96. Build your power base

Knowledge is power. What you know is your power base—it’s the battery you run on. You need to charge it constantly and consciously. Who do you want to be in charge of what you know? News directors? Radio disc jockeys? The office gossip? Tabloid newspaper editors? A pessimistic family member? Unless we consciously decide to build our own knowledge base, with a sense of direction to it, then we will be programmed, totally, by random input. Feeling miserable and alienated from life is caused by not being in control of what we know.

“Misery and alienation are not laid upon us by fate,” wrote Colin Wilson. “They are due to the failure of the ego to accept its role as the controller of consciousness. All our experiences of ...

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