Extract from... Education Copyright Robert Fullarton 2009

 Extract from... Education

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2009

Those who are given everything on a silver platter, those live in their mansions may have more emptiness within themselves than the full and satisfied life of an impoverished carer, for so long as the carer is caring for others, his poverty means less to him than it does for his affluent contemporary, but his love for others, means the world to him and this altruistic cycle of giving in greater measure to his receiving fuels the education or ideology by which the impoverished man has found a sense of security and belonging with his way of life and his way of life is an education to him through the vital experience of everyday life.

Too much in our world is modelled on the ambitious image of the celebrity world at large. We revolve too a large extent on the consumerist society we have been born into and both the celebrities and their and the products they endorse are part of this image which we affiliate and measure ourselves to. Too many want the easy life, we seek riches, pleasures, pretty people, good times, a fancy house, with a big driveway, two cars and a high flying carer to fund our pleasures. 

This illusory existence, this idealised world which we have too often conjured up is often out of reach for too many, it is the alienated, all too comfort world of an idler to a certain degree, only where it has separated us from the experiences from the greater community we live with. Of course where such an enclosed life has left us ungrateful, materialistic to a larger extent and completely lost in the bureaucracy of an office life. A generic life is so limited, it is spiritually wasted, it knows of facts, obscure notions and reasons but has no sense of the meaning behind these notions and no knowledge of the experience of a more fully rounded life, that denies and overcomes the modern aspirations for pleasure, profit and accumulation. The generic life relies almost completely on the media for its sources of information, a public complacency hangs over the heads of the people and the people are happy not knowing too much. 

Knowing disturbs the peace and destroys the comfy little world of the common consumerist. Too many people in the impoverished districts and enclaves of a slavish life of labour throughout the third world, have seen and lived a life which is fundamentally different to the that of the average westerner. The servant class watches the world from their television, the nouveau riche dominate, through galvanising their means of business, purporting the product to effectively sell and profiteer, while the servant class are sedated, without the means of intellectual, economic and financial power to think for themselves and to affront the modern liberties, privileges and powers of growing prestige of the business class. The sloth of a minority dominates the masses, because the masses have never been educated through vital experience, or to be more specific, without self realisation, there can be no self awareness that the copious amounts of marketable produce is not needed nut an alienable vestige of modern gobbledygook

religion of consumerism and materialism, modern man may not believe in the indestructible but he may come to feel, invincible in his airy fairy notions aspirations for property and pleasure.

What the oriental lacks in material limitations, he learns in his skills and qualities of life, he labours to survive on a daily basis and is grateful for having surviving the day alone. Wise is he who prays for the strength to make it through the day, for he is the wisdom and the gratitude in body and spirit to see all the blessings and the benefits that allow him to live. A certain wisdom of the more refined calibre is required for a human life to endure in the most appalling capacities and predicaments a human being can tolerate. The psychologies we adopt along with the lifestyle we tailor are the tools by which we can make life a little more tolerable and holistic in our own right.

If we attain a wisdom, by which we thrive off, then such a way of life keeps the sufferer together, it is the adhesive of the believer, the knower, the doer and the achiever. All our pain it seems is elementary, but in actual fact it is not, we need to learn and grow a perception of awareness around the reasons and the limits of our acute suffering. The perception of pain may be secondary to the pain itself but it is nonetheless the means by which we amplify our responses and how we build a lifestyle around the problems of our daily life. It is really a case of mind over matter or purpose over pain in many cases, if we choose to see it that way.

The base appearances of the world, the officialdom and the accepted creeds, the boisterous activities of celebrities, the scandals of the rich and powerful, speak more to me of the vanities and the shallowness, the superfluous and deceptive power of instant appeal and how it fools too many. For a beautiful woman in question may be more deceitful than an ugly man and it depends upon the level of honesty and openness with which one is ready to accept and adapt to. I mean to state that one may get an image of a certain politician or celebrity as a good family man and learn in good time that he is in fact a serial adulterer and abandoner of many children. One may learn that a Venus fly trap is not just pretty to the fly, but a deadly adversary and a predator when ready to strike and entice the prey to its’ own destruction.

Like with these two –merely vague- examples I simply state that human beings learn the depth and the receptiveness of life on a greater extent than others, some learn of skills and qualities and even less learn of good morals, to bear a healthy conscience.

As it was stated in the Gospel of Luke,

“He who laughs today shall be weeping tomorrow”, and that is true to the sense that if we don’t learn anything at all from the experiences we go through, if we have no gratitude for what truly sustains our live force intact and what has perhaps even helped us to recover, then we shall come falling down with a mighty crash.

It is not wealth and notoriety that make a happy and meaningful life, but a deep satisfaction for our sense of purpose and meaning and an intellectual and spiritual enrichment of life, through involvement and a daily participation in the world achieve a deep and resonating satisfaction that fills the hunger of inquirer. Life is not all about pleasure, it has its expensive lessons to be bore as well, but about realistic measurements and lifestyles by which we yield to and gain by, all is pristine and opaque to a man who has come back fully to a state of metanoia (this is the state and sense of redemption and self-correction).

We must banish the fairy tales we have been fed as children, for we as adults are firmly more knowledgeable on the grounds of reality. Real life has depth, nature has depth, she has a complexity, true spiritual life needs correction, edification, contemplation, self searching and yet soul bonding with others. The world to me has meaning if I believe it to have meaning, the paradoxes of the world are intangible to me and to many, but just as real and as important as any other critical decision, which I have to make, the lifestyle of change can only be affirmed by through the choice we make to abide by and to live by the changes we make. We should see ourselves as human beings with the chrysalis of nature and time, God and perception, awaiting the transformation from the cocoon of our limited and wholly negligent perceptions on ourselves and the external world which we are contained within.

Throughout history, philosophers and theologians alike have tried to find a credible and sustainable answer to the question of pain and suffering. All have highlighted the blight of nature’s disposition to the inherent weaknesses of human nature, all have pointedly given their opinions and have fallen short on a fully rounded answer on the universal factors of pain and suffering amidst the animal kingdom and in the fully conscious world of human life. Too many have been quick to summarize and conclude life as hopeless, as a mere shoreline on an encroaching tide, to view all life as entropy and shaped solely by the inanimate forces of the natural world. The view itself is more chaotic in my opinion than the actual forces of nature; the observation is more detrimental than the object of examination. 

What if we were to view pain and suffering in a new light, to see things in a wholly revised perspective, as life is transitory and yet meaningful if we see it to be such. We must surely see ourselves as the intelligent creatures that observe and absorb the world at large, and the planets in orbit. There is life within us, and the life contained within us is just as important as the world of the astrophysicist and the subject of dark matter, black holes and neutron stars. It easy for us, to base our assumptions on the unfinished sciences of our age, we will choose our philosophy for life, affirm to it and obstinately refuse to believe in anything other than a mechanical view of our existence as a purely accidental mesh of atoms, matter, electrons, ions and molecules. The rash and fickle judgments in our time have left too many intrepid to think more clearly outside the box of popular opinion and contemporary views to a large extent. I must admit that in the beginning I knew so little as a child, my naiveties were crushed by the weight of the world, my dream was flooded by the cynicism and the cruelties of my peers, my complacency was a weakness and I knew nothing about the world and the ways of men, but I did have my imagination, I endured and was free in my world of fantasy and play, no matter how alternative my methods and motives seemed to the neighbourhood boys and girls. I did not want to grow up so fast, but live has been so implacably cruel and yet I have ripened like a vintage wine and have drunk the grapes of a very innovative experience. But I was fool to think that I would escape from the cruelties of the world, I was softened up like a turkey to be snuffed and bled dry by the future that came with unexpected events. 

My comforts were shattered, my peace of mind and bodily pleasures were removed from my daily life and instead, panic, terror, anxiety, trauma, incessant pains and aches came and burst this idealised little bubble of what I once pictured the world to be and even what I thought I was. It goes like this if I have not lived enough, then I cannot judge on life in its totality, if I have not experienced the notion itself then I cannot even speculate what sense and what meaning can derives from the experience in question. The sense of matters are important, the words are meaningless in the order of powers of perception, when no sense and no meaning of their logic and their formality is given. This is the relationship between an object and its subject, one correlates unto the other and man is the subject that examines the objects of nature and yet no education is achieved nor thrilled in, until a sense of the meaning and the logic behind the examined object can be found and understood.

Are we merely marching one by one in line...living another man's life or are we really living

as God has has given us breath and breadth of vision.

Are we living for a promotion, gripped by the sensationalism of media and mere gossip.

Can we go against the grain and be hated for being ourselves, for bearing a principle which goes beyond what they deny, what they hate in this liberal age of ours...in this age of tearing down traditions and old morals...can we stand against the tide and say "No more!" to the tide that comes with a violence unmatched in all the ages. Can we protect the truth...if it really is the truth...against the sea of nay sayers...who deny simply for the sake of protestation. We cannot appease all parties...and that is indeed the heart of the liberal case itself

Do we call anything sacred at all? Our are we merely the men who burn the books of law and sacred appeal to all mankind in whole.