Dream Deep

16 thoughts to pin on the refrigerator door

Haj Ross
English Department
University of North Texas
haj@unt.edu

1. The Universe is One, as is all knowledge of it.

2. Being part of a total Unity, every person is also One.

3. To intuit, feel, live this Union, gives peace, tranquility, and an ecstasy beyond any conceivable description.

4. This ecstasy, this possibility of being beyond oneself, is what leads us to live an academic life.

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5. We all are born United with this truth. As we grow up, we forget, more and more, till we get to a point where someone has to remind us.

6. A baby begins life United with the Universe, but the process of socialization triggers a continual erosion of the knowledge of being One.

7. The so-called “educational system,” through the fault of no one, contributes to, and even accelerates, this process of forgetting, the loss of the joy of being born on our Home, so green, so beautiful, so One.

8. Our job is to be aware of the antieducational reality of the current system, to know that we are under no obligation to continue going in the wrong direction, and to coimagine and give collective birth to a new system, one whose objective will be that every person, whether teacher or student, student or teacher, returns to the ecstasy of Union.

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9. The first step, always the most important one, is to abandon the use of force, to drop the very thought that force could ever have any place in a learning encounter.

10. When we examine the way babies and children learn spontaneously, we see how joyful a process it is. The Smaller Ones live a reality in which there are
not two verbs, but just One:

L
E
P L A Y
R
N

11. What this means is that any requirement whatsoever, anything which interferes with the fun of learning, will get in the way.

12. Each one of us is born into a unique predestined path towards an adult awareness of the Unity of the Universe. The verb educate, which comes from the prefix ex-, “out of,” added to the root duc-, “to lead, guide,” thus was built to mean “to lead or guide that which is within to the outside.” Thus to educate yourself is to listen to a small voice, deep within yourself, which is always telling you what it is that you have to learn, and what the next step is for you. It may well be that that step would not be valid for anyone else in the whole world, but for you, it’s exactly the one that you must take.

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13. The only thing that we ever really can teach is our being, our stance towards the world, our unique path. The younger people in the classroom with us see with faultless clarity all of our most intimate qualities, such as:

the honesty of our inner search
our humility
our joy in sharing the joy of learning
our absence of fear
in the face of the immense Mystery
of not knowing everything

14. We have to learn not to teach, with all of the asymmetries of power which are necessarily bound up in this word, to learn not to believe in all of the things which conventionally flow from the power of the teacher over the students: homework, tests, and worst of all, grades. We have to find our way back to the ecstasy of co-learning. If we know something that our co-learners do not, we can invite them to do exercises, to memorize, to do drills – but we would never make them do anything.

15. When everyone in the classroom is trying, with great humility, to listen inwards, asking themselves,

What is my next step? How can I best move towards the One?

it sometimes happens that a Superindividual being is born. You might call it a collective soul. At such times, the process of co-learning again becomes a sacred journey for all of us. A voyage into the Self.

16. This voyage was, and always is, our heritage, and that of our children. We will accept nothing less, from any system of education. Never.