Learn How To Learn

The Most Important Essay I'll Ever Write

95% of people who end up in manifestation/conscious creation/spiritual circles will make little to no progress regardless of how much time they spend studying. This isn’t for lack of will or good intention. The problem isn’t that people are lazy or that they aren’t actually interested in deepening their understanding. It’s actually something much deeper and more dangerous than that.

People struggle to make progress because of a worldwide learning crisis. Quite simply, people are terrible learners. They want to understand things but don’t know how to.

It’s a shame that we’re all forced to endure a decade and a half of schooling and not once does anybody actually sit us down and teach us how best to learn. Some people are naturally better learners than others, and some figure out how to learn over time, but we’re more or less left to our own devices when it comes to the development of learning ability. Good learners are labeled “smart” and bad learners are labeled “stupid,” and that’s that.

But it doesn’t have to be left at that. Bad learners can learn to become good learners, and good learners can learn to become great learners. And the better you get at learning, the more progress you’ll make toward your manifestation goals — without exception. You’ll likely feel compelled to skip this essay because it won’t offer any juicy secrets or new techniques. You shouldn’t skip it though.

If I have one skill that I really believe I’m exceptional at, it’s my ability to learn. I have zero doubts about my ability to learn new things and new skills. If I forgot everything I ever learned about manifestation and conscious creation today I’d be able to start re-learning it tomorrow, and eventually, I’d end up right back where I am now. So I mean it when I say this is the most important essay I’ll ever write because I’m going to teach you a lot of what I know about how best to learn.

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Critical thinking is defined as, “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” So basically, critical thinking is looking at an issue or question, analyzing and evaluating it, figuring out what information you already know about the issue and what information you probably need to know, and then combining those two categories of information together so that you can make a judgment on said issue.

To me, the key thing to point out here is that information itself is only as valuable as one’s ability to recognize how information applies to the issue at hand. Really, the acquisition of new information is just manual labor in the grand scheme of the learning process. You need to acquire new information to learn, yes, but that’s not the difficult part of the process. It doesn’t require any thought to take in new information. Which brings me to my next point.

There are two types of learners: Learners who are information-oriented and learners who are understanding-oriented. The first type of learners aren’t really learners at all — they’re just the human equivalent of very disorganized filing cabinets. They take in new information all the time, but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Their minds are just meaningless collections of facts and statements. There’s no order or structure to anything.

Understanding-oriented learners, though, are incredibly organized in their thinking. While they might only know 1/10th of the information that their information-oriented counterparts do, every bit of information they have fits neatly into a larger understanding. There’s sense to be made of what they know, and new information doesn’t get filed away until it’s obvious how that information “fits” with everything else that’s been filed away previously.

The reason there’s such a crisis of learning ability in the world is that traditional schooling teaches us to be information-oriented learners. Your success is directly linked to the amount of information you’ve stored up in your brain and your ability to spill that information out onto a page when asked about it. This isn’t a problem in a lot of areas of life where success is also linked to one’s arsenal of information. However, being an information-oriented learner is useless in any discipline that requires a person to connect the dots between different pieces of information.

Manifestation (and spirituality in general) is one of these disciplines. The actual information you know is almost entirely irrelevant as it pertains to making spiritual progress. All that matters is how the things you do know fit together in your mind.

How can we be certain of this? Well, because different people in different periods of history have used entirely different pieces of information to arrive at the same conclusion: that consciousness is fundamental to reality and that by manipulating the contents of one’s mind one can manipulate the experiences he encounters in the world. It isn’t the information one knows that matters, it’s the connections one draws between those pieces of information.

So what’s my larger point in all this? Well, really what I’m encouraging you to do is become an understanding-oriented learner. A lot of times people ask me questions along the lines of, “In this essay, you said x,y, and z — If I do z, y, and x is that okay?” I try to walk a fine line when I respond to these kinds of comments. On the one hand, I usually can give you a direct answer, and sometimes I will. On the other hand, though, what I usually want to say is, “I don’t know — will z, y, and x work?”

This isn’t because I want to be vague or obtuse. What I’m trying to do is push you in the direction of building understanding instead of compiling a bunch of random information. If I always give you a direct, discrete answer to that kind of question I’m encouraging you to focus on information. Essentially what you’re asking me is “Is my answer correct?”

Imagine I told you, “To manifest money successfully, touch your toes three times, spin around in a circle, jump in the air, then repeat an affirmation 100 times.” It wouldn’t be useful to then ask me, “Can I start repeating the affirmation while I’m touching my toes, or do I have to wait until after I’ve jumped to start?” That’s just a blind seeking of information — it’s looking to be told exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. But even were I to give you an answer, the answer wouldn’t be useful. If you don’t know why you’re meant to be going through that whole routine in the first place, how can you adjust the routine to manifest things other than money? You’d be much better off asking, “Wait — why does doing that specific routine allow me to manifest money successfully? What is actually going on at a systemic level that allows this process to work?”

At the end of the day, I’m just some guy. I can’t transmit my understanding to you. Nobody can do that. Understanding is unteachable. Understanding is the connection between pieces of information. A vast majority of what I write isn’t based on providing you with any new bits of information — it’s my attempt at getting you to investigate how the information you already possess is connected. That’s why I always say, over and over again, “Don’t take anything I say for granted. Check what I tell you against your own experience.” What I’m trying to say is, “Look at the connection between these two/three/four facts of your experience — here’s an explanation for how they fit together. Does that explanation make sense to you?”

Think critically about your understanding of the manifestation process. You might find that you literally have zero systemic understanding of how the process actually works despite having tons and tons of information in your possession. That’s okay. You don’t have to throw everything you know away, you just have to start the process of connecting the dots.

Take one thing you’ve been taught or told that you know with absolute certainty is true. They, take another bit of information you know to be true and start thinking about how they’re connected.

“Based on my experience, when I feel good more good things tend to happen to me, and when I feel bad more bad things happen to me. How might the way I feel be connected to the things that happen? Could it be that I’m just more aware of good/bad things happening depending on my mood? Hmm, maybe, but I can remember a handful of times when the good/bad things that happened seemed so connected to my inner state that it seemed unlikely to be a coincidence. What else might be an explanation? Well, I heard someone say that’s the case because of x, y, and z — does x, y, and z make sense to me? Do the dots connect? Why or why not? Can I think of an alternative explanation? Do I have an intuition that their explanation is true, but there’s one part of it that doesn’t make sense to me? Is there a way to interpret their explanation that’s different from the way I’ve been interpreting it? Does that new interpretation make more sense? Etc., etc.”

If you start approaching your study in this way, you’ll begin to progress at light speed. Every day new things will click and your understanding will grow. You’ll be learning to learn, and in due time everything will make complete sense.

As always, good luck.