Participants are naturally interested in learning, and when one constructs the idea that nothing can be learned from a group, one will naturally not attend. This group offers the opportunity to challenge one’s view of what new learning entails by expanding a socially sanctioned and conditioned one-dimensional view of learning into a multi-dimensional one.

1. The knowledge as commodity dimension: The tyrannically dominant left-brain imprints on us the view that learning is about acquiring new knowledge from a student’s perspective, or providing new knowledge from a teacher’s perspective. While this is one of the dimensions of learning, it is by no means the only one, yet routinely and quite unconsciously the only one driving people’s behaviour towards the expectation of learning. When this is the only dimension driving our search for knowledge, we remain impoverished, particularly because it restricts learning to a passive attitude. In other words, for successful learning 4 further dimensions of learning are essential and must be honed.
2. The knowledge as hidden potential dimension: The student’s tendency is to believe she does not know enough. For most people this belief in one’s own ignorance is of the toxic, not of the healthy sort. The healthy belief in one’s own ignorance is exemplified by Socrates’ insight that the only thing he knew was that he did not know anything. This is in fact what wisdom is all about – the realization that knowledge is always tentative, complex, contextual, evolving and miniscule in comparison to what reality really is. Unfortunately, students mostly believe they are ignorant in the sense of being lacking, stupid, not very competent and woefully unauthoritative. This toxic form of feeling ignorant forgets that we always know more than we think, that the organism that we are is far wiser than we can ever imagine and that we have an implicit wealth of savvy and knowledge we routinely do not know how to tap into. What becomes essential here is to learn to understand education in the etymological sense of the word as not a process of ‘in-ducation’ (from Latin ‘leading stuff into someone’), but ‘e-ducation’, meaning ‘fostering stuff to come out of someone’. Practically this means to attend this group with the intent of tapping into what you already know but fail to gain access to.
3. The knowledge as creation dimension: To learn also means to actively participate by taking the initiative to expose yourself, tapping into the courage of being a fool, and creating something new out of what you have. Only through this dimension can we activate new integrative neurofiring patterns that create new vistas, empower us to realize our own internal authority by mobilizing our internal archetypal teacher and ensure integrative growth.
4. The knowledge as beginner’s mind dimension: Paradoxically, the student who believes to be ignorant and does not attend a group of peers because he believes he won’t learn anything from peers who are not more advanced than him, also unconsciously limits himself by believing only more knowledge in the form of a commodity can be helpful. This student is like a full cup of tea into which one would want to add more tea – it will only spill over and be wasted. One must empty oneself, realize that to be wise means to be the eternal beginner, and discover in every peer who knows the same or less than you a wealth of untapped wisdom, the way we enjoy the spontaneously creative, immensely inspiring kookiness of a child. To the extent you realize the untapped wisdom in your peers, you also realize it in yourself. Every teacher’s Buddha is his students, like every parents’ Buddha is his child.
5. The knowledge as repetitive process dimension: Growth cannot occur through the acquisition of new knowledge alone. It must entail the dimension of practice and repetition. In the same way as memory retrieval is a memory modifier, repetition is never about the time-bound reoccurrence of sameness. Instead, it is about the timeless recreation of variations on an evolving theme. So we attend a group such as this also to repeat, repeat, repeat, discovering in every repetition a new dimension we never saw before.