A Learning School

- Strephon Says 36 A Learning School

Strephon talks about a dream he had of a school of learning in which students learn only from a “method of enquiry and not books.”

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This is Strephon Kaplan-Williams writing this talk this morning at seven AM on the importance of the reality function.

In my remembered dream I was starting a learning school for adults in which the true essentials would be taught. We had four students enrolled at the beginning. We needed at least eight to make a go of it financially. I had no money and I had four stains on my good jeans.

My question to myself was, what should I do? Ask one of the men students my size to lend me a pair of his clean pants? Or, simply tell students that I knew I was wearing stained pants but that these were the only good pants I had right now for teaching class.

I thought if I did this I might go on a little long out of anxiety. Was it that important anyway? Why should I spend valuable class time on discussing the teacher’s personal ego and financial circumstances? Should not one be dealing with the really important concepts and things in life?

The style of the school was to be philosophic. This meant that any topic could be up for discussion, and that we would discuss it and relate to it in any way possible that had truth, clarity and immediacy.

We would not be using books. We would be using our minds right in the moment all the time. The topics for discussion would be the current ones happening at that moment.

That was my dream. When you think about it there are exciting concepts and issues here.

What if there were such a school in which no books were used, no essays from the internet, meaning nothing from the past. What if all you had to use in your four years of learning was your brain?

You would come to class each morning, if you came to class, with only your brain, and dressed in the clothes you chose.

Come to think of it, you know what I mean, this learning that I do with my dreams most nights and early morning meditations is exactly that, is learning without books.

I don’t think people usually learn this way. Learning without books.

Even many dream colleagues seem to interpret dreams, which means, imposing their already known concepts and attitudes onto dreams. They see in the dream what is in themselves as unconscious attitudes and world views.

Where is that in the dream? I ask.

Well, some of it is not there.

Thus in dream group we take as our study focus our dreams, the more immediate the better.

When we study our dreams we are studying, are we not, our place in life, our place in the immediate moment.

Why study your dreams, why remember them, why work with them, why use them as guidance for your perspective on life?

Because they are often immediate. They bring up current concerns and issues. They show you in a different light from the way you in your ego self like to think of yourself.

Also, relationships can do this. Intimate relating means stripping naked sometimes and fucking each other. Thank God we are finally getting to the perspective wherein fucking is fucking and not a sign of ultimate love, if there is such a thing.

Ask yourselves, what is the fucking for? What is the relating for? Why are you making having sex together the sign and seal of a mutual agreement that you are lovers and intimate companions in life?

Yet we do, don’t we?

We make sex, a biological function, some sort of near ultimate seal that we are a bonded and primary couple together.

Why have I diverted to the topic of sex again when we were speculating around my dream of having to teach with one good pair of jeans with four stains on them that students would see?

We are searching out what is the core issue in living life.

In my remembered dream this morning I could make a decision. What to do with my stained pants when I started teaching?

I could borrow a pair from a student if I found one man my size. I could simply state to my students that I knew my jeans had stains in them, and maybe discuss the philosophical implications of this with them, since we were practicing a method of inquiry on any subject as our chosen way of learning, a learning without books.

Or, I could say nothing. Yet this did not seem right since it would be something hidden. The stains in my pants would be obvious to students and myself but not made clear why they were there and I was teaching in these pants.

The further story was that in starting the school I was broke, I was poor, and so needed students to generate income.

I was starting a school as a potential income-generator and learning generator. This school of learning was an innovative idea based on ‘the method of inquiry into anything.’ Adult students were sure to go through transformation using this process. There would be no hiding behind books or other acquired knowledge possible.

What was I to do? Class was coming up?

I woke to the early morning light and wrote down my dream. Now in processing it with you I have realized significant meaning from it.

In doing these free podcasts which take at least four hours to create each one, I am practicing the method of ‘inquiry into anything.’

The only thing you and I have here is the clarity and the brilliance of our method: I analyze any aspect of life that seems that important in the moment. You and I listen and apply whatever is evoked in us to our own perspective on our own lives.

This is the method of seeking truth through a method of enquiry.

Of course your tools must be developed further as you go along.

For me these podcasts must be continually improved in themselves. The use of words, concepts, thinking, style, speaking, developing a point.

The main thing is the focus given by each podcast.

No matter how razzle-dazzle podcasts seem from here or elsewhere, what is the point of a podcast? What are you looking for? What is the podcast about? What is its value for you?

To entertain? Or to learn something?

Our method of enquiry is to learn something we did not know that is important for us in how we live life.

What we had going at the beginning of this talk was the rust stains on my jeans in my night dream from last night.

I also enquired into why the culture and almost each one of us makes sexual intercourse with someone the focus commitment that two people are very much in love and are intimate together as life partners.

Maybe sex is just sex, and have fun with it, but don’t tie it to finding your true love in life?

So we are not talking about sex or love here but about our method of inquiry. What seems important is that we question everything and through this sincere searching, arrive not at an abstraction but at a moment of truth.

Now wouldn’t that be wonderful!

You ask me, as in the dream, what is the purpose of your school of enquiry in which you don’t use books and already produced knowledge?

The moment of truth, I say back to you.

Our method of inquiry is to produce the moment of truth.

The Moment of Truth!

How is this done?

We think that when you arrive at a direct experience of immediate reality, and know it for what it truly is, that experience can become a moment of truth for you, in you, with you, and also with those who are participating in the moment of truth.

My designer jeans again. The rust stains are there. This is reality. I have to teach class with the commitment I have made to bring myself and the students into reality through our method of inquiry.

What should I do?

I am doing it here.

I am discussing the various choices I can make with this rather small situation, at least on the surface. I can then with my students make a decision. I can ask myself, which choice has the greatest revelatory possibilities for my commitment to keep searching for and experiencing the truth of situations, the core reality of situations?

Thus the position I take on an issue, if conscious, will depend at least partly on the values I am consciously committed to living in life, and partly on my ability to think clearly and perceptively in life.

I am teaching students how to think by my doing the best self-thinking I am capable of right with them in the moment.

I also do self-revelation of how I experience myself now in the immediate moments of experiential life.

I reveal myself and the thinking about myself with you right now in the hopes that through such self-revelation you can learn, if you choose, a way to live life that I highly value.

You see through my example a way to live life that you can also follow or not follow. One podcast listener wrote a brief appreciation to this effect: She said she appreciated that I was talking about the values she also wants to live in her life.

Here I am. Here you are. You know who you are. You know I am talking directly to you. You know that my words are getting into your ears. You know that you are in charge of the doorways past your ears into your mind and heart. You know how much further you let these words in. You know you can let them in all the way and practice them yourself and see what results.

Yet let me warn you, if you do so, you will be learning and you will be changing your life. All life is learning, yet imagine how accelerated this learning can be if you consciously choose to open to it.

Imagine what it can be like for you, for me, if you consciously open to learning without books, experts, authors, yet by developing consciously your commitment to the truth and your method of enquiry.

I call this also, developing the Reality Function. You and I have direct experiences yet do we open to learning from them each day? Or do we label them with attitudes and so limit their potential to teach us anything?

People tend to use their previous knowledge learned from others, themselves, and from books to categorize and label new experiences. It would be far better to learn how to process without labeling your experiences as they happen to you, using a method of enquiry.

From my dream I know that my limited economic means is to be dealt with as reality and to work within those means to create again more prosperity for myself and those I relate to.

From my dream I know that my focus is to process things as they are, and not project onto them the way I want things to be.

From my dream I know that my partner and I are a consciously loving couple since the basis for our relating is this constant enquiry into the truth of our experiences we are having together.

What then is the basis for love relating?

Not sex. Sex must face the same method of enquiry that any other aspect of our relating faces, such as generating the money we need to live on together.

We don’t discuss the news. The news is other people’s reality. We discuss what happens with us daily. We increase our awareness of each other and how each of us operates in life. We learn constantly from each other because we practice The Method Of Inquiry, building our Reality Functions around how we accept and live life.

The basis of our relationship is the enquiry into truth, the daily processing into truth of our couple and life experiences together. We are each actively working on ourselves.

Elsewhere I have talked about what a former relationship was like, like in the podcast, Loving Laurie. Now I am in present life and relationship and so my direct experiencing is happening now.

However, the essential difference with a lot of other relating I have done is that now I have a companion who is in the school of learning, like myself, enquiring into the truth of experience and learning from it. To learn we must change our present selves to a more open self, a new self born of the new possibilities for truth that we are to generate.

You learn from us, not by following our truths of experience, but by learning and using the method of enquiry that we use for living life.