our dependence upon our postconscious minds - our responsibility to be true to them and so to be responsible for each other and the whole Earth - to use our powers kindly, compassionately and considerately.
Then, certainly, the task is to teach our young basic mathematics, and communication skills, including the essential means of breaking the customary barrier to world communication - a common language. But chiefly the aim should be to help and encourage every child to intellate and become supraconscious so that they assess things and deal with others humantruly. Thereafter we should impart to them the common knowledge and skill that is socially needful, any special learning to follow afterwards, as an adult contribution to society, superimposed on this foundation of intellating and learning which would be common to all. This subject is further explored in Chapter 43, Code of Individual Behaviour.
Pt.IV REVELATION
AUTOMATIC CONTROLS
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