(Way# 49) ORGANIZING YOUR MIND: 48 Ways with Rabbi Aaron Dovid Poston

[Music] hey good day everybody welcome back to another episode of beyond the seven live from jerusalem with rabbi aaron david poston uh who's been teaching us the the wonderful series the 48 ways to wisdom and today we're in the bonus uh uh that the roshiva who wrote the course uh did we're in part 49. now i loved last week's lesson was pretty good on making the teacher wise found a lot there that we all could use to benefit and i always try to encourage noah hides to approach the rabbis with the utmost of uh uh care and concern and respect and dignity and uh make sure they're asking wonderful questions and i think he reiterated reiterated that last week and i so appreciate rabbi poston staying up late in jerusalem uh to share the light of torah with us so let's just jump right in and see how the rabbi is doing today rabbi poston you're live on the air i'm going to turn it over to you we're at part 49 today shavuot everyone and i'm glad to be back dan and good to see you i know you're working so hard outside of whatever you're doing here on the noah world center but uh what you're doing for the for the public vote as we say um so i'm glad to be back so we're on number 49 of the 48 ways you have to ask yourself what are we doing with 49 and i always just imagined and i understood the roshiva we spoke about the 49th waves it's called review you know he never let he never let you end anywhere you know you always have to work harder and continue somewhere however in his uh recordings actually there are 50 recordings and he gave another two classes and he based it on the idea that in the text even though we have in the the actual text itself of the mishnah there are only 48 ways right there's numbered 1 through 48 however there are some discrepancies i kind of alluded to that in the past a week or two after mentioning that we have two more classes i'll just give you an example so like awe and fear they you know you really think of them as the same and in certain um certain copies they are together and in certain uh manuscripts they're they're separate like for example he gave over um let's say humility um we call it nava and not taking credit which are also very similar and he separated them for example number seven and number 29. so in certain manuscripts certain texts these ideas were separate and given over you know 48 ways uh but he wanted to cover everything you know he wanted to cover all the different texts and possible uh what do you call you know combination scenarios so he ended up giving over 50 in the book that's over my left shoulder and i feel that this is the proper way to go even though i would have loved a little vacation right and making assume a a party for the completion of the 48 ways well looks like we just have to wait another week or two so that's the way it is so just just to understand that when it comes to the oral torah which is very different than the written torah right the written torah if you have one letter missing the whole thing is no good right it's it's called pursue and you have to rewrite it or fix it or put it away and it cannot be used uh when it comes to the written torah it's in concrete right it's concretized there's no mistakes but when it comes to the oral torah a lot of it is as we say it's oral and when someone's copying it down they're not as let's say as scrupulous they obviously should be and need to be but mistakes do creep in now those mistakes are not we'll call trad tragic mistakes right thank god erroneous errors god promised us that the oral torah will always remain in your mouths okay so this is like another example how the oral torah remains right the main principles are always going to be given over whether there's a small discrepancy of a word here or there a number system is not the end of the world so keep that in mind um for those who are interested in understanding why we have 50 in a uh in a mishna the mission actually says 48 it depends which text you read there's always going to be 48. his book is the 40 ways to wisdom based on that mishna that we discussed in chapter 6 mishna 6. so i think that's a very um important point before we get started with today so number 49 is not saying hebrews now you can translate that many different ways right means to have intent to well let's leave it at that for now uh what you hear however also means what you learn so he translates it like this his main idea is to organize your mind and we're going to go deep into this idea i saw a few other translations for this one is pondering what you've learned now pondering what you learned it really fits in with review the concept of review very well another idea is focus right kavanagh to focus on what you heard i would say that's probably the most literal translation of me but what does it mean to focus in on what you learn he's going to use the concept of organizing uh your mind and he'll basically he's basically telling you that let's say he brings an example let's say you have a very successful business and you have all kinds of receipts and papers and whatnot let's say you're not organized right and a very important um client comes and he says i want to order what i ordered last time i mean come on so you're going to start guessing what you ordered you're going to say why don't you send me your last slip it's not very professional right you want to be successful you should at least know where that receipt can be found quite quickly as quick as possible in order to fill the order and keep the customer happy right if you want to look professionally you say okay no worries we'll get around to it we'll give you exactly what you ordered last time and who knows whether it's five minutes or five weeks or five months until you find that that last paper now it could be even on your computer i mean people have to constantly well you know fix their folders on the computer organize in a way where you could find things uh one of the ideas of a tamil we always think atomic on the sage means that he has all that information stored it's it may be true and there are people with uh photographic memory and i mean i met these people i mean let alone some of the gedolin you know rabavady yosef was known to have a photographic memory of moshe feinstein but what about us what about us who who lack that that ability right we might come close to remembering certain things that are you know we're enthusiastic about that we love that that touched our hearts search for divine inspiration though yeah so i heard this is the definition today you know because we're not on the same level and it's not necessarily storing all that information but knowing how to access it knowing which file it's under and i think this this fits in very well with organizing your mind um i want to go into my own experience with rav north weinberg when i first came i know one of the first projects and i'm imagining it actually was i was muslim in yeshiva probably less than two months and we had um i came in l which is uh like a month before rosh hashanah and towards the uh the end of ello i'm sorry towards the end of tishrei which is the following month we had um what we celebrate as simchat torah and what they did at the yeshiva torah was they made an auction in other words for the different kibudin for the different honors of taking out a torah or reading the torah at a certain point in other words it's a big celebration and there's certain honors they're given so they auction off the different aliot the different readings of the torah the different other honor honoree things that are given out and basically what you have committed yourself is to memorizing certain things whether it was the six constant mitzvahs the the the 48 ways the 613 commandments or um teaching a certain amount of of students you had a whole year it was 365 days or whatever 354 days according to the jewish year you had a year to finish off the project whatever you committed yourself to do how many how many pages of the talmud you would learn or how many mishnahs you would learn or how many chapters in the mishnah torah the rambam or whatever it was it was many many options to choose from and i remember i raised my hand and i said okay i'm going to commit myself to learning or let's say memorizing it was not just learning but was memorizing uh the 613 commandments it was probably the biggest commitment i well i had a year to do it but it felt like the biggest commitment i ever made in my life it probably wasn't but at the time it certainly felt felt so i want to talk about that because we're going to talk about how to organize things in other words what is the purpose what is the need so i think when i think of that i think of going back to numbers chapter 15 verses 38 through 40 which we we say three and we say twice a day minimally this is the third paragraph of the shema which verse again rabbi number 15 15 verse 38 through 40. it's really it's really verse 39 but let's read the all three verses 38 says uh speak to the children of israel and you shall say to them that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and they shall affix a thread of sky blue wool on the fringe of each corner this shall be fringes for you and when you see it you will remember all the commandments of the lord to perform them and you shall not wander after your hearts and after your eyes after which you are going astray so that you shall remember and perform all my commandments and you shall be holy to your god now look i mean for those who are not familiar with these verses these are these are central right these are it's part of the shema which i'm also going to talk about when we talk about the shema we're talking about something that is so essential right we say it several times a day and it's something that we imagine ourselves saying if god forbid on our on our deathbed right we imagine ourselves if we're falling out of a plane or god forbid a plane is in a uh tailwind and there's uh you know the the pilot comes on and says you know prepare for a crash landing right or you're in a parachute whether i don't know whether you you believe the parachute is going to open or not i think you would still say this at that time it's it's so central that god is one so how many things do we do in judaism that remind us that god is one right so you have the to fill in which has the paragraphs in it you have the mezuzah which has the paragraph in it there's so many mitzvahs that point towards the idea that to believe in god so you have so many things going through your mind all the time and believe it or not you have to hyper focus you have to basically come up with some concept that's a heading a a broad heading and then there's so many subcategories and so many uh offshoots and races so here you have in these verses when you see it you will remember all the commands so the roshi used to i mean i would say like in a jest in a little joking fashion but he was totally serious and anybody knows his voice i mean he was he was just heavy you know whatever he said was heavy so he says what do you think the tour is telling you you're going to look at these things and you're going to remember it doesn't work like that you have to first learn it and you have to memorize it and only then when you see them and look at them it'll you'll remember you it's you can't just expect to look at these strings with the blue without the blue or the five knots with the a strings whatever all these things obviously represent that ultimately bring you to the consciousness of this realization that there is a god and he's almighty and he loves you and he's you know in a relationship with you all these things are very important okay and there's details so have to how do you remember all these details so this is the idea of what calls i don't really know how to translate it well um it means signs so one of the one of the lessons we were taught when you're learning a piece of gemara on your gemara each page write the one two three or four possible subject matters um that really moved you that the the whole daft that the page is discussing try to narrow it down into one so each page when you come across let's say you know saint hendra nunchet on page sanhedrin what is it talking about right it's so there are obviously um there's mnemonics we're always using mnemonics right even the the um we call reishi tavos there's just so many devices and we're going to talk about these we're going to talk about different devices you can use in order to remember okay but the first thing i think is committing yourself to working hard in order to get it into your system try to ask as many questions try to understand this and just to work as as hard as possible to begin with but know the goal is to um digest we're talking about kenyan right the whole idea of these are well it's got to be filed properly yeah a quiet tour so if you don't file them properly you won't be able to access them and these are in life missions uh you don't want to have just thoughts bouncing around like a ball right in your brain yeah and later on in verse 40 it says right what's the point so that you shall remember and perform all my commandments again so there's twice remembering so this is a very important point um and i thought that was okay so now i just wanted to bring another side point because i always had and i still do um a desk that's extremely messy now when i worked at 8 i learned for 10 years in the cola in asia torah but i also worked i had a small office and i dealt with thousands of students at a time we dealt with trips coming abroad from abroad from all over the world hashem we had computers um but we didn't have and we basically even the computers that we have were constantly updated and we had people who worked in the back in in the offices who i guess called programmers right who helped manipulate develop the programs according to our needs according to organizers needs and that was very um helpful but we had let's say like 18 classes going on at the same time i had to organize 18 different teachers uh and have the keys in the right place we had to have you know markers or whatever they request was overhead projectors uh movies whatever it was all the different logistics and um even though the computer system seemed to work well but sometimes it was down i always had a hard copy i always double checked the hard copies after i put in the computer i printed them off i had them all because sometimes you can't always see or rely on what the computer did to show you there were conflicts right that was the whole idea of this program to to show conflicts and if the teacher let's say is in one part of the jewish quarter and he had to be in the other part of the jewish quarter in zero minutes it wouldn't work so we'd have to readjust the schedule anyway um again the whole idea is how can you organize what are the best ways to organize in your own um no just just consider shouldn't we be having as i'm sure people are told through their lives to have a one year plan a five year plan like what do you want out of life you're about to go to college what do you want to do when you finish college right and and then you're uh about to take a job is there any a sense of advantage trajectory you need to reject trajectory do you see yourself in a different position in how many years right is that going to affect your family what about your family life you have one child two child is the house you're living in big enough are you close enough to your in-laws are far from your in-laws i mean how close do you want to be to your to your siblings right all these all these small details are going to be part of hopefully your your long-range plans but you have to have them organizing your time i remember in yeshiva was so huge i don't know if they do this another issue is time management time management was key in asia torah you know if you're going to learn 15 minutes let's say you see the sharing and then you're going to go to your next subject and how much time you're going to spend on it and where do you want to be in a year from now is that going to help you finish you know reach your goal these are all very important things i don't think i could be very wrong i don't think most yeshivas deal with those issues of time management and i think it does have unfortunate repercussions right there give you a curriculum instead yeah yeah um i'm just looking through my notes so we start talking about simone a little bit so i actually left on the other side of the room i don't know if i need to get it but there's a certain uh hummish written by rabari kaplan and what he does he he labels each paragraph now each paragraph in hebrew not in english i mean he he says in english but i'm talking about the way that the homish is broken into hebrew paragraphs so we had a fantastic teacher at asia torah i don't know why i didn't write his name down but i forget it right now it'll come to me later and he taught some money was so important you know whether you're learning the rambam or whether you're learning hamish even the arab the shocking arab the book of jewish law is all broken down into paragraphs with headings right again how to access that information so you learned all of hilka shabbas all the laws of shabbos but what about arab shabbos what about multichavis what are before shah after shamans what about you know the laws of cooking the laws of border how to dress on shabbos i mean when people come to you and ask you questions how are you going how are you going to answer them of course you know you're going to reach deep down and then down into your own gut and your own brain and your own psycho to figure out but you know what it's always good to have the access know where to find the answers so it's no mistake it's no mistake that the money that's we call them in the shop or label so this hamish is very good the rabbi arya kaplan hamish i don't know what it's called okay i'm gonna go get it okay hold on i'm gonna do it guys so this is just for an example uh yeah of organization uh and uh yeah i think a lot of what the rabbis teach cyclically with the ear is is to help us understand how to be more orderly it's amazing because even the names of the parshiots like you just said i mean just going through whether it's you know braces even knowing them it's knowing torah it's knowing how to access you know when did abraham do what he did you know at this point in time of his life so you'll know what parsha it's in right so this hamish is okay i i believe it's still in print um it's it's called the living torah okay that's what it's called now one of the main ideas the roshi of express is so you're going to learn a book where even after you finish the book there's a very important thing called drum roll please the table of contents it's like you want to know where things are just go to the table of content and that's what he does he lists you know each paragraph what the theme of the paragraph is okay it's just beautiful i mean i don't have to explain express how beautiful something like this would be the whole hamish and he i think he yes he does it also for the rest of the night at least for the the the prophets um i think he also does soothing the writings but this is um so you understand the the 613 misses how important it would be to learn and you could use the rambam um there's other books that asiator put out a book i actually have that here i'm looking for it on my shelf i'd have to get up and access it they're probably not in print anymore um there it is let me just get it i'm going to go get it okay one second yeah just becoming an organized person can uh yeah develops your growth for sure okay this was put out by asia torah like a hundred years ago i shouldn't say hundred it was um 1983 okay the last century 100 so what does it have it's amazing because each it just tells you which mitzvah is which now according to whom according to the yad khazaka according to the rambam according to the safer mitzvahs and then according to the so you have three different um who put together a list of the 613 mitzvahs they're a little bit different because some go according to the order from genesis all the way to the end of the deuteronomy and in exact order hal appears in the torah uh the rambam did not do it like that the rom bomb he put it in yes so that's a whole nother thing we have to talk about actually yeah so and that's another idea we're going to talk about like different methods okay i think i covered everything on my first oh so i just wanted to mention something that i a little trick that i did when i was learning talmud in the beginning uh so a lot of it is in aramaic i mean you have the mishnah which is mainly a biblical hebrew ancient hebrew let's say ancient hebrew hebrew you know two thousand years ago it's not certainly not modern hebrew and then you have the gemara which is a big mix of a lot of aramaic with quotes of mishnah or breit which is using mishnayik hebrew now that's not easy hebrew so this certain um edition called the rubinstein edition actually had the shroken arach and the rambam on whatever phrases were being highlighted in the gemara he would this um printer would take and i'll tell you the truth i mean it's like cheating right for a yeshiva guy it's like cheating because the shokanara and then rambam was in like i'm going to call it modern hebrew you know 500 years a thousand years ago is much more modern than the mishnayik and the gemara hebrew or even the ironman but it would be like a tool for me to first of all try to understand the words i didn't know because you can get them from the context of the rambam right but also it would the truth is every gamer does this they actually have a little key very small you need a magnifying glass sometimes uh when wherever the gamora is going to be quoted in the shroken rf or in the um in the in the rambam it's a little key it tells you where which means you have to get up and get another book but the rubenstein edition had it at the bottom already in i don't know if they still are in print but it was invaluable for me as a parallel power parallel book yeah that's a beginner but to see and note take note where where it is appearing in the rambam or in the shogunara because later you will have to go to that so these are all um good ideas in other words we're talking about organizing in your mind right so this is all so the roshiva says like this the human brain can be likened to an extremely sophisticated office could you talk about having an office and if you're not organized what are you going to do well the brain has constantly new information flowing through it so you've learned so many important lessons about living life so you're talking about fostering relationships building a marriage deepening your relationships with god maintaining business ethics coping with disappointments but without a systematic way to organize these ideas they quickly become a massive unmanageable ideas how are you going to access this information in the future without some type of structure so he's going to go through so many broke hashem so many ideas but he wants to drill it into you first right you have to create a mental filing cabinet so that when you hear a new piece of wisdom you can automatically place it into the correct file making it accessible for future use now i think this is wow i underline this the more organized your wisdom is right what do we say wisdom is power right wisdom is power right so guess what the more power you have the more power you have to access ability to function yeah yeah and use it to help you navigate your way through life right now if you don't under if you don't organize your wisdom you have this inability to find and use the insights that you've accumulated and it will actually have hard time it will discourage you and depress you right and i mean today we have google okay so you want to find something and you can't it's but you know what what you put in is what you're going to get out if you put in the wrong word you know what i guess i don't know what they're called the choices you're looking for well whatever search engine you're using but if you don't put the right words in you're not going to get out you're going to spend a lot of time and time is money right so time is valuable and you never get it back so having some files in your brain that you basically know are there but you you're having a hard time accessing them nevertheless the fact that you put them in a file you'll eventually find it bezrat hashem right with hashem's help davening you have to dive in you have to pray for torah right but you have to do the effort if you don't make the effort it doesn't matter how long you're going to doubt them for right it doesn't matter how much you pray okay so you have to make all these efforts and putting them into categories filing filing them so going through whatever pages going back to the beginning and looking at the table of contacts reviewing reviewing what you've learned knowing whether where they're located but putting little sim money for yourself at the top of each page or i mean i use i don't even show you the color coding i use it's unbelievable but anyway so what about this idea of you you become discouraged and depressed and you'll even dampen your desire to learn and grow what are you going to say you're going to say like this i've forgotten so many fantastic ideas in the past what's the point of trying to learn new ones right i'll probably just forget those as well well guess what feel the pain of a chaotic fragmented mind in order to motivate yourself to organize your ideas right when you pain when you're pained over the fact that you know that you know it and you can't access it and hopefully that will serve in the future to motivate yourself to to file things better now a key to organizing this wisdom is to develop a framework a framework miss garrett right some kind of framework that doesn't turn your mind into a bureaucracy right there's other there's a lot of ways here's examples right use what we call a logical flow right you look a piece of gemara you learned the sugiya say it we so-called shock levitaria the give and take say it over you know that these rabbis are wise and they went through you know one idea they went a little bit on a tangent then they came back to the main idea anybody that's you know learned a little piece of wisdom for the rabbis understand this idea well go through it repeat it see see if there's some logic did it go chew it up and digest it sure why did it go in this seemingly irrelevant tangent and then you'll find when after you review it there actually was a good reason and it was accessing another file right another important file that is put away for a rainy day let's say but you need to know it yeah um here he just says when you pick up a book first read through the table of contents and get a sense of the overall structure try to see if there's structure right take a few minutes to imagine what will be discussed in each chapter and how the chapters all connect to form one whole right and the torah itself has quite a number of table of contents right the classical system is how the 613 missiles are organized you have the ram bombs nishinoto for example and they organize the he organizes them into 14 volumes with subsets of 83 sections and this happens to be one of the greatest ways to memorize the entire oral torah and believe me there are so many young men sitting in asia torah memorizing the rambam the rambam is available in most yeshivas i won't deny that but to sit and learn the rambam from cover to cover right the 14 volumes there's not a lot of yeshiva's doing that nature torah had always pushed for that what's the value in memorizing the 613 commandments mitzvahs it gives you 613 file folders in which to place all new wisdom i'll tell you you know if someone would ask me what was the greatest advantage to learning or memorizing the 6 13 commandments so even though i did learn them in depth and memorize them i'm going to say superficially meaning at one time i could actually repeat them in order all 613 i don't know if i could do that today but what i can do is access the files somebody could tell me and people do oh yeah this is a mitzvah from the torah and i would say i don't think so i know them all and that ain't one of them you know maybe it's a rabbinic maybe it's a minhog maybe it's in kabbalah but it's not one of the 613 misses or vice versa to tell me it's it's only rabbinic only rabbinic are you kidding me it's actually in the torah okay because one of the commandments is not to add or subtract so you have to know which is from the torah which is not so knowing all 613 it's quite a valuable lesson um here he mentions this idea i mentioned by the shema by the fill in by the mezuzah he says listen if you learn one new concept that brings to life the concept of ye knowing that god is one you can file it under a particular mitzvah one of the myths is to know that god is one right or if you discover a new insight into helping people less fortunate you then you file that under charity right giving uh giving sadaka so you know where to file these things when you come across them here's an idea as we already spoke about some people give each section of the torah name i mean simon doesn't mean name it's more like a sign but okay to summarize its essence so you make your own name something that you can relate to um and then you memorize the names of the chapters in the talmud just knowing the chapters when you're right a certain concept is discussed in that chapter so you're already way ahead of the ball so you can you ever come across that idea you already know it's in chapter two of bob marcia right or whatever it is beautiful i heard a description of uh psalms in the last week and how they're broken down how uh david uh went through what he went through and uh yeah it just it kind of put it into chunks like that there are so many you know i'd say editions of psalms that have tables of contents that discuss the themes of each of the different um 150 chapters okay okay one of the key methods of organizing your wisdom is to extract the fundamental principle underlying a topic this is much easier to memorize than a bunch of details right so once you hear that topic if you remember if you really don't delve deeply into that subject matter and within your own mind you organize it as best you can so at least reviewing the topic you know periodically and going into the details is a great way to remember them later on but you just always try to get the underlying fundamental especially this this series you've been teaching us uh these 48 ways the wisdom i encourage everybody to go back check each and every one of these uh classes out again to just find that underlying uh fundamental even though it's right there at the beginning of the chapter when you when you give the title um yeah try to find that in in the lesson and boom it'll it'll stick with you a lot better i'll get i'll give you an example toast those themselves tosos is a a group of many rabbis from france germany england right after rashi and um so you talked about like almost a thousand years ago a little short of a thousand years ago and what he does is he he they uh find what you would almost say is contradictions within the oral law or uh problems right when you have like one idea how does that jive with the entire you know voluminous overall torah if you have this principle doesn't it seem to contradict that and then it's it's always resolving it's always trying to uh explain this in a different way that that's why it's it's not a problem so if you ever notice two great rabbi sitting and talking he'll just say that ptosis is over there that resolves the problem or right just to know where the you know again we're talking about organizing your mind to delve deeply into things and categorizing things and putting them into files and that's exactly what toasters does all he has to do is mention one principle or one page or one word one word from a a a page out of seven thousand pages and you sh the person who's having this discussion already knows the topic being discussed and understands how that one word relates to a topic that resolves the whole issue this is amazing and okay now there's other methods uh flash cards we used a lot of flash cards when trying to memorize anything 6 13 commandments i certainly use flash cards i use flash cards just even for the aleph bit just to remember what we call the alphabet in hebrew the alphabet the aleph bin these are very good ideas and have a friend test you right so whenever you come across a new piece of information write it on a card this system is easy to compute computerized you can even set up a hyperlinked network of information the main thing is to pick up a system whatever works for you to build your own wisdom database around it try this method in whatever subject you learn it's worth the investment because building a system will upgrade your learning for the rest of your life remember you're constantly picking up new information you're spending time and money to acquire knowledge if it's worth learning then it's certainly worth keeping and using so here's an idea he brings down and before beginning any important project open a new file folder for to store information whether it's gonna be money management or jewish wisdom or parenting be diligent in organizing information when you come across a good article or take notes on an insightful class don't just stuff it in a drawer somewhere for example if you're starting a family gather organize any wisdom you would have to acquire in order to raise children because learning on the job may be too late at least skim through in the beginning know it's important information know where to access it the most important thing is taking a few minutes to organize your laptop or your your computer and putting as you go through i do it a lot i send myself um articles and i put something in the subject i send it by email to myself and i put something in the subject matter that um like a key that i'll remember because sometimes you can't find that same article but guess what many times i've searched my own i've searched my own emails couldn't find it and but i at least remembered what i used then to search for the article and it comes up but that's the idea okay now we're going to get into memory devices right now we know the memorization is a tremendously powerful way to truly own an idea the whole idea is kenyan attorney making an acquisition it puts the concept or information into your pocket making it immediately accessible at your mental fingertips there's several ways to memorize an idea one to repeat it over and over again or right memorizing by rote or as we discussed already unraveling the logical flow now to discern discerning logical flow is usually more effective for long-term retention take for example a medical student who needs to memorize names of all the bones in the human body so there's different ways you can learn it alphabetically so he should memorize it alphabetically but that is not the flow the flow would be you know from head to toe or right we were growing up i mean i wish i remembered it but uh the one bones connected to the other bone there you go right all the way up to the hip okay after that you get lost but it's easy enough from the toe to the hip right and um so there's you see there's two ways you can memorize them which may be because they have what do they call greek names or latin names they're not so easy to remember i mean obviously if you if you're starting to be a men a medical student you you have to remember them right you would look silly if you said oh yeah it's the funny bone no the prescriptions they have to write the names of some of those things yeah maybe that's why they scribble they learn to scribble right maybe maybe that makes sense okay so you you can you can use the logical way or the um you know um what do you call it the alphabetical way so another way is called mnemonic devices right try to extract the essence of an idea summarize it in a catch phrase that can be easily memorized this way rather than struggling to recall the information from scratch you'll be able to retrieve the entire idea under your catchphrase right here's some other effective memory techniques assign a one or two word description to each idea two take the first letter of each concept and make a funny acronym out of the letters it works number three create an imaginary scene or story in which the key concepts all appear together now the more outrageous the the scene the easier it is to recall number four put the ideas into a song the tune will enable you to remember a series of words now i mentioned before when when you see people learning talmud and gemara right so what happens is a lot of times they will put into a sing song this is how right they'll remember it okay that's one way that we have let's say i don't know developed this way of of memorization another way um is the um it's unbelievable the way the gamora works is this rabbi said in the name of that rabbi who was walking with that rabbi at the time why do you need to know all that well there's a lot of reasons one of this is the integrity and you're always there's always be consistency and what rabbi said what that if we find in the talmud this rabbi said this and the same rabbi said the opposite somewhere else we have a problem right there has to be an integrity and a consistency but more than that how often how it's like this rap i was arguing with that that rabbi this rabbi was walking on the way with this rabbi and then there are stories where they're crossing a river they're crossing a bridge they're sitting in front of these rabbis there's always a story behind every single rabbi no matter what he says throughout the entire timeline and that's a great way to remember which i think that they named they knew and they instilled that into into the story into this beautiful yeah people typically have a big mental block to memorizing anything but once you get going it can become fun and easy to begin he suggests learning the names of the 48 waves by heart and review them as you walk down the street okay now this is i'm gonna say this is the power of the mind when you say to somebody don't forget this i don't think that's i don't think that's useful if you say please remember this i think it's much more useful so he claims that we have two buttons in our head one is the remember button one is the forget button i mean just think about if i tell you don't forget so you hear the word forget you hear it and i'm not saying that caused you to forget but it's likely to right but if i tell you to remember there's a good chance that that will you'll remember to remember because i told you to remember right it's a good word to remember okay anyway so he says evaluate and eliminate if knowledge is power then forgetting is the ultimate weakness we don't want to forget we have two we have two little buttons between our shoulder first of all the torah even says so many times one of the six 13 commandments is it's forbidden to do anything to cause yourself to forget the torah you're not allowed to forget it anyway with two little buttons between our shoulders one is the remember button and one is the forget button okay did you ever get a phone number from i don't know some millionaire or some let's talk guys here right some attractive woman or a woman from a very successful guy she wants to date it doesn't matter if it's 35 numbers she'll remember it and he'll remember it right the millionaire says yeah come i'll have coffee with you and i'll share with you some wisdom you're not going to forget that number because you're going to remember it right so use so how many times did we get a phone number yeah i'll remember we don't remember it right it slips out of your mind that's because you you press the forget button but we could press the remember button right when we when we want to so when you hear a valuable piece of wisdom decide this is important i want to remember it i'm going to keep it you have the power just press the button press the remember button okay i think on cell phones they have recall right you can recall now if you can't process new information on the spot then at least at the end of each day review the main things you've learned for example if you heard a good lecture verbalize the main points and file away what you found valuable furthermore set aside time for reviewing that's why this whole point is really about reviewing if you don't review you're never going to be able to make that full opinion review what you've learned it's easy to forget things when you're not dealing with them on a daily basis so reviewing not only helps you remember the information but it's going to help reveal those connections between ideas that you didn't see in the beginning and this is also going to help your flow right you the fir we say always you have to when you say review you have to go over things four times before you even make the claim i learned it once i think i've said that before at every every page of talmud has i'll just have to show you so let's say the talmud the actual gemara is here let me just turn this a little bit like this this is the talmud that's in the middle and then you have rashes on the inside ptosis is on the outside okay um there's of the of the middle now you see there's four lines on top before it gets shorter or thinned out there's always four lines every one of the seven thousand pages of the talmud has the top four lines wide and then they they thin out and it's told to me this is a reminder you have to learn everything four times before you even consider have learned it once and that's not even going into the the deeper ideas of par days of shot rem is drush and sod which those who are listening understand what i'm talking about um these are very important ideas don't assume you learn anything after hearing it or looking it over just once and even crucial notes helps retain more yeah a crucial part of organizing your mind there's all kinds of ways to do it right so one of the ideas just you know is this something between me and me is this something me and god is there something between me and others there's always categories to put it's a positive mitzvah is a negative mitzvah right when i say positive negative no misses are negative we mean are they do's or they don'ts right whatever i'm learning what category is this going to fit into so man these are so important my life my life right what i do between me and god what i do between me and myself what i do between do between me and others and i should know what category they fit into right so ask yourself let's say for example if it's between between me and myself what what is the purpose of life what are my goals and dreams how did i arrive at them what are my talents what are my virtues what do i ultimately want out of life so these are things to ask yourself constantly with any piece of information you hear but what are you going to do with it what about between me and others right what do i know about relationships with friends parents colleagues society what causes me to struggle in relationships how often do we have whether it's communication whether it's misunderstanding there's so much you know emotions that are involved in relationships what went wrong why did i feel this way after that conversation was it me go over these ideas because if you don't you you won't you'll never improve yourself or the relationship what do others like most about me i mean you have to know who you are in your relationship with others and what about between you and hashem your relationship what do i know about truth what do i know about kindness why was this world created what are my god-given rights and what are my obligations i mean i see now all over the world people are asking themselves these questions so as you're going through life file file the information you're hearing so he says and suggests now formulate your answers into a set of life plans create a one week plan a one month plan and one year plan and then think about your five year goals and how they're going to lead you to accomplish your lifetime objectives what do you want on your tombstone it is like who needs who wants to answer that this is a very powerful tool uh it's a very powerful question and it's a difficult one it helps clarify what you hold most important your life be mindful of your overreaching goals and keep your priorities straight okay so that's it for today i'm gonna look over my i did have some additional notes uh they're quite well rabbi just beautiful uh uh when you said it's worth the investment i think people need to know that they are worth the investment you are worth the investment and and invested in yourselves everything he's talking about today i love how you said if if knowledge is power forgetting is the ultimate weakness and how often uh many i i see but i know it could sit into so many classes how much are they really absorbing and then how much are they taken to the streets when they're actually out there living in this world i mean we have the opportunity to make this world a better place if we put into practice the beauty of the tour as it's shared and if you don't remember it oh and the opportunity pops up and you're like oh i remember there was a lesson from so and so and you don't have it filed anywhere you're standing there stumbling and mumbling and um you're looking for the right answer and yeah i love how you said you know even at the end of the day if you had a good class think about it i mean it should be part of your uh nightly prayer i mean uh before you go to bed reorganize what you had it'll stick with you better that way for sure i love that disturn discern logical flow in in what you're uh getting into understand the underlying fundamental and it just makes all the difference and you are worth asking yourself these questions i just want to um close with one verse from proverbs it's actually verse 21 it's michele it's proverbs chapter 4 it's really verse 21 but if you read 20 through 22 you'll get a better feel for the verse all right 20 says my son hearken to my words incline your ear to my sayings 21 let them not depart from your eyes guard them within your heart 22 for they are life for those who find them and for all his flesh a healing yeah you understand i mean this is king solomon you know the wisest man who ever lives right so when it begins my son hearken to my words imagine hashem is giving us his torah his manual for life this is so valuable and he's telling you incline your ears right listen well right listen well let them not depart from your eyes right they shouldn't leave your eyes meaning i'm gonna say means review let constantly review don't let them depart from your eyes try to imagine what is being spoken to you the value of it the meaning behind it but then the next statement says guard them within your heart i mean it has to enter your heart and you want to guard them you want to i'm going to again use the word review i mean it what does it mean right to really guard them and why obviously because they're valuable for they are life for those who find them and uh and all his healing i think that really sums it up review review review uh you couldn't do more than that but again the idea would be to and i'm going to just quote again the titles that we gave for this so you can choose which one is most fitting i think focus on what you heard is the most literal translation pondering what you have learned i understand that but the roshi says organizing your mind he puts it all down to that point and that makes a lot of sense and so that with that we finished uh number 49 and next week we have number 50. so bizrat hashem yeah there's nothing there's nothing more difficult than than being fragmented in your thoughts and if you want to be a whole person out there one able to uh to to do well um you've got to be organized in your thoughts and i think what the rabbi shared with us today uh gives us the tools the empowerment uh enablement to uh to to to get the task before it's done and uh hopefully uh those of you listening will take it to heart i'm so enjoying this series but i know we're winding down so rabbi hashem willing are we going to do a part 50 next week bizarre to shem i just don't know if i got that point across i wasn't trying to brag about the work i did on the computer when i was running all these programs the point was that point was that no matter how much you try and you have to make the effort hashem will be there to help you but you have to make the effort um they say about geniuses you know my your your table could be a mess i tell my wife i tell people don't touch it i know exactly where it is right it looks like a mess that's the whole point right these geniuses you see the order and the chaos i'm not saying i'm a genius but to find exactly what you're looking for that's the key right and sometimes you have to be we'll call redundant there are these ideas even in computing and you know i think it was this this this lesson um i think that really helped me i i i if you recall did you you note my my work i did with the magnetic anomalies uh trying to to validate a global flood the point is uh working with these magnetic anomalies i began to systematically organize them based on some thinking that came i think out of this series and uh basically i took all the the homogenous spatial mixing which is just just random colors and i separated them with you know photoshop algorithm so that all the colors are separate and you know you can look at each one individually as an overlay and all of a sudden you can see distinct motion um in such potential organization and my point is that when you're looking for something uh patterns emerge you know and i do a lot of cg animation and uh one of the most powerful tools used in adobe after effects is their um fractal uh fractal um what do they call it uh yeah fractal uh geometry interface it basically it just starts to to you can motion fractal imagery and when you understand the way the pattern flows and how similar it is to the organics in nature um you know you can begin to ponder just the profound notion that hashem has has woven everything together in such a way that is so profound um i think that the the root of torah uh is just so beautiful and and and so useful and i just hope that the banana my friend ashley g out there in california rabbi she says many thanks for your time and wisdom rabbi poston uh i'm glad to see several people that keep coming back to this course uh week in and week out it's been quite a journey so hashem willing we're on for part 50 next for week all right well rabbi thank you so much again today's a beautiful class uh got right to the point it's something for us all put into practice you are worth the investment folks so please do it and uh you'll see changes in your life uh especially when you start to make a plan where you want to be in a year two years five years like the rabbi suggested and then monitor your your path towards that uh break it down into chunks where do i want to be how far do i gotta go this month to get towards that and in six months and in one year all of a sudden you'll see leaps and bounds don't be afraid to tackle some things that seem like huge tasks if you start to do them uh bite-sized you'll get through them and uh yeah life will just be much more fulfilling for sure uh so thank you for that beautiful lesson today rabbi um you said it straightforward and very well and so we're going to sign out for today folks hashem william will be back next week with the final class of this series part 50 so until then have a wonderful wonderful day [Music] is