Forgetting is also a way of learning
Brief lesson about your mind
I recently read in a book that, as we meditate, our brains go from alpha waves to beta waves; that is, you enter a state of calm and rest that is almost impossible to achieve when you are conscious. The first step to achieve this is to focus attention on yourself, for this, it is necessary to put all your attention on your breath. This helped me understand why I had failed in my previous attempts, it had to do with a misconception about meditation that I learned as a child.
Instead of paying attention to my breathing, I concentrated on avoiding having any kind of thought, because when I was little I heard my grandfather say that to meditate you need to stop thinking. What my grandfather was trying to say was that I should stop paying attention to my thoughts, but all these years it was impossible for me to understand because my first learning on the subject was a misunderstanding. I mean, my worst enemy was my self from the past.
Now I know that my grandfather was not entirely wrong, but he had a slight flaw in his choice of words that had me trapped in a loop destined to fail in my attempts to meditate and save the world one ohm at a time.
The deception of the past
Why is it so difficult to learn something new if we start with the wrong knowledge? Let’s imagine that the mind is a new computer and we come into the world with a series of pre-installed programs thanks to the culture and behaviors learned over thousands of years of evolution.
Decision making is one of these many cognitive processes with which we arrive preloaded to the world. Every decision we make will define our personality. Believing or not in an idea is also a decision. The decision process is kind similar to a scale that weighs the different possibilities from a given task happens, then a battle begins between the different possibilities, so that in the end the best option wins, according to the different variants.
But there are traps that condition the decisions we make. For example, we tend to give advantage to options that reaffirm a previous belief. If we grew up thinking that the Earth is flat, it is very likely that throughout our lives we will choose to believe in any idea that reaffirms this previous belief. This applies to all kinds of beliefs and knowledge.
When you are trying to learn something new, this prior knowledge serves to create links between different concepts, which are vital to generating the neural connections necessary to learn new knowledge. Remember how you learned to do calculations. First, you started with addition and subtraction, and the next learning was multiplication and division. In your mind, the new knowledge was stored in the mathematical wisdom drawer.
This way of adding learning to our minds sounds great when the pieces fit together, but it becomes a complication when a piece of previous knowledge does not fit with the new piece of information that is intended to add to your field of knowledge.
It’s like trying to build a brick wall, on a wall you place in when you were five. The result will be an unstructured wall, which will fall in the slightest wind. In my case, that first attempt at construction on the subject of meditation gave me the wrong idea of the process, which was opposed to being able to learn the correct way to meditate.
There are times when it is impossible to build new knowledge on the basis that we already have, and the best option is to tear down the old wall to build a new one. Forgetting what we already know could be the best option to learn something that we do not yet know. Leaving an old belief behind may be the best decision to keep moving forward, to grow and learn something new.
