On the fourth day on the Camino, we dealt with the theme of trust in yourself. And I think that’s a pretty big topic, isn’t it?
Because when we wake up at, I don’t know, 16, 17, maybe 20, 21, when we’re awake, and we realize that we actually have consciousness, then I think most of us are startled and truly afraid, because the question becomes, now what?
And when I come awake, usually I’m perhaps finished school or finishing school, and I’m facing university, and that’s a whole different game, for sure. When I was in high school, high school was a bit of a lark, to be quite honest.
Many, many, many people were quitting high school, because the money that was paid in the industrial sector, in logging, fishing, farming, mining, was enormous.
If you worked one year as a laborer, perhaps as a logger, and you’ve got some training, you could perhaps buy a house, a house, in a year and a half, and you would pay cash, small house, of course, in some isolated village, but still a house.
You had home ownership in your thinking in a very limited period of time. So why go to school? Like, why go further?
So that became your reality in a sense. So you were fearful, and you didn’t have to trust in yourself, because it was given to you. You’d just get up in the morning, hopefully not too sick or hung over or stoned out or whatever it was.
Go down, catch the bus or get on a boat or wake up or whatever it was and make money, make money.
This is a true story. I was at university a number of years later, and a fellow in front of me sitting in this amphitheater disappeared. And he came back, gosh, three weeks later, and I said to him, where were you?
And he said, I was fishing. And I thought, jeez, that’s kind of odd, fishing. My dad took me fishing.
I said, how was the fishing? Trying to be a bit cheeky and glib. And he said to me, oh, jeez, pretty good, bought a house.
He had made $50,000 on a herring boat in three weeks. That was 5% of the crew take. The boat had made a million dollars.
He got 5%. So you could see the money that was involved. So you didn’t have to question yourself.
There was nothing involved in trusting yourself. But you learn to trust yourself when you get away from the industrial sector and you go to perhaps to school, to university, you travel a bit, and you have to make some decisions in life.
And those decisions many times are wrong. And then you learn, don’t you? Perhaps the decision in a relationship, you pick the wrong boy or girl, you get a job, it’s the wrong job, totally.
You enter in some form of career, it’s awful, I can’t believe I’m doing this. All of those things. But slowly but surely, when you act, you begin to learn.
Action is the great teacher, isn’t it? Once you act and you make a mistake, you learn I’m not going to make the same mistake twice, or at least three times. Right?
You learn that this body, I’ve got to nurture it, I’ve got to find loving relationships that are going to help me grow.
But it takes a long time, especially now, I think, for young people, because the Internet bombards us with comparative images constantly.
Wherever I go, I always looking at the phones to see what people are looking at, and they’re comparing pictures mostly. Young people, older people play games, because a lot of older people, I think, have just stopped.
They’re just continuing on to some mythical time called retirement. They’re not learning at all, I think. It’s frightening, but I think it’s true.
But this new generation has a chance to think.
It can learn to think critically, and most assuredly, it can learn that time is very precious. Those two phenomena, right? It can learn.
And if it doesn’t learn, well, it’s going to be a different world for sure, because we can see right now the crises that are upon the earth, be it may in Gaza or in the Ukraine. These are solvable situations with critical thinking, aren’t they?
But it seems that there’s a whole group of people that want to stir up, certainly in the West, and I suppose it’s the same in their own respective countries, they want to stir up some type of anger that allows the crisis to continue.
And of course, there’s money to be made with weapons, and you know, it just goes on, right?
But anyone standing back would say, wait a moment, this is like the body with an ache in the toe, and if the toe gets inflamed too much, the body won’t be able to walk, right? Because we’re all interconnected now, aren’t we?
So how am I going to trust myself?
Well, firstly, I’m going to learn that I am my own teacher, as I often say, perhaps every podcast, I say the same thing, but I’m really going to learn that this private world that I occupy can become excellent, as Aristotle tells us, right?
Always excellence, meaning the action of ongoing excellence. Why not? Why not?
And if I think that way, if I’m cognitive enough, and most of us are, most of us are quite smart, right?
For sure that I can think this thing through, then I can start to talk to myself, and I could begin to learn, become a broad reader, gotta read every single day. Gotta read. Gotta read.
Gotta learn. I have one student, he told me the other day, I don’t read, and I was just horrified. If he doesn’t read, how’s he ever gonna function in the world in the 21st century without being a slave?
The biggest fear that I have, actually, as a 69 or 70 year old man, is that we’re going to become slaves again.
In a sense, chattel slaves, because even though we won’t be owned by, perhaps, a man or a woman, we’ll be owned by a corporation, we’ll be owned by our debt, but we will not be free.
And we’re being told we’re free, but I don’t know too many people who really are truly free from crisis, bad health, bad emotional instability, etc., etc. And this is because we don’t learn to trust in the self, but we can. We can.
All we have to do is wake up in the morning and be grateful to be me, the flawed human being called me, and then appreciate where I am right now, and realize that I can build on me, because this my life, this great piece of life that I possess
somehow, somehow is going to be a wonderful existence, not without its pain, not without its suffering, but I promise myself, I promise myself I’m going to live a wonderful and flourishing life wherever the stream of life takes me. And yes, I will
try to direct it, of course, but ultimately that stream is still going to fill me with nourishment and sustenance. This is a wonderful way to think. I really do. And it’s not positive.
It’s just truthful, just truthful. So trust in yourself. Absolutely.
And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is everything, especially when we learn to trust in ourself.
And critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless.
Bye-bye.