New Books. New Jewels You Might Benefit From (Pt. 1)

I’ve recently taken a *sip* of the Adlerian Psychology Kool-aid. The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga has been in my ears this week. I’ve also been nibbling on the first few chapters of Vadim Zeland’s Reality Transurfing.

(Yes, I’m very much still neck-deep in my habit of reading multiple books at once. It’s how I choose to leverage my tech-induced ADHD brain.)

These two texts were born from different cultures, and posit different approaches to confronting life, struggle, tension, and inner conflict. What I find valuable about reading them at the same time is that it helps me identify the underlying thread that exists once we filter out matters of opinion.

The biggest note I want to make today is that I’ve personally started applying some of the things I’ve learned from these texts. There have been notable 180 degree changes in my life over the past two weeks alone. That’s why I think it’s so important that you take in some of this.

While I don’t subscribe to every tenet of the respective philosophies, each text has a valid point that is at the very least worth being perceived.

Comparable Takeaways from Two Philosophies

I choose to suffer, and so do you. 

The world gives us what we want. This is good and bad. The gag is, a lot of us want to suffer on some level, but don’t realize this is the case. Some of us have struggles we love to identify with, or relationships with people who we love to hate. Problems in the world of politics that we subconsciously love the drama of dealing with, and so on. And since so many of us get some level of benefit, novelty, or stimulation from being engaged with things we don’t like, it’s going to come around.

The thing is, if you’re unaware of what you’re drawing “value,” from, and what you’re enjoying on some level, you won’t understand why these things keep occurring. The world will give you more of what you’re channeling your emotional energy toward. If you say you hate something, but you’re also addicted to giving it your thought-energy and attention, guess what’s going to happen? Yeah, you’ll get more of it.

In Reality Transurfing, Zealand  talks about if you put energy toward hating something, you’re basically ensuring that you are going to come across it again and again. Actively hating something is attracting it toward you, because the world gives us what we we want (or in this case, what we put energy toward.) The best way to avoid something or cast it out of your life, it by completely ignoring it, and gravitating to a place of indifference regarding it. Not seeing it, not thinking about it, not ruminating on it. Letting it exist, and going on about your day. With this approach, negative things will start to dissolve out of your life.

Transurfing: You have the power to choose your lifeline

Really understanding this idea provides a powerful key to being present in your day to day life. Understand that you are choosing your destiny in each moment, and therefore have the power to “manifest” any potential by attuning to the lifeline where that potential exists.

I like to imagine this concept as the plot of the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, where it was doing a random absurd action that set the protagonist off on a specific destiny to ultimately become a martial arts master, a chef, a movie star, etc. The idea was that one random, but specific action could send you off to a different timeline where a specific outcome awaits you. It was such a minor, comedic element of the film, but I thought that small detail held a lot of power.

The concept of transurfing is not alluding to anything as blockbuster as that, but I think the comparison makes for an appropriate visual.

Life is not a line

Adler poses the profound idea that life is not really a line, but a series of points very close together. Dots, if you will. When zoomed out, there appears to be a line. In reality, life is only a collection of moments. 

This idea puts everything about his philosophy into context. 

Life is only the moment that you’re in right now. The past and the future are illusions, and don’t exist in any given moment. It makes you think about what a true waste it is to be sitting in a moment (the only life you have), and to be fixated on things that have happened in the past, or obsessed over what may or may not happen in the future. The obsession with one’s future is really common, and is detrimental because it can unconsciously make you treat your life as a sort of “preparatory existence,” only here to serve who you will be in the future.

These ideas really asked me to take a look at my approach to my work.

In what manner have I been living?

Part 2 will cover 3 more jewels I think are worth sharing.

There are a lot.

Til next time,

Dezzy