in every way, things are getting better and better.”  

You probably think that’s a John Lennon quote.  It’s from Jose Silva and I heard Steven Colbert say it last night.   

If you don’t know Silva, he’s a mind science guy who took off in the 50s.  My guess is he was taking off at the same time Scientology was.  I can’t say for sure.  There are also common threads with Christian Science woven here.  

I tried the free Silva learning course when I’d first gotten back to Detroit after my grandpa’s death.  I believe I was feeling better with the guided meditations and the self-hypnotic messages.  That is, until I got slammed upside the head with the reality that things were NOT getting better and better and better.  Life isn’t linear.  It’s zig-zagged.  

A rabbi put out a book some time ago about bad things happening to good people. That’s the book I need to read.  Instead, I’m reading someone’s journal about achieving a happier life… like you are, essentially.  Rubin charts her progress, by the way, with logs that look an awful lot like L. Ron Hubbard’s tracking sheets.  I don’t really have any thoughts on that, but it’s my observation.

A few hours after Colbert triggered this link to Silva, I watched a 20/20 special titled, “The Congresswoman and The Astronaut.”  What a story.  I immediately began crying.  I hadn’t even made it to the first commercial break.  Why do I watch this stuff?

They’re lives seemed to be an upward achievement of satisfaction.  I mean, c’mon, he’s an astronaut!  And, if you listen to him, she was a saint.  I bet she was.  I’m starting to think Gretchen Rubin is some sort of saint, too.  It’s very difficult to learn from saints. Unfortunately, life is a zig zag and now everything they’d worked for is in the balance. She may never get to serve again and he may not go on his final mission in space because his wife lays in a hospital bed.

Are we to expect him to find the bright side?

Eckhart Tolle would have me believe that a more enlightened me would react in stoicism.  Well, I don’t want it.  That, in truth, makes me a little happy.  I want to feel the pain of loss.  I want to cry about the loss of a nine-year-old’s dreams.  I want to feel wounded by the tragedies in life.  It reminds me I’m human.  It reminds me I never signed up to be perfect and I can relax a little.

I’m not sure why A New Earth did so well.  No, I know why.  Oprah loved it.  So let me rephrase.  I don’t know why THIS was the book that opened Oprah’s mind, but I found it dry and ridiculous.  Richard Bach is far more entertaining in his enlightment.  Tolle urged his readers to spend five minutes with a tree and recognize that it was not a tree.  I’m not sure what he was getting at, but I read better books about the nothingness of matter when I was in high school.  As far as I’m concerned, he wanted to suck out human nature from us and call it humanity.  

I’d buy his next book, though, if it promised me salvation.  Actually, if I had the cash, I’d go to a Jose Silva course in person because even in my zig zag, I still secretly hope that it’s jutting forward into gratification somehow.