(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you gorgeous people who matter so very, very much.
Right out of the gate, I want to give you the heads up.
We're about to pick up some speed in this chapter, because pretty soon we're going
to be ramming a huge concept.
One that will always stay with you, because once you see it for what it is, you can't
see it.
But isn't that kind of the blessing and the curse of the unfiltered truth?
Once it's on you, it is on you for life.
And from that part of the book on, that's where the biggest mind-blowing moments happen.
So for today, I'm going to talk about some of the ways that you can more easily foster
that connection with your fellow human beings, to understand them better, to not be as angry
with them, and I'm even going to give you another way to love them more easily.
So buckle up and get ready, because the doozies, they're coming.
Chapter 6 Not My Path
As I mentioned before, human beings started as groups and tribes.
Now when you're in a tribe, there's a lot less focus on getting for oneself, and a much
greater focus on doing for the betterment of the tribe.
Because before we even developed our languages, we knew two crucial things.
That there was something bigger than ourselves that we owed a debt of gratitude to, and that
life is always better with other people in it.
That we need each other, and that what is best is to be together.
And yes, you could go it alone, but it was a lonely, hard, and dangerous life.
Together we were stronger, and real joy could be had.
Alone, one may have some periods of contentment or appreciation of beauty, but happiness would
be elusive.
No one gets to happiness on their own, so what was one to do if they wanted more for
themselves?
Well, they could separate themselves from the rest of them, physically and emotionally.
Because the less you care about others, the more easily you can take for yourself.
But we didn't stay in tribes.
We built villages, we spread out kingdoms, towns, and cities.
We retained some of the tribal community mentality, but we no longer relied on our small community
to support us.
We no longer necessarily knew the person who slaughtered the animal that you had part of
for dinner, or the person that fixed something in your home.
Nowadays, a connection like that is much rarer.
With so much of what you use being made in a different country, yes, we are now much
freer than before to gain for self, but we no longer have that interpersonal protection
of the tribe, either.
The less tribal we became, the more fearful we became that there are people out there
that embrace the mentality that they could get more for themselves by caring about others
less.
So we began putting locks on doors, not just latches to keep them closed against the wind.
Bars on windows, alarm systems, wifi cameras, fences and gates to fences against those who
would take without care for the owner.
And we began to see the death of the neighbor.
People do not commune the way that they once did with their neighborhoods.
We have made ourselves much more efficient at being alone and depending only on a system
and its relatively faceless interactions.
And without our tribes, I fear that many more of us have had an easier time embracing getting
more by caring less.
Now I spoke before about the unpredictability of the cacophony.
We fear that others will do that which we would not prefer and our trust in each other
takes a nosedive.
Well, this is problematic when we, the blind pilots, decide on a course that we would like
our life to follow or as I call it, my own path.
Our fear of the unknown regarding the unpredictability of others increases the more we focus on my
own path.
It pushes us to stay even tighter to our own path and to not take risks helping each other
by making ourselves or our assets vulnerable.
So yes, we make a choice, but today most of us don't even think of that as an active choice.
A society has taught us that that's the norm for so long.
It's not a choice.
It's just what we do.
And each time we listen to that, each time we decide against helping, we let go of more
of our compassion.
It's just what we do.
We break a little more off each and every time we pass helping someone else or brush
off dealing with someone we don't feel like dealing with or walk the other direction away
from someone that's hurting.
It breaks our compassion more and more as if gripping harder to my own path creates
fissures and cracks in our connections to others.
Not only are we not physically able to see the inexplicable connection that we share
as human beings, but we also cannot see the damage that we are doing to those connections.
And one of the side effects of damaging that connection is that it fuels blame.
You see, for most of us, we carry around two different parameters when it comes to blame.
One for ourselves and one for everyone else.
With ourselves, yes, we take what occurred as a result of what we did into account, but
we weigh heavily our intent when assigning blame to ourselves.
I mean, we didn't mean for that to happen after all.
It wasn't our intent for it to go down the way that it went down.
Whereas blame that's assigned to others is typically based almost unilaterally around
what occurred as a result of the choice that they made.
And that's largely because we can't know each other's intentions.
We do not have the viewpoint and walking a mile in someone else's shoes won't cut it
because they are far more than a mere mile, as are you.
Their life consists of millions of interactions, experiences, decisions, outcomes, and observations
that make up why they think as they think and why they believe as they believe.
Not a one of us stands a chance at replicating their thinking process.
But what you can do is start with you.
I can say that most everything I've ever decided to do or to not do, I've had a
pretty good reason that made sense to me to do what I did at the time.
And my exact reasoning for why I believed it to be a good idea is not something that
I could ever offer to someone else.
I simply don't have the time to explain every single reason behind the way that I think
or the decisions that I make.
I usually try to make good decisions.
I trust that I usually try to make good decisions.
And I'd imagine that's a trust that you could extend to yourself as well, correct?
Good.
Because that's the first step.
It's the second step that's a bit more of a doozy.
Now once you realize that about yourself though, the second step does become doable.
Try trusting that the rest of them are the same as you and I in that respect.
Not everyone that cuts you off on the highway is just some idiot driver or doing it on purpose
to aggravate you.
Not everyone that argues with you is an idiot or just wrong.
If they are passionate about their cause, you can trust that they've got damn good
reasons for believing as they do.
So yeah, that's all well and good, but how does that help you?
Outside of being more tolerant and less angry and having a more functional relationship
with your fellow man, of course.
Well, to comment on that, I should very much like to bring up a book that changed my life
and kickstarted all that is being taught within the pages of the book that you're being read
right now.
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land is a rather unique book as he crafted a story
that allowed the author to offer his unique perspective on human behaviors.
The story centers around a child that's born on Mars, most commonly called Mike amongst
those that know him and the man Martian to those that don't.
This happens during the first man trip to Mars.
When the astronauts arrive, they discover that a Martian race already inhabits the planet.
During the astronauts' visit, the baby is born and one terrible thing happens to the
crew that was not the Martians doing.
That baby spends 20 years being raised by the red planet's inhabitants.
Finally, Earth, who hasn't heard from the astronauts in 20 years, arrives on a rescue
mission.
Now, I bring this book up to discuss a very interesting part of Mike's upbringing that
they discover.
Something very interesting about Mike's foster parent species is that they know that there's
an afterlife.
When the physical shell of one of their own expires, they shed it but remain among their
people.
They can still interact with the physical world and speak plainly with those who have
not yet quote unquote died.
But that's not the best part.
They can continue their life's work from beyond the grave.
So many of them will spend their whole lives perfecting the first few measures of a song
that they're writing because they know that they have an eternity to finish it and to
write however many songs they wish with the same level of attentiveness.
Time is not an issue to them, and this unique part of their existence lends to a beautiful
aspect in their culture.
Grocking.
You see, the Martians understood what I just wrote about prior, that every human being
has their own unique perspective that's a culmination of everything they've experienced.
Each person is therefore afforded a view of the world and its many truths that no one
else in the history of man will ever be able to view.
Imagine a large complex object in the center of a large crystal, a crystal that has been
cut so that it has thousands and thousands of facets or flat surfaces.
Each person has their own facet that they can view things through, but they only get
one angle of a small part of the whole picture.
And they can't move over and view someone else's facet for reasons you already know,
but they can ask them about theirs.
The more one learns about other people's facets, the better one's understanding of
the actual true nature of that which is being observed.
Once one has amassed enough knowledge of these facets, enough that they understand the truth
of the observed subject, then they grok the subject.
I've become a big fan of grokking.
It allows me to put new spins on old ideas.
You know, you don't really learn how stagnant your own thinking has become until you start
incorporating grokking.
Now, when someone doesn't agree with my view on something, do you know what I do?
I start asking them questions.
Not trying to trap them into realizing they're wrong, but just trying to find out what it
is that they're seeing from their facet, and what parts of it they're most passionate
about.
Because I don't know about you, but hearing the truth, it resonates when I hear it.
And I trust that they have their reasons that make sense to them for them to believe as
they do.
Not everyone will describe their facet to you, sometimes because they haven't looked
very carefully at it.
Sometimes for fear of finding out it isn't showing what they believed it was showing.
And sometimes they're staring at it and convinced they know what it shows.
It's bristles on a large paintbrush.
It's so obvious.
But if enough people tell you about what their facets show, you can piece together that it's
actually an elephant, with bristly hair at the end of its tail.
There are several parts in Stranger in a Strange Land that I found to be clever observations
about human behavior that the author made through Mike.
The character gave the author a unique platform.
Here's a person raised in a culture of civility and a focus on grokking and learning and understanding
all that they encounter.
The character is meeting humanity for the first time with a fully formed adult mind
at the wheel.
Mike spends a large portion of the book offering an outsider's perspective on several behavioral
mannerisms of people.
And the motivation for him to do this is strong.
He's also a human being that doesn't know why his people do the things that they do.
Eventually, he does feel like he has humanity pegged, but still doesn't, quote, feel like
people, due to one simple fact.
He does not understand why something is funny, and he's never laughed, ever.
His conundrum plagues him throughout the story, keeping him from finally feeling human.
And after several years have passed, I assume, Heinlein never really specifies, Mike and
his companion Jill are out together at a zoo, where they happen upon a monkey house, and
during an ugly incident between three monkeys, utters his first real laugh.
In fact, he absolutely shrieks, hacks, and wheezes his way through a large swath of the
laughter spectrum.
He laughs for so hard and for so long that Jill has to take him home.
Finally, he stops and he explains to her that he gets it, and he finally feels human.
When pressed, he tells her it's because he's, quote, found out why people laugh.
They laugh because it hurts so much, because it's the only thing that'll make it stop
hurting.
The statement perplexed me greatly.
Something inside of myself recognized the truth within it, but also that it was part
of another truth.
It said heavily in my mind, and was the subject of several meditations.
It stayed with me like a small sliver of glass in my mind.
That statement, and is next.
You see, Mike goes on to explain that every gut-bustingly funny joke, gag, prank, etc.
has at least one victim.
There's always someone taking the hit that has the worst luck in a situation, that gets
hurt or embarrassed or made to be a fool, that things go ironically or poetically wrong
for.
Think of all the story jokes that you know and see if this fits for yourself.
Sometimes, even the listener is the victim.
For example, why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the idiot's house, knock knock.
Who's there?
The chicken.
That's it from me today.
Thanks for coming to the reading.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at willhelpmail at gmail.com.
We've got the website coming to laughingmatters.com.
Right now it just links to the podcast.
Come talk about this stuff, ask questions, or hear what others think at r slash the laughingmatters
on reddit.
And you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I could
help.
And a quick word for you guys.
I'm putting this out there where I can and trying to make it as available as I can.
The writing of this book was not about turning a profit.
It's about contributing these findings and these concepts to the great wealth that is
the stores of human understanding.
And I need your help to make it spread.
I cannot do this alone.
Now I'm taking the book to publish, going to do whatever I can to promote it, but that
will never carry the same impact as you telling someone you know that they should check out
what this guy is saying.
Please talk to other people about these concepts.
Give them the understanding and give them a chance to also get out of it what you are
getting out of it.
You and I can help them.
We actually have something that can help them.
And that's just what I've read to you so far.
Some seriously huge perspective widening truths are coming and at very least, you're going
to want someone to talk about it with.
So until the next episode, take a look at a few of the jokes that you've loved over
the years and see if Mike wasn't right about that.
And while you're at it, trust that they have their own reasons.
Give them a chance to explain their views.
Be good for them and be good to them.
And you're going to be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.
We're
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