Auto-education

Pedagogy is a dysfunctional science. It only works as a kind of epidemic. It works like a garage that has to focus on breaking things really bad for them to be fixed in another garage. This breakage-focused garage is where tactical analysis is done and the space for intervention is figured out. What works? Can it be broken?

Breakage is a means of opening up things at their seams and marking out points for taking potshots. For any pedagogy to be verified it should be tested by being deployed in an empty room. The texture of the empty room before and after the episode of teaching should be carefully studied. If there is even a trace of corrosion, the intensity of the teacher's presence functions, else it does not amount to much. Education is a breakage lab, for calibrating the quality of investment to be placed in an educational experience, the breakage potential of a specific classroom has to be accessed. The world and its portals lack the confidence to let unbroken bodies roam the streets. Broken is safe. And systematic breakage needs to be started early, as soon as the child is out of the crib actually. This breakage works at every level possible: from breaking the auto-didactic possibilities of the student, to limiting the size of his or her ownership on the world to installing fear, insecurity and reverence for the supposed wisdom of the world.

After an educational experience has done its trick, it is very difficult to undo it. Undoing, if desired, becomes the project of an entire lifetime. This long process often becomes a directionless battle which doesn't have its aims defined very well. A war with the after-effects of education needs a lot of angst to fuel its consistent foray. Angst runs in short supply. Where would all the angst come from?

What is the ideal set of objectives of such warfare? Is eventual victory even possible or what is at stake is only an adjustment, a recalibration of sorts.

So, the unstated objective of education is breakage. To escape this necessitates obviating from entering into an educational arrangement in the first place. Undoing damage later will only make you a potted plant. You will become a product of a halfway cycle in operation, neither here nor there. We recommend education avoidance. If anyone offers to teach you something, you have to politely refuse.

This refusal is for a good many reasons. We have to refuse being taught and we have to refuse to self-learn because we believe in the spontaneous, auto-compiled variation of learning called living. Even at the cost of repeating a cliche (and we are never afraid of doing that): you live, you learn. The converse is also true: you don't live, you don't learn.

But what kind of living are we talking about? What kind of living is an automatic learning resource? What does automatic learning involve? Automatic learning involves scraping, synthesis, constipation, explosion and reassembly. Following this process doesn't seem like an obviously smooth ride, so life is naturally tumultuous. Life is not smooth, nor is there any way for it to be smooth. If we are alive, we have to make peace with its wavering quality and its seasonal nature and observe patterns in that.

We will expand on the key ideas of the automatic learning process now.

Scraping: When you are alive, there is a thin-layered sediment deposition of concentrated and sincere experience deposited on top of all the pods that float around in the pool of consciousness. These experiences need to be scraped off and collected. There is no competition or anxiety involved in this process. There is no scarcity. The sediment does not wear off on being scraped and can be recurrently scraped many, many times by many different living folk. This experience is scraped for a further analysis - if you have ever wondered what life means, it is because you have had no access to this sediment. This scraping and its further processing is a fictional representation of a process that is an obvious concomitant to its being natural. ‘Being’ is something we understand as the base state, lacking any form of self-manipulation and design. You can ‘be’ only when you are not trying to ‘become’. There is no other way. A total shut-down of the cognitive/narrative impulse makes this possible. If you are not able to be then no after-the-fact action or thought is going to help in simulating the state for you. The after-effects of scraping are produced in you immediately on ‘being’. There is no delay.

Once you have the crumbs of scraped experience with you, you can synthesise your own experience. All the sub-processes involved in automatic learning are automatic themselves. You can describe these sub-processes all you want, but there is nothing to be done. There is no scope for action. You might well ask how it is useful to know all of this if there is nothing for you to do. It is not. We do not serve a function and we do not aim to please you. If you find a use for anything that we do or say, please report immediately and we will instantly mend our ways. We bounce this content off your transparent but impenetrable viewport into the world because we want to offer you the noise that distracts you for long enough to let these things happen on their own. We would like that to occur not because we are benevolent and we care for you but because we are selfish and sometimes we hope to see other ghosts floating around in our world. If you are stripped and if your animal-state is awakened, you might become ैa potential candidate for a ghostly companion. Why can't we indulge in a fantasy?

Constipation: If you are floating in a state of ‘being’, you will never be constipated. Constipation is a check that indicates the reality of your state. Either flow happens or it doesn't. Either way we know something about you. As an entity occupying space in the system, either you are trans-receiving or you are not. What is the nature of your presence? If are in fact trans-receiving, you are not constipated and we can accept you as someone who has successfully scraped, digested and thrown something back in the flow. If you are channeling stuff, we know that you are actively engaged in auto-education. If not, you might no longer be capable of learning anymore and might be conveniently postured at the margins of knowledge. This situation generally arises because of over-education. If some corrupt professor has already filled your holes and successfully educated you then you might be left with resolving a lot of problems before you can participate in auto-education.

The down side of education is that it allows you to place trust on entities and institutions other than yourself and that becomes the first stumbling block. Nobody is reliable. Not because everybody is interested in taking you for a ride but because to get into any auto-responsive arrangement, there should be no other system in question than yours. To limit all possible variables to your own self, we insist on absolving all responsibility within yourself.

While rendering the surface of knowledge in a form that can offer a universal framework for auto-education triggered by dense surfaces that come pre-baked with all the facets of engagement, we realised that we are interested only in this self-contextualised form of education. No other forum of learning or teaching is honest. Every media offering, every format leaks earnestness and sincerity in such a potent way that no repair can be attempted.

Explosion. When the flow begins, does it taper in calmly or does it blow in with a force? The extent of passion has to be measured at all points of initiation. How is passion to be measured except by the damage on impact? When you receive knowledge finally after whatever process of struggle you have to pass through, how brightly does it shine out? How loudly does it make its presence felt? How loudly does it announce its arrival? These are the relevant questions.

Shit happens. True.

But how strong is the pressure?