You are no doubt reading this article for one of two reasons. Reason one, you feel stuck in some way – in which case you can bank on it, the Beattitude System will help you to “destuckify” – or reason two, while happily cruising along you’re proactively looking to turbo-charge your life, or some aspects of it. Either way, you will we glad to have found your way here.
Sometimes you’re in the zone where good things just happen naturally, and detours and bottlenecks are nothing but temporary setbacks. But other times things don’t go your way, you feel lost or are stuck without a paddle up the famous creek.
Take your cellphone. You’re not really interested in how it works (provided it does its job), but when it breaks down you suspect something wrong inside. So it is with learning. As long as it produces hoped-for results, you’re okay. But when a pattern of disappointments appears – abandoned dreams, broken promises, missed exams, unfulfilling work, relationships gone bad, living paycheck to paycheck, etc. – you conclude something is wrong inside. Should it ever get thus far, here is how it works inside. Everything you learned, you learned in one of three ways.
The Instinctive Way
The “instinctive” learning we share with “lower forms of life” such as plants and animals. Equipped with instinct only, plants and animals, sometimes in cooperation with each other, perform feats that puzzle the snobbiest of scientists. Instinct is a tremendous force in humans, too, but it is also vastly underrated and under-utilized. Creation does not short change man. In fact, man is especially blessed with the capacity to learn and know.
The “A Little Asleep At The Steering Wheel” Way
The “subconscious” learning we also share with animals, to a degree. As indicated by the label, subconscious learning takes place while you are a little asleep at the steering wheel. It has the potential to lead you to enlightenment, as well as to superstition, or to love, as well as to fear, or to happiness, as well as to despair.
Conscious
Conscious learning leads to knowledge for the sole purpose of getting you to the object of your imagination (regardless of the object itself). It is a uniquely human feature to be created with the ability to emulate creation itself and freely create in turn. Think about it, every book, chair and chewing gum – everything mankind created and takes for granted – was created in imagination first, before it was created by whatever process subsequently chosen. Ironically, but key to the creative process, conscious learning is also the door to understanding how to still consciousness. When I speak about stilling consciousness – equivalent to giving up resistance and struggle – some resist the idea. In doing so they add more resistance to their lives, not less, and struggle even harder than before. Only in stillness, when the “noise within” is reduced or switched off, are we open to receive.
The learning covered here at the Beattitude blog, is the “conscious learning.” It is aligned with conscious living and thus fits into the scope of Beattitude and The Beattitude System. Given the complexity of the topic – learning styles, methods, materials, etc. – we’ll chunk it up into article-size pieces. The typical learning pattern (ref. illustration) will serve as the template for the series of articles on learning, starting with today’s “Learning To Learn.”
Learning To Learn
In the arts, in sports and in sciences learning starts with the basics. Bet when it comes to learning itself, we tend to bypass the basics and go straight to “the real thing.” Because learning about learning is generally considered an oxymoron, it is mostly taught in ways akin to learning to swim where the student is thrown in at the deep end to see what happens. It saves time, but is not very effective as, clearly, many later “drown” in divorce, indebtedness, addiction, drugs (legal and not), loneliness or worse.
What Would You Teach Yourself?
What if you had the knowledge and the skills of the world’s best teachers, what would you teach yourself? Sit back for a moment and imagine yourself the teacher. Do you see a hungry, highly focused student? Does the student’s body language shout interest and participation? Is there joy, harmony and anticipation? Do you look into the eyes of a student eager to learn and explore? It might be reality, or a distant dream, but for teaching yourself and propel student performance, your task is to make it real.
Learning Involves Teaching
When you boil it down to essentials, the best teachers are Authority, Repetition, Intensity and Timing. When all four come together, the lesson is learned for life. As a youngster I ran after a ball onto the road and into the side of a passing taxi. A fraction of a second earlier would have had me run into the front of the taxi, with potentially fatal consequence. As it was, I simply bounced off the vehicle’s metal frame. Stunned, reduced to the sorry mistake-maker I had just been, I was about to regain my footing by the time the taxi driver had made his way out of his vehicle. I expected him to enquire, in a concerned tone, whether I was alright – as anyone in my known world would have. Instead, he smacked a good one onto the left side of my face, yelled “Never, ever, ever, ever do this again!”, turned, and left. In teaching terms, the perfect storm – authority (grown-up, driver), repetition (in my mind I repeated the man’s words over and over), intensity and timing working together. Five minutes later, coming from another person, the smack and words wouldn’t have worked as well, if at all.
The Perfect Teaching Storm
The story illustrates the awesome power in teaching when it’s done right. The trick, of course, is to create perfect teaching storms “at will,” rather than sit there and wait for it to happen. In learning at will the teacher and the student are the same person – you. It requires you to be a great teacher and eager student at the same time. A tall order, for teaching is complex.
Right To Teach Is Earned, Not Given
To begin with, you don’t “have” the right to teach, it’s a right that must be earned. It requires a bridge, as it were, between you and to the student. Your goal is to create an environment in which both the teacher and the student are learners. You want to teach, and the student wants to learn, not for knowledge, but for action.
At Will Learning Eliminates Waste
Much education never grows bigger than the brain cells it briefly occupies in the mind of the student, and is wasted. But with conscious “at will” learning – where you are both teacher and student – authority is high and confidence reigns. In this way what’s learned can be directly applied to everyday life and work, and waste is eliminated.
Note: remember learning is important, but from whom you learn is even more important (ref. earlier article).
Coclusion
For true success in life, simply reduce the amount of stuff that enters your mind while you’re a little asleep at the steering wheel, while increasing the amount of stuff you truly know by conscious learning. Good luck and happy learning!
If you would like to talk further about your own learning style, just post a comment. I’ll be happy to write back and get a dialog going.
QUOTES
- “Ideas are changed not by will, but by other ideas.” – Maxwell Waltz
- “Imagination is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein
- “Imagination rules the world.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Maybe reality isn’t all I imagine it to be.” – Anonymous
- “I see no dividing line between imagination and reality.” – Federico Fellini
- “We can live out of our imagination instead of our memory.” - Stephen Covey
- “Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
- “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” - Henry David Thoreau
- “There are many ways to be free. One way is to transcend reality by imagination.” – Anais Nin
- “All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.” – Cher
- “Saddle your dreams afore you ride ‘em.” – Mary Webb
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