Greetings, my dearest friends, blessed be every one of you here.\u00a0 We are assembled to create truth and light.\u00a0 Tonight’s lecture will deal with education in the New Age, the age that is coming, that is pushing into the resistant matter of the old.\u00a0 The old, stagnant age does not want to yield easily, yet it must.\u00a0 The new age will create human beings of the highest caliber in every respect.\u00a0 Many incarnated spirits are ready for a completely new approach to life\u2014the approach you are learning as you delve into the depths of your inner being on this path.<\/p>\n
As a fundamental prerequisite, education in the coming age has to make room for the understanding of the principles you are learning on this path, and also of the levels of human consciousness and their interactions.\u00a0 As you perhaps begin to realize, this path can be taught to children, not only as theory but as practical experience.<\/p>\n
Education must be a two-way street.\u00a0 First of all, it must bring out what exists within the higher self\u2014its uniqueness and limitless potential for creativity.\u00a0 Each incarnated individual has his or her unique contributions to make to the existing society.\u00a0 These potentialities need to be tapped, a channel for them created in full consciousness of the process.\u00a0 The complementing approach is learning from outside, without which such bringing out is hardly possible.<\/p>\n
This twofold approach must be considered as a constantly alternating process.\u00a0 You cannot draw out what is within if there is no knowledge, no concept, no room allowed for the richness of the world that exists in the inner universe.\u00a0 If you do not make such a tuning-in process available, the channel for bringing out the inner potentials will remain untapped.\u00a0 But if you teach that there is another level of consciousness, little by little the child learns to discover the language of the divine reality within just as you do.\u00a0 The child will learn to listen, to perceive, and to bring out the inner level.<\/p>\n
This does not mean, however, not to learn the fundamental knowledge that all children need to learn in the age just going by as well as in the new age.\u00a0 At present there is only room for the one, not for the other direction.\u00a0 An alternating approach is what really counts.\u00a0 You must not cultivate one at the expense of the other as people so often tend to do in many respects.\u00a0 Both are important.<\/p>\n
If you approach children with this double purpose, a very different process of learning and education will unfold.\u00a0 The inner voice will be discerned when its laws are understood.\u00a0 The child needs to learn the laws and also the pitfalls of the lower self so that its voice can be distinguished.\u00a0 This teaching must become a substantial aspect of the child’s curriculum.\u00a0 Then there will be a significant portion of learning about the inner being, on bringing out the higher self, on purification of the lower self.\u00a0 The child will learn how to distinguish one from the other and come to understand about the mask self.\u00a0 Education will prevent the formation of masks and start self-purification early.\u00a0 Such is the groundwork for all new age education.<\/p>\n
Parents will not undertake the fundamental groundwork alone.\u00a0 There is no guarantee that all parents are sufficiently developed to possess this knowledge and able to handle this aspect of the child’s education.\u00a0 Therefore it must also be part of the school curriculum, starting as early as kindergarten and continuing into college or university.\u00a0 Thus a large part of education will deal with the realization of the higher self as the fundamental road to learning.<\/p>\n
Intellectual knowledge will then become secondary.\u00a0 It will not become less important, however.\u00a0 Once children understand the fundamentals about the inner being, intellectual knowledge can bear fruit.\u00a0 The intellect needs to be trained and used as one of the important tools.\u00a0 Without the intellect grasping and understanding these laws and processes the personality cannot even begin to approach the road into the inner self.\u00a0 If the mind does not know that an inner world to find and explore even exists, it can never recognize and remove the obstructions or recognize what is an aid.<\/p>\n
Therefore, new age education is not only a question of emotional or spiritual education.\u00a0 It is truly a perception and an understanding of lawfulness.\u00a0 Just as there are laws of physics and chemistry and laws of mathematics, so are there laws of the inner world that humans need to learn and understand.<\/p>\n
Let us examine other aspects of education in the age to come.\u00a0 You must cultivate the curiosity of the child to make learning intensely interesting and fascinating.\u00a0 Unfortunately, education as it is currently practiced smothers and discourages the child’s innate curiosity.\u00a0 Children have millions of questions from their earliest age.\u00a0 You all know that.\u00a0 Usually parents and teachers become annoyed, bored and impatient.\u00a0 At best they give very insufficient answers that are hardly honest or that fail to take the questions and the questioner seriously.<\/p>\n
It is extremely important to cultivate this curiosity.\u00a0 Once it is squashed, the learning process becomes a dull “must” that kills the spirit and the life of learning.\u00a0 Education can be intrinsically exciting, enjoyable and adventurous.\u00a0 Instead humans attach to it a mass image of boredom.<\/p>\n
Parents should start to respect children and rejoice in their questions from the earliest phase.\u00a0 Do not try too hard, do not pretend to know more than you do.\u00a0 All you have to be is honest and interested.\u00a0 If you do not know an answer, say so.\u00a0 But also tell the child that school is the place to find the answers.\u00a0 Encourage the child to ask again, and perhaps make note of the questions.\u00a0 Parents can also make a concerted effort to find out meaningful and truthful answers and come back to the child with them.\u00a0 The spirit of the child reaches forth to explore the world in order to master it and fulfill a task in it.\u00a0 Without curiosity something dies.\u00a0 The longing to understand is very important.\u00a0 You can go to teachers or other people equipped to answer the child’s questions.\u00a0 Make a real effort.\u00a0 Such questions may be pointers to the spirit’s special inclinations and directions.\u00a0 Answer them again and again as the child grows older and can take in more.<\/p>\n
Schools in the coming age will know that the spirit ventures out into the earth realm, that curiosity is the sign of the adventurousness which made the entity want to incarnate and fulfill a task.\u00a0 Approached in this way the material makes learning an exciting process instead of a dull, compulsory, boring difficulty that children would like to have over and done with.\u00a0 Learning will become something to look forward to.\u00a0 It will offer many keys and deeply desired answers to life.\u00a0 This is very important, my friends, for the parents who are here and for the teachers, even if you cannot as yet create a new school system with a new curriculum.\u00a0 Just knowing of these approaches and making room in your consciousness for them will give you a new awareness and create a new climate in your dealings with the growing human being.<\/p>\n
Most of you still experience a difficulty in finding the fine balance between freedom and self-discipline.\u00a0 This applies equally to learning and education.\u00a0 The freedom to want to learn is important.\u00a0 There should be no whip behind it if at all possible.\u00a0 Adults who harbor an image that learning is a hardship, a boring and dull task, even if they do not say so, will affect the child in a similar way.\u00a0 An attitude that assumes that learning and homework is “the price to be paid” before pleasure can begin can guarantee a hatred of learning even in a child who is eager to learn.<\/p>\n
The necessity of self-discipline is great.\u00a0 Without it nothing can be gained or accomplished in life on any level.\u00a0 Freedom and spontaneity on the one hand and self-discipline on the other are not mutually exclusive as most people believe.\u00a0 They are in fact mutually interactive, interconnected and interdependent.\u00a0 Since most adults suffer from the duality that freedom and self-discipline cancel each other out, they inevitably transfer it to the child, if not in words then in their attitude.<\/p>\n
The wrong belief is that freedom means giving in to the line of least resistance, and thus becoming self-destructive.\u00a0 Or, conversely, that self-discipline means the dullness of laborious effort without reward.\u00a0 Most of you, my friends, begin to see how untrue this is.\u00a0 Such artificial divisions burden your soul substance, your inner consciousness, your entire life.<\/p>\n
You have to free yourself of this misconception on your own path as either parents or teachers.\u00a0 True freedom, with all its joy and liberating self-expression can only exist to the degree that self-discipline exists also.\u00a0 You have to distinguish clearly between discipline that is chosen by the self and discipline that is imposed from the outside.\u00a0 Discipline imposed from the outside, if we are to discard tyranny, must exist only where self-discipline is lacking, where adults or children act destructively toward their environment or themselves.\u00a0 Children’s self-destructive acts must be discouraged by their elders.\u00a0 This is hardly possible or desirable for adults, but we shall not go into this topic now.<\/p>\n
The concept of freely chosen self-discipline, as opposed to necessary discipline imposed when the self-discipline is absent, can be made clear to children without any difficulty whatsoever.\u00a0 A child is very capable of understanding that the outer discipline is a structure that is “waiting in reserve” only.\u00a0 If the child does not respond to the freedom of learning, if he or she is not willing to understand the necessity of wanting it\u2014even if this means occasionally overcoming a resistance or the temptation to do what seems most pleasurable at the moment\u2014the outwardly imposed discipline is essential for the child as well as for the community.<\/p>\n
Children who can learn to determine for themselves have learned a major lesson of life.\u00a0 Having learned self-determination and self-responsibility, having been guided into this understanding, they have gained a profound substance and foundation.\u00a0 If they can say, “Yes, I will do homework now and learn my daily lessons, even though I would rather go out and play, because I understand that studying will give me knowledge, strength, security, success later\u2014all the things that I find desirable\u2014and I choose so freely,” they have learned the lesson of real freedom very early in life.<\/p>\n
This is indeed possible.\u00a0 Guidance can be very explicitly and implicitly given for this aspect to grow in children so that they will freely choose self-discipline and no longer need to have discipline imposed from outside.\u00a0 External discipline can then be a structure in reserve to be used only when needed.\u00a0 Even in the new age there will be individuals who are not yet developed enough to understand what I am saying here and they will willfully act out in a destructive way\u2014children as well as adults.<\/p>\n
The time will come\u2014not in your lifetime\u2014when outer laws will no longer exist, when human beings will be governed by the inner laws of the divine self and will know what is right for them.\u00a0 They will not kill, steal, harm or destroy, but it will not be fear of punishment that would hold them back.<\/p>\n
No rigid rule will apply to everyone alike.\u00a0 Each person will be sufficiently united with his or her higher self.\u00a0 Conscience and integrity will be sufficiently strong so that people will freely do what is right, or necessary.\u00a0 People will not be obedient out of guilt and fear of disapproval, but will know “this is right for me,” whether it conforms with others or not.\u00a0 They will also be free from rebellion against authority and secret desires to exploit others.<\/p>\n
This fundamental understanding of self-discipline as a prerequisite for freedom will be part of the basic education.\u00a0 The time will soon come when children will freely choose self-discipline and do it joyfully because it is their choice.\u00a0 The whole inner climate of educating will be to foster knowledge that the soul of the little one truly thirsts for.\u00a0 Topics such as arithmetic, spelling and history, which some now find dull, will become interesting when taught with this new consciousness.\u00a0 The approach and the consciousness of those who teach is instrumental.<\/p>\n
A child can understand that the creative, free-flowing process can only flourish when the groundwork is done and that choosing to do so freely is in itself a great satisfaction that replaces whatever tediousness may have existed.\u00a0 This approach will make inroads into the creativity of the soul of each child.\u00a0 New avenues will be consciously and deliberately created from within that will help the child’s higher self express itself to everyone’s immense joy.<\/p>\n
Communication is of major importance.\u00a0 It takes place on two levels.\u00a0 One is the conscious level of expressed words and explanation, which is true teaching.\u00a0 The other is the level of awareness, feeling, and inner consciousness that may not necessarily be expressed in so many words.\u00a0 There is a great need for improvement in the educational system on both these levels.<\/p>\n
As children want to hear, listen and learn when they ask questions, so they also want and need to be heard and listened to.\u00a0 Children need to express themselves but too often this self-expression is curtailed.\u00a0 Encouragement to communicate feelings and thoughts\u2014as well as being responded to\u2014are essential aspects of the personality’s unfoldment.<\/p>\n
This is equally important on the inner level.\u00a0 Children often perceive feelings and thoughts of others that are not openly expressed.\u00a0 Unless they are encouraged to take these perceptions seriously, they cannot learn two important lessons.\u00a0 One is that they are not fantasizing but really perceiving something.\u00a0 The second is that sometimes their own projections interfere with and distort the exact nature of what they perceive.<\/p>\n
If this law of communication is taught early, children will understand them.\u00a0 What an enormous difference this will make in their lives, in dealing with themselves and others!\u00a0 They will neither discard their reactions nor take them blindly at face value.\u00a0 They will learn the process of investigation, of holding final determination in reserve, of probing, not only with teachers and parents, but with other children too.\u00a0 All of this will come from free self-expression of their impressions and a mutual exchange.<\/p>\n
I would like to mention here a new phase in your development that signifies an interim stage, one that is very important for you to understand.\u00a0 As you become more aware of your lower self, of previously hidden levels of consciousness and attitudes that you never wanted to admit to yourself, you automatically become aware of the lower self\u2014the hidden material\u2014of others.\u00a0 As you can accept your lower self without being devastated and totally rejected, by holding your inner balance and knowing of your fundamental divine nature, so will your awareness of the lower self of others not devastate you, annihilate you or make you hate and judge them.<\/p>\n
When you were still battling against part of yourself, whatever awareness you had of others’ negativities filled you with anxiety and discomfort.\u00a0 It threatened you the way your own lower self threatened you.\u00a0 Your perceptions may have been only partially accurate.\u00a0 They were tinged with your projections and with your need to see others as imperfect to relieve your own conscience.\u00a0 In this new kind of perception the awareness is different.\u00a0 There is an inner calm and certainty.\u00a0 Now your perception is clear and clean.\u00a0 This creates an entirely different climate.<\/p>\n
When you accept yourself totally and see yourself in truth\u2014both as the lower self and the higher self while the mask begins to dissolve\u2014you perceive the other person’s lower self in a very different and new way.\u00a0 You are very free.\u00a0 You understand it without being upset.\u00a0 You see it with a clarity that does not create hate and fear in you.<\/p>\n
In this state you can choose when and how to communicate your perceptions\u2014if that is appropriate and to the possible benefit to the other person and to the relationship\u2014and to take the risk of being resented.\u00a0 You may instead decide not to communicate your perceptions if that feels more appropriate.\u00a0 In this free perception the responsibility is truly given to the other person what to do with his or her negative attitudes and behavior, whether this is verbally expressed or not.\u00a0 This attitude of letting the other person take the responsibility develops on a very subtle but strong level of reality that is somehow always perceived.\u00a0 What I am saying here seems to deviate from the topic of education, but if you bear with me you will see that it is very much related to it.<\/p>\n
As this stage is being achieved, it first manifests in a sort of interim experience.\u00a0 You come to a point when you already perceive the other person with more clarity, without a personal stake in what you see and therefore without personal involvement.\u00a0 You may already be able to choose to express or not to express your perceptions according to your intuitive inspirations.\u00a0 At this point a tremendous rage, anger and hostility is created in others by your very freedom in seeing their hidden material.\u00a0 They sense this even when you do not express your perceptions.\u00a0 The lower self is infuriated.\u00a0 The conscious personality may be completely unaware of what is taking place on the subliminal level and may create a rationale for the rage.\u00a0 At this point you may not understand at all why you are met with such virulent hatred.\u00a0 It is as though the other person cannot bear the clarity of your knowledge and wants to annihilate you and it.\u00a0 You have to go through this, for it is a learning stage which represents a doorway to yet another stage.<\/p>\n
At this point you are no longer what you were.\u00a0 You see clearly without being personally upset and injured by what you see, without a stake in seeing it and without distortion.\u00a0 But your seeing creates intense rage and intense attacks on the part of those who are as yet defending the aspect you see and who have no intention of facing, admitting and changing it.\u00a0 This may even apply to unseen discarnate entities who are very deeply involved in their darkness and who are struggling for their supremacy.\u00a0 They want to use all the ammunition they can muster against the clarity of the light that streams forth from you.\u00a0 Only when you understand and build further will the light become so strong that these reactions cannot even graze you.\u00a0 Then the light will blind them and keep them away when they reach out with tentacles of hatred.<\/p>\n
This principle is extremely important to understand for those of you who are penetrating the encrustation of the mask, dissolving it and transforming the lower self, for your relationship to the world becomes altered.\u00a0 You no longer function on the level of mutual pretense.\u00a0 Mutual projections and accusations are no longer needed to keep you from facing your lower self.<\/p>\n
If children grow up with a clear understanding of these principles, it will give them an enormous protection.\u00a0 Without this understanding confusion, fear and vulnerability would create a new defense.\u00a0 The spiritual principles of the interaction of the inner levels is of utmost importance to comprehend for all growing human beings, whether they start on the path as adults or begin it in childhood in a new educational system.\u00a0 The new-age person will learn these basic principles of human interaction and of the existence of the various levels of the human soul.\u00a0 These principles are just as basic as language, mathematics, or any other topic, but are even more important.<\/p>\n
This “life learning”\u2014this all-encompassing knowledge of life, self and the universe in which we live, move and create\u2014will constitute at least fifty percent of the curriculum.\u00a0 It will be the most fascinating study and will alter the approach to teaching all other topics.\u00a0 Other learning will then not only be easier but will have a new flavor so that the discipline necessary for it will in most instances be truly self-chosen.<\/p>\n
New-age schools will be infiltrated energetically with a new consciousness and a new awareness that experiences school as the most exciting adventure imaginable.\u00a0 The classroom will be where life unfolds, where keys of understanding are handed to the child.\u00a0 Children will experience school as a privilege they look forward to, even though learning includes hard work and the relinquishing of some immediate pleasures.\u00a0 The child will rejoice in discovering all the things he or she always wanted to know, in finding out how things really work.\u00a0 This will be a thrill if those who create schools, educational systems and curricula participate in the new consciousness.<\/p>\n
Cultivate this vision, my friends.\u00a0 Even if you cannot yet institute it completely, begin to institute it in your own consciousness.\u00a0 Then those who teach can little by little bring out what they have to give through their awareness of the vision.\u00a0 The time is not far away when you will create your own school, even though there may not be too many children to begin with.<\/p>\n
It will come, an experiment that will reach out into the world and create a completely new approach to life.\u00a0 The visions we have shared of creating a new culture will also spread into the world and find increasing receptivity among those who are spiritually ready and thirsty for this approach.\u00a0 The new kind of politics, science, economics, sociology, art\u2014everything that is part of living in a civilized world\u2014will be infiltrated with this new approach, just as the healing arts and education will be.<\/p>\n
Knowledge of inner reality that comes as a result of following one’s own path must give people an entirely different outlook, approach and motivation in whatever they are doing.\u00a0 A politician who is grounded in these principles must necessarily develop a different approach to world government and political ideas than what the ordinary politician has now.\u00a0 Your current politicians come from the old-age school system and the consciousness behind it.\u00a0 Their approach is based mainly on appearance and on superficial, dualistic, ego-oriented ways.\u00a0 The same applies of course to every other area of life.\u00a0 The artist will create differently.\u00a0 The economist will solve problems from a different vantage point.\u00a0 Every area of work will embody the new consciousness.<\/p>\n
Even you who have started this path as adults already have a very different approach to life and to its areas of activity in the human community.\u00a0 You can imagine that children who grow up in a system of education such as I describe here will affect the world in a very new way.\u00a0 Imagine how much more forcefully truth will flow from a very different area within each person.\u00a0 The laws of God, the laws of the divine world will pour forth into your world in a flowing, flexible, ever-changing way and create indeed a new world.<\/p>\n
May this lecture be a foundation stone for another new building, in a spiritual sense and later even in a material sense.\u00a0 May it also help you in your innermost being to take in this new seed once again.\u00a0 Even though it is not immediately and directly applicable to you, it will help you personally in a different sense.\u00a0 When you see that the way you are going into your innermost self is the key to a new approach to life that has much farther-reaching evolutionary consequences than you may believe, you may perhaps also perceive that there is a vast plan behind your individual path that transcends the personal problems which may have been your initial motivation to come here, as far as your conscious awareness was concerned.\u00a0 It is now clear that your inner being knew more and had a vaster plan in mind.\u00a0 This awareness of the larger plan will bring light, encouragement and strength to you, wherever you are now on your path.\u00a0 You are all blessed, my very beloved dearest ones.\u00a0 Be in peace, be in joy, be in the beauty that unfolds itself forevermore in your life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a fundamental prerequisite, education in the coming age has to make room for the understanding of the principles you are learning on this path, and also of the levels of human consciousness and their interactions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"lecture-categories":[13],"lecture_tag":[1108,1794,1471,1795,1312,1796,1797,1092,1635,1669,1724,1214],"class_list":["post-2697","lecture","type-lecture","status-publish","hentry","lecture-categories-pathwork-lectures-1996-ed","lecture_tag-children","lecture_tag-curiosity","lecture_tag-discipline","lecture_tag-education","lecture_tag-freedom","lecture_tag-inner-and-outer-communication","lecture_tag-learning","lecture_tag-life","lecture_tag-life-centers","lecture_tag-new-age","lecture_tag-self-discipline","lecture_tag-teaching"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n