Uh, can you repeat that?

It is amazing how many times people can see/hear/read things and still not absorb them. I am talking about any kind of information, spiritual or not. I have been involved in many examples myself. I can't tell you how many times I have been in karate class during a training when one of my senseis would say something that would sound amazing, and I would go to them after class and say, "Hey! You never said that before! That was exactly what I needed to hear!" Invariably, the answer would be, "I've been telling you that for YEARS, dummy! You just finally HEARD me."

A lot of times, it is not the teaching or the student's inability to learn but it is often two other things:
1) The student was not ready to learn it before, and once the readiness arrives, the student learns.
2) The *way* in which the information was said was not the way in which the student needed to hear it.

Some people are better at giving information. Sometimes, people just need to hear things in a certain phrasing or tone and they get it. That is why you see a lot of different books on spirituality out there that say the same thing but say it in different ways. Everything that there is to say has already been said with regards to spiritual development! There is nothing I can say here that is new, and there is nothing that Dan Millman or Eckhart Tolle or any of those guys have written in the last few decades that is new. All that is different is the teachers, writing styles, phrasing, and accompanying anecdotes, really.

So my advice to anyone looking to read books on spirituality is to simply get guidance from someone who's been there before and ask them what books they like. Then try out a few different ones. Maybe you don't like the way Ken Wilber writes? Maybe Idries Shah is more your cup of tea? Who knows?

At the very least, I try to write things here in the way that I think of them. In a way, the things written here are a distillation of lots of other teachers. The intent is convenience.