Sitting in a coffee shop writing this, my curiosity gets the best of me as I gaze over the ever-growing number of self help books.
How does one achieve enlightenment through a book?
It seems to me that it’s most always hand-me-down knowledge.
The flow of this knowledge, as I see it, is:
- A person has an enlightenment experience in their life.
- They write a book about it.
- They create and execute a workshop about it.
- Another person takes this workshop.
- That person has a life-altering experience in the workshop.
- They write a book.
- Yet another person reads this book and feels changed by it.
Trickle-down enlightenment, eh?
So often I have had someone tell me that they just read something and it explained to them some puzzle they had been pondering. Since when did our personal experience become the truth that explains the world for everyone else?
Often I hear people in a meeting quote some “fact” or anecdote as if it explained something to me. Sometimes, I’ll look these things up and find that they are not corroborated or have been debunked as merely hearsay.
Because they get quoted so often they become part of the truth by which we make meaning of the world.
We give away the power of our own intuition, our ability to tap into the vast storehouse of knowledge out there, in lieu of something written by someone else who believes that they are experiencing the world through their intuition.
What is the reason that we fear our own intuition? Well, we might be wrong. The human ability to identify, listen to and understand their intuition is “iffy” at best.
The last thing that our ego will accept is us being wrong about anything. So we read a “fact”, accept it as truth and if it turns out to be false, then we can blame the author. We stay free of blame!
Perhaps a more useful approach would be to read a “fact” then spend some time with it, turning and twisting it over in our minds, examining it with our own intuition while asking “Just how true is this for me?”
From that we can make our own explanation of the world, or that is, of the world according to us.
Our intuition is connected to all that is us. It views everything in light of our preferences, our filters, our desires.
And it is connected to our oneness. That seems to be a great place to start when I am trying to make meaning of this existence!
Second-Hand Enlightenment
by thecryingshaman on November 13, 2011
Sitting in a coffee shop writing this, my curiosity gets the best of me as I gaze over the ever-growing number of self help books.
How does one achieve enlightenment through a book?
It seems to me that it’s most always hand-me-down knowledge.
The flow of this knowledge, as I see it, is:
Trickle-down enlightenment, eh?
So often I have had someone tell me that they just read something and it explained to them some puzzle they had been pondering. Since when did our personal experience become the truth that explains the world for everyone else?
Often I hear people in a meeting quote some “fact” or anecdote as if it explained something to me. Sometimes, I’ll look these things up and find that they are not corroborated or have been debunked as merely hearsay.
Because they get quoted so often they become part of the truth by which we make meaning of the world.
We give away the power of our own intuition, our ability to tap into the vast storehouse of knowledge out there, in lieu of something written by someone else who believes that they are experiencing the world through their intuition.
What is the reason that we fear our own intuition? Well, we might be wrong. The human ability to identify, listen to and understand their intuition is “iffy” at best.
The last thing that our ego will accept is us being wrong about anything. So we read a “fact”, accept it as truth and if it turns out to be false, then we can blame the author. We stay free of blame!
Perhaps a more useful approach would be to read a “fact” then spend some time with it, turning and twisting it over in our minds, examining it with our own intuition while asking “Just how true is this for me?”
From that we can make our own explanation of the world, or that is, of the world according to us.
Our intuition is connected to all that is us. It views everything in light of our preferences, our filters, our desires.
And it is connected to our oneness. That seems to be a great place to start when I am trying to make meaning of this existence!
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