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Vanity because of 'great' learning
It's easy to identify this type of pomposity if it confronts us directly. Yet its subconscious, indirect influence is much harder to detect as it considerably reduces our enthusiasm to access higher regions.
Unlimited Horizons
Direct Everyone who uses formal knowledge to impress others totally misunderstands the real function of knowledge.
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Knowledge we actively use to expand our range of experience quickly becomes a natural part of our life. The more we employ it to evaluate and change our attitudes and activities, the faster it transforms into genuine insight that soon ceases to be new or special and usually also does not give cause for vanity or arrogance.
Without this natural integration knowledge remains foreign and separate to us. Persons thirsting for high social status tend to display this formal, dead knowledge with vanity and in arrogant disdain for the 'less learned'. Convinced of their 'superiority' they define 'knowledge' as the stiff data they accumulated and with this totally block their own ability to comprehend it.
Their fellow people easily recognize this vanity for what it really is - a flaw of personality, but unfortunately still get negatively influenced in a subconscious way:
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Indirect Though we see through the game of the 'learned ones', we subconsciously equate 'knowledge' with the stagnancy and boredom these people emanate.
We associate 'learning' with their pathetic and arrogant behavior and do not want similar attitudes to breed within us.
