Unlearn!

The ability to learn is one of the greatest assets we have. But the apparent inability to unlearn, or more appropriately the unwillingness to unlearn whatever we have learnt by whatever means is one of our biggest weaknesses. 

Starting from our early childhood when we are always trying to satisfy our curiosity by learning from our environment, our family and our teachers, we become the target of an unconscious campaign by these very people to kill the said curiosity. A lot of the questions remain unanswered and we acquire the habit of ignoring these questions that our minds generate so frequently during our early years. As soon as our egos become large enough to play their part, we start getting convinced that any question that is still unanswered does not matter, that it is unimportant. These unanswered questions further put a stop to the birth of other questions in our minds and gradually, we only ask trivial questions, the answers to which do not affect anything which has any real significance in the time-space curves of the universe. We are only interested in learning things that affect our immediate surroundings in time and space. We are not bothered about the actual questions of time and space. We have to re-awaken the curiosity. We have to accept the fact that nobody knows everything and that there may be hundreds of truths that nobody knows at all. And somebody will be the first to uncover them and that that somebody could be us. 

In this age of technological revolution, information is more accessible than it ever was before. Thus, satisfaction of most kinds of intellectual curiosities is just a click away. What stops us from pursuing this path then? More than anything else, it is our belief that it is a useless exercise. Amusingly, by believing that learning varied things is a waste of time, we do not actually stop learning. We continue the process and learn new things everyday from people, from our experiences, from books, from the media. The only difference such an attitude makes that we learn whatever is thrown at us, whether we want to know it or not. In other words, our learning process escapes the boundaries of our free will. And when even our intellectual growth is in the hands of forces beyond our control, what else can we expect to hold on to?

The first thing we have to unlearn is this attitude. We must know the truth and if it is not readily available, we must find it. We must discover the truth about what we are doing at any given time and then decide whether it is worth doing or not. There should be only two reasons for doing anything. One that you want to do it and two that you have to do it. If nothing else we should at least be interested in learning and ensure that what we are doing is either what we actually want or it is something that we definitely have to do. We must unlearn to ignore unanswered questions. We must learn to ask and then to seek.

Even more harmful than the unanswered questions are the unquestioned answers; things that we learn starting from our childhood to the end of our lives; things that we learn not to question. We believe a lot of things merely because we hear them from someone, and are more prone to believe them without question if we read them in print or hear them from someone on media. Such unquestioned answers play a huge role in turning us away from the truth and making us believe a lot of falsehoods as if they were the absolute truths. Unfortunately we start living our lives on the basis of these facts and gradually the chances of our stumbling on the truth diminish. Then a time comes when even if we do stumble upon it, we try to ignore it since it does not fit in with our life and concepts, mostly based on false notions. When falsehood is believed to be the truth, the actual truth becomes a lie.

All progress in humanity occurred when a few people, scattered throughout history, questioned the hitherto unquestioned answers. Almost every time, they found them to be wrong and went on to ask, to seek and to learn, and a number of them ended up changing the world forever. We must unlearn the things we have been taught against our desires. It is not necessary that all of them would turn out to be wrong, but even if most of them were true, this questioning, learning and unlearning would give us an infinitely stronger basis to believe in them. Such a line of thought would omit the fiction from our belief and would strengthen the facts that already exist along with starting us off on the path to learning the truth that we do not know as yet.

Once we have uncovered the truth of all the forces that control us, we will realize that the strength of these powers is merely in our minds, a mere illusion. Only when we realize that we can be free of the powers these factors exercise on us. And only then would we be able to breathe the fresh air of freedom and take our own decisions based on our own choice. Freedom is something that just cannot be appreciated unless it is experienced.