The Planet as a College Campus

By Dorian Antuna

What type of human beings does the Earth we live on need, and what is our responsibility to become those human beings?

Here it’s necessary to pause for a minute and think about what for us, is indisputable fact. For example, the fact that transparent rain falls from the sky, even at night, or our mother’s name. What does this information depend on to determine whether or not it’s true or indisputable? Could it be that my senses are what teaches me about the world? Can I trust my senses? Did I receive information from someone else? How can I know anything, and how can I know if what I know, is even true? All of these questions teach us that disinformation and lies do exist, incredible, lies also educate us.

Listening is learning, it’s to educate oneself. Aristotle  passionately said that we’re animals that think, and he gave priority to sight over the rest of the senses. Ideas come from “eidos”, Greek for “what is seen”. From eidos, deus or God is derived and día or day. Although the great Greek thinker didn’t care that “what is seen” wasn’t palpable for any of our senses, including sight, Aristotle claimed that the beauty of the impalpable categories like God himself, can be “seen” through the eyes of the soul.

Nevertheless, to do justice to our other senses, like the one which allows us to speak, we should note that we learn by listening. Unlike Greek philosophy, we propose that we’re animals who listen to the songs of the wind, the color of the flowers, the sunlight, the current of a river, a prayer, all of that is language. True language ability is to sculpt the logos (soul) of the listener. One who listens doesn’t repeat what he’s learned, rather he learns from himself. Embodied silence is true learning, however this shouldn’t lead us to become mute. On the contrary, silence casts our brain forward, listening always comes from the future.

We learn by launching. This text, a mix of sight and hearing, which can be read and heard if we read out loud, is a possibility. It’s an invitation to consider the college campus a living being, understanding it as the skin of the soul. Planet Earth should be seen as a big university, those of us who want to learn by launching, are invited to be coherent and consistent with the principals and ideals of a better society, in harmony with the living body of our planetary university.

In traditional education, everything is pyramidal, therefore, the student (from latin a = without, lumini = light), lacks light and the professor (prophet) illuminates their disciple. In this educational model, wisdom is repetitive, there’s no light, everything is a machine that ultimately doesn’t manage to appease the new students’ search for knowledge. Those who today are fortunate enough to enjoy an educational alternative, normally search for something greater than what universities can offer. Youth who manage to reach the deepest level of study, arrive with a spiritual search rather than an offer for a future of labor, which translates to a conflict between what they feel and what the educational system offers.

In the search for something new, a new type of student would be adventurous enough to create solutions, whereas the established system of exams and evaluations aims to maintain students within its own system of repetition. “Launching” breaks this circle, because it searches for a solution, which in itself is a personal realization and the solution to a global problem.

We’re arriving to a metatopic: the new paradigm of no segregation, because we’re paradoxically unable to create an educational system or a system of any kind, which is separate from its spatiotemporal circumstance. In other words, we can’t forget, reject or ignore an educational system financed with capital from university graduates who learn to be employees, and where the professor teaches the students to be like him. In other words, a machine of repetitive information to produce mass workers who support the industry. “Launching” isn’t a critique to the institution, rather it uses the best part of it. In my years as a college student, I met many professors, some of which were true luminaries. I remember Fernando Mesa Nieto, he spoke Greek, Latin, French, German, Arabic and a few dead languages. He taught us an illiterate latin with drawings of Donald Duck in his eagerness to share his knowledge. He was a true philosopher of our time and a poet. Even though I desperately wanted what he had, I finally learned, thanks to him, that a true professor teaches you to learn from yourself.

Odín Ruz, permacultura designer for Organi-k and professor at Fray Luca Paccioli University in Cuernavaca, Mexico describes that, “As a professor, one has to leave the position of being the one who knows, the key is that no matter whether or not the focus of attention is a rock of Mother Earth, I as a professor, establish that we need to talk about that rock or whatever object it may be. My job is to facilitate a context, and the student by a “divine spark” discovers or personally resolves a problem. That discovery is the discovery of success. The person says ‘I discovered it’, the professor doesn’t matter and the student becomes empowered”.

The internet has facilitated interaction in such a way that today we all learn from one another in a lucky dance between information and disinformation, which brings us to inquire within ourselves, in search of a truth that allows us to discover the world. This brings us to our first question, what type of human beings need the Earth that we live on, and what is our responsibility to participate in her?

The urgency to harmonize the satisfaction of our human needs with the planet’s needs has made ancient wisdom more relevant today than ever. In response to that spiritual need, the UOAW emerged:

The University of Ancient Wisdom is a new branch of transcendental knowledge, destined to define the task of every human being on Earth, to learn to work together, cooperate and enlighten one another. As well as to strengthen our effort to protect our sacred cosmic mother and develop the ability to face the negative circumstances that modern society presents, with a positive and responsible attitude.

The foundation of this branch of education is that we are all children of Mother Earth, that no one is superior to anyone else, and the only one who deserves everyone’s attention is the one who generated our existence and continues to protect it through universal strength.

Ancient Wisdom is the legacy of all native cultures around the world, represented all over the planet by amazing contributions from ancient cultures, from the sacred India to southern Chile, the Mapuches, Guaranis and our brothers and sisters from the Sierra Nevada, as well in Mexico with the Yopis, Yaquis, Huicholes, in Australia and throughout the African continent, in the dunes of Egypt to the Middle East, and practically all around the world. We know that all cultures who ever flourished were in perfect harmony with nature: that harmony is what we call knowledge.

www.universityofancientwisdom.org