Introduction to unlearning and why it is critical for personal growth. Why is it as important as learning?
Preamble:
As we grew up we are taught that in order to be successful we need to learn. We have been told that we need to grow our intellect and expand our knowledge to achieve what we are striving for. Every endeavour has rules and in order to achieve something you need to understand and accurately follow a set of predefined rules, rules for relationships, careers, art, family, and health. When we embark on a new endeavour we addictively ask for the rules. We search for experts, manuals, and books to explain what to do and how to do it, which is ok for many things but for others we need to take completely different approach.
We have become programmed to learn, that we seek to learn how to overcome some of what we have already learnt.
Example:
Let’s take Self-confidence as example. Many books have been written to teach people how to become confident. Hundreds of online article full of tips and rules are being published. Unfortunately, all these tips don’t work for most of individuals. You rarely meet someone who became confident after reading a book. For the most part these rules help people fake being confident. at the end of the day they feel exhausted and naturally bounce to their usual doubts about themselves. Those tips are built upon imitating the behavior of genuinely confident persons.
Every child is innately confident. Losing confidence happens when the child is repeatedly and excessively criticized. The more the child is unfairly judged or compared to other children the more he doubts himself. Eventually, he would have been learnt to judge himself the same way he had been judged. Genuinely confident people haven’t experienced these situations, so they have no reason to doubt their own worth. Their minds hadn’t developed a neural network for excessive self-judgment. They are literally ignorant of how that is being done. They don’t have the distracting voice in their heads that unrelentlessly urges them to compare themselves to others.
Self doubt is the application of certain rules and can’t be conquered by adding new rules.
This is why learning to be confident is not the right approach, rather, one needs to unlearn being unconfident. He needs to find out about the roots to why he doubts himself, and whether there are certain situations that led him to doubt his ability to make decisions. What is that that he fears if he made mistakes? And why does he fear it? Is it really fearsome? What is the worst thing that might happen if he fails? And doesn’t it worth trying? Everyone needs to discover what stops him. What is that he hates about making progress?
Some applications:
As unlearning works for confidence it does work for many other traits and qualities. Love, courage, leadership, and any other good trait you believe you lack can be harnessed by unlearning what oppresses it.
Discrimination, racism, and prejudice:
We don’t have to learn how not to discriminate and how discrimination is immoral, we need to unlearn considering ourselves better than others due to our sex, race, color, or religion. We can’t genuinely be humble while we have a conviction that we belong to something that is greater than what others belong to.
Inferiority:
When we feel inferior we don’t need to learn how equal we are to others, we only need to remove the original thought that we are not as worthy as others for any reason. Usually people who feel inferior to others have discrimination against themselves believing that what they are/have is less worthy than what others have.
Love:
No heart is empty of love; humanity is bound to love and is built upon it. So the question is what stands between someone and his innate ability to love. What is preventing him from freely experience his innate feelings?
Unlearning:
Unlearning is the process of letting go of old conditioning, faulty thoughts and hindering emotions to land on one’s authentic abilities, qualities and traits. It is a change of attitude from trying to know how to achieve something to finding and resolving what prevents such achievement. It includes consistently reviewing everything one has been taught about himself and life, destructing old mentalities that do no good and built the one that makes you in ease with who you essentially are. It yields a radical change as it doesn’t add extra layers of knowledge to the already exist ones, rather to build upon the innate qualities and traits.
Unlearning requires turning one’s attention within, concisely identifying what he feels and why, understanding how he inwardly reacts to external situations and what this reveals about his inner workings.
It is a part of wisdom to realize there are many traits that are more a matter of potential than learning. It is time and effort consuming to take a talented person as a role model for something in which you are not as talented as him. Role models actually had reached their levels of proficiency because they don’t fight what they are, rather understanding themselves and what they can excel at with minimum effort. Rather than beating yourself up to reach another one’s level of skill, you can simply discard the whole thing and find what you are talented at and build upon it. You can save a lot of wasted time and effort. Lao Tzu once said “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
In order to adopt unlearning process you need to bear in mind that all human qualities, endeavours, and traits are equal to each other. You can utilize whatever authentic quality you discover after unlearning or completely discarding the fake ones. The easiest trait to excel at is the one that is authentically yours. There is no task you can accomplish better than the one that emanates from your heart.
A good portion of what we have learnt causes us stress, in our path to achievement we stress over thoughts of self doubt and comparison, as someone believes he belongs to a superior race he would stress over defending it against doubters and those who underestimate its superiority. Every time one unlearns something there is an accompanying feeling of relief, there is a lightness he experiences. Freedom is what one reaches when he unlearns fear, self-judgment, and caring what others are thinking of him, Beauty of life and other human beings is what one sees when he unlearns to over-judge them. Strength and beauty of authenticity is what he gains when he removes his masks and face life bare-hearted.
Imagine a world where people are unlearning and no longer teaching their children selfishness, discrimination, racism, hatred, tyranny, arrogance, superiority, inferiority, jealousy, and greed.
To be continued……..
