How Napoleon Hill Helped Throw The Whole World Out Of Balance

If you'd like to know the real trick to self-help, then here is what's missing from most books, DVDs, and courses teaching you how to improve yourself, looked at through the lens of what you might call modern Zen. And... once you've understood what I'm about to write, it'll make all the self-help in the world obsolete because you'll be able to drop your struggles completely.

Here it goes:

An idea I return to often is "you're it". That's what the quote in Sanskrit means in my signature.


I've said before that the realization of this is difficult because it is so basic and fundamental.


We miss what's beneath our nose because it is so close.


A friend recently introduced me to Ludovico Einaudi, a fantastic piano player.


He plays something you might call modern classical. It's mostly music without lyrics (a breath of fresh air, really), and in the style of the classical musicians, it's music as play. Which is to say that there's no lesson, no message to the music other than the music itself. The composition is the point.


But it's far from boring, which is my biggest hang up with traditional classical music. I begin to snore. There's much more blood and life running through Ludovico Einaudi's music (if for no other reason than because it's new to me).


The reason I bring this up is an important one.


Because basic to music are principles that make it a very good metaphor to teach Zen.


First of all, is that music as sound can only be enjoyed at all because what we commonly refer to as sound is really sound-silence.


That is to say that without the interval of silence in between sounds, there would be no contrast... and thus no music.


This is why strobe lights are so fascinating, because light too is a vibration. But when you're able to change the rhythm and speed at which the light vibrates... the whole world slows down. So it suddenly becomes very obvious what's going on during normal waking hours... and this amazes us.


To suddenly know that our normal waking life, at least in terms of what we see, is all made possible by the stroboscopic effect sped up so much that it seems to be constant, like sound.


Here it is, here it isn't. Now you see it, now you don't.


It's moving so fast we miss the dark interval. The silence. The space.


This is the meaning of yin and yang, and how they arise mutually.


If you had dark only, there would be no light. If you had light only, there would be no dark. It's not to say that if you have yin, you ought to have yang like you ought to have vegetables with your dinner... because it's good for you, or something like that. It's not a question of morals.


Rather it is to say that in the same way you can't sand off the tails side of a coin to only have a heads side... one implies the other. The very moment you have yin, you have yang. The distinction is arbitrary, really. It's a way of measuring things.


But this isn't very quick to settle in our common sense. Because we've been taught a way of looking at the world in which there is cause and effect.


You know that's a social convention, and in the real world there is no cause and effect?


There's not one thing called clapping and a sound that comes after it. You don't cause something called sound to happen the brief instant after you clap. The sound is the clapping.


In the case of music, there are these intervals of sound and silence.


Typically though, we don't notice the silence. We hear it but we don't make note of it. It is because it is so basic that we don't. It is the silence that makes the sound possible, but it's common to every sound. Just like what is beneath the text you're reading now is what makes the letters stand out.


It's so much everywhere that we don't really acknowledge it. Like how a fish in water may not know its in water because it doesn't have anything to contrast the experience to.


So in the same way, human consciousness is like water to humans. It's the basic. The fundamental. It is the place from which everything in our universe arises, and so we miss it. It completely skips our attention.


But you see, this is enlightenment. When you realize (that is, to make real... to have an experience of... as opposed to intellectualize) that it is exactly what you hear, smell, taste, feel, see and think that implies who you are. In exactly the same way the sound implies the silence.


It's common in religion and mysticism to describe this experience in terms of language that is very misleading because it is so grandiose and poetic. And while it's not my intention to poo-poo the world and say it's anything less than what it is... really, that'd be no more a mistake than saying it's much more than it is. And when things are out of balance it may be useful to go to one extreme to restore them, even if of itself the extreme would be a misstep.


This is like psychedelic drug use. Or any unique experience really. But in particular, I I remember my encounter with psilocybin (magic mushrooms). It should be noted here that I'm not advocating drug use. Once upon a time though, I did try what are commonly called "shrooms". Just the once. It was enough, as far as I was concerned.


I had heard what it was like to hallucinate and people used language like "you'll see things or hear things".


And there is, for those who have never had the experience, looking from the outside in... a sort of wonderful anxiety and fantasy that goes on. You imagine... what would it really be like to see a cup walking along a table with human legs or something?


But you've got to be careful not to take these descriptions literally or you'll be disappointed. Because really, how it works, is much closer to the way we see faces in the clouds. It's just that when you're on psychedelics, your grip on reality is much more fluid and ethereal and so you might get a little more lost in the Rorschach.


Human consciousness then, acts like a crystal prism that breaks up sunlight... only it knows so. And if you think of the six sense gates as different colors of the rainbow being plucked out of the sunlight by this prism... you've got human consciousness as the result of the combination of these things.


Keeping with our musical analogy, it's like the senses are instruments playing a song together in an orchestra. Out of this massive, otherwise dark space we call the universe... our senses pluck out, strum out, and blow out life.

We know though, that this is a limited perspective because we have instruments that point to whole other spectrums of light and vibration that we're unaware of. This limited experience is what we feel to be "right here".


But because we know we're here, we're vulnerable to making a certain unwarranted leap that inside this here is something altogether different than what's outside, simply because our gaze is fixed in this position.


That is to say... that we have spent so much time focusing on the sound we forget the silence is there at all.


And who you are really is the sound and the silence together.


The whole thing.


When you wake up to this... it's a funny sensation. You might be walking down the street on a sunny day and feel that the sun in all it's burning, violent glory isn't that far away at all. It might be just as close behind you as the lamp-post or telephone poll you just walked by, or even the hairs on the back of your head.


Because when you really feel that you're it... you're the space as well as the matter... it's absolutely true that the sun is just that close. "You"... don't end at the place call your skin. There is a sense in which you do, and that sense is a play. It's your persona. Which in Greek of course means mask.


But masks imply an actor; somebody beneath them. And so like G.K. Chesterton wrote in one of this poems, let's not forget...


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This post is taken from my blog... it's not a blog that sells anything. But recently I've received enough positive feedback on my posts that I think it might be nice to share it with the Warrior Forum community. If you enjoyed that post, please let me know in a comment and I'll put up the link here. Thanks.
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