Human beings are biological, sentient, autonomous cosmic supercomputers. You’re smarter and more powerful than the most expensive computer in the world. You’re the rarest and most valuable thing in the universe. Regardless of your personal opinion of yourself, you’re capable of looking at the world around you, identifying problems, solving them intellectually and then enacting your solution. You’re the only being in the universe that we know of that’s capable of doing that. Celebrate that fact, but know that with great power comes great responsibility. It’s your responsibility to think about the world’s problems and then solve them.
That’s an intimidating responsibility, but you shouldn’t have to be guilt tripped into accepting it. You should already be doing it out of selfishness if nothing else. You want to live in a better world, and you have the ability to make it better. You don’t have anything better to do than making the world a better place.
Even if you’re content where you’re at, the future of mankind depends on everyone solving as many problems as possible. The future has to be built brick by brick, and the more people who pitch in, the faster the future gets better. The more people find excuses not to solve problems, the slower humanity progresses and the greater the chance of collapse; there’s a tipping point where if too many people ignore their responsibility to think, then collapse is guaranteed.
We’ve spent our entire lives on the wrong side of the tipping point and don’t even recognize we’re living in a collapsed society. We take gun violence, international wars, sweatshops, invasive, predatory police, corrupt politicians and inefficient bureaucracy for granted. We even celebrate them. What we don’t do though is take responsibility for the world’s problems. We throw up our hands and tell ourselves it’s somebody else’s responsibility to fix all the problems around us. But it’s all of our responsibility to go out of our way and our comfort zone to think and solve problems. The whole reason the world is awash with problems is because most people aren’t thinking. If you’re not thinking then you’re being stupid, and stupid kills.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Doing nothing is evil. It’s the main ingredient in failure. If you want your life to be a success you need to think. If you want the world to become a better place then you need to think. Even if you don’t want to, the rest of humanity needs you to.
Think about this. The matter that makes up your body was present at the Big Bang. You’ve traveled through gas clouds, oceans and atmospheres to get where you are today. You’re a conscious being in a seemingly unconscious universe. You’re wasting your life if you don’t do the most amazing thing you’re designed to do. Think, and let’s build a better world brick by brick, problem by problem.
Everyone has heard of enlightenment, but most people don’t care enough about the topic to study or practice it and probably couldn’t even give you a coherent definition of the word. I’m not a genius or a spiritual guru. I’m a poor white trash kid from Texas, but I spent thousands of hours studying and thinking about enlightenment, and I came to some novel conclusions. In order to fully appreciate their meaning, you need to understand why and how I tried to teach myself enlightenment in the first place.
I have an identical twin brother, and we were born two months premature. My twin was born healthy, but my heart was underdeveloped. So I spent most of the first year of my life in and out of the hospital surviving a series of near-death experiences. These factors forced me to be lucidly conscious of my mortality and the surrealness of existence for long as I can remember.
I believe the sensory deprivation I experienced in the hospital during the formative weeks of my development wired my brain to adapt to solitude, stillness, and quiet. This may be where my INTP personality type comes from. Either way, I’ve always been an introvert who enjoys spending time alone thinking, writing and working on long, tedious projects. So my temperament and life situation predisposed me to ponder philosophical questions.
I wasn’t raised rich, with every education opportunity money could buy, but the small Texas towns I lived in had old-fashioned, strict, rigorous schools. So I received a solid understanding of science, history, English and critical thinking skills. I was also put in “gifted and talented” classes from the third grade where I was encouraged to think outside the box. These two education styles shaped how I approach philosophical questions.
Growing up in the Bible Belt, I took Christianity for granted, but I didn’t really practice it until high school when I made a conscious decision to accept Jesus as my savior and devote my life to being a Christian. Then I applied all my skill sets to prove the Bible to be the true word of God, but within a year I found so much evidence that the Bible is mythology, I wrote a book on it.
After losing my faith I plunged into existential despair and read as many religion/philosophy/self-help books as I could, searching for new insights into the riddle of life. I found the ancient Eastern religions and philosophies like Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism the most interesting.
The concept of enlightenment, in particular, appealed to me. I already knew enlightenment existed, but my deconversion gave me new motivation to take it seriously. I’d lost the need for faith or salvation, but I still needed a purpose to strive for, and enlightenment made the perfect substitute. It offered a way to become more than I am without having to surrender my life to a mythological deity invented by a primitive tribe to justify their culture.
When I was a Christian, I reasoned that if connecting with God was the best thing we could do, then we should do it. Now I reasoned that if a man has the potential to reach a higher state of mind, then he should, not because God commanded us to, but because it offers the most benefit to the individual. The cost/benefit analysis simply adds up.
I wanted to make the most of my life on a personal level, and I wanted to justify my existence on a philosophical level. To be completely honest, I also thought achieving enlightenment might give me some kind of superpowers. So I approached the study of enlightenment with childlike enthusiasm. To my surprise, my zeal dissipated into disillusionment as I found at least five holes in traditional theories of enlightenment:
1. There’s no agreed upon definition of what enlightenment is.
Hindus, Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, New Age gurus and thousands of other groups have different definitions of enlightenment and instructions to achieve it. There’s no test you can use to prove which definition or methodology is the true one. Ultimately, it’s all one big pile of stuff people made up. Some schools of thought claim enlightenment can’t be labeled or bottled, because that’s the point. It’s beyond words. That idea is vague to the point of being useless. If it does mean something, skeptics can’t disprove whatever it means, but proponents still can’t prove it’s true or disprove anyone else’s theories either.
2. You can’t prove a higher state of mind exists at all
10,000 years of religion and 200 years of psychology have proven if you commit your mind to connecting with Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Vishnu, a higher level of consciousness, a parallel universe or Elvis, eventually you’ll find something that feels real to you.
There’s no scientific evidence that a spiritual-level higher state of consciousness exists at all, and the burden of proof doesn’t lay on the skeptic to disprove its existence. The burden of proof lies on the self-proclaimed gurus of the world to prove their “higher” state of mind isn’t just a subjective experience that satisfies their subconscious desires, but it’s impossible for them to do that. So their personal testimonies are hearsay.
3. Every self-proclaimed authoritative source contains evidence of lack of authority
Any Hindu Yogi will agree that you can’t put Om in a test tube, but when you look at Hinduism on a whole you’ll find text-book signs of mythology such as an oppressive caste system, astrology, scientifically unsupported statements about the nature of the universe and animistic deities. New Age books on enlightenment are just as baseless. When a belief system contains inconsistencies, absurdities, and culturally relative idiosyncrasies, it casts doubt on its authority on any subject.
The authority of a book doesn’t come from who wrote it, how long it has been around, or how many people believe it. Its authority comes from how rigorously its conclusions have been vetted. If you want to learn about the human mind, then study psychology, not mythology.
4. It’s unlikely that our design is flawed
Some theories of enlightenment claim your average state of mind is inherently flawed, and enlightenment is achieved by eliminating or escaping your base state. Advocates of this school of thought point to stress and crime as evidence that we need to eliminate some part of ourselves. Being a self-loathing Christian, I latched onto this idea quickly and held onto it for a while, but studying astronomy and anatomy led me to the conclusion that it takes less faith to assume our minds work correctly than it does to assume our minds are cosmically/spiritually flawed.
I don’t know if there’s an intelligent creator, or if the universe came into existence by random chance. I don’t know why or how humans came into existence, but I do know that the universe is designed to behave very specifically and elegantly. Subatomic particles, atoms, molecules and solar systems are ingeniously structured to snap together in powerful and predictable ways.
It can be no more of an accident that humans exist in this universe than it is for stars or planets. The amount of forward-thinking it would take to design a universe that can rearrange itself from nothing, into to an expanding gas cloud, that condensed itself into rotating galaxies full of planets that sprouted sentient beings is staggering.
The complexity of the human body is magnitudes greater than the complexity of the planet that germinated us. Our bones and muscles are a series of levers, counter-levers, and pulleys that are positioned to anticipate the need to use opposing forces to create a system of tensegrity that can hold a body upright and perform acrobatics. Humans beings are still years away from designing a robot that can move as nimbly as a human. We’re even farther away from creating a computer anywhere near as powerful as the human brain. We don’t fully understand how the human brain works, but so far we haven’t found anything arbitrary about its design or functions.
If water is supposed to freeze at 32 degrees Celsius and light is supposed to travel at 186,000 miles per second, then the human brain is probably supposed to do exactly what it has been meticulously designed to do by a force infinitely more “intelligent” than a hermit who probably can’t even tell you what the pancreas does.
5. I can’t make a categorical imperative out of devoting one’s life to meditation
If everyone who has ever existed, spent their entire lives meditating in monasteries, we would never have discovered the Periodic Table of Elements. We’d be fighting wolves with clubs and entertaining ourselves around the campfire by making up fantastic, mythological theories to explain what lightning, wind, and the sun are. That’s not the perfection of the human experience. That’s a wasted opportunity.
My conclusion
I can’t tell you what enlightenment is, or if it even exists. I have a theory that I try to apply to my life. It could be wrong in all or part. Take what you can from it. Leave the rest.
Enlightenment is like love. It’s a feeling, a state of mind, and an action at all once. You can be in love and actively love someone. You can’t put your finger on it, but everyone’s lives have been revolving around this intangible force for as long as humans have existed. There’s no definitive book on love, but millions of books have been written about it.
Love is a feeling of attraction between people. Enlightenment is the feeling of existing. It’s how it feels to be awake and conscious of your own individuality. The experience of being you is mind-fuckingly fluid. You slip in and out of states of consciousness constantly. In a single day, you can experience sleeping, waking up, rushing, resting, fearing, loving, fighting, reminiscing, meditating, obsessing, planning, daydreaming, problem-solving, memorizing, fantasizing, hating, hurting, regretting, celebrating, hungering, and giving up.
Each of these states of mind exists because our brains evolved to use them to solve real-world problems. Devoting your life to holding onto or letting go of any one of these is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and sabotaging your opportunity to fulfill your all-around potential. The key to experiencing the most ideal reality is to master every facet of your mind and become the best You that you can be. Through fulfilling your potential, you’ll achieve as much clarity as humans are designed to achieve. You won’t become a higher form of life. You’ll just be more mature, which is profound enough.
You are your reality. Everything you experience is defined by what’s in your head. In order to live in the best mind-space, you need to do at least 7 things:
1. Learn science.
The universe is a big, scary place, but we can study nature and figure out why things happen. Having a basic understanding of science will give you more peace of mind than turning your brain off and ignoring the mysteries of the universe.
Science also gives us the power to create reliable shelters, warm clothing, mass-produced food, medicine, and spaceships. These luxuries empower people to live more comfortable, meaningful lives than sitting on a mountain training your mind to ignore the cold.
With understanding comes peace and empowerment. Ignorance confuses and disempowers us. So if you want to maximize your mind, the first thing you need to do is learn science.
2. Learn problem-solving skills.
Everything you ever do will require you to solve problems. The better you are at solving problems, the better you’ll be at navigating life. The weaker your problem-solving skills are, the less control you’ll have over your life. The more you master the art of problem-solving, the more effortlessly you can stride past the obstacles that stand between you and your goals. This is a far more effective way of achieving peace of mind than clearing your mind and convincing yourself that your problems don’t exist.
3. Learn psychology.
You are your mind. If you ever hope to cope with your existence, let alone maximize the experience of being you, then you need to understand how your mind works. Studying psychology will teach you why you have so many different states of mind and how to control them. Mastering your mind will bring you more peace and fulfillment than denying it.
4. Define and refine yourself.
The universe doesn’t need us. We don’t serve any practical purpose outside of ourselves. Nothing would be lost if we disappeared. Yet the universe went through almost 14 billion years of trouble rearranging itself to create the conditions necessary to create us. If we were supposed to be nothing, then the universe would have made us nothing. I believe throwing away your identity defeats the purpose of existing in the first place. I believe you’re here to be you.
Studying science, problem solving and psychology give you the toolsets to accomplish whatever goals you have. The morality of an action is determined by how much it helps/hinders life achieve the most important goal, and the most important goal is to become the best you that you can be. To do that, you need to define who you are, who you want to be, and then create/execute a plan to improve yourself.
5. Meditate and smell the roses.
Psychology classes can prepare you to be yourself, but the world off-campus is a brutal place full of idiots and sociopaths with agendas. You’ll be pulled in every direction, and every aspect of your mind will be put to the test. If you never spend any time in solitude, focusing your mind inward, exploring and feeling what it is to be you, then the world will force its definition of you onto your mind.
You don’t always have to sit in a quiet room and clear your mind to feel at one with the universe. You can find moments during the daily grind to stop and smell the roses or to take a deep breath and just be. Schedule time in the evening to stop and marvel at the stars.
If the drama of life is too overwhelming, then turn your mind off for 15 minutes to experience the peace that comes from quietly being one with the universe. Once you’ve centered yourself, pick yourself back up and resume your quest with renewed focus.
6.Do what you love.
Existence isn’t just something you passively experience. It’s something you do. Being a unique individual isn’t only accomplished solely by sitting in a room exploring the space behind your eyes. It’s something you do. The way you actively “be” yourself, is by doing what you love.
Doing what you love will bring you more peace and fulfillment than suppressing your passions. Those passions aren’t unnatural. Nature put them there. Nature gave you the freedom to express, enjoy and validate yourself through doing the things you love. If you’re not doing them, then you’re just letting life pass you by.
7. Love.
Solitude is an important tool in the quest to refine yourself, but if you were meant to be alone, then you would have been the only person to ever exist. If you want a transcendental experience that is more real and powerful than words can describe, then host a dinner party at your house and invite all the most important people in your life. The joy you’ll experience while communing with your loved ones will bring you closer to “God” than cutting yourself off from the world.
1. It has a set canon of books that are studied redundantly.
2. The canon has a few good ideas, but much of it is archaic, garbled, over-generalized, subjective, culturally biased and sometimes even flat out wrong.
3. Followers’ understanding of life begins and for the most part remains within the framework taught by teachers as opposed to each individual systematically figuring out life for themselves starting with what’s most important and working down from there.
4. Insanity and incomprehensibility are often mistaken for genius.
5. People who criticize the ideas taught in the canon are ridiculed and ostracized.
6. Any criticism of the canon’s shortcomings can be dismissed by saying, “You just don’t understand our ideology. If you were smarter and studied it more you’d get it.”
7. Winning an argument is more important than arriving at truth.
8. What cannot be disproven is given equal standing with what is provable… when it’s convenient.
9. The ability to quote great thinkers is mistaken for being a great thinker.
10. The people within the group are considered the elite, chosen or ubber. People outside the group are considered unworthy, subhuman and not worth living.
11. Violently and dogmatically defending prepackaged beliefs is only viewed as being close-minded when someone outside the group does it.When someone inside the group does it they are viewed as strong.
Thoughts follow the same rules of science as chemistry and physics. You can’t get a new thought from nothing. In order to have new ideas you either have to learn them from a source outside yourself or combine existing thoughts in new ways. Your thoughts will continue on the same trajectory until acted upon by a new thought.
Ultimately, thoughts are nothing more than mathematical equations. Every event that happens to you is a new variable for your brain to calculate and find a solution to, and there are so many variables involved in doing something as simple as crossing the street that if you gave your full attention to everything you did you’d never make it out of the house in the morning, but that’s okay because your brain is a cosmically powerful computer and can take simple tasks such as crossing the street and calculate them practically subconsciously, and it can do other tasks, like beating your heart, completely subconsciously.
Look at how these simple concepts make complete sense of the mysterious concepts of emotions, creativity, and inspiration. Our emotions are the product of our brain subconsciously calculating all the variables in our life. Falling in love seems so mysterious, but when you take a step back and tally all the variables it makes logical sense. The logic might not add up to a responsible decision, but when people make bad decisions it’s because they don’t have enough knowledge in their brain to calculate their decisions correctly. However, to them, it appears logical because they’ve come to the most logical conclusion based on the variables they have.
This is why psychologists have a bad reputation for asking people questions and never giving answers. If the patient knew all the variables in the first place, they wouldn’t have a problem because they could find the solution on their own. If the psychologist were to give them the answer, then the ‘patient’ would reject it because the correct answer doesn’t add up using the limited amount of variables they’re working with. So the only way for the psychologist to get the patient to see the correct answer is to walk them through the problem and let them solve it for themselves. The only way they can arrive at the idea is by someone walking them through the process of combining the ideas already in their head.
If you need more evidence that emotions are subconscious logic, then look at your own dreams. Psychologists are sometimes able to interpret dreams because they’re a logical representation of the variables in our lives even though they’re almost entirely the product of our subconscious. Sometimes the logic is obvious such as when a soldier has nightmares about war. Sometimes they’re mysterious, but even when they’re mysterious we know it’s not because they’re magical. It’s only because we don’t fully, consciously understand the variables in the equation.
Creativity is just a matter of combining variables in innovative ways. Sometimes the logic is obvious such as in the case of artists like M.C. Escher. While Norman Rockwell and H.R. Geiger may seem whimsically creative, if you walked through their childhoods you could identify all the variables that led them to develop the styles they chose. And neither of those two artists could have possibly arrived at the other’s style because the variables in their lives didn’t add up to the other’s conclusions.
Inspiration is the simplest of all. Whenever we all of a sudden have a brilliant flash of insight it’s because something caused us to combine the exact two thoughts in the exact way to come to a logical conclusion that we were previously missing a vital variable to arrive at.
Now let’s take this a step further. The sum of all your knowledge (aka variables) and thinking skills (aka formulas) yield your identity and your philosophy on life. The more variables you understand, and the better your thinking skills are, the more of a true individual you’ll be and the more successful your philosophy on life will be. The less you know, the less you can think. The less you’ve thought about the equation of life, the more incomplete of a person you’ll be and the worse your life skills will be.
Rule #1: Rules were written by people, and most people are idiots.
If there were one lesson to be learned throughout all of human history, it’s Rule #1. Amazingly though, there are billions of people who haven’t learned that lesson. Oh, sure they’ve learned not to kill 6 million Jews, but they haven’t learned to question their employer’s rules today. As a result, they get locked into enforcing outdated or illogical rules that make people’s lives worse.
The rules they enforce might not kill 6 million Jews, but they’ll waste the short and infinitely valuable time being bogged down with needless work. This will prevent them from accomplishing their highest level goals, ironically, in the name of doing what’s right.
Rule #2: A rule’s only true authority comes from its ability to help people.
Rules were created to serve people. People weren’t created to serve rules. When a rule ceases to help people, it negates its purpose for existence and thus negates its authority. For example, nobody would argue against the rule “don’t kill people.” However, rules have to be judged on a case by case basis according to whether or not they’ll help or hurt people each time they’re enforced. If a situation arises where it will help people more by not enforcing the rule, then it should not be enforced. For example, if you lived next to a Nazi concentration camp, you might decide it’s moral to break the “don’t kill people” rule if it were the only way to save the lives of the victims in the concentration camp.
Fixing computers for a living means you spend your whole day problem-solving. It’s insanely frustrating because you’re expected to be able to answer any question about any hardware or software problem there could ever be. Even if you went to school to study computers, all of your knowledge and experience is constantly becoming obsolete. So you have to constantly relearn your trade, but no matter how much you teach your self, you’ll never be able to memorize every error code, every symptom, and every solution to every problem that could possibly happen with every operating system.
However, you don’t have to. You’d be surprised how much you don’t have to know about computers and still be able to make a living fixing them… as long as you know how to think logically… which most people don’t. If they did, then most computer technicians, therapists, and police would be out of work. The following rules apply as much to fixing computers as they do to life:
Rule #1: If you want an exact answer, you need to ask an exact question.
When a user’s monitor goes blank they freak out and ask questions like, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why now?” “What the hell is wrong with this piece of shit?” etc. None of these questions are going to provide useful answers. So they call a computer tech who asks questions that cut to the heart of the issue such as, “What’s broken? What was the last thing you did before it broke? Does it have power? Are the connections loose? If we replace this piece will the problem go away or is the problem originating somewhere else?”
Life is the same way. When I’m sad, I don’t just mope around feeling miserable. I ask myself, “What is the problem? Why am I sad? What triggered it? How often does the occur and why? This keeps me from wallowing in hopelessness and ultimately leads to solutions.
Rule #2: Use a logical, systematic problem-solving process
When I first started fixing computers I’d freak out every time I got a call about a problem I didn’t know how to fix. I’d ask myself questions like, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?” Eventually, I stopped freaking out and learned to look at a computer with the cool air of a mysterious, wandering gunslinger. I’d take my time and break down the problem systematically starting by gathering all the facts, eliminating variables, and testing solutions one at a time until the problem was solved. And throughout the whole process, I’d keep in mind that if you’re not asking exact questions, you won’t get exact answers.
Eventually, I found my method of problem-solving worked equally well in real life. I could see it in my friends as well. The ones who had the most problems in their lives were the ones who sat around asking themselves, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why is life unfair?” These are the people who when you try to offer them solutions to their problems they argue with you and bark excuses at you for why nothing will work. The people who have the least problems in life are the ones who size up their problems logically.
Rule #3: The quality and quantity of answers you get are proportional to the quality and quantity of questions you ask.
Lucid people know that the causes and the solutions of any problem can be deduced by analyzing the variables in the problem. The degree of success you have deducing the causes and the solutions depends on how specific and articulate the questions you ask are. Using that mindset, they don’t wast any time freaking out or getting emotional about the problems in their lives. They simply go into analytical mode and start asking questions.
When I would get stumped fixing a difficult computer problem, I would stop, take a deep breath, and ask myself, “What questions have I been asking, and why am I asking myself these questions? Which questions haven’t I asked, and why not?” If I couldn’t solve the problem, I would ask for help from someone with more experience for help, but I wouldn’t just ask them for the answer. I would ask them to explain the series of questions they asked themselves to correctly deduce the variables in the equation so I would understand the system and know the right questions to ask next time and why.
So if you find yourself getting emotional about a problem, or one of your friends comes complaining to you about theirs, the first question you need to ask is, “What questions have you asked?”
Rule #4: Knowing where to find the right answer is just as good as knowing it from memory.
When I first started working at a computer help desk, most of my coworkers were equally inexperienced. We only had one guy on our team who could answer any question. I only used him as a last resort, because if I bothered him every time I got stumped, his entire job would consist of mentoring me. So one day I asked him, “How do you know so much? Why can you solve more problems than anyone else here?”
He looked at me like I was stupid and said, “I don’t know the answers to all the questions you guys bring to me, but I don’t have to if I know where to find them.” Then he pointed to his computer and said,” We’ve all got Google on your computer. There’s a wealth of information on the internet. If I don’t know something, I ask the internet.”
So now, when I run into a problem I’m having even a little difficulty with, I don’t ask myself, “What am I doing wrong!?” I ask myself, “Where can I find the answer without having to make every mistake myself first?”
I worked in the IT field for nine years, most of it as a help desk technician. It would be an understatement to say my job hasn’t been easy. Anyone who works on computers is part detective, part engineer, part psychologist, part interior designer, part whipping boy, and a shit load of other things that require you to push your mind to its limit in multiple directions every day. When you’re surrounded by intimidatingly mysterious problems every day, you think with your nose to the ground.
Computers aren’t mysterious, magical or spiritual. When you have a computer problem, you don’t pray. You call the helpdesk because deep down, you understand how reality works. Nothing happens because of magic, divine intervention or fate. Absolutely nothing ever happens for no reason at all. Every event in this universe is the product of a cause and effect chain of events. I’m not saying God isn’t real, just that if God is real, it doesn’t break the rules the natural laws the universe operates on.
When your car or computer breaks down, you don’t wonder if someone put a curse on it. Common sense tells you it happened for a cut and dry, logical, scientific reason. You can always confirm this by looking at the evidence and follow the chain of events backward logically to find the secular source of the problem. Yet, people pick and choose times to suspend sanity and slip back into magical thinking.
I once got a call from a user who said something was wrong with her computer. At the time I had a program that let me connect to other computers remotely and take control of the mouse and keyboard. I took control of her computer and started controlling her mouse remotely to check various settings on her computer. I made the mistake of not warning her that I was going to take control of her computer. When she saw her mouse start opening folders, she screamed into the phone, “MY COMPUTER IS POSSESSED!” That really happened. When I got off the phone with her I thought, “If this lady thinks ghosts haunt computers, how much else does she not understand about the universe? Her reality must be a scary place to live.”
A lot of people don’t like to accept that we live in a scientific universe because it’s easier to absolve yourself of ignorance by saying the universe is unknowable and to excuse yourself from responsibility because everything is part of God’s plan, and He’s going to clean up all our messes. It has been my experience, both a computer technician and a human being, that this is a destructive way of looking at life. It never solves anything, and it paralyzes us from taking realistic cause and effect measures to fix our problems. If you don’t believe me, then pray to God to fix your computer the next time your hard drive burns out and see what happens.
Or, when anything goes wrong in your life, don’t panic. Remind yourself, there’s a logical reason why it’s not working. If it seems mysterious, it’s just because you haven’t followed the cause and effect trail to the source of the problem using salt-of-the-earth deductive and/or inductive reasoning.
1: Accept you need to fulfill your mind’s potential.
Look at the graph below. Where on the graph would you mark yourself if the far left represented the ignorance of a newborn baby and the far right represented the genius of Leonardo Da Vince?
Okay, that was a trick. Without changing your position on the graph, replace the word “Ignorance” with “Insanity,” and replace the word “Genius” with “Sane.”
The definition of the word “sane” is: “having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense.”
Think about a baby. Does a baby think or act with sound reason, judgment, and sense? No. If an adult acted like a one-year-old, he’d be locked away in a mental institute. We’re all born insane, and our progress towards sanity doesn’t happen on its own. As we grow up, our brains develop and automatically make us more capable of sanity, but in to grow to your full potential you have to proactively use reason, sound judgment, and common sense.
Genius isn’t a condition you’re born with. It’s the process of pushing your mind to its unique potential. Once you’ve pushed your mind to what it’s capable of, you’ll be the person you’re capable of becoming.
2: Accept you’re capable of becoming a genius.
If you’re smart enough to graduate high school, then you’re smart enough to become a genius. How many song lyrics, movie characters, book titles, sports statistics, telephone numbers and street names will you memorize in your life? How many books/magazines/news articles/websites/blogs have you/will you read? When you add it all up, the number is astronomical even if you score low on a traditional I.Q. test.
You’ll never reach the limits of your mind. Therefore, the limits of your mental potential are defined more by what you believe they are than what they actually are. You have the potential to become an expert at just about anything if you would only allow yourself permission to become what you’re capable of becoming and push yourself as far as you can go.
3: Accept you’re ignorant.
Everyone is born insane, and we become saner by learning. But no matter how much you learn, you’ll always be an ant on a speck of dirt in an endless universe. Nobody knows shit about shit, and we’re all so lost we don’t even know how lost we are. So conceit is a delusion, and humility is sanity. The smarter you think you are, the less room and motivation you give yourself to grow. The more humbly you accept your ignorance, the more room and motivation you give yourself to grow.
4: Accept everyone is ignorant in different ways to different degrees.
Humanity doesn’t have life figured out. Our entire history has been a slow process of clueless adults raising clueless children. The younger generation always takes it for granted their parents’ generation has it all figured out. So children devote their lives to mimicking their elders only to waste their lives re-enacting primitive, obsolete customs invented by pompous monkeys.
Take everything you learn with a grain of salt. Even if someone teaches you something true, it’s probably still incomplete. Questioning people and their belief systems can only help you arrive at a clearer perception of the truth. Blind faith can only result in blindness.
Nobody can know everything. The end goal of genius isn’t to master every field of learning but to master the one/s that are most important to you. The only way you’ll have the motivation to master anything, is to love doing it. Find something you love, and excel at that. If you try to master something you aren’t terminally passionate about, you’re either going to quit or be miserable, which would defeat the purpose.
6: Develop a systematic plan to understand life.
Imagine it’s Sunday afternoon, and you don’t have to go to work, but you’ve got a ton of errands and chores you need to get done. If you just wander around the house and do a chore here and there when you just happen to find yourself in a room that needs something done it’s going to take forever to get all your chores done. Imagine driving around town aimlessly and hoping you run across the store or business you need to get something done at. You’ll never accomplish all your goals.
Becoming a genius (aka growing up, aka becoming sane) is the same way. You’re not going to be able to wander through life aimlessly, casually doing the things you feel inspired or hungry to do and hope to make the most out of your mind. You need to plan out what you want to learn and how you’re going to teach it to yourself.
If you want to be smarter, then learn more. If you want to be exceptionally smart, then learn an exceptional amount of information. You’re going to run out of time before you run out of storage space in your brain.
8: Learn and practice rational, logical thinking.
To understand the information you learn and make the best use of it, you have to be able to process the information effectively. You can memorize the encyclopedia, but if you don’t know how to think, all your good for is reciting information. The better you are at thinking, the more valuable conclusions you can draw from your knowledge.
9: Ask the right questions.
You might be able to cram enough knowledge into your brain to win every quiz game in the world, but that doesn’t make you a genius. What separates the savants from the geniuses is meaning. Is the knowledge you possess and are the questions you ask meaningful? Do your intellectual pursuits make a difference in the world? Do they help people? Do they advance humanity? If not, then it doesn’t matter how many credentials you have or how many people pat you on the back. Your efforts are meaningless.
You don’t have to be smart enough to figure out why E=MC2 to be a genius. The world doesn’t need 7 billion astrophysicists anyway. We need geniuses from every walk of life. We need people who can solve meaningful problems in the fields that they’re suited for. Solve a meaningful question and that will be an exercise in genius, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels for the rest of your life. Just because you did something genius yesterday doesn’t mean you’re a genius today. And just because you performed one stroke of genius doesn’t mean that you’re a genius in every other facet of your life. In fact, nobody is a full spectrum genius. Every genius is a complete idiot in other ways.
10: Question your answers.
Let’s suppose you questioned your personal beliefs and the foundations of your culture and found them lacking. So you went back and rewrote the rules and applauded yourself for fixing them. Then you lived the rest of your life by those new rules and taught them to other people. The only problem is you’re Anton Lavey, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Timothy Leary or Charles Manson. If you don’t question everything, especially your own answers, you’ll end up acting on irrational conclusions that will cause harm to you or others.
Step 1: Okay, someone is telling you something you disagree with. Recognize the fact that you’ve been wrong before. Regardless of how absurd his idea is remember that all the things you were wrong about before you initially though were absurd. The same thing could very well be happening again.
Step 2: Assume that if this person believes what they’re saying then they must have a compelling reason to. You might find in the end that it’s not logical, but since it’s strong enough to influence him there must be something to it. Find out his reasons for believing what he’s saying before you disagree with him. In fact, press him to keep talking. Find out everything there is to know about the topic before criticizing it.
Step 3: Don’t respond yet. Tell the person, “Give me a few minutes to think about this.” or better yet, “Let me sleep on it. We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow.”
Step 4: Assume/pretend the other person is right. Block out your beliefs for a time and look at the world through his eyes. Imagine living a life where you walk around believing what you were just told.
Step 5: Consider his arguments objectively. Imagine that you’re a scientist in a laboratory where ideas can be stored in petri dishes. In one dish is his argument. In another his his. Take your argument and put it on a shelf. Take his argument and put it under a microscope. Use logic to dissect it and study it independent of how it relates to your ideas. Put your initial hypothesis about the outcome out of your mind. This is a clinical study where scientific truth is more important than winning. In fact, the only way to truly win is to arrive at the truth. (Side Note: the book “How to Argue and Win Every Time” is an amazingly enlightening analysis of this concept.)
Furthermore, disregard the source of the idea you’re studying. Just because the idea came out of “The Communist Manifesto,” “Mein Kampf,” or “The Bible” doesn’t mean it can’t be true. Of course, it doesn’t mean is must be true either. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re arguing with is your father who you respect deeply and who himself insists he’s the head of the house and you must obey him. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re arguing with is an immature, conceited, hypocritical wanker. The source has nothing to do with the idea. So separate the two for the time being.
Step 6: Take the results of your scientific dissection and file them away. Then take your own ideas and put them under the microscope. Even if you’ve studied them before the fact that they’re being challenged means there’s a chance you might have missed something. Consider where your ideas came from. Did you really adopt them because you’d done all the math and arrived that this was the correct answer yourself or did somebody else tell you they were true? Dissect your arguments with the scalpel of logic again. Be brutal about it. Get angry at your ideas. Hate them. Tear them apart with the fury of a lover who just found out his soul mate was cheating on him.
Step 7: Compare the results from both of your studies understanding that the goal of the study isn’t to determine who is right and who is wrong. Arguments almost never black and white. You could both be right about some things and wrong about some things. The goal of the study is to take the good and bad of both arguments and mix them together to create the real truth. If at the end of the study you accept or reject the opposing idea completely you probably did your math wrong. If you do find fault on either side of the argument don’t simply throw that petri dish away. If an idea has flaws then fix them.
Step 8: If you want to you can present your findings to the person you argued with, but this isn’t necessary. This whole process was never a battle between people. It was really an internal battle in your personal search for truth. Whether or not you can convince the other person of your findings is irrelevant.
Step 9: If you do decide to continue the argument with the other person don’t worry about winning. Simply explain your findings to him, and if he doesn’t like it then end the conversation. Winning an argument won’t do anything for you except stroke your ego, which is pointless. However, if the other person is willing to engage in an objective debate then by all means proceed. Two heads are better than one.
Step 10: Watch for personal attacks. Once either side throws a personal attack the conversation is over. Dialogue has broken down, and neither side is listening objectively anymore. So you may as well quit. And remember that the person who throws the first body shot is probably wrong. If you had logical reasons for your argument you’d be using them instead of calling the other person names. And the more you make fun of the other person the more of a case you build that you never really had anything to say at all and are a close-minded bigot who just likes to fight.
That’s my method. Do I always use it? No. Do I defend my ideas without spending all night analyzing them? Sometimes. Do I call people names sometimes? Yes. Does that mean my method isn’t valid? No. Does it make me a bad person? Yes. But then again, we’re all bad people.
The Wise Sloth 