Learning and Enlightened Living

           Cycling has a prominent role in human social adaptation. It is the fundamental tool employed to assure the attachment of information that each culture provides its children though formal and informal education. When important things like customary points of view do not stick in a child’s mind the first time they are heard, they almost certainly will with enough exposures. 

            For example, think about how children learn the alphabet or multiplication tables. Repetition is the most reliable avenue to the rote learning these require. The alphabet is taught as a song that is performed for proud parents and adoring grandparents. Cards with multiplication data are “flashed” by teachers, tutors and parents until the information they hold is ensconced in the brain. 

What attaches is rewarded and additionally affixed by favorable adult reactions, the feeling of competence that results from performing well on quizzes and tests and competing successfully with peers, and the very natural sense of personal satisfaction that comes with attaining and possessing new knowledge, all of which bolster one’s identity. This basic accumulation then facilitates the attachment of similar cycling material, resulting over time in the masses we know as language and mathematics specifically, and a pool of knowledge more generally. 

This same process helps instill our attitudes, preconceptions and biases. As impressionable youngsters we hear adults making comments while watching the news or at the supper table and unconsciously take note. When similar comments are repeated by influential others, they begin to take on a conceptual structure that gets caught in the net of all of our other social learning. We then repeat these ourselves in conversations with our age mates, thereby strengthening their hold on our thinking. 

Being part of a group that shares similar ideas provides the sense of belonging that we as social beings all require. In order to gain affirmation and acceptance, we may even agree with things that do not resonate with the rest of our experience. This new learning, together with all attendant emotions, becomes the filter through which is unconsciously decided what is allowed in afterwards and what is rejected. It helps inform our perspectives on others and the world and becomes the bedrock of our cultural identities. Having become entrenched, it is often impossible to erase. 

It is the cycling of family, community, social, sub-cultural and cultural perspectives that results in beliefs and attitudes that persons outside of any of these social structures find hard to imagine because of their own programming. People might accuse others of having been “brainwashed” only because of their own contrary indoctrination. 

Once having adopted a point of view, it is hard to test if it is realistic, valid or accurate. This is because we measure it against what we know, which in a particular setting has been influenced in a circular way by what most others have agreed is realistic, valid or accurate. 

Knowing this, we do not have to first examine our knowledge stores for ideas that may or may not be true. In terms of the kind of progress we wish to make, shaking off old beliefs and notions and replacing them with new ones is not primarily what we are out to do. 

Remembering that enlightenment means subtraction, not addition, our work is to allow all of these things their place, but more as if they are historical artifacts or documents in a traveling museum, and not what we reference ever again as part of our conscious awareness. 

Just sit quietly and watch all thoughts and their attendant emotional reactions as they cycle through awareness again and again without trying to change anything. This is enlightened learning.