A Stepping Stone?

April 26, 2018 General Insights No Comments

If you want that a child learns to count to 10, you can start teaching it to count from 1 to 2.

Well done.

However, if the child is at the same time being led to believe that there is absolutely nothing after the 2, really nothing at all, because 2 is simply ‘the best of the best’, then the child will have the biggest trouble to get past the number 2, let’s say, on its way to number 3.

Good…

However, if you at the same time … you will run into the same problem again with 4.

And then we might arrive at 5, with quite a lot of effort.

And just maybe … we come to 6 … somewhere at the age of retirement … and …

And well. Actually we did not even want to teach the child to count to 10. We just wanted the child learning to count

… to infinity.

One often hears/reads: people need a ‘stepping stone’, on the way to deeper understanding. That ‘stepping stone’ is a belief in some kind of New-Age-y idea (or just really very Old-Age-y, does it matter?), something that pulls them out of the purely materialistic idea in which they might already have been a child for 30 or 40 years, on their way to insight in their own deeper possibilities.

That is possible.

But what I usually notice then is that people – as with our count above – just get stuck: at 2, at 3, at 4, … and then back to 2 or even to 1 …

All things considered I personally think that ‘stepping stones’ are not recommendable,

unless they are handed down in very great openness. But of course: then it would not be stepping stones anymore. Then it would be just the whole open thing from the start.

So show 1 and 2 and immediately show, even in advance, that it does not stop at 2, it always goes further.

By the way: also the 0 is important.

The 0 is very special. It is a starting point and an end. And you don’t have to do anything at all, for that 0. It goes entirely ‘spontaneously’ 😊.

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Comfortably (Self-)Destructive

That is how I see many people, swaying to the rhythm of routine and collective comfort, avoiding a deeper exploration of their true selves ― still partially conscious beings, teetering on the edge of untapped self-awareness and unresolved complexities. Comfort acts as a shield against the cold winds of uncertainty. However, this same comfort blinds Read the full article…

Subtlety

Something is subtle when related concepts are semantically close to each other or even overlap each other, while the distinctions are relevant and yet hard to grasp. One is easily mistaken, which has important implications. Subtlety is different from hairsplitting. This is very important! … and in a number of cases it is subtle too. Read the full article…

From Discussion to Conversation

This is not obvious to many people. Thereby they get into needless difficulties, trying to ‘win’ alone instead of to gain insight together. This is about people talking about some meaningful issue in a domain they both hold dear. Eventually of course, it can be any domain. A (converging) conversation is a being together, talking Read the full article…

Translate »