Seek It Out; Let It In!

SEEK IT OUT; LET IT IN!

By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, December 6, 2024

It has been said that Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams Realty International, has said, “You are either IGNORANCE based or you are LEARNING (knowledge) based!”  If he did say that, he was right then and even more so today!  Just like being positive, you either consciously or unconsciously make a decision every morning when you first wake up, to be so!  Today is either going to be positive or negative and I will act accordingly.  AND, you will choose to be and remain ignorant or you will choose to be learning based - TODAY!  In both cases, my advice to everyone would be to CHOOSE WISELY!  And…it wouldn’t hurt to put notes on your bathroom mirror (assuming you look in the mirror every morning when you brush your teeth, you do brush your teeth, right?) and the notes would remind you that for TODAY, I CHOOSE TO BE POSITIVE AND I CHOOSE TO BE LEARNING BASED!

With that said, I looked up “ignorance” and “learning”, this is what I discovered on the Internet:

Ignorance

1. “Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.” - Confucius
2. “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
3. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.” - Alfred North Whitehead
4. “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.” - Horace Mann
5. “It is not good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” - Frank Zappa

Learning

1. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” - Thomas Paine
2. “The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.” - Robert Burton
3. “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” - William Wordsworth
4. “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Daniel J. Boorstin
5. “Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never has doubts about.” – Socrates

Of all the above quotes besides the one attributed to Gary Keller, my favorite quote is #2 from Martin Luther King, Jr. “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

I have underlined the key words in the King quote to draw emphasis to the fact that people CHOOSE “conscientious stupidity!”  In other words, people CHOOSE to be STUPID!  How does one become learning based as compared to learning to be ignorant based?  If you believe that attending school makes you smart, I can show you a lot of people who have non-medical Doctor’s Degrees who show significant signs of stupidity because they have learned WHAT THEY WERE TAUGHT TO LEARN in our universities.  It is not just my opinion; many people have written about the indoctrination of students at all levels of our educational system.  You learn what your teacher wants you to learn, right or wrong.  Then as adults the learning does not stop with your education, most adults, certainly not you, get most if not all of their current information from the television news, their computers, and/or soon to be out of print newspapers.  What makes the adult version of becoming “knowledge based” so wrong, is that adults only seem to learn what the television anchors have chosen for them to learn and know about.  In other words, if most adults are not paying close attention, they will not recognize the fact that they are being spoon fed very small clips of information about people, current events, news stories and situations that could affect their lives, in the near future and the distant future.  More importantly they could be watching and hearing news that is actually fake news, untrue, a lie, call it whatever you want; it’s just not true;  COVID comes to mind!   If that does not scare you, I am going to suggest that you may in fact be a member of the ignorant or stupid group of Americans.

Want more proof?  Sure you do.  I draw your attention to the website that follows that reports, according to a Gallop Poll. that Americans “SAY” they read about 12 books a year or one a month.   Is that a real number to be believed?  Maybe so, maybe not; I don’t know.  What is the important question NOT asked?  Were the books fiction or non-fiction?  To me, reading fiction is more for enjoyment, not to learn something of significant value.  If you read non-fiction books, hopefully you are learning something of value.  I spent over 33 years in real estate sales as a salesman, broker and trainer.  I could not help but notice that very few of the agents ever read any books on sales or customer relations.  To put that into perspective, would you want to buy a home from someone who does not stay atop of his or her profession by reading about the profession?  Would you want a heart surgeon to operate on your heart if the surgeon hasn’t read anything on heart surgery since he or she first became a surgeon?  I think it is safe to say you would not choose an ignorant real estate agent nor an ignorant heart surgeon.   https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx

Since my early 40s, I have made a conscious decision to read AT LEAST ONE book PER MONTH but had a target of TWO BOOKS per month.  For decades I met the latter challenge.  Now approaching my 80s, that represents a great many books and only about 1% were fiction!  I studied my real estate profession and I carefully chose the books I decided to read.  I wanted them to fill a void in my education or my experience and just as important, where I saw my career going next.  I once counted up all of the books and eBooks I had read and they exceeded 1000. 

Since the early 1990s, I have moved on to reading more and more books and articles on politics, world history, U. S. History, biographies of famous and infamous people.  It was about this time that I came upon a phrase I had not heard before – becoming awaken!  What did that mean?  I now know what it is supposed to mean but how is it defined in the dictionary or on the Internet?  Here you go:

to become conscious or aware of something

awoke to the possibilities

At the same time, Italian prosecutors awoke to the international magnitude of their Sicilian underworld …—Selwyn Raab

To me, this is exactly what being “awake” meant but I would have expanded on the examples provided.  The Internet used the word “possibilities”, I would have added “probabilities”, “natural progression if left unchecked”, “natural digression if left unchecked” and finally “stagnation through conscientious stupidity!” 

People in general, certainly not you, CONSCIENTIOUSLY HAVE CHOSEN TO BE STUPID on all things involving their environment and politics or they CONSCIENTIOUSLY CHOOSE TO BE LEARNED!  The Learned People are AWAKE PEOPLE.  The Stupid People are the people that sleep walk through life verifying how Alfred Einstein defined insanity, “Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.” 

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?  WHICH ONE DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD BE AS COMPARED TO THE ONE YOU ACTUALLY ARE?  I have chosen to be AWAKE!  I have become awaken by reading, by listening to different opinions and beliefs as expressed in written words and spoken words of people from all walks of life; not just the words TAUGHT in schools or spoken on the television programs.  And…while I am on the subject, have you ever asked why they are called “programs?”  Could it be that both our schools and our main stream media and all of the various television shows are doing nothing by “programming” the way we think.  If so, we all, except those who have been awakened, we all begin to think in a very certain way.  As an example, how could anyone think that allowing millions of non-U. S. Citizens to cross into America is a good thing for our country?  If that is all you hear and read, that is what you will ultimately think, believe in and even argue for.  Look at all of the topics in today’s news that you should be questioning as to why they are being allowed to happen.  Could it be that we as a society are being systematically “programmed” to think in those terms?  IN MY OPINION, RIGHT OR WRONG, IT IS MY OPINION THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO AMERICA BY AMERICANS!  Also in my OPINION, that makes the millions of Americans who cannot see the disaster just waiting to happen as being bone-headed thinking all originating from CONSCIOUSLY STUPID AMERICANS! 

I have become very discouraged that I have chosen the road “less traveled” and I can assure you that while there is very little traffic on that path, it is a lonely road to follow.  On both sides of the road, millions of people have lined up to throw stones at those transiting the path to becoming awakened to all that is happening around them. That is a very uncomfortable feeling.  I know this because…

People who have chosen to become knowledgeable (awake) about activities and circumstances that could eventually become very harmful to civilization, should be respected, not ridiculed!  It will be those who have been awaken to the depravity, corruption and the wars created by governments all around the world, who will eventually open the eyes of those who have consciously or unconsciously chosen the path of “conscientious stupidity”, the opposite of which, is “enlightenment!”

C. JoyBell C, “The dance between darkness and light will always remain— the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be without the light.”

I could say that slightly differently: 

“The dance between ignorance and knowledge will always remain;

the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, ignorance cannot exist with the light of the knowledge so readily available! 

The information is out there, all YOU have to do is:

seek it out and then, let it in!”