Stupidity - The Word Must Go
To call anybody stupid is to use a term of abuse. To call anything stupid is to
call the person responsible for it stupid.
Stupid is making a lot of mistakes. There are no mistakes. They don't exist.
So-called mistakes are the result of your memory getting it wrong. When the
mathematician totals up her or his sums incorrectly, it only happens because the
memory misreports the information or rules of maths. Believing the wrong
information is understandable. It is not stupid. The mathematician and those who
you may call dunces are doing the best with what they have got. Their
intelligence is equal. The most perfect intelligence can be stunted by a poor
memory. Your memory is generally the way it is. It is not your fault if it is
unreliable.
Wrong is not the same thing as stupid. Anybody that is called stupid may simply
be wrong. Great intelligence does not guarantee that whatever conclusion you
come to is correct.
There is no right and wrong. There is only exact and inexact - inexact means
less exact. Also, there is deemed exact and deemed inexact. When you produce a
long answer in a maths examination and the answer is a different answer to what
is called the right answer, the work is not all bad or wrong. So inexact is the
right word. Don't say the answer is wrong. Inexact acknowledges that there is a
lot of good and correctness in the answer.
You are not your intelligence. You are simply your awareness. You do not condemn
calculators for getting bad microchips. The calculator is good but just has a
bad microchip to work with. So it is with us. If our intelligence is bad that
does mean we are stupid.
Not understanding physics but understanding history well does not mean you are
stupid. Nobody must aspire to be good at everything.
People who score low in IQ tests are not stupid but may have untrained minds
that easily get confused.
The teaching that negative thoughts puts wayward unseen forces into the universe
that do harm (often to innocent persons) is helpful here. The mistake you make
could be using up one of these forces. The force is depleted. Thus your mistake
has saved somebody from a force that could inflict cancer on them. You can also
use your positive thoughts about your mistake to make it undo undesirable forces
and turn them around. This belief is very very important.
Am I saying that we have to actually want to commit mistakes if we could be
doing somebody a favour? No. To want them is to create them. We must avoid
mistakes and if they happen we must move on having learned from them.
Perfection is not doing everything right. Never mean to be perfect but to do
your best. And when you do that, it is perfect! The modern art landscape that
has a deliberate paint spill on it to make an artistic point is perfect in its
way.
Treat your life as an adventure story. Think of it that way.