you learn through voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new genes turn on in your nervous system they encode for new proteins and so you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world into different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits so it's not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different physiological demands on on
yourself all the way down to the genetic level and that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central because you take yourself out of your dopey little village and that's just a little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more
out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which means in formation it means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis but there's also more of you too and so that's a very classic idea so imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it represents something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with
the world in a manner that would gain you the most information right because you build yourself out of the information in the piagetian sense and then here's why so imagine you do something new and that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new so that's one thing but the second thing is and there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a
new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you and so that's very cool
because who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at
the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society if you could look that look at that straight and and directly that that would turn you on maximally you learn through voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you you always learn when you're wrong which is very annoying now what do you learn when you're correct every time you learn something you learn because something you did didn't work and that exposes you to the part of the world that you don't understand every time you're
exposed to part of the world that you don't understand you have the possibility of rebuilding the structures that you use to interpret the world that's often why it's more important to notice that you're wrong than it is to prove that you're right one of the things that you're supposed to learn in university is precisely that it might be useful to listen to people that annoy you on the off chance that they know something that if they tell you you can use instead of dying talking to people who agree with what you say is like walking
around in a desert you already know everything that they say the reason you're associating with them in that situation is so that they never say anything that challenges you because you're afraid that if you go outside of what you understand that you won't be able to tolerate the chaos but it isn't the case people have an unbelievable capacity to face and overcome things they don't understand and not only that that's essentially what gives life its meaning when you fall into the belly of a whale and you're swallowed up by something that lurks underneath that you
can come out the other side transformed and that's actually how people learn one of the things that you do as a clinician is find out what people are afraid of and what they're avoiding and that can be in their past or in their present or in their future break it down into smaller pieces and help them devise strategies of approach and mastery what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntary voluntarily confronted and so you break it down what you
try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it and it doesn't really matter as long as they start it you know then they can put the next piece on in the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly they get braver well there isn't any difference between the fool and someone who's courageous right from an archetypal perspective and i mean abraham is a fool obviously when he starts his
his his adventures i mean the story lays it out in that manner he's far too old to be leaving home for example he's a late bloomer you know and and then he has he has a lot of catastrophic adventures along the way and certainly you could imagine that had you encountered him when he first encountered the famine in the land of strangers when he first went out that the idea that he had he had followed his misguided intuitions would have been self-evident but in the abrahamic stories there is this call to get out and do
and and that's it and the thing is is that you know one of the things i've learned to put it to make it concretely is that like i've done a lot of different things in my life and every time i did a new thing i was a fool i did it badly i i was an imposter right and and and because when you first start to do something you don't know what you're doing but that that's okay that's an acceptance of your vulnerability right and your ignorance that's humility in some sense the willingness to be
a fool in a nude in the land of strangers that's it the willingness to be a fool in the land of strangers and that's an act of courage because you also reveal your vulnerability to the world by stumbling around but as long as you're stumbling forward then you're going to move forward now how do you do that more concretely you aim at an ideal right and you aim at an ideal that's beyond you now maybe you don't aim to begin with an idea that ideal that's so beyond you that you're crushed by its magnificence you
know maybe that's that's that's too demotivating to move you but you could at least conceptualize yourself as the you that you are with fewer of the faults that you know of and that's a good start and i also think that's associated with the idea of humility take stock figure out how it is that you're not who you could be and then move in that direction and accept the consequences you know you're gonna get slapped a lot but maybe with each slap you'll straighten up a little bit especially if you listen even to the people who
are slapping you because sometimes they're the ones who can reveal for you very quickly where it is that you're weak and insufficient so that you won't have to be that way in the future so you
