Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), This week again let me bring to your attention an interesting excerpt from this thought provoking work, ‘Knowing How to Know’ by Idries Shah. In this work the author draws our attention to concealed patterns, normally invisible to our customary modes of thought.
Excerpt:
The Defeatist Culture
Overlapping all the differences of various current human cultures is the invisible ‘defeatist culture’, with common denominators among all people.
A child learns from its parents and those adults who surround it. It learns not only the positive injunctions of problem-solving which its elders think they are teaching it. In addition it is learning to emulate the parents; and it emulates their defeatism. This includes their rationalizations of why they do not attempt certain tasks, why they are ‘too tired’, or such-and-such an effort is not ‘worthwhile’.
This is true in the individual as it is in the society. Nobody had on record run a four-minute mile before someone did it. After that, because the unspoken taboo had been beaten, it became more and more common. A similar process takes place in children learning, perhaps sometimes without words, not to make a certain effort, an effort of will or of experiment.
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Concluding today’s session.
Let us remember: Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
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