You often mention your great-grandmother as someone who shaped you.
No, not shaped me in the sense of a role model. If she had been my role model, I would probably be a very different person, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There are two ways to see it: either I never grew up, or I was never truly a child. From the age of four or five, the way my mind works has been almost exactly the same as it is right now. Only my body grew, my ability to act in the world expanded, and life threw more things at me. But the person inside? Still the same. Back then, the weight of not-knowing made everything feel heavy. When I looked at something – a single bird, a tree, a face – the rest of the universe vanished. Total absorption. If I focused on one thing, everything else ceased to exist. Today I can hold awareness of the whole room while still looking deeply at one object. Back then, focus meant blackout of everything else. Even now, if I close my eyes and turn inward, the external world ends for me. I could sit like this until the body drops – there is no compulsive need to do anything. When something genuinely needs doing, we do it. That’s why there is no burden, no matter how intense the activity. I’m still thatevidnce same four-year-old boy inside. The only difference is that now I laugh more easily, because somewhere along the way I stumbled upon the password to bliss.
Ignorance vs Knowledge
You seem to value ignorance above knowledge – that sounds almost rebellious today.
Not rebellious, just accurate. Humanity keeps flipping the script. Look at the foundational stories in the West: the original sin was eating from the tree of knowledge. Why? Because knowledge, in the way we use the word, is never complete – it’s just accumulated fragments. Pick up three pebbles from the beach and declare, “Now I understand the ocean.” That’s what we do. We gather a few facts, a few experiences, a few verses, and suddenly we think we’ve cracked existence. That’s why people run to scriptures, gurus, experts, ideologies – because deep down they know they don’t know, but they’re terrified to admit it. The moment you genuinely admit “I do not know” – not to me, not to anyone, just to yourself – your intelligence switches on like a floodlight, 24×7, whether you’re awake or asleep. It starts looking, probing, tasting life directly.
But the instant you think “I know,” the light switches off and you fall asleep inside. Imagine walking across this room in bright daylight – you don’t even think about your steps. Now imagine the same room at 2 a.m., pitch black. Every step is alive with attention because you have no idea where the furniture is. Not-knowing forces alertness. We pretend the lights are on because we’ve memorized the floor plan or someone told us where the sofa is. That’s not seeing; that’s memory. Our entire education system is still in the hunter-gatherer stage mentally. Physically we’ve built rockets; mentally we’re still collecting berries and showing them off. Do we need a different kind of education?
Absolutely. Right now schools are like sausage factories: push in unique living beings at one end, out come standardized products at the other. A child is not dough. A child is a seed that can become a jasmine or a mango or a giant redwood – you can’t decide in advance. Very few places on the planet even attempt the kind of nurturing attention a seed actually needs. We mass-produce “educated” people who all know the same chemistry and calculus but have no clue who they are. The stupidest way to live.
All this happens because we’ve made earning a living the central drama of life. Survival has become a monster because we want to live like the neighbor who lives like the movie star who lives like the billionaire. The benchmark keeps rising. A hundred years ago a bicycle made you king. Today you need a private jet just to feel normal. We call this progress, but we’ve only raised the bar of what we think we need to survive. Even multimillionaires wake up anxious about losing it all. True affluence means survival is taken care of so completely that you’re free to explore life instead of constantly securing it. Imagine Jesus or Buddha showed up today and said, “Drop everything and come.” In today’s world most people couldn’t – the bank owns the next forty years of their life: student loans, mortgages, car payments, credit-card EMIs. You can’t serve both debt and truth at the same time. Whatever you accumulate – money, houses, degrees, followers – is only valuable for a tiny window of history. A thousand years ago the richest man on the planet owned more swords and horses than you. Today he’d be a broke guy with rusty metal and hungry animals. Accumulation enhances your social status, not your life.
Short-termism
Young people today live only for the moment.
They sense life is short – that part is intelligent. Living as if there is no tomorrow is fantastic if it comes from total awareness. But most of the time it comes from alcohol, drugs, endless scrolling – a forced numbness so tomorrow doesn’t matter. That’s not freedom; that’s anesthesia. Ignorance feels blissful only until the ground arrives. Skydiving without a parachute is the most liberated feeling in the world… for about twelve seconds. Then physics introduces itself.
Confidence vs Clarityevidnce
You often distinguish between confidence and clarity.
Simple example: walking across this brightly lit stage – do you need confidence? No, you just walk. Now switch off all lights, total darkness. Suddenly you need confidence to take even one step. Confidence is what we invent to cross territory we do not see. It works sometimes. Fifty-fifty. That’s why casinos and stock markets love confident people – half the time they win, half the time they’re broke, but they keep shouting slogans and marching forward. Clarity means the lights are on. You see exactly where to put your foot. No slogans needed. We’ve chosen to pump up confidence with belief systems, ideologies, motivational speeches, instead of turning on the light of clarity. A confident person who doesn’t see is naturally aggressive – he has to push, fight, dominate, because deep down he’s terrified of the dark. Science says your body and brain perform best when you’re joyful, not when you’re aggressive or fearful. Success is simply peak performance of this body and mind. Everything else is lottery. Is the world getting darker?
Today our public schools teachers are not teaching and this is proven by the stats. Teachers today are teaching because of benefits, and high paying salary. Just a week or so I went to a awards ceremony and was shocked to see one teacher after another highly overweight struggling just to make it the the stage. I took a look back many years back when I was is school no matter what age I was none of the teaches were over weight and we were taught what we needed and more how to seek truth. We had role modes people we could admire. What happened was standard teaching that are only interested in passing the test.
Idea have the parents grade the teachers, based on what the kids are learning not just scores on standard test required . Have weekly test, monthly test, 6 week test, and a final semester test. Be sure the kids are not just learning but able to understand and use the skill outside of the class room. Idea have the parents grade the teachers, based on what the kids are learning not just scores on standard test required . Have weekly test, monthly test, 6 week test, and a final semester test. Be sure the kids are not just learning but able to understand and use the skill outside of the class room. Reading, writing, math, history of world, country and state is necessary. History teaching them to look at how it was shaped failures and correction to make our world a better place.
More topics on life and seeking truth based on data evidence not emotions. website carverwisdom.com