If you think that what goes on in your life, or that just being alive is the challenge  –
you have no grasp at all as to what is going on,
nor the attitude necessary to gain same.
Nothing that may naturally occur in your life,
from being an unrecognized artistic genius, to having a fatal ill is a challenge,
nor do any such have any bearing on whether you catch on to what is going on;
to a man truly on the track, luck, fate, and happenstance of all stripes
are no more personally relevant than is the day’s weather,
and this is not a pose you can adopt, nor theory you embrace;
the potential for seeing life in this manner and living accordingly
comes with being born with ThatCertainHunger,
but as with all things related thereto, this ability is latent and must be nurtured:
first by hearing about it (and if it rings apropos to you) then by practice.
Those not born with that special aim can never be told that whatever happens in their life is irrelevant to their aim  –
since any aim they may have will be totally tied to the ordinary events of life,
thus what happens in their lives is(in their minds) of up most relevance.
But have you that innate, extreme interest in understanding that which others do not, you must quick come to your partial senses sufficient to look,
and realize that nothing that goes on in the ordinary lives of men, for good or ill,
has anything to do with you getting to the bottom of what goes on.
Whether you are tall and handsome, or stooped and homely;
rich or poor, strong or sick --  ‘tis all completely irrelevant –
not perhaps to how you literally, physically feel  --  but totally irrelevant to
the challenge of you personally discovering what is actually going on;
a wee bit of the initial trickiness is in understanding for yourself that
how you may physically be feeling due to the circumstances of your life
has no relevance to your aim  --
--  except that you acknowledge them by mentioning them –
                       then they have become relevant  --  and a bar.
 
 

To be alive, sane and all around normal
is to take what happens to you in life personally;
to an ordinary mind, there is no alternative –
no normal person even ever thinks about there being a possible alternative;
a family member dies --  your pain is personal --  you take their death personally;
your professional plans are rebuffed --  your dreams are dashed –
certainly you take such setbacks personally;
you cannot maintain a sexual relationship --  someone always mistreats you –
anyone with human emotions takes these things personally;
you are diagnosed with a potentially terminal affliction --
how can you not take this personally?!
Everything just noted (and all that was not) seems to the normal human beings
of this world to be matters of unquestionable relevance to their lives --
and if so they say  ---   they are correct,
and there is nothing to be ever said to them to the contrary,
but if you are one of the few born with ThatCertainDriveToKnow,
then you also have the ability to see and feel life otherwise –
without it and its cultivation  --   you will never understand any more about
what is going on than everyone else does (which is nada).
 

The natural attitude of ordinary people is commonly that simply,
being alive is a challenge;
that just surviving the endless hardships and misfortunes of human existence
is about all that any person can bear,
indeed the religious are given to say that our life on Earth is specifically intended as
a challenge  --  a test by the gods to measure a man’s mettle, primarily it seems,
his ability to tolerate afflictions (so from their view the matter is locked down & settled;
Life is a bitch  --  but it is also a test to challenge your faith, etc).
Those who say they believe  this --  say they believe this,
and it is of no interest or concern to a man with his own outsider’s aim.
 

This being said does not make it so,
all it can accomplish is to cause a person with the potential to eventually see,
to presently realize that for such as they, it do be so,
and to move them to post haste take note that none of the things that can,
and do occur in men’s lives have anything to do with whether you ever get your eyes fully opened or not.....unless of course you let them....which if you now continue to do, will simply prove that you were never actually one of the few.
 

A man truly with TheHunger is not derailed, sidetracked, or for long, much put-out
by anything that can happen to him in life, from the most mundane to the horrible,
and if this does not sound like the secret, RealYou,
then you are probably a fraud  --  at best a dilettante, fascinated by dreams of developing supernatural powers
(such as not being so bothered by what happens to you in life).
 
 
 

If after reading this, you still feel that terrible things have and do happen to you in life, and that just surviving and putting up with them all is a real challenge,
you are hopeless ---
you are not wrong, you are not stupid, you are not delusional;
you are normal, sane and ordinary,
but you are hopeless regarding anything beyond that,
and you are not exempted by saying:
“Yes, I do take things that happen to me far too personally, and I am well aware that I let the every day little annoyances in life upset me way too much” blah blah, blah, as though such vocal confession reveals your superior perspective & understanding  --  hardly;
such admissions presented as: objective-self-observations,
are still just crying in disguise;
a person with even a rudimentary grasp of what this is all about
never confesses to anything;
if he was standing in the town square with blood gushing from a wound,
he would not mention it  --   bind it, even seek help  --  yes;
                                                                       discuss it  --  no.
 
 

What is being herein pointed to is not some theory that some human has concocted, and is now trying to sell to others;
if to you it sounds like nonsense, then be assured --  it is,
but for the few born with that unusual mental potential and interest,
what has been here been rather bluntly put will sound strangely familiar,
like: “Yeah, I knew that was so --  I’d just never thought about it directly before.”
There is no explaining it, no defending it, and most assuredly no proving it,
but to a few people with a certain innate, non standard curiosity about life
nothing that occurs therein affects them beyond its silent, physical implications,
and is always seen as something totally separated from their private, personal aim, and in no way a meaningful challenge-to-be-met;
whatever happens to any man in life either kills him or not,
and if he survives whatever it is --
regardless of what he and those around him may later say --
it does not represent his triumph over a personal, formidable challenge;
if you are presently alive it is because life has kept you alive,
and if you are presently dead.........................well, you have probably caught on by now.
 
 

For a man born with the bug to ever see it take wing,
he must somehow come to his own personal realization that any and every thing
that can and does happen in life is in one distinct category (over here on your left),
and that his own aim to understand what is going on in life is in another completely different category (over here on the right) altogether,
and that they simply, and plainly have nothing whatsoever to do with one another:  they are absolutely un-re-la-ted, (and even if this is not literally true,
                                     you gotta treat it like it is..........and if you do  --  it works).
 
 

The only challenges worth while for the few never come from
the normal circumstances of life, but are always those they create themselves,
and the first one is the challenge of seeing clearly  and indisputably for yourself
that nothing which happens to you in life is a challenge,
or even anything to be taken so personally as to make you even mention it.
For a person with that secret, quite extraordinary inner goal –
life is just life; you live until you die, and anything said thereabout is palaver,
and in a way inexplicable, truly unworthy of a man with the secret aim.
In a sense what you do is refuse to verbally acknowledge that any aspect of life