The Science of Education Part 1 by Caleb Gattegno

The Science
of Education

Part 1:
Theoretical Considerations

Caleb Gattegno

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

First published in the United States of America in 1987. Reprinted in 2009.

Copyright © 1987 – 2009 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.
Author: Caleb Gattegno
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-87825-192-6

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.
2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, NY 10003-4555
www.EducationalSolutions.com

Table of Contents

Preface.........................................................................1

1 How A Science Is Born ............................................. 5

2 The Awareness Of Awareness .................................37

Ways Of Reaching The Awareness Of Awareness ................ 37
Ways Of Knowing...................................................................51

3 The Facts Of Awareness ..........................................75

The Consequences For Humanity.........................................94
Summary ..............................................................................112

4 Affectivity And Learning....................................... 115

Summary .............................................................................. 151

5 Memory And Retention......................................... 153

Summary ..............................................................................181

6 Forcing Awareness ...............................................183

Further Readings ..................................................... 211

Preface

This treatise on the Science of Education has been many years in
the making. The first hints that there was a possibility of looking
at education as a field of study that could ultimately become as
legitimate a science as others have been, came forth soon after
1940. The central point was that awareness, which has
permitted all the sciences to find their rightful places, could
become aware of itself. In the years that followed, a number of
research undertakings produced opportunities to gather
evidence that gave the initial intuition a body of facts which
established the foundations for that science and the openings for
its technology.

The decisive shift that there was a basis for suggesting to the
public that a science of education could be developed came with
the clear awareness that only awareness is educable in Man.

From the early 1950s to today, the empirical foundations have
been gleaned in a succession of solutions to problems met in the
classrooms of the world, solutions developed entirely on the
basis of awareness. This evidence is already overwhelming, even

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The Science of Education - Part 1: Theoretical Considerations

though it is essentially the work of only one man. It will be
gathered together as now in use in many spots of our planet,
which means that they have been thoroughly tested by a large
number of outsiders who can affirm now that they know
objectively that awareness can be educated and that indeed
nothing else can compete for that place in education.

Historically, it has not been necessary to provide the users of the
practical solutions with a thorough examination of their
theoretical basis. Still, many among those users requested at
least some theoretical justification for what was put in their
hands and was obviously doing the jobs of changing students
into readers, writers, spellers, mathematicians, with ease and
celerity.

To meet this request, a number of chapters of this volume
(Chapters 2, 3, and 4) were published separately in the 1970s. In
1986 chapter 5 appeared, and now chapters 1 and 6 have been
added, to complete Part I.

The contents of an empirical science, like that of education,
cannot be theoretical. But such a label is proper for a discussion
that keeps to the side the evidence which generated those
contents. In this book, the work done with students of all ages
who populate the schools, from grades one through fifteen, is
only implicit. It is that work which provided the evidence
needed to catch the subtle and invisible tasks of awareness and
its workings, dynamics that became the source of the theoretical
considerations presented here. We offer this treatise separately
because it can stand by itself and may find interested readers

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Preface

who do not want to be technicians of education and who find
their fulfillment in thinking about education’s larger issues.

Of course, no one will fail to see that much more could have
been written about the matters raised in the pages of this book.
But to give it a final form is beyond a mortal individual and has
to be left to a collectivity, one which may span generations.

In the earlier publication of several of these chapters, help had
been needed to give form to the findings in a language in a
process of evolution, one not yet ordinarily capable of
expressing new intuitions. Those who helped are warmly
thanked, even if they were often shy in their corrections for fear
of disturbing what appeared to be said cryptically in the English
of today, which still remains a language of action and of
communication in the fields of engineering, trade, and global
uniformizations.

Perhaps more gifted writers will be moved to give to these
proposals they find valuable a better form, capable of reaching
more people. I very much hope so.

Caleb Gattegno
June 1987

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1 How A Science Is Born

This treatise is about a new science and its technology.

Part I is devoted to the science and Part II mainly to its
technology as it has been developed to date.

A science can exist and be recognized some time after it has
been developed by its pioneer founder (s). The general public
becomes aware that a science has existed for some time only
when a sufficient corpus of findings has been established, as was
the case with, say, economics after Adam Smith and Ricardo,
and genetics after Mendel.

In the years after the Renaissance, when so many people started
so many of the sciences of nature, it was not possible to attempt
a classification of them, and it was only around 1850 that
Auguste Comte—the founder of sociology—proposed the first
such overview of all the sciences existing in his time, with
sociology at its apex and as its searchlight.

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For Auguste Comte, sciences can claim to exist when the minds
of men have abandoned the mythical and metaphysical levels of
functioning and reached the positive level, when objectivity
becomes the criterion of statements of truth. For him that
positive level was the final one, the previous ones offering myths
and metaphysical statements which could not be proven and so
required belief.

The situation has changed over the last 140 years. Much work
has been done by people who did not remain confined to what
the previous generation or generations stated as being
“objective.” For instance, the study of energy, the study of
electromagnetism, the study of evolution, of the atom, of the
cosmos, of the mind, of relativity were undertaken properly only
in the years after Auguste Comte made his classification of the
sciences. So many new sciences have been generated—and some
old ones transformed to the point of being unrecognizable—that
it may be time to look again at the challenge of classification,
particularly since this book is about a new science which became
possible only in recent decades.

In a work of mine of the early 1950s, (Conscience de la
Conscience), a chapter was dedicated to a proposal which took
psychology (seen as the science of time) as the focal point and
light of a new classification system, instead of Auguste Comte’s
newly founded sociology. Since then, refinements have
permitted a new departure, although the essential finding
remains central: “men can only study the contents of their
awarenesses, and these awarenesses go to form the sciences,
open to all those who share them.”

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In one word, the instrument for the study of the sciences as a
group, as well as of each science separately, is “awareness.”

Since in the next few chapters, we will study this instrument in
detail and make it take the forms best suited to the fields we
shall consider, we do not need to concentrate on it here, but
instead need to give the space of these pages to what this
instrument has made possible in so far as all sciences are
concerned.

***

In the enormous accumulation of observations made by millions
and now billions of human beings over a long time, there are
many which left tracks that are not accessible any more and that
form the set of automatic know-hows, but there is a certain
number (and possibly not too small a number) which resurface
time and again and force some individuals to keep them in
mind. They are what is called the “experience” of these
individuals.

From time immemorial, there were circumstances which forced
awareness on those who had to survive in an environment, and
had A NEED TO KNOW and to pass on their findings to the
individuals around them. This systematic knowing led to
knowledge that is at the basis of all the work done by humans:
on the land (constituting the agricultural experience of those
who worked the soil); on the materials accessible to humans,
from barks to clay and stone (constituting the basis of the
experience of artisans or of simple ordinary people doing their

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chores at home); on instruments or tools for hunting, fishing,
travel, etc. (constituting the layers of cultures from prehistory
on); on one’s soma, to find out how far one can stretch oneself in
walking, running, racing, climbing, shouting, imitating animal
sounds, etc. (which constitutes the basis for shifting from some
behaviors to new ones); on one’s capacity to “image,” leading to
a capacity to imagine (and this constitutes the basis of all
languages—along with the help of one’s knowledge of one’s
somatic functionings—and of all the arts).

Because all this and much more was done before records could
be kept, we lump these outcomes together and do not attempt to
find out the necessary temporal hierarchies required by the
remarkable achievements of our ancestors thousands, and
hundreds of thousands, of years ago. We therefore do not speak
of sciences in regard to their work. Mainly because the influence
of positivists has been so great, we want to reserve the word
“science” for the explicit effort to formulate our knowing in ways
which make people accept statements as true, essentially by
referring to realities accessible with our senses.

Nonetheless, it is possible to engage in studies of knowing which
bring out the profound resemblance between what our ancestors
did in their searches and what scientists do now in their own
sciences, which is to find out what is actually in their
consciousness.

This work, which is part of epistemology, or the science of
knowing, is as difficult concerning the scientists of today as it is
when we investigate the mental workings of humans of the

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remote past. Indeed, scientists in their sciences mainly want to
produce new knowledge and pay little attention to how they do
that. Hence, outsiders cannot know what the insiders have no
access to and are not interested in finding out. For that reason,
epistemology has for a very long time been only superficial,
reducing the real and complex knowing of humans (of all ages
and backgrounds) to a few simple principles conceived of as the
backbone of the sciences.

It therefore becomes possible to widen the notion of a science by
concentrating on the ways of working which characterize its
results as well as its procedures, and thus recapture for the
sciences all that which men did to answer their need to know.
The importance of asking about what precedes all the sciences
enables us to offer a classification of them which excludes none
and is not biased by an a priori, marked by time and space.
Auguste Comte selected positivism as the ultimate level of the
progress of the human mind in its overall evolution; he thus
mortgaged the future. On the one hand, he washed out in one
gesture all the work of thousands of generations of humans
seeking to know their condition, and on the other, he wanted to
reduce all possible searches to the one he made his own. Our
advantages over him are that, since 1850, ways of thinking
called evolution and relativity have surfaced, which have forced
us to discover how to accomodate time explicitly in our
pronouncements and how to give to every honest, watchful, and
serious investigator the right to his or her findings in any
selected field of endeavor.

***

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Let us consider first the notion of “a dialogue of one’s mind with
one’s self.”

This, of course, every one of us does every day, and we speak of
it as “talking to oneself.” But it is more pervasive and already
exists before the verbal stage.

Observation of very young babies yields evidence that in crying,
for instance, there is the presence of consciousness and that
crying is not only the use of reflex mechanisms but also reveals
the presence of the crier in the cries. Only the presence of
consciousness explains the reason these cries can be made
louder, more prolonged, and can be structured at will to express
small things the baby knows intimately from inside. At four
weeks, for example, a baby may find in his or her cry sounds
which have attributes that can be extracted from the whole,
singled out for special attention and examined per se before the
baby returns to crying and the purpose for which the crying was
started and is being continued.

Perhaps one must have encountered a phenomenon like this to
allow oneself to entertain as an instrument of study the multiple
dialogues the self has with itself, even from conception.

For how else are we to understand the possibility of each of us to
have access to the components of our soma, which are voluntary
and to give them commands which are obeyed? Until today, we
coped with these components of the soma by being satisfied
with the thought that the process was “natural,” or that it was

10


“imprinted by the DNA,” which really tell us nothing. Except
that we do not want to know what all this is truly about.

In talking to myself, I convince myself that I can and do have
dialogues with the complex reality called me. The contents of the
dialogue could be about something outside me too, such as, “Is it
my dog I see there?” The dialogue seems to be about my dog, but
in fact it is with myself, on whether I have inner evidence which
tells me that the dog I see (or which sends photons to my eyes to
produce an image on my retina) is the one I can recall from my
memory and recognize as being indeed my dog. Observations
may occupy us fully, but there must be an observer to make
sense of them. Hence, outside observations are dialogues with
oneself.

But our observations can also be of inner movements of energy,
which also can become the object of the dialogue with ourselves.
Thus for instance, we can have a dialogue about talking or not
talking at a meeting. The dialogue then is clearly between the
self and the circumstances in which we put or find ourselves.

Once it is clear that as adults, such dialogues are current and
frequent, we can ask whether they have always been ways of
ours to consider our moments and their contents. A quick
survey of our involvements and those of people around us—in
particular, of very young children, if some are present—will
convince us that it is impossible for conscious beings to go
through the successive moments of life without this instrument
of knowing. Further, to know one’s soma and its functionings
began before our birth. The same self which will know how to

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“dialogue” with energy and its vicissitudes at a particular age,
because it is then struck by the existence of energy, will have to
agree that it has been having such dialogues all along, in
different ways and about different contents.

I have always had a need to know, for there is so much to know,
some of it, but not all, indispensible for my remaining alive.
Some of my efforts feed back that my knowing was valid and
could be retained, that I was remaining in contact with the
challenge, that I was respecting its reality, that I was engaged in
experimenting on it or with it to ensure that my need to know
was being satisfied, and that I was finding what is true in the
circumstances. Indeed, no one but myself can do that, and I
know that so much of my life is so well constructed that I can
trust my perceptions, that I can measure my physical resources,
that my feelings tell me which ones they are and how faint or
intense they are.

I have not been taught to do that. In fact, no one knows that I
needed to do that and suggested it to me. I have educated myself
from the start and all the time, and like me, humans have had to
do that for themselves, to themselves.

While the need to know may lead me to become a trustworthy
observer, a person of experience, it may not necessarily lead me
to be someone who works both on what I am engaged in and
how I am engaged in it. It is this second preoccupation which
needs to become constant and perhaps prevalent for me to call
myself an epistemologist: a student of knowing.

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***

As an epistemologist I have several purposes which put me in
contact with a multitude of details of knowing in all the areas
where knowing is involved, but also, above and beyond the
details, with the overall grasp of how knowing operates in all
fields and in every field. In fact, it is because my self can be sure
of the specificity of a field and what makes it a field, that it can
either develop the various sciences, as we shall see, or, as in the
remote past, change the time of living into experiences sharable
by others, having an objectivity for all those who share in it.

***

The main difference between the existing, recognized sciences
and all the accumulated experience of millennia is that the first
have been codified socially and given a status by their journals,
their academies, their annual or regular congresses, while the
other is hanging in an untouched universe which the future may
want to reach and explore.

The survey of existing sciences is a relatively easy task since
their number is finite and their objects and methods spelled out
in existing writings in many libraries.

Hence we shall not follow that line, already explored several
times. Instead, we shall follow another lead—expressed in the
awareness that “man can only create the science of the contents
of his awareness”—and use man’s dialogues with himself as the

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“lightings” that generate the various hues which distinguish the
various sciences.

When man has had a dialogue with his senses—which enabled
him to structure the world into the visible, the audible, the
material and mechanical, the one recognized by smell and
taste—he could concentrate his dialogues on specific ways of
knowing.

Thus, he gathered all that struck his eyes, not to talk about what
he saw, but to understand why he could trust his sight and the
instruments he was using with it. He thus created “the science of
optics,” which defines the phenomena to be retained for the on-
going dialogues: What is light? How is it propagated in the
various media? What happens to it if it encounters a surface on
which it can bounce or in which it can penetrate? What is color?
What makes light white or have color? And the many other
questions we learn about when we study optics (geometric or
physical) in the treatises which sum up the findings of four
centuries of work.

In the same way, we gathered all that which struck one’s ears
and created the “science of acoustics,” which includes all we
have found out about sound as a mechanical behavior of the
material media, especially the air of our atmosphere. We have
known for generations that sound is propagated differently in
different substances, moving faster in solids than in liquids or
gases. We know too that sounds have attributes we have called
pitch, intensity, and timbre. And we have studied those aspects

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in the forms of sound called music by man, to which we relate
for reasons other than knowing.

Almost all experiments in the sciences of optics and acoustics
are suggested by specific awarenesses which are part of the need
to know. They are clearly dialogues of the mind with itself, with
the additional proviso that the mind does not want to fool itself,
or to be fooled. For that reason, a special watchfulness was
developed, which translated itself within the group into the
notion of “repeatability.” Whatever one found, anyone else could
find too, confirming the watchfulness at work in the first person,
and this repeatability led to the objectivation of the findings as
“facts of optics” or “facts of acoustics,” available to all through
special treatises.

Another whole science called “mechanics” sums up the
dialogues of minds with themselves stemming from the
awareness of impacts on the somas (seen as bones and muscles).
As men asked questions about movement, motion, and their
causes, they progressively found that the meanings of their
physical perceptions could be schematized and become thoughts
and ideas for the intellect to handle. (Mechanics was for a long
time the most important chapter of the physics of the 17th and
18th centuries in Europe.) Among the topics considered under
the heading of mechanics, the movements of the planets were
the challenges which fascinated the minds of scientists most.
The work of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton did much to discipline
the dialogues, so that more and more items looked accessible to
searching minds.

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Supporting this rapid increase in the knowledge and
understanding of the world around man, there were other
conquests of the mind at work on itself in what is called
“mathematics.” No one doubts that mathematics stands by
itself, is the clearest of the dialogues of the mind with itself.
Mathematics is created by mathematicians conversing first with
themselves and with one another. Still, because these dialogues
could be blended with other dialogues which refer to
perceptions of a reality taken to exist outside Man, mathematics
were not recognized for what they actually are until recently.
Based on the awareness that relations can be perceived as easily
as objects, the dynamics linking different kinds of relationships
were extracted by the minds of mathematicians and considered
per se. That is why there exists a large area called “pure
mathematics,” which is solely based on itself—that is, based on
statements from which the proposer could deduce other
statements compatible with the first and, in that way, equivalent
to them. Or, alternatively, another awareness of their mental
content.

Mathematics is the science par excellence to illustrate fully the
fact that scientists are only concerned with the content of their
awareness. At the same time, mathematics makes more
accessible what a dialogue of the mind with itself might mean.
So much of the pure mathematics that has been developed over
the last 400 years has no other value than to prove that there are
a number of different kinds of dialogues possible once someone
puts himself or herself in the state of considering this or that
relationship. Because mathematics has become an imposing
edifice which needs to be studied for itself and for what it makes
clear when blended with other human experiences, it has gained

16


an existence of its own, and we have lost contact with its makers,
the minds that know how to converse with themselves in
particular ways.

Relationships exist between items of experience which have
their sources in realities which can strike any one of our senses.
Thus, our awareness must simultaneously be of those realities
and of the relationships which link them. When stressing the
relationships per se, we use that in us which can create
mathematics, and it follows that man can give a mathematical
form to his perception of dynamics involving other components
as well. When he does this, man is said to be involved in
“applied mathematics.”

The whole of classical physics, of astronomy, is there to illustrate
the possibility that perceptions can gain a form expressible in
mathematical terms while the nature of the perception remains
as part of our consciousness. Think, for example, of the
pendulum, and you will find that the image of it does not leave
your consciousness as you move toward expressing its motion
by a mathematical formula.

For academics, “applied mathematics” usually evokes the
physical sciences and engineering. But for the student of
awareness, it can evoke any study in which the awareness of the
dynamics or relationships is co-present with other awarenesses.
Most statements of economists are of this type. Most models
built by biologists of all kinds make use of the same powers of
the mind. Taxonomy as a classification of classifications is one
such example.

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Thinking about anything leads invariably to concepts and
relations between them, to abstract models reminiscent of
mathematical organizations. Because they help thinking, they
are called in by all those who want to go beyond the initial notice
of some item striking their consciousness. Applied mathematics
are developed by such processes, and every day there are more
suggestions as to how to use mathematics in every one of the
sciences being worked on.

If it is easy to see mathematics as a variety of dialogues of the
mind with itself, it is not as easy to see the other sciences as
such. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that all sciences are human
endeavors, that they change by the contributions of individuals
in the same or successive generations, that some of the
viewpoints become obsolete, that some questions, important at
one time, lose their importance and whole fields of research are
abandoned or replaced by new ones, which may have the same
fate, and so on, all telling us that knowledge is the working of
knowing.

If we become aware that we want, for instance, to know what
matter is made of, i.e., that we want to be chemists or physico-
chemists, we have to acquire some mental disciplines capable of
keeping us in contact with the challenges we have chosen and
with the ways of meeting them. Human beings become scientists
when they know how to maintain these disciplines and use their
dialogues with their chosen subjects in ways that lead to new
awarenesses. The history of every science is a history of
awareness in some people who managed to focus upon a specific
question—which is nothing else than a dialogue of the mind—to

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make it into other questions which oneself and others can focus
upon.

Since man has shown himself capable of focusing on so many
aspects of what he notices with his sense organs and his
perception of his inner life, everything could be the source of a
new science. This has been proved by the proliferation of the
sciences derived from previous ones, first as branches, then as
autonomous fields of research.

Astronomy becomes astro-physics, cosmology, radio-astronomy,
spectro-astronomy, planet evolution, star evolution, galactic
systems, etc., each requiring different, though connected,
dialogues. This may be seen as specialization, generated by the
immensity of the challenge and its tasks, but it also—and
perhaps more accurately—can be described as preferred ways to
address oneself with questions which suit the minds of the
various scientists in the various disciplines.

***

“Objective knowledge” is shot through with the impacts of the
ways the dialogues are carried out. Each scientist knows to what
extent his own limitations and circumstances define the field of
his research and to what extent he leaves untouched questions
and areas of concern precisely because of these limitations.

There is only one science of a given awareness, and its
development results from the fact that scientists in a certain
field can affect each other’s awareness by giving to their facts of

19


awareness the focus which best meets the ways of working in
that field.

From 1910, when Alfred Wegener wrote and spoke of his
insights into the shifts of the continents to a non-responding
community of geologists, until 1957, when geophysicists
transmuted this idea into the “plate theory,” we can clearly see
that the science of geology was limited to dialogues between
like-minded people who allowed their prejudices to stop them
from working freely on the reality Wegener revealed to his
colleagues.

There are numerous examples of scientists who thwarted
research in their laboratories or institutions so as not to be
disturbed and be obliged to recast their set minds. At the same
time, uncommitted minds may have embraced enthusiastically
the same proposals and made them the center of their lives of
work, which was pursued parallel to that of the mainstream. So-
called great men have been petty and mean to other
investigators, using their social prestige to generate obstacles so
that young researchers did not receive positions of work which
would compete with theirs.

The sciences are the fiefs of some lords, at least during certain
durations in certain periods. They are essentially pursuits of the
truths which strike some minds, and therefore, they bear the
imprint of these minds.

If this is an astonishing finding in the natural sciences, it is
rather common in the social sciences and in the fields of

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application such as medicine and education. Specializations in
these areas is often equivalent to entering a school and
belonging to a cult. There are as many “psychologies” as there
are psychologists, more or less. There are as many “economic
theories” as there are economists. Opinions guide research in
most “human sciences.” Objectivity is more an ideal than a fact.

In fact, it is an illusion of many minds to believe that reality is
totally fathomable and that it will be possible to reach a stage at
which eternal unalterable knowledge will be available, if the
“scientific method” is used more carefully. Because reality is an
evolving human construct, it can only change as more people
concern themselves with it and state what they find in their
dialogues with it.

There is no reality which is not human—simply because reality is
a construct of the minds of the people who dedicate themselves
to it. “Objective reality” is as much a construct, except that it has
been submitted more explicitly to a set of demands and that
people attempt to accept them in their work.

***

Sciences are born when someone states that what occupies his
mind IS and, because of that, is part of reality and worth being
considered by others.

A remarkable example of this is the emergence of electricity as a
science in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Now all pervasive, it
seems incredible that 200 years ago electricity was only real to

21


the minds of a handful of people who could never have imagined
what would follow from their first insights. Electricity, contrary
to other sections of physics, which were related to the senses, is
entirely a laboratory science, created in fragments which
remained separated until Clerk Maxwell offered the world his
mathematization of Faraday’s singular conception of the
phenomena on which he worked in isolation in his laboratory,
and which he called “fields.”

Electricity is a good guide for those who want to see reality being
constructed in the minds of men. Starting as thoughts, ideas,
projects in some minds, these were given concrete form as
apparatuses, as experiments which could be magnified to
become factories, stations, machines, etc., made of concrete
materials to which no one could deny existence and reality. But
because it was obviously man-made, that reality reveals the
essential and profound presence of the mind of man in it.

Since the sciences are all man-made, they let us see in their
individual generation and evolution the work of the mind which
propose as a reality a preoccupation of a person who can
operate, up to a certain point, its transmutation into reality. All
reality considered in the sciences is then human reality. As such,
science is more easily graspable and understandable and also
more subject to showing the places it needs to change to become
more acceptable to those minds who not only observe but also
criticize.

There is always enough of the constructed reality that strikes
people as being of a permanent nature, to suggest to them that

22


an Absolute Reality exists and must be the object of our
attention and of our capacity to gloss about it. Some men
specialize in making that Absolute Reality a reality which all
men can come in contact with and that must be talked about as
the frame of reference for all human lives. And in human
research, we can then talk of Reality, the absolute one, which
must exist and be the frame of reference for all our endeavors to
understand our environment, inner and outer. But history is
there to tell us that all such attempts to find the absolute have
collapsed, and each proposal that presumably gives it to us has
had to be abandoned.

The dialogues of minds with themselves teach us that if we can
talk of Reality, this still remains a variable known only in the
forms of realities we construct with all our human means and
that we join together into one thought which we create in us and
label (relative) Reality, to be recast again and again.

This being the actual state of humanity’s thinking from the start,
“a function of time,” we can attempt to see that all the sciences
are needed for that historically defined Reality, but that they are
not sufficient, that more sciences will be born to account for new
awarenesses.

***

The need to know is not a biological need. Even if all humans
have it—it is the definition of being human, and the definition of
being aware of awareness—it has to be accompanied by the
possibility of researching and deciding whether what has been

23


reached experimentally and experientially is a reality for oneself
and by the possibility of testing it on others to confirm that it
belongs to the relative, historical Reality of the question under
investigation.

This complex and complicated collective procedure is taking
place all the time and is open to scrutiny by everyone.

The Science of Education, a newly proposed science, may be a
good example to follow the birth of sciences, including the well-
established.

Since it has been elaborated from 1940 on (almost half a
century) and has not yet attracted many workers doing all sorts
of things, it can be still more helpful in delineating how a science
can emerge from the raw material of the experience of humanity
and become progressively a system of thought which can be
isolated and presented per se, as we do in this treatise.

At the basis of all this research, which has been extended to
cover as much ground as one person alone can do in one life, is
the acceptance of a definition of man as being capable of the
awareness of his awareness. Chapter 2 will explore more fully
the meaning associated with these words. Here we want to
expand the awareness of man, as defined above, into an ongoing
dialogue of the mind with itself, while never forgetting the
awareness that is capable of making the awareness of awareness
a distinctly separate entity among all the other sciences.

24


(In chapter 3, we expand this preoccupation by arriving at the
awareness that FACTS OF AWARENESS exist and that this
therefore will legitimize their study as the body of a new science.
Sciences can indeed be seen as bringing to the fore some
awarenesses which are christened “facts.” We saw how some of
them are singled out and kept at the center of “the science of
optics” or “of acoustics” or “of mathematics,” but we leave it to
readers to see its application in the case of the new sciences. It
would seem necessary that those facts which can be well defined
and found different from those already claimed by the existing
sciences, could constitute a body of knowledge of a special kind,
systematic and neutral, needing human minds but not identified
with the first minds which revealed their existence, and open to
all those who entertain such awarenesses.)

In the light of the approach that all sciences begin with a new
awareness—which could be entertained per se and then become
numerous awarenesses, which are the contents of those
sciences—it became imperative to find which awarenesses would
provide the substance of a science of education. When it was
clear that there was a serious possibility for awareness—which
generated the various sciences by involving other experiences in
it—to take awareness itself as its object, a new dialogue opened
up which might never end.

This needs to be clarified further. Every one of the sciences is
based upon the awareness by the scientists of their awareness of
what occupies their minds: if it is light, they act as optics
scientists; if it is sound, they act as acousticians; if it is
relationships per se, they act as mathematicians—to remain
within the examples worked out above. But now we are

25


concerned with awareness itself, leaving as a blank the objects it
concerns itself with. Hence, to create the new science we are
looking at now, the awareness will be of awareness of awareness.
The triple use of the word awareness in this expression is
necessary, for it is possible to be aware of awareness and yet not
produce any statements of the mind needed to distinguish this
new science from all others.

One must be aware of the awareness of relationships in order to
be a mathematician, and to state it as the theorems and the
proofs of mathematics. Indeed, to control one’s thinking, to
know that one remains in contact with the particular challenge
which occupies one, and that one never leaves it, calling in other
mental material and experiences to feel progress in the
investigation, is to be aware of the awareness of all the
preceding demands.

But if now the stress is shifted to the capacity of awareness to
become an object itself, away from the other objects of which it
can be aware, all that follows will, by definition, belong to the
ways of working of the Science of Education.

For example, I know that I am writing English, which is proved
by what goes on the paper, and this may be my sole
preoccupation. But I can know that I know that I am writing
English and put part of my awareness on this new level and find
out what it is to write in English, a distinctive way of expression,
and what my mind does to keep at this so that no other of the
languages I know shows its presence in the act. In doing so, I
have shifted from the subject of my writing to what my mind is

26


doing to allow me to write on that subject in that language. My
mind does two things simultaneously, and the first is as effective
with the second preoccupation as it was without it, and this
preoccupation does not interfere with the writing itself.

It is in the recognition that the above could be written and
convey a sense that the third awareness is at work. What
awareness does in all this is look at the awareness which was
looking at the awareness in the specific writing which produced
these words. The awareness of the writer is on the words,
whether they fit, whether they are the right ones, the best ones
for the expression, those producing a desired esthetic effect (as
in a poem or a play), and so on, preventing the activity of writing
from becoming automatic. The mind cannot wander when
engaged in these awarenesses because all cooperate and do not
weigh specially. But to be able to say that while the words go
down on paper, there is a vigilant self doing all the jobs just
listed, is proof that awareness is with awareness all the time, and
the fact that one is singling out this awareness by one’s presence
in it introduces the third awareness that allows new findings.

These are the products which will form the objects of the Science
of Education.

In this science, it is not looking at something which comes to the
fore but looking at looking (at something). What will be found in
the enquiry is what the self does when it is engaged in looking.
What is being known is the looking, not the seen.

27


Similarly, one will be with listening and not with the sounds,
with touching and not with what is being touched, with tasting
and not the cause of the taste, with smelling and not the atoms
which reach one’s mucus in the nose. The one will know what
knowing is in the areas covered by the awarenesses associated
with the sense organs.

Knowing about knowing is the sole activity of the
epistemological aspect of the Science of Education.

This new epistemology will yield the various sciences when the
knowing remains attached to the concrete energies which define
the objects on which awareness can be at work. A classification
of the existing sciences would follow such scrutiny as one of its
by-products. The value of such a classification is the recognition
of man’s mind in all the sciences as the source of all knowledge
seen in the special forms that knowing takes, and as the result of
the multiple polarizations—focusings—that the mind can give
itself.

If the new epistemology is at the apex of the classification, it is
because it is exclusively concerned with knowing, and knowing
is present in all quests of man, which includes all the approaches
taken in the various sciences: the various ways of becoming
aware of something and pursuing that awareness so long as it
yields something new in that field. Something new for the global
community.

There is room in such a classification not only for the
established sciences but also for all the others, banned by the

28


academic pundits because such knowledge does not fall within
their definition of their own science or of their own approaches,
which are accessible to minds polarized somewhere else or
perhaps not even open to the complete human reality.

***

When it became clear that there was an awareness that could be
claimed by the Science of Education to be its special way of
grasping reality, it became clear that a new science had been
born.

Its method does not differ from any other serious pursuits of the
need to know, only its object is different, and this was stated to
be awareness, and only awareness. But because of that specific
object, it will find new awarenesses in all directions and
transmute knowing into the statements that will look like
knowledge of awareness about awareness in all its forms. In
such awarenesses are the germ of all the other statements men
can make about all the reality they entertain in their minds—as
if there were room in such statements for some other awareness,
co-present and generally ignored. The scientists of the Science of
Education aim at this other awareness, to make it evident, to
light it up so that it is seen to be present there and also capable
of being singled out to be scrutinized in and of itself.

Therefore, these scientists can start anywhere and, as if in a
forest, move in it to know it and some of its properties without
upsetting the trees and anything else that is in it. They would

29


know when to leave the forest and be in another aspect of
reality.

The Science of Education will do what no other science is
engaged in doing, and do it by creating its own means. It is
therefore possible to reach in its work and workings every one of
the attributes that presumably belong to the established
sciences: domain, approaches, methods, presentations,
verifications, etc.

The domain is all the states of being of every human, from
conception to death and beyond, everywhere on earth, at
present, in the past, and in the future.

Its approaches are those dictated by the awareness which looks
into the awareness of awareness. They can be anything and
everything, and cannot be regulated a priori by anyone. The
proviso is that the Science of Education concentrates on what
the self recognizes as awareness.

Its methods are the various aspects of watchfulness, or presence,
which inform the self that it is being with what it needs to be
with in order to know knowing. Watchfulness can be worked on
to become ever more adequate for the varying tasks it has been
called in to observe. When watchfulness becomes second nature
and can adjust immediately to the subtle demands of the
medium of consciousness, the person in question can say, “I am
a scientist of the Science of Education, and I can gather what is
new to me in my personal involvements.”

30


Its presentations are as varied and as precise as the instrument
of awareness permits. They engage others in recognizing the
new realities revealed by awareness, as entities capable of being
revealed to their awareness by their awareness.

The scientist in this new science has no more intention than do
the serious scientists in all other sciences to fool himself or
others or to be fooled by others. To be sure of what he finds in
his new field he uses a process of verification he calls
“continuous feedback.” This is the only way awareness gives
itself confirmation that any one finding encountered is indeed as
it appears Ordinary verifications are easily seen as reducible to
this view of feedback, even if they are carried out by other
people.

***

It remains to show that this new science is indeed concerned
with items of knowing which are new for everyone at a certain
instant, except to the one who is stating what he found. Here is a
list of such items:

1 That it becomes possible to UNIFY every
individual human being’s life, from conception to
death, by arriving at knowing oneself as an energy
(spiritual or, interchangeably, human, if one must
label it), which has ATTRIBUTES that work from
the beginning and produce individual evolution in
a dual environment, the inner and the outer.
Chapter 3 makes this explicit.

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2 That MEMORY can be known for what it is, also
from the time one is in gestation, making oneself
in the mother’s womb (as somatic memory), to any
time later, when RETENTION is memory’s normal
manner of transforming one’s time of life into the
singular experiences organized either to contribute
spontaneously to the continuation of an activity or
to be capable of being recalled at will. Chapter 5
expands this finding.

3 That there are several WAYS OF KNOWING
available to the self, which include the following:
the one the West has recognized and used steadily
during the last four centuries; the Chinese one, so
different from the first, but equally applicable to
oneself and the environment, very often yielding
different findings; the one needed by men engaged
in trying to know what their consciousness finds in
their inner and outer realities, as was attempted
for many centuries in India and other places (for
example in the Middle Ages in the West) when it
yielded inner dialogues open enough to allow
opposing items to coexist, as faith permits, for
example; the one which replaces a multitude of
new points by a single one capable of yielding
every other one by specialization; the one which
allows knowing something by letting it descend in
one’s consciousness, as is the case in
contemplation; the one which acts simultaneously
in a dual manner, respecting the whole by keeping
it in one’s consciousness while working through
diverse lightings to put into evidence as much of
what composes that whole as is possible. This last
way of knowing is needed in particular to progress
in the endeavors of the Science of Education.

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4 That THE AWARENESS OF ENERGY, which
arrived so differently to the Chinese, to the
Indians, and to the Westerners, can be seen as a
unifying notion at more levels than it has in
physics (which in the West happened less than 150
years ago), as well as serving as a light that brings
forth new understandings of what humans are and
are capable of doing with themselves. This human
energy, as we shall see, is locked up in some
structures which form the anatomical basis of
what we call the soma and in looser structures,
called the psyche, which maintain the soma in its
functioning states. The psyche is capable of
unifying the first functioning objectivations in the
soma with all those which use the soma in later
years and are more precisely described as
experiences (defined as the equivalent of energy
grafted on time). In addition to the energy of the
psyche channeling all the past to the present, an
energy exists which permits the self in the present
to meet the descending future, an energy we call
affectivity. Chapter 4 attempts to make this energy
more familiar to readers, who may then utilize it as
a light to understand their own inner problems
and those of others.

5 That HUMAN LEARNING can be recast to include
the realities of one’s life (which cannot be
accounted for by the simplistic theories of animal
laboratories) and to take into account the fact that
this generation of workers in the field is neither
the first nor the last. The Science of Education is
the first to have asked questions which actually
concern humans of all ages, questions which
attempt not to schematize too much the concrete
happenings in every life which make us into
embryos, fetuses, babies just born, very young and

33


young children engaged in making sense of
something (which reaches the children as energy
encountering an energy system inhabited by the
self), boys and girls of elementary school age,
adolescents having to sort out the meanings of the
dynamics in their inner lives, young men and
women handling the activities of their intellect in
an academic or social set. All these human
learnings affect the preexisting sets of
objectivations and can make them change radically
to give individual human beings their chances of
producing a unique personal life distinct from all
others but articulated with all, a process conceived
in a General Theory of Human Relativity, capable
of giving every human being on earth a place
under the sun.*

6 That SLEEP has been dedicated to learning, in the
sense that during the sleeping hours, the self sorts
out the charges received during the waking state,
retains what is useful for one’s evolution (or
perhaps even one’s survival), discharging the
harmful and useless, and making one’s psyche
grow uniquely and, if possible, to a continuous
healthy state. Sleep could not be understood for
what it was until it was accepted that each human
self gave itself two states of consciousness which
are what they are and must be studied with their
own means capable of yielding their reality and
their dynamics. Wakefulness can use
introspection, for example, sleep cannot or does
not. Sleep IS memory, wakefulness HAS memory.
Sleep is interrupted by hours of wakefulness when
the self is submitted to impacts from the outside

* This General Theory, implicit in all the chapters of this treatise, is to appear as a separate
monograph some time in the future.

34


which cannot be foreseen and therefore cannot be
adequately prepared for, while one night of sleep
after another permits a continuity of being which
protects one’s integrity. This integrity persists in
the waking state and accounts for our resilience in
the face of all the aggressions from an
environment not particularly knowledgeable of, or
attentive to, the individual humans we are. This is
discussed more fully in Chapters 4 and 6.

7 The Science of Education has proposed the
“subordination of teaching to learning” and
created the means to implement this principle in a
number of fields of study that currently are
compulsory in schools everywhere because they
shorten considerably the transmission of cultures
from one generation to the next. Because of the
impact of the Science of Education on the practice
of education, discussed in more detail in Chapter 6
(and much more fully in Part II of this treatise), we
can foresee that in the future it will be possible to
deliver what collectivities need to continue their
evolution in harmony with their history while
providing lessons that prepare the young
generation for their unique future still to be
formulated by them as their lived present—lived in
awareness.

***

These last few words can serve as conclusion to this
introduction, the function of which is to let readers know what
to expect from the following chapters and to surmise what Part
II will be made of.

35


Clearly this work, the work of one individual only, will need
constant revisions and recastings so as to make it agree with the
findings of others in this and following generations. In spite of
its magnitude, it can be perceived only as an opening gambit
that the workers in that field will transform by addition,
recastings, replacement of one awareness by another until each
generation makes it its own in the manner in which this has
already happened in the last hundred years in mathematics,
physics, biology, etc. A science, by definition, is susceptible to
such alterations and modifications since it is a collective
perception of a Reality always added to by the new dialogues of
new investigators.

36

2 The Awareness Of Awareness

In Chapter 1 we observed that awareness could become aware of
itself and concluded that this field of study formed the basis for
the science of education—for a self-education subject to orders
given to the self by the self. What we discussed in Chapter 1 may
have generally clarified the meaning of awareness but it barely
touched awareness of the awareness. Unless one grasps the
meaning of awareness of the awareness, there is no hope that a
science of education can be unfolded.

Ways Of Reaching The Awareness Of
Awareness

Let us start with another example from everyday life.

I can become aware that my eyes move or, more precisely, that I
can act on some of my ocular muscles to move my eyes from left
to right or the other way around and that that movement can be
made very gradual and slow, and through generating such
actions I can become aware of my will as it commands my

37


eyeballs to move. Therefore, I am not only with my eyes, I am
with my will as well.

Since I am aware of my will while it moves my eyes slowly from
left to right, can I leave my eyes altogether and be aware of my
will as such? For that, I have to acknowledge that within my
awareness my self can simultaneously find present a sensation
of my eyes, of the movement, of slowness, of direction, of my
will, and of its presence in the eyes—and of additional
observations if they appear. Then, I can observe that I can
ignore some of these components and only be aware of the
presence of the will in the act of stressing and ignoring some of
the contents. In focusing my awareness on my will, awareness of
the awareness has been achieved.

At each moment of each day it is possible to do a similar job and
to reach the multifarious appearances of awareness of the
awareness as one becomes more capable of experiencing that
the self is present in the awareness that is present in its content.
The self comes to know itself as needing to be present in the
content to become aware of it and as present in the awareness
that lights up that content.

***

Such movements have been suggested by other students of the
mind. They are called “reflection” by philosophers, when the
contents are ideas and thoughts, and “union” by the mystics,
when the content is the presence of grace.

38


The word reflection suggests that the awareness of a return of
light to the medium that produced it—the mind bending upon
itself to hold more closely what it has generated and is
contemplating. Because of reflection, one “sees” more of the
content and of its significance and therefore can more accurately
describe it and use it. Reflection is the form that awareness of
the awareness takes when the area of experience is the intellect.
Reflection does not automatically yield its nature so that it can
be acknowledged at once as the awareness of awareness because
of the movement’s concentration on the substance of the
reflection, but it can be seen for what it is, once the self reaches
the dynamics instead of the content. Stressing and ignoring, the
primitive tools of both plants and animals, also pervade man’s
existence and permit or forbid access to what is available. Once
one is aware of reflection, this could have yielded the awareness
of awareness had the thinker ignored the content and stressed
the dynamics.

When Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum,” he stated that his
awareness of thinking could be reached beyond all content, and
that such awareness alone sufficed to state categorically the
existence of one’s being. Once he made the world aware of
thought, he found that universes could open up through
intellectual questions, and he proposed a method of determining
if progress had been made by a mind entertaining such
questions.

Reflection is open to all, and many use it in establishing truth in
the field of the established sciences. If it is only seen as a way
that the intellect and not the self can work, the awareness of
awareness remains at the level of intellect and does not reach

39


the self. But it can be seen as more than thought because
affectivity, the effort to engage the unknown, that is, the future,
is also present. Through consciousness of the co-presence of
affectivity and thoughts, one can reach the self, a necessary step
in the movement to become aware of awareness. No one can
study the self if one removes from it both complexity and its
being in time, that is, the fact that it extends all through life
from conception to the present moment. The complicated state
of affairs that results from the simultaneity of a multitude of
functions working together within the self but also separately
upon respective fields, denies the use of Descartes’ method as a
means of establishing its truth.

New methods are required to go beyond thought. New methods
which result precisely from the empirical work of awareness in
all its forms. In the case of the intellect, Descartes’ cogito
produced the certainty that through his method, the results
would be worthwhile, which has been confirmed over centuries
of actual work; in the activity of the self in awareness, it is
awareness of the self that produces the certainty, while other
functionings produce the explicit details. Now we no longer need
to deliberately break up wholes to be able to know them. We can
simultaneously use different ways of knowing the whole,
deliberately (i.e., consciously) held together within the self that
throws lights on it and studies the lighted areas. Knowing is the
awareness that one is aware of something, and according to
whether we stress the something or the awareness, we progress
in the subject or in the education of our awareness. Movements
in the education of our awareness may be short-lived or
permanent. When short-lived, they are called flashes of
intuition, bright ideas, sudden insights. When permanent, they

40


make possible a familiarity with awareness and provide a chance
to reach awareness of the awareness as a state of being
acknowledged by the self.

***

For the mystic, yet another ingredient is present that alters the
inner climate. The whole is acknowledged more vividly and
placed in oneself as transcendental, i.e., as inaccessible to the
self on its own; it needs the support of “the one” who dwells in it,
Once this “grace” has been received, the transcendental reveals
itself as accessible in the manner described earlier, as belonging
to man and knowable in its details, even if the language for it
does not need to be pedestrian. The use of symbols, of entities
loaded with consciousness and presence, does not take away the
light shed upon the truth that one is living at that level and in
those universes.

Aware that the total universe is shrouded in mystery, the mystic
learns to respect the whole even more than the scientist of the
whole, who needs to know only that he is careful in not
forgetting it while he works. The mystic attributes his contact
with the whole to a special favor unrelated to his capacity to
reach it, one which is beyond him in terms of all he did to
“deserve” it. That is why he speaks of “grace.”

Still, for the mystic and the thinker, awareness of the awareness
is made possible by a refusal (1) to fragment and (2) to get lost
in details, letting the psyche, concerned with maintaining what
has worked well until now, dominate. Since the self nourishes

41


the psyche in energy, it can force its way and see to it that the
psyche cooperates rather than obstructs the process of shifting
from the content to awareness. But in the secular world this may
be less smooth than it is for the mystic, who has surrendered his
will so that a greater will prevails. In the secular world too many
ties have been formed within the psyche which bargain strongly
for their own existence.

***

One may be aware of some awareness but not of many others
that also exist. For instance, alerted by one’s dedication to some
goal, be it personal or otherwise, anything that touches that goal
awakes one’s awareness, and one becomes aware that one’s
awareness of that end is, say, being threatened, and one acts to
secure its defense.

One may be aware for a split second that there is more than
content to relate to, but one lets the content take over and thus
renders the initial perception inoperative. The result is an
incapacity to recall that there was even a chance of prolonging
the awareness without content.

One may be aware that in some states one’s self is felt much
more than one’s psyche and that this makes possible a contact
with one’s free energy which can be poured into an involvement
so as to stop the momentum of routines and enhance what is
perceived in its purity.

42


One may be aware of the movements of one’s psyche and
intervene to change them. This is possible only because the self,
aware of its energy and its dynamics, can use both to manage the
energy of the psyche in order to know the dynamics of behaviors
which are automatic within the psyche. This energy dynamics is
what constitutes the reality of the awareness of awareness.
Indeed, breaking through forms to reach energy is to leave
content aside and entertain the awareness itself.

One may be aware of oneself as time.

***

Since time is not a thing, to become aware of it requires
movements of the self other than perception, action, or analysis.
Time, in the words of Bergson, is the stream of consciousness;
awareness of it is awareness of consciousness in its dynamics,
excluding content. That the stream of one’s consciousness can
be reached in some states makes it knowable even if those states
generally prove only its existence. Disciplining oneself to be with
it promises greater acquaintance and deeper knowledge of it.
The results may be a facility to remain with it and know
consciousness as a functioning of the self. This is equivalent to
awareness of the awareness.

We will understand the concept of time better as we proceed
further. As we shall see, it is one of the most useful findings of
awareness of the awareness.

***

43


One may be aware of oneself as growth, and one will find
awareness engaged in equipping each of us with the ability to
transform the energy of the self into instruments, into
objectivations, into universes of experience the content of which
is the stuff of human lives. By lighting growth with the light
produced by the awareness of time, we can find that each of us is
engaged in a succession of hierarchies of awarenesses (which we
call temporal hierarchies), prior ones making possible
subsequent ones. For a duration, then, certain awarenesses are
“absolutes.” These are “relativized” only when their job is
achieved. This fact, translated in terms of living, tells us that the
temporal language of yesterday-today-tomorrow, of past-
present-future, means that we use all we have to meet the
challenge in the present of the demands of the descending
future. To this future, we note in passing here, is given the
function of integrating the past by transforming it. Only then do
we legitimately speak of growth.

In those in whom awareness dwells (in retrospect), the self can
see that the demands of becoming acquainted with the content
of different universes, of the objectivation of the energy in
manners compatible with that content, need the dominance of
absolutes which force awareness while limiting it to its tasks.
This can lead to relativity only when enough absolutes exist to
generate their comparative study, leading to the
acknowledgement that since awareness is a functioning of the
self that seems to be present in such diverse forms, awareness
has a reality that transcends each form but not itself. Here is
another chance to reach awareness of awareness beyond
content, beyond form. At a certain moment in life it is possible
for the self to face this transcendent as the immanence of

44


awareness in all that has been lived and is being lived. The
transformation of the awareness of transcendence into
awareness of immanence is one way of reaching awareness of
one’s awareness as a fact of one’s life.

***

More pedestrian moments exist in which we can become aware
of awareness, but rarely do we take advantage of them, either
because we are not specially solicited to do it or have not been
made aware that the occasion may have something vital to yield
to us beyond what causes it, or because we get lost in the
experience and know only its content. For instance, sorrow or
grief that forces us to return to ourselves, to leave our daily
occupations and preoccupations and contemplate life
differently, may have the quality to force upon us awareness of
that which can link us with our awareness. We know grief and
that we are experiencing it. We encounter ourselves in a state
that is favorable to reflection but concerned with feelings rather
than with ideas. This reflective mood cannot teach us much
about death—unknown to all of us—but could bring to our self’s
notice that we are prepared to receive a new light about life in
general, in particular about our functioning in the face of
mysteries.

Although in such circumstances one usually does not engage in
exercises of self awareness to force awareness of one’s
awareness, it is not excluded that such a result be forthcoming.
Usually other consequences take place, mainly because our
society is not geared to force that awareness as easily as, say, the

45


church can force awareness of something it stands for. Yet, that
this is possible gives us a hopeful fact, for it proves that
awareness can be forced in certain circumstances and that in a
secular world awareness of the awareness may be an acceptable
concomitant of grief when other suggestions may have lost their
appeal.

***

In our “spaceship earth,” our “electric village,” the proximity of
all mankind has a dual effect. First, it contributes to an openness
to all sorts of symbolisms and a recognition that there is, behind
them all, some other reality that is reachable by mankind.
Second, pressure from the density of population makes it easier
to propose human solutions where earlier cultural and local
ones were seen as more functional. Today, such local solutions
rarely look acceptable. Hence, circumstances are favorable today
to recognizing the impact of the local on the human. Today not
only can we reach the human behind all things, we can ask for
the human in preference to the culturally distinct. We could not
have asked for it had it been impossible!

We see (i.e., we are aware of) birth and death as human, and
delivery and funerals as cultural. We see knowing as human,
and specific knowledge as cultural. We see love as universally
human, and weddings as cultural and as social contracts. We see
growing up as universal, and education in school systems as
social institutional moldings. We see relating as human, but
trade relationships as economics. We see need for a shelter as
human, but dwellings as a response to the climatic conditions

46


where we live on earth. We see expression through words as
human, but each language as resulting from the impact of
interbreeding and living in specific valleys.

The term “human” is often used to mean conscious of oneself in
contrast to conscious of something. And to “see” oneself as
human is to be close to oneself as “conscious of” that which
makes one “conscious of.” Awareness of awareness belongs to
the human realm of evolution distinctive of that realm. In
Chapter 1 we saw that sciences can be defined as awareness of
what happens to man. We have seen also that when man
becomes aware of this, he could recast his perceptions and
organize them in all the sciences that exist today. Aware of the
contents of his awarenesses he could pursue each awareness to
the point that the initial intuition, once made explicit, could
involve the participation of hundreds and thousands of people
examining their awareness and inventing instruments to capture
it and its vicissitudes.

The arsenal of all the sciences as they are organized today only
tells of the steps of awareness of their own content. Philosophers
have tried to look behind the content to reach the process but
were limited by the limitations of their own reflection. In order
to reach beyond the content of the sciences, to reach each
science making itself, we must manage an awareness of the
awareness which is more than reflection.

***

47


If he is in the state of awareness, man can hold in awareness
anything that is part of the self and that is reachable. People
differ by what is reachable. For most of us, the functionings of
the soma which are reachable to some exceptional yogies are
beyond reach. For most of us, the actual “film” of our early
apprenticeships is inaccessible: we no longer know how we
learned to stand, walk, or jump, but we can reach the certainty
that we did learn each of these activities. Most of us do not know
how we learned to speak, to read or write, although these may be
activities we engaged in much later than standing or walking.

If we concentrate on what is reachable to one’s self, we then find
that our self is capable of being present simultaneously in what
occasions the concentration, in what presents itself at the same
time, in the presence of the self, and in what it is doing with
itself and with the material that comes to the surface. It may be
sufficient to practice this kind of dialogue with oneself to
generate awareness of the awareness. That makes possible some
of the studies we need in order to be as competent in it as we
may be at ping pong or playing the piano. Awareness of the
awareness is thus seen as a specialized activity of the self that we
can acquire as a skill, that becomes second nature, and that can
be used readily all the time as an automation although full of
consciousness.

***

We could of course learn a great deal from the ancient schools of
awareness that have led their devotees to states considered as
extraordinary but nonetheless natural. The price in time and

48


energy and the non-pursuit of other ends may be right for some
and too much for others. What we want to retain here is that
anyone ready to pay the right price may, through exercises and
disciplines, obtain access to the most primitive functionings in
our soma and show how the will is capable of affecting them as
easily as most of us affect our “voluntary muscles.” The self
(even if it does not do it in actuality now) can re-assert its
presence in the whole edifice of the objectivations and know
itself as present in the associated functionings by affecting them.
It is this climb (or descent) of the self into all it is in the field of
ideas that is the awareness of awareness displayed under the
name of reflection. Not all of us have to dwell in the same or
similar manifestations. Not all of us need to choose to devote
ourselves to only one of the many ways of being empirically
distinguished in concrete lives.

For the purpose of this book, our awareness will concentrate on
the awarenesses that lead to an understanding of what can
provide mankind with know-hows that open up all the fields of
being that have been particularly attractive to mankind over the
millennia and that have become part of education in the broader
sense.

This means that we shall not consider (although we could) the
activities of people who increase the span of what is accessible to
mankind via the awarenesses that have been kept for the
initiated for some time and perhaps are still now. The many
yogas will be left out. The education of the mystic in us, as well.
Also, the education of the sensitive in us, whether as a
competent judge of what Chinese medicine finds in the pulses,

49


or a competent diagnositican in a homeopathic clinic, or a
competent psychologist among people.

***

When aware of one’s awareness it becomes possible to make a
very important discovery: “Knowledge is not the opposite of
ignorance. They are two very different functions of the self only
connected by being together in the self.”

Ignorance is an awareness of the self, that because one is
enclosed in a “bag” and can only process what comes one’s way,
all that which does not come one’s way is unprocessable and
inevitably remains beyond one’s grasp. To ignorance we relate
only with respect, and at peace with not having any clue of what
it could be and how to prepare oneself for it. It is neither
threatening nor does it impinge on us. We know we are in
contact with ignorance when the self is aware of itself as
immersed in what cannot be made to be different from what it
is. Ignorance cannot be reduced by any of the functionings of the
self. It emerges in our consciousness as our state of being when
nothing could be done, could be contemplated to be done, so
that one is less ignorant, less oneself in that state. In awe one
recognizes that ignorance is the shared condition of those who,
living at the same moment on the calendar, enclosed in their
bags, irretrievably lose, every minute, all that which occupies the
cosmos at that second. Ignorance here is not concerned with
what I do not know that someone else may know. Rather with
that which no one can know, now or ever.

50


Knowledge on the contrary is the result of the self functioning
upon itself, producing out of itself that which is recognizable as
both oneself and other. Knowledge is vouched for by the self and
has properties accessible to one’s self.

Knowledge is a function of time. It may remain constant but
generally it varies with time. It is affected by awareness. It
comes to life through awareness. It is known through awareness.
It has a variety of components, it may be connected with events
held in one’s memory, it is neither entirely one’s own nor
entirely not one’s own, and can be recognized as such. It seems
that it calls in the process of knowing which made it appear for
the first time. It is clearly the outcome of some knowing. And
there are many ways of knowing which generate as many kinds
of knowledge. In particular, there is knowledge that is
distinguished sharply from awareness—the knowledge solely
entrusted to one’s memory, such as the label for such an object
or a telephone number, items which are arbitrary. Without
someone else, that knowledge would not exist for us.

Ways Of Knowing

Awareness of awareness can be illustrated by the example of
awareness of ways of knowing used by each of us every day with
greater or lesser penetration. Exercises of awareness of the
perceiving self while perceiving can well represent the most
universal exercise to acquaint everybody with awareness as
such. Because we focus while we look and see, we know at once
and immediately that the self is present, that the will is present,
that we are mobilized in our sight, that we receive impacts and

51


process them, make sense of them by integrating to ourselves
what we receive and to it what we already had.

To make every one aware of ways of knowing may be the easy
way to meet the present challenge to make awareness of the
awareness as commonplace as the rules of measuring. At the
same time, because we study ways of knowing, we equip people
with a new arsenal that may serve them well as educators.

***

The many ways of knowing generate different kinds of
knowledge. The same word (knowledge) is used only because
language allows again and again the use of one word to convey
several meanings, but it may in some cases be confusing.

Behind all ways of knowing there is one self and its capacity to
become aware.

Perception is a way of knowing applied to oneself as well as the
world around. From the outside world, amounts of energy are
added to that already “in the bag,” and to perceive is to become
aware that this is happening and how it is happening. From the
inner system, shifts of energy can become conscious, and
perception of the shifts is equivalent to knowing them.

Perception as energy added or shifting can be associated with
awareness of attributes of that energy as well as with a
movement within the existing system that relates to those
attributes, so that they are recognized as such. Recognition is a

52


general functioning of the self and is the self’s agent by which
attributes become triggers of more than themselves. Thus, once
the amount of energy carried by photons of a certain wavelength
is associated with a responsive unit in the brain, the unit can be
triggered when a small number of photons with that level of
energy reach it. The self can perceive the color associated with
those photons even when other photons are present in the
impacting light and can perceive it in the evocation of a memory
which only activates what is there and thus makes it susceptible
of awareness.

Perception as a way of knowing links the self and the outside
world. Because of the energy input we can say that perception is
concerned with “reality” in that it forces the self to acknowledge
either what is not itself or what happens to oneself. So
perception directly contributes to our sense of reality and our
sense of truth as reality acknowledged for itself.

We shall relate to perception as the ultimate arbiter in the inner
dynamics. The one that we cannot deny when dialoguing with
our self.

On the background of perception as the most primitive and the
most reliable way of knowing, upon which other ways will be
built and which will be integrated in them, we see that the
knowledge it provides is awareness of change, of a new state,
recognized for what it is and how it affects the edifice produced
by the self to that point in one’s growth and evolution. To know
through perception is to acknowledge the awareness of one’s
total energy system and of the alterations it can experience by

53


addition of outside energy or by shifts of energy from one part of
the system to another. Perception is thus a direct way of
knowing. It may not be able to attribute the added energy to
particular sources but the self knows because of it that it has
been affected, is being affected.

Every time it is called in we shall not escape acknowledging its
presence and what it can do to the whole of the situation we are
in.

***

Action is another direct way of knowing. It is characterized by an
expenditure of energy recognized by perception. Action is
needed to relate the self and its objectivations to the non-self. To
know the non-self which perception sees, the self takes the
initiative and submits the non-self to its impacts, recording the
results through perception. Thus, attributes of “reality” are
known as responses of the non-self to what the self knows
intimately from within as it consumes energy and/or perceives
inner changes following impacts generated by that spent energy.

This way of knowing is visible in early childhood when we test
everything to become familiar with the attributes of hardness,
softness, smoothness, slipperiness, roughness, resistance to
effort, to tearing, to pulling, to pushing, to fitting, etc.

Later on, action upon oneself becomes the main preoccupation
of boys and girls whose activities aim at letting them know
themselves via the instrument of action. Their games and their

54


drawings spell out clearly what they spontaneously spent their
time on. To know is the aim of life, and at that age it is to know
what action and perception can teach each of us.

Obviously, action is modified by the intellect in the realm of the
“virtual.” We end up our childhood having acted a lot but also
having realized how to extend our perception of our actions by
developing an arsenal of virtual actions that replace the actual
actions we start with. The immense advantage of the virtual over
the actual is that at a very low level of energy consumption, we
integrate functionings which could become actions but do not
always need to. These functionings can be tested for coherence
and efficacy on the virtual level. For example, children challenge
each other and intimidate each other first physically and when
experienced enough, verbally. Complicated military scenes in
drawings are a substitute for gang battles and are more
satisfying at a certain age. Actions become virtual by being
endowed potentially but not actualized in time. Hence, they do
not lose their reality nor their truth.

Tearing pieces of paper is an action; tearing can become virtual
if the only thing evoked is the muscle tone solicited as if the
paper were there to act on. Once virtual, there is no reason why
the materials should be finite and the width of the strip not
decrease indefinitely. Virtual actions are susceptible of
extension indefinitely while actual actions have to contend with
attributes that restrict them. Hence, the preference of man for
those actions that can be extended when they become virtual
and which open the door to intellectual activities.

55


Therefore, there are two ways of knowing that are associated
with action. The one that links with the actual expenditure of
energy and can be called direct knowledge and the other that
operates through the mind and the virtual, which is indirect
knowledge whose truth results from the first.

***

Perception and action when intimately blended provide a third
way of knowing, analysis and synthesis. It is upon this third way
of knowing that all the prehistoric progress of man on earth was
based. Whether the hunter, farmer, or warrior, man had to
extend himself through his tools, indicating thereby that he
knew more than what met his eye, more than resulted from his
aptitude to use his muscle tone and his energy for action. He
knew also that he had access to his knowledge and could adapt it
to new challenges. He realized that there was a double
movement in his grasp of himself-in-the-world: to invent what
would protect him at the same time as he invented what broke
the protection of others. This inner dynamics involved his
intellect and his imagination.

Analysis and synthesis form two aspects in the transmutation of
perception and action when operating at the level of the virtual.
Analysis is the analog of action that fragments, synthesis the
reverse movement that makes perception and memory supply
the initial form of the whole if it was known directly, or produces
an original whole compatible with the fragments.

***

56


Analysis as a way of knowing what the world is made of, has
gone hand in hand with action and perception. For example, we
have become aware of the inventory of nature using our mind in
that systematic way. Analysis is a necessary way of knowing if
we want to know stage by stage what is the content of a universe
of experience. Chemists as well as grammarians use it as their
way of knowing what interests them (though they use other
ways as well).

In the case of the chemists, in less than two centuries they have
managed to become aware that the enormous variety of
substances surrounding us is made up of a small number of
bricks called atoms (classified in Mendeleev’s Table) and to give
the world an exact insight of how these atoms articulate with
each other to produce almost all the known substances. The
story of chemistry is first and foremost the story of analytical
chemistry. It is possible to follow step by step the movement of
awareness from the rough contact with substances (rocks,
woods, water in rivers and seas, fabrics, tissues, etc.) to the
atomic architecture of the component molecules. Different kinds
of analyses were developed as the limitations of one or another
procedure were encountered in the effort to know better what
was being looked at.

Analysis is the name of a vast branch of mathematics. In it, there
is no restriction on the method employed to understand a
question. In the case of two other branches of mathematics—
algebra or topology—the analytic method is also constantly used,
but it gains a special aspect by being restricted to rules that do
not allow one to resort to awarenesses from other branches.

57


The way the mind works in science is to ask questions. These
make us aware. Analysis is a method of asking successive
questions that lead to a “nested” approach, one question
generating a number of others contained within the first.

***

It is clear that analysis is not the only approach; questions can
be asked that appear separate and unrelated to begin with. For
instance, what causes the weather we experience in a certain
region? What makes Constable’s painted skies so beautiful?

Synthesis is a method of work which causes questions that seem
separate to appear as related and, sometimes, as special cases of
a wider question or viewpoint.

While analysis makes us aware of the content of any perception
or notion, increasing our perception of attributes and of their
number, synthesis makes us aware of what needs to be
perceived behind the appearances to note a unity hidden by the
stressed differences.

Great strides in the sciences follow from syntheses, which
generally are followed by a large number of analytic
contributions justifying the synthesis. Charles Darwin saw
evolution happening because of the survival of the fittest; Karl
Marx saw political evolution as the expression of economic
interests fighting each other; Sigmund Freud saw all of our
behaviors as the result of a few unconscious or subconscious
drives struggling in the restricted arena of our mind; Max

58


Planck saw the cosmos in the state he was observing it as a
result of energy transacted in quanta and their multiples; Albert
Einstein unified the field theory as much as he could by
intimately relating observers using different systems of
reference for their observations of various fields; Niels Bohr
made the atom of Rutherford, which looked like a solar system,
compatible with the quantum theory. And so on.

A synthesis may suggest a new model instead of the current one,
which holds together what is known so far while the new one
includes that which could not be held by the previous one. This
difference, in fact, is the only criterion for preferring one model
to another. In the subsequent work of analysis, additional
details must be easily fitted into the fabric of the new model,
otherwise its usefulness will be questioned and efforts to
produce a more adequate one will start again.

In chemistry, synthesis means the processes through which the
molecular structure, which has been analyzed qualitatively (to
establish which atoms are part of it) and quantitatively (to
establish the relative amounts of these atoms in the original
substance) can be reproduced from the same components and
quantities so as to display the same tested properties of the
original substance.

Chemical syntheses are incomparably more difficult to perform
than analyses. Some great chemists became known as great after
managing to tell the world that a given substance can
architecturally be produced from very ordinary atoms and be as
effective as the one found in nature. From the synthesis of

59


existing substances, chemists proceeded to generate many man-
made products aptly called synthetics, because they were made
to exist by the process of chemical synthesis. Aspirin and nylon
are two such very useful products.

In physics, synthesis means the unification of concepts that look
very different. We have mentioned already Newton’s
gravitational theory and Einstein’s unified field theory.
Faraday’s and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories are
particularly enlightening in this respect. They tell us how
difficult it has been for the former to find all the experimental
evidence that would permit him to see magnetism as electricity
and electrostatics as electromagnetism, and how easy it has been
for the latter to provide a new universal model (by his
mathematization of Faraday’s insights) from which light
appeared to be electromagnetic in nature. Experience did not
seem to suggest this, but the model demanded it.

In biology, the theory of evolution, the gene theory of heredity,
the conception of the functioning of DNA and RNA, all represent
mental syntheses that changed the overall grasp by man of what
is essential and fundamental in the realm of the living. No
understanding of the millions of facts gathered in biological
studies can take place unless a synthesis that makes sense of
each and all is adopted. Syntheses are ways of making possible
some thinking which is excluded by the endless fragmentation of
analysis.

In mathematics, as in the other exact sciences, syntheses are
needed and are proposed from time to time. Early in this

60


century (following the proposal of Kronecker that God made the
integers and man did the rest), attempts were made extensively
and intensively to find the set of axioms out of which all the
known theorems could be obtained by the deductive process.
This method normally carried more conviction in the student
than any other approach. All sciences now prefer to be
presented as deductive systems.

Failure to find the universal axioms did not deter
mathematicians. They proposed instead to find all the
“structures” which by mental blending could reproduce every
one of the entities met with in mathematics. While that effort
was (partially) extremely successful, it has not managed to bring
together all thinking mathematicians, i.e., those among the
mathematicians who want to know exactly what they are doing.
Instead of one synthesis, mathematicians have a few,
maintaining the one which they themselves find congenial
because it agrees with their temperament. Side by side they go
their way, hoping for the day when a real genius will unify their
thinking.

Not all sciences manage to find even a partial synthesis that puts
facts together. Economics, meteorology, even geology have gone
on for generations without an overall model. In these fields the
workers know when what they consider is a valid challenge and
when it is trivial and useless. Knowing at the analytic level can
go on even when no unified theory is available. Indeed, some
workers are suspicious of theories, although they actually hold
one, their own, whenever they attack a problem.

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***

Acquaintance is a way of knowing that is best illustrated outside
of the established sciences, where, however, it will be found as
soon as we probe more deeply. It is the way of knowing used by
poets when they want to experience with the whole of
themselves a universe or an item in the universe that must
remain what it is while being known. For example, to know what
“the night” is, one can only yield to it, letting it penetrate one’s
awareness while holding out effortlessly all distractions of the
mind, all images, all words.

Acquaintance is the way of knowing of two people who neither
invest in each other, nor ever expect anything definite from each
other, but who know that they have access to each other and are
ready to be further known. The impacts are all received with
respect, i.e., the will and consciousness operate as watchdogs so
that the impacts do not get distorted by any one of one’s
movements.

Acquaintance is the kind of knowledge that the potter has of his
clay, the painter of his paints, the musician of his instrument,
when each is not thinking, not reminiscing, not reducing his
state to anything but itself, in contact at that moment with what
is becoming its promise.

Acquaintance is what two lovers have one of the other—nothing
analytic, nothing definite, but full and palpitating, stressing
their living relationship and its uniqueness.

62

The Science of Education Part 1 by Caleb Gattegno

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