“And the truth shall make you free.”¹ Free to consider , to act, to think , to perceive rightly, to be beyond the reach of—all that and more are implied in the words of the Apostle. In that single sentence are two of the most precious words of the human species, if not the most treasured words, linked in a conditional proposition. Similar words are to be found in various revelation texts around the world. But we must be cautious here, for the word “truth” is a difficult word when reiterated in this world, caught up in much history, and for which terrible sacrifices have been made; so is the word “freedom.” What then is this “truth” that is said to be the causa principalis of freedom, yet another uncertain signifier? We can perhaps state with some confidence what it is not. It is certainly not some mental idea or logical conclusion; it is not a description or representation; nor is it instilled in ritual or liturgy. All of these might confer power, but they bring us nowhere near being “free.” Rather the word “truth” here has the ring of a singularity, of something unique and unprecedented that will bring about a new existential condition. Neither freedom nor truth can be imagined; they have to be felt or realized deep within the sarco-pneumatic composite—the so-called organism. The upsurge of the intelligible activated by the Word-made-Flesh, as implied in the apostolic lines above, has this patent imprint of embodied truth. It is primal ontology. But there is also another element that hovers over that statement, making it tremble with the weight of the Unknown, for which I do not have a better word than Love. The string of signifiers maintains its truth through Love. How so? Locating the “you” within the economy of freedom does not make being-free an attribute of the subject. Rather, there is a direct translation of the subject into freedom. Etymology supports this contention. The proto-German friaz meant “beloved,” and Old English freogan meant also “to love.” Freedom thus becomes a bearing of Love toward what is.

Ontological bearing, or the orientation toward what is, is simultaneously both an intuitive-corporeal grasp of the cosmological condition of organismic presence, as well as an immanent ethicality, a respond-ability, with regard to presence—the concurrent incidence of freedom and truth. Therefore one might infer that the necessary and sufficient condition of moral action—such as, for example, education—is the quest for, and the co-arising of, freedom and truth, which results in the alignment of the microcosm with the macrocosm, or the collective psyche with the cosmic soma. From essence we derive bearing, and from such bearing, ethical action; and herein lies the relevance of ontological study for education. The highest ethical and educational aim, across cultures, is to be a light unto oneself. But this “light” correctly understood is not something metaphoric, personal, cultural, temporal, or epistemic. It is rather an ontological luminescence, an intuition of the numinous, directly and corporeally apprehended. It is the unprecedented turn of the being toward Being. Thus ethics, ontological effort, and education are seen to be a tightly knit bloc of existentials. Ontology is in reciprocal relation to the ethical, and their suchness, in turn, awaken the right spirited educative effort. Without ontological search, education becomes random, rudderless, and joins the procession of vanities that is a hallmark of bankrupt cultures.

Therefore the question is certainly not ‘what gets ontology and education to be spoken of in the same breath’; the question is, rather, ‘when and in what manner did they grow apart in the first place?’ How have we forgotten to contemplate the idea of the origin? Why is it that we go about our business in amnesia, oblivious of the central puzzle of our existence? Moreover, how did we forget that we have forgotten? It is part of the central thesis of the present work that an educational effort which is divorced from the direct contemplation of such questions as ‘what are we?’ or ‘how shall we live?’ or ‘what is the true meaning and purpose of action?’ or ‘what is our relation with all that is?’ is ultimately futile. It is futile not in the ordinary sense of the word, signifying the quality of being useless; for uselessness or usefulness is commonly judged by an already truncated quality of existence. It is futile in the sense that education without ontological questioning is rather like ‘polishing the tables on the Titanic,’ as the saying goes; while the tables might get shinier, the total endeavor sinks, slowly but definitively.² In order to counter this “entropy”—using a scientific metaphor—or the universal principle of dissipation, ontologically sensitive pedagogy must maintain the search for the truth of Being, which alone bestows negentropic meaning upon the existential status of organized beings. We must refuse doctrine, but we cannot turn away from inquiry into embodied truth without crippling our endeavor as educators.

In the opening lines, we began with a reference to essence. An ontological inquiry might begin with the most fundamental of all questions: What is there? Or, what ‘there-ness’ can we presume in order to even frame an ontological question? Further, to stretch it in the direction of education, we might ask: what is the relevance of the ‘there-being’ in the preparation of the student for a life? In the East, for instance, upon a time, the mandate of ontological inquiry as part of education was as insistent as daylight. Consciousness of discrete things (representation) had to be balanced by the intuition of the ultimate existential principle—pure being or the ground of consciousness itself (without conceptual distortion). ‘Be a light unto yourself’ was not merely a metaphorical exhortation. The light of being must begin to burn within oneself; the inner lamp must be lit. The outward sun was but a reminder of the possibility of dissipating inner darkness. But how was this cosmological pedagogy in general to be practiced? To put it differently, what is the starting point of the reconsideration of commonplace relations in the development and nurturing of ontological intuition? Let us begin with that question.

One of ontology’s basic assumptions is that the whole truth of existence is not revealed in discrete phenomena, and that there is a totality of meaning (noumena) in a purely qualitative dimension beyond common sense appearances that holds consciousness together. For a reasonable account of the relation between appearances and that which might lie beyond appearances, traditionally one relied on the accounts of the sages and the philosophers, for the ontological does not disclose itself readily. And while the sages insisted there is, the common man asked ‘where’? In other words, although self-nature is the most intimate non-thing, its direct intuition, in general, was the most difficult precisely due to its transparency and non-thing-ness.³ Therefore, it was well understood, that the awakening of intuition in this direction would require careful pedagogical work and nurturing, otherwise one remained in amnesia and the turbulence of the common sense. This pedagogical work included clearing the ground with adequate concepts about the ultimate nature of reality. To give an example, commenting on the opening verse of the Isha Upanishad,⁴ the Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo writes:

The Sanscrit word jagat [world] is in origin a reduplicated & therefore frequentative participle from the root gam to go. It signifies “that which is in perpetual motion”, and implies in its neuter form the world, universe, and in its feminine form the earth. World therefore is that which eternally vibrates, and the Hindu idea of the cosmos reduces itself to a harmony of eternal vibrations; form as we see it is simply the varying combination of different vibrations as they affect us through our perceptions & establish themselves to the concept. So far then such analysis has reached to the last & simplest material expression of this complex universe.⁵

In terms of ultimate materiality, the ancient sages, not unlike present day scientists who speak of ‘waves,’ found no materia prima other than universal motion, and behind it pulsations and oscillations. As for sense objects, these were deduced to be “varying combinations” and conditioned agglutinations of different vibrations. But vibrations of what, or, in what medium? That question is, of course, non sequitur today. It has long been established that electro-magnetic waves, for example, do not requir...