Awake: Education for Enlightenment

This second edition of Awake is really two books in one: the first is Anatomy of Awakening and chronicles the transformation of consciousness of the author and four prominent, contemporary spiritual teachers; the second part is Education for Enlightenment and offers a whole new paradigm for the purpose and possibility of education for your children and youth. In Dr. Jefferies' vision of education, children thrive through self-inquiry, putting them in touch with an intelligence that is beyond mental constructs. AWAKE walks us through the nature of the mind and the intellect, explaining how this is not our highest source of intelligence, as our current education paradigm presupposes. Jefferies explains what Einstein and the other great scientists and mystics have known, that in order to access true intelligence we need to go beyond the mind to pure consciousness. In this, we discover that this intelligence is, in fact, who we are. In the lineage of spiritual teachers including Krishnamurti, AWAKE lays out what our current education system is educating for, why it can never be enough, and what we can do instead. She acknowledges the transformative work of current spiritual teachers Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, asking what the implications of their work are for education. If what we call enlightenment is the profound clarity of perception that leads to the understanding of why the great problems of our world exist and what to do about them (such as inter-nation, religious, and racial conflict, global warming, poverty, and social stratification) as well as individual struggles such as depression and anxiety, then WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT BRING ENLIGHTENMENT ABOUT? Dr. Jefferies writes about her own deep insights into life through her own process of awakening, walking the reader through a first-person account to actively demonstrate what's possible.