Learning,

Creativity
And Career
A Roadmap
By Peter Fritz Walter
 Contents
What is Creativity? 3
Learning How-to Learn 11
Learning Beyond School 13
The Grammar School Nonsense 44
Holistic Learning 54
Learning and Career 85

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 What is Creativity?
What is creativity?
The question is age-old, and the answers as well.
And yet, until Edward de Bono came up with the
concept of what might be called ‘business creativity’
and what he himself termed ‘serious creativity,’ title
of one of his many books, there was not really an
awareness that human creativeness, in the genuine
sense, and creativity, in the practical sense, are not
one and the same thing.
We all know that artists are creative. This is some-
thing we got to hear as early as in school. What we
however did not learn, or most of us, is that all hu-
mans are creative, in the sense that genuine creative-
ness simply is a natural add-on to the human nature.

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You see that with children. All children are creative.
Why are not all adults creative?
That’s one of the questions we are going to ex-
plore in this guide. For there are precise factors that
make that human creativity, the practical day-to-day
application of creativeness, is thwarted. It’s like a
muscle you never use; it gets weaker and weaker, and
then one day, the muscle atrophies and becomes dys-
functional.
Creativity is as it were the muscle of genuine cre-
ativeness; or we can say that creativity is a kind of
lens through which human creativeness sees its day
and becomes visible in daily life. When we are not
creative in the practical sense, let’s say in finding new
ways of doing, drafting new concepts or invent new
things, we are still creative humans, but our lacking

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creativity makes that our creativeness becomes stag-
nant.
Let me give some examples of genuinely creative
people, who were able to channel their creativeness
into serious or not so serious creativity. I would like
to mention here Pablo Picasso, Charles Chaplin, Al-
bert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Edward de Bono, Dale
Carnegie, Svjatoslav Richter, Arthur Rubinstein and
Keith Jarrett. These nine great men, two physicists,
two corporate think tanks and life coaches, and five
artists, have displayed, and display, high creativity.
When we study their lives, their art, their musical
performances, their concepts, their patents, we see
that creativity is not limited to art or music, but dis-
plays its power as well in the corporate world, in
business, and in the technical sphere.

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 This insight led me to distinguish four basic
realms of creativity:
‣ Artistic Creativity
‣ Scientific Creativity
‣ Conceptual or Business Creativity
‣ Technical Creativity
Let me give some examples of each. When I look
at artistic creativity, I see that Pablo Picasso has creat-
ed art forms virtually from scratch that were nonexis-
tent before. He ventured into realms of visual art cre-
ativity that were so daring that many people, until
Picasso was in old age, and world-famous, were re-
jecting his art as ‘iconoclast vandalism,’ ‘childish im-
maturity’ or ‘deliberate ridicule.’
With Charlie Chaplin we see a man who already
well-known as an actor, broke with tradition and his
own former role image, to create the figure of the
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street vamp and charming clown, virtually from hags
and scratch found in his studio, and dared into the
unknown. He was ridiculed at first, but finally be-
came victorious after many trials.
When we look at scientific creativity, we see two
men standing out, Albert Einstein, today recognized
as a universal genius, brilliant physicist, math-
ematician and musician (violinist), and Nikola Tesla,
maverick researcher and no lesser genius, controver-
sial inventor, and holder of more than 400 patents on
inventions that changed our world.
When we look at conceptual or business creativi-
ty, we could look at the life stories of men like Dale
Carnegie, Edward de Bono or else Sergio Zyman,
who have changed our corporate world with their
original and daring concepts. Dale Carnegie became

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the first internationally known life coach and corpo-
rate trainer and yet when he started out, he was un-
able to hold a speech in front of a small audience,
and learnt it all from the bottom up. He created ma-
jor concepts for human resource training that today
are no more reflected about, because they are taken
for granted.
This is even more so with Edward de Bono, so far
in human history the greatest and most genial life
coach and corporate trainer, a think tank who has
revolutionized the business world with his brilliant
concepts and insights. He is credited with being the
originator of ‘lateral thinking,’ the ‘6 Hats’ brain-
storming method, ‘tactical’ success training, conflicts
solution, the ‘six action shoes,’ etc.

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 With Sergio Zyman we see a businessman and
grand-style corporate leader who stands out not only
through his ruthlessness but also his great concept-
inventiveness when heading and guiding The Coca
Cola Company to worldwide and nothing less than
gigantic success. While he’s a controversial figure, his
overall creativity for concept-design cannot be
downplayed or overlooked. It stands out as an ex-
ample for how to go beyond mere marketing and
‘running promotions,’ and instead create lasting
business success with what de Bono called ‘deliberate
concept design.’ That it works, his successes have
proven it.
Technical creativity is very important as well, and
often to be found in the media world, in fashion de-
sign, couture and lifestyle business. It’s not only the

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creativity and solution thinking of an engineer, but
also the daring creations of a couturier, interior de-
signer, architect, car maker, perfume distiller or shoe
maker.
This kind of creativity comes over as so sponta-
neous and natural that most people never even think
about it. And yet it’s an integral part of our culture’s,
and all cultures’ aesthetic achievements and crafts-
manship.
However, I go even farther in this guide, which is
not only about how to be and become more creative,
but also about how to recognize and develop your
unique gifts and talents, how to design your career,
how to make yourself stand out in the marketplace
and compete with others, how to develop a personal

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style, how to overcome timidity and other communi-
cation obstacles, and how to accept your difference.

Learning How-to Learn

Most of us were taught that learning is absorbing
knowledge. Only a few have absorbed the knowledge
that learning is more of a process of how-to-absorb,
rather than absorbing itself. The good learner, then,
is the one who knows the how-to of learning. And
the good teacher is the one who knows the how-to of
teaching.
At the university level, we of course need lectur-
ers, because at that level we should have learnt how
to absorb lectures. The how-to of learning is unfor-
tunately left to the basic school system. And there it
is in bad hands. Learning innovations are generally
not the outcome of the school system but rather the
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result of professional training, coaching, and man-
agement schools.
In the past we went to school once for a lifetime
whereas today learning is programmed into our
whole life cycle. Therefore it is so important to learn
how to learn fast, effectively, and joyfully! Clearly, if
we want to come back to something over and over
again, we need to experience pleasure doing it, and
that is what learning traditionally really never seemed
to be, pleasure. But ask the highly evolved scholar, as
the famous writer, ask the successful entrepreneur,
ask the artist of world renown: they will all tell you
that learning is for them sheer pleasure, and a chal-
lenge to grow. Once we grasp the truth that learning
is made for our pleasure and not for our torture we
are open to accept change in our learning habits.

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 It begins with questioning the effectiveness of our
former learning methods. Sometimes we are motivat-
ed by a particular teacher or the mentality of a par-
ticular school. But at the end of the day, we might
want to change the teacher or the school—all
schools. The learner is within us. It is inside and not
in any teacher, school or system.
We cannot change our brain but we can use it
more effectively so that the results we get with learn-
ing, memorizing and realizing things are enhanced.

Learning Beyond School

I guess for most of us school was pressure and
fear. The only difference between creative and uncre-
ative people is that the latter take ineffective learning
for granted. Creative learners either change the sys-
tem or drop out of it.
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 Research in the United States showed that a high
percentage of the young is illiterate! And this despite
a sophisticated and expensive school system. Most
college graduates, although studying languages for
years, are unable to lead a simple conversation in the
languages they major in.
Why? Because our mainstream learning methods
are not among the most effective. In the 1960s, we
had Superlearning® coming from Bulgaria to the
States and then the rest of the world. Dr. Lozanov’s
Suggestopedia, as he named it originally, seems to be
in alignment with natural laws and the way our brain
functions. It shows how to combine conscious and
unconscious memory so that we learn and memorize
with our whole brain.

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 Using music, our right-brain capacities are en-
hanced in Superlearning®, and the learning stuff is
absorbed by little chunks that are written into our
long-term memory. The chunks are patterns, and the
whole approach could be called a patterned learning
approach.
How can this be done? How can we realize virtu-
ally unlimited learning ability? The answer is, by
learning patterns, not singular elements. The brain
learns patterns by using both brain hemispheres si-
multaneously engaged.
Most of us are so used to the fact that we only use
a fraction of our potential that they do not inquire
further. In fact, we use in our culture most of the
time only the left side of our brain, our so-called left
brain hemisphere. We try to cope with progress and

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challenge using our conscious mind, our ratio, the
intellectual mind, disregarding the incredible poten-
tial of both our subconscious and our associative
mind, which is located in our right brain hemi-
sphere!
It is not by chance that our brain consists of two
hemispheres. The right hemisphere coordinates
rather than analyses, and when it assists the left brain
hemisphere in the learning process, a holistic under-
standing of the learning content is brought about. The
right hemisphere functions in an inductive and asso-
ciative manner. It does not, like the left hemisphere,
memorize abstract concepts but the images associat-
ed with those concepts.
Since a concept does not per se have an image
connected to it, it is useful to make up images about

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all we learn. The more vivid our imagination, the
better we memorize! Simply because imagination and
visual thinking gets the right brain involved in the
learning process.
Every poet knows that images, symbols and
metaphors can convey much more information in
much less time than strictly verbal transmission.
Therefore true poetry is acrobatics; it achieves the
impossible, by expressing what cannot be expressed.
It puts in words what is rather of an imaginal quality
and beyond words.
Dr. Lozanov and creative thinkers like him are the
true poets of our times. Their poetry brings revolu-
tion in evolution! They have changed the world with
their strong belief in our unlimited potential. In his
research Dr. Lozanov found that our passive learning

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capacity is about five times higher than our active
learning faculties. To give an example. Our passive
vocabulary in every language is five times as high as
our active vocabulary. This means that we under-
stand five times more than we are able to express.
It is funny because the negative thinkers conclude
from this fact that our brain suffered from an innate
deficiency when learning languages. In reality, this
very feature of our memory surface is a true advan-
tage. It namely ensures the fundamental understand-
ing of a foreign language long before we are able to
speak it. In fact, this characteristic of our memory in-
terface enables us to learn passively, that is to say al-
most without effort.
We learned as children our mother tongue with-
out studying grammar, didn’t we? Children pick up

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foreign languages while adults try to translate them
into the structures of their mother tongue. However,
this latter procedure, while it is used by the majority
of people, is highly ineffective and inappropriate. It
prolongs the learning process and is responsible for
the accent we bring into the foreign languages we
speak. Dr. Lozanov’s method, by contrast, has been
seen to produce native speakers. Learners speak for-
eign languages without any accent, like native speak-
ers, simply because they have absorbed the language
by patterns.
Before I go in more detail about highly effective
learning, let me first glimpse on the subject of learn-
ing from a more global perspective. I am conscious
that I am not dealing with reforming existing pat-
terns, but with nothing less but a revolution in edu-

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cation. This revolution has since long been prepared.
Great thinkers and teachers like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, John Locke, Maria Montessori or Alexan-
der S. Neill have prepared the shift which is now tak-
ing place all over the world. This is not a shift in
styles or methods or ways to perform, but a real par-
adigm shift.
The old paradigm holds that learning is an un-
pleasant and mechanical activity that is a necessary
but unavoidable sacrifice on the way to higher
achievement. The new paradigm holds that learning
is an essential ingredient of life, a part of the human
nature and naturally as pleasurable as breathing,
playing, eating or taking a hot shower.
It further holds that unpleasant learning is the re-
sult of ignorance and a deep mistrust in the human

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potential if not a form of violence originating from
one or the other pleasure-denying ideology. The old
paradigm favored oligarchic systems of power, based
upon the ignorance of the masses, while the new
paradigm strives for effective and nurturing forms of
learning as the very foundations of democracy!
The new paradigm associates learning with cre-
ative living and, as such, as a part of human dignity.
The paradigm shift in learning stresses human values
such as respect for the individual’s natural learning
faculties and intuition. It has given rise to a higher
value of personal choices and preferences.
The paradigm shift in learning deeply affects
modern society, which is currently evolving into a
global learning society with a high esteem for the in-
dividual’s learning capacities and choices. Hundreds

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or even thousands of new ways of learning are pres-
ently being born all over the world, and the common
denominator among them is diversification of the
learning process. The media, and even good old tele-
vision are going through a deep identity crisis and a
transformation that will get them ready to cope with
the enormous need for more and better education on
a mass-scale level.
In a globally networked and value-based con-
sumer culture, we need to learn constantly, effectively
and joyfully. Many of us, and among them the highly
gifted ones, practice this already now and probably
since their childhood.
The impact learning has on our creativity is not to
underestimate. To be creative and not to learn is
sheer impossible! Creativity and learning go hand in

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hand. I would go as far as advising everyone who
complains about lack of creativity to simply start
learning something new and then begin with practic-
ing this new learning. As a result, creativity will
bloom up, and not only in the particular field you
have chosen to learn about. It will be a general cre-
ativity and can affect areas of your life that you con-
sidered dull and stagnant. More generally we can say
that every learning experience rejuvenates us from
the deepest of our bones.
Expenses are currently reducing on a large scale
and the one who still invests a fortune in getting a
master’s degree or diploma will tomorrow be consid-
ered a fool! Learning will be tightly interwoven with
daily life, and it will be for the most part electronic. It
will on a lesser scale be left to professional teachers

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to teach, as the culture will provide virtually every-
body the opportunity to share information and thus
become a public teacher.
From such information distribution, income will
be created and this in a more diversified manner.
Since the individual will not have much to pay to get
information, the per-client profit of information
providers will be relatively small, yet the great mass
of potential clients networked within the global
learning structure will do for great profits!
The areas where new learning is required are as
large as our whole scale of interests. We will have to
master about a dozen languages fluently if we want
to cope with the global marketplace, and this can be
achieved once learning is felt as pleasure and as an
essential enrichment of life.

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 By playing with knowledge, we overcome learn-
ing barriers that result from negative past experi-
ences. Learning by playing helps thus to overcome
past learning frustrations because learning will be
such a tremendously new and energizing experience
that we do no longer associate it with the old frus-
trating patterns that damaged our self-esteem. Natu-
rally learning really is pleasurable since it reflects to
us our unlimited potential, and because it empowers
us and boosts our self-esteem.
The learning barriers many of us have are not in
our nature and certainly not, as some misanthropes
say, in the human nature. They are but conditioned
responses to inhuman learning experiences!
Love for learning actually is similar to love for life.
Children learn by play. They learn language by ab-

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sorbing language and by playing around with words
and phrases that they have already captured.
The way children learn languages can be com-
pared with a scanner. A scanner transforms pictures
or writing in electronic signals that the computer can
identify and retransform into pictures. Children in-
deed scan the language they are exposed to on a daily
basis, with all its complex grammatical structure, in-
tonation, syntax, and vocabulary, and they memorize
these whole patterns, not just single elements such as
words. They never learn isolated words and phrases,
nor any grammar, as most of us traditionally did.
Rather do they absorb language within a context, a
frame of reference, which is a patterned structure.
This is the secret. This context, this patterned
frame of reference in which we learn, is responsible

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for a much higher learning input. The more our
brain can associate new knowledge with existing or
contextual knowledge, the more easily it can store it
away in long-term memory. This has to do with the
neurological fact of preferred pathways in our brain.
That is why mental pictures help tremendously in
memorizing language or any other kind of learning
material.
Another factor is that children never are in a
learning environment specifically designed for them.
This is a major advantage! It means that they are
every day bombarded with new words, and that they
are, technically speaking, exposed to a much higher
input compared to the actual output they are able to
produce.

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 Traditional learning completely disregards our
passive learning capacities; it starts from the wrong
assumption that learning must always be an active
process! And that it must be hard and painful to get
learning results.
This assumption is disproved by holistic learning
that engages our full potential and that thus activates
our full memorization capacities.
Superlearning® techniques are natural since they
are based on the way our brain functions when it
functions as a whole brain. They recognize that we
can learn passively, just as we did as children, by ab-
sorbing the whole of the learning stuff, using our un-
conscious as a major reception antenna. These mod-
ern learning techniques are not only much more ef-
fective and pleasurable, they are also healthier since

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stress is reduced on a major scale and frustrations are
reduced to a minimum.
We speak of playful children. Nobody has yet
spoken of playful learning. Playful learning is however
something that really makes sense. Who ever met a
genius knows what I am talking about. Geniuses are
playful learners! They have never left childhood. Not
that they remain immature, but they voluntarily keep
their playful attitude in learning because they have
preserved the most precious we have, the inner child.
Geniuses like to play, with thoughts, with images,
with strategies, with concepts, with patterns, with
theories, and some also with people or countries, or
with life as a whole. In a way life is a game and can
be considered as a context where nature plays a game
with herself, where creatures play games with each

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other, in order to survive, but also in order to have
fun! What we need is positive stimulation in order to
learn effectively.
Learning brings more results once it is done in a
way that is fun, that feels good, that is lively, that mo-
tivates us without frustration.
Traditional learning is basically centered upon
sweat and potatoes. It is based on life-denying beliefs
such as life is a hard job or life on earth is a sacrifice
for later heaven, and similar nonsense. Therefore tra-
ditional learning has bred pressure and fear and got
many people to become non-learners who were en-
thusiastic learners as long as they were innocent. It
has built hero philosophies, which pretend that only
some people are winners and that all the rest will be-
come losers. And this rest are we!

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 The hero cult has deeply affected our self-esteem
in the most negative way. Many people were crippled
by traditional education to a point to be unable to
pursue life in a naturally pleasurable manner, and
they turned foul and bitter. However, life has not
born us to torture ourselves. Our brain is not a stub-
born old donkey that has to be beaten in order to run
in high gear. It has only to be motivated to learn and
it will learn—and frantically!
Learning is an essential part of a human life. Life
recognizes the enormous potential we got as human
beings and tries to activate this potential through ef-
fective and joyful learning. In fact, most of us never
learnt to learn, and in school, then, unlearnt the little
what life, or the street taught them about this impor-
tant subject. All the virtues that are connected to un-

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derstanding the learning process are bluntly disre-
garded in the traditional educational culture.
The first and foremost of those original virtues is
flexibility. Instead of teaching us flexibility, school
taught us rigidity.
Flexibility is the highest virtue because life itself is
unendingly flexible and yielding. Survival is right
that, the ability to flexibly adapt to any new situation
or environment. The dinosaurs disappeared because
they could not adapt to climatic changes. And many
people today are jobless because they are at pains
with anticipating structural changes in the world
economy or unable to cleanse their mind of outdated
knowledge.
Relying on what you have learnt in school is not
only silly but dangerous for your professional career.

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Among all what makes a modern society, the primary
school system is the end where we are still with one
leg in the dark ages.
More and more structural transformations change
the world presently and we all know that in only ten
years from now the world will be more different than
a hundred years ago compared to now. The accelera-
tion of development on both an individual and a col-
lective level is a fact of life that even non-intellectuals
today are beginning to face.
We cannot rely on school systems that teach stuff
instead of teaching learning skills. And we cannot
rely on governments since the broad majority among
them follow outdated paradigms and even fascist
ideologies instead of democratic growth-fostering
paradigms. Often, because badly needed reforms are

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postponed, huge unemployment and misery are the
result.
Learning-how-to-learn is philosophy in the origi-
nal sense of the word. ‘Philos’ originates from the
Greek philein, to love, and sophia means wisdom. Phi-
losophy thus is the ‘love of wisdom,’ and truly the
original source of motivation to study intriguing
phenomena such as learning.
Why do some people remember almost every-
thing they ever heard or saw, while others, perhaps
the majority, have rather bad memory capacity? I am
convinced that the answer to this very old question is
simple. The first group of people have learnt how to
learn, the second are too much centered upon what
to learn instead of realizing the primary importance
of the learning process. If the process of learning was

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not felt as a pleasure and an adventure for growth,
the result of learning will always be poor.
I had a colleague at law school who was gifted
with a phenomenal memory. He told the professors
right away when they made a mistake, citing by
memory from voluminous commentaries, indicating
page number and exact location of the quote on the
page. When I asked him where he got his ex-
traordinary talent from, he replied, smiling:
—Oh, that’s very easy. I just visualize everything I
want to learn. I look at the page one moment with
high concentration, very intensely, and thus photo-
graph the page into my memory. It’s just like scan-
ning the page—and that’s it. Like that I scan whole
books, law texts, commentaries, everything I want.

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 Needless to add that this lad was the best of our
law class, if not of the whole university. In addition,
he was blessed being from one of the finest families
in town. He drove to the law school in an old classic
Mercedes 500 Roadster, but despite his extraordinary
gifts and his royal-class family life, he was one of the
most modest and friendly people I’ve met in my
young life.
This example may raise your awareness to the
importance of memory. Usually we are not conscious
of how important it is to have good memory. You
may say that good memory serves to keep track with
phone numbers, birthdays and faces.
But it’s much more than that and it’s much more
basic, too. Good memory is not all in life but it facili-
tates life tremendously. We should not underestimate

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it in the daily running of our business or in whatever
we do. People who cannot remember faces live
through many awkward situations and their relation-
al life is deeply affected by their incapacity to keep in
mind the features of another person. Whatever the
deeper psychological reasons for this strange inability
may be, there is no doubt that people who easily re-
member others give the impression to be more open,
more friendly, more accessible and competent, if not
more social and communicative. However, as impor-
tant as memory is, it is only one element in the learn-
ing process, which is concerned with the know-how
of storing pertinent information.
The most important word in this sentence is per-
tinent. Why do we forget certain things and not cer-
tain other things? Do we forget at all? In fact, the

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truth is that we don’t forget anything. Research has
shown that our unconscious knows exactly how
many steps we go to get to the office, and back
home.
Why not consciously? The reason is obvious, we
would be submerged with information. The informa-
tion is all the time present in the memory surface,
but it’s hidden away from conscious awareness. You
can imagine this as some sort of backup tape where
you have more data stored than on your hard disc,
data that you archived because it could be important
one day, or that you need to keep for other reasons,
but data that you do not need to have on your active
hard drive.
Now, there are people who, by nature, have got
such an extraordinary conscious memory surface that

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they virtually can’t forget anything. The famous pi-
anist Svjatoslav Richter was one of them. Even in old
age, he knew sixty-three complete concert recitals by
heart, which means about two hundred hours of un-
interrupted music, note by note, including the fin-
gerings, the tempi, the dynamics and other details
important for brilliant piano play.
In some interviews shortly before he died, he said
he could remember events and people from his
childhood, and their long Russian names, as clearly
as he had seen them the day before. He admitted ac-
tually in this interview that he was suffering all his
life from his unnatural incapacity to forget.
What is it that makes good memory? Is it perhaps
motivation? Is it involvement? Or is it even some-
thing like a playful attitude toward learning in gener-

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al? Or is it direct perception, or else a combination of
various factors in play?
Excellent learning certainly is based upon strong
learning motivation, high degree of involvement and,
as research has shown, a playful attitude toward
learning in general, as well as high curiosity.
Direct perception is the faculty to achieve results
without involving analysis or theory. It is the use of
intuition and spontaneity to perceiving reality in a
non-mental as well as a non-judgmental way. The se-
cret about the amazing speed of early childhood
learning is immediate perception. Small children
learn directly, holistically, by absorbing the whole of
the experience and importantly so, without judging
and without the past getting involved in the learning
process. The past gets in the way through thought.

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Thought which is the derivative of past experience
and its projection into the present moment, blocks
learning instead of enhancing it. Thought generally is
concerned with the use or the usefulness of some
endeavor or activity.
Those worries keep us from being completely ab-
sorbed by the learning experience. It is irrelevant if
the specific content of what we are learning is useful.
What we learn with learning is learning itself! Even if
we forget the content of what we have learned, if we
have learnt the right way, that is, through direct per-
ception, the fruit of the learning process will be there:
we will have enriched our learning-how-to-learn ex-
perience. And this, by itself, is worth any kind of
learning. Motivation is the door and it is the guide to
highly effective learning. We can reach such insight

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only through understanding learning as a holistic ex-
perience.
The traditional approach to learning is reductionist
in that it deprives learning of a whole lot of its im-
plicit and contextual content. There is a broadening
of our intelligence in every single learning experi-
ence. Even if the learning content is irrelevant or be-
comes futile later on, if we have passed through the
experience with enthusiasm and have been immersed
in it, there is something like a subtle essence that posi-
tively touched our human potential. This is valid not
only for single learning experiences but, more in
general, for learning systems or methods.
On the other hand, it is typical in our days to
overestimate the effectiveness of electronic media for
learning. Today’s enthusiasm for electronic learning is

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probably a natural outcome of our moving into the
information age and our almost child-like joy to in-
dulge in those exciting new media features. I am not
different in that and was from the start a fervent
prophet of the New Age of Information. However, we
should not forget in our i-fever that the computer
does not change our thinking habits; it’s our brain
that created the computer, and not the computer that
created our brain. It is through studying our brain
and our natural ways to handle information, and not
through imitating the very incomplete way how
computers deal with information that we progress in
understanding fast and effective learning for our-
selves and our children.

—43—
The Grammar School Nonsense
Traditionally, teaching languages was teaching a
grammar. Until now in English the term ‘Grammar
School’ is used for a basic, elementary school. Just
recall what you learned about grammar in school and
then evaluate how well you could speak a foreign
language with this grammar knowledge only.
I guess, zero percent! We do simply not learn lan-
guages by gathering knowledge about grammar. This
is a fact that has specific psychological and neurolog-
ical reasons, which are in the meantime also scientifi-
cally corroborated.
Our brain does not need grammar to learn a for-
eign language, but something totally different! But
despite this knowledge we go on to teach children
the grammar nonsense and let them lose their time

—44—
with mechanical and highly boring activities! And
then we wonder why they feel bored and want to
break out! They should break out because this proves
that their creative impulse is strong enough to sur-
vive the prison of routines in which we want to in-
carcerate them. 
I already mentioned Dr. Lozanov who found that
we learn better when our brain functions in the so-
called alpha state. The alpha state is the state in be-
tween wake and sleep. In this state of consciousness,
our left and right brain hemispheres function in sync,
thus ensuring the full potential of creative possibili-
ties we dispose of. In our waking state, by contrast,
our brain functions on beta waves, and most of the
time invoking the left-brain hemisphere, enabling us
to straightforward, logical and so-called rational

—45—
thought, to the detriment of our intuitive, receptive
and truly creative possibilities.
It can be said that the whole of modern Western
culture is based on a predominance of our left brain
hemisphere! Logically then, within this reductionist
system, it was upheld that language learning meant
the study of grammar. But times have changed. To-
day, not only with Superlearning® have we got a
method that is revolutionizing learning since it is de-
void of any conscious effort to learn. There are
nowadays other methods around that are perhaps
less sophisticated, but also much less expensive,
among them, for example, the Assimil method. This
method, like Superlearning®, is based upon the fact
that our brain picks up whole patterns, and this in-
cluding the grammar structure of the language. That

—46—
is why Assimil does not teach any grammar and yet is
one of the most effective modern language teachings
worldwide. And in addition it’s highly affordable!
But Dr. Lozanov did not only revolutionize lan-
guage teaching. After he was already a famous psy-
chiatrist and parapsychologist in his home country
Bulgaria, Lozanov went to India in order to study the
astonishing psychic capacities of Yogis. At the same
time, the Russian scientist Alexander Luria spent
decades to study Venjamin, a man who remembers
all, and found his memory capacities unlimited. Ven-
jamin never forgot anything and could even remem-
ber the setup of the dishes and the flowers on a table
of an afternoon tea forty years back in time. Dr.
Lozanov knew Luria’s writings and found similar
phenomena among the Yogis in Bulgaria and India.

—47—
Some of them had an almost total photographic
memory.
What Lozanov did, then, was to combine his re-
search on language teaching with what we know
about the functioning of the human memory. And
here we have a method that is, despite all similarities
with Assimil, very different and unique.
While Assimil and most of the newer programs
for language learning are made for self-teaching, Su-
perlearning® cannot be applied that way, and some
people who have tried to transform it into a self-
study method failed. The original Superlearning®
technique needs a specially trained instructor. This
teacher must have qualities of an actor or conféri-
encier. Students are in armchairs and enveloped by
soft string sounds, by preference Baroque airs. The

—48—
teacher, standing in front of the audience, recites
long texts in the foreign language. The tone of his
voice alternates. One moment he shouts, then he
whispers, then he talks normally. The rhythm of his
speech is exactly in sync with the rhythm of the mu-
sic, which in turn is in sync with the breathing
rhythm of the learners.
The results are nothing short of astounding! Peo-
ple learn difficult languages such as Russian or Chi-
nese in two or three months; children learn to read
and write in no more than six months—and this with
an almost total perfection. The foreign languages are
pronounced without accent and written in exact or-
thography and this despite the fact that no grammar
is ever taught. Dr. Lozanov holds that our brain, our
subconscious mind, knows all grammars of all lan-

—49—
guages, and therefore picks them out of the spoken
phrases, which are listened to in the alpha state. His
theory must be right since the results show that all
tested students of his programs knew the grammar of
the foreign language—without ever having studied it.
The reason why the speaker alternates the volume
of his voice has to do with the reception capacity of
our brain. First of all, our subconscious mind picks
up what is underlying in a mixture of different
sounds, and not what is dominant. At the beginning
of the sessions, Dr. Lozanov puts specially chosen
music to help his audience to relax. The airs and an-
dante are adjusted in tempo so that they fit exactly
our natural heartbeat which is around 62 beats per
minute, thus relaxing those who are nervous (heart-
beat too quick) and stimulating those others who are

—50—
apathetic and unmotivated (heartbeat too slow). Lat-
er Dr. Lozanov found another important function of
the music: its transmitter function. The music was
seen to serve as a transmitter for the spoken texts. As
the phrases were spoken in exact accordance with
the tempo of the music, the music in a way became a
transmitter for the foreign language to reach the sub-
conscious mind of the listeners.
From Bulgaria, Dr. Lozanov’s method spread very
quickly, first of all to the United States, and from
there back to Europe and all high-tech nations. The
essential new discovery, however, penetrated only
into very few societies. It has, to my knowledge, not
yet reached the level of public education where the
pupils still sit on hard benches, with a crushed stom-
ach, and are pumped up with grammar knowledge,

—51—
leaving their classes with a feeling of having done
‘hard work.’ Hard work indeed, but work without
significant results!
Dr. Lozanov’s findings are just a beginning for us,
today. The great psychiatrist was for us a pioneer and
we have to continue the research that he so brilliantly
began. In our era of mass culture, the struggle for
every single youngster to succeed in the rat-race is
harder than ever before.
On the other hand, the challenge to reach more
satisfying lifestyles and careers, more satisfying in
creative realization, is today present in all societies
that have reached a certain level of technological
progress and a basic level of democratic freedom!
There is not one process of creativity, there are
many. They are interwoven in a complex network of

—52—
brain functions, on one hand, and behavioral atti-
tudes, on the other.
The study of education therefore is very large. It is
the study of man as a whole, and of his culture. Our
research must have a theoretical basis as well as a
practical dimension. Without theory, our experi-
ments will not explain us why things develop in a
certain way and not in a certain other way and with-
out practice our hypotheses remain unproven.
Theoretical work means the review of the abun-
dant and rapidly growing literature on the subject of
creativity research in order to find out the state of the
art in this field, to see what is admitted in the mean-
time and what has still to be proven. It equally en-
compasses the working out of new hypotheses, even

—53—
if they in turn revolutionize our findings from yester-
day.
Progress has become rapid all over the globe and
the human development takes big steps in new direc-
tions. Faster, more effective and more relaxed learn-
ing is only one of them, but a very important one!

Holistic Learning
All learning is a process. When we focus upon the
process of learning we learn about learning. What we
did traditionally was to focus upon the learning con-
tent. Thus, we can say that in the past learning was
considered as something rather static and mechanical
while today we see learning as a dynamic process and
something ongoing, organic and that is somehow
part of life. This process of learning, if we are to un-
derstand it intelligently, must be seen in alignment
—54—
with our totality of perception. Learning is the way
we deal with what we perceive, and it is all about
how we process the information that has been col-
lected by our brain, but not only our brain, through
a rather complicated process that we call perception.
Thus, when we want to find out about the process of
learning, we need to look what perception is and
how it works.
Perception, it seems, is a subject not very broadly
discussed in modern science. This obvious neglect of
scientific in-depth study of the holistic process of
perception has various reasons, one of them being
the general focus of modern science upon informa-
tion processing. There was a historic shift around the
end of Antiquity that led to a trend away from direct
perception and toward information processing, ar-

—55—
chiving or mere information reproduction. And yet,
direct perception is our natural and most spontaneous-
ly intelligent mode of perception. It is the way our
brain receives and stores information.
New research has fully corroborated the teachings
of the old sages who affirmed that learning has to be
holistic and whole-brain in order to be truly effective.
We can only wonder when we hear scientists state
that generally we use only between about five to
eight percent of our brain.
Why are we so terribly uncreative, so utterly inef-
fective in our learning performance? Despite this
whole process called civilization, despite school, de-
spite the printing press, Gutenberg and all the rest of
it, we have remained in a truly primitive state of evo-
lution regarding learning.

—56—
 I am not really concerned with finding out about
the causes or reasons for this terrible waste of human
potential, but with the possibilities to take action here
and now to change this state of affairs. Changing the
world comes about through individual changes.
Once a sufficient number of individuals quantum
leaped to a higher evolutionary scale, there will be a
major paradigm shift in the whole system. This is how
civilization develops; it all begins in the cell and then
expands to still bigger patterns.
Nature is programmed in a system of patterns that
are holistically related to each other and where the in-
formation of the whole is contained in every single
cell of the pattern. The pattern structure is typical for
the information the brain receives and stores. New
information is added on to existing information.

—57—
Without such connections which in neurology are
called preferred pathways, memory is not possible.
The better the brain can manage to associate new in-
put with already stored patterns, the better the in-
formation storage will be, and the higher will be the
memorization result.
Our brain does this whole process of perception
and information storage automatically, passively,
without a need for us to set a decision about it. This
fact is important for the understanding of the func-
tioning of the brain. There is namely a positive side and
a negative side about it.
Positively, the passively organizing perception
structure of the brain insures that we continuously
receive and store information, at any moment of the
day and the night. Also during sleep and even in

—58—
deep coma all the information from the five senses is
stored in the unconscious memory surface. So the
apparently passive functioning of the brain is actually
an extremely active process. The important point
about it is that the organizer of the information is in-
side and not outside of the system.
To give an example, let us have a look at two
groups of children. The first group is raised freely so
that they can pick up any information from their en-
vironment and grow, from the information they get,
into what they are destined for. The second group,
however, is strictly regulated, protected and guarded
from unprocessed information.
Which group, would you think, will be more in-
telligent and more creative, the first or the second
one? Of course the first one. Simply because in their

—59—
case the freely organizing and unhindered system of
their perception and the free flow of information,
combined with high input, made that their brains
were working in high gear whereas in the second
group creative learning processes were for the most
part impeded and blocked. In the first group the or-
ganizer of the information was inside, within the
children, while in the second group it was the tute-
lary adults around the children, their parents and
teachers for the most part, that were putting up
valves for the free flow of incoming information fil-
tering out the larger part of it.
We can also put it that way: in the first group it
was nature’s intelligence that cared for those chil-
dren’s evolution, in the second case it was limited
and rather shortsighted human willfulness.

—60—
 This simple example shows the high impact the
early environment has on the development of our in-
telligence and our later use of the potential we’ve got.
In my opinion we all got high potential but only very
few of us were exposed to the necessary amount of
environmental support and have, in addition, devel-
oped the creative will for freeing themselves from the
dangers of conditioning; we need both these factors
working in a positive direction if we are to fully de-
velop our talents and creative powers.
I am sure that people like Leonardo da Vinci, Al-
bert Einstein or Pablo Picasso, were they scored for
the use of their creative resources, would have found
to use more than eighty percent of their creative in-
telligence potential whereas for the common individ-
ual four to eight percent might be realistic.

—61—
 Behold, one of the greatest errors consists in as-
suming that this state of affairs could not be changed
or was inherent in our human nature! Darwinism has
contributed to spread this error as one of the most
destructive and absurd lies about the human nature
and the hero cult has built it into the belief system of
millions that forms part and parcel of postmodern in-
ternational consumer culture.
The truth is that every single human being has got
this incredible power that enables us to achieve
whatever we wish, if only we set our minds to it and
develop tremendous focus on realizing our creative
will.
In his book Serious Creativity (1996), Edward de
Bono states that education does very little indeed
about teaching creative thinking. For more than two

—62—
decades, de Bono stressed that there was an astound-
ing lack of creativity not only in schools and univer-
sities, but also in business, even in the highest ranks
of management, and the even higher ranks of gov-
ernment.
Edward de Bono’s creativity teaching focuses on
enhancing business creativity as a deliberate approach,
something that can be learnt and that he called later-
al thinking. Lateral thinking is not a special wondrous
skill of the right brain, but simply a particularly co-
ordinated way of both brain hemispheres working in
sync.
The discovery of lateral thinking came about
through the observation of the human brain’s unique
capability to collect and store information through
pattern recognition and pattern assembly. The brain

—63—
does not store isolated pieces of information but al-
ways organizes information in patterns. De Bono
states:

What computers find so hard to do (pattern

recognition) the brain does instantly and auto-
matically. (Id., p. 11)

When de Bono released his theory of passively or-

ganizing systems in one of his first books, The Mech-
anism of Mind, scientists at first disregarded these as-
tonishing findings. However, later Nobel Prize win-
ners confirmed them; in addition, the amazing new
discoveries in neurology corroborate them brilliantly.
The preferred-pathways system of the brain, nowa-
days presented as common knowledge even in popu-
lar science books, is but another way of formulating
de Bono’s early theory.

—64—
 And de Bono equally saw the negative side of this
mechanism whereas neurologists continue to ac-
knowledge but the positive effects of it. The essential
negative point in passively organizing systems is that
the recognition itself is conditioned upon the already
existing patterns. Bono said that when we analyze
data we can only pick out the idea we already have.
And even more clearly:

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all

business school graduates believe that if you ana-
lyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortu-
nately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can
only see what it is prepared to see. (Id., p. 24)

That de Bono’s insight is more than neurology is

shown by the fact that no lesser than Krishnamurti
stated exactly the same, saying that only passive

—65—
awareness and not active thought can help us under-
stand the world intelligently.
Thought or what we call our ratio is not able to
recognize patterns, it can only process patterns that
are already available. In addition, the conditioning of
perception by thought and past experience was a ma-
jor argument Krishnamurti used to overcome the
limitations of the conscious mind, showing that there
is unlimited intelligence and awareness not in
thought but in the realm beyond thought.
Creativity, then, is strictly speaking not a product
of thinking, but of creative thinking which is more
than thinking. De Bono is very outspoken about the
destructive process of creative thinking. What he
calls the creative challenge basically consists in de-
stroying existing patterns or just disregarding them

—66—
in order to be able to free one’s perception from their
conditioning influence. In this sense, creativity
comes close to love, or else love could be seen as a
form of creativity.
Krishnamurti stated that love is destructive in the
sense that it destroys existing perception patterns and
thus powerfully refreshes our regard on life, and on
ourselves. It also happens, as de Bono repeatedly
pointed out, in humor. This is the reason why humor
heals and exerts such a positive influence not only on
our mind but also on our organism. Humor detoxi-
fies the body from accumulated old patterns that
have restricted our evolution.
To understand this reasoning we should keep in
mind that evolution can only take place where our
regard shifts. Evolution proceeds in a spiraled man-

—67—
ner, repeating the basic processes of one level of evo-
lution on the next level, thus climbing one step high-
er in the evolutionary scale. The form of the DNA,
symbol of all life, reminds it plastically. Our regard
can only shift in moments where conditioning ends.
This can happen during meditation or during what
de Bono calls the creative pause. Meditation in its
original meaning is exactly that, a powerful induce-
ment of inward silence that goes along with a slow-
down of our rational thought processes, so as to give
way to a heightened and acute, yet passive aware-
ness; it is passive in the sense that it is able to prac-
tice detachment but not passive in the sense of slug-
gishness or half-heartedness. There is to be lots of
energy if acute awareness is to take place.

—68—
 The way de Bono develops creativity is based
upon actively implying right-brain capacities in our
regular thought processes for bringing about a more
holistic process of thinking. It is quite different from
the Eastern approach which was traditionally ob-
sessed with the idea to deliberately stop thought in
order to connect to the higher realm of wisdom and
creative thinking. For de Bono, it is not to stop
thinking but to think differently. Another difference
would be one of dynamics.
Both approaches, the ancient Eastern approach to
complete perception, and de Bono’s, have in common
that they stress the ultimate importance of the per-
ception process as what it is, a movement. In terms of
the dynamics involved in the process of perception,
the Western and the Eastern approaches differ. The

—69—
latter starts from the premise that only by slowing
down thought, by one’s detaching from the thought
content and by becoming passively aware, we pre-
pare for the unknown and thus become creative.
For de Bono it is in the contrary a very active and
deliberate process of thinking to be learned and car-
ried out that will trigger the creativity response. This
difference in approaching the question typically rep-
resents the fashion in which East and West are struc-
turally distinct.
It also makes clear what the essential difference is
between creativity and creativeness. De Bono’s lateral
thinking method is intentionally limited to bringing
about creative results on demand. It is not meant to
be an artist’s way for constant creation— it is not
meant to teach creativeness.

—70—
 On the other hand, Krishnamurti’s educational
approach, as the basis of the Krishnamurti Schools def-
initely is a way to educate children within a continu-
um of gradual unfoldment through creative and
holistic living. Krishnamurti’s starting point was that
institutionalized education destroys intuition.
The third important factor in learning, next to di-
rect perception and intuition is self-regulation. Obser-
vation of nature, psychoanalysis and permissive,
non-authoritarian educational projects such as Sum-
merhill as well as modern systems theory demon-
strate the existence of an inherent mechanism of self-
regulation in all natural growth processes.
—See A.S. Neill, Summerhill (1961), pp. 29 ff. and Neill!
Neill! Orange Peel! (1972).

—71—
 Permissive education assumes that as a matter of
fact, children grow by themselves and that we do not
need to artificially stimulate children’s emotions,
children’s sensitivity and children’s creativity. What
we have to look for is only that these values, which
are naturally present in every child, are not de-
stroyed, and thus preserved. Children are by nature
emotional, sensitive and creative. It is society that de-
stroys this integrity in schools that are more like
prisons than anything else, and that subdue children
and undermine their natural self-esteem.
What we only have to care about is that children
receive adequate support so as to grow in an envi-
ronment that is nurturant for fostering their unique-
ness, their creative potential and their intrinsic tal-
ents.

—72—
 Before the existence of schools, children were
raised by their parents and other adults present in
the extended family. They learned primarily by ob-
servation or by direct perception, picking up what
they needed for their later career, from their early en-
vironment. They do this still today, but there is less
freedom in our society for children to grow up wild
and develop their own emotional and cognitive in-
sights. Conditioning is very strong in today’s indus-
trialized societies and the culture tries to impregnate
children from early age with its agenda and values.
De Bono, much in the same way as Lozanov,
found that only in early childhood learning, and es-
pecially in the way young children learn their first
language, we see nature’s full intelligence at work. It
is a well-known fact that geniuses such as Einstein or

—73—
Picasso and most of our cherished cultural heroes
never entered or finished school, dropped out or flew
it. These people know that they know better and fol-
low their inner instinct rather than an artificial learn-
ing system that represents a considerable waste of
time and resources and that essentially violates hu-
man dignity in the most flagrant way. Life, seen
through the eyes of a school system, is but a mecha-
nistic, dead system that, pretty much in the style of
the vivisectionists, has to be killed in order to be
ready for study.
In my personal view, trainers and coaches who
pretend to provide creativity training but who are not
themselves artists and creators just fake something. I
have consulted organizations who have previously
done training with well-known coaches, and I saw

—74—
the quite ridiculous result: posters on the walls with
colorful mind maps, brochures abounding with well-
sounding policies such as we are a network company
or we practice supreme customer understanding and
other beautiful things of the kind. But when we did
one brainstorming session and the people were asked
to find one, only one alternative solution to an exist-
ing problem, they were silent like graves or just re-
peated their nice-sounding statements like tape
recorders.
It is certainly not through disciplining employees
and molding them into new frameworks but by let-
ting them participate in the process of creating those
frameworks that we achieve a more effective business
culture in the long run. This kind of training does
neither require big names nor big budgets but a true

—75—
and uncompromising commitment to the human in-
dividual and soul being.
Until today, international organizations such as
the United Nations or UNICEF still adhere to con-
cepts such as alphabetization of the masses, and this
despite the fact that more and more research is ac-
cumulated that shows that alphabetization alone has
no value at all without being imbedded in a school
system that respects the child as a unique individual
and creative and spiritually-minded person in her
own right.
Mass civilization, mass learning, mass standard-
ization and mass indoctrination have led to a dehu-
manization of culture, and this on the global level.
These reductionist and mechanistic principles have
led to worldwide destruction and violence.

—76—
 This cycle is currently undergoing a deep revision
through a total reformation of the educational and
pedagogical systems on a worldwide scale.
Learning through direct perception is the key. This
form of direct learning is not new, but actually very
old. Many of those who were and are considered as
stupid, recalcitrant, refractory or even criminal in the
traditional educational system are actually the intelli-
gent ones, the highly gifted ones and the ones with a
unique and original mindset. They regularly know
that true and original learning is not what they can
find in schools or colleges, religious or worldly, but
what they directly and spontaneously comprehend,
by observation, by the experience of immediate per-
ception that passes not through the reasoning mind
but through the still mind of the passive observer.

—77—
 Let me explain more in detail what direct percep-
tion is about using a famous example, Krishnamurti.
While in the meantime K is recognized to have been
one of humanity’s greatest spiritual teachers, he was
beaten in school by a stupid and ignorant teacher. He
was left utterly alone and would probably have end-
ed as the village idiot in Madanapalle, India, if not
the theosophists had saved him and taken him to
England where he was educated under their patron-
age. Announced by seers as the New Messiahs, this
boy was found, at fourteen, at a beach side, neglect-
ed, almost toothless, malnourished and in a precari-
ous health condition. His whole early environment
treated him without any respect, without any dignity
and, needless to add, without any intelligence.

—78—
 Krishnamurti, as a little boy, rejected all knowl-
edge he was supposed to assimilate. He rejected the
whole of it, the whole of conditioning, societal, reli-
gious, moral or whatever; and because of this refusal
he was treated with utter disrespect and violence, as
so many children who, like him, prefer to remain in
their original state of mind that is pure and un-
spoiled, the mind of a totally conscious direct ob-
server.
Once freed from the uncivil early environment,
Krishnamurti learnt everything, languages, behavior
patterns of many different cultures, religious customs
and traditions, philosophical doctrines, literature,
poetry, and even worldly matters such as driving. He,
the little neglected boy became one of the greatest
teachers and philosophers of our times and of all

—79—
times. Krishnamurti learned through direct perception
and therefore his learning was immediate, sponta-
neous and almost instantaneous, the learning of a
genius.
From his experience and deep insight into the
spiritual nature of man, he founded the Krishnamurti
Schools in India, Britain and the United States which
are truly alternative in terms of teaching because they
teach the wholeness of life and not fragmented and
isolated subjects.
Direct perception is the key to using our hidden
potential in hitherto unforeseen ways so as to achieve
miraculous results that we know only from people
who are called geniuses. Truly, we all possess the
spark of divine intelligence, able to pass beyond the

—80—
limitations of our conditioned mind once we are able
to use our whole brain.
Direct perception is a whole-brain experience. Since
the left brain is not primarily involved in it, the lan-
guage center is not, either. When we perceive truth
in an immediate way, it cannot be put in words, be-
cause it does not come to us through words. People
who report direct perception experiences almost al-
ways have difficulties to put their holistic view into
the limited corset of language. For example, when
children report to have seen Virgin Mary, as it hap-
pened at repeated occasions in Zeitoun, Egypt, in Fa-
tima, Portugal or in Lourdes, France, they are
speechless at first. Even adults, when witnessing a
miracle, tend to lose control over their choice of

—81—
words or just repeat the same words over and over
again.
—See, for example, Michael Talbot, The Holographic Uni-
verse (1992).

Similarly, in situations of shock or trauma, we lose

speech for a while. Why is that so? I suppose that in
such situations, our brain uses temporarily an archaic
survival pattern that energizes first of all the brain
stem and the right brain, activating basic mecha-
nisms of flight and fight. Survival works without the
involvement of the neocortex and thus without the
involvement of the language center which is located
there. It is in this mode of functioning that direct
perception takes place. When there is danger, the
brain switches into this mode and triggers the sur-
vival response. It does so because this mode of reac-

—82—
tion is much faster than reasoning, thought and lan-
guage. Of course, what the brain does in danger, it
can also do in peace. We only have to understand
how the brain triggers the immediate response so
that we can let it work for learning purposes.
What then is evolution actually about? Looking
back in history and becoming aware of the high level
of wisdom that humanity possessed in ancient times,
we cannot seriously claim that there was evolution at
all. In the contrary, humanity has devolved during the
process of what we use to call civilization, at least
since the last part of this process, which are grossly
the last five thousand years, the time of patriarchy. It
is for this reason that today we must head into devel-
oping the parts of the brain that have been left out by
evolution, the right brain hemisphere and the brain

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stem. It will begin with relearning how to learn, with
unlocking our potential for true receptiveness, for
whole-brain learning, for using our brain for what it
is destined for: learning by absorbing whole patterns
instead of isolated pieces of knowledge. It will begin
with consciousness-based and holistic education, and
it will be electronic learning. And eventually it will
pass into the school and schooling systems world-
wide.
As long as we continue to bring up and being
brought up in systems where our true intelligence
agonizes and dies, we will breed but confusion and
violence. And there is no question that, then, we will
not be able to master the challenges of the new era
we are heading into: the Information Age, the New
Age, the Aquarius Age. Only through holistic solu-

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tions that involve our wholeness and the integration
of all parts of our being will we be able to survive in
the mess that we ourselves, or past generations, have
left over to us.
Learning through direct perception is the way out,
and it is actually a way back. Back to true intelligence
and to the teachings of the ancient mystery schools
where perennial wisdom was once taught to an elite.

Learning and Career

Creative career design is one of the most impor-
tant yet also one the most challenging tasks of civil
administration. It actually requires a joint coopera-
tion of government and industry so that workable so-
lutions can be implemented. This is even more so as
career design or generally professional formation is a
long-term endeavor. Educational structures are root-
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ed in social and cultural conventions and are there-
fore not easy to change. It takes a considerable effort
from the side of the decision-makers involved to
come up with creative new solutions.
Our times bring profound change in all areas of
life. Jobs get lost through structural changes on a
worldwide scale. Rebuilding the world economy
brings much suffering if educational needs are not
met in time.
One of the most urgent educational needs is a
closer connection between education and the indus-
try. That is where career design comes in. Creative
career design remodels education in a way to be
more flexibly adapted to the demands and expecta-
tions of the industry. This can for example be done
through implementing think-tank classes like The Art

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of Learning in the school system. In those classes no
specific skills are taught, but the how-to of learning.
Social scientists and psychologists agree that in the
future job changes will occur much more often in
our lives and careers as before. This brings about the
need to take up learning almost constantly during
one’s lifetime. Formerly, it was generally sufficient to
have learned one specific job or skill in order to sur-
vive as a craftsman or employee. Today and tomor-
row this is going to change drastically. Individual de-
velopment and social change are required today and
tomorrow at such a speed that there is certainty
about one thing only: that there will be change!
Laurence G. Boldt, a well-known career consul-
tant, stresses that most of his clients come to get a
ready-made solution for their career problems. Boldt

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says that most people lack initiative to see a wider
perspective of professional possibilities and do not
understand that it was their limited thinking much
more than a lack of specific skills that led to their
unemployment. On the other hand, Boldt found that
people can hardly be blamed for their apathy since
they come out of a highly rigid educational system
that is impregnated with the belief that once you
went successfully through the required stuff, you will
make it later on.
—See, for example, Laurence G. Boldt, Zen and the Art of
Making a Living (1993) and The Tao of Abundance (1999).

What we learn is at the end of the day far less im-

portant than how we learn what we learn, and what
we generally think about learning. Specialists agree
that those who rapidly acquire a wide perspective

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about opportunities, and who develop motivation
and excitement for new learning easily overcome re-
cession periods and find new ways of successful em-
ployment or even entrepreneurship. For example,
they may choose freelancing as a new and creative
possibility of earning their life.
Freelancing has gained widespread reputation be-
cause it is much better adapted to the quick changes
modern life brings along. Freelancing also ensures a
basically free and relatively creative professional life
without too many restraints and thus contributes to
an independent lifestyle.
On the other hand, the financial situation of the
freelancer typically is unstable and rather fluctuant.
But for many people, especially in creative profes-
sions such as creative writing, design, art, music pro-

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duction, consulting and nowadays telecommunica-
tions and networking, freelancing is preferred be-
cause it ensures space for creativity and inventive-
ness. Another quality freelancers must possess is ag-
gressiveness or toughness to market their product
through a morass of competing alternatives.
However, freelancing is not based on knowledge
we acquire in school. Much to the contrary, none of
the typical characteristics a successful freelancer
needs are taught in school. There is almost no em-
phasis, in traditional upbringing, upon indepen-
dence, nor on creativity or positive forms of aggres-
siveness or at least carefreeness. Yet, compared to
both employment and entrepreneurship, freelancing
is one of the fastest growing fields of professional re-
alization. 

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 Freelancing is also well suited to survive structur-
al change and diversification. Compared to employ-
ment, it offers a lot more freedom and space for cre-
ative impact on one’s life while it does not generally
require the huge financial investments that are typi-
cal for free entrepreneurship.
It is after all irresponsible from the side of gov-
ernments to stay with the outmoded and depleted
educational system. This system namely is fundamen-
tally inadequate to keep up with the present, and even
more so, the future requirements for successful and
satisfying professional endeavor. We are since long
beyond the times where governments educated peo-
ple to become either blissful soldiers or thankful
breeding machines for new offspring to be readily
killed in the next war or civil war.

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 Despite the urgent need for reform, governments
tend to cut costs at the frontline of education rather
than in military budgets or through bureaucracy re-
duction. This is why chances are that only through a
well-thought strategy of intervention from the side of
the industry itself, changes may occur on the gov-
ernment side.
Bureaucracies are not likely to initiate change
from inside out. Evolutionary processes therefore
have to take place from outside in, through consul-
tancy or through joint-ventures between government
and industry.
The first step in this process of structural change
would be to raise awareness about how and to what
extent a networked world and an international mar-
ketplace molds the human potential, and what we

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can learn from that. This is an assessment that is rela-
tively easy to be done. It will bring about the insight
that there is an amazing similarity of the human
qualities needed in modern market competition all
over the world, which are not dependent on culture,
race or social conditioning. Some of those qualities
are:
• Flexibility, adaptability
• Intellectual mobility
• Curiosity
• Ability to play with concepts
• Creativity and response-ability
• Integrity and commitment
• Readiness for change and personal growth
• Readiness for team work
• Readiness for sharing
• Interdependent thinking
• Understanding about networking and team leadership
• Readiness for stewardship
• Care and quality management
• Awareness of social, cultural and environmental factors

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 Individuals who possess these qualities can learn
any of the skills needed for the specific tasks they are
dealing with in their career. Skills are always at the
periphery of the personality whereas qualities are part
of our inside nature. Skills are built on qualities, and
not vice versa. Where there are no inner qualities,
skills may be trained but they will vanish because the
fertile ground for their growth is missing.
Typically, inner qualities are assembled in an atti-
tude. Hence, the importance of attitude training and
its superiority over mere skill-based training. Human
resources and endowments are often wasted because
this fundamental distinction is widely misunderstood
or even ignored in the business world. In my experi-
ence, in management training all over the world, the
general emphasis is on skills. However, the truth is

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that a person who is really dedicated and possesses
the right attitude will easily acquire the skills she
needs for realizing her inner qualities on an outside
level. 
Skills incarnate qualities and make them visible
reality. Before they can be learnt, a seed must be
planted inside. Qualities are these inner seeds. And
there must have been a growth process to let this
seed unfold.
Seen from this perspective, the obsession with in-
culcating skills seems almost grotesque, as if people
were discussing a lot about the color and furnish of a
new car they want to buy while they do not even
know if this car can be built and construed and made
available for purchase in their market economy.

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 Only a deep concern and commitment from the
top of both government and industry can bring
about a fundamental reform of the existing vocation-
al training. This must result in providing the funds,
in bringing the right people together, and in a consis-
tent implementation of the new career policies. It
cannot be done through quick fixes such as putting
computers in schools or stating in curricula that cre-
ative input from pupils should be encouraged and
valued. 
Only a holistic solution that is brought about in
joint cooperation by all decision-makers involved
will finally assure the victory over the deep crisis of
education we presently face. Here is a comprehensive
list of some of the changes that could and should be
implemented:

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—Joint operations between government and in-
dustry for the adaptation of education to modern
standards;

—A task-force that is jointly composed of gov-

ernment representatives, industry leaders and
consultants to work out operational solutions
that provide a high-quality and at the same time
flexible educational standard that allows gradu-
ates to adapt creatively to every possible profes-
sional challenge;

—Educational curricula to be worked out jointly

with industry experts, such as H.R. managers,
training consultants and teachers in order to en-
sure their effectiveness; 

—Curricula to be revised on a more consistent

and more frequent basis than ever before;

—Learning results measured more in terms of in-

tegrative and holistic thinking capacities and so-
lution-centeredness than measured in terms of
specific knowledge or skills;

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—Learning strategies implemented that focus on
the development of creativity and integrated or
parallel thinking capacities as an add-on to exist-
ing analytic and merely logical forms of thinking
training;

—Industry funding for educational innovations

from the rationale that the industry has a vivid
interest to sponsor more practice-oriented educa-
tional solutions; the higher the practical useful-
ness of graduates for the industry, the less train-
ing budget corporations have to spend on them;

—Job search offices or resource centers at every

school and university that provide service for
graduates to find a job, that organize regular
meetings with representatives of the industry, that
provide free writing facilities such as computers,
phone and fax connections, and C.V. writing ser-
vices for users.

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