I used to know everything, or go to great lengths to pretend to at least. At that time in my life I was afraid, childish, stupid, stubborn, hard headed and either an ass or a coward most of the time. I was right and you were wrong and I would prove it, normally destroying any human connection in the process. Being right was more important than being happy or loving others.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so the result of my egotistical dogmatism was an existential beat down of epic proportion. A great war with intense battles was waged on the forefront of my pre-frontal cortex. And the result - I lost the war and likely lost every battle, along with time I can never recover. Decades of basically useless suffering, but it was the war I had to fight (and lose) to eventually be here, be happy, be well and be free.
My quest for knowledge and information to be "right" was simply a childs' egocentric attempt to frame the world in black and white and eliminate uncertainty and chaos. It was my attempt to control the external world and feel some sense of security. Self delusion seems an appropriate term for what I was doing, as there is no certainty or security in anything.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so the result of my egotistical dogmatism was an existential beat down of epic proportion. A great war with intense battles was waged on the forefront of my pre-frontal cortex. And the result - I lost the war and likely lost every battle, along with time I can never recover. Decades of basically useless suffering, but it was the war I had to fight (and lose) to eventually be here, be happy, be well and be free.
My quest for knowledge and information to be "right" was simply a childs' egocentric attempt to frame the world in black and white and eliminate uncertainty and chaos. It was my attempt to control the external world and feel some sense of security. Self delusion seems an appropriate term for what I was doing, as there is no certainty or security in anything.
Knowing something does not give it meaning. I can know the name of a thing and still not understand it. I can name the fruit "orange", but cannot explain how it tastes to you, you must eat it to know the full meaning. The same applies to everything else, which is why I fear we have millions of educated people who know names of things and know no meaning.
I was the kid who had to take all of my toys apart to figure out how they worked. I never put them back together to experience them afterwards, so I knew something about how they worked, but lost the meaning in the process. It's like going to an art gallery and simply dissecting all the rules of art and whatever versus just looking, experiencing and feeling the art.
I read almanacs, atlases, history books, owners manuals, maps, newspapers, really whatever had information. I was good at Jeopardy and played people for money, usually kids with 4.5 GPAs when I was barely a 3.0 GPA and preferred to play sports and whatever else. I knew all kinds of information and none of it had any meaning. My head was full of dates, facts and other relatively meaningless information - which only gave me a overinflated ego that I was "smart".
Being labeled smart was damaging to my growth and evolution as a person. I could simply no longer be wrong because I was "smart" and being wrong meant I was dumb, which was akin to death.
In reality, I have been wrong exponentially more than I have ever been right, if I have ever been entirely right about anything ever. Once I was able to say that (and actually believe it) the battles and war in my head stopped. The most influential person in that process was Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, who simply offered to always ask - "Am I Sure?"
Am I Sure? No. What I have come to realize is the world is 1000 shades of grey. There is no black and there is no white. There is no truth and there is no right. There just "IS" and what I think about it is mostly irrelevant.
What is left is this new found curiosity to know the meaning of things and not just search for the facts, information, "truth" or something just to be right, make myself feel more secure or battle others.
~ Meaning is found through experience and understanding.
In nowhere else is this more profound than in interpersonal relationships. If I can never "know" something for sure, how can I ever say I truly know another person at any time? I cannot. So, to maintain healthy and happy relationships I am constantly seeking to understand and re-understand people as we are not static beings, we are dynamic and ever changing. To love someone is to seek to understand them.
~ Seek to understand, not to be understood.
If you like this, check out my book "Letters to My Son: Choosing Yourself First" on Kindle through Amazon.
If you want to chat, feel free to email me at douglashilbert@yahoo.com
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