yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Make Time Your Friend, Not Your Enemy


3m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dicken’s wrote, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” What does it mean to live in the Past, the Present, and the Future? What lessons do they teach, and how are these lessons shut out? That’s what I’m interested in exploring, and I’m gonna explore this idea through a dialogue.


The following is a conversation between a monk (M) and a student (S).

M: A wise person lives in the Past, the Present, and the Future all at once.

S: Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. How can I live anywhere but the present?

M: You’re taking my words too literally. What I mean is that the wise person understands the Effects of Time on their actions, and by doing so, they make Time their friend, not their enemy.

S: What do you mean they understand the Effects of Time on their actions, and how do they make Time their friend? What does that mean?

M: Time closes the gap between the way things are and the way they should be. Time reaps every seed you sow. If you water trees all day, eventually you’ll have a lot of fruit. In this case, you’ve made Time your friend. If you chop trees down all day, eventually you’ll starve yourself of oxygen. And so, in this case, you’ve made Time your enemy. A wise person understands the Effects of Time on their actions and so befriends Time.

S: OK, so how do I understand the Effects of Time on my actions?

M: Understanding the Effects of Time on your actions actually occurs naturally. We call that process Learning. So the question isn’t /how do you learn/, but rather, /what’s stopping you from learning/? If the process is natural, you must have constructed some barriers against it.

S: Well, what /is/ stopping me from learning?

M: There are two barriers to learning, but the best way to understand them is to first understand the two conditions necessary for learning to take place: sincerity and contradiction.

S: Can you explain them both for me?

M: Yeah, the first condition necessary for learning is sincerity. Sincerity is when you do what you genuinely want to do.

S: And why’s that necessary for learning?

M: In order for your understanding of the world to improve, you have to test your own knowledge, and the only time you’re /actually/ testing your own knowledge is when you act sincerely. For example, think about these two scenarios. In the first scenario, you really wanna go to the mall, but you’ve never been there before. So you try and find your way there, using your own knowledge of the city. Now, in the second scenario, your friend jumps in your car and says, “let’s go to the mall.” You’ve never been there before, and you don’t really wanna go, but you agree. So they start giving you directions. In this case, you’re acting on their knowledge. In which scenario do you think you’ll learn better?

S: The first for sure. The one where I sincerely want to go to the mall and act on my own knowledge.

M: Exactly. In the first scenario, because you actually wanna learn how to get to the mall, you put your own knowledge to the test. And because you’re testing your own knowledge, you’re more mindful of the right and wrong turns that you take. But in the second scenario, you don’t really care about learning the directions. Instead, you rely on the knowledge of your friend. And because you’re relying on someone else’s knowledge, you’re not testing your own knowledge. And because you’re not testing your own knowledge, you won’t really learn anything. So your understanding of the world improves through testing your own knowledge, and the only time we test our own knowledge is when we act sincerely.

S: OK, that makes sense. Can you explain the second condition for me?

M: The second condition necessary for learning is contradiction. Contradiction is information that falsifies your understanding, or in other words, it’s proof that you’re wrong. Remember, when you act sincerely, you’re putting your own knowledge to the te...

More Articles

View All
Big Trophy Hunting | Explorer
BRYAN CHRISTY: The hunting held out one place as the gold standard for trophy hunting, a place they say big game hunting is honest and killing saves lives. I set my coordinates for Southern Zimbabwe, the same country where Cecil was shot and killed not lo…
The Unspoken Rules of Society
You wake up in the morning, head outside and you say good morning to your next-door neighbor. You walk down the street and you see a familiar face, so you nodded them to let them know that you acknowledge them. You get into a bus and an old lady walks in …
Geometric constructions: parallel line | Congruence | High school geometry | Khan Academy
Let’s say that we have a line. I’m drawing it right over there, and our goal is to construct another line that is parallel to this line that goes through this point. How would we do that? Well, the way that we can approach it is by creating what will even…
Seth MacFarlane’s Scientific Influences | StarTalk
Seth, I called you into my office. Yes, I gotta talk to you because you want me to help you clean up. I clean up the office. Uh, I got at some point I had to find you and talk to you about the science and Family Guy. Yeah, yeah, you just have to watch a …
Cosine equation algebraic solution set
The goal of this video is to find the solution set for the following equation: negative 6 times the cosine of 8x plus 4 is equal to 5. And like always, I encourage you to pause this video and see if you can have a go at this before we do it together. A re…
ETHEREUM IS ABOUT TO TAKE OVER
What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, I think it’s no surprise that overall 2021 has been a breakthrough year in so many ways. Like, we now have a brain implant that translates thought to text with 94% accuracy, a new lithium metal battery technology tha…