This article will be mostly about reading. Specifically why reading doesn’t fulfill its purpose with you…
Remember when I asked you if your life was empty? a week or so ago…
Well, when nothing is actually happening in your life, it feels empty.
Reading, fiction, in a certain way, fills your life up… because it allows you to live through the characters, go to places, experience what they experience.
I said: in a certain way. Wallace D. Wattles, a unique dude from more than a hundred years ago, used that expression… and, even though millions have read his “The Science of Getting Rich” no one has paid particular attention to the how, ‘the certain way’, except a woman whose name I still remember, Rebecca Fine. She started to teach ‘the certain way’…
But I promise, even though I have no actual facts, that people didn’t take to ‘the certain way’… because they still don’t.
MY teacher also teaches a certain way… while
Everybody is clamoring for the what, and only some even hear the how.
The how is the most important aspect of everything, the what is, at most, secondary. This applies to everything, including reading.
So I read. I read fiction, and very rarely non-fiction. Why not non-fiction? After all I could learn something, you must be thinking, but no… Given that most non-fiction is at best 10% truth value, I would not learn anything.
I listened to this presentation yesterday with Mark Joyner and I didn’t learn anything,while I was reading this thriller type fiction today, and I learned something really profound.
In fiction I am not TOLD what to think… I thought without being told. Non-fiction tells you what to think.
In this book I just read, a Burmese woman who is politically active to free her country of the military regime, is nearly brought to her feet by the ‘regime’ kidnapping her daughter.
She decides to sacrifice herself for her daughter, after all ‘she is my daughter’…
This started the thought process what it is I would do in her place.
Sacrifice myself, the work I am doing, and ultimately the freedom of my people for MY daughter?
I wouldn’t.
I know not one of you who is reading this article agrees with me… but when I ask Source, Source says: the mother’s decision in the book is pure ‘desire to receive for the self alone’, while mine is ‘desire to receive for the sake of sharing’.
How so?
The moment you and yours are more important that the cause you ‘live for’, you show your real colors: it is all about you. You are not a freedom fighter, you play the role of a freedom fighter, but it’s a role: it is not who you are. You are like many actors who play doctors on television… not doctors.
Unless you have some important and difficult questions that arise for YOU in every book you read, your reading is a form of dopamine-rush… and you are using your life for that.
I avoid dopamine rush books or movies. Romance, sex, too much excitement, horror. The moment I feel the feelings come up, I stop reading the book. If it is not the main theme, I return to it later. If it is, I stop reading it altogether.
I manage my dopamine ‘consumption’… preferably I keep it at zero.
I avoid it with everything. I get off the phone when someone argues. Attacks, I am out of there.
Remember? Emotions up, intelligence down… sorry, not interested.
I am doing everything in my power to be even-keeled.
Google mucked up my emails… I breathe… and wait to do anything until the anger, excitement, whatever goes away completely, until I can look: what do I want, how to get it, and then do what I need to do.
It is near impossible to make good decisions when the emotions are high.
This includes the emotion of being needy. At the moment I am still needy, I can hear the whiny little voice in my head… no problem, I have time to wait you out, little voice.
Here is another thing I got out of reading… it’s a book I mentioned before, about the timelines.
Looking at MY timelines… My private “It’s a wonderful life”
Remember in that movie the angel who is working for his wings helps the character played by Jimmy Steward see that had he not been born, the world would have been worse, much worse off.
There was a sentence in the ‘timelines’ books, in the last of the three rewinder books, where the grandma who, when she was young, was hellbent on destroying the world, and spoke of having a child with utter disgust, says: I would not have wanted to miss out having you… Seeing you grow up… He says this to his grandson.
Almost everyone I know has children, grandchildren… something I never had. I even moved away from where my parents and brothers lived… far far away.
But reading that sentence, I have been brooding… occasionally weeping.
I am playing ‘what if’… what if I had gotten married? Remained an architect. Remained in Hungary…
Would my life have been as horrible as it turned out to be? In THIS timeline…
If I were a ‘rewinder’, would I go back and find the point where had I made a different decision, I would have had a life I’d like more at age 72?
I think doing mental gymnastics is useful, but regret isn’t. Weeping, looking is useful though.
Don’t wait with that until you are in your deathbed… you may not be well and coherent enough to do the thinking.
Here is, maybe, the most important thing you can get out of reading fiction:
You get to observe, conspicuously all kinds of behaviors, and look at them from the sideways view. And analyze them, while in real life you can’t do it, because you don’t have time, or you are overwhelmed.
If you want to widen your horizon with regards to humans, including yourself, you need to experience a lot, read a lot… and give yourself time to ponder.
Without that… you are a dull person… and no one wants to be friends with you other than other dull people.
That will give you a life you don’t want… I wouldn’t.
As I said in another email, your most missing capacity is controlling your attention.
I can’t do it for you. It is a matter of self-discipline… and the will to do what it takes.
If you don’t attend to it, nothing will change for you. NOT A THING… sorry to be the one to break it to you.
So what can I offer to help?
Your Bach Profile can help. It can tell you want is underneath your inability or unwillingness to control your attention. Impatience? desire trap? arrogance? too high about-me score, self-righteousness, very active ITCH… or what?
Go to step 2
