Learned helplessness, this is today’s topic. The opposite of “Bring it on…!” Your life depends on which is your dominant attitude.
Which attitude will get you what you want?
No contest, I hope, learned helplessness will get you more of the same.
50% of the world’s population behaves like they can’t handle it. It is learned helplessness… it is not innate. But it feels innate…
But it is, in reality, a reflex built and initiated by parents, religion, school, and politics.
The “I can’t handle it” reflex, like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of the bell, whether there is food there or not, gets activated by anything society deems ugly or bad.
Werner Erhard, some 40 years ago, asked his 46 Forum Leader Candidates, what they thought the reason was that they wee not promoted to Forum Leader, like Werner himself. After a lot of guessing, Werner told them: “The reason is because I can be with “it’s not working” longer than any of you.” ((
| Keywords: | Description: |
| learned helplessness | Is a phenomenon where, through training, the subject gives up even trying… it is based on a delusion that he can’t… that you need to be in control to do anything. |
| seligman m e | Martin Seligman in the 1965 ran experiments with dogs… and coined the behavior of giving up, resignation, no action to be “learned helplessness”. Today 50% of humans living on the planet have been exposed to this “training”… by society, starting with judgmental parents who themselves are mostly learnedly helpless. |
| learned helplessness theory | The theory of learned helplessness is that after some repeated exposure to danger and pain, and at the same time controlling you, physically, you won’t be able to escape pain or danger… you give up. |
))
This capacity of Werner’s goes directly against learned helplessness (I can’t, I can’t handle it!).
I’ll give you an example for learned helplessness, so you can see how ridiculous it is, looking at another person acting under the influence of the “learned helplessness” reflex.
Yesterday doing the colour exercise I walked past a wall mural painted entirely in shades of the colour I was carrying. I saw it, felt fear that I couldn’t look at it all without naming it so to avoid the fear I walked past and didn’t look. Barely even tried just to avoid the emotions of fear and hopelessness when I would fail.
Is that an example of me using fear to get off the hook? Next time is it better to stand there and summon Allow and step back?
The “bad” or “negative” consequence the student is trying to avoid is to feel bad about themselves or about the exercise. Try to avoid doing the bad thing.
The exercise says: look at your sample color in your hand, then look at the “world” (in this case the mural) and find the color you see closest match the color in your hand… then double check. Go back and forth to see that the two colors match.
If possible, don’t name the color. Why? Because, for example, the color blue has 256 shades, so if you match the two colors with your mind, any blue will suffice.
Why is that a problem? Because we are trying to increase your level of astuteness, and decrease your knee jerk, jumping into conclusion behavior.
Named the color? No problem. Now match the sample color to the color you saw “outside”. Do they match? Good. They don’t match? Good, they don’t match.
No mistake made. No reason to feel bad about yourself. You were not in real danger.
The “learned helplessness” makes everything look like a life threatening danger.
Your job is to bring astuteness, and see if it actually threatens you with real harm, or this is only a learned reflex?
If you were Pavlov’s dog, I would give you an assignment, that when you hear the bell, please also look if there is food or not. Eventually the dog would find out that sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn’t….
With you it will take longer. Why? Because you treat your mind as truth machine… it isn’t. It is actually a lie machine, 99% of the time.
This is why the Detached capacity is so incredibly potent: the moment you step back from the mind, you get access to real thinking. To real looking. To real intelligence. And you can see that hardly anything ever threatens your well-being.
You can see that you can handle the emotional ups and downs… so what? Big f…ing what? No big deal. You can handle it.
You can handle being wrong, making a mistake, know something wrong, you can… the question is: will you? It will take work, persistence, and maybe some capacities. The remedies, Heaven on Earth, Unconditional Love Activator will be very helpful.
Download the book: You are not so smart, in the subscribers area… Worth reading.
Read the original article: Learned Helplessness: 50% of humanity is a wuss, a sissy… a cry-baby. In 1945 it was 7%… In Jesus’ time it was 1%