Bill Epps | Deliberate Awareness

DELIBERATE AWARENESS

(The Importance of Education Continuously)

And the Voice said, “TO KNOW BETTER, IS TO BE FOREVER ENLIGHTENED.”

To continuously educate oneself, is it important? Perhaps not, depending upon your point of view. How you see or feel about your surroundings will be a strong motivating factor of the actions you take to learn more or not, deliberately.

Education, or the gaining of knowledge, tends to free you. While the lack of it, ignorance, enslaves you. Not having the desire for a better life, or wanting to improve your situation will keep you in a state of mental darkness. A sought of self-imposed ignorance. A dulled sense of awareness, not knowing, or wanting to know, where to go or what to do! No movement. No growth. Just plain stagnation, deliberately.

Freeing oneself of ignorance, which is having little or no knowledge or awareness of something, allows one to progressively move beyond just surviving and stagnation. It’s about moving forward, deliberately learning and growing. To be free of ignorance clears the way to a journey of limitless wealth and discovery, if you so desire.

Is education important continuously? I say yes! But first, one must have the desire and want to learn more in order to take the preliminary steps necessary to start such a wealth filled and revealing adventure. Dynamic knowledge, things known and growing, has the power to enlighten. To make brighter. To light the way. In fact, education being the act of learning continuously, is fully responsible for all the progress of humankind since the beginning of our survival and beyond. Over the ages, what a tremendous wealth of knowledge we have deliberately acquired. And, our intellect and wisdom is still growing. Still evolving.

About your surroundings, are you aware, deliberately?

And really, is education important continuously? Now I say yes strongly! Why? Mainly because the act of continuous learning is an endless evolutionary process of deliberate awareness and enlightenment where human beings are concerned. This process of deliberateness awakens within us an intellectual power and energy of knowledge-gathering that lights the way. It’s an awareness purposely gained through which we find solutions to immediate and future problems. The beauty of all this is, we humans are all born with this ability to continuously learn, to reason. For it is a matter of logic. And yes, it is extremely important to continuously develop this trait!

How important? Consider the following…

Let’s go back about 500,000 years or so, and we find ourselves on the southeastern part of the continent of Africa among an area of vast vegetation near modern day Zambia (formerly northern Rhodesia). There, in the bush we see an early human, which today’s scientist called Homo Rhodesiensis (also classed with Homo Heidelbergensis). He is very busy, and through natural curiosity, deliberate awareness and keen senses, he has learned to overcome the fear of fire and has even domesticated it. This is a major accomplishment, certainly one of humans’ most significant learning events. Think for a moment about the following quote from an article on human evolution titled “The Vast Future of Homo Nobilis, Stellaris” by writer Peter Weiss (April, 1997).

“All animals are instinctually terrified by fire. So were the ancestors of our

kind. To not only overcome this innate terror of fire, but to domesticate it, is

indisputable evidence of the evolution of reason, and of logic. Only reason can

overcome the deeply innate terror of fire, and only a careful logic can

domesticate it.”

There were many other major milestones during the progress of humankind. The making of tools, the start of cave art, the invention of agriculture as well as mathematics to name a few. To have come to where we are today, spiritually, physically and socioeconomically clearly shows that we have the brain power and intellectual capacity to solve all our problems, if we so desire. Modern man has traveled quite a journey of discovery and knowledge-gathering, and is still going! Such achievements occur through an on-going process of deliberate awareness and continuous learning.

Now, do you think to learn continuously is important? And to move forward in this world today, shouldn’t you increase your awareness, deliberately?

Dr. Douglas Palmer, science writer, lecturer and educator of human evolution states in his book “The Origin of Man” that, “…the most important evolutionary changes that differentiate the human family from our higher ape ‘cousins’ are associated with the brain and our cognitive superiority.” (page 186)

Yes, it’s true. There’s no doubt about it, we humans are endowed with a great and magnificent “cognitive superiority”. And, in the grand scheme of things, the on-going evolutionary development of human beings, it is our responsibi