How to become smarter, intelligence development
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As I see it, the power of the mind is in understanding. The better you understand, the smarter you are. Even in the explanatory dictionary, "smart" is interpreted as "understanding". To become smarter, you need to train the speed, accuracy and depth of understanding. Understanding gives answers to all the most important questions of life: what is happening, who we are, where we are and where we are going.
Understanding can be trained. The most accessible way is attentive communication, when you feel the interlocutor: his words, feelings, motives. That is, a person tells you something, and you understand him. It would seem an ordinary phenomenon, but in fact - a great rarity!
We think that we understand others. But this is not so. It is better to immediately take this as a starting point: you do not even try to understand others. If you tried, you would have become brilliant psychologists long ago.
We do not listen to or understand people, but constantly judge and evaluate. We pretend to listen, and automatically nod, waiting for our turn to speak. We are usually not interested in what the other person really feels, what he is trying to convey to us. We do not want to understand other people, because they may be right, because their understanding may run counter to our delusions. Understanding is fraught with shaking the usual supports of the mind, on which our illusory values are based. And therefore, in order to keep our mind intact, we do not listen to the interlocutor. We catch his words with half an ear only to check how much they correspond to the hackneyed patterns of our mind. If there is no correspondence, we begin to evaluate, judge, and even argue. And if the words of the interlocutor fit into our usual picture of the world, we say: “uh-huh”, “yes-yes!”, “exactly!”. We avoid change with all our might, so we don’t like to listen to and understand others just in case, so as not to disturb our delusions. We don’t want to understand. We want to be understood, so that the interlocutor is imbued with our worldview and joins in with our delusions. If they agree with us, it means that we are respected, loved and accepted. It means that we don’t need to change, and we can preserve our illusions, stopping in development.
Such “joining in” with our ideas creates the appearance of unity, in which the morbid pride of the interlocutors revels in their mutual illusions. Sometimes the “friendship” of many people is based on such quirks.
True understanding comes from the position of a student. It’s not that you learn specifically from the interlocutor. It’s just that in this way you kind of listen to the voice of life. Even if the interlocutor is talking nonsense, you don’t judge or evaluate, but understand what exactly and why he is saying. You feel the interlocutor. This type of understanding is called “empathy” in psychology.
Essentially, empathy is the practice of mindfulness in communication. By using empathy, you quickly grasp what you hear and discover in yourself the ability to respond sensitively.