https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Yw0rA7ACT8w
Well, in terms of a child, I think that the best way to train a mind, I would say, is love. Sorry to use that word that everybody finds. But this is related to what I’m talking about in terms of the notion that consciousness stacks up or that person come together in terms of communion. And so the idea of that communion is the way to train a mind. That being in a relationship with someone, that’s the real way to train a mind. That by attending, by paying attention to something, by treating a child is important. And when you do that, then you have two sides, which will appear right away. One is a side which is to encourage what encourages the communion, and then the other would be to discourage a right and a left hand, a right hand to bring closer and a left hand to move away. And that actually is training the mind in how to interact with the world. That is, when we interact with the world, we have those same two tendencies, which is the tendency towards one and the tendency towards many. The one and perceiving the many, when you’re raising up a child, that’s what you’re constantly doing in terms of the child. You’re constantly showing the child what is straight and what is crooked, you could say. And the child will have to explore what is crooked as well. They’ll have to. It’s part of doing it, but then they’ll also see the consequences of the crooked and the consequences of the straight, all this. And so to me, that’s how you train the mind. And it comes back to this idea that the first reality of human people is people. The first thing we care about is other minds, other people. That’s what we care about first. Many parents, and I have meaningful experience in this, pretend to attend. And that is really problematic. And this, I think, is a characteristic of a particular kind of mind. So we now have an interesting feedback loop, which is that first question. How do you actually shift your own mind so that a habit of pretending is actually able to be replaced by an actual lived attending, which then gives rise to the possibility of then that relationship with your child that we’ve identified as perhaps being the way to help them develop their mind. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s when practices like practicing attention itself in the Christian mystical tradition, you have this idea that there’s attention and then there’s memory. You always have to remember yourself. The idea is remembering God and remembering death, you could say, remembering the two extremes. And when you do that, then you don’t get distracted. Well, we end up, it happens anyways, but it’s like, if you’re capable of keeping attention and keeping memory in the sense of remembering, not remembering things in the past, but remembering the sense of staying connected to something. Remembering. Yeah, exactly. So it’s like you’re in this state of attention and memory, and then it’s more difficult, then you won’t pretend. Or if you do, it’ll be malicious if you do. It won’t be, it’ll be even worse if you pretend when you’re attending because it’ll almost be immoral because you’ll be doing it out of, yeah. Yes, I would say it would be profane. Yeah, because usually we’re distracted. That’s why we pretend. That’s why we don’t attend to our children because it’s like we’re there with our children, but we’re thinking about our job. We’re thinking about whatever other problem, some stupid thing someone said on Facebook or whatever. And then we’re not there. But I do think that being there, giving a child attention for like 10 minutes, like actual real attention. I mean, you can feed a child, that child, like actual real attention. I’ve noticed that if I can do that with my kids, like 10 minutes a day, they’re happy. Then after that, it’s like everything kind of is together. But if I can just like focus for 10 minutes, then real, real attention, then they know that you care and they know that they’re part of this family. We homeschooled our kids. And now my daughter, she decided to go to school. She’s 12. And we’re really nervous at first because obviously homeschool is different, just the whole approach. And it’s more holistic. It’s more about people and relationships and giving the kids time to be really bored so that they’re thinking about stuff. And my son picked up the piano because he was so bored. And he started playing three hours a day. And we’re like, yeah, it works. But we were a little afraid of the academic part because we didn’t hammer on that as much. And so our daughter went to school and she did totally fine. She’s completely fine. She has good grades. She’s doing well. And what I realized is it has something to do with what you were talking about in terms of, I think that what we gave her in homeschool was not so much a bunch of stuff to learn, but rather a way of being and a way of learning. So that’s the implicit part. She knows how to learn. She knows how to be. And so put her in any circumstance, she’ll be fine. Even if she doesn’t know something, she knows how to be quiet and to listen and to catch the right pattern and then to quickly catch up because she can learn. And I was like, oh, okay. So then I was like, okay, now I know why we homeschooled. I understand what the advantage was. It was really giving them, teaching them to be a person first. And then after that, you can just let them loose and they’ll do whatever. They’ll be fine. So much of what we are is just about being with other people. And it’s just about, and I say that, I’m on YouTube and I’m talking and I’m explaining stuff to people. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But so much of what we are is just this, like we’re communal beings. We’re meant to be together and we learn from each other. And so you can kind of understand the idea of a saint or of a star, like a spiritual guide or something, this notion that even just being with someone who has attained a certain moral level or a certain spiritual level, that can transform you. It can change you just by being in contact with somebody because a lot of it is implicit. It’s not just the idea of getting a teaching from somebody, but it is somewhat like imbibing their being. And so then once you kind of get that, you can understand why people want to go to rock concerts, why people want to meet stars and all this stuff. It’s a caricature in a way. I mean, it’s not a caricature. It’s the actual thing, but it’s maybe a little bit debased version of the desire to be with holy people or to be with someone who is manifesting something in the world. It’s like this person is, they’re just, I mean, I would say that I think that seeing what happened to Jordan Peterson, to me, I saw something of that where it was like, because he wasn’t really, sometimes he wasn’t even saying much or he keeps repeating the same things, obviously. I mean, after you’ve done a thousand shows, it’s like you’re obviously repeating, you have to repeat yourself. You can’t just be always saying new things. And then people just want to be there in the room and be in the room where he’s saying the same thing that he said 10 times on his YouTube channel. And so it’s like, that’s when you realize just how much, so much of knowledge and so much of who we are is just about, that’s why I use the word love, because it’s about this actual connection with somebody. It’s more than just propositional. And noticing, by the way, that if you’re in a particular moment and you’re having a conversation with someone, the thing that is happening at the propositional level, while it may or may not be the intention, like right now, like the conversation that we’re having explicitly at the propositional level is almost certainly the least important thing that’s actually happening.