Gnowly Matrix Learning Introduction 2.8—Foundational Knowledge
Channel: Consciousness Research Centre
Date: 2023-02-08

Now finally I just want to review a little bit about Skillful Living. The process of becoming skillful should especially be applied to foundational knowledge. Skillful Living provides foundational knowledge of human life and beingness, as well as techniques for developing that knowledge to a high degree of skillfulness. Foundational knowledge is defined as follows: 

It aims at the extinction of the suffering unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of every experience or state of being in the world. 

It has an intrinsic truth that you can see and experience for yourself without having to rely on authority, tradition, logic, philosophy, hearsay and rumor, common sense, preconceived ideas, the social status of the presenter or because you consider yourself the student of the presenter.

These are all dangerous assumptions, because they can lead you to accept an idea on belief—on faith alone; without testing it, without examining the assumptions behind it; without experiencing it for yourself. Real learning only comes from experience. Book learning is just the appetizer. 

I'm not saying it's not important—it is. But book learning is just the prelude to actual learning, because learning requires growth of being. And this is the thing that ordinary education has ruined in everybody that I know, because ordinary education allows you to become a so-called 'learned' person—with a degree and all kinds of letters after your name—without changing your being. 

And so they cheat us—they don’t force us to grow. And the hardest thing about spiritual teaching, in my experience, is getting students out of this habit, and actually getting them to grow: to seek out new experiences; to seek out new ways of being, develop hem themselves. Because no one can do that for you. 

It’s like thinking for yourself: nobody can teach you how to think for yourself. Nobody, really, can teach you how to roller skate. Maybe they can set up conditions where you’re motivated to learn for yourself; that’s the best they can do. And that’s the best I can do, by making these videos, or by our Apprenticeship program. 

You can become situated in a situation that motivates you to actually learn, to actually change your being. But that's the best we can do. We can communicate to you what a metacognition is. We can talk about it, but we can't actually give it to you by talking about it, because it can't be spoken in words! It can only be experienced. But when you experience it, you’ll know it. 

And you’ll say, “Whoa. You mean, I went through twelve years of school, or sixteen years of school or whatever it was, and I never had an experience like this. I never had a growing experience where I learned something about life so profoundly, so deeply.”
You can come here to Sri Lanka and go in a temple and study Buddhism for years and years, and never have a metacognition about it. It’s quite possible. That’s because academic learning does not give growth of being. So from the beginning, we are stressing growth in being: becoming. And in that way, we’ll get you really ready to have a metacognition, to bring being to realization of the subject matter, and become genius.