I'm basically standing in the same place as yourself with all of this. As someone who started out on the truth-seeking journey from the analytical/physics/philosophy side of things and then slowly opening up to wider possibilities, I realize that without a taste of numinous, it's hard to make the jump.
Non local quantum results got me to Idealism got me to some spiritual texts. And that was all super fucking wild and cool and exciting. But, it wasn't 'til I ate some mushroom chocolate (stupidly, stupidly!) after a long night of drinking and a resulting set of crazy energy experiences did I really allow the nature of what your writing about to land. And then reading a lot of the source material you've presented on this new site plus a bunch of others got me to a place where this all becomes the smart money bet for me.
It just became a weight of evidence across multiple domains. And I do wonder how much the personal taste of "impossible" experience is required for most people to get on board.
Dude that means a great deal. I’m STILL trying to hold this one lightly. Another commentator raised a very interesting point about the fact that this is still a little up and out rather than being grounded here on earth. And I feel that critique quite deeply. But there’s a lot of daily benefit from this thesis for me.
It's interesting that the critique for me feels a bit hollow, probably because it feels presumptive/analytical. And this comes back to the lived experience part of things. I actually feel more grounded as I think you said you are as well. Which, admittedly in part stems from the fact that it removes a lot of the fear of death.
Now, it's very easy to lob criticisms at subjective truth claims which are unverifiable of course, but that's where I come back to a weight of evidence argument. It just seems much more likely to be SOMETHING like Earth School to me than any other proffered theories about what's really going on.
It is somewhat unfair to tell people that you may not get it until it has been non-conceptually (to steal the Buddhist term) felt, but that is really reportage and not an attempt at persuasion. In, fact, I think that reportage and the way one's life is lived in the wake of such experience/reasoning is far superior to any attempts of persuasion anyway.
I will elide over the myriad cases of people having blown out experiences and trying to declaim the truth from up on (super duper) high, but I think that's not what's being discussed here. The context of the way you set up this site and article come back to that weight of evidence notion. It may, however, require that further ingredient of some sort of personal experience to really penetrate effectively. This seems particularly salient to me in the lack of response to your posts about this both here and on Twitter.
Well written as ever pal. And I admire bits of this perspective. It’s just a bit too otherworldly for me in terms of Platonic/Christian metaphysics translated into therapeutic-developmental language. That Earth is real enough to matter, but not ontologically self-sufficient. Apparent existence, deeper reality, hidden purpose, final disclosure, moral destination, etc. Earth being valued as a means to something beyond Earth. I tend to lean more Nietzschean. Could you love existence if nobody designed your suffering? Or if the universe wasn’t communicating personally with you? Or your enemies weren’t assigned to teach you and synchronicities were sometimes just coincidences? His Zarathustra would call Earth Schoolers “afterworldsmen” or “backworldsmen.” Not sure what an Earth Schooler would call Nietzsche!
I totally understand your perspective. I just don't share it. I appreciate I'm probably entirely delusional and this would shatter basically all of my worldview, but I do believe that reality is more intelligent than we give it credit for and we find meaning in interfacing with that reality. Now it could be something as prosaic as a more expansive intelligent electromagnetic field, Michael Levin's work, but it's there, none the same, and it has a telos. And oddly, maybe I should have written this, but Earth School has made me more engaged in my daily life because I'm constantly looking around for ways to better appreciate my reality.
Add it in. I’m all for anything that becomes a practical philosophy and changes people’s day to day in a positive way. I wonder if England will help you better appreciate reality later 😁
I love this. It’s deeply gratifying to have someone articulate so clearly what I’ve come to feel is true—and even some of the practices I’ve found myself undertaking, some consciously and some almost intuitively. The Earthschool site/app is dope. Many thanks for all of this.
Thank you. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and organization of these ideas. I'm not that smart, but I'm surprised there was no mention of Buddhist philosophy, which has so much to say on this topic. I apologize if I missed it, as this is my first time encountering your site. Flip through just about any book by Thich Nhat Hanh and you'll be offered sophisticated and practical discussion applicable to much if not all of this. I don't know, it might strengthen your work. And core Buddhist ideas are agnostic in regards to any one "religion" so individuals are invited to think about those ideas and test them against your own experience, rejecting them if unbelievable. You don't even have to shave your head. Thanks for sharing your journey.
Thanks Fred! Buddhism is on the grid in the main site with a footnote that it explicitly resists many of the classifications. But the main reason it’s missing from my essay is basically ignorance; I don’t know much about Buddhism and haven’t been drawn to the (probably distorted) western versions I’ve predominantly encountered. Yet!
I do like your analogies, and I, too, have heard these ideas. Ithink there is much to be said for treating events, and life and death, very symbolically
.However, as someone who does some counseling, this"school" sometimes seems to be run by sadists. Or at the the very least is a case of the blind leading the blind. The pain I regularly witness in clients, my own childhood experiences of abuse, and the worldwide suffering happening on a daily basis, all make this"school" analogy feel off to me. Who would enroll a beloved child in that kind of school?
I have thought of other analogies over the years. Maybe it's like a bad relationship we just can't let go of so we keep coming back. Once I had an idea of a cesspool, somehow trying to cleanse the universe (I had the idea, and then I had to look up what a cesspool did:).
I realize these are somewhat grandiose, thinking I can improve on universal design. But so are all these theories, right?
My latest thoughts are about some kind of fall, a separation from the light we came from. In emotional healing we often work with events that cause people to believe they are bad and deserve to suffer. (Parents yell or hit, schools shame or threaten, innocent children are tortured. ) What if people actually incarnate with these beliefs about being bad? THen the school thing might make some sense. We might choose families or situations that bring punishment. And our lesson is to realize we are mistaken. As more and more of us realize this, there is more love and healing here in earth.
For me, the best wording for my purpose here is about healing for myself , and to help others' healing the best I can. That feels more heartfelt than just"learning", which seems more intellectual to me. But that is probably partly semantics.
I do appreciate your article and intend to use it on my healing journey.
Thank you! I don’t claim to know much, but I suspect the school isn’t run by sadists; the kids in the school can be sadists. And free will means we are allowed to make horrible mistakes. And who knows what we sign up for between incarnations and why in terms of an experience that will accelerate our growth through suffering. I appreciate that’s a hard theory for those who have faced incomprehensible hardship.
Thank you, Tom, for your understanding of why there is intelligent life and how we become higher evolved beings. Have you studied the revelations of Marshall Vian Summers? If not, then I strongly recommend His revelations from the Angelic Assembly for our world. His work goes under the heading of The New Message from God. https://www.newmessage.org/the-message/
I'm not sure where this lands between the Earth School synthesis and the Nietzschean read John raised, honestly somewhere in the friction between the two feels like the right place to sit with it.
What if a wounded world could call for restoration on its own terms, with no beyond required to make the call worth answering?
The Pawnee, who lived along the river valleys of the central Plains in what's now Nebraska and Kansas, crafted a warrior song and passed it down through generations of oral tradition. The song is built on a single repeated line, asking the gods who dwell everywhere whether the life I am living is real, asking it three times over before naming the life itself, then asking once more without waiting for a reply. Is this life I am living real?
I love to imagine in my own body what it must have felt like to actually sing this song. A Pawnee warrior at the height of their own power, standing out on the open plain under the full weight of daylight, no walls, no shade, nothing between the voice and the sky it addressed. The body itself doing the asking, thrown outward into a landscape that could kill by nightfall.
The song, as far as I can understand it, held its meaning in the testing of right relationship, with the land, the ancestors and descendants. The knowing of the Pawnee warrior was that their single life carried immense weight inside that web. One person out of right relation, one broken link, could unravel a great deal of what held everyone else together. That's exactly why such tremendous care went into raising children toward becoming great mothers, fathers, and warriors, so the sanctity and beauty of the whole chain carried on unbroken.
That same sentiment ran through nearly every nation across the Americas, carried forward for centuries upon centuries, warrior peoples from the Arctic down through the Andes holding the same aim at the center of their lives.
N. Scott Momaday, who I think is one of the great American writers of any era, reads this Pawnee song as the warrior ideal in its purest form, a singer willing to place their own life on the line as the proof, calling it a moral necessity that he put the matter to the test.
A warrior testing the ground rather than asking it for reassurance.
It's funny that another really resonant comment this morning is that there's something about Earth School that's a little bit up and out. I'm not sure my synthesis has done enough justice to the wisdom of the Earth herself. That maybe it's more Plotkin-like in terms of becoming embedded in a niche in the world, as much as it is ascending through various different lessons.
Well- I suppose when we are trying to make sense of our lives and the world we inhabit its always going to be a work in progress...
one of the critical tensions that emerges in our own modern myth with its origins in Romanticism and a Hegelian style framing of thesis/antithesis/synthesis is that it tends to read older myths and traditions as framing life in terms of ascension / descension.
When we dive into the older myths themselves however, what we most see is that higher and lower distinctions speak purely to geography - Olympus and Hades, under the earth and the sky etc. Odysseus descends into the underworld for information not for transformation.
Fly and Hummingbird are sent down through the layers of the world after the people neglect the mother corn altar and the rain clouds leave. Their mission is to hand tobacco to old Buzzard so he can purify the town.
In one mythical architecture information comes to us to individuals serving a personal ascent / decent narrative, in another information arrives as orientation or to be in service to a larger restoration ceremony. These two very different mythical architectures resist synthesis - they are just wholly particular
As I reflected upon your essay, I realized that by describing Earth as school, an opening for misunderstanding arises. Possibly. The context of your writing suggests otherwise, but here it is: Earth is not a backdrop or passive infrastructure for our schooling. It is not only dynamic, but a living presence endowed (as we are) with a spiritual nature as well as a physical level. One of the main lessons could be for us to recognize that we are not only creative, but an integral part of the Earth. The emerging discipline of Spiritual Ecology addresses that aspect. The timing of drastic climate change speaks to that lesson, possibly as a group lesson. It has been said that souls with affinity incarnate in groups. There could be group lessons as part of the curriculum. And now, perhaps for the first time, a school wide learning challenge: can we learn to get along, learn to manage ourselves as a planetary collective, and minimize the disruptions due to our over reach, pollution, ecosystem collapse, etc? The increasing awareness of NHI and UAP could have something to do with this challenge. It would be coherent with Jaques Vallee's "control system" hypothesis. Thank you for your writing.
An exceptionally synchronistic point. It was made by someone else moments ago as well. The Earth is dynamically providing the wisdom for us. Maybe we need to embed ourselves into it in the way of a niche.
In therapy, much insight can be gained by asking people about their metaphor for life: "Dor you, Life is ...?" A game, and battle, a theatre, a joke...there are many replies. Over the years, only two stood out as being more than metaphors, and closer to something real: 1. Life is a school, and 2. Life is a journey. Great research and writing! I am heartened to read about Earth School.
I'm basically standing in the same place as yourself with all of this. As someone who started out on the truth-seeking journey from the analytical/physics/philosophy side of things and then slowly opening up to wider possibilities, I realize that without a taste of numinous, it's hard to make the jump.
Non local quantum results got me to Idealism got me to some spiritual texts. And that was all super fucking wild and cool and exciting. But, it wasn't 'til I ate some mushroom chocolate (stupidly, stupidly!) after a long night of drinking and a resulting set of crazy energy experiences did I really allow the nature of what your writing about to land. And then reading a lot of the source material you've presented on this new site plus a bunch of others got me to a place where this all becomes the smart money bet for me.
It just became a weight of evidence across multiple domains. And I do wonder how much the personal taste of "impossible" experience is required for most people to get on board.
Love your shit as always. Keep going please!
Dude that means a great deal. I’m STILL trying to hold this one lightly. Another commentator raised a very interesting point about the fact that this is still a little up and out rather than being grounded here on earth. And I feel that critique quite deeply. But there’s a lot of daily benefit from this thesis for me.
It's interesting that the critique for me feels a bit hollow, probably because it feels presumptive/analytical. And this comes back to the lived experience part of things. I actually feel more grounded as I think you said you are as well. Which, admittedly in part stems from the fact that it removes a lot of the fear of death.
Now, it's very easy to lob criticisms at subjective truth claims which are unverifiable of course, but that's where I come back to a weight of evidence argument. It just seems much more likely to be SOMETHING like Earth School to me than any other proffered theories about what's really going on.
It is somewhat unfair to tell people that you may not get it until it has been non-conceptually (to steal the Buddhist term) felt, but that is really reportage and not an attempt at persuasion. In, fact, I think that reportage and the way one's life is lived in the wake of such experience/reasoning is far superior to any attempts of persuasion anyway.
I will elide over the myriad cases of people having blown out experiences and trying to declaim the truth from up on (super duper) high, but I think that's not what's being discussed here. The context of the way you set up this site and article come back to that weight of evidence notion. It may, however, require that further ingredient of some sort of personal experience to really penetrate effectively. This seems particularly salient to me in the lack of response to your posts about this both here and on Twitter.
Well written as ever pal. And I admire bits of this perspective. It’s just a bit too otherworldly for me in terms of Platonic/Christian metaphysics translated into therapeutic-developmental language. That Earth is real enough to matter, but not ontologically self-sufficient. Apparent existence, deeper reality, hidden purpose, final disclosure, moral destination, etc. Earth being valued as a means to something beyond Earth. I tend to lean more Nietzschean. Could you love existence if nobody designed your suffering? Or if the universe wasn’t communicating personally with you? Or your enemies weren’t assigned to teach you and synchronicities were sometimes just coincidences? His Zarathustra would call Earth Schoolers “afterworldsmen” or “backworldsmen.” Not sure what an Earth Schooler would call Nietzsche!
I totally understand your perspective. I just don't share it. I appreciate I'm probably entirely delusional and this would shatter basically all of my worldview, but I do believe that reality is more intelligent than we give it credit for and we find meaning in interfacing with that reality. Now it could be something as prosaic as a more expansive intelligent electromagnetic field, Michael Levin's work, but it's there, none the same, and it has a telos. And oddly, maybe I should have written this, but Earth School has made me more engaged in my daily life because I'm constantly looking around for ways to better appreciate my reality.
Add it in. I’m all for anything that becomes a practical philosophy and changes people’s day to day in a positive way. I wonder if England will help you better appreciate reality later 😁
There is no greater karmic debt than being an England supporter.
😂 I’m English but a Liverpool fan so don’t get involved with it other than the schadenfreude.
I'm a Liverpool fan too, so I have made room in my life for two sets of disappointment.
I love this. It’s deeply gratifying to have someone articulate so clearly what I’ve come to feel is true—and even some of the practices I’ve found myself undertaking, some consciously and some almost intuitively. The Earthschool site/app is dope. Many thanks for all of this.
Thanks Sam! It’s also really gratifying to me encounter people who agree with this worldview, even if it means we are both insane.
Another banger, thanks Tom!
🫡
Thank you. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and organization of these ideas. I'm not that smart, but I'm surprised there was no mention of Buddhist philosophy, which has so much to say on this topic. I apologize if I missed it, as this is my first time encountering your site. Flip through just about any book by Thich Nhat Hanh and you'll be offered sophisticated and practical discussion applicable to much if not all of this. I don't know, it might strengthen your work. And core Buddhist ideas are agnostic in regards to any one "religion" so individuals are invited to think about those ideas and test them against your own experience, rejecting them if unbelievable. You don't even have to shave your head. Thanks for sharing your journey.
Thanks Fred! Buddhism is on the grid in the main site with a footnote that it explicitly resists many of the classifications. But the main reason it’s missing from my essay is basically ignorance; I don’t know much about Buddhism and haven’t been drawn to the (probably distorted) western versions I’ve predominantly encountered. Yet!
I do like your analogies, and I, too, have heard these ideas. Ithink there is much to be said for treating events, and life and death, very symbolically
.However, as someone who does some counseling, this"school" sometimes seems to be run by sadists. Or at the the very least is a case of the blind leading the blind. The pain I regularly witness in clients, my own childhood experiences of abuse, and the worldwide suffering happening on a daily basis, all make this"school" analogy feel off to me. Who would enroll a beloved child in that kind of school?
I have thought of other analogies over the years. Maybe it's like a bad relationship we just can't let go of so we keep coming back. Once I had an idea of a cesspool, somehow trying to cleanse the universe (I had the idea, and then I had to look up what a cesspool did:).
I realize these are somewhat grandiose, thinking I can improve on universal design. But so are all these theories, right?
My latest thoughts are about some kind of fall, a separation from the light we came from. In emotional healing we often work with events that cause people to believe they are bad and deserve to suffer. (Parents yell or hit, schools shame or threaten, innocent children are tortured. ) What if people actually incarnate with these beliefs about being bad? THen the school thing might make some sense. We might choose families or situations that bring punishment. And our lesson is to realize we are mistaken. As more and more of us realize this, there is more love and healing here in earth.
For me, the best wording for my purpose here is about healing for myself , and to help others' healing the best I can. That feels more heartfelt than just"learning", which seems more intellectual to me. But that is probably partly semantics.
I do appreciate your article and intend to use it on my healing journey.
Thank you! I don’t claim to know much, but I suspect the school isn’t run by sadists; the kids in the school can be sadists. And free will means we are allowed to make horrible mistakes. And who knows what we sign up for between incarnations and why in terms of an experience that will accelerate our growth through suffering. I appreciate that’s a hard theory for those who have faced incomprehensible hardship.
Thank you, Tom, for your understanding of why there is intelligent life and how we become higher evolved beings. Have you studied the revelations of Marshall Vian Summers? If not, then I strongly recommend His revelations from the Angelic Assembly for our world. His work goes under the heading of The New Message from God. https://www.newmessage.org/the-message/
Not until you mentioned but looking into it now thank you!
Also kudos - super well written and thoughtful!
I'm not sure where this lands between the Earth School synthesis and the Nietzschean read John raised, honestly somewhere in the friction between the two feels like the right place to sit with it.
What if a wounded world could call for restoration on its own terms, with no beyond required to make the call worth answering?
The Pawnee, who lived along the river valleys of the central Plains in what's now Nebraska and Kansas, crafted a warrior song and passed it down through generations of oral tradition. The song is built on a single repeated line, asking the gods who dwell everywhere whether the life I am living is real, asking it three times over before naming the life itself, then asking once more without waiting for a reply. Is this life I am living real?
I love to imagine in my own body what it must have felt like to actually sing this song. A Pawnee warrior at the height of their own power, standing out on the open plain under the full weight of daylight, no walls, no shade, nothing between the voice and the sky it addressed. The body itself doing the asking, thrown outward into a landscape that could kill by nightfall.
The song, as far as I can understand it, held its meaning in the testing of right relationship, with the land, the ancestors and descendants. The knowing of the Pawnee warrior was that their single life carried immense weight inside that web. One person out of right relation, one broken link, could unravel a great deal of what held everyone else together. That's exactly why such tremendous care went into raising children toward becoming great mothers, fathers, and warriors, so the sanctity and beauty of the whole chain carried on unbroken.
That same sentiment ran through nearly every nation across the Americas, carried forward for centuries upon centuries, warrior peoples from the Arctic down through the Andes holding the same aim at the center of their lives.
N. Scott Momaday, who I think is one of the great American writers of any era, reads this Pawnee song as the warrior ideal in its purest form, a singer willing to place their own life on the line as the proof, calling it a moral necessity that he put the matter to the test.
A warrior testing the ground rather than asking it for reassurance.
It's funny that another really resonant comment this morning is that there's something about Earth School that's a little bit up and out. I'm not sure my synthesis has done enough justice to the wisdom of the Earth herself. That maybe it's more Plotkin-like in terms of becoming embedded in a niche in the world, as much as it is ascending through various different lessons.
Well- I suppose when we are trying to make sense of our lives and the world we inhabit its always going to be a work in progress...
one of the critical tensions that emerges in our own modern myth with its origins in Romanticism and a Hegelian style framing of thesis/antithesis/synthesis is that it tends to read older myths and traditions as framing life in terms of ascension / descension.
When we dive into the older myths themselves however, what we most see is that higher and lower distinctions speak purely to geography - Olympus and Hades, under the earth and the sky etc. Odysseus descends into the underworld for information not for transformation.
Fly and Hummingbird are sent down through the layers of the world after the people neglect the mother corn altar and the rain clouds leave. Their mission is to hand tobacco to old Buzzard so he can purify the town.
In one mythical architecture information comes to us to individuals serving a personal ascent / decent narrative, in another information arrives as orientation or to be in service to a larger restoration ceremony. These two very different mythical architectures resist synthesis - they are just wholly particular
As I reflected upon your essay, I realized that by describing Earth as school, an opening for misunderstanding arises. Possibly. The context of your writing suggests otherwise, but here it is: Earth is not a backdrop or passive infrastructure for our schooling. It is not only dynamic, but a living presence endowed (as we are) with a spiritual nature as well as a physical level. One of the main lessons could be for us to recognize that we are not only creative, but an integral part of the Earth. The emerging discipline of Spiritual Ecology addresses that aspect. The timing of drastic climate change speaks to that lesson, possibly as a group lesson. It has been said that souls with affinity incarnate in groups. There could be group lessons as part of the curriculum. And now, perhaps for the first time, a school wide learning challenge: can we learn to get along, learn to manage ourselves as a planetary collective, and minimize the disruptions due to our over reach, pollution, ecosystem collapse, etc? The increasing awareness of NHI and UAP could have something to do with this challenge. It would be coherent with Jaques Vallee's "control system" hypothesis. Thank you for your writing.
An exceptionally synchronistic point. It was made by someone else moments ago as well. The Earth is dynamically providing the wisdom for us. Maybe we need to embed ourselves into it in the way of a niche.
Yes, and to also embed the Earth in our Heart. The Earth, recently neglected, raped, and brutalized could use some loving. Don't we all?
In therapy, much insight can be gained by asking people about their metaphor for life: "Dor you, Life is ...?" A game, and battle, a theatre, a joke...there are many replies. Over the years, only two stood out as being more than metaphors, and closer to something real: 1. Life is a school, and 2. Life is a journey. Great research and writing! I am heartened to read about Earth School.
Thank you so much. I feel a simulation, as I said, is too lightweight, A school feels just about right in terms of its warmth.
This makes a lot of sense to me. It also reminds me that I want to return to listening to the telepathy tapes - I haven't finished the series yet.