Interview with the author, Dr. Robert C. Worstell
Midwest Journal:Welcome! Today we have as our guest Dr. Robert C. Worstell, author of numerous self-help books and part-time farmer and cartoonist. He's just released a new book on spiritual training entitled "An Operating Manual for Modern Living." We want to discuss his novel approach which reads more like, well, something out of Kurt Vonnegut rather than a dry travel guide through the human experience. More in a second...
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Midwest Journal:Welcome back to today's interview. Our guest to day is Dr. Robert C. Worstell, author of the new release, "An Operating Guide to Modern Living".
Dr. Worstell, this is an interesting read. It doesn't lay out rules and methods to follow like some other self-help book - so how do you figure that this will get the point across?
Dr. Worstell:
Well, it isn't a self-help book. It's for when you're done with self-help and ready for what's next.
MJ: That still doesn't answer the question of why you've laid it out in such a different manner than most. It looks like some sort of Q and A session.
Worstell: It follows in the oldest traditions of teaching and learning. You may have heard the phrase, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears"?
MJ: Yes...
Worstell: So it's the same here. The concept was a simple one in writing this - what questions did I have and what was the answer. It took a very loose intuitive grasp of what I'd been studying for most of my life, and more intensively over the past decade. Once I figured I already knew what I needed to, then I had to sit down and simply put it all into some sensible structure. And I knew you just didn't just sit down and build it like a set of tinkertoys - it was too involved with specious relationships that defied logic. You had to do it intuitively.
MJ: So you had to use your intuition to distill your research?
Worstell: Yes, that was the key to it all. Using the universal solvant to capture the universal solvant. I had actually worked out at least one unified system which would take anyone all the way out to enlightenment. The basics of it are in the first three "Go Thunk Yourself!" series. In the fourth of that series (also published as "Freedom Is - (period.)", I laid out the complete method of getting to an enlightened state that anyone could follow - if it was useful for them.
MJ: Then why did you have to write this Operating Manual to Modern Living?
Worstell: Well, enlightenment isn't what it's marketed to be. First, only a small handful of people ever try to reach it. Mostly Zen types, but there are people who have reached it in all areas of our society. Second, once you've reached it, that is no guarantee that you'll stay in that state. Because you have all sorts of choice in the matter. Your own Free Will and Self Determinism are very much active. But the state itself is very, very valuable and the lessons from this are priceless.
MJ: So this is a guidebook to getting enlightened?
Worstell: No, it's some very simple and basic lessons in how to live life. Any life in our modern times. It's like having this great revelation and then coming back down to earth with what you learned - only in a very common-sense approach. And I wanted to make this very accessible, so every person who gets this book can apply these to their lives, regardless of whether they are working to get enlightened or not.
Look, most people are contented in merely living life. It's exciting enough as it is without wanting to change your whole mindset and world-view. Even people who are working with self-help and personal improvement materials are really making their brain creak from time to time as they confront and handle all sorts of mental patterns they long ago learned to ignore.
This book is really just a way to take some of the simple lessons that are available and let everyone in on them - in an interesting and entertaining format.
MJ: Now about that format, why are these sections numbered like that?
Worstell: It's hexadecimal, something left over from my computer networking training. Each chapter counts by 16 and there are 8 chapters, so there are exactly 128 lessons in the book. I hope to republish this as a learning game at some point, so the best way to do this was to have a base which would work from the ground up. Just playing around with yet another way to reach people. That game is another back-burner item on an already crowded stove-top, I'm afraid. But I'll get to it some day...
MJ: Well, right now, we are happy to have your new book. Anything else coming up?
Worstell: Well, funny enough, while it took awhile to figure out how to get the epub version ready for the iBookstore distribution (and this website was on hold until then), National Novel Writing Month happened - and I wrote another novel. This is now published on Lulu as well, called "The Dreamer Dreamed". And I'm just working at setting that website up as well in order to let people know about it.
But I'm afraid you'll have to come back for another interview on that book. It's very exciting on it's own - using fiction as a genre to reach a wider audience while you explore new concepts is an old standard that goes back through Star Trek days to Shakespeare and the hand-me-down parables in their verbal tradition.
MJ: And I certainly think we'll set up an appointment to do so.
This has been the Midwest Journal interviewing Dr. Robert C. Worstell about his new book, "An Operating Manual for Modern Living." It's been released on Lulu and should be in Amazon and other fine booksellers by the time you get this. As well as the epub edition on Apple's iBookstore.
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