The first steps into the unknown have been taken.

We have clarified our purpose and considered how to navigate this new landscape. We have also adopted a reality-seeking attitude and begun to look for other ways of moving with the help of the imagination. A first step has been to recognise our fears as an urge to turn away from reality, to distract ourselves from the what is going on right now.

So we want instead to turn towards the present, to become better able at discerning what will help us on our journey. We want to learn how to move differently.

This opens up the question of learning: how do we learn new ways of moving when we have found ourselves conditioned to make the same mistakes again and again? Do we need to unlearn certain ways of moving before we can learn to move differently? Are there better ways of learning or any requirements for learning well?

How do we learn to learn?

The best answer to this broad question is probably that we suspend our habits and bring our full attention and abilities to bear on the moment and whatever we want to learn. But if we want to say something more about how we become good at learning we will have to meander through some of our assumptions about the nature of learning and observe what encourages us to learn.

First, to inquire about these questions it is be helpful to make a distinction between learning as the replication of a rule that exist outside ourselves – a transfer of an idea, a sign, a geometry or a function between two minds – and learning as a natural ability that follows from being a living creature and that has no beginning or end.

The first view of learning can be found in most schools. The teacher says "A for Ape" and the students repeat. In time they learn that apes can be both subjects and objects depending on the order of the sentence in which they appear. And that such order is structured by grammatical rules. In this context it is supposed that learning is a kind of accumulation of knowledge about apes and rules of grammar within a person's mind or a brain. Depending on the inbuilt capacities of brains they are supposed to have different potentials for learning.

We can call this a linear model of learning where information is supposed to pass unidirectionally from one brain to another. This model involves two key roles or players: one of a teacher who knows something and another of a neophyte who acquires the knowledge of the teacher. This caricature of learning as the accumulation of discrete knowledge in the neophyte brain is obsolete and not what concerns us here.

The second view of learning encompasses the narrow view of the linear model but sees learning as an ability that is innate to all of life.

So before we inquire further about human learning it is worth briefly to consider learning as a general capacity of living organisms. What does it mean to say that an ape or a tree or even a cell learns?

To approach an answer to this question requires some sort of heuristic or idea of what learning means. Without attempting a long-winded definition condensed from educational theories let's consult Wikipedia:

"Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information."

Acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviour or values.

Synthesising information.

With the help of Gregory Bateson we can bastardise this definition a little to "being able to respond appropriately to news of difference".

This acknowledges Bateson's understanding that "perception operates only upon difference" and that "all receipt of information is necessarily news of difference". Likewise, the idea of an "appropriate response" builds on his basic insight that the ability to create patterns out of information or 'news of difference' enables the perceiver to anticipate and respond to similar news in a different context.

In this articulation of learning the word appropriate is important as it makes all the difference between learning and not learning. Learning involves an ability to respond creatively beyond a conditioned or mechanical reaction – in a way that is appropriate to contexts we are unfamiliar with. An appropriate response is not necessarily achieved at once, it is often a longer process of experimenting, observing and modifying behaviours in relation to the environment.

This heuristic allows an explanation of the notion that learning is innate to all of life.

That all of life has an ability to pick up contextual news of difference and adapt responses accordingly is not a radical position – it is accepted that bacteria learn and have the ability to anticipate the future. And as life forms grow more complex so do their avenues of response.

The understanding of living organisms as 'autopoietic', self-regulating entities that are able to maintain their pattern of organisation while undergoing changes in structure, helps us to see how learning is a fundamental capacity in all life forms. Fritjof Capra provides a basic description of this insight in The Web of Life:

"As a living organism responds to environmental influences with structural changes [self-renewal and creation of new internal connections in the organism], these changes will in turn alter its future behavior. In other words, a structurally coupled system [an organism that interacts continually with its environment] is a learning system. As long as it remains alive, a living organism will couple structurally to its environment. Its continual structural changes in response to the environment – and consequently its continuing adaptation, learning and development – are key characteristics of living beings."

While this technical language provides us only with an abstract notion of learning within living organisms it provides a stepping stone to a radically different view of learning than the linear model: it posits that life has an inherent creative tendency (which it substantiates by describing evolution as movement of creating novelty through mutation, gene 'trading' and symbiosis). Beyond telling us something about how learning can be considered a shared characteristic of all of life this perspective also tells us something about the fundamentals of the world we inhabit. Far from a clockwork universe it is a place in continual transformation, teeming with creativity and characterised by interdependence and relationship (more on this will follow in a future Refiguration).

If learning is a capacity of all of life it is reasonable to expect that we have something like an instinct for learning. We know how to learn without having to problematise it. In encouraging learning it may therefore be much more important to create the right circumstances for connecting with that instinct than to follow a particular method. If we already know how to learn maybe the first thing to do is to get out of the way of learning with all our procedures and theorising.

So without wanting to set forth a method we can use our heuristic that learning is the ability to respond appropriately to news of difference to help us understand more about the conditions that encourage learning.

First of all, contextual news of difference are perceived. Perception is at the heart of learning not just in terms of enabling learning through the senses but as a power that can be refined. Learning can in this way be seen as a coming into awareness of finer details and greater granularity than we knew before – as an increasing perceptual sensitivity to the world which enables our response: moving from seeing only a blank plane to sensing tiny ripples and currents on a surface. We need first to become aware that there is more than the blankness that initially presents itself to us and when we then direct our attention to it we may gradually begin to experience a pattern on the surface.

Also, we can say that we learn better when the flow of news is unmediated and truthful. If the news are not authentic our response is unlikely to be appropriate.

And more news are only better up to a point. Understanding the meaning of news of difference depends on our sensitivity to subtlety rather than having the right amount of information. While more news allow us to widen our perspectives, too much news become noise and can drown out the most important signals.

Finally, context makes all the difference. Learning is context dependent and the circumstances of the context are decisive for picking up the relevant news and being able to respond. As the saying goes you only learn to swim in water. But the size of the waves – the noise, personal pressure, disturbances, etc. – are crucial for the possibility of learning anything at all. If the waves are too big the experience can end up becoming traumatic.

But context does not merely mean 'learning environment'.

Context – understood as the totality of relationships in which the information we receive is embedded – gives information its very meaning. In this sense, 'information' is not an independent 'fact' about the world. It is a signal of difference which only makes sense the way it does because it is found within a stable but complex context which – for humans – includes cultural conventions, linguistic dispositions, perceptual limitations and conceptual frameworks. As Werner Herzog shows so cogently in The Flying Doctors of East Africa, perception varies between cultures: where most Westerners see a symbolic representation of an 'eye' other cultures see something entirely different – if anything at all. Learning to see an eye is not just a matter of decoding information, it is about acquiring an understanding of the whole context which gives information its meaning.

(From a philosophical point of view it is necessary to issue a warning about the inadequacy of the concept of 'information': in a strict sense there is no information. This is already an abstraction which comes with a certain set of assumptions derived from a computational view of cognition: a separate individual receiving 'informational facts' from an independent world – and a similar criticism can be made of the abstraction of living organisms as 'systems'. We need to treat these concepts with care not to slip back into the linear model. 'Information' is used here as a short hand for the perception of difference in the environment.)

When we establish a pattern for certain kinds of news we begin to become competent in that area of life. We then quickly recognise the meaning of more news of this kind and can respond more effectively. However, learning doesn't really end anywhere: although our previous experience gives us ground for anticipating the future we need to remain open to adjust our expectations. Most of us master the skill of walking but it isn't hard to think of circumstances where it would be unwise to assume we didn't need to adapt our competence.

This sort of adjustment of previous experience to news of difference is where the action is when it comes to enabling an appropriate response. Learning is the cycle of going through this sort of adjustment in response to new experiences. Bohm describes this process and the frame of mind that is conducive to learning in the following way:

"… real perception that is capable of seeing something new and unfamiliar requires that one be attentive, alert, aware and sensitive. In this frame of mind, one does something (perhaps only to move the body or handle an object), and then notes the difference between what actually happens and what is inferred from previous knowledge. From this difference, one is led to a new perception or a new idea that accounts for the difference. And this process can go on indefinitely without beginning or end, in any field whatsoever".

When learning occurs – when an appropriate response to news of difference is discovered – an organism becomes able to build new relationships and participate in new contexts. While the outcomes of learning are not always constructive – nuclear bombs! – we can see how learning as an evolutionary force generates new complexity and order by creating novel behaviour and new associations within the community of life. Which leads us to the question: how can we engage with learning as a force that aligns us with the creative force of life?

This question is not a question of method. How do I do A to achieve B? It is a question which asks us why do we feel a need to align with 'life' in the first place? What are my motives for this journey? It is a question that asks us to clarify our purpose. It is a question about our deepest values.

If learning is inherent to living organisms and we can honestly declare allegiance to life itself – not to Life as an abstract idol but to the experience of being alive and to all of life's manifestations – the question becomes: how do we practice learning as an activity that does not oppress our inherent creativity or intelligence but sets it free?

The simple answer is that we avoid to enter into relationships which suppress our creativity or intelligence. If we have an inherent tendency towards learning by virtue of being alive we don't need anything but trust in our own being in order to learn.

This inkling was developed by Joseph Jacotot into a "universal teaching" two hundred years ago: to learn something and to relate to it all the rest by this principle: all men have equal intelligence (as described by Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster). This is a radical challenge to the notion of a hierarchy of intelligence inherent to the linear model of learning where knowledge passes from a knowing teacher to an unknowledgeable student. Jacotot's discovery that we can teach what we don't know proved to him that there is no information passing from one brain or intelligence to another. Rather, intelligence is "the power to make oneself understood through another's verification" and learning is simply what happens when an intelligence is active of its own volition.

So what happens when we willingly engage with another intelligence to learn from its experience?

From our observations about authenticity and equality of intelligence we can see that trust is a necessary condition for learning from others' experience. If we trust that another intelligence is helping our learning without oppressing our inherent creativity, we can benefit from our extraordinary ability to enter the experience of others through the imagination in order to learn. While learning is experiential, our imagination can help us get a sense of what an experience is like. We will then be able to verify this for ourselves through our own experience and judge how certain news of difference correspond with reality.

This sort of verification is crucial when it comes to learning from others' experience. We need to be careful not to confuse stories or lessons about experience with learning itself. I haven't learned to cycle just because I know the instructions about how to use a bicycle by heart.

Here's an example from a recent experience. A woman who has not given birth may learn what birthing is like through stories about birth and in this way come to a greater understanding of different aspects about birthing. But to know birth she has to go through it – all the various stories she has heard then come to fit (or not) into her actual experience of labour, the separation from her child and the resulting physical and psychological changes. As she experiences what the stories tried to convey, her awareness expands and the reality of birth deepens for her.

Learning has been a deepening of her perception of reality.

The stories – representations of experience in words – she heard about birth may have been more or less helpful. If the stories didn't fit with the experience and were not able to guide her actions in birthing they have not been helpful. They are removed from her actual experience.

We can see that there is a limit to the power of secondhand news: thoughts about experience (symbolic representations of reality) can never convey the fullness of firsthand experience. Secondhand news is likely to lead to expectations about what something is like and the formation of expectations quickly becomes counterproductive: it distracts us from what is actually going on.

We should not confuse learning with the formation of expectations based on stories about other people's experience. Clearly, stories help us imagine what something is like and make it easier for us to tune into news of difference. But if the point is learning we should be careful not to swamp our attention with anticipation. For learning to happen we have to move away from theory and conceptions into experience.

This example also shows that we should be careful about who we listen to when we want to learn what something is like. Knowing about something can be very far from actually knowing: those who have experience are the real experts. And there is a gradient to learning: not everyone can move down that gradient to the same extent. Being a man I will never be able to know birthing like a mother does.

We can now say a little more about how we can learn to learn and provide some preliminary answers to our questions.

Our conditioning and disposition towards making the same mistakes can be seen as a lack of the kind of sensitivity and awareness that is needed to perceive news of difference and adjust our expectations or behaviour. Like being on autopilot when we need to respond creatively to our condition. Learning to move differently is therefore not so much a question of simply acquiring a new kind of move. It is a question of first getting good at 'real perception', as Bohm calls it. It requires that we stand still before we move, calm our urge to act and take a good look at our circumstances. What led us here? Are there particular moments we can identify and remember so that we can pick up an early warning next time?

So we do need to unlearn something before we can learn to move differently. But not in the way that the linear model would propose: if one action leads to the wrong result we simply stop that action and try another one until we get the result we want or need. Because if we don't have the necessary sensitivity we are aiming blindly – we wouldn't be able to "account for the difference" in outcomes. What we need to unlearn are the habits or dispositions that lead us to pattern news of difference inappropriately – and this requires patience and presence.

Our observations also suggest that there are right conditions and better ways of learning. We should avoid entering into relations where there is an implicit inequality of intelligence. We should consult only those we trust and who have experience. We should be mindful of our own motives and attitude. We should get out of our own way and avoid problematising what we want to learn. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to allow mistakes: they are the basis for our being able to make adjustments to our expectations.

This last point reflects something to us about the context of the wider culture in which we are trying to learn: in an environment where the ultimate measure is 'success' and where mistakes are dismissed as 'failures', it will be impossible to learn anything if we don't disabuse ourselves of many of the cultural norms we have been inculcated with. This realisation is the foundation for the journey we are undertaking and we will need to accept this position on the fringe of cultural expectations.

Refining our sensitivity to news of difference will help us learn more generally. It will make it easier for us to discern and confront those habits that block our creativity and begin moving differently through cycles of experimentation and adaptation. Learning 'real perception' strengthens our ability to respond appropriately to news of difference in all areas of life. We can call this a non-linear mode of learning in contrast with the linear mode of learning where the 'output' from one brain is proportional to the 'input' in another. And where the linear model focuses on discrete knowledge and facts, the non-linear mode sees knowledge as relational: we perceive (dis)similarities across contexts which begin to form part of a larger pattern.

Leaping forward, we can begin to sense the meaning of the notion that "everything is in everything". One thing is because another is what it is. Rather than a world of separate objects and beings we can sense an inter-connected world where everything is participating in a larger pattern or order.

The question that meets us as we move through this world of patterns is: how does my movement fit within this larger flow of patterns?

Does what I am doing integrate me with the surrounding world or separate me from it?

Can I learn to move with the world?

If learning is inherent to our being we won't need first to learn a method or a strategy to do this. We need to get out of the way and avoid trying too hard. To turn towards the moment. To be sensitive to it. And then to respond. With time and practice we will learn the most appropriate response.