This week, I went to my friend’s cottage and had dinner. We are all in our late 40’s and early 50’s. The topic was ‘Young people these days’ and ‘why do they act the way they do?’.
It’s a typical topic.
One friend starts by saying, “A friend of mine, who is a professor at a university, explained that students these days, they are not studying. I don’t know why they are not studying.”
Another friend goes, “Yeah, they just copy and paste,” and another friend says, “They are different from us.”
And the conversation kept on going along with beer and drinks late into the night.
“Consumer Karma” is one reason why young people don’t study these days.
The purpose of studying something is to learn something that you didn’t know or understand before.
For example, I started learning Aikido 4 years ago, and I thought at that time, “I need some exercise, and maybe it’s good to learn a Japanese martial art,” or something like that. But I can say now, “I didn’t know what I’m learning”.
In the first year, I had no idea what I was doing, and I followed what the teacher told us to do. But I didn’t understand “Why this hand goes here, and why we should step this way and move like this.” All these kinds of questions came up but somehow I knew that I got to follow, so followed, and then it slowly all started to make sense.
I think when you learn something, it ‘takes’ you in this way. When you learn, you can do something you couldn’t do before, or you are able to think in a different way than before. It opens-up your possibilities. And when you open-up your possibilities, joy comes up.
Unfortunately, nowadays, typical university curriculums show a syllabus to students and they choose from it. The syllabus explains what you are going to study about and explains what you get after finishing this class.
This is not learning. This is shopping.
When you go shopping, you know what you are going to buy, you do some research about it and compare with similar things, and think about the cost effectiveness, “Is this worth paying for?” And this is happening in schools.
Students become consumers, with the attitude of a customer. So, they’re not going to make an effort to study, because they have become customers. They think they are right to and deserve to receive service. “Why I have to work hard, since I paid for it. The teacher should be responsible to make me understand it”.
In this way, you’ll never learn anything and there will be no joy of studying. Because it is not possible to open-up your potential by shopping.
If you want to learn something, you better open to something new and something you didn’t know, and then you’ll open-up a whole new world in front of you.
And also, on a deeper level, if you are going to open to something you can’t see, once you develop this ability, there is a new, exciting frontier that you’ll discover.
Come, see and experience the world of Ki energy in your subconscious.
Kenchi Mogi
