Chapter 50

Albert Einstein (perhaps the smartest man who ever lived aside from Isaac Newton) once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Of course I agree with Einstein and would even like to go a step further to suggest if you blend imagination with knowledge, you get art. Modern art can take many clever forms and is rarely appreciated, especially if it is complex or abstract. There are, of course, a great many reasons for this –not the least of which is that most people are simply not willing to invest any effort to understand the artist or his motives and purposes.

In one sense, as a reader of my writings, you are viewing my personal artwork in the form of words, which upon closer examination, can be clearly seen as a formulation of my ideas and theoretical viewpoints. At no point have I made any suggestion that my views were necessary accoutrements to a successful program of recovery, in the same way that an artist would never suggest his particular painting fully represented all there would be to see or appreciate in the art-world. One primary reason my art (or, what you would see as my “book”) is deep, complex, and sometimes abstract is that I seek to stimulate the minds of my readers in a way that forces them to ponder and reflect on matters affecting us all –in a very broad sense. I consider my readers to be important, and I want to bring them value and make their time investment in reading this worthwhile.

In order to appreciate my book, it is interesting to know how much effort goes into all this, for example: Chapter 49 took me about 7 hours to write, as I had to think extremely hard and consider many possible objections and potentialities… not to mention, I revised it about 5 times to amend my grammatical mistakes and so on. Much of what you read here has taken me YEARS to think out, and I am finally getting all this knowledge out of my head and “onto paper” so I can pass it on. Many of my thoughts are very deep, so if you read it too quickly, you will miss it... read all of this very slowly and let it sink in. Overall, my book (you see the chapters posted here on this blog as I write them) is coming along just fine quite frankly, and I am thoroughly enjoying the exercise of writing it.

Many books have been written on the subject of recovery, but none quite like this. As I have stated before, a reader of my writings will be taken on a fully encompassing intellectual joyride all over creation with no particular rhyme or reason. Consider it an exercise. We all know that in order to achieve results from physical exercise, we must push ourselves beyond our normal limits… this makes us grow. Well the same principle applies with the mind: If you want it to grow, you need to exert, strive, groan, and push forward toward the objective of receiving benefit. The worst that could happen would be that you learn a few new ideas that could be helpful. Now that’s not so bad is it?