Surpassing Obstacles

[Updated August 2021. Essay on Tarot: XXI The World]

The World is about perspective. When you walk the surface of the planet, you see the best and the worst of it. A small stone can trip you up. A building or a mountain or a lake can completely block your journey. Once you rise up high enough, all you see is beauty! From space, this blue marble is breath-taking and awe-inspiring.

The following post walks you through exercises in shifting your perspective to overcome obstacles that seem to block your way.

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As we all know, the earth is a sphere—not an exact sphere, but more or less. Gravity pulls down toward the center of the planet. That means, no matter where you stand, the center is always directly beneath you. In another perspective, that also means that no matter where you stand, you are always on top of the World!

A journey is from where you are to where you want to be. So let’s, for a moment, assume that where you want to be is the furtherest possible place from where you are: the direct opposite spot on the planet. You cannot travel directly there since the entire earth is in your way. You must circumnavigate the globe to get there.

This is a worse case scenario, and I am sure we all have desires that feel just this hard to achieve. The whole of the earth appears to be your obstacle. However, it is also the way there. Follow its surface in any direction, and you will get there! It is like being at the exact North Pole. Everywhere you look is south. It is the only direction you can travel in. And if your desire is being at the South Pole, you cannot go wrong!

If the entire earth is not an unsurpassable obstacle, then nothing less is either. You don’t have to figure out where to go. You don’t want to carry the whole earth on your back; you can’t anyway. You just need to take a step…and then another one.

And you’ll never not be on the top of the world. As you walk, the earth turns beneath you. The center is always directly below, but the fulfillment of your desire gets closer.

If a journey to the opposite point on the earth feels impossibly long, consider this fact. You and your desire exchange positions every 12 hours! If your desire hovered in place above the surface of the earth, the earth’s rotation would facilitate the journey for you. In 12 hours, all you would need do is reach up and grab it. [Of course, this only works at the equator, but you get the point.]

As unreal as all of this seems, it is based on facts as we know them. It is an exercise in perspective. As large as the earth is, it makes a full rotation in 24 hours. Without taking one step, you travel a great distance each day. In six months, you’ve traveled further than to the sun and back.

There was a time when people didn’t know there was another side of earth. They didn’t know what was beyond the edge of their maps. Now we have airplanes that can carry us all the way to the other side. It might take more than 24 hours to make the journey, but people do it everyday.

As we align with concepts, we make them real. Right now, you can talk to someone in nearly any corner of the earth. You simply need to know their phone number and make the call. In this way, you are connected with nearly the whole population.

Impossible becomes improbable becomes against all odds becomes there is the slightest chance becomes there is a way becomes what the hell, I have nothing to lose becomes look, I’m closer today than I was yesterday becomes I’m making progress becomes I’m halfway there becomes holy shit, I never thought I would get this far becomes I can see the light at the end of the tunnel becomes Oh my God, I did it!

On that note: I have some exciting news. Yesterday, the Kindle edition of Journey to the Temple of Ra went on sale for $0.99. This offer expires next Friday.

As you may know, an earlier version of that story was published as A Fool’s Journey. When poking around on the internet some, I found an article written by Ura P Auckland entitled Books that impacted my journey 1961 to 2011. Toward the end of the article, Ura places A Fool’s Journey on a list that starts with Dan Millman’s The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, a book that got things started for me too. What an honor it is to see my name listed in that company!

Furthermore, both Journey to the Temple of Ra and Scribe to the Pantheon of Rome have been added to the Visionary Fiction Alliance Bookstore on Amazon. You can peruse their bookstore via: http://astore.amazon.com/jusele-20?node=1&page=8.

Oh the places we will go!