The Essentials of Originals

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom 

I can recall the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami saying something like - If people read the same books then they'll think the same thoughts - Extrapolate this into everday actions and aspirations and what you end up with is a society full of clones and copies, no-one original: no-one who has sourced his own thoughts, his own consciousness, his own depths, but instead, just a whole bunch of 'people' doing what everyone else does, thinking what everyone else 'thinks'.

In her wonderful book The Essentials of Mysticism, written in the early part of the 1900s, Evelyn Underhill undertakes the grand task of describing the essential elements of the spiritual-mystical experience. Underhill herself described mysticism as:

the direct intuition or experience of God -

and the mystic as:

one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.

The problem we have today is that there is little of that 'first hand personal knowledge', and too much of the second hand stuff vomited forth by the mire of media sources we are all enmeshed in. Man has lost the power to think critically, to think originally. Our education system has a vested interest in keeping the dissent down. It is a business after all, an industry that props up and fuels the capitalist paradigm.

As Underhill eloquently states:

The majority of the 'well-educated' probably pass through life... with at best the vaguest notions of the hygiene of the soul.

Sourcing our own knowledge through reflection and contemplation is the only way to avoid becoming a xerox. Really, the only way to 'educate' the self. We need to liberate the self from its strictures. Free up time and space, and the self, for a more contemplative, and slow, approach to living. We need to stop making a living, and do the living. An epileptic consciousness is no consciousness. In order to think, first we must have the necessary space to do so. It is written in the Bhuddist canons that when there is no more space left between thoughts a dark age will have descended upon us.

In the chapter entitled The Education of the Spirit, Underhill writes:

Were reality able to come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, were we able to enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves - then, we should all be artists... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original.

Time and space is the key. 

Slowness, in other words.