Everyone knows that words not supported by the energy of personal experience carry much less power to influence others than words which are. This happens, I think, not because the words themselves are different or are delivered with a different inflection, but because when people speak, they unleash a tangible but invisible power into the space around them. This power comes ultimately from our experience and from the energetic access that our experience has created in us. Our words float on this power, like a canoe floating on a rushing stream. In this playful dance of content and energetic resonance, ordinary learning sometimes crosses a threshold to become Great Learning.
Education becomes transformational learning.
What may begin as an intellectual exercise cracks open to reveal penetrating and timely truths. When learning reaches this white-hot level of intensity, old boundaries can fall away in seconds, old wounds can open and be drained of their accumulated poisons, the hard can become soft and pliant once again. In India, transformational learning is called jnana yoga, the path of gaining entry into the Divine through skillful intellectual inquiry. The Divine, or whatever one wishes to call the extraordinary power, intelligence, and beauty that manifests as the cosmos, seems to delight in being known, and every step into genuine knowledge is seen as a step deeper into the being of the Divine. To be aligned with truth is to be aligned with reality, and alignment opens oneself to the healing, insight, and transformation that is continuously flowing from the whole to its many parts.