Stupidity and why 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.