From "I Do" to the Aha Moment: The Ability to Maintain a Family and Love

Voice transcript

Ah, hello everyone, this is CLEC James Talks, and I am James.

Today should be episode seven of James Talks, so today let us talk about one thing.

Some of you may already know CLEC's guiding purposes, and some may never have heard them. CLEC has four guiding purposes: elevate, health, care, and wealth. Those are our four purposes.

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Elevating yourself may elevate the whole of society and raise the spiritual energy of everyone; guarding health means, of course, guarding the health of our own family, and even guarding the mental and physical health of all humanity. These are all CLEC's purposes.

And of course we... next comes caring for others. Caring for any person, matter, or thing in society, and of course caring for the natural environment as well.

Then comes creating wealth. We put wealth last among all our purposes.

Although CLEC started out teaching investing and money management, in this material society, if I had started CLEC by talking about elevation, spiritual energy, and health, I think there are already plenty of people talking about that, so no one would have listened. Even when we talk about investing our voice is faint, but at least this lamp is lit.

All right, so today we start from CLEC's purposes. As for elevation, I still come back to "love," to that most basic thing called love.

Of course, in talking about love, we do not need to get into universal love; we can start with the home. But love is only the most basic thing. It is like investing: everyone knows, "Oh, you should invest." Some people may know they should invest and still not invest. So it is the same with love: love is like investing, it is just a noun. "Oh, that thing exists"; investing, "Oh, you know that thing exists."

But beyond knowing that it exists, that is only knowing, or being willing: "I am willing to invest, I am willing to love." Yet "I do" will not accomplish the mission by itself. "I am willing to invest" and "I am willing to love my family" are in themselves an "I do," but you still need a way to carry it out and the ability to carry it out.

It is like investing: I am willing to invest, but do you have the ability to invest? That is another matter entirely. So one is willingness and the other is ability.

So besides having love, having love for your family, being willing, which is the most basic thing, you have to go through time's trials and tempering, through experiencing, applying, correcting, applying again, correcting again, until finally you reach the ability of sudden realization.

So the "love" we speak of is a willingness, but bringing that love to the point of execution, conviction, endurance, and faith, arriving finally at faith, is an ability.

So within a family, we know that love is the most basic thing; having love is the most basic thing, and that is "I am willing." And since we are all under the same roof, there has to be love; otherwise being under this roof without love would be terribly painful.

So when two young people first built this family, there was love. But later that love was worn away, and the reason is that we were never taught how to love, or how to communicate, as an ability.

It is just like knowing that investing exists while never having been taught the ability to invest; the same principle.

In our society I often say that our schools teach everything except investing; they teach everything except how husband and wife should get along, how people should get along with one another.

How you get along with your family and how you deal with your boss at the company are not the same thing.

We have love for our family, so I am willing. But you do not need love for your job at a company; you just serve, and that is right. As for your boss, it is enough to be loyal to the company and to its purpose of serving people. You do not need to love the company, you do not need to love the boss, you only need to love your own contribution.

All right, so if that love is not maintained, if the skills, experience, and ability for love in the family are insufficient, then the love in the home is gradually worn down and slowly disappears. And if in the end there is no going back, that is bad.

So everyone should learn the skills of love before the relationship reaches the point of no return.

Love itself is a willingness, "I do, I am willing," but how to maintain it is an ability. So everyone has to experience and learn this ability.

First we hear, we know, we understand. Hearing and knowing: the first thing you hear is that a home must have love; the second thing you must know is that home is not a place for arguing who is right, home is a place for listening to what the other person is saying, a place where their feelings and emotions can be caught and held.

So at home you are not in a place for arguing who is right; you are in a place for listening to your family speak, and a place where you catch and hold their feelings.

Next: what does "family" include? Of course husband and wife, spouses, and parents, and children. Of course that is my own definition; if you extend it to siblings, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts, I have no objection, but being able to sort out what happens under this one roof is already no small thing.

So once you have heard, known, understood, and believed, then facing your family from the bottom of your heart, the first things in your heart should be:

1. "Thank you": thank you for being my child, thank you for being my partner, thank you to my parents for raising us.

2. "I am sorry": that is, I may have said the wrong thing or done the wrong thing to my family, not taken it to heart, not caught and held what they said.

3. "I love you."

These three things have to be practiced from the heart, again and again. So we hear, know, understand, believe; and once you reach belief, you start practicing.

Next comes: "I may be wrong, and they may be right."

Honestly I am often a rather stubborn person, so sometimes when I think I am right I say it very definitively. But in fact the more definite we are about something, the more outrageously wrong we may be. So sometimes I correct myself; and correcting yourself about investing is of course fine, but relationships at home may not be something correction can fix. So as far as possible, do not be too decisive at the start in rejecting the other person's view or their thinking.

Instead you should first tell yourself in your heart: our view may be wrong, and they are right.

And of course if in the end we are right and they are wrong, that is fine; that is their lesson, and they have to wake up to it themselves. So the other person's awakening, realization, and awareness are their own lesson.

So all of the above, "I am sorry," "thank you," "I love you," and "I may be wrong, you may be right," have to be realized from the bottom of your heart, and that is a kind of knowledge, an ability. Besides having love and being willing, what I am telling you all is "how to do it."

"How to do it" is an ability, just as with investing I tell everyone how to do asset allocation and how to do risk control; that is an ability, and it has to be learned. So to maintain love in the family and harmony at home, besides being willing, you have to have this ability.

So you often hear about family disputes, and someone will say, "I love him so much, so why does he treat me like this?" or "I love him so much, and yet we still quarrel all the time." That is being willing without having the ability.

So everything we have described above is a kind of "technique." Whether it is telling yourself from the heart "thank you, I am sorry, I love you," or "I may be wrong, you may be right," these are all techniques, that is, tools.

And going from hearing, knowing, understanding, believing, executing, holding conviction, enduring: these are all techniques.

Only on reaching "faith" is it truly complete. Just as with our investing: only when you reach faith, faith in the CLEC investing philosophy, is your whole approach to investing complete.

So it is the same principle: everything I described earlier, when you put it into practice, is a skill, a technique, and also a tool. After hearing it you go and use it, and each time you use it you feel where it needs correcting. Take a knife, for example: how you cut, how you cut across the grain of the meat, how to cut so the meat is tender and easy to slice; and sometimes the knife needs sharpening. So a tool is something you have to use, and by using it gradually you gradually become familiar with it.

But when a tool is to be handled with ease, when you make it as natural as breathing, then in the end, out of all this practice, something called an Aha moment arises; in English it is called an Aha moment.

That is, "Ah! I finally understand!" But it cannot be explained; that Aha moment is the crucial moment, that click, that very click! All at once it comes clear to you, click!

It is like investing: after you have listened to our CLEC billion-dollar investing lecture, you go "Ah!" and it comes clear, you have been struck by lightning; that is arriving at a kind of astonishment, and then all your tools can be used freely. It is that feeling that is the real understanding, really possessing this ability to get along with people.

With any body of knowledge, when you finally reach that astonishment of an Aha moment, you come to appreciate its subtlety.

Take investing: at the beginning, over my past 40 years, I did everything, speculating in individual stocks, options, short selling, day trading too. But in the end we moved to long-term index investing in stocks, then to borrowing to invest, then to borrowing to live on, and finally to buy, borrow, die, and all at once I had that "Ah!" moment.

In 20... honestly it is rather embarrassing to say, it was only in 2018 that I found this Aha moment, that is, I started doing stock-backed borrowing, and finally arrived at the last Aha moment of investing: the moment of awakening, awareness, and sudden realization.

So with family relationships, you have to reach an Aha moment too. So I hope that today's CLEC talk, James Talks, is like the billion-dollar investing lecture, and I hope you are struck by lightning and have that feeling of "Ah! I finally understand!", that very, very, very feeling.

So hearing, knowing, understanding, believing, executing, holding conviction, enduring: these are all techniques, all a kind of insight, seeing the essence.

But sudden realization is a sudden understanding: what you thought you understood before was in fact not understanding, and only when the Aha moment comes, after awakening and awareness, does your whole way of thinking change forever.

So I hope today's episode lets everyone reach an Aha moment about love, family relationships, and how to get along with people, that click. There is an old saying of ours, "a thousand years of darkness in a room, one lamp and it is bright," so I hope today's James Talks brings to your family and your relationships a sense of "Ah! One lamp and it is bright," letting you see this whole universe clearly.

It is like "a hundred years of confusion, one thought and you awaken": I hope that just a little of this clicks, that at the crucial moment it clicks, ah! It comes clear! That feeling.

So in summary: having love is a willingness, "I am willing" to love, but you still need life's seasoning and the ability to communicate, you need ability. "One thing is that I am willing, but being willing you still cannot do it," and that means cultivating that ability. "I am willing" and "do I have this ability" are two different things. Finally, take that "I am willing" and that "I have this ability" and keep executing, training, practicing; if you do not get it right once, never mind, practice again, until you have an Aha moment, and then in that instant it is carved into your bones, you reach the point of faith, and that is success, success.

Before you have communication skills, you may still feel at a loss listening to this now, not knowing where to start. At first you cannot even say "thank you" or "I love you" to your spouse or family, and cannot even get out an "I am sorry."

So never mind, start from the most basic, most basic, safest way of communicating:

To begin with, "listen, do not interrupt." Just "listen," do not interrupt. So when the other person is speaking you have to tell yourself, "do not interrupt, do not interrupt," yes, let them finish, keep listening patiently to what they say. This is the safest way to communicate.

If you absolutely must say something, then say, "right," "okay," "no problem," "let us do it that way," "I agree."

Whether you agree inside is secondary; but your expression should be like this, so that the other person feels caught and held.

Afterwards we slowly go through the chemical reaction... and resolve the matter satisfactorily.

If you contradict them at the start, or interrupt at the start, then there is no chance of any chemical reaction at all afterwards, only physical collision.

So first learn "listen, do not interrupt."

Then, besides listening, the second level is: "catching and holding the other person's feelings and emotions."

Very often, when someone talks to you, they are not coming for a solution. Especially a spouse or a child: when they run into a problem and have emotions and come to tell you about it, it is not because they do not know what to do, but because they need a container to hold their present emotions and grievance.

If at this point you immediately leap in as "life coach" and start directing the game, start analyzing who is right and who is wrong, start delivering great principles, then you have completely missed that chance to catch and hold them.

You only need to say to them:

"Really? That must have been very upsetting at the time."

"Wow, that really does sound infuriating."

"That was hard on you; it is a good thing you handled it."

You see, just those few simple sentences: you made no concession on anything material and changed no fact, and yet the other person's feelings were caught and their emotions were seen. Once a person's emotions have been caught and held, that defensive line of reasoning and that sense of opposition come down.

So in family relationships, catching emotions is always more important than solving problems.

Those of us who do investing and money management insist on logic, on data, on rationality, right? Asset allocation has to be calculated precisely, risk control has to be calculated tightly. But you must never carry that "extremely rational" logic of investing home unchanged.

What matters at home is not efficiency; what matters at home is empathy.

If you face your family with extremely rational logic, you win the argument and lose the relationship; you win every debate and end up pushing the people who love you most further and further away. That is not the wealth we want. The "wealth" CLEC speaks of is not only wealth of assets in your pocket; wealth of spirit and wholeness in family relationships, that is real wealth.

So everyone really should remember: from that willingness of "I do," to practicing the communication "techniques" of listening, not interrupting, and catching emotions, until at some instant you suddenly awaken.

You suddenly see the other person's fragility, see your own stubbornness, and that moment arrives, an Aha moment!

In an instant you light that lamp. "A thousand years of darkness in a room, one lamp and it is bright." From then on, facing your family, facing your spouse, facing your children, your state of mind is completely different. You will no longer be dragged along by pointless quarrels, and you will be able to give your family the firmest support and strength at any time.

That is what we wanted to share in episode seven of CLEC James Talks today.

I hope this episode, like our "billion-dollar investing lecture," gives you a little inspiration, and brings you that crucial click.

All right, that is where we will stop today's talk. Thank you all, and see you next episode!