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the origin of humanity

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Truth, the ultimate

https://beatschindler.substack.com/p/truth

And why it doesn’t work so well

Truth is a word.

The evolution of truth — how the word happened or came about — is a different story entirely, but typical of words, the fact it exists can be denied only by confirming it.

That explains why the one thing everybody agrees is true about true is that it is a word. Everything is a word and nothing is a word, says more about words than a word-user ever could, and truth is simply no exception.

“Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

That is because we don’t live in a dream world. We live in a word-world.

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, truth doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world, I’m told there are two different types of word-users:

  • Those who are looking for the truth.
  • Those who claim to have found it.

But call it as is, a word, and everything changes. Your interest shifts from trying to understand truth to understand words instead, and when you figure out how truth works, you have the key to how all words work.

Call it a perspective, it doesn’t change anything. Everything we have a word for is.

Pre-internet

Pre-internet, that is back when the truth was off-line and hotly debated, the truth had been just that for thousands of years. For the adults, that was alright because they had gotten used to it, but for the children, caught in the middle of it, it is confusing as hell. Whom to believe?

  • Who claims the truth is in a book they have a copy of, each their own?
  • Who insists the truth is what school is about?
  • Who pretends the wisest and noblest teacher are the wordless, also known as nature, evolution, or the wild?

Post-internet

Post-internet, the truth is everything it was before, however, with a sizeable difference. The internet provides the short-cuts to truth we had, it seems, invented the internet for.

Now, true is “about 4.24 billion results” (Google), “most commonly refers to truth” (Wikipedia), and “connected with facts rather than things that have been invented or guessed” (Oxford Learners Dictionaries), to name just a few of those short-cuts.

Then as now

Then as now, shouts for “Will the real truth please stand up!” is a waste of energy and time. You might as well ask:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest truth of them all?”

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest truth of them all?”

Things have changed, but the mirrors have remained constant. A mirror will still only tell you who is looking at it, that is what mirrors are for, and the internet cares only about storing as many truths about you as it possibly can.

But what matters to us is for us to decide, each their own, and for many it is like for the children, a decision between black and white. That is all there is, they want you to believe, but my eyes tell me it’s colors everywhere and truth isn’t one of them. And I know I’m not alone, we’re all in this together which explains, I think, why the truth doesn’t work so well.

Fresh perspective

There are no truths here, only words.

What happens next is anybody’s guess. Were I to write, “Look, my friend, we are talking serious business here,” you might respond with, “That is a matter of opinion!” and both of us would be equally spot on. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the truth is a question of character and personal preference, to each their own.

When you see truth as is — a word that never happened — you can let go of it and just deal with people’s points of view and perspectives instead.

However, keep your expectations in check. Letting go of truth won’t simplify your life beyond recognition because that is not how simplification works. Simple isn’t a place you find, it’s a decision you make.

Ditto with truth.

The best you can do is decide to forget about it, and when in the presence of people who claim to have found it, run for cover.

Do animals have ____ (fill in the blank)?

https://beatschindler.substack.com/p/do-animals-have-__-fill-in-the

The unconventional way to simple

People want to know

“Do animals have belly buttons, blood types, cell walls, conscience, culture, empathy, feelings, free will, humor, language, morals, periods, religion, rights, schools, souls, thoughts, or wants?”

These are genuine inquiries on the internet.

Or as Peter Drucker would have it: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

To understand why that is, you must return to when it all began.

In the beginning of the world is the word
In the beginning of you is the word

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons. This, we all know from personal experience.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world, we use words to describe other words.

What have words got to do with it?
  • In the wordy world, we have gone from animal to the top of the food chain, the most advanced specie ever, ready for breakfast on Mars, in the most recent 0.0003% of Earth-Time only? Why not earlier?
  • How in the world did the wordless manage without us for the first 99.9997% of Earth-Time?
  • Why are we here? Why are the wordless absent?

What have words got to do with it?

All kinds of things are being said, depending on who is saying them.

Some say the reason we’re here is our upright walk, disposable thumb, naked skin, wisdom, meteorites, aliens, Cambrian explosion, a bang of some size, genes, memes, or any combination thereof. Others insist the universe is written in math and it is our thinking that got us here, but overlooking math and thinking are words, they are barking up the wrong tree.

“Words become works.” – Seneca

Whether a word happened or not doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it’s true, and you can’t order people what to believe, the word or the word-user, for beliefs are a question of character and personal preference, to each their own. And I think that is a good thing.

Having hit that milestone time and again, I can assure you, when you change the way you look at words, the world changes.

What’s in it for you

Before you knew your first word, you knew how to make yourself from scratch. After you spoke your first, everything was different not because you were different, but because you now had words. It may have taken years, but the moment it happened was still a surprise to you as well as welcome news to those who had been waiting for just that moment to arrive.

“It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late. They even consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was, but surely no less than three.” – Albert Einstein

That is where your freedom is.

You can simplify your world without having to wait for the world to change first. Instead of asking, “Do animals have words?” you can ask, “Does it have words?” Not only is it a simple question but it also comes with the added benefit of an answer even the word-beginners, also known as children, can understand.

  • “Yes!” means it is one of us and we have everything we have a word for.
  • “No!” means it is wordless.

“To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” – Claude Monet

Begin

https://beatschindler.substack.com/p/begin

A good place to start.

If you’re new at B@’s perspective, this is a good place to begin. Here’s a bird’s eye view what it is about.

We live in word-world

In the beginning is the word.

In the wordless world, beginning doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

The fact can be denied only by confirming it and like it or not, there is nothing we can do about it.

But you can tip the balance in your favor.

We’re conditioned to pay attention to knowing what we’re talking ABOUT. B@’s perspective demands the bulk of your attention to knowing what you’re talking WITH. It makes sense to know the beginning, the benefits of which can be understood only after the fact, but having hit that milestone time and again, I can be your guide.

That is, in a nutshell, what 5 years in the making — B@’s perspective — is about.

Simple, I got rid of

For many wonderful new freedoms

Any information in isolation is difficult for us to understand, hence our tendency to compare it to something else — to create an apple to apples or orange to oranges comparison — not necessarily in our favour, but more about that later.

Simple is an exception only in that you’re actually better off without it. Trying to figure out why simple means different things to different people will only wear you out in the long run.

Getting rid of simple allows for many wonderful new freedoms. For these and other reasons as well, there is no wrong time for getting rid of simple and feel a weight off your shoulders.

Now, if my experience is anything to go by, you probably think that is crazy and letting go is difficult, but don’t let that worry you. Sure, your life will be simple-less, but with something that genuinely works filling the void, and if you think that’s good news, you’re probably rearing to go, wondering:

What took me so long?

As a Swiss-born who’s worked half of his adult life in other countries, I have often wondered myself what took me so long to see the obvious. But things have changed and I’d be out of my mind to have it any other way.

Some of the changes in our lives are visible to the naked eye. We grow, buy stuff, have children, successes, and accidents, that type of thing. Equally life-changing, I think are the invisible changes, when the world stops revolving and you’re seeing it as though for the first time. It may happen in a lifetime or in a heartbeat. Time doesn’t seem to be a part of it, and unlike the visible changes that fade away or decay over time, the invisible changes grow like a new-found muscle put to work for you.

There is more to the story of what took me so long, but not to worry, I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty, for it would only distract from getting rid of simple and replacing it with something that works. In a nutshell: The reason it took me so long is I played it safe for so long. For those too young to know what I’m talking about, let me explain what playing it safe meant 20 years ago.

20 years ago, the demand for simplification went through the roof. At the time, in the aftermath of the internet, the world had just moved from wishing for information to drowning in it, “Information Overload” was the new monster in town, and we believed simplification would kill the beast. Being a simplification coach was the safe thing to do, everybody thought so, and I joined in. In high demand, do what you love, travel the world, and get paid for it, what’s not to like?

Well, what’s not to like is we had to finish the job, which took years, before we could realize:

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

Simplification, it turns out, had lost the fight before it began. For what’s left of it, it might as well not have happened.

Trying to stop more information than anyone can handle, it seems is rather like trying to stop an erupting volcano’s free-flowing lava and ashes. More information than anyone can handle is easy to say but difficult to measure, but I think the number of words we give ourselves to describe it with, is a good indicator.

Before Words, After Words: Number of words. Source Wiktionary — Wikipedia

“Get over it” is okay for those of us who are used to it, but for the children, it is a different story entirely.

With simplification off the table, what will the children do? If simplification doesn’t work, what will? Well, predictions are famously hard to make, especially about the children. I don’t know why that is, but I think it’s important.

To know one you must know the other

The golden rule of comparisons — “To know one you must know the other” — has always been a challenge. There is nothing new about it. The only change is with artificial intelligence, for all we know, the comparisons here may come from an AI-machine on the backside of the moon. The difference between artificial comparisons and natural comparisons will be as hard to tell as it is now.

The best thing we can do is understand that evil people can take advantage of this trait of human behavior. The setup can be rigged so that a selfish word-master’s audience ends up comparing apples to oranges, or even believes an apple is an orange.

There are many ways to do this. When we’re out shopping, are the prices we see expensive, cheap, or right? Of course, the priority of the conditioned mind is to be right, however, it depends entirely on who set up the comparison, doesn’t it?

Who controlled the context? Was it you, a friend, or someone of low moral standards and some mastery of words?

How do the chicken know?

I cannot imagine “I wish for a complicated life” on children’s wish lists anywhere in the world. Nonetheless, sooner or later, the complicated plays a seriously starring role in everyone’s life. On the upside, later we get to decide which complications exactly and how many.

Yours truly how-do-the-chicken-know, age 5

When I was just a toddler, my mum would take me along for her marketing at the neighborhood store. Maybe also to give my sister some quiet time, I suppose. Anyhoo, a mere 5-minute walk away from home, our cat would follow us as if trained for the purpose, hoping for scraps at the butchers. Recalling the scene brings smiles back every time, but the reason for sharing the story are the chicken and eggs. I just couldn’t figure out how that worked.

Every customer was asked, “The Swiss eggs or the imports, please?” and every customer got exactly what they wanted. One day, curiosity got the upper hand and I asked my mum, “How do the chicken know?”

Despite my mother’s best efforts to explain, all I heard and all that remains is the crowd of people laughing at me looking for a hole in the ground to disappear in, and like other toddlers with similar experiences, or so I concluded, I decided to stop asking my childish questions with adults around.

In many ways, this served me well, for when the time came to pick a career, my fascination for the simple was not only intact, but it was key in the decision to make simplification mine.

One aspect in particular I disliked from the start, namely for simple to even get a seat at the table, somebody had to make something complicated first. While fabulous for business, it seemed assbackwards. Why not simplify where simple begins, before it gets complicated?

Breakthrough

The breakthrough came in 2016.

I had seen nature all my life, but I had always taken it for what it’s supposed to be, the natural way. Never before had I thought of it as the simple way. The exact date I don’t remember, but when I realized the extent of the lies told at school, I danced with joy.

Wordless

In the wordless world, also known as nature, evolution or the wild, simple doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

Wordy

In the wordy world…

You Before Words, You After Words

…simple appears on the horizon only after words — between the ages of one and six, is how it usually works— not because when we speak, we cease to be natural, but because we must learn how to recognize, read, and write words before we can even begin to understand what that means.

My parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late. They even consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was, but surely no less than three.”— Albert Einstein

In the world of our own making, with everything we hear, feel, touch, smell, taste, or see a word, it is difficult for us to imagine life without simple. But the wordless have been simple-less for 4.65 billion years. What if they could talk?

The wordless

If the wordless had words, too, what would they tell us? Well, with if’s we could put Paris into a bottle for breakfast and save the world for lunch, but that’s of no use here because you don’t get rid of simple with an if.

Before we jump into a new pool, we want the be certain there’s water in it, so when it’s about what the wordless would say, you don’t want to be iffed, you want to be certain.

There exists only one place where you can be certain beyond the shadow of a doubt to find it any time of day and night. Not outside of you, for that is outside of your control.

You

You made yourself — well, a cell that split itself in two, made you — from scratch, wordlessly, and wordless you’ve arrived. That means you know the wordless world like the inside of your pocket. Sure, it may be some time ago, hence difficult to re-member, however, you are ninety percent wordless (approximately) as we speak.

You

That is because when you reached the age of words, only your mouth became wordy. The 70% water and 100% cells in you, to name a few, are wordless.

So how can we be certain our cells know what they’re doing? I don’t mean to say I know the answer.

When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” — Paul Simon

‎Strange times are these in which we live, when old and young are taught falsehoods in school.” — Plato

But what we know is messages like these will never come from a cell.

The wordless may have been interesting when we were wordless ourselves, but once words showed up…

Before Words: Collectively, Individually

…we paid our attention to them at the expense of everything else. Some say that’s grotesque while others want you to believe that is the way.

It is what word-users do, they love to use their words, and anyone caught in the middle of it knows there are two options: You can join the debate, or you can use your common knowledge and your common sense.

The debate is still young, but common knowledge and common senses have been around for 4.65 billion years and didn’t stop working when words showed up.

Common sense

Feel, hear, smell, touch, taste, and sight — collectively known as the common senses— everybody knows them like the inside of their pockets.

What is less commonly talked about is the common knowledge.

Common knowledge

What have the wordless known for 4.65 billion years? Maybe because it is so obvious, it sometimes gets inadvertently overlooked that you can bet your future on it.

Lungs breathe, roses don’t dream of being tulips, fish fly, birds dive, rivers return to the sea, fireflies fly to Africa all the way from India, sharks hunt in the dark, cells feed on oxygen, acorns get eaten or become oaks, trees have roots, hands touch faces, and toes hurt when stepped on.

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it.” — John Cage

You can bet your future on it, the wordless don’t do their thing, each their own, because they can or because they have to. The common denominator in all things wordless is each knows what it wants.

Given we’re overwhelmingly wordless, that is not only good news, but it also comes with the certainty of knowing from personal experience, that had you failed to respond to your most pressing want in the past even just once, you wouldn’t be here. If you’re still breathing, you know what I mean.

Know what you want

Do as the wordless do.

#1: Know what you want
#2: The how will show up
#3: Remember #1

In the wordy world, some would have you believe #1 is hard, but nothing could be farther from the truth. You can feel good or bad anytime. People do it every day.

But why trust your feelings? I hear you, they can let us down sometimes.

Sometimes I feel very, very confident and I lose in straight sets.” — Roger Federer

But everything and everybody else can be equally as disappointing, and as if that weren’t enough, you don’t have a choice, because what you pursue and what you avoid is decided not by what you think, but by what you feel.

Feelings. Also known at the circle game or merry go round.

Everybody wants to get old but nobody wants to be, and while that is going on, everybody also wants to belong, buy stuff, make the world a better place, create the life of their dream, follow their bliss, or any combination thereof.

That makes the complexity of wants a self-fulfilling prophecy and, I think explains why feeling is considered childish, girlish, or in other ways inferior to manly or thinking.

But from the children who dance to music before they know it will later be a word, we know what we pursue and what we avoid is decided by feelings, not by thoughts, and if feelings were to be understood, they’d be called understandings.

I’m not suggesting feelings should be the purpose of life. All I’m saying is give feelings a chance.

The games people play

The wordless wouldn’t know the difference, but in the world of our own making, feelings come in good and bad.

Good feelings can be easily attributed, and bad feelings can be easily blamed on other people or other things. With lawyers on your side, it’s a walk in the park.

We are conditioned to be victims of feelings, to believe our feelings are decided by anything or anyone that can be made responsible. Maybe it’s written in the stars or in a book.

Don’t get involved. It is the conditioned playing the blame game and you’ve got better things to do. Ignore them if you can, but make no mistake about it, they all want the same thing: For you to be just like them.

Many wonderful new freedoms

#1: Know what you want to feel
#2: The how will show up
#3: Remember #1

But let’s conclude getting rid of simple on a practical note!

Practically speaking, be the captain of your soul. Without thinking twice, take full responsibility for what you feel.

When you know what you want, many decisions are already made, such as the end of the blame game. Feeling is a decision you make, not a place you find. Yours day and night, your feeling will guide you from within more than the things you can have, be, or do without.

The rest is technique:

#1: Whenever you wake up, decide what you want to feel when you go to sleep.
#2: Do this for a month.

Twelve months from now? I truly hope you’ll not even recognize how many how’s have shown up.

When time stops and you forget the name of the things you’re looking at, you’re just getting started again. You’ll never get out of this world alive anyway. You might as well trust all you need is inside of you right now, the natural way when what’s preventing it is eliminated. Play with ideas. See the world as though for the first time. Forget perfection. Know that freedom stops where the freedom of others begins, follow your bliss, and be guided by your feelings.

The how’s will show up.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” — Rumi

Imagine you knew the difference between story and history

Imagine you knew the difference between story and history.

It would make a difference, wouldn’t it? You might even wonder why it’s not herstory.

Kidding aside, to people whose mother tongue isn’t English, there’s nothing new and no surprise, English is amazing.

In French and German, to name a few, it’s easy. Histoire is a story no matter what and Geschichte is a story beyond the shadow of a doubt,

Given history has everybody confused, is usually how it works, makes you wonder what words are for, doesn’t it?
#words#history#story#education#manipulation

If words control you

Everybody actually loves words, they’re just doing it wrong.

The 3rd-most-common mistake people make with words, so common it is taken for perfection, is looking at them, in vain, for meaning and for making sense. As Peter Drucker put it, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

It is useless because words lack the sensory organs required for the job. The sensational one, the one with the senses, is you. And looking at words for meaning is equally useless because what a word means to you, no word can know it for you. 

Sure, deciding the meaning of words takes work and there are people out there eager to do it for you, for free. For free? Well, let’s put it this way, in the words of Bruce Lee, “If words control you means everyone else can control you.”
#leadership#inspiration#education#words

If the wordless could talk

For my research to answer the children’s questions, I’d love and appreciate your thoughts on the “If they could talk?”-question pictured below.

We can talk to and about the wordless. But what if the wordless could talk, too? What would they tell us? In other words, what can we learn from the wordless? What can the wordless learn from us? 

Thanks for reading and for sharing, if so inclined, your thoughts in the comments section below!
#inspiration#knowlegde#education#words

Dream Killers

When you lose your dream, only time will tell who has lost and who has been left behind. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” – Langston Hughes

DREAM-KILLER #1: A BIGGER DREAM. Should that happen to you, it simply means your dream isn’t big enough. Why bigger trumps good is being debated. All the more reason to choose your dream well.

DREAM-KILLER #2: DISTRACTIONS. Distractions are a slow dream-killer. They often go unnoticed until the damage is done.

DREAM-KILLER #3: NOT COUPLED WITH THE COURAGE IT TAKES TO FOLLOW THROUGH. Some dreamers don’t break down after the start, but just before the breakthrough.

Either way, dream-killers work in impunity because there is no dream police. It is all up to you.
#dreambig#inspiration#words

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The Story Of Words, Last Train To Simple and other books by the same author are Schindlersword-productions by Beat Schindler in Biel-Bienne, Switzerland. © 2004-2021

Copyright © 2023 · Beat Schindler