Qualities

It’s not dependent on education, age, or intelligence.

It’s not to be compared, as in, this person is more of a profound learner than that person.

Rather, profound learning is a process of seeking depth, and for a profound learner that process can continue over the rest of their lives.

It may start when camping and seeing the indescribable beauty of a mountain range or the vastness of a starlit night. It may start while reading a book in high school. It may start when experiencing the miracle of birth or the sacredness of hospice. As one’s existing truths are made insufficient or incomplete or just not true anymore, as the wonders of science, or nature, or relationship, or the divine are revealed just enough to humble us, the process of looking even deeper begins. It continues until we presume to think we have discovered it all, that we have mastered it, and our beliefs become resting places instead of works-in-progress. That lasts until something punches a hole in them, or remolds them. Then the process starts over, building a deep well of understanding, knowledge tested and retested and elaborated and adapted, in an ongoing pilgrimage toward an end that can never be found, only sought.

The irony of this journey-with-no-conclusion is that one doesn’t have to travel anywhere to achieve it. It is only available in the present moment. It can be accessed through practices like study, questioning, exploring, and trying.

It is true that others might define the profound learner differently, as someone Einsteinian or Da Vinci-esque or Gandhi-istic, but here we are just simply calling the profound learner someone who pursues deeper knowledge over time.

We are all babes in the woods.

Here we start to think about the qualities of profound learners.