Knowledge is power. What you know is your power base—it’s the battery you use. You need to charge it constantly and consciously. Who do you want in charge of what you know? The news director? The radio disc jockey? The office gossip? The tabloid editor? The pessimistic family member? Unless we consciously decide to build our own knowledge base, with a sense of direction to it, we will be programmed, totally, with random input.
Feeling miserable and alienated from life comes from not controlling what we know. “Misery and alienation are not imposed on us by fate,” writes Colin Wilson. “They are caused by the ego’s failure to accept its role as controller of consciousness. All our experiences of happiness and intensity impose the same beliefs on us, because they involve a sense of mastery.” Our own destiny. You can make choices all day long about what you will learn and what you will not learn.
“What are you reading there?” someone might ask you. “Oh, that’s just something I found in the trash,” you might say. And it might seem pretty dangerous to read something you found in the trash because there’s nothing else nearby, but all of life is structured that way. The computer term “GIGO”—garbage in, garbage out—is even more apt for human biocomputers than for mechanical ones.
Take control of what you know. The more you know about what motivates you, the easier it is to motivate yourself. The more you know about the human brain, the less trouble you will have operating it. Knowledge is power. Honor yours and build on it.