“A Different Education”

Excerpt from “Remembering Eternity”: “Early in his college life, he had decided to utilize those four years to attempt to gain, not a set of skills whose utility would be later revealed in wealth and renown, but answers to his profound questions about life and his place in it. Although he did not realize it at the time, this decision put the then-freshman squarely in the corner of wise souls such as the Vedic rishis, Socrates, Plato, Gautama Buddha, and Lao Tzu, all of whom offered the rather obvious but usually ignored counsel: know thyself before attempting to know anything else. This advice was valid for many reasons: logically, because it made sense to proceed in understanding from that closest to that furthest away from oneself; psychologically, because one’s perceptions distorted one’s observations; philosophically, because one might well find that all knowledge is only knowledge of oneself; and spiritually, because one’s own being would prove identical with the Being of the entire creation and All that had not even been created.”