The Biggest Chapter Yet

I want to tell you what happened to me in Scottsdale.

I was four minutes into the keynote, eleven hundred people, sold out, standing room, and I stopped talking. I did not decide to stop. I stood there for nineteen minutes and nobody in that room moved. Nobody coughed. Nobody looked at a phone. People who have never met, from different cities, have since told me that during those nineteen minutes they heard me speaking to them by name. I was not speaking. I want that on the record. I was not speaking and they heard me.

That is what you are a part of. I don't think you understand that yet. I don't think you are able to.

Eleven years ago I walked into a dying society. Sixty paying members, a website like a ransom note, and a roomful of very old people who had confused being quiet with being deep. They looked at me like I was there to fix the copier. Where are they now? I will tell you where they are. They are in the back of the room, and they are on my payroll.

People compare me to Professor James. I have stopped correcting them, but let us be honest with each other, because you deserve that. James had one idea and a basement. He died alone at a desk with a broken radiator and two hundred members. James found the door. I am what came through it. He visited me, by the way, in the spring of 2019, at a Marriott in Tempe. He stood at the foot of the bed. He was smaller than you would think. He said nothing at all and I understood him completely, and what I understood was that he was sorry it had taken me so long to arrive.

I don't sleep anymore. Three hours. Doctors have looked at this.

I know things about you. Not you in general. You. It isn't something I do, it comes off me, ask anyone who has been in a room with me. There is a woman in one of our Western Chapters who sold her house last spring and brought me the check personally. I never asked her to. I want that understood. I also did not tell her to stop, because who am I to stand between a person and her own becoming? She has never been happier. She is on the waitlist for the Intensive.

Some of you have left. I know your names. I don't hold it against you. I only notice that it doesn't seem to go well for people, afterward, and that I receive letters, and that I am not the one who makes the rules about that.

Now a word about standards, because this matters to me more than you know. Several of you have written in about the look of certain recent contributions to this Bulletin. Believe me, I have seen them. Black pages. Gas masks. A horse. This is a premium organization. We flew a crew out to shoot me on a ridgeline at dawn, and I would like someone to explain to me why I am looking at a horse. I have spoken to the Web Committee and I have been assured that it will be handled. Nothing goes up on this site that I do not personally approve. I read every word.

Here is what is coming. I have seen it, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. There is going to be a day, and it is soon, when the people on the inside of this are going to be very glad that they were on the inside, and the people who were waiting for a better time to upgrade are going to be standing in a parking lot. I can't say more than that. Fellowship is $1,200 and there are payment plans.

I have never been more certain of anything in my life. I have never, in my life, been wrong.