Why We Don't Learn

Small Business Coach and Self Employment Expert x

Articles by Karyn Greenstreet

Why We Don't Learn

First, I'll warn you that I come from a 22-year background in adult education. That, combined with a deep spiritual belief in life, has given me a different view of learning than most trainers.

I believe there is a difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom." For me, knowledge is something obtained from outside sources. Wisdom in something obtained from experience, and from within, via insight. Wisdom is taking knowledge and merging it with common sense and compassion, and a kind of "soul understanding." Wisdom is deeper than knowledge; it is an understanding of the application of knowledge to reality.

Knowledge explains the technicalities of life. Wisdom explains the meaning in life.

I can learn both knowledge and wisdom. I can teach knowledge; wisdom will only be heard (and used) when the student is ready regardless of how good the instructor is.

I believe that each Soul has a series of lessons it must learn on the path to enlightenment. Each Soul takes whatever time is necessary to learn an individual lesson, even if the lesson must be repeated over and over again. This happens for several reasons: First, to a Soul, there is no time, so it doesn't matter how long it takes to learn. Second, the Soul is put in a human body, and is instantly weighed down with ego, emotion and social pressure, all which might encourage the human (and, therefore, the Soul), to not learn.

So, you can tell an employee who hates her job that she should leave it. Her Soul understands that, but her humanness can not grasp the wisdom, even though she understands the knowledge.

Our job as spiritual beings is to be tolerant of people's struggles towards wisdom...and to be compassionate with our own struggles as we transmute knowledge into wisdom.

A little motivation...

"Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are."

--Norman Vincent Peale

"Is it any coincidence then that the most incredibly successful people have the most confident and positive attitudes? Many people think that positive attitude is a by-product of having achieved wealth and success. In my experience I have found that this attitude was more often the reason for and not the result of success."

--Mark A. Crouch