Unteachable Lessons

There are some things in life you just can’t be taught. You can hear from people who have been there and done that, telling you the mistakes they made along the way, and still refuse to take their advice and make the same mistakes yourself.

That’s certainly been the case for me. In business I was told that “if people don’t pay they don’t pay attention”, and still offered my best for free until I got frustrated that it wasn’t valued. I remember being told that it doesn’t matter how much I achieve, that what determines how you feel in the face of your achievement is your relationship with needing to achieve, yet I still pursued more to fill a bottomless pit. If I’m being honest, I’m still in progress with that one.

What I’m describing are ‘unteachable lessons’ - things that you only come to know are true through your personal experience. Hearing it or learning it doesn’t actually change your behavior, but living it does.

This is in part a matter of consciousness. There are different types of feedback that you can integrate at different levels of consciousness. When you’re highly conscious you can take other people’s experience and receive the benefits from them as if you’re own… When you’re mildly conscious you experience something yourself and take that feedback to be meaningful… And when you’re hardly conscious you miss the obvious lessons right in front of you, hiding in plain sight.

There’s a parable that echoes this: A man received a letter from a neighbor telling him not to take a certain road. He got in the car and started driving on that road anyway. Along that road he encountered some bumps he didn’t remember being there. It seemed odd to him, but he decided to keep driving anyway. Further along the road a boulder fell from a steep grade alongside him and crashed into his car. After some light repairs, he drove forward on the road, and as he was speeding forward he realized he was quickly approaching a cliff.

Of course it’s an exaggerated representation of things, but it maps to having different levels of consciousness. Someone who’s highly conscious would have taken the letter as enough reason to not go on the road. Someone who’s mildly conscious that experienced unexpected bumps would have determined that the road was unsafe to be on. Someone who is hardly conscious would have realized that there was danger on the road when they got hit by the boulder. And someone who is unconscious speeds their way right off the cliff.

The reason this all matters: Lessons aren’t completely unteachable. We’re only unable to learn them from our level of consciousness. So the more we invest in being more aware of ourselves and the ‘cause and effect’ nature of the world around us, the faster we can learn and the better we will be.

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