Here is one:
Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
Another:
Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
I have always worked to belong to that minority, as should, I hope, be obvious, while remaining quite aware those are the ones who get crucified.
The POINT I started to make, though–before getting distracted by Lessing, who I love–was that we choose to live inside prisons, because the prisons are within us, without our seeing them.
All automatic reactions you have, conditioned reactions, animal reactions–they are not you, not your soul, not your spiritual part. They are limits on you. A button is pushed and you are reacting before you can stop. They are robotic. Within our nervous systems, I suppose it could reasonably be said we are all already cyborgs with innate programming which we can change only with great effort and considerable time and skill.
That we are confined in these ways–and there are levels which proceed beyond the physical to etheric or more subtle–is the essence of all good spiritual teaching. If we are defined by walls within us, we cannot but choose walls outside of us, prisons of behavior and affect. As within, so without.
I don’t think one person in a hundred ever dreams of true freedom across a lifetime, for the simple reason that they cannot see their limitations. Put more precisely, their conditioning blinds them to their limitations. It is like putting wallpaper on the cells of a prison, then mistaking it for reality.
All of this is hard. I deal with hard things. It tires me. It makes me irritable sometimes. It makes me misunderstood nearly continually. It makes me emotionally tone deaf at times, because I am not wired like most of the people I meet, for better and for worse–both, certainly. But all I conclude, logically, is that I am here to learn, and that whatever missteps I may make, however often I may get or feel lost, I have to keep trying, over and over and over and over, until I die or find peace.