Excerpted from The List by Harvey Jackins (1997)
ADULTS
18.001 Adults are not more intelligent than young people are.
18.002 Adults often have more information about more things than young people do (they’ve had more time to acquire such information), but much of their information is wrong.
18.003 Your parents and other adults are good people, but they often do not act like good people. When they do not act like good people, there is a reason why they do not. This reason can be understood, and often, with information and planning, something can be done to improve the situation.
18.00 The adults around you will often behave in many strange, upsetting, and difficult-to-understand ways. You have not caused any of this behavior. It is not your fault at all.
18.005 All the strange ways that adults and older young people behave (and young people your own age also, for that matter) have an explanation. The real explanation for these strange behaviors is not an explanation that you usually hear from most adults or from reading school books. The explanations that are usually given are more like excuses which people think up for acting these ways because they don’t know the real explanation. There is a real explanation. It is an explanation you can understand. We have been talking about it in this book and will say more about it in this chapter.
HUMAN CAPABILITIES
18.019 You are a very remarkable being. You are not as big as a mountain or a planet or a star, but you are more complex than any of them. You can handle what goes on around you better than any other kind of being that we have any knowledge of. You can make things around you happen the way you want them to happen. You can remember billions of things from the past. You can think ahead to the things that will probably happen, and you can plan to interrupt them, change them, or prevent them from happening. You have a splendid body which is strong and capable and which will become more strong and more capable as you grow older. There isn’t anything in the world you can’t do (that you would really want to do). You can enjoy everything you do. Human beings are essentially very marvelous, very complex. They are a very advanced form of life with splendid bodies, splendid skills, and great capacities for enjoying, handling, and improving their environments.
18.020 We can think because we have very complex nervous systems, with thousands of billions of separate nerve cells that communicate with each other in an enormous number of ways. This means that we can do at least four important things that non-thinkers cannot do. We can be intelligent. We can meet each new situation with a completely new response that we have created, just that moment, exactly to handle that situation. As what happens brings us new information, we can keep modifying what we are doing and become more and more successful as we continue to operate.
We can be aware. We can notice what’s going on while it’s going on and continually change our appreciation of, and response to, the situation. We can even notice what we are thinking, while we are thinking it, and can think about making improvements not only to the situation but also improvements in the way we are thinking about it. We can be aware of a large number of different things at the same time. We can repair a delicate piece of machinery or solve a complex mathematical problem while enjoying the sound of music, the smell of flowers in the fresh, balmy air that is blowing over our faces, and the comfort of our position. We can take account of and handle an enormous amount of information below our awareness, but we can also be aware of at least several different factors at the same time and do not have to restrict our awareness to just one item.
We have complete freedom of decision. We can decide anything we want to decide, anytime we want to decide it, and we can decide it any way that we want to decide it. This freedom leads to us making very good decisions. We have freedom to decide what attitude or viewpoint we will take towards any situation.
We have complete power to have things around us happen the way we want them to happen. A human being is very powerful in a different way than we usually have been taught by the society to think of power. Our real power is not the power to push other people around, but the power to have things be the way we want them to be.
18.021 Our ability to be intelligent is obscured and “apparently” invalidated by the way the society around us functions. We are trained and conditioned by the patterns involved in the society to tell each other that we are “stupid,” that we are not smart, or that other people are smarter than we are. Sometimes, if we are feeling bad enough, we may “believe” this and actually start having difficulty being intelligent as well as difficulty in believing that we are intelligent. We can recover from this distress and confusion and not only become very intelligent again as we get our intelligence free of the patterns and back to functioning in the way that we can use it, but we can also realize and believe once more how intelligent we are.
18.022 Our awareness can be interfered with, also, in other ways. One of these ways is by our becoming preoccupied with the hurt patterns that have been left upon us while we keep trying to make sense of the patterns to ourselves, and in the process tie up so much of our attention that we stop noticing what’s going on around us. This can be corrected, too, as we get rid of all the old recordings of hurt and learn to keep our attention in the present except (sometimes) when we are having a counseling session about the old hurts. Other times we will again clearly notice what is going on around us. If we have lost touch with our inherent freedom of choice it is usually because we have been “bossed around” by someone who was bigger, stronger, louder than we were in the way they were acting, and we felt we had to “give in” to them. This can have become a patterned habit and led to a belief that we are only free to do what someone else tells us to do. We can get back our confidence in our own judgment and in our freedom to act on our own judgment by having sessions on these old, bad times, and also by experimenting with actually acting boldly on our own judgment and re-discovering in practice that we can “stick by our guns” and make our own choices.
18.023 The same kind of situation will lead us to reclaim our power. This may take considerable determination and persistence because the society has generally caused all the people around us, including our parents, our teachers, our bosses, and all the people that we feel drawn to use as models, to also feel that they have no power and to act on these non-powerful feelings all the time. We may find that we have to be the model for other people. We may have to insist out of our own bravery, that we will be completely powerful and that we will encourage other people to learn to do it, too.
18.024 There is much that we do not yet know or understand about our own intelligence. An interesting guess is that as a network of communication grows between the different nerve cells in an animal, new possibilities develop at certain critical stages of complexity. We can speculate that the characteristics of intelligence, awareness, self-determination, and freedom of choice would appear spontaneously in some individuals if there were a large population of creatures with these complexities. The individuals who developed these characteristics would undoubtedly have superior survival powers as a result and would tend to soon become the dominant strain of that line of creatures. This might mean that squids or octopi could, and perhaps will, develop intelligences like ours sometime in the next few million years. It could also mean that a computer network that is complex enough will begin to act intelligently.
In any case, whether it was inevitable, accidental, or “planned by some higher power,” our species is enormously fortunate to presently have the capacities of intelligence, awareness, freedom of choice, and power, even though they have been mostly obscured for most individuals until now by the heavy accumulation of distress patterns on the world population of humans and the long delay (until very recently) in the discovery or re-discovery and use of the procedures for re-emergence.