“Nobody is smart enough to be 100% right or 100% wrong.” – Ken Wilber
Put away your tinfoil hat, this ‘aint that type of talk.
There will be no conspiracy theories here.
Just a simple, down-to-earth lesson in better thinking, so you can fall for fewer traps, solve deeper problems, learn faster, and unlock more of your intelligence.
Let’s start here:
Science has made it very clear that human awareness blocks out more than it allows in.
We can’t see gamma rays or x-rays, for example — though our man-made tools pick them up clearly.
There’s a wide spectrum of colour our eyes don’t see (though a small portion of the population are “tetrachromats” and can see up to 100 times more colour than the average person).
Heck, our ears can’t even pick up a dog whistle.
NASA estimates that everything ever observed by humans or our instruments makes up less than 5% of the universe.
(and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be far less than that)
This won’t be a science lesson, I just want to make this next point very clear:
What we don’t know about the universe far, far exceeds what we know.
That much is obvious.
So whenever I hear someone say…
“Aliens don’t exist.”
(which, oddly, has happened several times in the past week — hence this email)
…My ignorance radar blows all the way up.
If we care at all about the truth, all we can honestly say is:
“Aliens might exist.”
And that’s really it.
I guess if we wanted to, we could go as far as…
“Aliens probably exist.”
…Just based on the fact that we’re a tiny population living on a tiny rock in a tiny corner of a tiny sub-section of an infinite universe that we know almost nothing about.
So “probably” would be a logical guess.
But saying they “don’t” exist?
That’s just basic human ignorance.
Because, obviously, we don’t actually know.
And thinking we know something when we don’t kills the flow of intelligence like cement in the head.
Which brings us to the all-important point:
If you want to unlock your intelligence, get in the habit of noticing when you mistake a personal belief for a fact.
It could be a silly belief, like “aliens aren’t real.”
It could be an emotionally-charged belief, like “Democrats are better than Republicans” (I’m still not sure I even know what the difference is).
Or it could be a fundamental belief about reality, like “I can see all the colours that exist” (tell that to a tetrachromat).
Thousands of these little beliefs act like walls in our mind, shutting us off to any new information that might challenge those beliefs.
In other words, closing our mind.
And the first step to opening our mind back up is simply recognizing the difference between beliefs and facts — and then holding your beliefs open, updating them as new information (ie. intelligence) arrives.
That’s just good thinking.
And good thinking means better decision making, more clarity, more accuracy, more learning, more effectiveness, and more life possibilities.
So, I’ll pass this on to you:
Do aliens exist?
Think it over and I’ll see you back here tomorrow 🙂
– T