Creative Learning and Career: Some Ideas About Not Getting a Job

CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER

BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER

Sovereign Immunity Litigation

Coaching Your Inner Child

The Leadership I Ching

Leadership & Career in the 21st Century

Creative-C Learning

Integrate Your Emotions

Krishnamurti and the Psychological Revolution

The New Paradigm in Business, Leadership and Career

The New Paradigm in Consciousness and Spirituality

The New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory

The Vibrant Nature of Life

Shamanic Wisdom Meets the Western Mind

Creative Genius

The Better Life

Servant Leadership

Creative Learning and Career

CREATIVE LEARNING

AND CAREERSome Ideas About Not Getting a Job

by Peter Fritz Walter

Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walterhttp://peterfritzwalter.com

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About the Author

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Swit-zerland and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pi-erre) focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciences and humanities.

From adolescence, Pierre wrote essays and received a high school award for creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine. Upon finalizing his international law doctorate, he privately studied psychology and psycho-analysis and started writing both fiction and nonfiction books.

In 1996, Pierre started his main career as a corporate trainer and personal coach. He trained the management staff of 5-star hotels in Java, Lombok, and Bali, Indonesia, as well as an elite unit of the Indonesian government (Lembaga Administrasi Negara), which trains all civil ser-vants in Indonesia.

From 2000 to 2001, Pierre built a 3-villa compound in Seminyak, Bali (Dua Bunga) which he managed until he sold it in 2002. Likewise, from January 2011, Pierre man-aged two real estate companies in Pattaya, Thailand, until he sold his pool villas in 2014.

In 2015, Pierre extended his consulting business in the private sector, both online with self-improvement media content bundled in a subscription, and locally with pres-entations about the unlimited scope of our human poten-tial, and the spiritual teaching of the late Dr. Joseph Mur-phy.

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addi-tion, Pierre has notions of Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japa-nese.

All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published, designed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company, Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the im-prints of IPUBLICA and SCM (Sirius-C Media).

To Victor

The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.

ContentsIntroduction! 13Why Getting a Job?

Chapter One! 21Schooling vs. Career

Learning vs. Superlearning! 24

Holistic Learning! 46

Learning and Career! 61

Points to Ponder! 68

Chapter Two! 71Creative Learning and Realization

What is Creativity?! 71

How Creativity Manifests! 79

Creativity and Democracy! 81

Creativity and Individuality! 86

The Creative Continuum! 89

The Creative Ones! 93


Chapter Three! 99Opening Inner Space

Introduction! 99

Classical Psychoanalysis! 103

Transactional Analysis! 105

Hypnotherapy! 107

Bioenergetics! 108

Shamanism! 109

Divination! 112

Sages! 117

Spiritism and Channeling! 121


Chapter Four! 127By Yourself About Yourself

Introduction! 127

You Got It! 129

A First-Hand Life! 131

The True Meaning of Education! 138

How Consciousness Works! 141


Chapter Five! 153From Imitating to Originating

Creators Essentials! 153

Why Attitude Counts! 156

Where New Ideas Originate From! 158

How to Nurture a Creative Mind! 164

Write Your Story

Practice Meditation

Note Your Dreams

The Adventure of Solitude


Chapter Six! 175Your Way to Be Different

Introduction! 175

The Art to Be Different! 176

Your Way to Be Different! 178

Task One : Roadmap for Distinction

1. My top ten reasons to be different

2. This is how I value creativity and originality

3. This is what I think about marginality

4. This is how I admire, adore and imitate others

5. This is how I differ from others

Task Two : Attentiveness


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Task Three : Just do it!

Task Four : Mark Your Path


Chapter Seven! 191Ten Success Principles

1st Principle! 191

Be Yourself

2nd Principle! 194

Respect Your Soul Values

3rd Principle! 194

Fight Timidity

4th Principle! 195

Handle Negativity

5th Principle! 197

Handle People

6th Principle! 198

Timing

7th Principle! 199

Resource Management

8th Principle! 200

Be Compassionate

9th Principle! 203

Be Ecstatic

10th Principle! 205

CONTENTS

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Live Your Love


Work Sheets! 213Doing the WorkYour Ultimate Decision! 215

Your Ultimate Decision and Contract

Your Ultimate Decision

A Contract With Yourself

Your Needs! 218

Your Needs Statement

Your Expectations! 220

Your Expectations Statement

Power Impediments! 222

Developing Your Inner Powers

Power Animals! 223


Power Problem! 224


Power Change! 225


Power and Ideals! 226


Power and Community ! 227


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Book Reviews! 229Books on Leadership & Career

Laurence G. Bold! 233Creative Career Design

Zen and the Art of Making a Living! 235 How to Find the Work You Love! 244 Zen Soup! 250 The Tao of Abundance! 257

Tom Butler-Bowden! 264 50 Success Classics! 265

Edward de Bono! 277 The Use of Lateral Thinking! 279 The Mechanism of Mind! 281 Serious Creativity! 284 Sur/Petition! 287 Tactics! 295

James Borg! 302 Persuasion! 302

Stephen R. Covey! 313 The 8th Habit! 315 The 3rd Alternative! 327

Napoleon Hill ! 342 The Law of Success! 344

Donald G. Krause! 362 Sun Tzu! 362

Jack Welch! 367 Winning! 367

Sergio Zyman! 384 The End of Marketing as We Know It! 386

Bibliography! 395Contextual Bibliography

CONTENTS

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Personal Notes! 423


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IntroductionWhy Getting a Job?

Dolf de Roos, Ph.D., is a very successful real-estate in-vestor from New Zealand. He writes in his books that he never had a job in his life. And he says that with a certain pride, let alone being ashamed about it. As a young man, he found a mentor, and when he was starting out investing in real estate, he met Robert T. Kiyosaki who shared with him a lot of his success stories as an investor, and of course also a lot of know-how. Rather early in his twenties, Dolf was making his first million.

Now, Dolf de Roos travels the world around for teach-ing investment strategy to large groups of people. I am one of his students, for I always had a knack for real estate, too, was successful at first and then loosing a lot, by doing a lot

of mistakes. Thats why, after those huge losses, I sought him out, and bought several of his books. And I knew from that moment that failure is not my accepted reality and that I can win back those losses, even though they made out one third of my entire fortune!

If you have decided to read this book just for getting a job, you should look for someone else to help you. I am not helping you for getting a job.

I think that the very idea of getting a job is mistaken. Its a bottomline philosophy. If you love to work for some-body because you are afraid to take charge of your own life, thats okay. But then, you wont reasonably expect to be-come a millionaire, right?

This book is written for those of you who do reasona-bly except to become millionaires, and not by the age of 60, for that matter!

To begin with, a good career starts with a creative atti-tude. What is a creative attitude? Its an attitude based on a firm conviction, or belief, namely that you will make it. A creative attitude is a flexible mind, a mind which can adapt to about every possible situation. Creativity is nothing but that: a non-stick Teflon pan. Let me explain.

When you have realized a project, or you created some-thing out of nothing, a groove will be stablished in your gray matter that is an image of the strategy you used for solving that problem, and achieving the solution. Its like a recording, a track you can play back over and over again.


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But life is unendingly changing! And the next time the situation will be different, and you are applying the wis-dom of your previous experience, activating the groove in your brain, and you will see and experience that it will not give you the solution!

Thats not because you were not smart enough, its be-cause of an automatism of the human brain. The brain can only see what it knows, it can only learn more of what it already has learnt. In technical terms, the brain can only add on new patterns to existing patterns; it can also create new neuronal patterns or pathways, but it will do that only in very exceptional cases once we pass beyond the age of six.

From our age two to six, the brain creates a lot of new pathways, but once we complete the age of six, the brain relies much more heavily on acquired pathways, reluctant to create new neuronal highways.

As we grow older, the brain becomes more and more wary to create more pathways. That means in clear text, as we grow older, we become more and more awkward learn-ing new things, and change the ways we do things, while as children we were totally open for learning new behav-iors.

This is something so natural that you should not make a fuss about it, but you should definitely know about it. For you will feel it yourself when you grow older. The secret of growing old and still learn in old age is that you are crea-tive; to be creative means to be destructive! For you have

WHY GETTING A JOB?

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to constantly destroy the old ways of doing things, the old grooves in your brain, the old neuronal connections; only then you have a chance to come up with something new, something virtually unthought of.

In the words of think tank Edward de Bono, a new idea cannot be unthought. Thats a good expression for the fact that essentially all we create is a function of thought, or rather, the way we handle thought.

Now, when you apply this insight to your career path, you may shy away from a strategy that targets the bottom-line: get a job! For you know now thats not a creative way of handling your life, your thoughts, the neurons in your brain, and your relationships with others.

You will then think of learning, the learning experience as such, as a meaningful and also pleasurable endeavor.

That means you do not focus on lack, as when you fo-cus on a job for when you say that, you mean money.

When you focus on your qualities, and you remain steadfast with this focus, the money will come, and your lifes work, as career coach Laurence G. Boldt expresses it, will be meaningful and fulfilling.

Let us explore now in the seven chapters of this book what this implies, what such a career path requires you to doand not to doand how you prepare yourself for the challenge. Its basically that you start to coach yourself, by developing vision, focus, emotional maturity, endurance, persistence, and joy. Dont forget, life should be fun as well


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and the reward of a fulfilling career is that you do not feel it to be work; and you dont mind to do your business, art or whatever it is you happen to choose as your career path, on Sundays or during holidays. This is actually the litmus test: if you resent to sacrifice time for your lifes occupa-tion when your friends are partying, then its not meant to be your thing, then you need to focus inside one more time and find out what it really is that makes you happy.

If you focus on money only, especially in the beginning of your career, you risk to spoil the outcome entirely. This is so because money is not a value, its an energy that re-flects your own spiritual energy. The more you develop your true gifts and talents, the more you refine your spiri-tual energy, and the more money you will attract as a re-sult. Thus, money is an effect, not the cause. The cause is your inner life, the way you think, the way you act on what you fix in your mind as true, and the way you feel about yourself. Feelings of self-worth are very important in this process while self-condemnation is utterly destructive in this process of developing your spiritual heritage, for you yourself do matter in the universe. You yourself are part of this creative process, and by self-abnegation and guilt, you weaken your success chances.

This being said, and after you got your beginners fo-cus right, we shall see what education truly means. I am not using the word in its new institutional sense, but in its oldest, most traditional meaning. The word comes from the Latin educere, which means something like guiding

WHY GETTING A JOB?

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along. Thus, education in this most ancient sense of the word means self-education, it means to guide yourself, to be yourself your own guide, your own light, your own guru. I cant stress this often enough in this book: all in your career will visibly reflect how much you have guided yourself, educated yourself, and coached yourself, and as a result, how much your self-esteem has grown with you!

This in last resort also means that you are responsible for your education, not your parents, not your teachers, and not your professional mentors. To meet this responsibility, you will stop complaining about conditions and circum-stances and focus, once again, inside, too see how in your thoughts and feelings you create your life, on a day-to-day basis, and thereby, your future.

In your career, then, you will have many opportunities to let others become aware of your emotional maturity, and your self-knowledge. This is one of the strongest factors in building good relationships, both professional and private for it gives people reasons for trusting you! And trust is all in professional life, and without trust, there will not be any companiesfor the people in a firm accompany each other and thus they give each other company by giving each other trust.

These values, if you will reflect throughout this book, are much more important than any first salary for any job for they build the rock-solid foundation for your suc-cess.


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Success is not something chance-like, volatile and haz-ardous. Napoleon Hill has shown in his remarkable life-long research of the common success principles with highly effective people that success can be traced, demystified and rationally grasped; it can be seen related, or in relation with values, inner values, personal values, and principles!

Emerson said that all success in life is the triumph of principles! In this sense, your focus on values and princi-ples in your life will pay you a huge dividend. This focus will also attract to you the right circumstances for your professional deployment, and the right people to collabo-rate with, work with, and do business with.

WHY GETTING A JOB?

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Chapter OneSchooling vs. Career

Most of us were taught that learning is the process of absorbing knowledge. Only a few of us have absorbed the knowledge that learning is more of a process of how-to-absorb, rather than absorbing itself. The good learner, then, is the one who knows the how-to of learning. And the good teacher is the one who knows the how-to of teaching.

At the university level, we of course need lecturers, because at that level we should have learnt how to absorb lectures. The how-to of learning is unfortunately left to the basic school system. And there it is in bad hands. Learning innovations are generally not the outcome of the school system but rather the result of professional training, coach-ing, and management schools. In the past we went to

school once for a lifetime whereas today learning is pro-grammed into our whole life cycle. Therefore it is so im-portant to learn how to learn fast, effectively, and joyfully! Clearly, if we want to come back to something over and over, we need to experience pleasure doing it, and that is what learning traditionally really never seemed to be: pleasure. But ask the highly evolved scholar, as the famous writer, ask the successful entrepreneur, ask the artist of world renown: they will all tell you that learning is for them sheer pleasure, and a challenge to grow.

Once we grasp the truth that learning is made for our pleasure and not for our torture we are open to accept change in our learning habits. It begins with questioning the effectiveness of our former learning methods.

Sometimes we are motivated by a particular teacher or the mentality of a particular school. But at the end of the day, we might want to change the teacher or the schoolall schools. The learner is in us. It is inside and not in any teacher, school or system. We cannot change our brain but we can use it more effectively so that the results we get with learning, memorizing and realizing things are enhanced. I learnt this truth when I was confronted with my baccalau-reate. This was something of a shock after eight years of hanging around in a high school that bored me and where, lacking stimulation, I was dreaming my days through.

Not that I was stupid in school, but I had been absent almost all the time; not physically absent but mentally, emotionally. I felt all through those years that the world I


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was living in was strangely different from the world those teachers and those other students were living in. I just felt different, and they felt it too, and let me feel my difference. I guess it is not helpful for career if others make you feel dis-integrated or marginal. However, in a certain way it is an advantage, for you mature more quickly. Since you do not trust or believe your outside world, you begin to develop more trust and belief in yourself, in your intuition, your inner world, your creative intelligence.

And I really needed that trust then, because I was far behind in some subjects. Yet despite all, I wanted to suc-ceed above average in my diploma.

However, there was nobody to teach me what effective learning was about. I had left the boarding one year earlier and thus went home every day after classes, eighty miles to ride every day. I thought I better use the time creatively, and the cars tape player.

Thus I prepared tapes for English and French vocabu-lary, and Latin grammar. However, it was dreadful to pre-pare these tapes because at that time I hated my voice, for I did not love myself. But it was good to notice that as I took a firm decision, then, I was able to change that condition later on. So I listened to those tapes while driving to school and back. No, I think the secret is that I did not listen to them. I let them play while daydreaming. I did not con-sciously listen. At the time, this was the result of my lazi-ness, yet it was to my benefit. I did not know that it was exactly this method that makes for maximum results!

SCHOOLING VS. CAREER

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I passed the baccalaureate so brilliantly that some of my teachers looked at me angrily and said I had fooled them for years! They could not believe it, yet the results were there. The creative writing I had submitted for the German examination was recited by our German teacher in front of the whole school

I was glad. I had made it, and without their support, their school, their teachers. Simply by trusting my joyful inner learner.

I guess for most of us school was pressure and fear. The only difference between creative and uncreative people is that the latter take ineffective learning for granted. Creative learners either change the system or drop out of it.

Learning vs. Superlearning

Recent research in the United States showed that a high percentage of the young is illiterate! And this despite a so-phisticated and highly expensive school system. Most col-lege graduates, although studying languages for years, are unable to lead a simple conversation in the languages they major in. Why? Because our mainstream learning methods are not among the most effective. In the 1960s, we had Su-perlearning coming from Bulgaria to the States and then the rest of the world. Dr. Lozanovs Suggestopedia, as he named it originally, seems to be in alignment with natural laws and the way our brain functions.

Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder, Superlearning 2000 (1994)


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It shows how to combine conscious and unconscious memory so that we learn and memorize with our whole brain.

Using music, our right-brain capacities are enhanced in Superlearning, and the learning stuff is absorbed by little chunks that are written into our long-term memory. The chunks are patterns, and the whole approach could be called a patterned learning approach.

How can this be done? How can we realize virtually unlimited learning ability? The answer is, by learning pat-terns, not singular elements. The brain learns patterns by using both brain hemispheres simultaneously engaged.

Most of us are so used to the fact that we only use a fraction of our potential that they do not inquire further. In fact, we use in our culture most of the time only the left side of our brain, our so-called left brain hemisphere. We try to cope with progress and challenge using our conscious mind, our ratio, the intellectual mind, disregarding the in-credible potential of both our subconscious and our asso-ciative mind, which is located in our right brain hemisphere!

It is not by chance that our brain consists of two hemi-spheres. The right hemisphere coordinates while the left brain hemisphere analyses, and when the right brain hemi-sphere assists the left brain hemisphere in the learning process, a holistic understanding of the learning content is brought about. The right hemisphere functions in an in-ductive and associative manner. It does not, like the left hemisphere, memorize abstract concepts but the images


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associated with those concepts. Since a concept does not per se have an image connected to it, it is useful to make up images about all we learn. The more vivid our imagina-tion, the better we memorize! Simply because imagination and visual thinking gets the right brain involved in the learning process. Every poet knows that images, symbols and metaphors can convey much more information in much less time than strictly verbal transmission. Therefore true poetry is acrobatics; it achieves the impossible, by ex-pressing what cannot be expressed. It puts in words what is rather of an imagery quality and beyond words.

Dr. Lozanov and creative thinkers like him are the true poets of our times. Their poetry brings revolution in evolution! They have changed the world with their strong belief in our unlimited potential. In his research Dr. Lozanov found that our passive learning capacity is about five times higher than our active learning faculties. To give an example. Our passive vocabulary in every language is five times as high as our active vocabulary. This means that we understand five times more than we are able to express.

It is funny because the negative thinkers conclude from this fact that our brain suffered from an innate deficiency when learning languages. In reality, this very feature of our memory surface is a true advantage. It namely ensures the fundamental understanding of a foreign language actually before we are able to speak it. In fact, this characteristic of our memory interface enables us to learn passively, that is to say almost without effort.


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We learnt our mother tongue without studying gram-mar, didnt we? Children pick up foreign languages while adults try to translate them into the structures of their mother tongue.

However, this latter procedure, while it is used by the majority of people, is highly ineffective and inappropriate. It prolongs the learning process and is responsible for the accent we bring into the foreign languages we speak. Dr. Lozanovs method, by contrast, has been seen to produce native speakers. Learners speak foreign languages without any accent, like native speakers, simply because they have absorbed the language by patterned recognition.

Before I go in more detail about highly effective learn-ing, let me first glimpse on the subject of learning from a more global perspective. I am conscious that I am not deal-ing with reforming existing organizational structures, but with nothing less but a revolution in education. This revo-lution has since long been on our evolutionary agenda. Great writers, philosophers and teachers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Maria Montessori or Alexander S. Neill have prepared the shift which is now taking place all over the world. This is not a shift in styles or methods or ways to perform, but a real paradigm shift.

The old paradigm holds that learning is an unpleasant and mechanical activity that is a necessary but unavoid-able sacrifice on the way to higher achievement. The new paradigm holds that learning is an essential ingredient of


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life, a part of the human nature and naturally as pleasur-able as breathing, playing, eating or taking a hot shower.

It further holds that unpleasant learning is the result of ignorance and a deep mistrust in the human potential if not a form of outright violence originating from a pleasure-denying ideology. The old paradigm favored oligarchic sys-tems of power, based on the ignorance of the masses, while the new paradigm strives for effective and nurturing forms of learning as the very foundations of democracy!

The new paradigm associates learning with creative liv-ing and, as such, as a part of human dignity. The paradigm shift in learning stresses human values such as respect for the individuals natural learning faculties and intuition. It has given rise to a higher value of personal choices and preferences.

The paradigm shift in learning deeply affects modern society, which is currently evolving into a global learning society with a supreme esteem for the individuals learn-ing capacities and choices. Hundreds or even thousands of new ways of learning are presently being born all over the world, and the common denominator among them is di-versification of the learning process. The media, and even good old television are going through a deep identity crisis and a transformation that will get them ready to cope with the global need for more and better education on a mass-scale level. In a globally networked and value-based con-sumer culture, we need to learn constantly, effectively and joyfully.


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Many of us, and among them the highly gifted ones, practice this already now and probably since their child-hood. The impact learning has on our creativity is not to underestimate. To be creative and not to learn is sheer im-possible! Creativity and learning go hand in hand. I would go as far as advising everyone who complains about lack of creativity to simply start learning something new and then begin with practicing this new learning.

As a result, creativity will blossom, and not only in the particular field you have chosen to learn about. It will be a general creativity and can affect areas of your life that you considered dull and stagnant. More generally put, we can say that every learning experience rejuvenates us from the deepest of our bones.

Expenses are currently reducing on a large scale and the one who still invests a fortune in getting a masters de-gree or diploma will tomorrow be considered a fool!

Learning will be tightly interwoven with daily life, and it will be for the most part electronic. It will on a lesser scale be left to professional teachers to teach, as the culture will provide virtually everybody the opportunity to share information and thus become a public teacher.

From such large-scale information distribution, income will be created and this in a more diversified manner. Since the individual will not have much to pay to get informa-tion, the per-client profit of information providers will be relatively small, yet the great mass of potential clients net-


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worked within the global learning structure will do for great profits!

The areas where new learning is required are as large as our whole scale of interests. We will have to master about a dozen languages fluently if we want to cope with the global marketplace, and this can be achieved once learning is felt as pleasure and as an essential enrichment of life.

By playing with knowledge, we overcome learning barri-ers that result from negative past experiences. Learning by playing helps thus to overcome past learning frustrations because learning will be such a tremendously new and en-ergizing experience that we do no longer associate it with the old frustrating patterns that damaged our self-esteem.

Naturally learning really is pleasurable since it reflects to us our unlimited potential, and because it empowers us and boosts our self-esteem.

The learning barriers many of us have are not in our nature and certainly not, as some misanthropes say, in the human nature. They are but conditioned responses to in-human learning experiences! Love for learning actually is similar to love for life.

Children learn by play. They learn language by absorbing language and by playing with words and phrases that they have already captured. The way children learn languages can be compared with a scanner. A scanner transforms pic-tures or writing in electronic signals that the computer can identify and retransform into pictures.


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Children indeed scan the language they are exposed to on a daily basis, with all its complex grammatical struc-ture, intonation, syntax, and vocabulary, and they memo-rize these whole patterns, not just single elements such as words, or grammar. They never learn isolated words and phrases, nor any grammar, as most of us traditionally did.

Rather do they absorb language within a context, a frame of reference, which is a patterned structure. This is the secret. This context, this patterned frame of reference in which we learn, is responsible for a much higher learning input. The more our brain can associate new knowledge with existing or contextual knowledge, the more easily it can store it away in long-term memory. This has to do with the neurological fact of preferred pathways in our brain. That is why mental pictures help tremendously in memorizing language or any other kind of learning material.

Another factor is that children never are in a learning environment specifically designed for them.

Behold, this is a major advantage! It means that they are every day bombarded with new words, and that they are, technically speaking, exposed to a much higher input com-pared to the actual output they are able to produce. Tradi-tional learning completely disregards our passive learning capacities; it starts from the wrong assumption that learning must always be an active process! And that it must be hard and painful to get learning results. This assumption is dis-proved by holistic learning that engages our full potential and that thus activates our full memorization capacities.


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Superlearning techniques are natural in that sense since they are based on the way our brain functions when it functions as a whole brain. They recognize that we can learn passively, just as we did as children, by absorbing the whole of the learning stuff, using our unconscious as a major recep-tion antenna.

These modern learning techniques are not only much more effective, they are also healthier since stress is re-duced on a major scale and frustrations are reduced to a minimum.

We speak of playful children. Nobody has yet spoken of playful learning. Playful learning is however something that really makes sense. Who ever met a genius knows what I am talking about. Geniuses are playful learners! They have never left childhood. Not that they remain immature, but they voluntarily keep their playful attitude in learning be-cause they have preserved the most precious we have, the inner child.

Geniuses like to play, with thoughts, with images, with strategies, with concepts, with patterns, with theories, and some also with people or countries, or with life as a whole. In a way life is a game and can be considered as a context where nature plays a game with herself, where creatures play games with each other, in order to survive, but also in order to have fun! What we need is positive stimulation in order to learn effectively.


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Learning brings more results once it is done in a way that is fun, that feels good, that is lively, that motivates us without frustration.

Traditional learning is basically centered upon sweat and potatoes. It is based on life-denying beliefs such as life is a hard job or life on earth is a sacrifice for later heaven, and similar nonsense. Therefore traditional learning has bred pressure and fear and got many people to become non-learners who were enthusiastic learners as long as they were innocent. It has built hero philosophies, which tell us that only some people are winners and that all the rest will become losers. And this rest are we.

The hero cult has deeply affected our self-esteem in the most negative way. Many people were crippled by tradi-tional education to a point to be unable to pursue life in a naturally pleasurable manner; they turned foul and bitter.

However, life has not born us to torture ourselves. Our brain is not a stubborn old donkey that has to be beaten in order to run in high gear. It has only to be motivated to learn and it will learnand frantically so!

Learning is an essential part of a human life. Life rec-ognizes the enormous potential we got as human beings and tries to activate this potential through effective and joyful learning. In fact, most of us never learnt to learn, and in school, then, unlearnt the little what life, or the street taught us about this important subject. All the virtues that are connected to understanding the learning process are bluntly disregarded in the traditional educational culture.


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The first and foremost of those original virtues is flexibility. Instead of teaching us flexibility, school taught us rigidity.

Flexibility is the highest virtue because life itself is un-endingly flexible and yielding. Survival is that, the ability to flexibly adapt to any new situation or environment. The dinosaurs disappeared because they couldnt adapt to cli-matic changes. And many people today are jobless because they are at pains with anticipating structural changes in the world economy or unable to cleanse their mind of out-dated knowledge. Relying on what you have learnt in school is not only silly but dangerous for your professional career. Among all what makes a modern society, the pri-mary school system is the end where we are still with one leg in the dark ages. More and more structural transforma-tions change the world presently and we all know that in only ten years from now the world will be more different than a hundred years ago compared to now. The accelera-tion of development on both an individual and a collective level is a fact of life that even non-intellectuals today are beginning to face.

We cannot rely on school systems that teach this or that stuff instead of teaching learning skills. And we cannot rely on governments since the broad majority among them fol-low outdated paradigms and even fascist ideologies in-stead of democratic growth-fostering paradigms.

Often, because badly needed reforms are postponed, huge unemployment and misery are the result. And in ad-dition, because of insufficient knowledge about how to


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learn, masses of people are maladjusted in a world that is developing far beyond the concepts traditional education was based upon.

Needless to say that all this is a bad mix and potential root of upheaval and social unrest. There is an urgent need for groups of enlightened individuals to take responsible control of the media so as to spread information about the following topics:

The unlimited and divine nature of the human soul;

The unlimited range and power of our human potential;

The most effective forms of learning and self-study;

The art of learning-how-to-learn;

The art of peaceful and joyful living;

The art of holistic problem solving;

The philosophy of the information age;

and related subjects.

Learning-how-to-learn is what we call philosophy in the original sense of the word. Philos originates from the Greek philein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. Philosophy thus is the love of wisdom, and truly the original source of moti-vation to study intriguing phenomena such as learning.

Let me ask: Why do some people remember almost everything they ever heard or saw, while others, perhaps


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the majority, have rather bad memory capacity?I am con-vinced that the answer to this very old question is simple.

The first group of people have learnt how to learn, the second are too much centered upon what to learn instead of realizing the primary importance of the learning process. If the process of learning was not felt as a pleasure and an adventure for growth, the result of learning will always be poor. I had a colleague at law school who was gifted with a phenomenal memory. He told the professors right away when they made a mistake, citing by memory from volu-minous commentaries, indicating page number and exact location of the quote on the page. When I asked him where he got his extraordinary talent from, he replied, smiling:

Oh, thats easy. I just visualize everything I want to learn. I look at the page one moment with high concentra-tion, very intensely, and thus photograph the page into my memory. Its just like scanning the pageand thats it. Like that I scan whole books, law texts, commentaries, every-thing I want.

Needless to add that this lad was the best of our law class, if not of the whole university. In addition, he was blessed being from one of the finest families in town. He drove to law school in an old classic Mercedes 500 Road-ster, but despite his extraordinary gifts and his royal-class family life, he was one of the most modest and friendly people Ive met in my young life.

This example may raise your awareness to the impor-tance of memory. Usually we are not conscious of how im-


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portant it is to have good memory. You may say that good memory serves to keep track with phone numbers, birth-days and faces. But its much more than that and its much more basic, too. Good memory is not all in life but it facili-tates life tremendously. We should not underestimate it in the daily running of our business or in whatever we do.

People who cannot remember faces live through many awkward situations and their relational life is deeply af-fected by their incapacity to keep in mind the features of another person. Whatever the deeper psychological rea-sons for this strange inability may be, there is no doubt that people who easily remember others give the impres-sion to be more open, more friendly, more accessible and competent, if not more social and communicative. How-ever, as important as memory is, it is only one element in the learning process, which is concerned with the know-how of storing pertinent information. The most important word in this sentence is pertinent. Why do we forget certain things and not certain other things? Do we forget at all? In fact, the truth is that we dont forget anything. Research has shown that our unconscious knows exactly how many steps we go to get to their office, and back home.

Why not consciously, then? The reason is obvious, we would be submerged with information.

The information is all the time present in the memory surface, but its hidden away from conscious awareness. You can figure this as some sort of backup tape where you have more data stored than on your hard disc, data that


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you archived because it could be important one day, or that you need to keep for other reasons, but data that you do not need to have on your active hard drive.

Now, there are people who, by nature, have got such an extraordinary conscious memory surface that they vir-tually cant forget anything. The famous pianist Svjatoslav Richter was one of them. Even in old age, he knew sixty-three complete concert recitals by heart, which means about two hundred hours of uninterrupted music, note by note, including fingerings, tempi, dynamics and other important details important for brilliant piano play. In some inter-views shortly before he died, he said he could remember events and people from his childhood, and their long Rus-sian names, as clearly as he had seen them the day before.

He admitted actually in this interview that he was suf-fering all his life from his unnatural incapacity to forget.

What is it that makes good memory? Is it perhaps mo-tivation? Is it involvement? Or is it even something like a playful attitude toward learning in general?

Or is it direct perception, or else a combination of vari-ous factors in play? Excellent learning certainly is based upon strong learning motivation, high degree of involve-ment and, as research has shown, a playful attitude toward learning in general, as well as high curiosity.

Direct perception is the faculty to achieve results with-out involving analysis or theory. It is the use of intuition and spontaneity to perceiving reality in a non-mental as well as a non-judgmental way.Small children learn directly, ho-


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listically, by absorbing the whole of the experience and importantly so, without judging and without the past get-ting involved in the learning process.

The past gets in the way because of thought. Thought which is the derivative of past experience and its projec-tion into the present moment, blocks learning instead of enhancing it. Thought generally is concerned with the use or the usefulness of some endeavor or activity. Those wor-ries keep us from being completely absorbed by the learn-ing experience.

It is irrelevant if the specific content of what we are learning is useful. What we learn with learning is learning it-self! Even if we forget the content of what we have learned, if we have learnt the right way, that is, through direct percep-tion, the fruit of the learning process will be there: we will have enriched our learning-how-to-learn experience. And this, by itself, is worth any kind of learning. Motivation is the door and it is the guide to highly effective learning. We can reach such insight only through understanding learning as a holistic experience. The traditional approach to learning is reductionist in that it deprives learning of a whole lot of its implicit and contextual content.

There is a broadening of our intelligence in every sin-gle learning experience. Even if the learning content is ir-relevant or becomes futile, if we have passed through the experience with enthusiasm and have been immersed in it, there is a subtle essence that positively touched our human potential.This is valid not only for single learning experi-


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ences but, more in general, for learning systems or meth-ods.

On the other hand, it is typical in our days to overesti-mate the effectiveness of electronic media for learning. To-days enthusiasm for electronic learning is the natural out-come of our moving into the information age and our al-most child-like joy to indulge in those exciting new media features. I am not different in that and was from the start a fervent prophet of the New Age of Information. However, we should not forget in our i-fever that the computer does not change our thinking habits; its our brain that created the computer, and not the computer that created our brain.

It is through studying our brain and our natural ways to handle information, and not through imitating the very incomplete way how computers deal with information that we progress in understanding fast and effective learning for ourselves and our children.

Traditionally, teaching languages was teaching a gram-mar. Until now in English the term Grammar School is used for a basic, elementary school. Just recall what you learned about grammar in school and then evaluate how well you could speak a foreign language with this grammar knowl-edge only.

I guess, zero percent!

We do simply not learn languages by gathering knowl-edge about grammar. This is a fact that has psychological and neurological reasons, which are in the meantime also scientifically corroborated. Our brain simply does not need


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grammar to learn a foreign language, but something to-tally different!

But despite this knowledge we go on to teach children the grammar nonsense and let them lose their time with mechanical and highly boring activities!

And then we wonder why they feel bored and want to break out! They should break out because this proves that their creative impulse is strong enough to survive the prison of routines in which we want to incarcerate them.

I already mentioned Dr. Lozanov who found that we learn better when our brain functions in the so-called alpha state.The alpha state is the state in between wake and sleep.

In this state of consciousness, our left and right brain hemispheres function in sync, thus ensuring the full poten-tial of creative possibilities we dispose of.

In our waking state, by contrast, our brain functions on beta waves, and most of the time invoking the left-brain hemisphere, enabling us to straightforward, logical and so-called rational thought, to the detriment of our intuitive, receptive and truly creative possibilities.

It can be said that the whole of modern culture is based on a predominance of our left brain hemisphere! Logically then, within this reductionist system, it was upheld that language learning meant the study of grammar. But times have changed. Today, not only with Superlearning have we got a method that is revolutionizing learning since it is de-void of any conscious effort to learn.


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There are nowadays other methods around that are perhaps less sophisticated, but also less expensive, among them, for example, the Assimil method.

This method, like Superlearning, is based upon the fact that our brain picks up whole patterns, and this including the grammar structure of the language. That is why Assimil does not teach any grammar and yet is one of the most ef-fective modern language teachings worldwide. And in ad-dition its highly affordable!

But Georgi Lozanov did not only revolutionize lan-guage teaching. After he was already a famous psychiatrist and parapsychologist in his home country Bulgaria, Lo-zanov went to India in order to study the astonishing psy-chic capacities of Yogis. At the same time, the Russian sci-entist Alexander Luria spent decades to study Venjamin, a man who remembers all, and found his memory capacities unlimited. Venjamin never forgot anything and could even remember the setup of the dishes and the flowers on a ta-ble of an afternoon tea forty years back in time. Lozanov knew Lurias books and found similar phenomena among the Yogis in Bulgaria and India. Some of them had an al-most total photographic memory.

What Lozanov did, then, was to combine his research on language teaching with what we know about the func-tioning of the human memory.

And here we have a method that is, despite all similari-ties with Assimil, very different and unique. While Assimil and most of the newer programs for language learning are


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made for self-teaching, Superlearning cannot be applied that way, and some people who have tried to transform it into a self-study method failed. The original Superlearning technique needs a specially trained instructor. This teacher must have qualities of an actor. Students are in armchairs and enveloped by soft string sounds, by preference Ba-roque airs. The teacher, standing in front of the audience, recites long texts in the foreign language. The tone of his voice alternates. One moment he shouts, then he whispers, then he talks normally. The rhythm of his speech is exactly in sync with the rhythm of the music, which in turn is in sync with the breathing rhythm of the learners.

The results are nothing short of astounding! You can learn difficult languages such as Arabic, Russian or Chi-nese in two months; children learn to read and write in no more than six monthsand this with an almost total per-fection. The foreign languages are spoken without accent and written in exact orthography and this despite the fact that no grammar is ever taught.

Dr. Lozanov was convinced that our brain, our subcon-scious mind, knows all grammars of all languages, and therefore picks them out of the spoken phrases, which are listened to in the alpha state. His theory must be right since the results show that all tested students of his programs knew the grammar of the foreign languagewithout ever having studied it.

The reason why the speaker alternates the volume of his voice has to do with the reception capacity of our brain.


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First of all, our subconscious mind picks up what is underlying in a mixture of different sounds, and not what is dominant. At the beginning of the sessions, Dr. Lozanov puts specially chosen music to help his audience to relax. The airs and andante are adjusted in tempo so that they fit exactly our natural heartbeat which is around 62 beats per minute, thus relaxing those who are nervous (heartbeat too quick) and stimulating those others who are apathetic and unmotivated (heartbeat too slow).

Later Dr. Lozanov found another important function of the music: its transmitter function. The music was seen to serve as a transmitter for the spoken texts. As the phrases were spoken in exact accordance with the tempo of the music, the music in a way became a transmitter for the for-eign language reach the subconscious mind of the listen-ers.

From Bulgaria, Suggestopedia spread very quickly, first of all to the United States, and from there back to Europe and all high-tech nations. The essential new discovery, however, penetrated only into very few societies. It has, to my knowledge, not reached the level of public education where students still sit on benches, with a crushed stom-ach, and are pumped up with grammar knowledge, leav-ing their classes with a feeling of having done hard work.

Hard work indeed, but work without significant re-sults. Lozanovs findings are just a beginning for us, today. The great psychiatrist was for us a pioneer and we have to continue the research that he so brilliantly begun. In our


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era of mass culture, the struggle for every single youngster to succeed in the rat-race is harder than ever before. On the other hand, the challenge to reach more satisfying lifestyles and careers, more satisfying in creative realization, is today present in all societies that have reached a certain level of progress and a basic level of democratic freedom!

There is not one process of creativity, there are many. They are interwoven in a complex network of brain func-tions, on one hand, and behavioral attitudes, on the other.

The study of education therefore is very large. It is the study of man as a whole, and of his culture. Our research must have a theoretical basis as well as a practical dimen-sion. Without theory, our experiments will not explain us why things develop in a certain way and not in a certain other way and without practice our hypotheses remain unproven.

Theoretical work means the review of the abundant and rapidly growing literature on the subject of creativity research in order to find out the state of the art in this field, to see what is admitted in the meantime and what has still to be proven.

It equally encompasses the working out of new hy-potheses, even if they revolutionize our findings from yes-terday. Progress has become rapid all over the globe and the human development takes big steps in new directions. Faster, more effective and more relaxed learning is only one of them, but a very important one!


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Holistic Learning

All learning is a process. When we focus upon the proc-ess of learning we learn about learning.

What we did traditionally was to focus upon the learn-ing content. Thus, we can say that in the past learning was considered as something static and mechanical while to-day we see learning as a dynamic process, something ongo-ing, organic and that is somehow part of life. This process of learning, if we are to understand it intelligently, must be seen in alignment with our totality of perception.

Learning is the way we deal with what we perceive, and it is all about how we process the information that has been collected by our brain, but not only our brain, through a rather complicated process that we call perception. Thus, when we want to find out about the process of learning, we need to look what perception is and how it works.

Perception, it seems, is a subject not very broadly dis-cussed in modern science. This obvious neglect of scientific in-depth study of the holistic process of perception has vari-ous reasons, one of them being the general focus of mod-ern science upon information processing. There was a his-toric shift around the end of Antiquity that led to a trend away from direct perception and toward information proc-essing, archiving or mere information reproduction.

And yet, direct perception is our most natural, sponta-neously intelligent mode of perception. It is the way our brain receives and stores information. New research has fully corroborated the teachings of the old sages who af-


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firmed that learning has to be holistic and whole-brain in order to be truly effective. We can only wonder when we hear scientists state that generally we use only between about five to eight percent of our brain.

Why are we so terribly uncreative, so utterly ineffective in our learning performance? Despite this whole process called civilization, despite schooling, despite the printing press, Gutenberg and all the rest of it, we have remained in a truly primitive state of evolution regarding learning.

I am not concerned with finding out about the causes or reasons for this terrible waste of human potential, but with the possibilities to take action here and now to change this state of affairs.

Changing the world comes about through individual changes. Once a sufficient number of individuals quantum leaped to a higher evolutionary scale, there will be a major paradigm shift in the whole system. This is how civilization develops about; it all begins in the cell and then expands to still bigger patterns. Nature is programmed in a system of patterns that are holistically related to each other and where the information of the whole is contained in every single cell of the pattern. The pattern structure is typical for the in-formation the brain receives and stores information. New information is added on to existing patterns of informa-tion. Without such connections which in neurology are called preferred pathways, memory is not possible. The bet-ter the brain can manage to associate new input with al-ready stored patterns, the better the information storage


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will be, and the higher will be the memorization result. Our brain does the entire process of perception and infor-mation storage automatically, passively, without a need for us to set a decision about it. This fact is important for the understanding of the functioning of the brain. There is a positive side and a negative side about it.

Positively, the passively organizing perception struc-ture of the brain insures that we continuously receive and store information, at any moment of the day and the night.

Also during sleep and even in deep coma all the in-formation from the five senses is stored in the unconscious memory surface. So the apparently passive functioning of the brain is actually an extremely active process. The im-portant point about it is that the organizer of the informa-tion is inside and not outside of the system.

To give an example, let us have a look at two groups of children. The first group is raised freely so that they can pick up any information from their environment and grow, from the information they get, into what they are destined for.

The second group, however, is strictly regulated, pro-tected and guarded off from unprocessed information.

Which group, would you think, will be more intelligent and more creative, the first or the second one? Of course the first one. Simply because in their case the freely organ-izing and unhindered system of their perception and the free flow of information, combined with high input, made that their brains were working in high gear whereas in the


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second group creative learning processes were for the most part impeded and blocked. In the first group the organizer of the information was inside, within the children, while in the second group it was the tutelary adults around the chil-dren who were installing valves for the free flow of incom-ing information filtering out the larger part of it.

We can also put it that way: in the first group it was natures intelligence that cared for those childrens evolu-tion, in the second case it was shortsighted human willful-ness.

This example shows the impact the early environment has on the development of our intelligence and our later use of the potential weve got.

In my opinion we all got high potential but only very few of us were exposed to the necessary amount of envi-ronmental support and have, in addition, developed the creative will for freeing themselves from the dangers of conditioning; we need both these factors working in a posi-tive direction if we are to fully develop our talents and creative powers.

I am convinced that people like Leonardo da Vinci, Al-bert Einstein or Pablo Picasso, were they scored for the use of their creative resources, would have been found to use more than eighty percent of their creative intelligence po-tential whereas for the common individual four to eight percent might be realistic. Behold, one of the greatest er-rors consists in assuming that this state of affairs could not be changed or was inherent in our human nature! Darwin-


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ism has contributed to spread this error as one of the most destructive and absurd lies about the human nature and the hero cult has built it into the belief system of millions that forms part and parcel of postmodern international consumer culture.

The truth is that every single human being has got this incredible power that enables us to achieve whatever we wish, if only we set our minds to it and develop tremen-dous focus on realizing our creative will.

In his book Serious Creativity (1996), Edward de Bono states that education does very little indeed about teaching crea-tive thinking. For more than two decades, de Bono stressed that there was an astounding lack of creativity not only in schools and universities, but also in business, even in the highest ranks of management, and the even higher ranks of government.

Edward de Bonos creativity teaching focuses on en-hancing business creativity as a deliberate approach, some-thing that can be learnt and that he called lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is not a special wondrous skill of the right brain, but simply a particularly coordinated way of both brain hemispheres working in sync.

The discovery of lateral thinking came about through the observation of the human brains unique capability to collect and store information through pattern recognition and pattern assembly. The brain does not store isolated pieces of information but always organizes information in patterns. De Bono states on page 11 of his book:


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What computers find so hard to do (pattern recogni-tion) the brain does instantly and automatically.

When de Bono released his theory of passively organiz-ing systems in one of his first books, The Mechanism of Mind, scientists at first disregarded these astonishing find-ings. However, later Nobel Prize winners confirmed them; in addition, the amazing new discoveries in neurology cor-roborate them brilliantly.

The preferred-pathways system of the brain, nowadays presented as common knowledge even in popular science books, is but another way of formulating de Bonos early theory. And de Bono equally saw the negative side of this mechanism whereas neurologists continue to acknowledge but the positive effects of it. The essential negative point in passively organizing systems is that the recognition itself is conditioned upon the already existing patterns. Bono said that when we analyze data we can only pick out the idea we al-ready have. And even more clearly does he state on p. 24:

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all busi-ness school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is pre-pared to see.

That de Bonos insight is about more than neurology is shown by the fact that no lesser than Krishnamurti stated exactly the same, saying that only passive awareness and not


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active thought can help us understand the world intelli-gently.

Thought or what we call our ratio is not able to recog-nize patterns, it can only process patterns that are already available.

In addition, the conditioning of perception by thought and past experience was a major argument Krishnamurti used to overcome the limitations of the conscious mind, showing that there is unlimited intelligence and awareness not in thought but in the realm beyond thought.

Creativity, then, is strictly speaking not a product of thinking, but of creative thinking which is more than think-ing. De Bono was outspoken about the destructive process of creative thinking. What he calls the creative challenge ba-sically consists in destroying existing patterns or just dis-regarding them in order to be able to free ones perception from their conditioning influence. In this sense, creativity comes close to love, or else love could be seen as a form of creativity.

Krishnamurti stated that love is destructive in the sense that it destroys existing perception patterns and thus pow-erfully refreshes our regard on life, and on ourselves.

It also happens, as de Bono repeatedly pointed out, in humor. This is the reason why humor heals and exerts such a positive influence not only on our mind but also on our organism. Humor detoxifies the body from accumulated old patterns that have restricted our evolution.


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To understand this reasoning we should keep in mind that evolution can only take place where our regard shifts. Evolution proceeds in a spiraled manner, repeating the ba-sic processes of one level of evolution on the next level, thus climbing one step higher in the evolutionary scale. The form of the DNA, symbol of all life, reminds it plastically.

Our regard can only shift in moments where condition-ing ends. This can happen during meditation or during what de Bono calls the creative pause. The way de Bono de-velops creativity is based upon actively implying right-brain capacities in our regular thought processes for bring-ing about a more holistic process of thinking. It is quite differ-ent from the Eastern approach which was traditionally ob-sessed with the idea to deliberately stop thought in order to connect to the higher realm of wisdom and creative thinking. For de Bono, it is not to stop thinking but to think differently. Another difference would be one of dynamics.

Both approaches, the ancient Eastern approach to com-plete perception, and de Bonos, have in common that they stress the ultimate importance of the perception process as what it is, a movement.

In terms of the dynamics involved in the process of perception, the Western and the Eastern approaches differ.

The latter starts from the premise that only by slowing down thought, by ones detaching from the thought con-tent and by becoming passively aware, we prepare for the unknown and thus become creative. For de Bono it is in the contrary a very active and deliberate process of think-


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ing to be learned and carried out that will trigger the crea-tivity response. This difference in approaching the ques-tion typically represents the fashion in which East and West are structurally distinct.

It also makes clear what the essential difference is be-tween creativity and creativeness. De Bonos lateral think-ing method is intentionally limited to bringing about crea-tive results on demand. It is not meant to be an artists way for constant creationit is not meant to teach creativeness.

Krishnamurtis educational approach, as the basis of the Krishnamurti Schools definitely is a way to educate chil-dren within a continuum of gradual unfoldment through creative and holistic living. Krishnamurtis starting point was that institutionalized education destroys intuition.

The third important factor in learning, next to direct perception and intuition is self-regulation. Observation of nature, psychoanalysis and permissive, non-authoritarian educational projects such as Summerhill as well as modern systems theory demonstrate the existence of an inherent mechanism of self-regulation in all natural growth processes.

See A.S. Neill, Summerhill (1961), pp. 29 ff. and Neill! Neill! Or-ange Peel! (1972).

Permissive Education assumes that as a matter of fact, children grow by themselves and thus we do not need to artificially stimulate childrens emotions, childrens sensitiv-ity and childrens creativity. What we have to look for is only that these values, which are naturally present in every


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child, are not destroyed, and thus preserved. Children are by nature emotional, sensitive and creative. It is society that destroys this integrity in schools that are more like prisons than anything else, and that subdue children and undermine their natural self-esteem.

What we only have to care about is that children re-ceive adequate support so as to grow in an environment that is nurturant for fostering their uniqueness, their crea-tive potential and their intrinsic talents.

Before the existence of schools, children were raised by their parents and other adults present in the extended fam-ily. They learned primarily by observation or by direct per-ception, picking up what they needed for their later career, from their early environment. They do this still today, but there is less freedom in our society for children to grow up uncontrolled and unsupervised and develop their own emo-tional and cognitive insights.

Conditioning is very strong in todays industrialized societies and the culture tries to impregnate children from early age with its agenda and values.

De Bono, much like Lozanov, found that only in early childhood learning, and especially in the way young chil-dren learn their first language, we see natures full intelli-gence at work.

It is a well-known fact that geniuses such as Einstein or Picasso and most of our cherished cultural heroes never entered or finished school, dropped out or flew it. These people know that they know better and follow their inner


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instinct rather than an artificial learning system that repre-sents a considerable waste of time and resources and that essentially violates human dignity in the most flagrant way. Life, seen through the eyes of a school system, is but a mechanistic, dead system that, pretty much in the style of the vivisectionists, has to be killed in order to be ready for study.

Until today, international organizations such as the United Nations or UNICEF still adhere to concepts such as alphabetization of the masses, and this despite the fact that more and more research is accumulated that shows that alphabetization alone has no value at all without being imbed-ded in a school system that respects the child as a unique individual and creative and spiritually minded person in her own right. Mass civilization, mass learning, mass stan-dardization and mass indoctrination have led to a dehu-manization of culture, and this on the global level. These reductionist principles have led to worldwide destruction and violence.

This cycle is currently undergoing a revision through a total reformation of the educational and pedagogical sys-tems on a worldwide scale.

Learning through direct perception is the key. This form of direct learning is not new, but actually very old. Many of those who were and are considered as stupid, recalcitrant, refractory or even criminal in the traditional educational system are actually the intelligent ones, the highly gifted ones and the ones with a unique and original mindset.


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They regularly know that true and original learning is not what they can find in schools or colleges, religious or worldly, but what they directly and spontaneously compre-hend, by observation, by the experience of immediate per-ception that passes not through the reasoning mind but through the still mind of the passive observer.

Let me explain more in detail what direct perception is about, using a famous example, Krishnamurti. While in the meantime K is recognized to have been one of humanitys greatest spiritual teachers, he was beaten daily in school by a stupid and ignorant teacher.

He was left utterly alone and would probably have ended as the village idiot in Madanapalle, India, if not the theosophists had taken him to England where he was edu-cated under their patronage.

Announced by seers as the New Messiahs, this boy was found, at fourteen, at a beach side, neglected, almost tooth-less, malnourished and in a precarious health condition. His whole early environment treated him without any re-spect, without any dignity and, needless to add, without any intelligence.

Krishnamurti, as a little boy, rejected all knowledge he was supposed to assimilate. He rejected the whole of it, the whole of conditioning, societal, religious, moral or what-ever; and because of this refusal he was treated with utter disrespect and violence, as so many other children who, like him, prefer to remain in their original state of mind that is pure and unspoiled, the mind of a totally conscious


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direct observer Once freed from the uncivil early environ-ment, Krishnamurti learnt everything, languages, behavior patterns of many different cultures, religious customs and traditions, philosophical doctrines, literature, poetry, and even worldly matters such as driving.

He, the little neglected boy became one of the greatest teachers and philosophers of our times and of all times. Krishnamurti learned through direct perception and there-fore his learning was immediate, spontaneous and almost instantaneous, the learning of a genius.

From his experience and deep insight into the spiritual nature of man, he founded the Krishnamurti Schools in In-dia, Britain and the United States which are truly alterna-tive in terms of teaching because they teach the wholeness of life and not fragmented and isolated subjects.

Direct perception is the key to using our hidden poten-tial in hitherto unforeseen ways so as to achieve miracu-lous results that we know only from people who are called geniuses. Truly, we all possess the spark of divine intelli-gence, able to pass beyond the limitations of our condi-tioned mind once we are able to use our whole brain.

Direct perception is a whole-brain experience. Since the left brain is not primarily involved in it, the language cen-ter is not, either. When we perceive truth in an immediate way, it cannot be put in words, because it does not come to us through words.

People who report direct perception experiences al-most always have difficulties to put their holistic view into


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the limited corset of language. For example, when children report to have seen Virgin Mary, as it happened at repeated occasions in Zeitoun, Egypt, in Fatima, Portugal or in Lourdes, France, they are speechless at first. Even adults, when witnessing a miracle, tend to lose control over their choice of words or just repeat the same words over and over again.

See Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (1992).

Similarly, in situations of shock or trauma, we lose speech for a while. Why is that so?

I suppose that in such situations, our brain uses tempo-rarily an archaic survival pattern that energizes first of all the brain stem and the right brain, activating basic mecha-nisms of flight and fight. Survival works without the in-volvement of the neocortex and thus without the involve-ment of the language center which is located there. It is in this mode of functioning that direct perception takes place.

When there is danger for life, the brain switches into survival mode and triggers the survival response. It does so because this mode of reaction is much faster than rea-soning, thought and language.

Of course, what the brain does in danger, it can also do in peace. We only have to understand how the brain trig-gers the immediate response so that we can let it work for learning purposes.

What then is evolution actually about? Looking back in history and becoming aware of the high level of wisdom


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that humanity possessed in ancient times, we cannot seri-ously claim that there was evolution at all. In the contrary, humanity has devolved during the process of what we use to call civilization, at least since the last part of this process, which are grossly the last five thousand years, the time of patriarchy.

It is for this reason that today we must head into de-veloping the parts of the brain that have been left out by evolution, the right brain hemisphere and the brain stem.

It will begin with relearning how to learn, with unlock-ing our potential for true receptiveness, for whole-brain learning, for using our brain for what it is destined for: learning by absorbing whole patterns instead of isolated pieces of knowledge.

It will begin with consciousness-based holistic educa-tion, and it will be with electronic learning. And eventually it will pass into the school and schooling systems world-wide.

As long as we continue to bring up and being brought up in systems where our true intelligence agonizes and dies, we will breed but confusion and violence. And there is no question that, then, we will not be able to master the challenges of the new era we are heading into: the Informa-tion Age, the New Age, the Aquarius Age. Only through holis-tic solutions that involve our wholeness and the integration of all parts of our being will we be able to survive in the mess that we ourselves, or past generations, have left over to us.


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Learning through direct perception is the way out, and it is actually a way back. Back to true intelligence and to the teachings of the ancient mystery schools where peren-nial wisdom was once taught to an elite.

Learning and Career

Creative career design is one of the most important yet also one the most challenging tasks of civil administration.

It actually requires a joint cooperation of government and industry so that workable solutions can be implemented.

This is even more so as career design or generally pro-fessional formation is a long-term endeavor.

Educational structures are rooted in social and cultural conventions and are therefore not easy to change. It takes a considerable effort from the side of the decision-makers involved to come up with creative new solutions.

Our times bring profound change in all areas of life. Jobs get lost through structural changes on a worldwide scale. Rebuilding the world economy brings much suffer-ing if educational needs are not met in time.

One of the most urgent educational needs is a closer connec-tion between education and the industry. That is where career design comes in.

Creative career design remodels education in a way to be more flexibly adapted to the demands and expectations of the industry.This can for example be done through im-plementing think-tank classes like The Art of Learning in the


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school system. In those classes no specific skills are taught, but the how to of learning. Social scientists and psycholo-gists agree that in the future job changes will occur much more often in our lives and careers as before.

This brings about the need to take up learning almost constantly during ones lifetime.Formerly, it was generally sufficient to have learned one specific job or skill in order to survive as a craftsman or employee. Today and tomor-row this is going to change drastically. Individual devel-opment and social change are required today and tomor-row at such a speed that there is certainty about one thing only: that there will be change!

Laurence G. Boldt, career consultant, stresses that most of his clients come to get a ready-made solution for their career problems. Boldt says that most people lack initiative to see a wider perspective of professional possibilities and do not understand that it was their limited thinking much more than a lack of specific skills that led to their unem-ployment. On the other hand, Boldt found that people can hardly be blamed for their apathy since they come out of a highly rigid educational system that is impregnated with the belief that once you went successfully through the re-quired stuff, you will make it later on.

See, for example, Laurence G. Boldt, Zen and the Art of Making a Living (1993) and The Tao of Abundance (1999).

What we learn is at the end of the day far less impor-tant than how we learn what we learn, and what we gener-


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ally think about learning. Specialists agree that those who rapidly acquire a wide perspective about opportunities, and who develop motivation and excitement for new learning easily overcome recession periods and find new ways of successful employment or even entrepreneurship. For ex-ample, they may choose freelancing as a new and creative possibility of earning their life.

Freelancing has gained widespread reputation because it is much better adapted to the quick changes modern life brings along. Freelancing also ensures a basically free and relatively creative professional life without too many re-straints and thus contributes to an independent lifestyle.

On the other hand, the financial situation of the free-lancer typically is unstable and rather fluctuant. But for many people, especially in creative professions such as creative writing, design, art, music production, consulting and nowadays telecommunications and networking, free-lancing is preferred because it ensures space for creativity and inventiveness. Another quality freelancers must pos-sess is aggressiveness or toughness to market their product through a morass of competing alternatives.

However, freelancing is not based on knowledge we acquire in school. Much to the contrary, none of the typical characteristics a successful freelancer needs are taught in school.

There is almost no emphasis, in traditional upbringing, upon independence, nor on creativity or positive forms of ag-gressiveness or at least carefreeness.


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Yet, compared to both employment and entrepreneur-ship, freelancing is one of the fastest growing fields of pro-fessional realization.Freelancing is also well suited to sur-vive structural change and diversification. Compared to employment, it offers a lot more freedom and space for creative impact on ones life while it does not generally require the huge financial investments that are typical for free entrepreneurship. It is after all irresponsible from the side of governments to stay with our outdated and de-pleted educational system. This system namely is funda-mentally inadequate to keep up with the present, and even more so, the future requirements for successful and satisfy-ing professional endeavor.

We are since long beyond the times where govern-ments educated people to become either blissful soldiers or thankful breeding machines for new offspring to be readily killed in the next war or civil war.

Despite the urgent need for reform, governments tend to cut costs at the frontline of education rather than in mili-tary budgets or through bureaucracy reduction. This is why chances are that only through a well-thought strategy of intervention from the side of the industry itself, changes may occur on the government side.

Bureaucracies are not likely to initiate change from in-side out. Evolutionary processes therefore have to take place from outside in, through consultancy or through joint-ventures between government and industry.


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The first step in this process of structural change would be to raise awareness about how and to what extent a net-worked world and an international marketplace molds the human potential, and what we can learn from that. This is an assessment that is relatively easy to be done. It will bring about the insight that there is an amazing similarity of the human qualities needed in modern market competi-tion all over the world, which are not dependent on cul-ture, race or social conditioning.

Some of those qualities are:

Flexibility, adaptability

Intellectual mobility

Curiosity

Ability to play with concepts

Creativity and response-ability

Integrity and commitment

Readiness for change and personal growth

Readiness for team work

Readiness for sharing

Interdependent thinking

Understanding about networking and team leadership

Readiness for stewardship

Care and quality management


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Awareness of social, cultural and environmental factors

Individuals who possess these qualities can learn any of the skills needed for the specific tasks they are dealing with in their career. Skills are always at the periphery of the personality whereas qualities are part of our inside nature. Skills are built on qualities, and not vice versa. Where there are no inner qualities, skills may be trained but they will van-ish because the fertile ground for their growth is missing.

Typically, inner qualities are assembled in an attitude. Hence, the importance of attitude training and its superior-ity over mere skill-based training.

Human resources and endowments are often wasted because this fundamental distinction is widely misunder-stood or even ignored in the business world. In my experi-ence, in management training all over the world, the gen-eral emphasis is on skills. However, the truth is that a per-son who is really dedicated and possesses the right attitude will easily acquire the skills she needs for realizing her in-ner qualities on an outside level.

Skills incarnate qualities and make them visible reality. Before they can be learnt, a seed must be planted inside. Qualities are these inner seeds. And there must have been a growth process to let this seed unfold.

Seen from this perspective, the obsession with inculcat-ing skills seems almost grotesque, as if people were dis-cussing a lot about the color and furnish of a new car they want to buy while they do not even know if this car can be


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built and construed and made available for purchase in their market economy.

Only a deep concern and commitment from the top of both government and industry can bring about a funda-mental reform of the existing vocational training.

This must result in providing the funds, in bringing the right people together, and in a consistent implementation of the new career policies. It cannot be done through quick fixes such as putting computers in schools or stating in curricula that creative input from pupils should be encour-aged and valued. Only a holistic solution that is brought about in joint cooperation by all decision-makers involved will finally assure the victory over the deep crisis of educa-tion we presently face. These are some of the changes that could and should be implemented:

Joint operations between government and industry for the adaptation of education to modern standards;

A task-force that is jointly composed of government repre-sentatives, industry leaders and consultants to work out operational solutions that provide a high-quality and at the same time flexible educational standard that allows gradu-ates to adapt creatively to every possible professional chal-lenge;

Educational curricula to be worked out jointly with industry experts, such as H.R. managers, training consultants and teachers in orde

Documents

Creative Learning and Career: Some Ideas About Not Getting a Job