WHAT WE DO KNOW BECOMES OBSOLETE

Besides the cycles of dissatisfaction that our current set of limitations locks us into (what we know blocks what we haven't learned yet), there is an even more practical reason for learning how to adapt. All of us are forced to interact with a constantly changing physical environment to fulfill our needs and achieve our goals. The way we interact with the environment, what choices we perceive in relationship to what is actually available from the environment's perspective, and what we do in relationship to what we perceive are all a function of what we have learned. Now, if you will recall, everything that constitutes the physical environment is in constant motion. Anything that is in motion (which includes everything made of atoms and molecules) is also changing over time. So change is an automatic function of the physical environment.

However, the mental environment is composed of positively or negatively charged energy that carries information about our experiences, what we have learned that forms into organizational patterns that we call beliefs and concepts about the nature of the physical environment. Energy is not made of atoms and molecules and therefore does not change over time. In fact, energy exists in a nonphysical dimension outside of time as we perceive it with our senses. Electrical energy or chemically produced electrical energy can be stored just the same as in a battery and the information it carries is stored with it. That is, time has no effect on the quality of this energy (the degree of the positive or negative charge) and the ways in which it affects our perception of environmental information and how it acts as a force on our behavior.

Changing our mental environment to correspond with the constant external changes going on in the physical environment is not automatic.

The information stored in our mental environment about the nature of the physical environment can remain unchanged for years or a lifetime, for that matter, regardless of how outdated, useless, or even harmful it may be. And furthermore this outdated knowledge will continue to act as a force on our behavior, causing us to interact with the environment in completely inappropriate ways relative to the conditions. So even if we are experiencing satisfaction in certain areas of our lives, we cannot take it for granted that the conditions that we have learned to interact with will stay as we know them to exist.

The problem is that the conditions will change and we won't necessarily recognize these changes even if we start to experience some degree of dissatisfaction, unless we are constantly vigilant that even though we have learned something that works, it can still become obsolete.