Education: Initiation to The Mysteries
Thousands of years ago Plato wrote his Allegory of the Cave, re-expressing a timeless, well worked perennial idea speaking to the essential conundrum of human potential. He invoked the tradition of the Mysteries and of a practical need for people to orient themselves as critical thinkers. It was also a warning for students and teachers about education’s power to distance the enlightened from the uneducated masses. It was Plato’s teacher Socrates, after all, who was sentenced to death for “corrupting” his students: They learned to challenge, innovate, and think for themselves. Corruption in this case meant corrupting traditional Athenian authority and status quo. So perhaps education has less to do with learning how to think, and more to do with thinking for oneself.
In some ways, perennialism and canonical mythology from cultures across time, geography, and scale cannot escape referencing this central idea: that education is an initiation, promising both power, freedom, responsibility, and danger. This core myth behind the idea of education itself is written in our collective records as a species, and continues to be rewritten, reworked, and relived. It is perennial because it is a repeating archetype, it is essential because it speaks to the competencies of education that both include and transcend pragmatic generational need, and it is especially phenomenological because it can be, and is meant to, be directly experienced by each and every individual in new, meaningful, and profound ways.
Initiation is an invitation arriving from the cosmos upon the axis of subjectivity and objectivity. We find it in our deepest drives and vital desires, a primeval inheritance we must also intentionally purpose, urging us toward something new. It is not only animalistic or mammalian, but speaks of an abstract, transpersonal yearning that even science and spirituality cannot define or contain.
It is also somehow dangerous. It speaks of evolution in indefinite terms, and cannot be controlled or politicized. It speaks of liberation as something unfathomable, unlimited, useful yet transcendent. There are countless ways that cultures and civilizations go about seeking or repressing this inherent, human prerogative.
In fact, the way that a society orients its youth to this existential journey–the journey of moving beyond–will define it. It will define its lifespan and its potential for innovation and progress. It will define its level of happiness and capacity for empathy or self-destruction. It will define its biases and prejudices, and whether it will be doomed to fulfill its own limited prophecies or to be reborn beyond their reach.
Education is one word to define what initiation signifies, but not the only word. Today, we have a world of teachers, schools, subjects, and developmental pathways we call academia. But this is just one of many worlds. It is one of many ways to raise young people into adults with competency, purpose, support, and depth.
It is true with any industry or specialization, that if its mainstream paradigm eclipses the larger archetype it occupies, it will become “corrupted”. It is not the youth that are corrupted, but the elders in a society that fail in their role as mentors, coaches, patrons, champions, and wayshowers of the youth. They corrupt the Mysteries by trying to dominate them.
To be a wayshower means showing youth the way of the existential journey. It is a physical, emotional, mental, collective, and spiritual pursuit. It speaks to what it means to be human and, if this path is not walked, or if rejected, it speaks of despair, war, and illness. It is a sacred path for this reason–not because it is mythic, even though it certainly is, but because it asks us to sacrifice ourselves in the pursuit of a collective evolution that demands everything and promises nothing. It is a level of cosmic ethics which demands a level of such complexity as to appear chaotic.
Nobody can tell us what this means for us personally, culturally, or as a planet. It must be lived, innovated, and renewed personally. There are rules to the game that must be strictly obeyed, and yet these rules can also be bent and, in rare circumstances, even broken. It is a game of knowledge and love that requires a magnitude of intelligence that would make our species on Earth today look infantile and unprepared.
The world today has tremendous potential to renew itself and usher in an age of true humanity that would rival any other in history. It hangs on the balance of self-destruction and transformation, of hope and despair. It is a tiresome circumstance for those that know their history, and have walked and continue to walk the path of the Mysteries, because humanity cannot escape the law of initiation that binds it to itself. Whether humanity fails or succeeds, it will inevitably find itself again at this precise spot: the threshold of education.
But what if our species today should annihilate itself? Even the entire planet? What if we were to all die tomorrow, or right now, reading these words? What if everything we knew and loved and cared about were to abruptly end, proving untrue and ephemeral? What if every intention to pursue something good and meaningful in our life had been a mistake?
These questions do not corrupt us but bring us closer to ourselves, to a reality that cannot be dissected, disinfected, and preserved. It must be lived and entrusted to, even though it will certainly betray us and ask us, yet again, to reach beyond our known reality and become something entirely different and better.
Standardized education can be found in ancient China, in the Islamic Golden Age, and in the state controlled, compulsory Prussian schools that continue to dominate our ideas about the purpose and method of education today. In ancient places around the world, other highly effective methods of cultivating new generations of youth existed, and today, though some of these remain, these traditions are certainly reduced and under constant attack by a voracious status quo.
The enemy of humankind is not just the corruption and domination of education, but of ways of knowing, accessing, and living the trials that lead to the Mysteries. Whether humanity is imprisoned in a dystopian totalitarianism or an Edenic paradise, it matters not. If people cannot access their inner senses, perceiving the physical world in its sublimity as an interconnected and intelligent complexity, we will fail in our mission as a species to reach beyond ourself while remaining firmly rooted to the ground.
We must reach beyond ourselves, beyond the stars, beyond the innermost limits of consciousness, beyond all societal standards and limits, beyond fear and juvenile disagreements, and beyond our most sacred values and beliefs.
Education is not easy going these days. It ranges from systems akin to institutional prisons to enlightened laboratories. For enlightened, modern teachers that have knowledge of pedagogical, developmental, and vocational models, engaging youth in relevant and meaningful learning experiences, appreciating the “whole child” (as if one could cut up a child and teach only a part!), there is perhaps at least the silent, unspoken power of the Mysteries. What feels progressive, effective, or holistic is often attributed to something or another–but what initiates people into the Mysteries of their own being is always something beyond characterization.
Even for progressive education: modern, compulsory models offer limited knowledge with great cost. It teaches children to think and feel, but only so far, and only in certain directions with certain rules, and if one cannot succeed by these conditions they will be labeled something unflattering, and if they do succeed they will instead be labeled, one way or another, as “corrupted”. They are, of course, awake in a corrupted society, and so will be refused by it, worshipped unduly by it, or destroyed by it.
Real education offers a much more resilient idea: unlimited knowledge without limits, for free. This is the true origin of all educational thinking, and though modern schooling and universities have fallen far from this ideal, they cannot entirely escape it. In fact, schools that seek to educate while imposing costs of any kind on students will inevitably thrust themselves into a kind of limbo, being a foreigner in their own home so to speak–these students risk being true outsiders, strangers both in their own world and in the Mysteries.
True knowledge leads toward freedom and promotes an understanding of ethical progress that is infinitely complex (wisdom). This is a challenging idea. Even among more innovative, more ancient kinds of schooling: “free universities” or “modern alternative education” or “whole child education” or “competency based education” or “character education”, etc. teachers must put forth great effort just to keep a foot in the door for students to, if they dare, squeeze through into liberation. Additionally, it is unlikely that teachers even know why their foot is in the door, and that they too can enter (if they dare).
What does liberation mean? What lies beyond for those that seek the Mysteries? Simply said: An ability to think and feel for oneself. More practically, individuals that embrace, and have in turn been embraced by the Mysteries, can walk freely across worlds. They will be able to succeed in academics, they will be able to relate and empathize with all peoples and cultures, and with plants, animals, and the natural world. At night they will dream impossible things that defy individuality, time, and scale.
A liberated organism is one that no longer needs to limit its perception to belong, to survive, or to inhibit its level of existence for reasons of comfort, familiarity, or self-aggrandizement. It is called the Mysteries because, beyond this, human consciousness teaches itself to embrace a level of complexity that belongs entirely to other orders of reality.
There are levels of reality that include more information, emotion, and relating than a single physical form can hold and say with integrity, I Am. At some point, being both an individual being and a transpersonal vessel–as much connected to ordinary things as cosmic ones–new paradigms are required to communicate, distill method and technique, and go even further. It is no different from the jargon and technical difficulty of talking about quantum physics, the philosophy of ontology, the role of mitochondrial crosstalk, or the importance of mycelium in biome homeostasis.
But the esoteric nature of the Mysteries, and the role of liberation in education, are not only specializations of society, ideology, or mysticism. Education as a path of wisdom and liberation is innately human. It is the natural resting state of the human organism. In a corrupted civilization, it is a path of rebellion and revolution, but in a more natural community it hardly needs to be espoused at all. It is the teaching and learning of a cosmogenesis found in tiny acorns, massive quasars, in our terrestrial sapien neuroprocesses, and in the instincts of youth.
Teachers in classrooms are fond of talking about the whole child. Innovative schools are fond of the word “holistic”. These are, in fact, radical and dangerous words that threaten to disrupt society and subvert conservative ideology. Offering liberation to a generation of children that have inherited corruption, trauma, and systemic ideological conditioning is a recipe for conflict and chaos.
However, to not do so would be entirely unethical and inhumane.
So, fellow teachers (for we are all responsible for the youth of our species and their prodigious continuance), what shall we do? Capitulate and conform? Suppress our instinct for liberation? Or compromise its vital drive and project it upon issues that matter less–like serving politics, religion, and the economy?
It is the allegory of initiation all over again. It is a myth that lives in our DNA, our breath, our gait, our most intimate biases, fears, and hopes. We cannot escape it anymore than we can escape our own dreams at night. If we can understand it thoroughly, we will see that it is the only myth that matters. It is what wars are actually fought over. It is what youth actually cry out for, to slake thirst and satiate the malnourishment of social media, scary news, and well meaning but corrupted forms of education.
What the species needs at this time is what it always needs: liberated beings to emerge from their own compromising, heartlessness, hypocrisy, ignorance, judgement, inconsistency, shortsightedness, and a thousand other illnesses for which education is the only real medicine. Humanity is a species defined by its ability to educate itself, individually and collectively, with integrity to the selfless pursuit of knowledge.
Having this knowledge, we will again feel connected to ourselves, to each other, to nature, and to our potential as a creative, expansive, and transcendental species. We will know peace, happiness, and love. Knowledge brings wholeness, which brings companionship, which brings abundance and mutual success. These are the things that teachers should cultivate in themselves, inoculate their classrooms with, and stay up late at night wondering with passion and awe.
To choose to be a teacher or, in whatever capacity, to either influence youth or take intentional responsibility for the shaping of future generations, is the most daring and challenging thing a person can do. It means to have power. It means to choose to be human or at least to die trying. It means to demonstrate humanity’s capacity for maturity by showing great respect for teaching and learning, whatever it may look like, wherever it may be found, and whatever horizon it may lead beyond. It is the chance of a lifetime to influence the direction of a whole species and of its planet, as its destiny spirals out upon the tapestry of galaxies that, in turn, teach and learn with the earth.
As adults meanwhile, we are responsible for ourselves and for our own education. There are no limits to what we can learn and become, even if we must also specialize ourselves given the duration of a lifetime. Considering reincarnation however, we might imagine an education plan that spans multiple lifetimes, perhaps dozens or even hundred or more. Ultimately there is a primal, archetypal nature to education that leads to transformation. Education is about the power of the individual, the power of the group, and the power of the species. Education is never bad and is always liberatory. There is a high cost to neglecting this responsibility, including disease, stupidity, and even the fall of civilization. In order to succeed, we will need to treat education differently–it is the mechanism that allows us to control our time, and to travel as a species through time in a more conscious way.