Arrogance is your mind saying that you already know everything there is to know
No matter what level of the vibrational scale you are, your aspects will do what your aspects do. The difference is how YOU will behave, how you will react to it.
I have been observing it for a while. It has become predictable. And yet, I am still always surprised.
The mind, every time I find out something, distinguish something, predictably says: “OK, Now I really know everything.”
It is both annoying and funny. Especially if you consider that since age three your mind has been preventing you, discouraging you to learn anything important, and you’ve never caught up.
Try to explain something to a three-year old and the answer is always: I know. Now, when you are the adult, you can see how ridiculous it is, because they can’t know. You know they don’t know. They don’t know that they don’t know. The mind is speaking and the mind always thinks it already knows everything there is to know.
Of course, you find yourself ineffective in life, you need a degree here, a degree there, and reluctantly you go and get it, but are you learning anything? Most of the time you don’t. Or not really.
The information you learn is just that, information, all of the learning takes place outside of the mind.
I am fortunate to have picked a field of study where everything your mind knows is literally irrelevant. If you are new, I studied to be an architect and practiced for 17 unhappy years.
Now, returning to arrogance, let us redefine what arrogance is, so you can catch it and so you can counter it with your behavior when you catch it.
Arrogance is your mind saying that you already know everything there is to know
Because the mind is not in touch with any aspect of the world, or reality, it thinks itself independent, and its stored data all of it. All there is to know.
Result: you walk around in life looking at only what you recognize, and missing everything else. You don’t even consider looking at what you don’t recognize, after all how could it be relevant, after all you already know everything.
You may have questions, initially, but later on all your questions will be inside what you already know: this is why so many people are incarcerated who didn’t know what they were accused with doing, and so many people never got caught.
This is why you never have what you want, because to get it, you would have to look.
I’d like to retell the story of the guy from the crappy book of Napoleon Hill. 1
Although millions have read this book, and I have heard the story countless times, I didn’t actually see what the real lesson is from it, the lesson that can only be seen from the distinction “arrogance.”
You see, at any one point in your journey, you think you know where you are. But in fact you don’t. Why? because for the most part you don’t look for clues to where you are. And the reason you don’t look for or you don’t see the clues, because you don’t know how to.
In the 3-feet story, the experienced gold explorer saw, from the clues he could see, that he was doomed, so he sold the land.
The “junk man” saw that making a decision based on insufficient or poorly analyzed data is for arrogant fools, so he hired an expert who could see what was under the ground, where no expert can see with the naked eye. 2
You are looking from your mind, and your mind thinks it knows everything. It makes a decision based on what you know and see, it doesn’t suggest that you get more clues.
All your decisions are based on incomplete information. You could complete it, partially, just looking a little bit more, and all of it by getting someone to look who is an expert.
Stupid as the stupid does. This sentence from Forrest Gump is very wise. It says: when you do something stupid, then you are stupid. But the label “stupid” is never true.
When you aren’t looking, when you make decisions to quit, to buy, to marry, to invest, to continue, based on incomplete information, then you are always stupid.
I have learned this through self-observation. It never feels good to catch yourself red-handed being stupid, but it is always useful. First: you can see that you have made this same type of mistake many times before, but you never caught it. Second: you can see that you can expect to make this type of mistake again, unless you learn from your mistake, and are willing to look longer, and better: to get clearer on what you see.
And that will take some distinguishing.
Now, if you would, give me examples where you quit early and later you discovered that you could have win, had you not quit… please?
- The story of Mr. Darby, the gold explorer who gave up on mining the ore because he unknowingly had hit a fault line—3 feet beyond which lay the vein full of gold gave me pause. The ironic part of the story is that Mr. Darby then sold his drill to a “junk man” who hired an expert about fault lines and continued to drill to become a millionaire from Mr. Darby’s mine.
- Now, this expert, when he went to school, learned information, but it became knowledge only when he applied that knowledge.
Dear Sophie:
I don’t have the precise kind of example you are asking for. What I have is an example of a fixed mindset. As you know, I quit architecture school. One thought that plagued me for a while was the idea that because I was not good at math, that I would never understand the engineering aspect of architecture. I said to myself: “Because I do not love the engineering aspect of architecture and do not have a command of it, I will never be a great architect like Frank Lloyd Wright.” Who know how much of that is true? Yes, an engineer-architect like Pier Luigi Nervi or Santiago Calatrava have some edge. You can also hire an engineer.
And now, I am an okay singer and songwriter and guitar player. I hate practicing and learning new stuff. The difference here is that I have already dedicated the next 20 years of my life to this pursuit. I don’t know how it’s going to look, and I might stink the whole way through. I can work on my singing and writing and team up with a great player, who knows? There is a way.