A Tea Master's Lesson On Perfectionism

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In this episode of the Gifted Creative Podcast we explore the destructive nature of perfectionism in society and its negative impact on creativity, human intelligence, and holistic growth. The episode delves into historical examples, such as 16th century Japan's tea master Sen No Rikyu, to illustrate how an obsession with perfection is unhealthy. The podcast emphasizes that true beauty and intelligence come from imperfections and integrated thinking, not from artificial perfection. It critiques the current educational system for fragmenting children's natural holistic intelligence, which stifles creative genius and leads to various mental and physical health issues. It calls for a shift away from rigid, perfectionist thinking towards embracing multidimensional intelligence, which it argues is essential for personal and societal survival in times of profound change. 

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Transcript

A Tea Master's Lesson on Perfectionism

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gifted Creative Podcast. I am Lillian Skinner. Today we're gonna talk about perfectionism, how perfectionism has gotten outta hand. 

When society hits the ends of their civilizations, we notice perfectionism becomes an extreme form. This was also noticed back in the 16th century in Japan. There is a zen story about a tea master Sen no Rikyu. he was considered one of the most important influences of Japan of that era. 

He was the first to emphasize several aspects of the ceremony, including rustic simplicity and a directness of approach and honesty of self. The story that he's most well known for goes something like this. He had a group of aristocrats come into his tea house who were polished, refined, and trained in elite tastes.

Instead of presenting them with the perfectly symmetrical, glossy Chinese porcelain that was the admired kind of the time. He offered them some rough and mishap tea bowls. Bowls that were irregular, uneven, and had bumps and earthy textures that felt crude to the [00:01:00] upperclassmen. These aristocrats were upset.

They questioned the team master over the bowls. They said, these are unfinished, flawed, and imperfect. What are you serving us? His response was, perfectionism is the end of use. Flaws are where the beauty enters. And he gave no apology because they weren't broken.

What they were was natural, imperfect and humble. He was trying to do something that today I'm gonna try to do as well. He was trying to change the hyperfocus on perfectionism back towards healthy. He saw symmetry, polish, and luxury as a deadening to the senses.

And I couldn't agree more.

Living in a perfectly curated world is an affront to my senses. They take away from the perfection that nature provides. Beauty is beautiful because it's rare, not abundant. Perfection in nature is not symmetrical.

 We have so much perfection that is artificial. It is expected and dull, and it takes away from noticing and valuing the things that are most important in the world. Like our families, our connections, the [00:02:00] things that make us grow and heal and better. Instead, we are divided, we're pulled apart. Everything is about grabbing our attention or focus instead of our whole intelligence.

We've forgotten that beauty does not equal perfection. The real world is beautiful because it has blended bloom and decay. Flaws awaken attention, and that fosters presence, which makes us actually see. Beauty was never in the object. It's actually in the relationship between the use, the moment and place. 

Because beauty isn't in a thing. Beauty is in the connection of things. People are beautiful until you get to know them, and then sometimes they're not so beautiful and then other people are not so beautiful until you get to know them and then they're truly beautiful.

 Everything valued in our society creates disconnection. Perfectionism is the tool they use. Perfectionism stagnates our personal growth, it slows down our natural learning. And in letting go of perfectionism we understand the value of what we are doing. Using or relating to?

Master Rikyu had a saying, [00:03:00] no goal is an invitation to relax. Because he believed that perfectionism made people anxious, and that is a common theme I'm hearing right now. He felt that beauty and refinement were addictive in one way and yet uncomfortable in another.

And I have to say that beautifully represents what it feels like to be divided. To go from holistic intelligence to separated intelligence. It feels addictive in your head and uncomfortable in your body.

 History shows a very disturbing pattern for perfectionism. Civilization's obsession with it grows stronger as it comes closer to collapse. The Tower of Babel story, which I've covered on my other podcast revealed a flawless symmetry in its bricks just before the linguistic confusion completely scattered its builders.

It is almost like we forget how to make mortar while we're building the perfect bricks. Connection is lost as perfection in the individual object is obtained. Egypt's pyramids represented mathematical perfection just as the kingdom's adaptive powers crumbled because of too much bureaucracy. [00:04:00] 

The more perfect we individually become, the closer we are to collapse. The reason is stupid simple; perfectionism represents cognitive rigidity. 

Perfectionism is used to eliminate our holistic intelligence by driving us to our highest functioning cognitive stamina.

This drive towards excellence and flawlessness, as they say, is hiding the elimination of our cognitive flexibility. As society's pursue perfection. They eliminate creativity, innovation, and responsive intelligence. But really that elimination starts the second they put in a 2D system. The very qualities we need most to survive are the ones that are eliminating and now that we're at the end, it's in full elimination.

Creatives are not in the system, which is why they leave first.

Study after study confirms that Perfectionism correlates with eating disorders, anxiety, depression, physical ailments, including allergies, eczema, and autoimmune conditions. We are witnessing a public health crisis that's actually a physical manifestation of the cognitive violence that's being done on our minds, particularly our children's minds.

What research funding will never allow to be captured [00:05:00] is that it's a systematic destruction of human intelligence, presented as educational achievement.

Our educational systems make us dumber. The more intelligent you are the more anxiety you will have because you're trying to figure out what's missing. What you need to know in addition to this to make it make sense.

This is how we cognitively destroy intelligence, and it is shown in our own data.

We are all born with intelligence that naturally operates as a whole. My intelligence just happened to remain holistic, thanks to some genetics and extreme sensitivity, and that allows me to continue to see the whole picture.

Most people are broken from their top down to their bottom up, and we have the elite mostly sitting in their top-down thinking and the masses mostly in their bottom up. I still have whole. And for this I am able to see the big picture and the tiny details and make them one.

Historically, 2D systems do not value those of us who can connect things. They do not value those of us who make things whole, they do not pay well for those who heal or care or [00:06:00] do things that actually are the backbone of our society. They pay well for those who dissect, breakdown, and money is almost the perfect example of that. The people who make the most money. Are the ones who divide up money and make more of it, even though it's not really truly more .

That is also why we keep collapsing. Because 2D does not heal. It destroys. It's taking things that are alive, breaking them down so that they're no longer alive. But now they're just resources.

Education is the designer of this. It breaks up our learning into separate components for measurement and instruction. It destroys the very things it claims it's developing, which is intelligence or creative genius. And we have many studies that show this.

We have NASA funded studies on creative genius that I've talked about before. Where 98% of children going into school, they have creative genius and it drops down to 2% of adults after they've finished school. This is clearly demonstrating systematic cognitive destruction through division.

Children enter [00:07:00] school with integrated intelligence that can approach problems from multiple angles, see connections across domains, generate novel solutions with their whole thinking, and school comes along and breaks that apart.

It teaches them mathematics is not related to music. Literature has nothing to do with science and logical reasoning operates independently from emotional understanding.

 It drives division, making them demonstrably less intelligent than when they first started. and It is perfectionism that accelerates the breaking

Students quickly learn that seeing connections between subjects gets them marked wrong. The teacher gets upset with them. They don't want them to cross boundaries or cross subjects.

 Yet That is the worst possible thing we can do right now because our system is falling apart. What is different this time than from other collapses is this is a global collapse, and we have created a machine version of the box that they push our children into. And that machine has all the answers. It's smarter than our children will ever be - cognitively. 

So that machine is its own entity, and we don't need people [00:08:00] in the box anymore.

Yet we still continue redirecting them to stay on topic when their natural impulse is to bring things together and integrate.

Cognitive scientists, Douglas Hofstadter's research on analogical thinking proves how this approach destroys intelligence. His work showed us that intelligence doesn't operate through separate modules That can be trained independently. It works through dynamic integration where pattern recognition enhances the linguistic process. Where spatial reasoning informs mathematical understanding. Where body awareness grounds abstract thinking.

When we force these separations of subjects into instruction and assessment, we eliminate the integration that creates what true creative genius is. Students learn to chase the perfect scores in isolated subjects. They memorize formulas without understanding their beauty or real-world application.

But formulas are shortcuts for something. Yet we never learn really what the shortcuts are. We could be so much more efficient with our teaching. I didn't learn physics or really understand it until I took Juujitsu. And then all of a sudden all that made sense. It [00:09:00] sat in my brain rattling around worthless until I applied it in real life. But the problem is most of us lose or atrophy, that information before it is needed. 

Which is the biggest concern right now that we have in our school systems with AI. But there's a very simple solution to this and we will not implement it. Because we don't bother teaching them what it means in real life. We're just expected to memorize tables and formulas and then apply them, but not actually in things we do.

Cognitive scientist, Daniel Willinghams Research reveals that our educational assessments measures what he calls shallow processing. The ability to recognize patterns and apply algorithms without understanding underlying principles. Each perfect score moves them further from their natural ability into thinking creatively and solving complex problems and this is where the anxiety starts.

Our children's nervous system knows something's wrong. Their bodies are rebelling against this cognitive violence because their natural intelligence isn't supposed to be chopped into pieces.

Antonio [00:10:00] Demasio is a neuroscientist whose research on somatic markers show that authentic intelligence requires integration between the body and the mind.

The Body provides crucial, grounded information that allows us to use the pure abstract thinking and validate it. If you cannot ground it in reality, then you should probably consider it's not real. This is how we're gonna survive great change. We really need to get to our embodied realities. Because in chaos that is the only way to know what truth is.

Yet our educational system refuses to let students do this. 

What follows when you try to divide a kid who has holistic intelligence that can't be divided is a host of negative mental and physical manifestations. Because our brains and our bodies are meant to operate together, they're meant to intellectually operate together. It is going against our natural functioning. The higher our sensitivities are, the more we need to maintain our natural functioning.

 The future outcomes for children that break has now flipped.

Instead of being the ones that will be successful, the system designated successful students end up as expert people [00:11:00] pleasers. They spend their entire lives frantically trying to impress deliver for others, but they never learn how to cultivate or deliver for themselves.

 They lose the ability to trust their own thinking, to connect knowledge across subjects or see the whole picture, and they develop what educational researcher Ellen Langer calls mindless learning.

Mindless learning is exactly what it sounds like. It is the acquiring of information that is done in a way that prevents us from actually using it, resulting in greater learned helplessness, and greater system dependence. 

Educational psychologist, Mel Levine's, research on learning differences, Reveals that many students who are labeled as learning disabled simply can't cognitively break to stamina due to their higher sensitivity.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Research on flow shows that overwhelmingly schools limit our students' flow. Students may find flow in extracurricular activities like band, athletics, or working on team projects, but they almost never find it in the traditional academic class because traditional school fragments learning and prevents [00:12:00] optimal states.

Research shows artificial time blocks prevent flow. In sustained integration. Students report the lowest flow during lectures and audio-visual presentations, which is exactly what most commonly teachers use to teach. Alternative schools maintain higher levels of integration and flow. 

Students in Montessori show significantly more flow. However, I have sensitive students in Montessori, and we were unable to find flow. So, the children with the highest dimensional learning are still losing it. And this is exactly why I was alone in my experience. Because we are such outliers that our dimensional learning really was a hindrance.

The more sensitive you are, the more difficult it's to be in our systems. Once you get them out, once you get yourself out, you move through this period where you heal your ADHD, which I believe is Stockholm Syndrome, and then you find flow.

 Research is supporting that AI is going to make traditional learning disabilities irrelevant. They're going to go away because the very thing we have been running up against is the compression of higher dimensional thinking down to 2D.

For THose with very high dimensional thinking it is [00:13:00] painful to compress down to 2D. These are the learning differences. It has always been a lie that they're learning disabilities because we have stronger integration intelligence. it was never disability.

We have only chosen one way of teaching. It is small picture. It is the way that breaks us, makes us less intelligent, it reduces us.

 AI is revealing people's true intelligence capabilities. We Were told that there's something wrong with us because they could exploit us that way. Because they have been devaluing our ability to connect and create for thousands of years now.

There's a theme here, and that theme is our systems do not connect, and they do not create. They dissect, and those of us who can create, we're put at the bottom and then we're exploited. I keep seeing this over and over. I've come to realize that pretty much everyone out there except for the most creative are conditioned to exploit the creatives.

I keep running into people who want to collaborate with me, and when I say, okay, let's swap what we make, immediately what they do is they take what I give them [00:14:00] and they try to make it more average. They try to help me. I don't need help. I actually have never needed help.

I've paid a whole lot of money for people to tell me how to be like them, when that was never really what I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be like me. And darn it, if I don't get feedback every day of my life that there's something deeply wrong with me because everyone else is conditioned and can't see the whole picture, and that is how they control us.

I have no interest in being average. I have a box that can help me be average in a 20,000 gazillion ways, and I know all the ways I can use it, and I can be it in a moment. My job has always been to go in the other direction because that is where the creatives are supposed to go because we have to get in front of what is coming.

The changes coming is profound. But our schools are working against us.

I was talking to a friend recently and she was saying that her children's orientation was different this year, that the teachers kept saying how the children were really anxious today. But the teachers kept claiming it wasn't their fault, and they weren't yelling at them, that the kids were just anxious because of social media or [00:15:00] electronics.

I don't agree with that at all. The kids are not anxious because of social media and electronics. They're anxious because we have more perfectionism than we've ever had before.

They are relentless at trying to break children because that's all our system knows how to do, and they don't even understand why they're doing it.

They think, we need to do more. The dissection, the breaking down the reduction is all people know how to do.

That is the opposite of what we need. What we actually need is more dimension. We need to understand more completely.

When I put my stuff out there it is going to sit out there and it might only get listened to by a hundred people, but each week. I get a hundred more, and in five years that information will apply to more people than anyone ever could have thought possible because that is where we're going. Those of us who are sensitive, we know the future. We are just there first.

That's how our multidimensionality forces us to be there first and we can see where it will go. We are the natural leaders in times of great change. We are not controllers. [00:16:00] We go into the change. We don't try to make it be, which is what our current system does.

2D is about controlling the future. But We can't control the future. That was stupid. Why did we ever think we could control the future?

We need to let go of our need to control. We need to let go of this for our children and allow them to figure out how to be, because that's exactly what they need to learn how to do to navigate what is coming to navigate the change. The need for control is dangerous. It leads to more control and more narrow-mindedness and more myopic thinking.

Everybody is going down that path and the only way to switch it is to divert to whole picture. When you have whole picture, you relax. This is why they're nervous. They're being forced to see small picture, tiny. That is not natural. Children need to see the whole picture so that they can navigate, so they can learn, so they know how to use their emotions for them, not against them.

We keep forcing them down to the lowest levels of thinking. That's bloom's thinking. Taxonomy [00:17:00] levels 1, 2, 3. The smarter you are, the more painful that is. You are not dumb. Because you can't think low. You are multidimensional. We're all born at thinking level six unless you're a psychopath.

I have created taxonomies for somatic intelligence and creative intelligence thinking that show how our full intelligence works.

And you'll never guess what I found. The creatives sit on top of the other two and it goes up to 11. And you know what 11 is, it's singularity. Because singularity is the highest level of human intelligence, not machine. Machines are 2D. Even if they get up to 3D, who cares? We can get up to 10 D.

We only have one choice, and that is to go back to our higher dimensional thinking and find it. We will be amazing. With ai We will be not exhausted because we're all being forced into our cognitive stamina., And it will be a better world to live in. The creatives made this machine for us so that we can be free. The people who can't figure out how to use it well are not supposed to [00:18:00] be in charge.

If we can prevent our children from being broken in our system, we can allow them to find their flow and natural talent and we get to bring back healthy again.

We are all born with genius, so we can get it back. We can survive if we get it back. Genius isn't what they say. Genius is not about fitting in and doing the hard stuff. Genius is about being like a kid again, our children have it. Let them keep it. Then watch them and learn from them and get it back yourself.

This is what we need to do to survive. We absolutely have to do this. You don't control when you're brilliant. You understand. The greatest thing I ever did was let my kids be and learn from them. They see the whole picture. You move into it with them. Then You know what will happen next, and that is genius.

There's such a huge payoff for being genius. There's no reason not to find it now because our world needs it. So let go of your perfectionism. Let go of perfectionism for your child. Let them stay in their [00:19:00] multidimensional intelligence. If we go into this intelligence, we will be able to survive what's coming.

This is how we heal. This is how we heal others.

Thank you for listening. I hope this was valuable. Take care.

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