Uncommon Sense
Chapter 9 The road back
There are no extraordinary people. There are just ordinary people who do extraordinary things because they know something others don’t. There is a difference that makes a difference among people. Some people seem to have it. Others don’t. Some people just can’t, no matter how hard they try. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Some people see things as they are and ask why. Some see things that never were and ask why not.”. There are some things we ought to know, but we don’t; Common sense ideas that are so profoundly invaluable to our lives that, once you get it, you wonder how did we ever get this far without knowing them. Some things should be common sense, but apparently, they are not. They are an Uncommon Sense.
Uncommon sense is a sense of things based on a more in-depth perception of that which is common to our experience. It is clearly not genetic. It seems to be memetic. It is not passed on. Show me a great man who is the son of a great man. It is replicated only by those who seek it. You seek it because you need to not because you grasp for it. It doesn’t take “strength of will.” It takes humility. It is not something you make happen. It is something you allow to happen to you. You get an uncommon sense from taking a journey within yourself and challenging what you believe. This journey is a search for truth not about the world but the truth about yourself. It is a journey to answer the question of who am “I’: That which you refer to as I, not the reflected self but the authentic self. It is by taking on the responsibility of being the architect of your own mind that you gain an uncommon sense. You have to make up your mind to change the makeup of your mind.
Life lessons will be repeated until learned. You can change your context all you like, but you will simply repeat the lesson until you learn it. You can learn what you need to know in life either by using your intelligence, or you can learn it by going through suffering. The choice is yours and yours alone. Just as no one can live for you, and no one can die for you, there are some choices you must own for yourself. Most of us are conditioned to use pain as a way to learn. It takes a strong commitment to make the necessary effort to use your intelligence. A person who can use their intelligence is someone we think of as being mentally strong and smart. However, making this kind of personal commitment is not a question of having the will to do it. It is about having the humility to allow it to happen. Learning to cultivate that kind of humility often begins with understanding what it truly means to be smart. A wise man is one who knows enough to know he doesn’t know. A fool is one who knows so little that he believes he knows it all. If you know enough to know you don’t know, then you will want to find out what you need to know. If you believe you know something, then you don’t want to find out anything because it may contradict what you believe.
Having the self-honesty to self reflect is the truest form of integrity. Integrity means to be undivided. Most people do not want to feel stupid. Stupid feels isolated and alone. Stupid invokes feelings of inadequacy and thus an inability to protect oneself. In our desperation to not “feel” stupid, we lose the very valuable lesson of humility. Stupid is a word that actually means slow to learn. It does not mean you don’t know something. Ignorance means not possessing knowledge. Ignorance is a natural state. It is not a feeling. There will always be something you are ignorant about. Stupidity however is a behavior, It is not something that you are, It is something that you do and like all behaviors it is something you practice. In trying not to “feel” stupid we often do stupid things. What we want to feel is the opposite of stupid, which most people intuitively believe is smart. Smart is not the opposite of stupid. Clever means quick to learn. Clever is not smart. We try to act smart by being clever and so become vested in an elaborate pretense.
We look for ideas that we agree with. We believe that somehow because we agree or because a lot of people agree with what we believe then that means that we are smart. Agreeing with something isn’t knowing it. In doing these things we actively create obstacles to our own understanding and the result is that we end up embodying, the very thing we are trying to avoid, being slow to learn. We take the same action over and over and each time we are expecting a different result. All because we want what we want and believe that is enough, so we are disappointed when we don’t have it. We “should” have it and this leads into a death spiral around why we can’t have it. We even go so far as to look at the outside of others and believe they have what we want on the inside. After all we are not stupid. We believe in this bizarre inversion so completely that we actually expect things to work out the way we imagine. When they don’t, we are surprised, hurt, disappointed, and even wounded. Often we are clever but not smart. So clever in fact, we abort our life lessons only to end up repeating the process. How is it to learn painfully the simplest of things? This is how we come to exist in the perpetual state of being slow to learn. All the while being so clever, we outsmart ourselves.
Being slow to learn is a mental virus that we inherited from the matrix (our society). Believe it or not, being stupid, being slow to learn, whether encumbered by ego or pride in being clever, is, in fact, common sense. It is a simple perception. We got it by mirroring and matching what we think others are doing. We got it from trying desperately to avoid feeling stupid. Stupid is not a feeling. Humiliation, the abasement of pride, where abasement is being belittled and degraded, is a feeling. Clever is not a source of pride. First, you have to decide to stop being slow to learn. Smart, the noun, is the ability to make good judgments and quick decisions. Smart takes humility not pride. Pride is an irrationally corrupt sense of one’s personal value. Wisdom, being able to apply knowledge, can only come from submission. You have to allow your experience to teach you. It all begins with being willing to accept that being stupid or smart is not something that you are, this is common sense. An uncommon sense realizes there is a difference in being clever and being smart. Smart is something that you do, not something you feel. The good news is you can learn to do something else. What you need to know is how. If we truly want to smart, which means being quick to learn, which is the opposite of being slow to learn, then you have to cultivate some different behaviors. This is an Uncommon Sense.
The only way to get Uncommon Sense is to earn it by your own efforts. No one can give an uncommon sense to you. You have to earn it for yourself. You need to learn how to do it then practice it until you get it right and then practice it until you can’t get it wrong. That is how you get from here to there, but first you have to decide what you are going to do with what you now know. You need to choose to be committed to making some concrete changes in your life; this means accepting responsibility for your own life and being resolved to educate yourself.
