How To Become Your Own Guru

"You must be a light unto yourself!" Jiddu Krishnamurti

"All knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge." - Bruce Lee

"What you do is what the entire universe is doing at the place you call here and now." -Alan Watts

I'm going to suggest what may or may not turn out to be a controversial idea.

It is this: you can't actually learn *anything* from John Carlton, Scott Haines, Gary Halbert (R.I.P.), Kevin Rogers, or anyone else.

Does that mean they're bad teachers? No. They are fantastic teachers who are very dedicated to their craft.

But to understand what I've said we've got to go deeper into the question of what does it mean to learn? If I hand you a calculator and teach you how to push the buttons to arrive at certain answers, have you got any real understanding of the relationships of numbers to each other or the operations of arithmetic? What happens when the battery goes dead in the calculator?

You become stuck because you have no real understanding. It is a mechanical operation. The mind is essentially sleeping. Dead.

And so similarly if I give you a script for writing, or a swipe file that demonstrates good headlines or scarcity or what have you... and you apply it to your sales situation... like using a calculator you might be effective in a certain situation. But you've learned nothing.

So what does it mean to learn? To really have an intelligent, awake, alert mind capable of creativity?

It means to be in what Krishnamurti called a constant state of revolt. Of being aware in this moment. Not concerned with what has happened before, or what may happen. But to ask yourself what is going on right now, this instant?

It is a highly receptive and sensitive state of mind. You are letting the world come to you, without distraction, without interruption and most importantly without judgement.

Because you see to have judgement is to believe, which is limiting. The moment I start to look at the world through a belief I am in that very moment narrowing my awareness. I am cutting off entire realms of potentially relevant data.

Smart marketers know how to inspire this sort of tunnel vision in their audience. If you're in this community you've seen it countless times. They start with a statement or a promise that the audience is eager for and then go on to support it with testimonials, with stories, with anecdotes, with rhetoric. And by the end of the whole ride the audience is foaming at the mouth because they've been so excited that what they believe has been proven to be "true". So true, usually, that they're willing to part with their money. Appalling amounts of it.

But you see that process of belief *must* be, fundamentally, a departure from reality as it is. Because the real world isn't a belief. It's not an idea, it's not a concept, it's not a symbol.

Does this make sense?

I'll use an example to illustrate. If a martial artist is trained to have mechanical responses... like if someone grabs your shirt, perform move A and then move B etc. in this sequence... that person feels prepared to be assaulted by shirt grabbers.

But what happens when someone grabs his arm? Or a different part of his shirt then he was used to practicing? He freezes up! Fear clutches him tight because he was counting on a fixed pattern, a belief, to save him.

The point is, reality is fluid. It's always here and now and so it's always changing. The real awake, dynamic, living mind doesn't hold onto crystallized, dead patterns or beliefs.

It's alive, alert... ready for whatever may come.

And so the job of the educator, the real educator, is to wake the student up. If the student won't wake up, a good teacher will encourage him to keep making stupider and stupider mistakes until he does wake up, realizing that "the fool who persists in his folly will become wise".

If you're counting on newsletters, or DVDs, or books written by masters of copywriting or marketing to teach you how to be a master copywriter... you're walking down a "not a through street".

It's a dead end my friend. You know this, instinctively. Because otherwise you'd stop buying how-to material and start making it.

The marketers know this. They see the same names ordering their stuff year after year, the same faces come to their seminars. People waiting to be delivered. And I don't doubt for a second that those teachers really do intend to get their students off the ground.

But unfortunately it's not up to the teachers. It's up to the student. You must become your own guru. Ready to respond to the environment as it is here and now. Ready to take the steps yourself.

And if you've read all this and ask, "but how do I do that?" My answer to you is this: you must not be ready. Because built into the question are presuppositions of the same limiting belief that's got you stuck to begin with.

All I can really say is... in the tradition of many Zen masters... just do it.