On being Educated…

What does it mean to say one is ‘educated’? One definition says that it is ‘the ability to profit from experience’. Is this to say that we cannot learn vicariously, from another’s experience, or is it not necessarily our own experience that is required? If this is true, then it is not necessary for everyone to have experience, just knowledge of the experience of others, which we may refer to as knowing about someone else’s experience, or having information in relation to it.

But is it enough to have information about an event or thing or person in one’s memory which may be regurgitated at a moment’s notice, to know about something? If so, then a computer is ‘educated’, and a great deal more than any human, since it can recall (if programmed accordingly, of course) much more information and with greater accuracy than any human. Surely to be educated is a great deal more

Is Belief what we’re fighting for?

Once upon a time, there lived Believers. It was important to Believers to Believe. And so they did. Of course, the First Difficult Thing was that they didn’t all have the same Beliefs.

Before I explain why this was Difficult, it’s important to explain what Beliefs were. Beliefs were ideas about Being, and yet the Beliefs that Believers Believed were not the Being part, they were Symbols of it. Very much like the shadows that are made when a Being gets in the way of the light, they were like Being but weren’t Being; rather they were an approximation or representation of Being.

The Believers subscribed so strongly to their Beliefs that they eventually lost sight of Being, and here’s why the First Difficult Thing was Difficult: Everyone saw the same Being, but called it by different names, and they believed that their different names made the Being different. This couldn’t possibly Be, but it was difficult to see that once you Believed in a certain Description. It was equally difficult to see how others could have another Description, since they Believed that there could only be one Description of Being. Naturally, this caused some problems, because,