April 10, 2023

Below is a lesson from David Foster Wallace on daily awareness and what you pay attention to, as well as our key learnings.

The Blue Courage team is dedicated to continual learning and growth.  We have adopted a concept from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why team called “Learn, Share, Grow”.  We are constantly finding great articles, videos, and readings that have so much learning.  As we learn new and great things, this new knowledge should be shared for everyone to then grow from. 

This is Water

David Foster Wallace

Key Learnings:

• The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to totally different people given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. We never discuss where these beliefs templates come from, or that how we construct meaning is a matter of personal, intentional choice. Often this comes with arrogance that the other way of believing or constructing meaning cannot be true.
• Blind certainty - a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
• Teaching people to think is about being just a little less arrogant -- to have just a little more critical awareness about one's self and one's certainties. A huge percentage that one tends to be automatically certain of is often wrong and diluted.
• For example: experiences you have had tends to make you believe that you are the center of the universe -- every experience you have involves you, in front of you or behind of you, to the side of you, on your TV/monitor, etc. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you, but your own is so immediate and real. Therefore, you must choose to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of the natural hard-wired default setting to be deeply and literally self-centered. Being "well-adjusted."
• Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise control over how and what you think; being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. 
• Learning how to think - how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being alone, day in and day out -- through the boring, routine, and petty frustration. 
• The petty frustrations of life is where the work of choosing comes in. Every time you don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, you will be upset and miserable every time you experience these frustrations -- the natural default setting is the certainty the these situations is all about "me": my hunger, my fatigue, my desire to go home, everyone is just in my way (negativity). 
• You can choose to consider what situations others may be in, their feelings and own frustrations. It's hard and takes will and effort to think this way. Some days you won't want to, or it's too hard to. But most days, if you are aware enough to give yourself a choice you can choose to look differently at others and at experiences. 
• If you are automatically sure on what reality is and who and what is really important, operate on your default setting, then you probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. 
• If you really learn how to think and how to pay attention, you will know there are other options. It is within your power to experience situations as meaningful and sacred: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. You get to decide how you see a situation/experience.
• You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. What to worship (not just religious worship, but where you place value). 
• The really important kind of freedom involves attention, awareness, discipline and being able to truly care about people and sacrifice for them every day. That is freedom, and being education, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.  
• The real value of education: nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves "this is water."