Are YOU or BOOKS the Remedy to a Bad Situation?

Every challenge is a new curriculum.

Every time something fucked up happens to me in my life, I, like most of us, look at it as bad, shitty, and horrible. How can this be happening to me? Why? This absolutely sucks! But how many of us can say: well, this is just another chapter of my life and and perhaps I can actually learn something here. There’s nothing new about this philosophy. There’s a million books on the shelf screaming about “learning from your failures” and “never giving up” and all that sort of jazz to make you feel so warm and gooey inside. Frankly, I’m tired of it all! I’m tired of the self help reading that litters our magazines, newspapers, and dinner conversations. Just help-YOUR-self instead of reading about SELF-help. Wouldn’t that make more sense?

Who in the world told everyone that they were a fucking philosopher!?

So this is how I’m putting it to you today: try it out for yourself and actually spend some real time and effort attempting to see and experience what good can come out of any difficult situation. You can’t have the fruit without growing the seed. Sure, you can easily comfort yourself with a few lines from Anthony Robbins or Oprah or, say, OSHO. That’s all fine and dandy. But has your vision deepened any? Do you actually realize, truthfully and faithfully, that there’s always light beyond the dark? Have you descended any further into your understanding of Self or have remained on the superficial lines of each page?

If not, burn the book! It’s as useless to you as the Bible to Lucifer.

If we spent more time actually philosophizing with ourselves than with the ideas within books and gurus, then, maybe, perhaps we can gain some traction here. Perhaps we can move forward in life and appreciate the rust of the pipe instead of trying to furiously scrub it away with book after guru after blog after one of our self-appointed television gurus.

I question any guru that is popular enough to sit with Oprah and thereafter sell a million-plus books within a day. How fickle the minds of my nation! How easily we wag our tails to the next spiritual fad in line. The next step to enlightenment is just a mouse-click away. Popularity, as far as I can discern, runs perpendicular to the solid ground of truth; unless, of course, organic events take place and make it absolutely necessary for popularity to grease the wheels of truth.

“Every challenge is a new curriculum” is an immense statement.

Are you brave enough to explore it? To take the risk of venturing down a truly unique way of thought. To temporarily push aside everything that you know and have learned up to this point in order to actually benefit from such a statement?

Well I don’t know about you, but I think I’m ready to. I’ve been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, now for close to two-months and let’s just say that it hasn’t been quite a walk in the park. Being without Internet for the better part of one-month, or to be more accurate, stable and sufficiently fast Internet, has been extremely testing on my spirit. Being that ninety-nine percent of my work is done (expressed and shared) online, maybe you can imagine just how pissed-off, frustrated, and simply thrown-off I was.

But it was a blessing in disguise I would come to realize. Now you may say that not having the Internet is trivial and pales in comparison to those without food and the likes, but I would go on to say that “triviality” should never be less respected than so-called more important matters. The little ant that walks across my keyboard may be just a trivial little bug, yet remove all the ants from the Earth and you’ll see just how trivial it was as all human life would quickly fall.

Not Having may be better than Having

Not having the Internet gave me a chance to see just how addicted and dependent I had become on it. Not having it allowed me to get back to my good ol’ journal writing and my actual book writing on loose-leaf. It jolted me out of my ten-plus hours per day just sitting on the web, watching life go by without truly experiencing it. I came to see that I needed to restore the balance of actually interacting more, going for more walks, experiencing the city more, and just harmonizing once again between the so-called “work and play” struggle. Not having the Internet, as difficult as it was, was a great lesson for me—a powerful curriculum!

I think this “lack of something” or “hardship” or “difficult time” can be simultaneously giving, adding, and tremendously educating if we would just humble ourselves enough to see the lesson unfolding. That way, it shifts from a “what the fuck’s happening” to a “ah, ok, it’s just happening.” Now let me go with the current or against it. I have had to face the hard reality that going against the current is insanely energy-expending and tiring. One can easily read that in a book and docilely accept that theory as truth, but there’s a whole ‘nother world of actually “experiencing” it on your own life and seeing it happen in practice.

Theory is not your friend!
Practice and Experience are!

This isn’t to say be happy in the face of difficulty or just ignore any problems that you are having, but to simply experiment with the wave of difficulty; try riding it next time instead of ducking or attempting to go through it. You may find out that even in that darkness, uncertainty, and difficulty, that in the end, you’re actually nearer to the shore than you thought.

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