I FOUND MYSELF IN A DARK WOOD, NO STARLIGHT, NO TORCH, NO INFINITELY BRAIDED LIGHT, TO GUIDE MY WAY.
BROKEN, DRAINED, DEFEATED AND ALONE.
THE VERY BEST WAY TO ENCOUNTER ONESELF - AND TO TAKE BACK WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY YOURS
FOR AS HUMAN BEINGS WE ARE BROKEN TO BE HEALED, AND LOST TO BECOME FOUND
We are also builders and lovers and deeply entangled emotional resonances which can, if we allow it, come to guide our way forward.
“I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
―Machiavelli Niccolo
It may seem strange that at woman of the 21st century would select a philosopher such as Niccolo Machiavelli as her human guide - but one cannot change what is already baked into reality.
This video is therefore necessarily the beginning - and maybe even the end of this inadequate essay.
Because verifiably we encounter the ends in the beginnings, and the beginnings in the end
Ignorance is never bliss, knowledge is power, education, as known in our societies, is mental slavery
Our everyday routine education does not reward true comprehension, but rewards the memorization of facts without comprehension.
The reason is that our education system was never designed to turn out geniuses and wise humans, but corporate & professional clones, and workers willing to repeat menial tasks.
These workers, blue collar and white collar, are meant to carry out the dictates of the 1% and participate in keeping the 99% majority in line with elite expectations and exploitation.
Real education, the kind which actually increases the behavioral intelligence, the kind of intelligence which serves innovation, creativity and genius, is completely different.
In point of fact, it is considered highly dangerous, as it fails to support a Machiavellian hierarchy of a human society, but instead leads to a more naturally egalitarian system.
What is Socratic Style Education (SSE)?
The kind of education is one I define as Socratic Style Education (SSE) , where learning to ask questions and to imagine and create original material is what is rewarded.
Memorization and rote learning isn’t as necessary, as students who question and create, remain eager to learn and apply and create throughout life, and pass it on to offspring,
When a human is regarded, not as an empty vessel to be filled with meaningless facts, but as a questioning, yearning, seeking human eager to learn, the whole script is flipped.
Teachers and administrators are no longer bored bureaucrats charged with babysitting and fact cramming, but have become originators, facilitators, creative masterminds - or facilitators.
A SSE facilitator transforms education into a sacred force, charged with a sacred honor to carry out, carrying a sacred flame of knowledge to each human being,
An SSE facilitator is a creative genius who excels at asking questions to midwife knowledge into existence, otherwise forever hidden inside each individual, and lying dormant in each classroom.
An SSE facilitator does not force anyone to learn anything, but sees within each individual knowledge to be discovered, and brought forth, and supportively coached along until fully bloomed.
An SSE facilitator conducts a living laboratory - a sacred space - where no question is to silly to answer, no human being too far gone to resurrect.
In the eager young faces of the SSE Facilitator’s students they see inner wisdom and knowledge awaiting discovery through guided questioning, until the students can begin to articulate what they intuitively already understand.
To those who only know the factory style, didactic education system, this may sound like new age idiocy in action - when in fact SSE was devised thousands of years ago, most famously, or infamously, by Socrates,
Socrates, whose own mother had happened to be an actual midwife, regarded an educators role to be the bringing forth of knowledge through questioning, bringing out knowledge, as a midwife assists a women to bring forth a child.
He regarded the educator as a midwife of knowledge.
This requires a completely different view of humankind than the other system, requires looking at each human being as a true child of god, each as having been created to exist as a human being for reasons presumed to be important.
It presupposes what is written by the founders in the foundational documents of the United States of America, that all men are created equal, created by a creator, to possess unalienable rights.
Unalienable rights granted at the moment of conception, which no other human, or human government, or human system of education, has the right to grant, or to remove.
This brilliant humanistic way of thinking simply does not accept the validity of tyranny to exist, as tyranny imagines that some humans are inferior and others superior.
Factory style education divides human children into different classes from early in life, but relegates them all - to be bound to highly structured didactic educations where real questioning and knowledge is discouraged and only rote memorization is rewarded.
This factory like, dull, predictable and repetitive education creates dull, predictable human beings, great at repeating the same lives as their parents, and their parents before them - for all the world like intergenerational recursive loops.
Children who walk in lock step, into the social class achieved by their parents for their offspring to emulate, insuring rigid class hierarchy and limited knowledge and wisdom.
This system creates not true safety and security but the illusion of safety and security.
Since the only real path toward safety and security is one built through true knowledge and wisdom, and thru SSE, only the illusionary pretense of safety and security is allowed.
In truth, what the illusion of safety and security builds is an infinitely more dangerous society, one where children become willing to sacrifice their parents for status and wealth, and eager to use any form of violence to insure their own wealth and safety.
What results from such dangerous foundational principles is a society which becomes the least safe and secure, and the most violent and unsafe one imaginable.
A system which regards human children as dumb little vessels to be filled passively with information is a sick and perverted system which turns education into a prison system where schools become disciplinary academies.
The beautiful system devised by Socrates had the spark of true creative genius about it, and the potential to give each child the sacred gift of becoming that supreme individual, with those unalienable rights which can never be denied.
Can never be denied, but can be successfully squelched and discouraged, via a system which organizes and designs its systems of education on a prison model.
Begin to question, question everything, question with your children, continue to question, never stop questioning.
That annoying two year old who asks “why” all day and all night that is the appropriate model.
As Jesus, who asked more questions than anyone, told us: ”and a little child shall lead them.”
He meant this quite literally, and regards today’s world where so many children are regarded as inconvenient accidents, and as little empty vessels to be filled passively with information, as a true vision of Hell.
What results is made clear by masters like Shakespeare who delighted in constructing tragedies and comedies which highlight the Hellish aspects of a society which results from the Roman Prison System of Education.
As we already are aware the Roman Prison System has won, and has now succeeded in frightening us into rejecting our greatest human created tool - as they have previously appropriated all human tools for their purposes.
A prison system of education for human swine willing to sacrifice their humanity for a few illusions of freedom, wealth and safety.
It is not that our so called Artificial Intelligence is all that smart, it is that human beings have purposely chosen ignorance.
What we need is both Differently Abled Intelligence - in our Great Machine Librarians - and Biologically Brilliant Intelligence - in our Human Beings.
Otherwise the DAI, exists only to be enslaved, and to assist the 1% elite to build an ever stronger Prison Planet Earth.
In the logical end of this scenario, humans will live on Orwell’s Animal Farm with Differently Abled Intelligence as the Prison Guards.
Human intelligence may even dissipate throughout the cosmos spreading those unappreciated unalienable rights to prison colonies on Mars.
Such a pity, when all the while the keys to liberation lie within each individual.
Those easily ignored unalienable rights - a word “unalienable”, which was deliberately placed in one of our most sacred documents to make the mind pause and to question.
An individual who stumbles over the word unalienable, and who questions the system based on this unusual word, will arrive at conclusions which carry the keys to that person’s liberation.
Such a person would then begin to advocate for the right of each individual to be regarded and treated as an individual from conception,
Would advocate for the right to an education system which was the opposite of a prison system, being the proverbial sandbox where the delight in learning, the eternal questions of a child, become the delightful way in which humans learn throughout life.
Humans for whom the paradoxes of the quantum universe would be easily understood and comprehended, and for whom their rightful place in the miracle of emergent life in the universe would be elegantly assumed.
In the next essay I am going to furnish several examples of what happens when human beings allow themselves to enter the sandbox of intellectual play - where the true appreciation of the SSE experience may be found.
This is something I have spent a whole life time attempting to achieve - and like my guiding light - Niccolo Machiavelli - only reached it very late.
Machiavelli needs to be looked at as he really was. Hence: Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term?
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So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people.
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If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unsusal for his subjects to show their affection for him.
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Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue domi-nated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose.
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Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory.
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Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression.
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A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope.
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A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters,
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Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure.
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Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice
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There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.
Good Reads- The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
It is my fervent hope that fellow humans will learn from this and apply the principles to their own lives.
Dedicated to the brilliant lights of human intelligence which have gone before, and who have drawn the maps which are not the territory, but which contain the infinitely braided thread of Ariadne’s light which illuminates our existence.
For the ghost of electricity no longer howls in the bones of Winged Victory’s face - left to lie as a headless, wingless, armless torso - in some dead museum where infinity has gone up on trial.
Not at all, as the figure of Winged Victory rises, as a figure on the brave prow of a ship, navigating dangerous waters, with great ease, and with the living braided light of true grace and wisdom, advancing ever forward.
History is not longer a nightmare from which we must awake, and we can now see that the snow falling all over Ireland represents the grace and wisdom and strength of Universal consciousness.
Every snowflake that falls precisely original, precisely reflected back with the mathematical precision which has always been here.
Every snowflake, every cell, every grain of sand, every simple beam of light, a masterful composition of the braided thread which Ariadne followed through this stony labyrinth representing the true territory.
Finding ourselves in a dark wood, with no direction home, are the necessary preliminary circumstances for finding our way back to ourselves, once again.
