Price And Value Of Learning
Why value has become currency, instead of attention.
In the modern world, people rarely trust what costs nothing.
Even learning—once the most natural act of human curiosity—has become a transaction.
There must be a price, a certificate, a teacher, a course, or a branded promise of transformation before it can be recognised as real. Without these markers, people grow uneasy. They mistake freedom for absence, and simplicity for lack.
Yet genuine learning was never meant to be bought. It arises from attention, not from curriculum.
It happens in the moment a man sees, feels, or understands something that was invisible to him before.
The discovery may cost him time, effort, or discomfort, but rarely money. And the exchange is always internal: awareness traded for old certainty.
The commodification of insight
The modern confusion between price and value is a symptom of a deeper displacement.
We have outsourced our sense of meaning to institutions—universities, coaches, therapists, and “programs”—that offer a packaged version of what was once freely available through experience and relationship.
When an encounter costs money, it feels legitimate; when it is freely offered, it feels suspicious.
The result is that most people no longer believe they can learn from life directly. They wait to be taught, accredited, and approved.
This commodification of insight has quietly eroded self-trust. A man no longer looks within to verify his knowing; he waits for a receipt. Even intimacy is now sold in courses, and silence is monetised as mindfulness. The market has replaced the monastery.
And so we have learned to associate learning itself with consumption—something to acquire, not to inhabit.
The act of paying attention
The Practice of Peace stands outside this logic. It does not sell knowledge; it creates conditions for awareness.
The fee is not a price for information but a small act of commitment, a way to remind a man that what he seeks cannot be passively received. Money, in this case, becomes a ritual token—a declaration of intent, not a purchase.
The real payment is the one made in attention: the willingness to show up, to be present, and to stay open when the mind wants to retreat.
Attention is the original currency. It is finite, precise, and personal. When a man gives it freely, without distraction or agenda, it changes what it touches.
A practice like this one is valuable not because it costs so many dollars, but because it costs an unguarded moment of his life.
That moment, once spent in full awareness, is worth everything.
Restoring the older meaning of education
The Latin educere—from which we draw education—means to lead out, not to fill up.
To educate was to draw something forth from within, not to insert new material.
In that older sense, the practice is an education in its purest form: it leads a man out of his noise, his armour, his ideas about who he should be, and back into his own living presence.
It does not add anything new; it reveals what was always there.
So the question is not what a man gets for his money, but what he gives his attention to.
If he spends it wisely—on stillness, on listening, on the quiet act of self-recognition—then he has already received more than he paid for. The value of such learning cannot be written on an invoice because it was never for sale.
