Getting Clear About What You Want
Collecting more experiences will not make you clear about what you want, because without guidelines for choosing experiences and reflecting on them to form conclusions, experiences only confuse the mind.
Dandapani challenges the advice to take a gap year and gather as many experiences as possible. He explains that experiences without reflection confuse the mind, and that the conclusion you draw is what organizes the subconscious so clarity becomes possible.
What this talk covers
- If you are confused about what you want or what your next step is, more experiences will not necessarily give you more clarity.
- He considers the standard advice to take a gap year and get as many experiences as possible to be very bad advice.
- As a Hindu who believes in reincarnation, he could return to this planet a thousand times and still not have every experience it has to offer.
- Experiences confuse the mind because we are given no proper guidelines on how to choose them, how to reflect on them, and how to form conclusions.
- The conclusion part of an experience is what organizes the subconscious so that we have clarity about what we want.
The conclusion part of the experience is critical in organizing the subconscious so we have clarity in what it is we want.Dandapani
Questions
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Not on its own. A gap year of travel and a wide range of experiences will not give you clarity, and he says it confuses the mind more than anything else.
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Because nobody teaches us how to choose which experiences to have, or how to reflect afterwards and form a conclusion. Without the conclusion, the subconscious never gets organized.
Transcript
228 words · 1:24
If you're confused about what you want to do in life, if you're not clear what the next step in your life is, gaining more experiences in life doesn't necessarily mean you will have more clarity on what you should do next. Now I often hear parents say to their children, take a gap year, go travel, see the world, try and get as much experiences as you can out there
so you'll have a better idea of what it is you want to do in life. Personally, I think that's very bad advice, because as a Hindu, just as a sign note, I believe in reincarnation. I could reincarnate on this planet a thousand times and still not have every experience
this planet has to offer. So if I take a gap year and I travel around the world and had a whole range of experiences, that's not going to help me gain clarity. What does it do?
It actually more than anything else confuses the mind. Why does it confuse the mind? Because when we go out to have experiences, we're not given proper guidelines on how to choose what experiences we have, and then how to reflect on that experience and form
conclusions. The conclusion part of the experience is critical in organizing the subconscious so we have clarity in what it is we want.