One who seeks knowledge
learns something new every day.
One who seeks the Tao
unlearns something new every day.
—Tao Te Ching - Verse 47
Math was never my strong suit. I can remember in third grade being regularly outperformed in the “Mad Minute”—a sixty-second blitz to mentally calculate as many multiplication problems as possible. In high school, I remember the pressure of being called on in pre-calc and my brain being about as useful as a bowl of Jell-O.
Last night, I woke up to a dream of a similar grade school embarrassment and realized the fear of public shame has fueled my pursuit of knowledge above all else. Every opportunity I get, from the time I wake to the time I sleep, is filled with reading or listening to something educational. And if I’m not doing something to expand my knowledge base, I get anxious that I’m wasting time. Even the pursuit of meditation (and my relationship with God, to some degree) has come second to the pursuit of knowledge. Here, I recognized the parallel of “putting no other God before Me” as discussed in a recent post about chasing Aphrodite and the temptation of lust.
Sometimes, I think I get woken up in the middle of the night with trauma-healing insights or good ideas because that’s the only time my mind is quiet enough to receive them. In the sense that the smart man learns something every day while the wise man unlearns something every day, I’m so busy spending my conscious hours pursuing knowledge that I give myself no space to receive wisdom.
Learning as much as possible all the time has been driven by a grade school fear of classmates finding out I’m dumb because I wasn’t very good at math. But as I dissolved this trauma, I realized that in the end, the last laugh is mine because my only Mad Minute limitation now is how fast my fingers can type into the calculator app on my phone. Take that, Mrs. Third Grade Teacher Whose Name Has Been Forgotten.