History As A Teacher of Wisdom

This caught my attention.

"They just don't teach history in school anymore," said a black man with his 8-year-old child I met while waiting at a cab pickup area at Block Island. We chatted about many things in our 10-minute wait for our cabs. Like me, he was also a pilot in need of a ride back to his plane at Block Island Airport. 

A cab arrived and my party of four and he and his boy all decided to share the cab as we packed ourselves together in the space the best we could.

Considering his comment, I thought to myself how important it is for any of us humans to learn from our past mistakes. Professionally, I teach and lecture about success and use hypnosis and meditation to demonstrate the latent power of the human mind. I teach thousands of people each year how important it is to focus on the solution rather than the problem. I promote how one can never truly fail if he or she refuses to give up, and how one can become more aware and train themselves to notice the opportunity in any given situation.

My ultimate goal through my work is to teach others and reveal how to use the power of the mind to navigate the complexity of life to ultimately learn to live free in what often is an un-free world. Often, un-free because of our lack of understanding of how the mind works. For this reason, experiences often become stumbling blocks rather than stepping stones to bridge one over to their next experiences to find the paradise they seek - in their mind.

But with all my successes, not only as a mind teacher, but also from my real estate ventures, my work as a pilot, and my mission to achieve bodily healthy and maintain harmony in my relationships, I've realized that we can only get better at anything via the feedback of learning what doesn't work. Like an artist, we can only get stronger through critique. We learn what we like and where are successes are, by learning what we don't like and where we've failed. This is where we can improve and strengthen our work.

When we don't have feedback, we often stumble and attract the same problems over and over again.

That is the importance of learning about history. I've always said that real wisdom is learning from other's failures, so we don't need to make the same inevitable  mistakes. We are here in the world to transcend the limiting experiences and struggles to live as free, child-like spirits expressing ourselves openly and freely.

I've learned that we can only get better by learning from our mistakes. But, I've always said "wisdom" is to have the insight to learn from other's mistakes so you don't need to make the same mistakes yourself. It's not about being perfect, it's about efficiency.

By not learning from historical events and mistakes and successes of past civilizations, how are we to move forward without making the inevitable mistakes humans tend to make? Our excellence as a society will come to fruit only when we can collectively educate ourselves from the past historical tragedy and successes and move forward with a quiet wisdom guiding us from the insights learned from our ancestors.

With no history, we become a slave to the agenda surrounding us without a foundation to hold us connected to common sense that can only be born from wisdom.

We arrived at the airport and walked out to our planes together. We each took off and radioed to each other how cool it was to meet as we each flew over the water into the late afternoon sun to our destinations on the mainland.

If you feel inspired, pass it on... if you want more insight into your mind... get my book Thinking Beyond Habitual Thinking.