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HOW TO EDUCATE YOUR "SELF" (1 of 5)
The Philosophy Behind the Program
Educate Yourself for Tomorrow provides a practical, engaging, and personally meaningful guide to some of the highest and greatest achievements of western culture. The curriculum is presented not as a finished product but as intellectually nursing food for thought, as ideas for you to digest and make part of your vision of yourself and the world. It is a learning experience which meets the needs of many who are dissatisfied with some aspects of traditional academic education. Whereas traditional approaches are often fragment, we approaching education with the ancient alchemy circle symbol in mind: a circle as an undivided whole interconnected to all its parts.
The program you are taking as a continuation of the first course overcomes the current separation between value-learning - "knowing that " and fact-learning - "knowing why," two aspects of education which have increasingly grown apart in our time. Religion, philosophy and the humanities in general are intended to yield perspective on life, while the sciences can help reveal hidden patterns and relationships of the worlds without and within. Both humanistic and scientific studies help us develop a vision of existence; what is profound and what is profane; what is great and what is small. Both studies help us become truly "rational," a word sharing a common etymology with the words "ratio" and "ration." A rational individual is one who has learned to apportion his energies within a wide scope of priorities, concerns and realms of knowledge. In essence, humanistic and scientific studies, if rightly pursued, help the individual develop values. It is this element of holism that is symbolic in the alchemy circles in times past; such circles were symbols of the unification of qualities with a vision of the whole.
Many scientists see values as lying in the subjective realm within the individual; humanists consider objective scientific knowledge dangerous if not tempered with moral or spiritual principles. Our program overcomes this unnecessary and counter productive split between learning facts and values by focusing on educating the self to become capable of synthesizing the two sides into an undivided awareness. Through the readings, recordings and the accompanying lectures the student is given a key to a rich heritage of non-dualistic knowledge essential to the education of the self. Learning of the world and learning about yourself are intimately united and an education which unites both the subject and the object, the known and the knower is the foundation stone of dynamic creativity and of responsible individualism.
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Read more about the alchemy circle and alchemy circles as symbolic of wholeness.
Suggested Courses
HUM 103: THE DESTINY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
HUM 104a: SUFI TALES AS A KEY TO LEARNING
HUM 104b: THE SPIRITUAL SEARCH THROUGH LITERATURE
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