It has already been totally demonstrated that fear stops free initiative. The bad financial situation of millions of people is, beyond any doubt, due to fear.
A fearful boy seeks his dear mother and becomes attached to her in search for security. A fearful husband becomes attached to his wife and feels that he loves her even more. A frightened wife feels attached to her husband and children and thinks she loves them much more.
From the psychological point of view, it is strange and interesting to see how fear often disguises itself in love’s chothings.
People who have very little spiritual values within, who are internally poor, always seek something external to make themselves complete.
Internally poor people are always worried about foolishness, gossip, bestial pleasures, etc.
Internally poor people live from fear to fear and as it is natural, become attached to their husband, wife, parents, children, to old and degenerated traditions, etc.
Every sick and poor psychologically old man is usually full of fear and clings with infinite anxiety to money, family traditions, grandchildren, memories, etc., as if seeking security. This is something we can all see by carefully observing old people.
Whenever people are afraid they hide behind the protective shield of respectability, by following a tradition of race, family or nation, etc.
Actually, every tradition is merely a senseless repetition, empty and without true value.
All people have a marked tendency to imitate others and this imitating is a product of fear.
People with fear imitate all those to whom they become attached. They imitate husbands, wives, children, brothers, friends who protect them, etc.
Imitation is the result of fear and totally destroys free initiative.
In schools, colleges and universities, teachers make the mistake of teaching through imitation.
In painting and drawing lessons students are taught to copy images of trees, houses, mountains, animals, etc. That is not creating, that is imitating, taking a picture.
Creating is not imitating or taking a picture. To create is to translate and vividly transmit with a brush, a tree that enchants us, a beautiful sunset, a dawn with its ineffable melodies, etc.
There is true creation in Chinese and Japanese Zen art, both abstract and semi- abstract.
Any Chinese painter of Chan and Zen is not interested in imitating, taking pictures. Painters of China and Japan enjoy creating again and again.
Painters of Zen and Chan, do not imitate, they create and this is their work.
Painters of China an Japan are not interested in painting or taking a picture of a beautiful woman. They enjoy trasmitting her abstract beauty.
Painters of China and Japan would never imitate a sunset. They enjoy transmitting in abstract beauty all the enchantment of sunset.
What is important is not to imitate, to copy in black or white. What is important is to feel the deep meaning of beauty and know how to transmit it, but for that, it is necessary not to have fear, attachment to rules, traditions, fear of what people might say, or fear of the teachers’ reprimand.
It is imperative that teachers understand the necessity for students to develop creative power.
It is clearly absurd to teach students to imitate. It is better to teach them to create.
Unfortunately human beings are unconscious, sleeping machines, who only know how to imitate.
We imitate other people’s clothes, and out of that imitation emerge the different trends of fashion.
We imitate other people’s customs even when they are mistaken.
We imitate vices, we imitate all that which is absurd and that which is always repeated throughout time, etc.
It is necessary for teachers to teach their students how to think independently.
Teachers should give their students all possibilities, in order that they stop being mechanical imitators.
Teachers should provide the best opportunities available for students to develop creative power.
It is imperative for students to know true freedom so that they learn to think independently and without fear at all.
A mind which lives enslaved to “what people may say”, a mind which imitates, because of fear of violating traditions, rules, customs, etc., is not a creative mind, neither a free mind.
People’s mind is like a house, closed and sealed with seven seals. A house where nothing new can happen, where the sun does not shine, where only death and pain reins. The new can only take place when fear does not exist, when both imitation and attachment to things, money, people, traditions, customs, etc., do not exist.
People live enslaved to plotting, envy, family customs, habits, the insatiable desire to conquer positions, climb to the top, make themselves felt, etc.
It is imperative for teachers to teach their students, the necessity of not imitating this degenerate and out-of-date order of timeworn things.
It is imperative that students learn to create, think and feel freely in school.
Students spend the best part of their lives at school acquiring information and yet they do not have time left to think about all these things.
Ten or fifteen years at school living a mechanical and unconscious life, they leave school with their Conscience asleep, yet believing themselves to be awake.
The human mind lives bottled up between conservative and reactionary ideas. Human beings cannot think with true freedom because they are full of fear.
Human beings fear life, death, what people say or might sat, they fear gossip, losing
their jobs, breaking regulations or someone taking away their partners, etc.
At school we are taught to imitate and we leave school after having been transformed into imitators.
We do not have free initiative because from our school desks, we were taught to imitate.
samael aun weor
People imitate because of fear of what other people might say. Students imitate because teachers terrorize them, they threaten them with low marks, specific punishments and expulsion, etc.
I we really want to become creative in the most complete sense of the word, we should become conscious of all those imitations which unfortunately have us trapped.
When we are already capable of knowing all those imitations, and have very closely analysed each of them, we become conscious of them, and as a logical consequence, the power to create is spontaneously born within us.
It is necessary for students at school, colleges and universities to free themselves from all imitation so that they become truly creative.
Teachers who erroneously assume that students need to imitate in order to learn, are mistaken. Whoever imitates does not learn, but becomes a machine and that is all.
It is not a case of imitation what authors of geography, physics, arithmetic, history, etc., say. To imitate, memorize, repeat like chatterboxes or parrots is stupid. It is better to consciously understand what we are studying.
Fundamental education is the science of the Conscience which allows us to discover our relationship with human beings, nature and everything.
A mind which only knows how to imitate is mechanical, is a machine which functions, incapable of creating, it does not truly think, and only repeats, that is all.
Teachers should be concerned about the awakening of Conscience in each student.
Students only worry about passing the school year and later, once out of school in practical life, they become ordinary office clerks or child-making machines.
Ten or fifteen years of studies so as to come out trasformed into talking machines. The subjects studied are forgotten little by little until at last, nothing remains in the memory.
If students become Conscious of the subjects they studied, if their studies were not only based on information, imitation and memory, matters would be different. They would leave school having acquired Conscious, unforgettable and complete knowledge, which would not be subjected to their unfaithful memories.
Fundamental education will help students by awakening their Conscience, and intelligence.
Fundamental education takes young people along the path of true revolution.
Students would insist that teachers give them true education, Fundamental Education.
It is not enough for students to sit at school desks to receive information about a king or a war; but something else is needed. Fundamental education is needed to awaken Conscience.
It is imperative for students to leave school mature, truly conscious and intelligent, so that they do not become simple automatic parts of social machinery.
Samael Aun Weor
