First you have to be able to listen, to be open to learn things that you may not know. We may be helped by the following understanding of how humans process new information by Martin Heidegger.
A – Are those things that I know
that I know. These can be proven through results. Eg: I can read English.
B – Are those things that I know
that I don’t know. These too can be proven by results Eg: I cannot read Japanese.
A & B are within me and
at any given moment define the boundaries of my knowledge.
C – Are those things that I don’t
know that I don’t know. These things are always outside of me, either in other
people, books, or other sources of information.
Success occurs when I am
willing to question, to search for that C. Our purpose as humans is to grow and to develop. This
growth/development happens by expanding my knowledge (A) through seeking out
more things that I don’t know (C).
In a recent study almost 99%
of the participants claimed the desire to grow, but as soon as they heard an
opinion contrary to theirs they right away began to argue. By doing this they
are preventing their C base from helping them expand their A knowledge base and
therefore preventing growth.
This is one of the big
differences between children and adults. Children take in new information, ask
questions and become curious. While adults put up shields to prevent new
knowledge from entering saying things like “Sweetheart, what I’ve forgotten
you’ll never even learn.” And now to begin......
The first of the "Four Noble Truths" which Buddah taught was "Life is suffering" which Scott Peck in The Road Less Travelled changes to Life is difficult. This is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we can transcend it. Once we truly know, understand and really accept that life is difficult, then in essence life will no longer be difficult. Our goal should not be how to avoid suffering and how to get out of suffering but rather to understand it, to learn from it, and most importantly to grow from it. As Nietzsche said "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
The problem is that most of us do not fully see this as a fact and instead we just like to complain to ourselves and anyone thats willing to listen about the enormity of our problems, burdens, and difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. Or we see suffering as a problem, as something wrong with ourselves. Victor Frankl in Man's Search For Meaning quotes Edith Weisskopf-Joelson in one article from 1955 as stating "our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy." In another paper in 1958 she expressed hope that logotherapy "may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his or her suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading so that they are not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy."
So there are two ways to go about this. One is to go along with the masses and just continue to complain, teach our kids to complain and in essence take the easy way out. The other option is to drill into our heads that life is difficult. It will not sink in right away it needs constant repeating, but slowly we will see a difference. Once we have this in our heads we can start working on the difficulties, trying to grow from them, trying to learn from them, trying to teach others from what we experienced/learned. This second option is a much harder one and requires a lot of effort and a lot of pain but in the end it is the much more rewarding option of the two.
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