Each of us has to find a specific way in which we study and take in information, and move in this world. This process is different for everyone. What we are looking for is the creation of a personal style, customized to our real needs, temperament and history.
The paradigm of learning that most of us have been exposed to in the outdated educational systems of the Western world is primarily oriented on learning information from books, gathering data and memorizing it. This approach has done much damage to our understanding of the world and what the potential of a human being is. It is rooted in a very limited understanding of actual human faculties and possibilities, and has brought us to the point that we actually believe we cannot know anything if we haven’t read it somewhere in a book, which is ridiculous. The end result of such education is that we no longer trust our intuitive knowledge unless we find some kind of confirmation for it in a written text.
The new way of learning includes embodying knowledge through direct experience. It includes opening up to deep cellular knowing, an inner library which contains all information in existence. It includes listening to one’s intuition, the voice of our higher self. And also many other voices, like those of our ancestors or spiritual helpers from many different layers of existence.
Any kind of spiritual endeavor and self discovery is a unique process for which no one can provide the exact formula. There is no one model that fits all and that’s why sticking to any kind of a program that is based on repetition of fixed patterns ultimately fails. What the great teachers have left us are only maps and the maps cannot take the journey for us. A map can show us the diagram of the streets and roads, but it doesn’t give us the experience of the journey. For example, a map can show us where a certain street is located in New York City, but it doesn’t give us the experience of how it is to actually drink a cup of coffee in a little café on a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. That we have to find out for ourselves.
Nobody can tell us what to do and how to grow, how to adapt, how to evolve. It is something we find out along the way as we go. Listening to other people experiences can be inspirational, but also detrimental if we get stuck on wanting to re-create that other person’s experience, which is basically impossible. In that way we develop expectations that turn out impossible to meet, because our own journey has something else in store for us. And there’s a danger of completely missing out on our own experience because all the time we are waiting for someone else’s experience to occur.
Once we get to know ourselves and how we function, we start to feel more and more confident in our process and knowledge. This confidence is the key element which pushes us forward. We no longer use or disperse valuable energy in waiting for the others to validate our experience. There comes a moment when we become 100% sure in our personal experience and our truth. It still is a mysterious and a magical process which is not predestined, and it’s likely to change along the way. However, once we develop that certainty we can move on our way with even more precise focus in the direction that we feel that we need to go and we can cut more easily through fears, doubts and obstacles. By remaining in this mode of constant deep listening of self we are able to move fluidly, reevaluate our position at any given moment and change course if necessary.