Theos-Talk Archives (April 2003 Message tt00050)

Hi all of you,

My Sufilight view:
But I could think, that it must have been a very very terrible experience
Bart went through, so why ask Bart like that ?
Why not make up - and rest in deep meditation ?
Silence sometimes seems a good idea...
>:-)

Well, I just lost the allegorical overview in the ongiong below debate.
So try this...which I humbly offers you all...

Here is part 1 of 2 (in Idries Shah printing)

A CURRICULUM OF A SCHOOL

"Q: Could you give us a view of the curriculum of a School, from 'inside the
School' so to speak?"

"A: In our teaching, we must group correctly these elements: the pupils, the
teacher and the circumstances of study. Only at the right time and place,
with the teacher suitable to these, and with the right body of students, can
our studies be said to be capable of coherent development."

"Does this sound difficult or unreasonable? Let us compare these
requirements with an analogy of our needs: the ordinary educational
institution."

"If we are learning, say, physics, we must have a man skilled in physics
[having successfully completed his own training; able also to teach; and
with a mandate to teach]; students who want to learn and who have capacity
and some background for the study; and adequate laboratories and other
facilities for the studies to take place."

"A physics teacher could not make any real progress with a class of idiots,
or people who primarily wanted power or fame or gain through physics. These
factors would be getting in the way of the teaching. A class of brilliant
students, faced with a man who knew no physics, or who only had a
smattering, would make little progress. A good teacher, with a student body,
could do little unless the instruments and equipment, the building and so
on, were available as and when needed."

"Yet this principle, so well established in conventional studies of all
kinds, is largely passed over and has fallen into disuse, among
esotericists. Why? Because they have a primitive and unenlightened attitude
towards teaching. Like an oaf who has just heard of physics or only seen
some of its manifestations, the would-be student wants it all *now*. He does
not care about the necessary presence of other students. He wants to skip
the curriculum and he sees no connection between the building and the
subject of physics. So he does not want a laboratory."

"Just observe what happens when people try to carry on learning or teaching
without the correct grouping of the three essentials:"

"Would-be students always try to operate their studies with only one, or at
the most two, of the three factors. Teachers try to teach those who are
unsuitable, because of the difficulties of finding enough people to form a
class. Students who have no teacher try to teach themselves. Transpose this
into a group of people trying to learn physics, and you will see some of
their problems. Others group themselves around the literature and
methodology of older schools, trying to make the scrap material of someone
else's physics laboratory work. They formalize rituals, become obsessed by
principles and slogans, assign disproportionate importance to the elements
which are only tools, but which they regard as a more significant heritage."

"Anyone can think of several schools, cults, religions, systems of
psychology or philosophy which fall into the above classifications."

"We must categorically affirm that it is impossible to increase human
knowledge in the higher field by these methods. The statistical possibility
of useful gains within a reasonable time is so remote as to be excluded from
one's calculations."

"Why, then, do people insist on raking over the embers and looking for truth
when they have little chance of finding it? Simply because they are using
their conditioning propensity, not their capacity for higher perception, to
try to follow the path. There is intellectual stimulus and emotional
attraction in the mere effort to plumb the unknown. When the ordinary human
mind encounters evidences of a higher state of being, of even when it
conceives the possibility of them, it will invariably conclude that there is
some possibility of progress for that mind without the application of the
factors of teaching-teacher-students-time-and-place which are essentials."

Taken partly from: "Learning How to Learn" by the Afghan sufi-author Idries
Shah, published near 1968.

End of part 1.
Part 2 follows shortly...


A view and a comment:
I like the idea about a teacher. But, let us all not forget, that we are all
students - and teachers; i.e. only exception is the avatar of all ages.

from
M. Suiflight with a big happy sufi-like smile...
(And certainly it is this time of year...>:-)...Smile)




----- Original Message -----
From: "Etzion Becker" <etvionbb@netvision.net.il>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 9:11 PM
Subject: Re: Theos-World Correction Plus Musings


> I was just trying to console wry, as she said that she has some problem,
it
> was nothing to do with copying e-mails, nothing to do with you, and you
> don't have to be so rude all the time. You can adopt a sweet tongue for a
> change. Etzion
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bart Lidofsky" <bartl@sprynet.com>
> To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 3:12 PM
> Subject: Re: Theos-World Correction Plus Musings
>
>
> > Etzion Becker wrote:
> > > Dear wry, nothing *horrible* happened to you, it never happened and
> > > never will. It is all in the realm of imagination - you will drop the
> > > body sooner or later, so, where the horrors are? All gone.
> >
> > One user of this list had a habit of taking messages I posted on this
> > list, carefully editing pieces so as to radically alter the meanings of
> > my messages, and post them on other lists. For example, I was discussing
> > racism on this list, and described a racist way of thinking. That user
> > posted the description on another list, as if it were the way >I<
> > thought. And not everybody on the other list had access to the original
> > quotes, so there was no way I could PROVE that I was right.
> >
> > So don't tell me or anybody that nothing horrible can happen. It
> > certainly can, and it HAS.
> >
> > Bart Lidofsky
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>