Why do we need a new form of education? Do we not already have enough schooling, educations, as well as an enormous amount of scientific literature and wisdom literature in the form religions and various spiritual teachings? Yes we do, and it is precisely this enormous amount of schools, literature and ideas, that is part of the problem. This is what is supporting the division in people's attitudes towards life rather than uniting them. Is there anyone who would even be able to read through everything that has been written in order to find the best wisdom even if they devoted their entire life to such an endeavour? Doubtful.
Besides, reading wisdom literature is useless without criticism and evaluation. A religion or science can have hundreds of books devoted to it, where none of them completely agrees with the other or arrives at the same interpretation. All books cannot be correct. More books and more education is not what we need, unless they educate a sense of criticism and points out what in our culture is beneficial for our lives and what is not – a selection for societal sanity.
This does not mean that the rest should be prohibited or destroyed. Such a proposal should not be part of a selection for societal sanity. But we need an evaluation compass; a system of elimination or exclusion. A simplification that gives us the right focus, keeps our thoughts in the right channels, and increases our awareness and understanding. If we learn everything without discrimination we'll never know the things that are essential.
All culture has an educational influence on people. But real education should differ from culture in general by being attentive, understanding, and intentional in its transmission of knowledge. Real education – essential education – is an evaluation compass. Nothing else is education. Everything else is only ineffective, partial transmission of culture, which does not differ essentially from the term "culture" in general. It is all imitation and routine. This, of course, has its place, especially when it comes to the training of practical skills. But these can also be developed outside of a school.
If we had an education, instead of only partial transmission of culture and tons of disagreeing knowledge then I wouldn't have gone through the trouble of suggesting this education or write my book on the subject. One thing about our culture and with our knowledge that people rarely acknowledges, which even scientists seems to give very little recognition, is the reality of human clumsiness and incompetence. When an error has appeared in a scientific theory or in a translation or interpretation of a religious book, how likely is the probability that the error or mistake gets corrected when culture has a tendency to indoctrinate people en masse? Yes, sure, there is always someone who discovers the error sooner or later, perhaps several individuals and year after year. But once this discovery finally happens, the culture has already indoctrinated millions of people with the erroneous knowledge. What can a single individual do in order to change the opinion of millions of people? What can two, three, or even a hundred people do to change the opinion or idea amongst millions? Especially once the idea has become comfortable, written down in books and various cultural artefacts that has not only educated and influenced billions, but which will influence billions also in the future, as long as nobody destroys every artefact that contains the error. And such purges almost never happens since naturally nobody wants to throw away much that might be of value along with the mistakes and errors.
It is clear that what is needed is not cultural tradition, but one's own understanding. We need to avoid referring to authorities as much as possible, and instead understand by ourselves. And every real authority has a responsibility to transmit their knowledge in a comprehensible way. Nothing needs to be vague, because if it really is relevant then it is not something that needs to be unclear. An authority, if he or she is an authority, needs to be able to explain it simply or understandably. And if they cannot explain it simply or understandably, then they themselves don't understand it well enough. The only essential educational value in an authority is that they can transmit their knowledge or understanding without anything being taken wrong or becomes routine-based repetition of information. All essential education lies in the attention towards the process of transmission. Not just in the knowledge itself.
The most difficult blockage when it comes to the transmission of knowledge and insights from one person to another, lies in the fact that experiences are personal and a true authority does not simply possess information, i.e. imitation or culture. A true authority possesses understanding in the form of experience, which is true understanding. But experience is perhaps the most difficult thing to transmit to another with any precision. People use words and language, but words and language can never transmit precise experiences or understanding.
In order to transmit knowledge and understanding, i.e. experiences, you need more than words and phrases. You need to know exactly what you're doing. Any sort of ineptitude or mistake and you can fail completely. Nothing requires so much energy and attention – requires so much education – as insights into processes of transmission. Attention towards this will also increase your own awareness towards the subject you want to transmit. Thus what is most important in education is the attention towards processes of transmission. That is exactly why people often learn more when they discuss and attempt to communicate with others, rather than when they only attempt to think and absorb information. The attempt to reach others will force people to re-think and refine their own knowledge, sort out errors in both their own and the other's knowledge in order to express themselves more precisely and competently, as well as putting more energy into understanding others. Communication and discussion is an essential part of real education and growth, something the ancient Greeks understood when they wanted every citizen to take part in public politics and discourse.
What we need is an evaluation compass; an authority that is not a human being with flaws and subjective interpretations of words and phrases, but a tool or epistemology that can measure timeless laws of nature and reality as compensation for the deficiency in man's words and language.
It is not the first time such a proposal has been put forth, and numbers are already an ancient attempt at finding a universal language for science. In other words, I am talking about measurements and parameters. An education, if it is to fulfill its true purpose, needs to be attentive, discriminating, and evaluating. And in order to evaluate something, anything, as "good" or "bad," the evaluation needs to be connected to a system. This is where the necessity of a tool or epistemology comes into the picture. An epistemology that establishes precise parameters for evaluation, similar to mathematics, satisfies both our need for a universal language, a way to discriminate, and finally a way to make everyone into their own authority. If such an epistemology should be established, then it would also be the most essential for primary education.
This timeless education is precisely such an epistemology, based on an essentialness-key that increases the quality of intelligence drastically and isolates all knowledge that is relevant from all knowledge that is not. This key or tool I call "A-Ω-X-Ω" (originally A-Ö-X-Ö in Swedish) and it expresses the timeless configuration of reality, which is based on the primary causes: connection, contrast, cycles, and analogy.
The result is nothing less than a complete philosophical system that can improve our culture and education. The entire system is based on timeless principles and the fact that real effects must have certain causes. More than an education about this or that, it is one about how things are related. With this education you can within a short timespan acquire universal knowledge, and might be able to speak on all subjects with unprecedented teaching and inexhaustible eloquence.
My essentialness-key A-Ω-X-Ω is an urgent epistemology for evaluating our civilization, our cultural norms, our scientific truth, and what is of value in religion and spiritual teachings; a logic that can explain for us nature's, and also our psyche's, timeless laws, and which can deal with the problems of our human existence, human society, and its mechanisms; together with principles towards evaluation studies aimed at true ethics and aesthetics. An epistemology that can prevent and even cure psychic illness with enormous precision in diagnosis and treatment.
It fills the need for an evaluation compass that can explain what is relevant and healthy in our culture by employing timeless parameters. Our current cultural intellectuality is far too mediocre, even in academic circles. This timeless education provides our culture with a new method for understanding the problems of society more clearly, so that we can handle our problems better, faster, easier, and with more precision.
An education that, with a new, superior and impartial logic, calculates essentialness for societal sanity. A re-evaluation of all cultural values that will quickly expose and question subjective ideas based on partiality and cultural trends, which can prevent cultural hypnosis and destructive brainwashing.
We must give up that which is unnecessary if we are to become stable, wise, loving, and capable of right action. We must be capable of handling the complexity of our cultural heritage and of our human psyche in a sane way, with the help of a simplified but essential synthesis. What comes first is the right knowledge, which must be based on timeless parameters if it is to not lead to imaginations and errors.
Once we begin to understand and can leave behind us our bias and ignorance, we must begin to act the right way in accordance with what we know, and give up everything erroneous that is blocking improvement for ourselves and others. The more we walk in such a direction, the more we become stable, satisfied with ourselves, with life, and with each other.
People are partial by nature in order to maintain certain necessary laws of reality that makes life, experience, and existence possible to begin with. This partialness (bias) makes people limited in their capacity for love, and only perceives undesirable oppositions instead of necessary complements; which in turn leads to a focus on norms and wishes; which leads to a cultural split, confusion, control-madness, and psychic stress with huge suffering as the unavoidable result.
However, people have a possibility of becoming aware of their partiality and ignorance through Timeless Education, making it possible to stop striving in an impossible direction, and instead become capable of achieving that which is possible and live advantageous with the right focus and appreciation towards our differences.
Criticism of contemprary education
Apart from this introduction regarding why we need a new education, it is also appropriate that I point out why our current school and education no longer is desirable.
Our schools are responsible for our development, but does not fulfill its function. Instead of being in service to the individual, today's education is almost exclusively in the service of the economy, the market, and various ideologies. Education is done routinely and coldly with excessive conformity as the goal, without thought or questioning. Real education is more than simply offering more subjects or information. It is also a question of unlearning wrong answers and wrong concepts. Society usually works with the assumption that, if we still have problems, or problems are increasing, then people need to learn more. Our educational system and politicians rarely question whether the education we have to begin with is true and sensible, that a more rational way might be to decrease the education that is not working, instead of always trying to add to it with more and more subjects and information the student needs to take in.
We need an education for becoming an emotionally healthy human being, and foster understanding with acceptance and flexibility instead of ideology – that is to say, instead of a biased focus on wishes. In school we should minimize all pest such as the usual tests, essays, and grades. The grading system was once introduced because there arose competition in regards to attractive educations and careers, and that remains the only sensible use of grading. Young people should come to school because they want to learn. Not because society demands that they conform with grades as carrot and whip. Manipulation through threats of failure and future hardships must stop. Real education transmits healthy culture without the need of much more than simply the example of developed people who naturally influences the less developed. It is more effective and natural than words since people remember it directly through experience. Education and culture takes care of itself if we only understand and take care of ourselves first, without threats, manipulation, or artificial norms.
Is it strange that there is a lack of teachers in today's society, when the education of teachers mostly indoctrinate them to give students specific and uncreative instructions which then makes them unpopular as teachers and creates an enormous stress. Even most teachers feel that they are doing something meaningless. Real education is something meaningful and would encourage people to become teachers again, and the students would appreciate them.
Education is an important aspect of every culture, because it stands for our values. But values must not consist of unquestioned assumptions or a biased focus on wishes. That is how we have ended up in the harmful status quo. Education cease being education once it has become based in routine. Real education must always evaluate itself and be aware of what it is doing, as well as what its most essential purpose is. Otherwise it will only become an irrelevant or fossilized information-machine.
Nobody truly thinks about what education really is or what is essential. Parents send their children to school and criticize their performance since this is our culture. Students go to school because their parents tell them to do so, since this is our tradition. Teachers are only focused on grades and results in order to satisfy parents and politicians, since this is their profession. The result is that millions of students all over the world are going to school every day in a routinely and bored manner without knowing why they need to manage tests with information they are just going to forget a few months later. It is a stressful modern education based on chastisement and demands that youths must earn a ticket to society, without the least bit of analysis in regards to fundamental reasons or of love. The result of punishment and demands is only the transmission of punishment and demands. Nobody learns consideration or healthy questioning as a result of such antitheses. It is an unsuccessful education that blames the students for its failure instead of the bad education. Even students who manages to take in the information and get good grades are still left mostly confused in life.
Since culture always is adoptation and imitation, we cannot call cultural influence that which is authentic in a person. The real soul always lies in a person's nature. So when we do not know people's nature, then we do not really know man's true soul. A teacher or parent who loves a young person for his or her culturally possessed – that is to say imitated – upbringing, practice of religion, or school grades, loves, in fact, not the human being in the individual – only the adaptation or acquisition; the culture they've been fed. And the individual herself, ignorant of his/her own nature and its deeper needs, can go so far as discarding his/her own soul in order to get respect and love by imitating the culture even more. How does this help people to love one another when they only love "the culture" in themselves and others?
If the recurring crisis in the world and societies is a problem of relationship that arises from a limited capacity to love, the so-called "hatred in the world", then it is absurd that we continue to pay attention to culture and ideals – i.e. falseness (artifice) and chastisement – above nature and honesty, i.e. above truth and acceptance. Culture can only be of value if it supports man in his/her acceptance and understanding of his/her own and others' nature, not when it demands imitation and chastisement in order to accept people and keep them from being punished or rejected. But nowhere do we find an education that teaches and gives grades in the ability to establish satisfying relationships with others.
Of course, human nature can be egocentric and have strong desires, but at least it is authentic and natural instincts that thus might be worth affirming in order to find out what they really want to get at, and in that way get to know and identify our nature. Culture, on the other hand, give people artificial desires that are not even authentic – desire for money, vehicles, fashion, possessions, plastic surgery, nuclear military defenses, and so on – fictitious things, which are actually alien to life, that didn't exist only a couple of hundred years ago, and which has very little to do with people's deeper needs.
If we analyze and think it over, we soon find that the demonization of our inherent human nature appear more and more unfounded. Nature is more easily nourished by simpler, more natural things, than cultural adaptation. The destructive tendency we see among people around the planet today is mainly due to adaptation and brainwashing, it has very little to do with authentic nature. Ideas and culture are also often threatening and alien, a society that seems to be against you – against your nature. The soul can sense that the culture does not fulfill deeper needs, and this brings about depression, desperation and rebellion. The culture will then use this rebellion and strife as "proof" that the culture's ideas and demands must be enforced even more in order to keep human nature in check when it really is the other way around.
But we cannot get away from the fact that human nature has produced culture, so we should not take culture completely separately from nature. However, culture is what disguises and distracts us from perceiving our own nature so that we can deal with it.
If we recognize our nature as the primary cause, then we must conclude that peoples nature is not homogeneous. People usually make the assumption that people are more alike than they actually are and thus that their ideas would be equally good and natural for everyone if they were to be realized. People do not realize the extent to which we have different natures, different psychology. We need to understand that we are partial, and that this bias leads to a focus on norms and wishes, so-called "ideals," instead of real peace, love and acceptance.
If man is the problem, then we need to understand man. Psychology, religion, philosophy, art, literature, and various social theories, all attempts to understand and explain man. My education is no different. And an essential, timeless education, should not be different.
The starting-point must be that all humans contribute to our collective problems at all periods of time. Since people do not realize the extent to which they themselves are the problem, correct knowledge is necessary.
The positive thing about this is that, even if you have contributed to the problems, you cannot be blamed since you lacked the correct education and understanding. Cultural influences have brainwashed us all. You can only be blamed at this stage if you refuse to seek more understanding and knowledge, or resist understanding. The cure against the "brainwashing," as well as your own partiality, is thus:
- Correct education based on beneficial valuation that should be established in the culture, namely the education I am talking about.
- The individual's own effort in attempting to understand and not simply imitate in a routine manner.
- The individual's own effort to exercise self-control over their own partiality, as well as over their feelings of lack and recognize the disadvantage in them.
