Defining Conventional Wisdom

In a word, Conventional Wisdom is crap.

Now that I have that off my chest allow me to elaborate just a bit. Conventional wisdom is the stuff your mother told you and in all fairness to mom she didn't have any idea what she was saying at time or she wouldn't have said it.

I'm not going to leave dad or your teachers, preachers or best friends out of the discussion either. Chances are pretty good that if you know someone, anyone to be precise, then the things they have told you to believe have all been based on conventional wisdom.

From a Quantum Physics point of view and in a very general sense the entire universe is made up of two things, energy and information. Matter as we know it is the result of organizing the energy and information into systems or patterns that our physical bodies have the ability to detect using one or more of the five senses.

The human being is a very specialized mammal on a planet that is crawling with life. We have a brain and when the brain does what it is designed to do "think" it creates an electrical/chemical energy field. Without going into a huge amount of detail about how this process works, suffice it to say for now that the energy field I'm talking about is what we have come to know as the mind. In other words the mind is a product of your brain doing what it was designed to do.

Going back to the prehistoric times when the "human" life form was competing with every other life form for dominion on this planet the brains primary function was survival and all thinking came from that survival mode. We used our five senses to gather data from the world around us and determine if it was going to benefit us or be a threat. As we evolved this became the two basic feelings, Pleasure and Pain.

All of the thinking that has been hard wired into the human brain since the beginning of our current existence on this planet has found its roots in the survival mode of thinking where everything is evaluated on whether or not it will bring us pleasure or pain. This survival mode is the essence of conventional wisdom and fear of death is the root of all fears.

Back to where I started this discussion, conventional wisdom is a bunch of crap because it is based on our survival instincts and not our true self (consciousness aka., spirit) which is capable of functioning well above the survival mode and yet for many of us we still rely upon age old thinking habits or patterns that no longer truly serve us or our potential.

After humans started to walk upright and use tools to gather food and build shelter some bands of humans or "Tribes" were more successful than others. Some became very accomplished hunters, gatherers, and later even farmers. In each tribe there developed a hierarchy that meant the smartest, strongest and most successful became leaders of the tribe and the rest became the workers.

Let's call the chief of this one particular tribe Ug.

Ug discovered he didn't have to go out and risk his life by hunting for food and he discovered that he could hang back at the cave and contemplate things. Ug probably stuck a stick in the ground one day and observed the shadow move in a circle, he maybe even put small stones at the end of the shadow every now and then and drew lines connecting the dots. To make a long story short Ug started using his brain to think for purposes other than survival.

As time went by there were other very successful cavemen in that tribe and since they couldn't beat up Ug and they too were smart, they became cavemen of leisure as well. Then one day a really scary event like a forest fire or eclipse of the sun or something unusual happened and the people of the tribe all came running to Ug and the other cavemen of leisure wanting some kind of reassurance and explanation for what was or had happened.

These cavemen who had been using their brain to think "outside" of the box were quick on their feet and not wanting to appera stupid they gave the other tribal members a story of gods and super natural powers and they became looked upon as very wise cavemen indeed.

Ug being the lazy and enterprising cave man that he was saw an opening to substantially reduce the amount of work he would have to do so he appointed one of his fellow cavemen "priest" and from then on all the unexplained events would be addressed by him and Ug wouldn't have to be bothered by anybody except the priest who Ug supervised on a regular basis to keep him from getting out of line. Naturally this entire process occured over the span of several geneations and Ug is symbolic of the King or tribal leader.

Somewhere along the line Ug and his priest figured out they could exercise substantial control over the rest of the tribe with superstition and they introduced a new idea called religion and a new feeling to go along with pleasure and pain called guilt.

The story I've just told gives an outline of where and how conventional wisdom originated and evolved. It isn't intended to be a historical account, just an example to define a point. The point is, much of conventional wisdom is either based on survival instinct, what causes pleasure, what causes pain, superstition and or, last but not least control.

Conventional Wisdom is a body of knowledge that is a part of a much larger energy field in the universe that Freud called the ego. So as the humans evolved out of cave dwelling and into organized societies their thinking evolved into a process where it created a mindset based on ego driven thought patterns.

Fast forward to the modern times and what we have is just an evolved state of the same kind of mind set. Our educational system is based on teaching us "things" based on the fundamental principles of an ego which are, pleasure, pain, superstition, control and of course survival.

The single biggest problem with an egoic mindset is the fact that it is extremely competitive and once again going back to the beginning of human existence, competition meant the difference between life and death. That doesn't make it bad. It was a matter of survival to be extremely competitive so in fact it was quite useful back then.

I wont debate the pros and cons of competitive human nature and the consequences of it in our society, that would be the topic of another blog but I will point out that this competitive egoic mind set leads most of the people we know to live in a constant state of fear and a mentality of poverty consciousness, even though most of these people wont admit they are afraid because of pride.

Today people live in a state of constant fear of loss and believe there truly isn't enough to go around and its a dog eat dog world and if they don't grab their share there wont be any left and then suddenly in walks the priest and introduces the idea of guilt and how we should feel guilty if we have too much or are too successful or too attractive, too sexy etc.

Conventional wisdom is actually more of a psychosis where a totally dysfunctional way of thinking produces the kind of energy in the mind that works against the owner of the brain doing the thinking. I say dysfunctional not because conventional wisdom is all bad but because the way we are taught to use our brains makes using them in a functional manner almost impossible.

Conventional wisdom is therefore responsible for keeping people stuck in a rut and a rut is only different from a grave because it's still open on both ends. People in our society have been doing their level best to follow the rules and using conventional wisdom as their guide they wonder what the hell, it don't matter what I do I cant win. They tip toe through life hoping to make it safely to death and now at the age of 68 they discover some dishonest CFO and CEO stole the money from their pension fund and now, instead of retiring they will be a Wal Mart greeter till the day they die.

Conventional wisdom is dysfunctional because it does not teach the natural laws and principles of creating true wealth in this lifetime. In my first blog post (Getting Started) I discussed a statistic that said only 3% of the population will ever achieve financial freedom. That's 3% of the earth's population! Did you realize they control over 80% of the monetary wealth on this planet?

Have you ever wondered what they know that you don't know?

Well I just told you, they know that conventional wisdom is a bunch of crap. They also know that as long as you and I keep believing in conventional wisdom their chunk of the world's monetary wealth is pretty secure. So they continue to espouse the virtues of teaching it to our children. Last but not least they know how to use the natural laws of abundance and ancient principles to create wealth with seemingly effortless regularity.

They know the secret and have kept it to themselves for thousands of years. These ancient principles are similar to gravity in as much as the work all the time whether you believe in them or even know about them. They also can work against you if you don't use them correctly...just like gravity will work against you if you don't pay attention to the last step on the stairs.

I encourage you to follow this blog with me as we continue to explore the ancient principles of universal prosperity and abundance and you'll discover the secrets the 3%ers have kept to themselves and how we can use them to create true wealth in our lives.

For more information on how the brain "thinks" and uses the body to feel and form survival patterns and habits I recommend you read the book "Evolve Your Brain" The Science of Changing Your Mind by Joe Dispenza and a great movie to watch is "What the Bleep Do we Know?