How Do You Know What You Know?
If you deposit money in an interest-bearing account, and leave it there, the power of compound interest will increase your capital. If the interest out-paces inflation, you have a sure-fire approach to wealth over time.
If you constantly, daily, seek to improve yourself by 1%, you are looking to improve in ways that outpace age and time. If you do, you constantly improve your physical, emotional, and financial wealth over time. Just a tiny improvement daily will, over time, produce…MAGIC.
But the opposite is true as well. If you make just a tiny mistake daily, and compound over time, you will lose yourself, and have no idea how you got lost. This is where the questions: “Who am I?” and “What is True?” are so damned important.
You have to know how you know what you know. And if the answer is just “someone told me” or “I feel it” you may be in trouble. While there is no way for the conscious mind or ego to “know” ultimately, the most honest thing I can do is start the new week, the new month, looking at the best means I know of. NOTE: It is impossible for me to discuss these things without including my personal perspective. I’ll state that clearly now, so I don’t have to bring it up endlessly.
- Ground you basic beliefs in the most basic building TESTABLE AND OBSERVABLE blocks of reality. For human beings, that’s Newtonian physics, and biology. Action-reaction, pleasure-pain and so on relate to this.
- Look for the answers that explain history and current events.
- Look for answers that allow you to make predictions of human behavior.
- The most basic answers should apply to physical, emotional, and mental arenas. “Why do you believe X?” “Because I can use it to strengthen my body, relationship, and finances” is probably the best answer I know of. While you cannot be absolutely CERTAIN these things are important in some ultimate way, if I’m wrong, I still get health, love, money, and time to enjoy them. That ain’t bad.
- The most basic truths should align with your sense of the ethical structure of the universe. From a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe has been about increasing interconnection and complexity. The same pattern applies to life itself. And human society. And individual human evolution.
- Look for benchmarks that are measurable, quantifiable, objective. If I’m trying to reduce fear, I can create subjective measures of how I feel…or can say “if I was less afraid, I’d get out on the dance floor faster and spend more time there. I’d ask more girls on dates. I’d spar every night” or whatever. Then while working on whatever technique you have chosen to reduce fear, you have objective means of measuring the results.
- Choose your mentors carefully. They should be “over the horizon” in some discipline you admire, in getting results you desire. You are seeking to follow their path. To do this you’ll need to BOTH listen to what they SAY, observe what they DO, and research what they DID. People don’t always know, or teach, their real secrets. Dig deep.
- Choose multiple mentors. I’d say at least three. What you are looking for is the “critical path” to their accomplishment, NOT the eccentric actions. If you seek to model, say, Stephen King, you might make the mistake of thinking his flaw (cocaine) was responsible for his success. But if you also look at a minimum of two other writers, LOOK FOR WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON. If you don’t choose carefully, you might choose three with substance abuse problems, and the unwise person will conclude “ah! The drugs made them great!” And follow the road to hell. But if you dig deeper, you’ll ask WHY they used the various substances. The answer is always to access something they always had within them to begin with. The drug was a MEANS to an end. And you get to ask: are there healthier ways to do this?
- Find an ethical pattern larger and older than yourself. The Three Gates is wonderful, a simplified version of the Eightfold Path. Very hard to hurt yourself if you are constantly concerned with honesty, kindness, and effectiveness. And HOW DO YOU KNOW if something is true and effective? When you can apply it to all three arenas: health/fitness, love/emotions, and mind/money. If you have a major wound in one of those arenas, until proven otherwise assume that better behaviors would yield better results. Take responsibility. RESPONSE-ABILITY is the door to being an awake, aware, adult human being. People who blame “luck” for success or failure risk being consumed by childish, magical thinking.
- Conversely, you cannot take TOTAL responsibility in a Newtonian universe…there are things outside yourself. To walk this path you have to BOTH take responsibility, AND know that responsibility is not total. This is a place people get confused. It is BOTH true that people can be born into oppression, abuse, bigotry, and it will impact the average performance of that group. It is also true that INDIVIDUALS within that group can excel, if they can see clearly enough, and not allow themselves to be gaslit. This is rare, but the health of the group depends largely on how many individuals within it can awaken and claw their way out, and leave a trail for other. If there is any positive aspect of this, it is epigenetic. Put it like this: abused and oppressed people are running a Tough Mudder up a hill with refrigerators strapped to their backs. The other runners have no such load, but are either oblivious or sanguine about your unfair load. Worse, the very people who strapped the refrigerator there will often lie their @#$$ off, mocking you as you stagger up the hill. But here’s the thing: those who survive? Those who make it? They have strength the others cannot grasp. They will, however, SENSE that there is something different about you, and it frightens them. They know they couldn’t have done it. And what they most fear is that you will reach back and help others find the strength to climb that hill, in spite of the load. Because if you can..? The abusers just created their own worse nightmare.
BONUS: There are two things you must do. One is trigger your survival drive, which is connected to instinct. You look at reality from the animal perspective: no games, no ego, just raw survival. The other is you must open your heart, to both love yourself and to being the process of ego expansion so that you feel and KNOW how others are connected to you, like individual mushrooms sprouting from the same mycelial cluster.
Does it move you away from pain toward joy?
Does it facilitate positive results in body, relationships, and career?
Does it align with the Three Gates?
Did you learn it from someone who could exemplify it AND produce those results for others?
These are the things I learned from my teachers, teachers who themselves were world-class at their disciplines. Simply emptied my cup and said “teach me, Sifu” and they did. Why? BECAUSE THEY WERE MASTERS. And real masters are always learning, always doing, and always teaching. They recognized another seeker, that is all. And as others had given to them, they gave to me.
And now…I give to you.
Namaste
Steve