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Science and Christian Healing.
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An answer may be found in the manner children were educated in that 'classical' period. We recognize such things today as classical humanist education. What they did in that period was totally different than what we do today. Today, we teach what we consider facts, and expect our students to subscribe to these facts. But this process doesn't generate any fundamental thinkers, nor does it set the stage for new ground-breaking discoveries. Who needs to think if the elite supplies all the answers? Who needs to bother with the process of discovering truth, or reason about fundamental principles, if all that is required of today's students, is to "repeat after me?" This kind of process, which is erroneously called education, is neither intelligent nor natural, nor is it productive to advance human civilization to a higher level.
In a speech at the Presidents' Day Conference of the Schiller Institute in 1994,*(See The New Federalist, March 7, 1994) Lyndon LaRouche stated, that what they did different in those early days at the time just before the Renaissance was launched, was to set up a system of education that required the child to do what the child does naturally, if it is given the opportunity to do so, namely to explore, to probe, to discover, to experience the very act of discovery itself by replicating in their mind the process of discovery by the great geniuses of humanity - "to re-experience the act of discovery as that act had been produced earlier within the mind of the original discoverer."
Fundamentally, this is what a baby does when it sets out to familiarize itself with the world into which it was brought. Lyndon LaRouche suggests that there is a great difference between learning formulas, formalized logic or historic facts, and the rigorous work of actually re-experiencing in ones own internal processes the underlying experiences that had led to the original discovery. In short, they were literally teaching creativity in those early days. And that is how geniuses were born, of which society brought forth many in those days.
Now, if we were to do this again in our modern world, Lyndon LaRouche suggests, if we were to educate ourselves and our children to re-experience the discoveries of the great pioneers of mankind, then, our mind and that of the population at large, will become populated with the very essence of those people who have become cornerstones in the structure of human civilization as we know it today, people like Pythagaros, Plato, Nicolas of Cusa, Kepler, Leonardo DeVinci, Leibnitz, Schiller, etc., for, then, we have re-experienced in our own mind that moment of the creation of an idea which occurred in the mind of these people by replicating the same experiences, and many more, in as much as this is possible to do.
Now you ask yourself against this background, What is Truth? You will no longer answer, truth is what you read in textbooks, or in the newspapers, or what an authority figure tells you it is. You will apply that same rigor of experiencing discoveries, and you will say to yourself, truth is that which comes out of creative discoveries that illustrate the existence of fundamental principles that can be understood, that can be demonstrated, that can be applied to life and used to advance civilization as the pioneers and geniuses had done in earlier times who had built civilization out of their recognition of reality. In other words, the truth is that which results from creativity, from a kind of thinking as did the early pioneers who discovered fundamental truths. Against this background a person will no longer ask a teacher: What is truth?
Truth is not something one can learn from a book, though a book may point one in the right direction. It must be learned in life. Formalism closes the door on this learning. Formalism, apart from other factors, may be the reason why the field of Christian Science has so drastically diminished, why it was starved of the needed development that must forever continue, for the horizon of truth is infinity itself. Formalism chills the advancing spirit. Without constant scientific development, there is inevitable decay. Life and its manifest cannot be held static, it either develops itself and unfolds, or it ceases, while artificial structures that are not based on reality tend to grow negatively to a point, but then disintegrate.
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