Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.
— Isaac Asimov, from his essay “A Sense of Perspective”
Self-education is an expansive journey of discovery — a path that demands both curiosity and courage. It’s the act of questioning, exploring, and applying knowledge beyond the confines of formal institutions and accepted norms. In a world where information is abundant but wisdom seems increasingly rare, self-education becomes not only a tool for personal growth but an act of liberation — a way to reclaim autonomy over how we learn, think, and understand the world around us.
We each grapple uniquely with epistemology — the way we learn, process, and retain knowledge from a vast field of conflicting, often misleading avenues of study. What are the essential aspects of self-education? Discernment. Self-directed study. Nonlinear research, independent inquiry, and critical analysis. Learning across a broad range of topics, perhaps mastering a few. Resisting an overly specialized focus. Adopting and exploring practical processes, and applying acquired knowledge in real-world contexts. Practice and firsthand experience. Repeated hypothesizing, testing, and failure; stumbling, fumbling, grasping at phantoms, flailing about in occasional frustration and confusion — yet always pushing forward. Unlearning what has been taught. Disintegrating and detaching from what is false, while integrating what is real and true. Breaking cycles of destructive or harmful behavior, particularly self-sabotage. The willingness to be completely wrong, over and over again.
Self-education is the only kind of education that truly matters.
Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
— Louis L’Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man
What is discernment? How do we develop this critical capability, and how do we expand its world-revealing capacity within ourselves? What types of discernment exist beyond the spiritual? This complex and profound concept — one of the central elements of our broad spectrum of human abilities — will be explored in depth elsewhere. In short, discernment is the ability to make thoughtful, insightful decisions and judgments across a variety of domains — whether spiritual, moral, emotional, or practical. It is an essential skill that helps us navigate the complexities of life. To develop discernment, we must cultivate self-awareness, critical thinking, and openness to learning from a wide range of experiences, and from the people who accompany us along the way. By actively practicing discernment — especially through self-education — we can expand our capacity for making wise and informed choices. Who wouldn’t want that?
The primary objective is not only to recognize our passive, submissive, and often unconscious indoctrination but to free ourselves entirely from its grip. Once we discern the truth of something, it can no longer have power or influence over us. Rather than reaching desperately for moral relativism or relying on mindless ideological regurgitation, we must become aware of our cognitive dissonances and unconscious biases. Only then can we stand firmly grounded in our own profound knowledge and hard-won wisdom — free from the damaging, disruptive, and unnerving influence of psychosocial programming and invasive conditioning.
Self-education is deeply gratifying, psychologically empowering, philosophically liberating, and, most importantly, spiritually satisfying. It is, in fact, the only way to truly know where you stand. Most of us simply parrot and repeat what we’ve learned by rote, without real interrogation or comprehension of the information. It is through self-education that one gains a depth of perception beyond conventional understanding — the unconscious adaptations we accept in modernity. To be self-educated is to be awake and aware.
Institutional education, in my opinion, is a near-complete failure. Formal schooling should be seen as an introduction, not an endpoint. The sterility of controlled environments subjugates and represses the spirit, rather than empowering and invigorating it. Competition is imposed, not a natural outcome of study, training, and personal development. Systemization, conformity, protocolization, and rote learning of facts and figures — too often rooted in revisionist history and inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading sciences — compromise critical thinking and undermine any attempt at a fruitful epistemology, all in service of social, political, or ideological agendas.
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
— Alexandre Dumas, from The Three Musketeers (1844)
To understand the true nature of our reality requires not only spiritual discernment but also the development of uncommon wisdom. I write about aspects of this realm that, according to the mainstream, are perhaps controversial, esoteric, countercultural, subversive, dissident, and often relegated to the domain of the occult — concepts that have been obscured, misrepresented, or entirely obfuscated, hidden away and deftly censored from public view. This, of course, is no accident.
Those who desire power and control are adept at perverting, inverting, subduing, and subsuming profound truths into their vast, entangled agendas, and they have been doing so for millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. Accept this fact for what it is. Recognize that it is your responsibility to self-educate — to uplift and liberate yourself from the morass of persistent mental constructs. Those who are like me stand in opposition, challenging the dominion over what is authentic, real, and true. It can be a lonely place, but I am not complaining. It is in solitude that one can truly appreciate freedom of thought. This uncommon purpose, I believe, ultimately benefits all and elevates the collective.
What is most important, however, is that I am elevated and liberated myself — able, each day, to better discern and comprehend, to keep pressing onward and upward, unlearning what has hampered or blockaded my heart, mind, and spirit, and to amplify the light. And by light, I mean that which expands beyond the distortions of new-age paradigms, religious dogma, or any other artificially imposed control frameworks. To amplify the light means, to me, to overcome all illusion, to call out and dispel all forms of deception, and to alleviate all that has suppressed and entrapped the spirit.
As of this moment, it is the only substantial, meaningful, and enduring pursuit I know of. And it is enough.
Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.
— Robert Henri, from The Art Spirit (1923) (Free Audiobook)
Solvitur ambulando