- Jeston Lu's Newsletter
- Posts
- Week 8: Vulnerability, Consciousness, and Education
Week 8: Vulnerability, Consciousness, and Education
Jeston Lu
September 09, 2024
Welcome to my newsletter, where I share weekly wisdom on artistry, awareness, and digital autonomy. If you want to check out my essays/long-form writing, feel free to click the link here. Thanks for reading. :)
Personal Updates
No podcast episodes this week because of wisdom teeth surgery (don’t think a bloated face unable to talk would be very suitable to something that literally requires you to talk). But in the next few weeks, I have 5 episodes scheduled, which I’m very excited to share with you in the next few weekly newsletters. Stay tuned - going to be bringing on some really awesome guests.
First kinda full meal with a good high school friend :)
This week, I’ve really focused a lot on writing. A few days ago, I published a 5,000-word essay about my existential crisis at 18 y/o. The day after, I doubted whether I had made a stupid decision sharing this much of my life on the Internet, but after some reflection and talking to other people, it wasn’t a stupid decision at all. In fact, it was a much-needed decision.
We don’t show our vulnerable sides enough. We often want to conjure up a perfect image of ourselves to others, and in return, it creates misalignment between who we actually are inside to who we are on the outside. And that’s the script that many of us live by for so much of our lives - and causing so much unnecessary suffering. Only by opening up do we release the burden.
“I write all of this to show you the lows, to show you, one, how fucked up of a human being I am. I was literally in shambles less than a year ago, but it’s so fricking possible to change your life. And that requires you to take a deep look inside of you, who you actually are, and to heal all the spiritual wounds that you’ve left on yourself. This is the way, and that has been my experience toward healing.”
Learnings
This is probably one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time. When people think about the buzz words of “spirituality” and “elevating consciousness,” they often perceive life as: “Okay, I want to feel as much love and freedom as possible. The negative emotions are something to avoid.” While there’s some truth to the premise, it often fails to put this into consideration:
You have to go through hell to experience heaven. You can’t experience heaven by shooting for heaven. You experience heaven by first experiencing hell. You can’t be in the light without being in darkness. Do I have any scientific evidence to back this up? No, but it feels true for me to say it. It genuinely feels like one of the fundamental truths of the human experience.
"Love is already what you are, so we need to take the indirect path to love which is essentially, you gotta go through hell to experience heaven. That's what transforms hell into heaven. Because you go into hell with love and in return, it's like: 'Dude, this entire time I've been living in heaven I didn't even have the fucking eyes to see.'“
So if we want to feel what it’s like to love at the fullest capacity, we have to embrace these lower states. If you’re feeling sad, embrace what you’re feeling. If love is already who we are, the lower states is just love waiting to be expressed. Therefore, kindling these lower states ought to require zero judgment. Hold space and presence.
"There is magic on the other side of anger once you finish feeling that fully. Be wherever your feet are at. If you're pissed off, just feel that fully. God's intelligence is far greater than our own, so we may want to be in love, but if we're just like, 'fuck this shit,' then just say 'fuck this shit.' Just be there and finish that feeling and you'll be amazed at how quickly God reveals the glory that's intrinsic to your nature."
We suffer from availability bias: our capacity for thinking lies in the things we most commonly see. Here’s what Nat Eliason says: “Instead of expanding our radius to areas with less competition, we choose to wait in line.” When there’s a better option elsewhere, we pick what we already know to avoid the discomfort of leaving the circle of familiarity. This can be applied to college:
"If you go up to a recruiter at a college career fair and try to stand out on any of these criteria, then in 99% of cases you’re unmemorable. You’re another student with a high GPA, another student who led some club, another student who took the same hard classes as everyone else, another student on dean’s list. None of these qualities are memorable."
When you know you’re in a hogwash of undifferentiated peers, the best way to stand out isn’t by doing the same thing, but by doing quirky things outside of availability bias. That’s how you create the best lore, the best plot, and become the hero of your own journey. Heck, even having an existential crisis during your 1st year of college is all for the plot LOL.
In the words of my friend: “Don’t be basic.”
One of my favorite hobbies is learning about the criminal upbringing of the American education system. At the time of reading, I’ve already read: Deschooling Society, Paper Belt on Fire, Excellent Sheep, and now Weapons of Mass Instruction, as well as a few essays: Saving the Liberal Arts, School is Not Enough, and The Lesson to Unlearn.
I've written slightly controversial essays about this topic as well, such as The Deification of the Clock Tower, 3 Observations from my 1st Year at College, and What the Hell Happened to Our Childhood? Why do I read and write so much about this topic? Because the topic of education matters deeply to me, and it feels like we’ve been robbed of our capacity to learn.
Here’s some deeply unsettling quotes from this book:
"... The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.”
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
“In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.”
"In our dreams... people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [of intellectual and moral education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Not my words, but the words of some of the supposedly “great” people of the United States, one apparently the 28th president of the country. Don’t you find it a little concerning - at the very least?
Conclusion
Alright. That was a truck load of weekly learnings - and I can’t believe I’m at week 8 already. Let me know what you think about these; it’s been tremendous fun along the way so far. Here’s a quote from the 1st learning to wrap up this past week - one that really makes you think a little bit. What if life is just one infinite game? What if death is just the rebirth?
"God is far too powerful, far too creative for the story to end with death. The story goes on. Deep down, I think we all know it. This lifetime, I feel like the story is progressing at a rate far superior to anything I've experienced. When you tell the truth, so many things start happening. Even that is a reflection of the time that we are in. God is just playing recklessly with the most love. People are waking up to the love of God and allowing God to live and play through them. There is no separation between you and the divine."
Elevating consciousness,
Jeston Lu
Reply