“All I know is that I know nothing.” –Socrates

I remember sitting in my freshman humanities seminar listening to my professor read aloud from Plato’s Apology. For me, it was a revelation. By the end of that book, my other classes felt like sophistry and my professors no more than glorified rhetoricians. And by the end of sophomore year, I sensed that the modern Western academy had consciously chosen to focus on Aristotelian construction rather than Socratic deconstruction; that it opted to teach knowledge rather than wisdom. It felt like an ancient mistake, one that had given us great progress scientifically and materially but not spiritually. A mistake I felt I had been paying dearly for and thought it time to stop. My interest in unlearning was born.

Socrates was determined to challenge people about their assumptions, to test what their beliefs were based upon. He brought people down from the invulnerable tower of knowing to the fresh earth of unknowing. Some hated him for this, while others were set free by what he termed his “intellectual midwifery.” The pursuit of wisdom and what he and Plato called simply “the good” were all that mattered. Whatever had to be shed on the path, whatever sacrifices had to be made, whatever beliefs and practices had to be laid to rest, so be it. The Socratic path to truth was to, in determination, enter into the open heart of the unknown in order to “recollect” something deeper. Something no one had to teach you, but that you were born knowing: that fresh strawberries are delicious, that jumping in cold water on a hot day is refreshing, and that genuine laughter heals.

This sacred concentration is evident in the determination of a child trying to learn something precious to them. Children have the ability to let everything that doesn’t satisfy their quest drop away; in essence, to become unlearned. As adults, we’re trained away from this precious attitude by a culture suspicious of the joy of the present moment and sacrificial toward the promise of a more learned future. And in time, without even realizing it, we stop trusting ourselves. We internalize the voice of measurement and feel shame for not being the impossibly perfect person we imagine we ought to be.

This internalization of self-doubt causes us to suffer. Siddhartha Guatama dealt with self-doubt 2,500 years ago when he sat down under the Bodhi tree. Mara, the adversarial demon that tried to derail Siddhartha’s efforts, first came as a sensual being trying to lure him away from his determined state. But to no avail. She then came in the form of a terrifying monster. But to no avail. She finally came disguised as the internal voice of self-doubt, and this form was the most difficult to ignore. Mara said, “Who do you think you are! What right do you have to be doing this?” This was most effective, but Mara did not prevail. Siddhartha touched the earth in response, signifying that he was part of the unfathomable cosmos and that everything too was a part of him; that in his complete surrender to connection, he was both vulnerable and powerful simultaneously. He was awake. He had become Buddha.

We have to work very hard to unlearn the lie that we aren’t enough just as we are. But, once we know the truth that we are good enough and the present moment is here for the living, we know strawberries again and cool water and laughter. And, we know them in a way that nobody ever had to teach us about.

Here are three steps that can help you begin to unlearn negative habits and feelings:

1. Come to understand your personal genealogy from an objective perspective. In other words, know what psychological, philosophical and moral burdens have been inadvertently passed down to you. Unmask them, and allow them to drop away. For example, in your own familial configuration, you may have been taught that lying in order to protect someone else’s feelings, at the expense of distorting your own, is virtuous. You may be doing this unconsciously, all the while hurting yourself without a clear understanding of why you’re compelled to act this way. This step requires us to understand where this behavior came from and how it got unknowingly passed down as a “family value.” It may have started with a great-grandfather trying to spare his mother from grief or a great-great-aunt trying to cloak her daughter’s trauma. Whatever the reason, we must find it out and set it right in our own life. We must learn family secrets so we can unlearn any destructive behaviors that accompany them.

2. Befriend difficult emotions. Grief, terror, rage and despair are things we don’t like to show others, let alone ourselves, in this culture. We tend to go into hiding when we feel these things; we deny or medicate them. We’re often taught that feeling the depths of our feelings is a child’s indulgence, and we’re told early to stop crying so vehemently. We learn to cut it off in favor of doing internal violence to ourselves (“normal”) or violence toward others (“deviant”).

We must unlearn our fear and disdain for difficult feelings, because life will leave us in no short supply of them. For example, if you’re a soldier who has been paid to kill for a year and half, it makes sense that you would feel rage, terror and displacement (despair) when you were returned stateside to deliver mail, coach little league and cut grass on the weekends. We have to unlearn the cultural dogma that says all will be “normal” again. Things are never normal again after trauma—they are forever transformed. We have to unlearn fear of deep emotional states and learn to swim all the way through them so they reveal transformative wisdom.

3.Experience this present moment. The past is re-created in us so long as we ingest it and live it without question. As soon as we bring awareness to what is happening, the past falls off and only present remains. The future too is a fallacy of delusion, dredged up by our fears, hopes, disappointments and aspirations. Better to unlearn the lament of what was and the self-beating we are taught to do with it. Better too to unlearn the projection into the future that we are taught to do as a means to dominate the indomitable and unknowable fluidity of the present moment. The present moment is a vulnerable moment because we don’t know what will happen. We are taught to subdue and dominate that vulnerability with plans or analysis. But the present moment, if felt as is, has no agenda. It accepts whatever we are without judgment. It has room in it to live. The past and the future only have room to project; and projection is not a life. We have to unlearn the desire to understand the past and control the future in favor of tenuously living this very tender moment just now. The one that is not permanent. The one that knows that anything can happen and that all is unknowable.

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