We never stop learning. It is a continuous process of life itself. The other thing that is remarkable is the fact that what we learn is directly related to our circumstances. Whatever it is we are confronted with we have the capability to learn from it. But what exactly is learning?
Learning is ‘knowledge acquired through study, experience, or being taught’. Wikipedia mentions the following about learning:
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, attitudes and preferences…. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime.
Learning is something every living organism does during its lifetime. It is part of the whole adaptation system the organism uses to adjust to its environment, to learn from it and to adapt its way of living in order to increase its survival chances. Hence, repeated events and situations will be a major stimulus to change the behaviour of the organism, which is based on what it ‘knows’, on its own ‘understanding’ of how life operates around it. The organism will, as a result of the learning process, make different choices with regards to its responses to its environment. Survival is the main driving force behind the natural learning process.
So, differing circumstances create the possibilities for learning, for increasing knowledge. However, the unknown in life, like circumstances we are not familiar with, is also a source of fear. The known, the familiar, we respond to, we cope with, we adjust to. The unknown is something we do not possess an appropriate response to and so we have a tendency to avoid those circumstances and to keep life within the ‘known’, within what we have determined to be our comfort zone. This means that learning involves stepping out of your comfort zone and into the unknown, which, in general terms, fills us with a feeling of discomfort and anxiety. We can make a conscious decision to undertake this step and accept the challenge of experiencing something new, or we can be forced into it by the environmental circumstances that keep repeating itself. Either way we are standing on the threshold of something new. We are about to learn something new, to enrich our field of knowledge.
Babies learn the concept of shapes and spatial awareness by putting them together, by fitting one shape into another, by putting pieces of a puzzle together into a meaningful whole. They learn new skills like standing up by trying something they haven’t tried before. There exists a natural internal drive to learn. They are interested in their environment and by trying things out they will collect experiences, which will guide them in a certain direction in life. Each individual will be drawn to learning different things at different times, depending on their environment and on their inner makeup. The latter is responsible for creating their interest in certain aspects of life at certain times. Whatever is most urgent to the individual will be focused on first. Hence, a schooling system that forces children and adults to all learn the same things at the same time in life is bound to fail to contribute most appropriately to the development of the individual.
But the more experiences one gathers the more one’s responses change. More experiences equals more knowledge. The first time a toddler gets confronted with, experiences, a hot cooking plate or the side of a burning stove he will be in pain, quickly retract his hand from the offending site and he will have learned to stay away from it, not to repeat the experience. However, over time we learn to handle heat sources in a more nuanced way whereby we have learned that certain temperatures are still okay to us and others aren’t. Interestingly, once again, there is a great range of experiences of heat tolerance within human society. When I look at the hot pans a master chef picks up from a burning stove with his bare hands I wonder why he isn’t in pain. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to get a burned reaction from his physical system, such as redness and blistering, either. He, obviously, is able ‘to tolerate’ more heat than my system is. When asked if he doesn’t feel the heat, he replies: “One gets used to it.” So, let’s analyse this learning process step by step. The first experience of connection with heat as a toddler results in pain, panic and a burned skin. Later on, the human system learns to appreciate and ‘withstand’ a certain amount of heat connection to the system without it resulting in panic, without it creating a sensation labelled as ‘pain’. All of this results in a minimal to no physical burned response. People who expose themselves more regularly to more extreme heat conditions elevate their tolerance to higher temperatures and none of the prior human reactions are manifesting anymore. They have learned to live with it. By repeating the experience the system learns how to deal with it in a more appropriate way. It is getting used to it. By allowing the experience, instead of avoiding it, the system learns more about the situation and is able to provide a more subtle response.
The response of quickly retreating from a situation we experience as uncomfortable, as unknown, is an immediate survival reaction. Don’t know it, get away from it. What drives this response is fear and panic. Fear is nothing more than a signal, just as pain is. As an acute signal, this is meant to elicit an immediate survival response. If, on the other hand, we are becoming afraid of the signal itself we introduce suffering into our lives. However, getting away from the danger is not the end of it. The confrontation with an unknown, possibly dangerous, situation within your own environment may well not be a one-off event. When it keeps repeating itself it would be wise ‘to learn’ more about it in order to handle it differently in future confrontations. That is how people have learned to live in all kinds of circumstances, in all kinds of natural habitats, because they have learned about those specific conditions and they have adjusted their responses. By staying with the experience one can learn more about it, become wiser with regards to the different aspects of it, which results in us having to be less afraid and to be able to make more appropriate decisions about when it is a real threat to life or health and when it isn’t.
When you are standing sideways next to a window and a ball, which you didn’t see coming, hits the window hard at head level, you instantly move your body away from where the ball hits the window. You may even scream. Your system has just panicked in a reaction to an unknown, an unforeseen, situation. This way it protected you from being harmed by the impact of the incoming projectile, even though the window would ensure no such impact was possible. This stands in sharp contrast with how you will react when you are aware of the trajectory of the same ball. When you are standing outside and you see the ball coming your way, aiming for your head, you may simply catch the ball or even head it back to where it came from. No panic at all! How is this possible? Well, from other experiences with a ball we have learned to judge it as not dangerous, as not going to harm us. This allows us to pick a non-fear response in answer to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Having learned more about the impact a ball can have on our own system we now ‘know’ there is nothing to be afraid of. Knowledge of the conditions, of the circumstances, allows us to remain relaxed in those conditions and circumstances.
What have we learned so far about the learning process? Learning is a relatively lasting change in behaviour that is the result of experience. It is the acquisition of information, knowledge, and skills. To learn, you must encounter new information, pay attention to it, coordinate it with what you already know, store it in your memory, and apply it. What sources of learning are commonly used besides direct personal experience?
- Learning through association is one of the most fundamental ways that people learn new things. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered one method of learning during his experiments on the digestive systems of dogs. He noted that the dogs would naturally salivate at the sight of food, but that eventually the dogs also began to salivate whenever they spotted the experimenter’s white lab coat. Later experiments involved pairing the sight of food with the sound of a bell tone. After multiple pairings, the dogs eventually began to salivate to the sound of the bell alone. Learning through conditioning.
- The consequences of your actions can also play a role in determining how and what you learn. Behaviourist B.F. Skinner noted that while classical conditioning could be used to explain some types of learning, it could not account for everything. Instead, he suggested that reinforcements and punishments were responsible for some types of learning. When something immediately follows a behaviour, it can either increase or decrease the likelihood that the behaviour will occur again in the future.
- Observational learning occurs also by observing the actions and consequences of other people’s behaviour. Learning through copying.
Learning doesn’t always come easy. Sometimes, you must overcome obstacles in order to gain new knowledge. These obstacles may take several different forms.
- Environmental challenges
- Cognitive challenges: the ability to memorise information and pay attention to information
- Motivational challenges
Do not forget that learning, in essence, is a natural process that aims to increase the survival chances of the organism. So whatever ‘academic’ learning we pursue, whatever ‘science’ we learn about, we should never forget what it is for. Learning is basically aimed at gaining knowledge about your living conditions, which will allow you to make more appropriate choices with regards to your survival. Theoretical models, whether they are thinking models or physical models, do not mean that we have learned something. Only the confrontation with the reality, only the true experience can teach us something real. However, copying theoretical models and thought processes will direct our attention and our interest in a very specific way. It will put all other potential observations beyond our field of vision, beyond our observational reach. When we don’t pay attention to something we do not observe it properly and we do not store the information that is connected to it. Moreover, when certain models are associated with obtaining rewards and others leading to punishment we are bound to learn whatever the controller of the punishment-reward-scheme is wanting us to learn. Hence, only being allowed into a specific job when you have the ‘right’ diploma or certificate, which you can only obtain by successfully finishing a specific schooling trajectory, is only going to teach us whatever the organisers of the course want us to know. Only what they teach you at school you are allowed to learn, allowed to know, and whatever else is part of the reality of life is now beyond the scope of your observation. Furthermore, regulating the ensuing profession will ensure that no other information, deemed to be inappropriate, is allowed into the field of knowledge of that profession.
And what about the idea that the process of learning is more important than the result of the learning? In other words, why we want to learn and how we learn is more important than the conclusions the learning leads to? Learning, as we stated, is a process of acquiring understanding and knowledge. True knowledge is defined as ‘awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation’. This indicates that only experience itself is the road to real knowledge. This would definitely exclude copying as a way of furthering your learning and your knowledge. The real value of copying someone or something else is then to apply it yourself and observe the outcome as it is manifesting to you. Only by observing your own learning process will you gain real knowledge, knowledge that means something to you, that has real value in your own life. And what is the real value of the result of the learning process? As learning is a spontaneous continuous process inherent to life itself, it will continue for as long as living organisms will be around. Circumstances change all the time, so will ‘what we have learned’. Hence, the result of the learning process will evolve continually. There does not exist an absolute truth as ‘the truth’ as we see it will evolve and change constantly. Once you have learned something you will need to learn something more of the same or something else. All of which contributes to your own understanding and knowledge of your own environment and the way life presents itself to you.
Simply put, you observe your own life, your own environment and the effects it has on your own life. Being confronted with a new situation the system sends out a warning signal such as pain and/or panic, which triggers an immediate retreat response away from the perceived danger, which is, at that time, the interpretation given to ‘the unknown’. In order to embrace the possibility to change such a response of fear, one needs to confront the unknown again and again in order to be able to observe and experience it better, which means that we are learning more and more about it. This increases our own knowledge of the previously unknown situation and turns it into a more familiar thing. The more familiar we become with certain circumstances and situations the less anxiety they will create in our system. So, fear and panic is changed into relaxation and familiarity through the learning process of allowing yourself to step into the unknown and allowing yourself to observe the unknown.
But what happens to our system when we are unable to observe the situation we are finding ourselves in and consequently we are unable to learn more about the unknown that is causing our system to panic? What happens to us when we are fearful of a situation, or a specific environment, that we are unable to observe ourselves? How can this occur? Copying ideas, beliefs and models that are supposed to describe life and its natural processes, and placing greater value onto these than on your own observations, may induce fear for things unseen, for things not experienced by yourself. If your life is being threatened by an outside force, be it a predator or a natural cataclysm, you can observe it. By observing it you can learn more about it, which allows you to become less fearful and more knowledgeable about it. But what if they tell you that your life is constantly being threatened by an outside force you cannot observe in any possible way, an unseen threat that you are ‘potentially’ surrounded by all the time? Nothing happens to your system, unless you begin to believe something. If you perceive something, real or imaginary, as a threat your system will respond to that in its usual way. Our natural response to incoming danger is to retreat from it, to move towards a place, a situation, of safety. Our initial response is triggered by fear. However, if you don’t know when the danger is actually present and threatening you, where it comes from and what form it takes, there is no place you can escape to. Your system will be constantly panicking as the undetectable danger is believed to possibly be present all the time, everywhere. You can only hope it is not going to be you who is going to be affected or even destroyed by the unseen danger. Hope and pray is all you can do. In the meantime your system is constantly sending out the fear signal because you believe danger is heading your way. Your unconscious safety system is constantly on high alert in order to keep you safe, even though it doesn’t know what the danger entails and where it comes from. It is afraid on the unknown.
The medical profession warns us against ‘potential’ danger. In order not to get infected we need to protect ourselves against organisms we cannot detect at any level of our being. As, according to the professionals, an infection can have dire consequences to our health, they recommend avoiding contact with the offending organism. They alert us to the circumstances we are ‘most likely’ will come across these organisms and they advise us to avoid those conditions. When I take note of how they say these organisms will invade my body and when I take their advice on not to open myself up to the possibility of getting infected, it seems to me pretty clear as to what my plan of action needs to be. I need to stop breathing – I need to stop eating – I need to stop having sex.
Believing your life is being threatened by undetectable ‘predators’ such as bacteria, parasites, viruses and toxins overtaxes the natural protection system. It was never designed for this task as in nature no constant threat exists. There are acute dangers but they also pass, which allows the organism to relax and to live. In nature, the organism only has to be able to protect itself against danger it is actually confronted with and to this effect it is equipped with a frequency sensitive system that is able to detect energetic changes. So it will pick up ‘energetic dangers’, significant changes in the energetic balance of the environment, rather than having to wait to be confronted with real manifested dangers. The energetic changes are a prelude to the manifestation of the danger in the physical reality.
The main point of the confrontation with real danger is that the incoming information and its evaluation is done by your own system, by your own observation. You feel the fear and respond accordingly. The person standing next to you may evaluate the incoming information completely differently and will therefore respond in a totally different way. This is reality. However, when the incoming information does not contain any information of potential danger but you now ‘know’, you have convinced yourself, you cannot trust that information, you do need to panic all the time. If you can’t trust your natural system to keep you safe, you are in big big trouble!
The other interesting point about living in constant fear in response to an imaginary, a believed, danger to our life, to our health, is a stalling of the learning process. We learn through observing and experiencing. In this case we cannot observe what we believe is the reality we live in and we can’t experience it. Hence, we cannot learn anything about it! Doctors tell us that ‘when you notice something, it is already too late’. Living in imaginary danger stops our learning process. We cannot learn anything about this situation, about this potential danger, because we are inhibited from making any relevant observations about the reality we face. This would be comparable to not having any experience of the reality of a moving ball and now believing that a ball, which you can never observe heading your way, is going to strike you and cause enormous damage to your wellbeing, regardless whether you find yourself behind a window or not. There is no possible protection against a possible strike and yet you must be constantly on the lookout for a potentially lethal hit by a ball you cannot see coming.
The only way one can ‘learn’ something more about this potential danger and the way we are being threatened is by copying what someone else tells us about it. Without any personal evidence to back up what we are being told we accept the information, not only as being relevant, but also as being crucial to our survival. Being in a position where one cannot experience something for oneself always makes any ‘knowledge’ copied from someone else at best a theoretical model, awaiting further testing and experiencing by oneself. Only then can it become real knowledge. As this is never going to happen in the case of a theoretical model that puts forward a potential life threatening environment that cannot, in any way shape or form, be experienced by any individual, it results in people living under a constant threat, perceived as real because of a constantly repeated story. And the repetition is now happening inside your own head. You believe it. A life of constant fear, which people cannot escape from, unless they return to their natural instincts, shapes their destiny.
Trusting nature, which has a perfectly working system to allow you to learn the best possible way for you to survive in the given circumstances, is experiencing your own reality as is, not as imagined it to be. Your own observations connect you to the reality of your own life and what you need to learn is embedded within the experiences you will have. You are going to need to trust your own experiences, your own observations and your own evaluations.
It is your life, and only you can know it.
Learn more about it by observing it more closely.ystem.
