We spend an awful lot of time studying various things. We learn a language to communicate, we go to school and then to college and acquire certificates and diplomas that declare our worth to the world. We understand who is a friend and who is an enemy, and sometimes we learn the two are the same. We realize we like tea and not coffee, and we learn to defend our beliefs and way of life most staunchly. We learn to love those that share these and despise those that don’t. We learn to show off and keep up with the Joneses, and we learn to behave in ways that make us more acceptable to society and our cultures. When we are born, we are given our name, nationality, and religion, and then we spend the rest of our lives learning to defend things we never consciously chose for ourselves.
We learn that we are better than others because of class, religion, money, or because we speak in a certain way or went to a certain school. We learn not to trust, and we learn not to wear our hearts on a sleeve. We learn jealousy, greed, and anger, and we learn to seethe silently inside as we present an outer calm. And we learn to treat strangers with greater courtesy than our loved ones.
We Spend A Lot of Time Learning…
But what if we consciously unlearned. What if we started unlearning? Today. Consciously. What if we decided that everything we know is not true. What if we indulged in a little bit of private anarchy. What if we walked away from the friend, partner, or job that was hurting us. What if we supported a different football or cricket team for a few months. What if we decided to do our wife’s household chores or we decided to let our husband be stay-at-home dad’s and become career ambitious. What if we read books that challenged us and joined Facebook groups that held opposing views to our own… to understand rather than to heckle. What if we let our children choose their belief systems for themselves, and what if we realized through all of this, that we are not everyone else’s opinion of us. What if we decided to laugh at ourselves more and others less, if we took ourselves far less seriously…?
What if we unlearned the shackles of our learning to connect with our higher selves and discovered the incredible interconnectivity between us and the wealth of power that lies in our thoughts. Wouldn’t that be the real nature of progress for humanity? When we blindly stop blundering through the tunnel of learning, we dig for ourselves and learn to collaborate, care, and give to each other and this world with the wisdom of all we unlearn.
For as the incredible philosopher and writer David Henry Thoreau beautifully said, “When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.”
Sangeetha Shinde Tee is an author of four books, editor of 3 international magazines, an acclaimed healer, and a reluctant entrepreneur. Also an unconventional traveler, rebellious truth seeker, and inveterate animal rescuer, she is working on her fifth book – a collection of ghost stories from around the world. Find out more about her life, books, and work at www.sangeethashindetee.com
