The importance of being wrong…
… I have been so many times!
Here’s another of the old blog posts from my website that I am collecting here, probably written around 2014, with a 2021 update at the end. I think this is a very important topic, especially over the past few years when friends and families have found themselves divided over certain opinions, both sides absolutely sure they were right. There are so many layers to the deceptions and lies in pretty much every sphere of knowledge that I put most things into the “I don’t know” bin these days. This stops me getting upset with anyone who has a different view about anything, as I have been wrong so many times, I might just be wrong again. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the blog…
Mark Twain once said, “”It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” and Ram Tzu (Wayne Liquorman) also nailed the sentiment with, “Bring me your dearest held beliefs and with any luck you will leave without them.”
During my life, on many occasions, I’ve been absolutely sure of something, and more often than not, after some time, it was proved to be, at best, flawed, or at worst, a load of rubbish. I would always pride myself on having an open mind, but sometimes I’ve been stuck on something for years that looking back, didn’t really serve me at all.
Now, on one level everything is one, “we are that” and all is unfolding as it should, so there is never anything that doesn’t serve us, but when dealing with healing the body, sometimes we have to “come down” a level or two. Back in 1996/7 when I wrote the first edition of my Pure Activity book, I really thought I knew it all. I had been a hippy, I’d been a yogi, and now I was a personal trainer into diet, exercise and bodybuilding. Surely I must have had all bases covered? Well, there are a few beliefs from back then that have only been tweaked slightly, but from my experiences since, I am open to them being totally blown out of the water – I just haven’t found anything to replace them yet. Some beliefs I held dear though, like vegetarianism for example, I have since seen to be very damaging… at least to me.
Sometimes I have had to be slapped hard by life to get rid of these beliefs. Although at the time I got really ill in 2010 I was eating a bit of chicken now and again, in my heart I still believed that vegetarianism was the best way to go, and I actually felt a pang of guilt every time I ate it. Back in the days when I was in tremendous pain with my joints, I still clung onto that notion and went full-on vegan and then raw vegan, and experimented with that for a year or so. Still in pain, but having lost a lot of muscle while retaining the fat, I finally twigged something was amiss, and came to the idea of Paleo eating… the details of which are a story for another time. This shift in my thinking was perhaps the most dramatic step towards health on my journey. It’s not a cure – for that you have to go and squash some far deeper and subtler brainwashing, but it was a start.
Since then I’ve been known as somebody who bangs on about Paleo a lot, and understandably. I live in Skelmersdale, a community in the north of England where there are a lot of TM meditators, many of whom are still caught up in vegetarianism. Now, it’s a personal choice of course, and we all have the path we are supposed to take in life with all its consequences, but it always broke my heart when somebody was ill, asked me how I had improved my health and then when I told them, replied with, “Eew, I could never eat meat, and I do love bread!” Vegetarianism in spiritual communities is a classic meme, coming from old Hindu ideals, and in my opinion, utterly outdated for modern day realities. I guess nothing had actually hurt enough yet to make them let go. That’s why I’m so grateful for arthritis – it was the kick I needed!
Now, I’m not actually attached to Paleo eating. Okay, it’s the best plan I have found so far, but I’m totally open to the idea that somebody might come along and discover a theory that blows it out of the water and presents something that gives far more benefits. If so, I’ve learned my lessons enough to be totally open to that, and I’ll be the first to start excitedly blogging about it and punishing my friends with my zeal.
There used to be a certain embarrassment when I discovered I was wrong, and some degree of resistance to change, but now there is purely excitement that another discovery is round the corner. I had to let go of so many concepts and take on so many new ones in the three years after I got ill that being wrong has become a kind of hobby. It is ALWAYS the gateway to something better.
If you even suspect you might be wrong about something, just let it go and see what comes up. Life actually gives us what we need at the pace we can handle it. I guarantee that better information will come to you very quickly, and it will always be a step in an evolutionary direction.
A while ago I was wandering round London killing time before a meeting, listening on my headphones to Wayne Dyer speaking about memes. Something struck me very deeply about his description of most of the things we believe being just mind viruses – something we have been told by somebody else, and which we have little or no proof of, yet we cling desperately to them, often to our detriment, and that’s exactly the pattern I can see in myself and so many others. I hope that I’ve loosened that tendency somewhat, because in the end we are just little kids on this planet with only a few years’ experience, yet we seem to get such entrenched views about things that if we really examine closely, fall apart.
So, next time you’re wrong and find you’ve been clinging to a meme, don’t beat yourself up, deny it, or resist it – treat it as a blessing! You’re evolving!
But don’t get too attached to the new the meme that you replace the old meme with – it’s probably crap too!
2021 edit… Funny. I just looked up this post to send to a friend and realised how far I have come since writing this, and how many times I have realised I have been wrong over the past seven years… or at least distilled my ideas further. A year after I wrote this piece, I ditched all the “healthy” plants in the paleo diet and went fully carnivore, and have been for six years now.
There isn’t enough space here to describe the health benefits that come from ditching the last few plants, and the extraordinary reversal of so-called incurable issues that I have seen among scores of my personal clients and those people on my social media including my 100% Carnivore… and Beyond Facebook group, which at the time of writing has over 15,000 members… in fact everything that we are told red meat causes in the first place.
Even when I wrote this article, I never imagined that I would learn that there is absolutely nothing in plant foods of any kind that we actually need… and in fact most of them are rather toxic. I never imagined that I would come to be known as the “UK carnivore guy” doing many online interviews and videos about it. But am I dogmatic? No… as I explain in the video linked below, it’s a basic reset for a leaky gut, safe in the long term if you choose, but by all means add back seasonal plants etc if you like once you are healed. However, many don’t once they experience the benefits… and they thrive, eating nothing but the one food that “science” tells us is the most dangerous.
I can so identify! The chunks of humble pie I noshed through were liberating and thoroughly life changing.
"A mental conflict occurs when beliefs are contradicted by new information. This conflict activates areas of the brain involved in personal identity and emotional response to threats. The brain's alarms go off when a person feels threatened on a deeply personal and emotional level, causing htem to shut down and disregard any rational evidence that contradicts what they previously regarded as "truth".