I have shared with you in my previous article all the juicy principles I gleaned from my conversation with the student who hated the idea to become proud of his ancestral heritage.
But I had one insight that, for me, was worth a lot more than the rest of the two hour long conversation.
I actually saw, for the first time, why my decision to accept being stupid, was so dramatically effective for me.
When you live your life inside smart and stupid… you live inside a circumstance.
You don’t have much to say about your abilities… I mean, it is true that if you hydrate your cells, you get smarter. It is true that if you make peace between your two selves with the Unconditional Love Activator: you become smarter.
But no matter what you do, no matter what, that ability will be circumstantial to you.
What is circumstantial is not an inner value.
What I see missing for people mainly is knowledge. Accurate knowledge.
Especially for people who think they are smart, only to go into deep despair when they think what life is telling them that they are not.
When I took my eyes off my ability, smart/stupid, I had a whole new world open up for me.
The world of growing. The world of seeing. The world of increasing myself on the inside.
When you think you are smart, you think that what you see is accurate, and that you see the whole picture. And you think you know what is the meaning — based on those beliefs.
It doesn’t even occur to you that what you see is inaccurate, and that you don’t see the whole picture. It never occurs to you.
And then what happens is that all your meanings, all your emotions, all your attitudes are based on something that is not accurate or not complete.
And life proves that the meaning you made up was not what you saw meant.
You automatically go to question your mental capabilities, but the issue is not there. You have vast areas in your knowledge base that are empty. Nothing there.
When I publish an article I often watch who is reading, and connect to their emotions. Obviously I don’t know what else is going on… but often I can feel their emotional reaction to the article.
Most of the time it is despair. Despair over finding out that they are not smart enough… because they missed something, or didn’t understand.
But the truth is that it had nothing to do with smarts.
We may all agree that Bill Gates is mart. But in an area where he knows nothing, he is going to sound stupid… so is he smart or stupid?
Neither. He is knowledgeable in one area, and ignorant in others.
Where Bill Gates may be different from you is this: because he knows that his results come from his many distinctions… he will suspect that in the area where he is ignorant, he lacks distinctions.
So what does he do? He’ll find an expert and start gathering distinctions, if it is important to him to get results in that new area.
He will also suspect that it will take work. Maybe years. And every time he thinks he knows already, he will be on a new level of ignorance: maybe worse than he was before.
Some soul corrections have a worse time than others with this.
The attitude that can be helpful is humility.
The way this, humility, was worded in a training program I did around the time when I decided that being stupid is a good thing, back in 1987 and again in 1996, went like this:
Declare yourself incompetent in the matter of this course. That way you open yourself up to be trained.
Incompetent is a combination of ignorant and not knowing how to do something…
I luckily had no problem declaring myself to be incompetent. I could see that it was not a judgment call. I could see that it was an act of power: creating space for learning.
Because for me nothing beats creating space for learning. I am a learning machine.
What about you? Can you, instead of trying to prove that you are smart, can you declare yourself ready to learn? Having nothing to prove?
