Chapter One: There Is Nothing To Teach Except This One Skill

There is nothing to teach. We have already discussed how wisdom is basically impossible to transfer. Unfortunately, it gets more complicated. Even if we know that it is virtually impossible to transfer, we still attempt to do it, and sometimes we do it with way too much effort and energy.

See, when somebody who has been struggling all of his or her life with finding meaning, conquering depression, figuring out relationships - actually finds something that works - there is something that happens within, that goes: “I MUST SHARE THIS WITH EVERYONE!”

Not because they want to make money off of it, not because they want to become famous, or anything else that is somewhat egotistical. No, for many of them, it is a form of pure love. They believe they have found something that will be a ‘solution’ to the problem of so many other people like them. They can save them time, and they can help them with their lives.

This is why we get so many self-help books. In reality, they are more let-me-tell-you-how-to-live-books, or my-method-will-save-you-books, or perhaps preach-help books. They are not actually teaching you all that much about how you can help yourself. There is a caveat here - these books can still be extremely useful for people struggling, and they should not be completely discarded. Many “self-help” books actually helped me, and they are all (even the really bad ones) a part of my precious life-journey, and I am grateful to every author whose work I have read.

The important fact is, they simply can’t help everyone, because we are all unique, our journeys are so mind-bogglingly different, that trying to apply the same method to two different individuals is just not going to work all that well. It might be a decent crutch or a tool that works for a while. You might also actually figure out how to change your life, and become a dogmatic believer in a method, a system, a form of religion. It can work, but that is not freedom. That is not pure joy. You will sell your ‘soul’ (okay, that was perhaps a wild overstatement, but I am going to keep it), to the method, and you will hide your true self behind it.

What we are trying to figure out is something else entirely - is there a method, a tool, a collection of principles, a way of thinking that can actually help an individual to become a wise seeker of wisdom - an individual who is trying to build a unique method that only works for them and nobody else - and I have a gut feeling that there is.

However, it can’t be a method, because if I were to now give you an outright step-by-step method, then I would commit the very act I have now been so passionately dismembering. Herein lies the problem - there is something within me that I can, and want to give, but I can’t do it by using a ‘method’, and I can’t do it by simply telling you what to do, I need to trick and manipulate you into coming up with it on your own. Well, that is something I would call a conundrum. Let me go and think about this for a few days or weeks. I will be back.

Okay, I am back. Isn’t it great how an intense period of thinking can last a microsecond once it becomes a text in a book? Love it. Wish it worked this way in the default world.

This is what we are going to do. We are going to explore the “Path Of Love”.

Wait, don’t run. Don’t ‘turn off’ this book. There is an awareness in me that screams that you must be warned before you can escape. When I say ‘love’, I do not mean the romantic connection between two (or more) people. When I say ‘love’, I do not mean the ‘missing hole within you that you are trying so desperately to fill by hoping to convince someone else to see the good in you, or if they are not able to do so, then at least help you aleviate some of the intolerable human loneliness’ kind of love.

No, that is not it, although it might become important at some point, at least when it comes to understanding why so many get it wrong (In short, they are too busy figuring out how to get others to love them, instead of focusing on how to learn and practice ‘loving’).

The kind of love I want to talk about in this book, the kind of love I want to attempt to help you find within yourself completely on your own by sharing a few methods, tricks, and stories is much more simply than that, but also much more nuanced. We are going to start talking about the very core of love that is the very core of your being, that lies within what many would say your ‘heart’, but I find this statement too bland and unclear.

We are going to talk about ‘love’ as a skill of choosing the good in your life.