September 06, 2002

Enlightenment

\En*light"en*ment\, n. Act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed.

Enlightenment is a completely themeable, highly configurable Window Manager for the X Window System, traditionally used in Unix environments. - That is from the homepage dedicated to the Window Manager for X.

But we are talking about the former - The state of being instructed. I like to think of learning as a passage from ignorance to enlightment. That is the only way learning should occur. Let me define 'enlightment'. When you learn something new, there is a time, when you dont know anything about it. And as you learn it you go into enlightenment. You know you are enlightened, when the topic is no longer strange to you. You know the basics of the topic. You know what rules are involved, and you really 'understand' those rules. The topic is no longer a representation for a cause-effect. You no longer understand the topic in a particular context, but understand the idea beyond the concept. That is enlightenment.

Let me explain. There are a lot of ways of learning

  1. Just learn that A gives rise to B
  2. Learn that class A gives rise to class B
  3. Learn all cases A which can give rise to corresponding cases of B
  4. Learn the reason why A gave rise to B
  5. Learn what happened
  6. Learn why something happened

The case (f) my friends is enlightenment. That is when you dont need to learn anything. The memory requirements are minimal. You learn a basic law of the universe. You have understood something that goes far beyond where you saw it first.
"Into this state, my teachers, let my brain awake..."

That is the problem with our learning system. We learn upto c, and then someone comes along and gives us smatterings of d and f in utterly in correlated chunks. Let that change, things will not be so tough after all.

Wishful thinking? mebbe, mebbe not.

Nothing goes according to plan, if it did, why would it still be called just a plan. It would be reality.

~!nrk

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