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Turning things around… creating a turning point
I have a potential turning point for how I teach and what I teach… I saw it yesterday.
It’s a potential turning point, because I am not sure I can do it. After all I would be teaching something I did not learn myself. So I don’t even know if it is teachable. But at least now I understand what is going on. Why the results are sporadic.
I’ll explain later, after the story… but let’s start with a story, OK?
I’ve been cooking regularly since I was eight or nine years old. Don’t remember the age, I only remember what I screwed up then. So I am a veteran when it comes to cooking. And a veteran to screwing up.
Something happened a few weeks ago. I learned a new word.
Aromatics. I recognized this word from Organic Chemistry… Yes, I went to school, and yes I learned what was taught. Didn’t you?
Onion, garlic, celery, even carrots… spices, herbs. All aromatics. All contain oil-like substance that has a strong smell… thus the word aromatics. Aroma = a pleasant smell.
Aromatics refer to vegetables and herbs that add flavor and aroma to a dish. When cooked together, these ingredients help create layers of flavor in your food.
Just like with everything, food can be looked at from many different vantage points. These vantage points are called, at least in this work, distinctions. They are, in effect, the frame you are looking through… and everything that you see in that frame relates to that particular frame…
So if we look through the frame of aromatics, everything we’ll see has something to do with the aroma.
Aromatics is a distinction. The common denominator, what they all share, is that they release an AROMA when they are cooked.
Aroma is a distinctive, typically but not necessarily a pleasant smell. And while individually they may not smell good, in combination it is heavenly
You can look at different cuisines through their use of aromatics.
You can estimate the sophistication of a country and its culture through their use of aromatics.
Today, instead of learning to cook, learning to use aromatics, people take a shortcut and go to a different country’s restaurant to eat… Almost every country’s ‘cuisine’ is boring, flat. And hard to enjoy more often than once a week.
Chinese, Tai, Indian… all those dishes, in the hands of a cook, taste the same after a while.
In the hands of a chef you can eat there every day and don’t get bored.
So there you are: another distinction: cook vs chef.
My cooking, on the other hand, just because of that one distinction, aromatics, has become explosively more enjoyable over the past few weeks.
Aromatics are like musical notes. You can create pentatone (boring) music with it, or you can create symphonies, musicals, rousing songs of love and loss…
Same with words…
Same with facial expressions…
Or the alphabet… 26 letters, millions of words and combinations.
Or information… all the raw material you can use.
The difference between a five star chef and a cook is simple: the chef has distinctions, the cook doesn’t. The cook follows a template. Cooks by a recipe.
At best the cook can smell and taste the difference between something good or not… But most cooks can’t even look at cooking differently, have no flexibility in their vantage points, have no distinctions, so they can’t tell why something tastes good or not.
Same in every area. Music, literature, acting. No distinctions.
You may have a kitchen without ingredients. You may have access to many ingredients, but don’t have any distinctions of cooking, you’ll put ketchup on everything, or follow a recipe. Repeat the words…
This is what has been happening in my classes: you repeat the words. but there is no substance behind the words. Nothing landed, nothing is useful, they are just words.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
You are boring and you are bored like the food you eat… Skin deep.
Now, about the turning point.
I have been finding out that the raw material I provide isn’t made useful knowledge by you.
You can only use them in the recipe it came up in… not everywhere.
The beauty of distinctions is really their nature of being like a letter of the alphabet. The letter c is useful in the word ‘crown’ and in the word ‘cloud’… it can make a word that’s a curse word, and a word that is godly.
Just like raw materials in the kitchen, you need to process the information to make it a distinction. Distinctions make ‘haute cuisine’, really good food.
It is the job of the cook, not the job of the vendor who sells the raw materials. Raw materials, in my case information.
You may think you can cook, but you learned to make the dish. You did not learn cooking.
Unless you know and are masterful at the basic techniques of cooking, you are not a chef. You have not mastered distinctions.
I challenged one of my students to learn to cook. She misunderstood. She thought I said: be able to prepare some dishes for herself.
But I said: learn to cook. The distinctions of cooking… So you can play ‘cooking’ like a violin.
An interesting story: yesterday I learned that the Michelin guide with its star system wasn’t created to guide people to eat good food. Instead it was created to make people drive to longer distances to restaurants rated, so they use up their tires. Michelin was and is a tire company after all. The more you drive your car, the more tires they sell.
So back to the aromatics:
unless you have that as a distinction… unless you actually know that the aroma doesn’t release unless the aromatic is taken to near burning in some fat, you end up with the tasteless slop most Americans, German, Dutch, British, Russian, Irish eat… Probably there are more, I just haven’t eaten in every country…
And you’ll put cheese, and French fried onion, and mushroom soup in dishes, and post a youtube video proud of your prowess to make tasteless slop have some taste… ugh.
I am watching the vegan wannabes imitating meat… but even meat is only tasty if it is prepared like an aromatic…
I recommended that she starts with just onions and garlic… and takes that to mastery… observe her attitude, her body language, the angle between her body and the cutting board…
Because you can’t cook well with a shitty attitude.
It can take months, years to mastery.
But once you have ONE distinction, you are well on your way. Now you know what you are aiming at. Until now… you have had no idea.
You can’t work on everything and hope that you’ll end up with distinctions!
But how you do anything is how you do everything… If you are only as deep as a puddle, you’ll spread yourself thin.
Alas, you have never been taught to ‘cook’ information into enjoyable and useful ‘dishes’… and if I ever wanted to make a difference, I may have to teach you myself.
Teach you to see. Teach you the difference between a local truth and a universal truth. The difference between working from a recipe and inventing Life…
The name of this ‘seeing’ activity is called, I think, critical thinking. Not because it accepts or rejects the information, as one would think from the word ‘critical’. It is more like critical because if it is missing, the information isn’t processed.
OK I made that up. Critical thinking is taking yourself off automatic, and look through the ‘structure for fulfillment’ I taught in the Drink your Food challenge.
The fourth step of that structure is the question: what action will you take… What FIRST action.
Will you, after learning about the Structure FOR Fulfillment, go back to gut feelings? Or do the easiest action? The hardest?
If and when you get that the Structure FOR Fulfillment is a structure to fulfill anything, including deciding what is your first action, what is your second… You start using it. It is, for achievement, is as crucial as aromatics are for good tasting, enjoyable food.
One of the distinctions people are gleaning from the Drink your Food challenge is BEING PRESENT… or presence…
It’s a distinction. You can look at anything and everything, and anyone, any time, and see if they are present… or if they are somewhere in the past, in the future, but not with what they are doing.
No matter what is your FIRST distinction, LIFE turns to a more favorable direction, if you just keep on looking through the frame the distinction gives you.
My articles, my videos, my courses. Chunks of raw material. not useful.
So I am still learning how to teach you to look through a distinction. I was born able to do this. So I never had to learn it.
In the Drinking your Food challenge I integrated new information with unfamiliar activity.
So far it has performed beyond expectation…
It’s the first time. It is new. Because it is based on a thinking skill.
And because chewing your food AND your beverages forces you to be present… your thinking ability is kicking in…
It is now apparent that you cannot think unless you are present.
What you have been considering thinking wasn’t… It was treading water for the most part.
None of my students have had this thinking skill.
Critical thinking may be the number one skill to achieve anything in any area of life.
And my hunch is: those who have it don’t think that others don’t.
I found a pdf on critical thinking… I have managed to read half of it and then my attention wondered, and I missed the next four sentences.
But my intention was to teach it, like I was taught the letters… the teacher was holding my hand holding the pencil as WE made the circles over and over, to form the letter o. Distintion ‘o’.
Creating a muscle-memory-like phenomenon, when no thinking is needed for knowing or doing.
From that pdf it is clear that most of us are not taught, not trained, not even shown critical thinking.
It seems that an activity that develops critical thinking is an activity where you are forced to use it…
I am reading Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, and he credits being on the debate team, and doing Dale Carnegie’s public speaking course. I would say that maybe attending and working Toastmaster’s can be very useful too.
Myself, I have used learning through teaching. I have been doing this since the fifth grade. It has sharpened my critical thinking abilities.
My methodology since this insight has been the challenges.
Challenges are looking through a distinction, and doing it long enough that the frame lands as a distinction.
Distinctions don’t benefit from explanations. They only benefit from actual distinguishing.
I may still write my regular articles, but my main effort will be to teach (at least a handful of people) the minimum of critical thinking so they can actually benefit from what they see and hear.
We have started with the idea that what you say about reality creates a personal reality… full of shoulds and ought-tos, and havetos, and needtos, and wants. Then we graduated to framing, thee sideways view, and then attitude.
So far not many people managed to get out of their own way… They can see what I ask them to see, but they don’t see it as a frame, as something to look through, as a distinction… Whether it is being present, or the structure for fulfillment, or any of the things I ask them to look through.
But with the Drink your Food challenge it is subtly changing. I always KNEW that unless people work on something, they can’t learn anything new or different than what got them to where they are.
Is there a DNA capacity that if it is not on, you can’t do it?
Not a gene specifically. But in my experience, one needs to be willing to feel stupid, a beginner. One needs to WILLING to stop trying to prove that they are smart. Stop explaining, stop justifying, stop avoiding domination, the things they normally do. Being willing to do the things that got them where they are now.
Doing any of that is counterproductive. Doing any of that works against allowing the brain muscles to learn to do what they have never done.
Do I have anything that makes being willing easier? Yes. The Big Bundle. It is an energy audio that you play directly into the ears. The energy makes Consciousness aware that what is going on is important. It makes the brain aware that something unusual is happening, so it pays attention. So the brain can tell the muscles to stop fighting. So it can tell the fear and the anxiety to go away.
I use it, on my ears, nowadays 24/7. I am, and my teaching is now moving again… And I can connect dots that never connected for me before.
Get the Big BundlePS: here is a link to the video that created the distinction aromatics for me
Although I have been able to cook, learning new ways to do the same thing, new ways that may be more effective has been a real eye opener for me. I also saw that seeing this way now as the be all, end all is the next big mistake I can make.
Who would have thought I’d learn so much from watching a video. On cooking.
PPS: I think I have managed to make the Drink your Food challenge evergreen…
It hasn’t been tested, but the signup link is now active again.
