WHY TEACH PEOPLE

Why teach people how enjoy all that is life and never again get irritated, upset, angry, worried, concerned, anxious, stressed, afraid, (unpleasant)?  Why teach people that they are infinite, limitless, unbound, life having a finite, limited, bound human experience;
that they are not their body, mind, emotions, but are temporarily a body, mind, and emotions;
to do what is in front of them;
to do their best for the joy of doing their best;
to receive all things with thankfulness;  
to not be mentally, emotionally physically attached, entangled, identified with people, places, things;
to have no mental, physical, emotional needs, wants, desires that must be met;
to not use people, places, things to feel pleasant inside;
to have no way life must go;
to not care about outcomes, but rather, receive them with thankfulness;
to be inclusive, not exclusive;
to have no biases, prejudices, philosophies, theories, theologies, dogma, beliefs, faiths, religions, make no judgements, and draw no conclusions about life;
to accept what cannot be influenced, altered or changed?
to have no preferences, likes, dislikes, not use ethics, virtue, morality, not call things good ir bad, virtuous or vile, good or evil, not divide life into dark and light;
to manage their mind;
to relax, release and let go when their mind or emotions have conniption fits;
to not ignore that your self-aware mind creates your mental separation from life;
that the less you think you are “something” the more you are everything;
to live, love, dance, and not take life too seriously.
to just be grateful they are alive having experiences?


Realized-self-realization-awaken-liberated-enlightenment-illuminated-spiritual-non-duality

column for facebook: out of your mind

Congratulations.  You now realize earth is a theme park like Disney Land.  You entered when young and will go home when old or whenever your ticket gets punched. If you’re a kid, you’ll enjoy it, but might throw a tantrum when told it’s time to go home (kids can be so contrary–and so entertaining...until teenagers when they know everything and are hilarious).

The theme park is a wild place, and anything can happen at anytime, which is why it’s also called, Adventure World, Death World, and Psycho Ward World (“Oh look, a squirrel”).

No one knows for sure who built the theme park, but people play guessy games trying to figure it out.  Playing guessy games is a major part of the adventure in the theme park, which is why there are so many guessy theologies and “My religion is the only true one and the other two thousand cause gas.”  

Since you now realize you’re in a theme park for a brief time, you’ll automatically no longer be so serious and will enjoy it all unless of course you still believe the bullshit your mind was fed from the moment you were ejected from your prenatal escape pod (you have to be out of your mind to enjoy all that is life).
 

AUGUST COLUM FACE BOOK, WILD RIDE ON EARTH 2ND COLUMN

 If you want a ride on the wild side of life, go to earth, get yourself a human avatar (ya gotta get born) and hold on, ‘cause you are gonna have the adventure of your life.  I might mention, youse gottsa die or get killed to get out alive.  Oh...and you won’t remember who or what you really are.  That’s the icing on the cake that makes it a real adventure ‘cause you’ll think yer actually only human.  Weird, right?

And if you want a certain kind of adventure, say a religious one, or be a plumber, soldier, husband, wife, or even identify as a giraffe, the earth adventure is your huckleberry.

I’ve been there a dozen times or more.  I could check to see how many times, but I don’t care.  I only go there when I want to enjoy holiday-hell for a few years.

Sometimes I choose the “Who knows what your gonna experience” adventure.  Yeah, it’s the wildest one of all, except if you end up a rock.  Booooooring.

One adventure I had was being a zillionaire.  I don’t know why I chose it, it’s not like we lack anything here.  By the way, yesterday, Ed wanted to ride on a comet.  He thought it would be quick.  Ha...he’s out there in space heading to who knows what galaxy.  Martha figures he won’t be back for dinner.

Oh...and just so you know, don’t go to earth during golden years, nothing happens, no war, hardly any crime, all the food you want, all everything you want, hell, there’s hardly any paper cuts, it’s like you never left home.  

The best time to go to earth is during an age of Kali Yuga (talk about demons...WOW!!) the age of darkness, the age of vice and misery, or the age of quarrel and hypocrisy, the age when all human constructs get flucked up and everything they built and depended on and planned for blows up in their faces.  Think of billions of humans living a fun life, and then (slowly at first, and then speeding up like crazy towards the end) it all turns to shit.  Go then, it’s the wackiest ride ever.  Well...until next time...”Hey, speaking of next time, let’s go as monkeys.  I hear that in China, they eat monkey brains while the monkey is still alive (though it’s illegal at times).  I can feel it now: “Ouch, hey, you’re supposed to eat the Cerebellum last.  It’s the tastiest part.”






 

DAILY COLUMN FOR FACEBOOK - THE VISITOR AND OTHER COLUMNS STARTING AUG 2023

 THE VISITOR
    Chapter One

I was sitting on a beach watching the sunrise when out of ocean mist and walking on foaming seas appeared a translucent human.  He stepped onto the beach, tripped and crashed face down in the sand.  Defying gravity he levitated from his prone position and pivoted upright mid air, laughing.  Unruffled, he settled to earth, firmly planted his sandaled feet on the beach,  brushed sand from his shaggy white hair and beard and jiggled his body like a wet dog.

I sat there, frozen in place, mouth wide open, eyebrows raised, and could feel the whites of my eyes exposed.   I was in shock, unbelieving that there was a Walmart tag still attached to his sandals.

He sauntered towards me like a man without a care in the universe.  When he was within spitting distance, he stopped,  flopped down in front of me, crossed his legs, adjusted his shimmering white robe, and said, “Hi, Tom, want to have some fun?”

I looked around me to make sure no one was watching, got up and tackled him.  We rolled around in the sand, ran out of breath and settled down, and I said, “You’re late, Nemesis.”

“Late?  You really said, ‘late’, seriously?”

“Just testing you,” I said.

“Good.  I thought maybe you had reverted to your pudding-headed way of thinking. Come on, let’s go for a walk on the beach and see whose minds  we can screw with.”
                   

THE VISITOR updated july 2023

THE VISITOR
    Chapter One

I was sitting on a beach watching the sunrise when out of ocean mist and walking on foaming seas appeared a translucent human.  He stepped onto the beach, tripped and crashed face down in the sand.  Defying gravity he levitated from his prone position and pivoted upright mid air, laughing.  Unruffled, he settled to earth, firmly planted his sandaled feet on the beach,  brushed sand from his shaggy white hair and beard and jiggled his body like a wet dog.

I sat there, frozen in place, mouth wide open, eyebrows raised, and could feel the whites of my eyes exposed.   I was in shock, unbelieving that there was a Walmart tag still attached to his sandals.

He sauntered towards me like a man without a care in the universe.  When he was within spitting distance, he stopped,  flopped down in front of me, crossed his legs, adjusted his shimmering white robe, and said, “Hi, Tom, want to have some fun?”

I looked around me to make sure no one was watching, got up and tackled him.  We rolled around in the sand, ran out of breath and settled down, and I said, “You’re late, Nemesis.”

“Late?  You really said, ‘late’, seriously?”

“Just testing you,” I said.

“Good.  I thought maybe you had reverted to your pudding-headed way of thinking. Come on, let’s go for a walk on the beach and see whose minds  we can screw with.”

UPDATED PERFECT SPECTACLES JULY 2023

 1


THE PERFECT SPECTACLES
 
CHAPTER 1

I entered the optical shop to purchase new spectacles.  As of late I have become aware that my vision has changed.  Nothing is quite as clear as it once had been. The shop is old.  I cannot recall seeing it.  The gentleman at the counter looks equally old.  His white beard nearly touches the center button on his coat.
“Good afternoon sir.  I have come seeking new spectacles.  They must provide a perfect view, lacking every distortion.  They must be the perfect spectacles.”
  “There are many eyeglasses to choose from,” he says, smiling, and then points to a long shelf absolutely overflowing with them.
  I give them a brief look.  “I feel there is a perfect pair I must obtain, but I do not think them to be among this selection.”
  “Perfect spectacles, with lenses true.  Yes,  I have them, but a note of caution, a warning, if you will.  Not everyone can wear perfect spectacles.  Let me show you what is available.”
  As he turns to obtain them, his words, "Caution! Warning!" Come fully to mind.  I wonder at the old man’s meaning?
  He reaches beneath a counter and lifts a wooden case and delicately sits it on the table before me.  He draws out a chair and I sit down. I look at the box.  It appears ancient, its surface ornate, intricate with carvings.
  Then, quite tenderly, the old man presses his index finger on the center of the lid, as if in a precise spot, and quickly withdraws his hand.  The lid rises of its own accord.
  I am not at all certain, but it seems that as the lid rises I hear voices, familiar voices.  I attempt to discern them but then too quickly my attention is drawn to the three spectacles resting in separate compartments lined in red velvet.  As the lid fully opens a gold framed looking-glass comes into view.  Its clarity and depth are enchanting, mesmerizing.
With great difficulty I look away from the looking-glass to speak to the old man, but he is gone, which is just as well for my attention is immediately and fully drawn back to the looking-glass, and the spectacles.
The spectacles are displayed in two rows of three, one row above another. At first I am drawn to the sixth one at bottom right and am reaching for it when my hand, without a thought from me, moves towards the fourth pair at bottom left. Then it is that I realize there are but three spectacles in the box. They appear as six, but it is an illusion of the looking-glass, which I suppose is made more acute by my poor vision.
With great care I remove the first spectacles and turn them about, examining them and looking through them  at a fair distance from my face. Suddenly they jump out of my hands and situate themselves over my eyes and instantly my attention is pulled into the looking-glass.
 




CHAPTER 2            
 
I am horror struck.  I am looking at me.  Not as I am at this moment, but as I had been in times past.  I am seeing familiar faces and hearing familiar voices, voices in anguish,   loved ones in pain, in pain because I am inflicting it upon them, with great passion, my personal hate and anger.
The scenes encompass every dreadful sight of my past.  The horror of it as I relive the judgments with which I torment not only the ones I love, but all who fall under my vehement tongue and deeds.
But that was not the whole of it, for I see that in my supposed righteous hate and righteous anger I did instill in them fear, and more so in myself.  With my clouded view of life and my narrow vision and false perspective, I see the misery and the pain that are my gifts to those I love, and all others, and no less myself.  I am judge and jury of all things, and but for the law, executioner.  My judgments of the world, and man in it, has assured my misery, and all this because I had been looking through less than perfect spectacles, those dreadful spectacles bequeathed to me at a tender age and then loved by me for so many years now past.
And then, as quick as it had begun, the spectacles drop from my face and into my hands.  And just as quick I return them to their resting place and draw back from the looking-glass.
I have looked painfully into my past. It is a poignant reminder of how I had viewed the world, and as a consequence, how I had treated others and what I had been and what I had done.
I look about desiring to speak to the old man, but upon that very thought and again without my consent, my hand moves toward the box and retrieves the spectacles at my far right, the first I had intended to look through.  And then, as before, the spectacles jump from my hand and attach themselves to my face, and immediately my attention is fully drawn in by the looking-glass.
I am not displeased with what I am seeing through these spectacles as reflecting in the looking-glass.  It is quite complimentary, really.  It is again showing me, to me, but it is not revealing my distant past as before, but rather, as I am now.  I am free of the curse of judgment, of judging people, places and things as if I knew all things, and I have but slight opinions.  My love is greatly expanded, and no less, my charity and gratitude.
I am seeing more clearly than before.  I am viewing life through an improved perspective, though lenses more true, and, if you will, through spectacles less distorted, less clouded, and brighter.  Yet, even so, I wonder at it, for there is evidence in me of a slight discontent. I cannot discern its cause.
I continue looking into the looking-glass and see that the change in my view of life, is not in life, but in me.  Yet how it came about was not at all clear to me, that is, until I saw the path I had traveled.
In seeing my past I realize that my journey has been filled with great personal pain, sorrow, anguish and regret.  As I view my own suffering, I see that a time had come when I had concluded, “I have suffered quite enough!”   Then it was that I rejected the things that had caused my pain.  Indeed, I also rejected the false happiness that accompanied it, the pretense of happiness.  As I look on I see that as soon as I stopped expecting people to value what I value, appreciate what I appreciate, think the way I think, believe the way I believe and act the way I act, my love for them increased greatly, and my joy.
But my greatest personal peace was not fully realized until I no longer needed, wanted or desired people to be different than they are, at any given moment in time.  I came to understand that a person cannot be what he is not, cannot be but who he is.  The truth is clear to me now.  For if a person can conducts himself different, he would conduct himself different.  As always, the event reveals the person.
Suddenly the looking-glass releases its hold upon me and I return the spectacles to its proper place.
I look up and see the old man standing at my side.  He smiles at me, and I at him, and he says, “Perhaps you would like to try on one of the spectacles in the looking-glass.
I look at him in astonishment, and then quick as an eye-blink I am drawn back to the looking-glass just in time to see my hand reach into it and pick up the spectacles furthest to the right.  However, before I can actually grasp them, I am fully pulled through the looking-glass.

































CHAPTER 3

As I overcome my absolute astonishment at the sudden turn of events, a thought comes to mind, if seeing is believing, then experiencing is knowing.  Yet here I stand not knowing what I am experiencing, and as for seeing, there is nothing to see, so there’s nothing to believe.  It is all whiteness, as if I had opened my eyes to the sun and had been blinded by it.
I decide to wait.  I wait some more.  Still nothing.  This is very strange.  I have been pulled through a looking-glass and there is nothing to look at.  Again I wait. I am not afraid, though I certainly do not know why.  Then I realize that not only is there nothing to see, but there is nothing to hear, not a sound.  It is as quiet and silent as a tomb.  I begin to walk. On what I am walking is beyond me to know.  I do not go far.  I am walking in a small circle, always ending where I began, or so I think, since I am not at all certain from where I began.  I wait in the pure whiteness of nothing, nothing at all-and in the silence.
I do not know the passing of time here, thus I do not know how long since I left the optical shop, though I am not discomforted in any way. I must admit to boredom, for beyond my inquiring of this place, my mind seems unable to reflect upon but little, almost nothing that might have occurred previously, and in fact, I am not sure at all that there was a previously.  I sense I am fading into the light, or rather, merging with it, as if it is a part of me, or I it.
I am trying, or at least I think I am trying, to keep hold of thoughts, but it seems the longer I am here, the less of them there are to get a hold of.  It is as if I am being erased.

Words failing fast.  Imagination, gone. Reflecting, gone.  Feeling, gone. Breathing, gone.  Everything, gone. Nothing. Nothing.  Nothing.
“Welcome back,” says the old man.
I start at this words.  I am again sitting before the looking glass.  My faculties slowly return, yet I dare not look into the looking-glass again.  I keep my eyes solidly set on the old man.
“What occurred?” I asked.
“Nothing.  Nothing at all,” He laughs.  “Is it not the same with life?  Think nothing and nothing happens, or rather, nothing appears and nothing but nothing is experienced.  The value of not thinking is like the value of sleep, refreshing, no thoughts, no something, no pain.  Just endless peace.  Very refreshing.”
“That is rather flippant,” I said,   It was not as entertaining as you might suppose.”

“My apologies.  Yet there is great value in the stillness of silence, and in humor, as you will see.”
“What do you mean, ‘As I will see’?”  I ask, not soothed at all.
“It is difficult to explain the spectacles.  They reveal what they will.  Thought I suspect they give what is needed, though how they know what that might be, I do not know.  And their humor is equal to your own.”
“Humor perhaps, but for whom?  I did find it interesting, the silence, the nothingness, that is...until I disappeared.  That was vexing, though how I knew that at the time I do not know.  But I know now quite fully.   My state of mind is such that I doubt somewhat that I shall find the perfect spectacles I seek, here.”
“You have but tried three spectacles. Perhaps what you desire will yet appear.  Seldom, if ever, to my remembrance, has anyone left disappointed.  I will leave you to your decision.”











































CHAPTER 4

As I reflect upon what the old man said I feel a keen desire to turn and again face the looking-glass.  I am not at all comforted by my desire, yet perhaps, if I control my mind, it will go well.
I am being most careful with my thoughts, keeping them in check, lest they usurp me again and cause my hand to rise and select a pair of spectacles I have no mind to select.  As a guard against it, I firmly hold my arms at my side, grasping the chair’s edge.  But to no avail, for as I turn to look at the spectacles I cannot resist the center one in the box.  And, as sure as twice previously, it attaches itself before my eyes (a comfort almost, for apparently I am not be drawn through the looking-glass as before, or so I hope). I direct my eyes to the looking-glass.
I see a cloudy haze, darkening, much like a cloud filled sky before a summer storm.  A slight fear takes hold of me.  And then, in an instant, the haze becomes as I fear, a storm, and it grows in violence.  The sky blackens and lightning flashes.  I hear the thunder.  It is frightful, yet it draws me near.  I cannot explain it.  I watch the storm’s display, but after a time, I think it might disperse, and at the thought, the sky clears and the sun shines bright in a clear sky.  Most interesting.  I wonder if it will again brew a storm if I think upon it.  I attempt it, but no, no storm, not even an inkling, not even a puffy summer cloud.  The sun continues in its brightness, What is this then?
For a time I watch the sun.  Then bored, I desire to know upon what the sun casts its rays.  With THAT thought, the looking-glass shifts to earth upon a meadow lush and full with flowers growing wild.
 How is it that the looking-glass reflects my thoughts one instance, but not another?  Or, is something else afoot?  I will try again, though not quite as cavalier, for I am now determined to understand my thoughts, for what use to repeat failure if perhaps success is but another thought away?
Yes, I think I have discerned it.  The looking-glass reflects not just any thought cast wildly or idly about, but creates only thoughts with great intent or great interest, and only thoughts imbued with great desire, which if so, is not without reason.  For in examining my thoughts previously, when the storm increased at my thought, upon what shown the sun, my interest was very keen, though at the time, I was fully unaware of my keenness.  And as to my intent to see the storm return, it was but an idle thought, a mere whim, an uncaring question, if you will, which produced nothing at all.  I will attempt again to create within the looking-glass.
I hold my thoughts in check, and my imagination as well (no image from me will this looking-glass have).  I lift my eyes and again look into the enchanted mirror.  I see not but myself.  Excellent!  As a final endeavor at seeing my thoughts reflect in the looking-glass, I think most earnestly upon a red rose, an as sure as the thought, it appears,
I am delighted at the game, most entertaining.  I play it for a time, casting thoughts and images, each appearing at my cue.  Interesting indeed that every thought upon which I sincerely and enthusiastically focus, appears.  But then, something goes amiss, a strange event.
The looking-glass, I think has gone quite berserk.  It casts thoughts within my mind and then reveals them in the mirror.  Yet surely they are not thoughts or images of my making?
I see a man walking alone in a forest.  Upon looking closer I see he is seriously disgruntled and upset.  His face has many lines giving him a most mean, if not terrifying look.  He has an ax.  There is blood dripping from its blade.  He is dragging a rope and at its end a sack.  What is in the sack is wriggling and struggling to get out.  With but few steps between he keeps turning his head sharply and casts loud whispers at what is in the sack.  I cannot understand his words.
I am horrified.  He  chopped someone and is going deeper into the forest to finish his work and hide his awful deed?  I cannot suffer to look, nor look away.  I must know the end of it.





































CHAPTER 5

The man has stopped amidst a thicket dark and deep.  Tree limbs are broad, hang low and intertwine.  If I were not looking down upon him, little would I see.  He drags his sack within a thicket, casts his eyes about as if to see if he is seen.  He scans the tree branches looking for eyes that might be concealed within, and then, as near a striking snake might hypnotize its prey, his eyes lock upon mine.  I freeze.  I dare not move.  Then a thought like a bright light dispelling  darkness strikes me.  How silly of me, it is but a looking glass.  Aaah, true it is, yet.... a looking glass that snatches one into its world
I can look no longer.  Quicker than another thought could come, I slam shut the lid upon the box of spectacles and the looking-glass that surely is from hell.  I am distraught.
At the sound of the slamming lid, the old man suddenly appeared at my side.  “What made you close the box?” he asks, as if I have a tale to tell for his amusement.  I stand up and move a pace away from the table, yet hold onto the chair upon which I sat.  I take a breath and wonder at it all, all that has happened since entering the optical shop.  I look about. It seems to be as any shop like it ought to be, except for that cursed box.  I make up my mind to leave.
  “Please, tell me what you saw?” he inquires most sincerely this time.
My words spill out like I have overturned a full bucket, “I saw a man holding an ax dripping blood and a sack which he drags behind him and whatever is in the sack is not yet dead and upon reaching a hidden spot he looks up at me and stares into my eyes.  He sees me.  And I am afraid the mirror will bring me to him”
“What was in the sack,” asks the old man.
“I do not know.  I did not wait to see.  I’m sure it’s frightful.  It is small.  A child perhaps.”
“Please, look again and you will see the end of the matter.  The mirror will not take you in.”
“How is it you know that?  I dare not. Yet…I am profoundly curious.  If you will stay at my side, with your hand upon my shoulder, I will look.”
The old man did as I asked.  Then turning to the box, he presses the lid.  I stay my spot, unmoving.  My eyes are closed.  My mind empty.  I hear the lid rise.  I wait for it to fully open.  I peek slightly, squinting, quickly, then fully open my eyes to see nothing.  There is nothing.  Nothing but my reflection.  I sit down and look fully into the mirror.  I am determined to see the end of it.  And then, with my determination fully resolved, it begins.
The man with ax firmly in hand gathers the rope and stands over the sack untying it.  There is no movement from within.  He pulls the opening apart and the sack drops around a young girl.  She stands up.  By all that I can see she is unharmed.  He gives a hand that she takes and steps out of the sack.  They exchange but a word or two, and then he gathers up the sack and they hide yet deeper in the thickets until I cannot see them.
Almost immediately, upon the path they had traveled, comes a band of what looks to be pirates.  At least they appear to me to be so.  They scour the underbrush, thrashing with swords and yelling as they go.
In short order, they give up the search and walk again the path upon which they came until they emerged upon a clearing near the sea.  Straightaway they are set upon by what appears to be the captain of a ship anchored near.  He yells and gestures in his madness at losing such a prize (the young girl I presume) to a turncoat from among them (the man dragging the sack).  I sigh in relief.  The mirror goes dark and the lid closes of its own accord.
I thought, how often I mis-read and misjudge things, always to my consternation.   I see and hear and pronounce as if I know, and do it all without knowing all.  Seldom is the truth wholly revealed.  How quickly my mind takes up a tale, a chasing of thoughts, and then concluded motives, intent, and finally, embraces its own misunderstanding as understanding.  I have yet to see clearly.
 True to his word, the old man has remained by my side,  that was, until I sighed in relief when the tale had been told by the looking-glass, and now he is gone. I know not where.  But I am at peace, no longer afraid, yet cautious, for who is to know what may happen next.
I look at the box.  I press the lid.  It opens revealing the two spectacles remaining and wonder if I should?  My eyes wander about the shop. I briefly look at the clock.  It is broken, I think, for the passing of time is not recorded.  It is set as if I had just entered the shop.  I ponder what to do.  Then I return my attention to the box.  Of the two remaining spectacles, one is to my left and the other is in the center, both within the mirror.  I relish not the idea of touching either one, yet feel compelled.
































CHAPTER 6

Just as I am about to reach through the looking glass I hear the tinkling bell above the door announcing another visitor to the shop.  I stop and look up.  It is a young man, perhaps thirty, wearing a rumpled suit that suites him not at all, for it seems twice his size, hanging like old drapes cast thoughtlessly upon a chair.  I almost laugh, but merely smile, yet laugh within.  He is a sight.
The old man greets him with great enthusiasm, much more than one would expect of a shop owner greeting such a poorly dressed, and certainly poor in funds customer, if indeed a customer he is. I pretend not to look, but manage just the same.
The young man has a ruddy complexion, as a worker might who labors less with brain than brawn. The old man greets him, and then the young man seats himself at a table not unlike my own.  I wonder if the old man has another box with which to tease his clientele.  I laugh at the thought.  One such box is surely more than sufficient for a shop this size.
They chatter for a spell, then the old man goes to the front door, opens it and leaves.
I am alone with a stranger, and of course the box. This is frightful.  What should I do? Not knowing what to do, I sit alert and wait, for what I know not.
The young man pays me no heed, for which I am thankful, and I doubt his interest will include one such as me.  Suddenly he leaves his seat and walks to me and asks, “Would you mind greatly if I took a quick look into the looking glass? It will be for just a moment.  I have but one question.”
I do not know what to say as my thoughts run together, "Look into the looking glass, ask a question, what is this box, can it answer an inquiry like a crystal ball?"  I am flustered, and in my agitation I get up without another thought and say (to my surprise) “As you wish,” and move away.  I stand there as a fool knowing not what to do.  I think he noticed.
He sits down, then turns and looks at me, perhaps to see if I am listening.  I pretend not to be, but how can I not?
Satisfied at my deception, he turns towards the mirror and says some words.  I could not hear them, though not for trying.  He keeps his voice too small.  A light flashes in the looking glass, then all goes dark, that is, until he rises, whereupon I see the looking-glass has become again a looking-glass. He thanks me and returns to his seat, and I return cautiously to my seat before the looking-glass.
The door opens and the old man returns carrying a black leather briefcase and gives it to the young man.  He gets up, thanks the old man and leaves the shop.  The old man returns to my side, smiling.
“I cannot refrain to ask,” I say to the old man, “who was that young and frumpy dressed man who you quite left me alone with, and that without any notice at all?”
“I’m sorry.  It was an emergency.  That ‘frumpy; dressed young man, as you call him, owns this shop and many more.  He works among the poor, thus his less than well-to-do attire.  As to my errand and the briefcase, he had me go to his office to obtain some funds for a family in great need.”
“Oh,” was all I could say, feeling again that not only is my eyesight lacking, but my judgments as well.  Perhaps I need more than the perfect spectacles.
“While you were gone, the young man begged a moment to look into the looking glass.  He spoke, it flashed and then went dark.  What of that?”
“I do not know what he saw, not a detail, but I know that through the looking glass he sees the pain and suffering of others, and according to what he sees, he knows what to do that will bring comfort, and then he goes and does.”
“I have been mistaken greatly,” I said, “and were it not for my shame I would not speak a word of it, yet feel to say, I am sorry, for I judge him poorly.”
“It is well,” said the old man. “Who among us sees perfectly with our understanding?  We can do no less, and do no more than to act our part at any time, and time will improve on how we view things.”
“Thank you,” I said.  Feeling slightly improved at his words, I was about to turn and face the looking-glass but was yet thinking about my self-centered dilemma.
I am beside myself.  I feel I am no nearer in my search for the perfect spectacles that at the start, and in truth, further away.  I think I am troubling myself too much in the search.  This box, the mirror, the spectacles, this place, the young man, and now the old man as well, all reveal too much to me of me.  Twice I have been prompted to chastise my thoughts, and in such short order.  I would stop this insanity now, but…there are two spectacles remaining.  It seems a waste to not continue.  My mind drives me so.  It knows no limits.  It must know.  I must know.































CHAPTER 7

And so again I take up the task (for a task it now is) and thus I sit and ponder upon the two remaining spectacles in the looking-glass.  I look at both, equally, so as not to be drawn to either, so as not to be yanked again through the mirror.
However, quite startlingly, I am presented with a dilemma, for as I look at the spectacles within the looking-glass, they disappear.  How can that be? The three spectacles in the box are situated where they ought to be, but no reflection of them whatsoever is in the looking-glass.  It cannot be.  My senses are lost.
I sit bewildered.  Is this my doing?  Have my thoughts been such, so amiss, that I have been rejected even by the spectacles? Even the looking-glass seems disinterested in me, for it’s lively glow has diminished, and amazingly my own interest as well.  It is not nearly as pronounced as it had been previously.
I look left, then right, hoping to see the old man, but as usual he is not to be seen.  I sit slumped in my chair.  It is over.  I am alone.
It is just as well. I must look a pitiful sight.  This is a cursed shop, and I am equally cursed for having ever stepped over its threshold.  And the box–bewitched at best or a devil’s tool.
I sit bemoaning my situation.  Before entering here I had been quite content with myself and the world, but now, now, well, things are different. One cannot return to a place he has left, thinking it will be the same, for one’s thinking is never the same once experience has done its work.  And in my case, my experiences since entering this shop have revealed me for what I was, and though delighted to see into the looking-glass for who I had become, I am now exposed, and the more so, and quickly at that, and quite clearly as well.  I have learned who I yet most surely am, and I like it not at all.
I desire to change, truly, but know not how.  I am a drift, perhaps in a sea of fate, but I dislike so to think of it in that fashion. Is there no help for such as me?
My family, friends and acquaintances, they are not so much different than I, which is reason for our common association and likes, but they are content with who they are, whereas I am anything but content, having seen so much of me, perhaps too much.  What shall I do?
The tinkling bell at the door sounds, pulling me from my joyless thoughts.  I look up, expecting a new face, but it is again the same young man, though this time I know him as the owner of the shop.  He is dressed now extremely well,  suited as a man of his stature demands.  He looks straight at me and walks towards me.  The old man is nowhere to greet him. The young man stops where I am sitting.
“May I speak with you a moment?” He asks most gently.
“Yes, of course,” I reply (I want immediately to apologize to him for my earlier ways, though I had said not a word to discredit myself,  yet I suppose he reads me easily without need of words.  I hold my tongue on that account).
“Earlier you were so kind to allow me a brief look into the looking glass, though you were then engaged with it.  I thank you for that.”
I smile my best smile and say, “It is quite alright.”
“Would you like to know what I saw when I looked within the looking-glass?”
I yell, yes!  Most dearly!  (but not a word passes my lips, not a sound does he hear, not a word of it).  Then, speaking calmly, I merely say in my nicest and in somewhat disinterested tone, “That would be lovely.”
He smiles.  Knowingly, I think.  There is a twinkle in his eyes.  I am discovered, but he is gentleman enough to let it pass without comment.
“I was on an errand most important, and after obtaining what I needed from the looking-glass, it showed me briefly your future, just a portion, which is why I returned.”
I do not know what to make of his words.  What did he see? And why did he see it, and not I? I shifted in my seat.  It has become quite uncomfortable.  What was he shown?  I wait.
“When I looked into the mirror there was yet your essence in it. A consequence of my interrupting you, for which I apologize, again.  I will relate what I saw if you so wish.”
If I so wish!  Of course I wish!  Tell me quickly.  Is it dire?  I said none of that, and merely said, “That might be quite interesting”
“Your future is wonderful.  A bright light to many who yet walk in the darkness of their own minds.  All things past have worked for your understanding, which is greatly expanded and brings you much joy, which joy you share with others just being your wonderful self.  You have many, many joyous days ahead.”
Should I relate to this young stranger my inner thoughts?  Would he understand?  I am not quite as wonderful as he makes me out to be.  If he only knew my pathetic nature that has cursed me so, and others equally.  Yet, I suppose, there has been some improvement.  I keep most of my pathetic thoughts and feelings to myself, well, except when biting my tongue fails it purpose.  Did he see details of my future?  How should I respond to his kind words?  Shall I be honest? And then I blurt out.  “I am not as wonderful as you make me out to be” (my brainless mouth has spoken without me).
He smiles kindly and laughs lightly, not offensive at all, yet revealing.  Can he read my thought as the mirror has done?  Is he wearing clear spectacles that I cannot see, though which he sees me clearly?  He is like the old man who I feel knows too much of me already.  Is there no privacy in this cursed shop?
“You are wonderful in so many ways, and in those ways you think not, they have purpose and serve you and others in ways difficult to understand, but serve none-the-less.  Wherever you go and with whomever you are with, you are serving perfectly, even should your thoughts be contrary.  I must go now.  May you continue to enjoy your journey, for it is long and bright.”  And with those words, he excuses himself most gentlemanly and leaves the shop.
Is that all?  No details?  What future is that, without details?  Journey?  Long and bright?  Poof! Not a thing to grasp, to hold on to.  And now look, he has left and here again I am alone with the looking-glass.  Though all said, his words have soothed my tempestuousness soul, somewhat, as kind words might.
I turn slowly towards the looking-glass.  I can but feel its mesmerizing influence again.  I have no thought now but to continue my quest, for has he not said my journey is to be long and bright.
I peek into the looking-glass most briefly, just enough to see perchance the spectacles have returned.  They have indeed.  Quickly I pull my eyes away.  I will take not a chance.  I will control what is to happen next.
I close my eyes, tight.  I keep my mind empty, nary a thought.  Then, when I feel most assured, I open my eyes and fully stare into the looking-glass at the two remaining glasses.  Ha! Nothing happens.  Good!  It will be as I propose.

 












































CHAPTER 8

I turn my chair away from the looking-glass with every intent of thinking about something with which to tease it.  But I can think not of a thing.  It is as if my mind has gone on holiday without me.  It reminds me almost as if I were back in the whiteness when I previously had been drawn into the looking-glass, when words had failed, even imagination, when there was not an image to be had.  Nothing!  It is almost the same now, except there is no whiteness.
Ah yes, I recall…well…not precisely, but the old man had spoken about the silence, and humor… if I recollect correctly.  Perhaps he was speaking of madness?  Am I going mad? “Think! Think!” I said.  “Think!”  There is not a thought.  Must I repeat again and again my failures.  Is this “not thinking” just more of the same as previous?  The looking-glass must think me a fool.  Perhaps it is so.
I try to think of my early childhood-nothing.  If I am not able to think, I am undone.  What is life without thought?  I try to think of what I like, dislike, love, detest, abhor, fear, relish. Absolutely nothing comes to answer my inquiry.  I am a void.  Surely I am mad.  Can one even live without thinking?   Yet, I am thinking....about thinking, thus I am not without thinking, just without judgment about what I am thinking.  Well…that cannot be all sour cream.
I have concluded that not thinking has value.  It is certainly quiet, even silent, except for my mind’s incessant questions.  It so needs to know, like a pestering child with endless questions.    Silence of mind most certainly would be a cherished holiday.  BE STILL, MY MIND!
I feel not ill at all about not thinking, not now.  It is quite pleasant, really.  I have no unpleasant feelings against a soul.  And no pleasant feelings either.  I have no worries, no regrets, no fears.  I am not anxious, how can I be, ha, I have no thoughts to disquiet me.  This is quite superb.  I am yet alive, or so I think, “Ouch!” yes, a pinch has proven it.
Good gracious, I am free of my mind, or out of it, yet, it is quite pleasant.  I am babbling.  I am bored.  This will not do.  Oops!  I am thinking again, and that without my realization, and with it comes my discontent and my fears, as always they are but a thought away.  Hummm, I shall look further into this matter of not thinking.  I must work upon it.  It seems a useful skill.  No ill feelings stirred, without a thought to stir them.  Banish ill thoughts, and vanishes my ill will and self-destructive feelings.  There is value in not thinking, indeed.  I shall think upon it.
Now what?  Shall I look into the looking-glass?
But if I look now, thinking so little, it will reflect but little.  I think I am not in control after all.
If I reach into the looking glass, will it take me as before, or will I be able to snatch a spectacles undetected.  I know not.  This is a dilemma.  Yet I cannot prattle about all day.  I must decide.
I hold my breath, aim my hand at the center spectacle and thrust it into the looking-glass.
I have it.  I pull back my hand and the spectacle is in it.  I look quickly into the looking-glass.  I have withdrawn the spectacles on the left.  I must have snatched poorly.  It matters not.  I have it, and it is not as yet attempting to set itself before my eyes as before, though for caution I am holding them at furthest arms reach.
I get up from my chair and move away from the box.  The spectacles are at my side having lowered my arm that they might be out of my sight.  I am holding them ever so tightly. Now what?  Surely they have no value if I do not place them before my eyes. But not so quick.  I am relishing this moment.  I shall walk about the shop.  It is a victory after all.
I step to go to the counter, but there is no counter.  I glance about.  I am not in the optical shop.  It is gone.  I do not know where I am.  All is a haze.  I close my eyes and reopen them, but it is the same.  The shop is gone.  I look about, squinting, and then fully open my eyes.  The haze is becoming something.  Aah yes.  Things are becoming clearer.  I am standing in a meadow, much like the one I had seen in the looking-glass upon which the sun had shown its rays.
This is absurd!  Is there no escape from my own thoughts? Must they all come to life, to fruition through that insidious looking- glass.  And what of these spectacles I yet hold.  I feel to cast them away, yet … what if it is my only passage to return to the optical shop…and my life?
I  sit down on the grass amidst wild flowers in the meadow.  I refuse to participate in this sham.  I shall sit here until something happens.  I came to the optical shop seeking the perfect spectacles and THIS is what I get for my troubles; and I shall not forget all that has happened previously.  “Humph!”  I will sit with my eyes closed.  I shall nap.
I cannot sleep. I look skyward.  The sun is at noon day.  The air is cool as it always is following a summer storm.  “Humph!”  But of course it is, I ordered it so previously through the looking-glass.  Why should it not be?  Why should anything be that I have not decided to be?  Good grief!  Everything is my fault.  This is too much.  I cannot bear it.  It is easier to shift blame and accuse others. But that will not do.  It is as I thought previously, I am undone… again.  If I were to wager, the old man will be nowhere here to be found either.  And the young shop owner? Perhaps.  He has helped me once.
I lay down in the meadow again, not to nap, but to wait.  The flowers’ delightful essence wafts through the air like a cherished gift.  The wet meadow has dampened my clothes.  There are trees to my left, a forest, and the sound of breaking water, and … what is that I hear in the forest?  Voices.  Angry, shouting voices.  I am frozen to my spot, yet know I should conceal myself the more in the high grass.
I listen.  The voices diminish.  The sound is moving away from me towards the sea.  What if there are others?  This open meadow will not do.  I rise up with great effort.  Fear has nearly immobilized me, yet I stumble to the forests edge to conceal myself among the dense undergrowth.  I am in an excellent spot.  No one will see me here.
I hear footsteps.  Twigs cracking, and a dragging sound.  It is approaching.  I hunch down tighter.  It is hard to breath crunched in this fashion.
The footsteps stop.  I dare not look.  I rise slightly and peer through the undergrowth.  I gasp.  I feel to run but cannot find my legs.  It is as well, for my eyes are frozen on the sight.  A rough man has opened a sack and therein stands a young girl.
I am puzzled.  This scene has played before.  I was then but viewing it as in my mind through the looking-glass.  Now it is real and I am there, rather here, or there, who is to know, and I am experiencing it.  Damn my mind for its games!  Must I live my thoughts?  If it is so, I know what is to come next, as sure as my thoughts create it.


CHAPTER 9

The rough man gives the girl a hand that she takes and she steps out of the sack.  They exchange words and then he gathers the sack and they hide yet deeper in the thickets until I cannot see them.
All falls silent.  I have not been discovered.  I breathe a sigh, and my tension leaves me as quickly as the thought that created it.  There is a lesson in this, and I was about to think upon it when my mind flies to the glasses.  Where have I placed them?  In my haste to dash from the meadow, I had no presence of mind to recall their disposition.  I search my wardrobe.  They are not upon me.  I will have to return to the meadow.
I listen and look carefully, then I leave my place of concealment.  Now which way had I come?  I am in a tangled overgrowth of intertwining brush and low hanging tree limbs.  I can barely make out anything at all.  I go one way, then another, then back again.  At least I think I am back where I had been hiding.  I am not sure.  My footsteps disappear as quickly as I make them.  I am lost.  I know the meadow is but a brief distance from where I had been, but I cannot find it.  I fear I have gone deeper into the forest.  I no longer hear the pounding surf.
What am I to do?  Without the spectacles I fear I am doomed to stay here.  I want to go home, back to my comforts, back to things I know.
I smell smoke.  I lift my head to the breeze and breathe in.  Yes; smoke; a cooking fire. Mmmmm, there is a stew brewing.  I suddenly realize I am famished.  How long has it been since I have eaten?  I follow the wafting aroma, carefully, quietly, hopefully to its source.  Then I snap a stick.  I freeze.  Even damp from earlier rain the crack of the stick resounds in the stillness like a gun shot.  Then I realize I am no longer alone.  I look without turning my head.  I think my movement has revealed me.  I see nothing, but I feel a presence.  I am afraid. The very hairs on my neck have risen to the occasion.  My breathing quickens though I am trying to control it.  I hear the blood rushing through my ears.  I am hot.  I want to run, to hide, but I cannot, I am stuck.
They are here, the pirates, looking, searching, one is coming at me.  He sees me and yells, yet it is as if he is looking past me at something else.  I turn my head quickly and look behind me.  Has he seen the man and the girl?  I turn my head back to the pirate just as he crashes into me.  I fall, yet…he keeps going as if he has not hit me.  It is as if he went through me, yet in truth, I felt him crashing into me.  I lie upon the ground and hear their yelling and hollering slowly fade within the denseness of the forest.
I sit up.  What am I to make of this?  Am I dreaming, and if so, why did the crashing into me not awaken me.  I have dreamt before, not as vivid, but when a thing occurs that frightens me, I awake immediately.  This must be more than a dream, yet a dream.
Well then, if nothing can harm me in this place, there is nothing to fear.  I shall immediately, and noisily, search for my spectacles.  This world shall have no hold upon me, well, except of course, I have not a clue as to how to leave it.
I pick up a stick and thrash the underbrush.  I am as yet not looking for the spectacles but merely trying to disengage myself from the bramble that pulls at my feet.  I must return to my first hiding place at forest’s edge and retrace my steps to the meadow.  Surely my disturbing of the forest floor has left telltale signs.  I shall proceed slowly.
I would say if asked, that it took me nearly the whole of the day to find again the meadow, but who can tell the passing of time in an illusion, yet the task is accomplished and I am again where I had begun.  I look intently about in the high grass where I had lain.  The grass is yet pressed down, and there, at its edge, lay the spectacles.  I am ecstatic and reach for them when I hear a commanding voice trumpet, “Stop!  Do not move!  Not a muscle.”
I stop moving.  What now?  I am frozen I am sure in a most ridiculous pose, bent half over, one arm reaching into the grass, fingers extended,  the other  arm high into the air behind me–a curious statue in a meadow.  Then I see it, coiled, neck bent, tongue flicking, a black serpent ready to strike.  Then as quick as a flash, a hand dashes between me and the serpent and plucks it up by its tail and moves it away.
Without another thought I seize the spectacles and place them in my pocket and standup to see who my benefactor is.  There is no one here.  I swish about in a circle, looking, but there is not a soul in the meadow but my own.
I saw what I saw, I am sure, but I cannot believe what I saw.  Surely there is no such thing as a disembodied hand, a hand only, no arm, nothing to propel it.
And then the thought, why had I been afraid?  Nothing here can hurt me, if not the crashing pirate, then not the serpent.  But then between my own ears I hear loudly and distinctly, “Are you sure?”         
“Well I certainly was assured,” I yell, “until you disturbed my surety with your question.  Show yourself!”
“I cannot show you what I am not,” said the voice.  “I am but a voice.”
“You were more than a voice when you snatched the serpent.”
 I turn again in a circle to see perchance, to catch perchance, from where and from what the voice had come, but there is just me.  And then a thought, the voice was that of the young man in the optical shop, perhaps.  I am saved once again.
I am beginning to doubt it all.  I cannot make sense of it.  No serpent?  No hand?  Certainly no body.  I am as mad as a hatter.    More mad perhaps.
I reach into my pocket.  Yes, the glasses are here–real.  But as to the other, was it just of mind?  My fear was real enough.  Had I created the serpent and manifested the hand, as if my mind has such power?  As if my thoughts can do such things?  What then is real, and what is illusion?  Where is one to draw the line?  Or is this all illusion?  Is a vivid dream not life, or is life a dream most vivid–in each it feels physical.
Well … Illusion or not, real or not, matters little, for whatever is of mind is real enough that I must engage it and handle it, for that, apparently, is what my life has become, if indeed it has not always been, which for thinking it, it is entirely possible.  Even my presence in this meadow may not be real or the optical shop for that matter, and now certainly even the spectacles themselves are suspect.  After all, what matters most, what is real or what I think is real, for do I not act accordingly to what I think a thing is, rather than what it is?  And surely the serpent would testify to these truths, for there is no doubt it can talk, if I but think it so.
Then, without a thought to deter me, I take the spectacles out of my pocket and place them before my eyes.  My eyes are closed and I wait to see if the very air about me changes, or the sounds, but there is nothing noticeably different.  I yet smell the flowers fragrance, and feel a slight breeze caress my face.  Yet I wait, eyes closed.  I dare not open them.
I reach up to feel the spectacles.  They are not there.  I open my eyes to see if I have dropped them, but upon doing so I am aware I am seeing through lenses. I lift a finger to touch the glass, and touch my eye instead.  There are no lenses which I may touch, yet my eyes are seeing through them, and I can see the wire frames as well, but cannot touch them.  I bring both my hands to my face and press against my eyes.  I feel my eyebrows, eyes, nose and cheek.  My hands say there is no spectacle there, while my eyes clearly are looking through them.
Out of hand I dismiss the incongruity as consequence of the continued unbelievableness  of  my adventure, and look beyond the lenses, expecting fully to see things unexpected.  I am not disappointed.
I am standing on a dusty road in a desert long, surrounded by distant high barren mountains.  The road stretches before me unto the horizon.  I see no end.  I turn about and look.  It is the same, barren, and the roads know no beginning.  Immediately I feel the scorching heat, and I, without a hat.  If ever I return to the optical ship I shall smash the box, and the spectacles as well.  I have been tried quiet enough.
What on earth am I do in this place?
I reach up to remove the spectacles, but then recall they are there but for my eyes to see and not for my hands to touch, yet I try, regardless, scratching, as it were, at my face to dislodge them, but to no avail.  They are as if mentally implanted and not a physical thing.  My hands drop to my side; my shoulders slump; I am wasted.  I would cry if it wouldn’t fog the damned lenses that are not upon my nose.
I hear music? Is it playing in the breeze?  It ebbs and flows again, as if carried by the waves of heat that brush my face.  It is soft music, as a flute might sound, one of reeds, a wispy alluring melody, a distant sound calling me.  I close my eyes to hear it more acutely and turn my head that my ears might catch from where it comes.  I cannot discern its origin; it is coming as if from everywhere around me.  I am encircled with it.  A sweet sound that conjures up images of dancing, swaying, singing flowers as if they have legs and voices.
I open my eyes.  Things have changed, again, of course.  I am sitting on a wooden bench in a park.  It is a vast flower garden and the colors are exquisite, reds, pinks, blues yellows, and all in different hues, and the perfume of them just enough to tantalize, but not overpowering.  I am shaded by trees, and in-between the flower bed is grass.  I have gone to heaven, and almost thought so when I feel a hand upon me shaking me. I ignore it.  It isn’t rough, not firm enough to end my reverie, though at this moment I think it not a dream at all, but real and wonder who is disturbing me in this park serene ?  I am being jostled and it has a voice.  It’s getting louder.  My thought is, Go away!  Perhaps I even spoke it.  I don’t know, but in that moment of contention, the spell is broken I am rudely propelled out of the garden park and am again on the dusty desert road in the heat of the day.  I open my eyes fully, and there is the old man from the optical shop, fully present, shaking me and imploring my return.  My first thought is,  what are you doing here?  Come to save a lost customer?
The old man shakes me some more; it seems surreal; I am looking fully square at him.  His shaking of me is incessant; as if he cannot comprehend I am seeing him and feeling him shaking me as well.  I yell, “Stop!” which he does, even as I see that I am back in the optical shop.
I yell, “What of the desert and the garden park?”  Then, awake fully, I realize the truth of it–‘twas but an illusion.
I am not at all sure whether I am glad to be back in the optical shop.  Not at all.  This place seems quite as unreal as does everything else.
“May I?” was the first words I hear clearly from the old man as he deftly removes the spectacles that my hands themselves could not touch nor remove.  And off they come without me having time to respond to his request.  He places the spectacles back into the box, then turns and smiles at me.  I wonder why?  I think I have not yet fully returned, from who knows where?   I have been so much elsewhere, I hardly know where here or there is.  Yet my senses are returning  and I speak with all sincerity,  “I’m not sure I like your spectacles, nor the looking-glass.”
The old man laughs and then reminds me of the warning he had given when first I entered the shop.
HUMMMMPH! So he had.  Why didn’t I listen?
I ask him, “I was in a desert, then a garden park, and then again a desert, and now here.  What of that?
“Your  journey’s of mind are your own,” he says without nary a tone of consolation.  “Who can predict them? It is all centered in you, whether real or not, who can say?  Yet this much I know,  how you perceive a thing is more real than what is true, for if it be real to you, is it not true as well, for you?”
“But  why a desert and a park?”  I ask, not wanting to let it go.
 “It is as a dream, the interpretation must by your own, as with life.  You live it; you dream it, as you will.  Truly your life, and your dreams as well, are equal to your thoughts.  What you think is more important than what is, for you make what is your own, and act the part.  A dream or life, it is what you think it is.”
“Well then,” I say, not satisfied at all, “the desert was hot, desolate and miserable and the garden park most pleasant.  A stark contrast, extreme even, and for what purpose?”
“Is life not contrast” How but by their differences can one appreciate them?  Is not life a journey of contrasts, and thereby we gain appreciation?  Perhaps that is all this look at life through those lenses mean.”
“Yes, well then … a return to reality it is, and if these, the last spectacles, are not the perfect spectacles, then surely this has been but a grand waste of a perfectly good day.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not? You will know when the day has run its course.”
And so I turned my wary attention back to the box and the one untried spectacle and the looking-glass, not at all sure I am up to the task.  Yet the prospect of finding the perfect spectacles is fully enthroned, though at this point, I begin to wonder the purpose of these journeys, when all I really want is to see life more clearly.
The old man has departed and so I steel myself and peek quickly at the center spectacle in the looking-glass, expecting what I know not.  Nothing happens.  I look up and gaze around the shop.  It has not changed.  Feeling slightly more at ease, and perhaps foolishly brave, I look again into the looking-glass. The center spectacle, the only one I have not yet looked through, is fading into the distance even as I look.  Unthinkingly, I put my face close to the looking-glass to see more clearly.  My nose actually touches it.  Then my nose goes into the looking-glass, or partly so.  I quickly pull myself back from the looking-glass as far as my chair allows and jump out of my chair.  I am clear of it.
Whether it is luck or a propensity of the looking-glass to do nothing with my nose poking around in it, I do not know.
Thinking no more of it, I slowly return to my seat and look into the looking-glass.  I find the old man.  He is within the looking-glass wearing my last spectacles and looking at me most queerly.













































 CHAPTER 10

I yell into the looking-glass, “What are you doing in there?”  Though I am not nearly as shocked as I am laughing inside for the old man’s predicament, yet I do wonder what is the cause of him being within.
“I am within, I suppose,” says the old man through the looking-glass, “as a consequence of your thoughts.  Certainly, not of my own volition.”
 “How can that be?” I ask.  “I only briefly, and much earlier, thought secretly that you should experience the looking-glass.  How can that affect you?”
“Is it not so with life?” asks the old man.  “What you think in secret manifests in life.  Is not a person’s life but a mirror of his thoughts?  For this cause, but this cause not alone, am I within the looking-glass, for your thoughts and you actions affect others, sometimes as much, and as quickly, as they do yourself.”
Hmmm.  Am I the cause of this, and if so, how am I to make a correction, or at least, balance the scales?  I laugh secretly again.  Has the old man not put me through five spectacles, and this one as well.  Perhaps he is deserving of this.  Yet I must do something.
“What can I do, to undo what I have done?” I ask the old man.
“Reach your hand through the looking-glass and remove the spectacles from my face and it will be the same as before”
I was about to reach within when the thought struck, “as before?” Does he mean I am to be drawn through the looking-glass as an exchange?  Am I to endure another journey within the looking-glass?  Yet… is this not my journey, and not his?  I hesitate.
The old man smiles patiently and waits.  The look upon his face is as if he is quite content with his situation.  He appears quite jolly, actually.  No need to hurry.  I will think upon it.
I turn from the looking-glass and was about to get up and walk about some what when I suddenly feel I am not quite myself.  Never since years gone by have I but entertained just and moral thoughts, and here I am at this late date debating with myself as to the fate of the old man.  Who am I?  Who is this person I am?  I thought I was different.  I am different, for my thoughts of yesteryear, appearing now, again, cause me to feel ill at ease. I will trust my feelings, for thoughts come and go but what I do with them, whether I act upon them or not, that is who I am.  I will retrieve the old man.
With that thought in mind I look fully and squarely into the looking-glass.  The old man is gone.  I am staring but at myself, yet was fully expecting to see the old man.  Where has the looking-glass taken him?
As I continue staring at the looking-glass I see something I have not seen previously.  A strange light is within the looking-glass.  It emanates from me.  The light is less than attractive.  It appears dark.  Is the cause of it my earlier thoughts to keep the old man caged?  But I have changed that thought and was about to attempt to secure his release.  Yet, my light is still dark.  Is it really my thoughts creating this light?
Just briefly I experiment (I have not forgotten the old man’s dilemma).  I think kind and loving thoughts, then quickly look into the looking-glass.  The light reflecting therein is warm and bright.  Then I think mean and hateful thoughts, and turn again quickly to the looking-glass.  The light is dark, even ugly to behold.  Truly then, my thoughts, though within, reveal themselves without.  Not only can I not hide them from myself, but they reveal me to others.  This is a sorry plight.  Is nothing secret?  Are we then not all exposed?
Suddenly I feel a presence at my right and turn from the looking glass to see, and what I see is the old man standing at my shoulder, smiling at me like a parent catching a mischievous child in the act.
“How did you get out of the looking-glass? And where are the spectacles that were upon your face?”  I then see that the old man is holding the spectacles in his hand.
You let me out of the looking-glass when your thoughts drifted to the light surrounding you,” says the old man.  “If you waver in your thinking, that which you were thinking loses power, while that which you are thinking increases.  You yourself released me when you changed your focus with your thoughts.”
“How can I, or anyone, have such power over others with but mere thoughts?”
“Thoughts, if you will, are the spirits of creation, and they are not powerless.  At the least they create the light by which creation takes form, and at most, they alter things already created.  Thoughts are powerful indeed.”
With that said, the old man holds the spectacles towards me and says, “Perhaps these last spectacles, are the perfect spectacles?”
I look up at him.  And then my hand does the unthinkable and snatches the spectacles from his hands and throws them across the room.  It quickly dawns on me what I have done and I turn back towards the old man to apologize, but he is gone.  Now what have I done?  I have offended him.  Yet again my thoughts have ruled my actions, and they have ruled my day.
And what of the spectacles?
























CHAPTER 11  

I gaze about the shop.  Truly the old man has disappeared.  I wonder if I should leave.  After my conduct I’m surprised the old man left, instead of asking me to go.   I can be so very contrary.  It Is an awful state.
I get up from my chair and search for the spectacles.  The least I can do is return them to the cursed box.  I hope they are not broken.  I look about the floor where they might have crashed, but find nothing.  Then I search where I think they might be, yet know they cannot be.  All to no avail.  I cannot leave the shop without replacing the spectacles.
The bell at the door jingles.  It is the young man, the owner of the shop.  I should hide myself.  A ridiculous thought, but one I consider fleetingly.  Hide indeed.  I sigh deeply and turn fully to look at him so I can tell him what I have done.
He smiles when he sees me.  He won’t be smiling long.  I smile back.
He walks over to the far counter where I have concluded my worthless search.  I wonder what to say.
 “I found these spectacles,” he says, in a humorous tone, and then laughs pleasantly. “Would you mind if I return them to the box?  I think they are lonely.”  He laughs again, and places them within.
 “I was going to explain that, though I’m not sure how that might have sounded.”
 “No explanation is needed.  I understand.  Introspection is not easy.  I marvel at your tenacity.  You have stayed the course, many have not.”
 I like this young fellow. No wonder he is successful.  His manner is easy and congenial, unlike my own.  His kindness is my encouragement.  Perhaps my quest is not over.
“If you would like, the last spectacles are yours yet to try.”
 “This has become much more than a visit to an optical shop to seek perfect spectacles.  It is as if though, in this search, I am creating a new me.  Is it not so?”
“The shop, the spectacles and the looking-glass each have their purpose, as do all things in life.  This journey you yourself called forth.”
 “It appears so, though I had no thought but to see more clearly.
 “Life is a journey, is it not?  It reveals the traveler.  Never is the journey void of the experiences one calls forth.  Every experience serves the traveler, thought at the time he may think it not so, yet truly it is so.”
“That may well be.  Yet it is hard to bear.  There is much pain in life, and yes, pleasure too.  The spectacles have been more pain than pleasure.  And if I again place them before my eyes, what have they yet in store for me?  Another adventure to show myself, even a disgrace in my own eyes?  Of this I have had enough.  Yes, I have experienced.  Yes, I have learned.  But in truth, I wonder if the pain is worth the price, for surely a look at oneself is ever hard to bear.”
“It will be as you decide.”
“I will think upon it, if you please.  And may I ask, what of the old man?  I did not mean to turn him away.  I was distraught.”
“He is not far.  And he, like myself, knows the course and its trials, thus there is no offense, and no judgment.  And who knows (for I know not) if he will yet appear again.”
“I will sit again and face the looking-glass and will see what the last spectacles bring to fruition.  I can do no less, seeing how far this has come.”
“Yes, you will see indeed that which you yourself bring about in the looking-glass.  Be not surprised at your doings which will be revealed, for they are yours and yours alone.”
At the precise conclusion of those words, the bell jingles at the door.  I look.  It opens, but no one enters.  I turn towards the young man. He is gone.  The bell jingles again.  I again turn towards the door.  It is closing, but there is no one to see, not at the door, nor in the shop.  I am alone.
It’s just as well.  Ever are we alone in life, though yet surrounded by all that is life.  And so this, my last journey, will prove my point.  And with that said, I sit again in front of the box at the table.  It was then that I notice the box is closed.
I quickly look for the old man (out of habit I suppose).  Yet I know he will not be there.  Shall I touch the lid?  What can happen?  What can happen indeed.
Without another thought to dissuade me I press the lid upon the spot.  I jump, just a little, as it opens.
I quickly turn away from the box.  No need to set it off before it fully opens.  I count to three and turn around and look into the looking-glass.  Well…I thought I would be looking into the looking-glass, but there is no looking-glass.  And there are no spectacles.
The box is empty, empty except for an envelope.  I look at it and cock my head a little to read the writing upon it.  I certainly will not reach into the box and actually touch it.  I squint my eyes to make it out.  I squint a little more and can barely read the single word upon the envelope.  It is my name.  I am reading my name.  It is addressed to me.  Cautiously, very slowly and carefully I reach for it and touch it quickly and pull back just as quick. Nothing happens.  I touch it again with just my fingertip.  My finger is intact.  I reach in and turn it over delicately.  The envelope is unsealed.  And then, summoning my courage, I pick it up quickly and remove it from the box.
I turn the envelope and lift the flap.  I pull out the letter and unfold it and read:
"Dear me,
I write this letter to my future-self, when I will be aged. It is a list of accomplishments I wish to pursue, and .... "
I pause my reading.  I reflect back, but recall writing no such letter to myself.
Suddenly the old man appears at my side and says, “That’s because you haven’t written it yet.”
You’re back!  What are you saying?  How can I be reading a letter I did not yet write?”
“Look into the looking-glass and you will see.”
“But the looking-glass has disappeared, as have the spectacles.”  I turn and point at the box.  To my surprise (I should not have been surprised) the looking-glass and the spectacles are there, except for one pair.  I lift my eyes to glance briefly into the looking-glass.  I am shocked, to see therein, me, me as I had been at fifteen years of age.
This is getting quite ridiculous I was about to say to the old man, but before the words can leave my mouth I am pulled through the looking glass and find myself in my room, in my house as it had been in the days of my youth.  I am sitting at my old desk, writing a letter.
I hear a familiar voice.  It is my mother calling me to supper.  She has been dead many years.  This is marvelous.  I get up from my desk and walk down the hall towards the dining area.  I hear the voices of my family in my youth.  Will they recognize me?  I have not seen a one of them in nearly fifty years.  I enter the dining area.  They are all there.
I look at my mother and father and at my brother and sisters.  I walk to each of them and hug them thoroughly and tell them how overjoyed I am to see them again.  They look at me very strange, like I am acting quite queer and out of character.
My mother says to me, rather sternly, “Do not neglect the dishes this evening, as you did last evening.”
I laugh in wonderment at her words.
My father asks me, “What humor is this?”
I do not know how to answer.  My sister looks at me in a peculiar fashion and says, “I see you visited the optical shop.  Your spectacles look quite becoming.  I think they are perfect for you.”
I have no inkling I am wearing spectacles.  I leave the dining room quickly, pulling off the spectacles as I run down the hall to my room.  I stand before the mirror in my room.  I am fifteen again.  I quickly put on the spectacles and look again into the mirror.  I am yet fifteen.  I take the spectacles off again and look into the mirror.  No change.  I am fifteen.
I hear my mother outside my door.  “Are you alright?” she asks.
“Yes, “I answer  “I will be but a moment.”
       “Are your new spectacles giving you a fit?  They will do that on occasion.”
“No, they are quite perfect, really.”
I look again into the mirror on my wall.  Truly, I am fifteen, and then appears the old man in the mirror, smiling and waving.  I smile and return his wave, and then he slowly fades and disappears. I sigh, and think, and walk back towards the dining area to my family.
I am young.....not old.   It was but a dream, or was it.  How can this be?  I have memories of a whole life, but am yet fifteen (and have those memories as well). Was it my future, or my past, or both?  I cannot tell.  I do not know.  I am perplexed.
If a dream, I have learned much, and at a tender age, and am the wiser for it.  If not a dream (what but a dream could it have been)?
I shall be more careful with my thoughts, not as rash with my opinions and not as quick in judgment.  Surely my life will be less painful and more  joyful.  I will a blessing, not a curse.  After all, has not my vision of things improved, is it not more clear, giving a more perfect view, with less distortion?  Yes! I think I have found the perfect spectacles...and at such a young age.....I think.





THE PERFECT SPECTACLES (work in progress)
COPYRIGHT JULY 2017
Wisdom Digest Publishing
Thomas Trost Braun Senior
ALL COMMERCIAL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE USA
You may copy for non-commercial use
                                        

celebrate life

 

my pic

 

 

NUTS

 

THE BOOK

NUTS COPY JANUARY 4, 2021

 ☛ Your first breath was a battle-cry, and your last breath will be a sigh, and in-between is mystery, wonder and magic as you spin life’s realities into your own.  So mount-up, rise to the challenge, engage the adventure for all you are worth, for in old-age and with fond reflection you will realize it was the struggle, the fight and the battle that made life worth living.  Yet how serene and joyful you will be if you engaged the wrath of life with a cheerful heart and vanquished your foes with a smile, a chuckle, and a mighty laugh because you now know, life’s insanity was but your own.

☛ Ninety-nine percent of humans have  beliefs about life, but are too busy to examine them; 78% are afraid to examine them; 50% don’t care if their beliefs are true; 97% believe their beliefs are the only true beliefs and everyone else’s beliefs cause arthritis, and the 1% who have actually experienced and know the truth about life and tell others are hunted down and killed by the 257% who believe life isn’t funny.  Only 1% of humans admit and  say, “I don’t know,” when they don’t know something by experience (most humans know the above is true, but won’t admit it publically, but dogs suspect it, and cats know it and show it with their aloofness, disdain and contempt for human beliefs, and thinking).                         
☛ Did your thoughts not help to make the person that is you?  Of the thoughts you could have thought who else but you did choose?  Like a seed your every thought produces fruit in kind.  Either you are victim of or master of your mind.

☛ Humans have been indoctrinated since birth.  An indoctrinated mind is a closed mind, is a prison cell, but... if your mind escapes, you’ll be mindless, and then what are you going to do?  You will be free to live life without opinions, biases, prejudices, and without conclusions.  You will be free of beliefs, theologies, theories, philosophies, and without judgments.  You will see life clearly, without a belief-programmed mind filled with unprovable mystical mush.  You will see life as life really is.

☛ If  humans think clearly, it’s a miracle of nature.  If humans think they think clearly, it’s a miracle of propaganda.  Most humans think that their thinking is accurate, thus the saying, “Every human thinks they’re right, and everyone else has bubble-wrap for brains.”   
☛ Life’s purpose is not to personally torment and torture you.  Life’s purpose is to torment and torture everyone, but not everyone boobs about it.  No human likes boobs (did I misspeak?).

☛ Life does what life does, and it doesn’t give a camel’s hump what humans thinks it should do, or what they think life should be like.  Life could care-less what humans think and believe.  If a human doesn’t believe in gravity and jumps off a cliff, life will pick up the pieces and build something intelligent.

☛ Life does not exist to please humans.  Humans who think otherwise are mental midgets and should only have children in case of an emergency.

☛ It’s all in your mind this game of life; it’s all in your head, the worry and strife. That which is real and that which is true, is just a potpourri of your mental-stew.  It’s all in your mind, stuck in your head, the living and dying the pain and the dread.  You think it; you are it, that’s how it works; try not to be a crybaby jerk. Life is your mind diddling with dark and with light, if you don’t enjoy it, you’re wound-up too tight.

☛ I used to let my mind run wild, untamed, unruly like a child.  I didn’t know my mind’s a tool that makes me wise or a fool.  I started watching every thought, banished the foolish ones I caught.  Base thoughts that will not leave my mind I replace with other kinds.  Two thoughts at once no one can play no matter what my wife may say.

☛ Though most humans justify their vanity and pride in the circus mirrors of their own conceit, you just gotta love them–it may even be a law.  Humans are the spices that make life scrumptiously worth living.  Without humans, humans wouldn’t enjoy life and wouldn’t have anyone to complain about.

☛ Your life would be more enjoyable if you could enjoy all that is life in spite of humans who have not evolved beyond mosquito-brains who want nothing more than to suck power, wealth and glory out of everyone so they can play god.

☛ Most humans are not capable of being happy unless life is willing to suffer their every nonsensical expectation, and acquiesce to their every cockamamie wish, which, if granted, would just make them more miserable.  Since life will not suffer human imbecility, you might want to be careful what you wish for, you just might get the nonsense you’ll hate.

☛Why were you born?  Two humans you never met had unprotected sex without your permission.  “Happy Birthday!”

☛ Life is a mindless birthing and killing machine, a life and death, cause and effect, action and reaction matrix of violence.  Life doesn’t give a flying leap if you cleared the cactus or got impaled.  Life doesn’t care what you do or don’t do, or what happens or doesn’t happen.  And you should be thankful for life leaving you alone to enjoy or suffer the consequences of your brilliance.

☛ You either do life well or you suffer the results of your ignorance.   Learn to do things well and things tend to turn out well, except when they don’t, which wouldn’t be a problem if you blame the right person.

☛ You think it through, before you do, or you will rue, your poison brew, and have to spew your noxious slew, and then undo your bugaboo, or you’ll be screwed, tied and tattooed, because you blew, thinking it through.

☛ You can be and do and have anything you want.  No one will try to stop you except your mind, its programming, your thoughts, beliefs, the grim reaper, and other humans (especially other humans).  Did I mention other humans?  Well I meant to mention other humans, especially humans that are programmed and brainwashed differently than you.

☛ You were born with three amazing abilities: bad breath, body odor and gas. They are your weapons.  Learn to use them. They may be the only superpowers you ever have.  

☛ Belief and faith are tools to prove a thing, not substitutes for a thing.  When you experience a thing, belief and faith have an end concerning that thing.  “Believe all things but only hold fast to that which proves true.”  “TRUTH IS THINGS AS THEY WERE, ARE AND WILL BE.” If you have not experienced a thing, you do not know that thing.  You can believe and have faith in whatever you want, but your belief and faith do not make things true that are not proven.  Belief and faith are excellent tools when not in the hands of fools.

☛ Raise up a child to believe anything you want.  Brainwash it according to your desires, and it will have great difficulty dumping the nonsense you programmed it to believe.  When a child comes of age, it will call the nonsense you indoctrinated it with, the truth. It will say, “I know this or that is the true,” when in fact, it only believes and has faith in things it has not experienced.   If you have not experienced a thing, you do not know that thing.

☛ There is only life doing life.  Life is everything, every person, place and thing.  When you look in the mirror, you are looking at life.  You are seeing life being the person you think is you, the person your parents named Dick or Jane.  What your parents should have told you is, “You are life.  You are a temporary, bound, limited expression of life.  Everything you sense in this matrix of life, is life being everything.  We just give people, places and things, names.”   Most humans who have not experienced the oneness of life object to that self-evident truth (no belief needed if you think it through).

☛ Life is inclusive.  Humans are exclusive (unless they have experienced the oneness of life).  It is human’s exclusive-thinking that cause much of the challenges of life.

☛ You are the result of billions of humans responding to the call of their hormones to roll in the hay, and here we are, seven billion humans without a clue about life.

☛ You didn’t ask to be born.  You didn’t choose your parents.  You didn’t choose your ethnicity, body, gender, IQ, emotional sanity or insanity, disposition, personality, abilities and inabilities.  You didn’t choose the time or place of your birth.  If you believe otherwise, prove it.  If you can’t prove it, enjoy your beliefs–but don’t say you know.

☛ Humans leak.  They are mostly liquid and have more holes in them than a sponge.  Humans will spend their whole lives trying to keep themselves from squirting to death just so they can be pickled, dehydrated or made an ash of in time for their funeral.

☛ Humans were born with physical, mental and emotional potential and a question mark in their parent’s eyes. Parents have no clue if their off-springs will be Republicans, Democrats or serial killers or whether they will even like cheese cake.

☛ You only get one body, consider taking care of it  just in case your life depends on it.

☛ Humans come with male or female bodies and mustaches in mysterious places. If a human  likes the gender it is not, that’s how it rolls, other humans roll-in-the-hay differently.  The side effect is a bonus.  Different hay-rollers don’t  birth serial killers, corrupt politicians or religious fanatics like Jim Jones (google it).     

☛  You were born into a family, culture, society, government and nation, and if  that did not unhinge your psycho-side, there are over 1,000 belief systems selling that the other 999 are Satan.  The odds are one-in-a-thousand that yours is the only one that is true.  To be safe, you might consider joining them all, or become an equal opportunity disbeliever.

☛ Life did not create unhappy humans. Unhappy humans created unhappy humans.

☛ Four keys to enjoy life: Have no way that life must go.  Accept the way life works.   Accept that your life is up to you.  View life as an adventure (or be a Yo-yo and be UpHappy when life goes your way, and downSad when it doesn’t).  

☛ If you refuse to be at peace with the innate and inevitable unpleasantness and discomforts that life inflicts–without your permission–well then, welcome to being at war with life.  In the end, guess who wins? The good news is, your moaning, groaning, irritation, upset and anger was yours to enjoy, and for others to suffer).

☛  I am free to do what I want at the price of consequences.  It is self-evident that I am free to think, believe, say, be, and do whatever I have a mind to. If I am good at running, weaving, dodging and circumventing the consequences for something I did, my new consequences are running, weaving and dodging (“Congratulations, Genius!”).  

☛  Human freedom is total.  Freedom to do what they want is their birthright (again, the consequences, not so much).  Since I am free, it is down-right against my dark human nature to accept other human’s freedom to think, believe, say, be, and do whatever they have on their minds. I only bitch-slap the ones that physically attack me, or are different than me, or dress funny, or have tattoos, body jewelry, pink Mohawks or are just too damn happy not being ME.    

☛ It’s a wonderful fact that I am a despicable human, if I get my jollies by trying to reduce other humans to sewage scum by puking on their freedom to enjoy life their way.  But, if I only throw-up on them to feed my maniacal starving ego, vanity and pride so I can feel temporarily and mistakenly superior to them, I’m merely a friggin’ moron.

☛ I accept every human’s right to be free, even as I want others to accept my right to be free.   I do not judge humans with my teeny-tiny-mini-micro-bikini-reptilian brain, because I do not want to be judged by that freaky brain.  

☛ No one has to be like me, so thankfully I have no twin.  If everyone around me is thankful that I have no twin, I must be a real jerk.

☛ If you die while being mean to someone, you will only get half a virgin–and there’s no guarantee which half or which gender.

☛ Life is going to screw you.  It’s going to screw you every chance it gets.   Imagine being happy and at peace and enjoying life even when it doesn’t go your way. Imagine that your life is going the opposite of what you want, and you are enjoying it.  Imagine that you have a really good imagination, because in the history of humans there was only one human who was pleasant all the time no matter what life threw at him, no matter how unpleasant his life was: the inventor of laughing gas.

☛ Thinking makes real and thinking makes you, you think it, you feel it, then you do.  You take what is and give it a name; you judge what is with a biased brain. It’s virtuous or vile; it’s good or it’s bad, perhaps your beliefs are driving you mad.  Your angst and your fear, your pain and your dread, surely you know it’s all in your head.  Life is just life unless you believe, it is what it ain’t and then you’re deceived.  The pain you inflict by judging another is why you’re unloved except by your mother.

☛ If I get annoyed, irritated, upset or angry when things don’t please me, but I’m content, happy, or joyful when people, places and things do please me, I am a Yo-yo.  

☛ If I complain, whine, pout, sulk, roll on the floor and scream, or throws things, when I don’t get my way, I am a crybaby.  

☛ If I am unreasonable, illogical, and irrational, and say and do thing that are harmful for me, or others, I am nuts.

☛ If telling the truth that all humans are Yo-yos, crybabies and nuts seems harsh, just think what the less crazy humans around them have to endure.   

☛ If a human is not enjoying all that is life, it is living in its mind (“Knock, knock.”  “Whose there?”  “Boo!”  “Boo-hoo?”  “Aw diaper rash...another crybaby polluting the planet”).

☛ If the shoe fits, I  admit it; I take the hit, don’t throw a fit, and keep my wits.    

☛ Life is simple: I got born; I play with stuff; I die.  The End...or not.  The only ones that know if there is an after-life are dead humans.  (if belief in an after-life makes you happy, THANK GOD something makes you happy).

☛I never worry.  I came with nothing; I leave with nothing, and in between there’s pizza.

☛ ”It is, what it is,” is what I say, since life will not always go my way.

☛  I had my heart set on it.  My mind said this way must be.  Then faster than an eagle life took it away from me.  I learned from my experiences, gained understanding to know, life will break the strongest heart of a mind that is set in stone.  I now put my heart into it, but on it my heart’s not set, and my mind like the eagle soars free and without regret.

☛ If you’re like most humans you got a body when they’re born.  If it’s not as healthy, athletic, shapely or as intelligent as you desire, you have two options, sue your parents, (might work in the world today) or accept yourself joyfully, because no matter how beautiful and intelligent you are, there are billions of humans with more, or less, beauty and intelligence than you, and comparing yourself to others will make you either prideful or  miserable, so don’t do it.  Don’t compare.  Just get on with your life and enjoy  what you got.  And if other humans try to put you down, or look at you funny, tell them to beat sand.  And never forget, there are humans born without legs and without arms, and without etc., and if that ain’t you, you got nothing worthy of complaining about.   

☛ Expect the best, be at peace with the rest, or “rest in peace” is all the peace you’ll get.

☛ You came with personality quirks, disposition, temperament, and attitude.  If you’re not happy with what you got, and won’t work to change yourself, and you think what you got sucks, buy a T-shirt that says, “I SUCK!”   It’s like an early warning system.  Other humans will appreciate you for your consideration, for the “heads-up,” so they can run away quick.  No one likes being around humans who complain about themselves, but the good news is, they’ll join with you if you complain about other humans (for proof, just look at this book.  It has sold a million copies and I haven’t even finished writing it).

☛ From the moment a human starts filling its diaper and crying and screaming in its crib, its mind is exposed to and polluted with mystical mush.  All humans are indoctrinated, programmed, propagandized and brainwashed, and though baby humans cause a stink, the brainwashing never stops.

☛ Impressionable human minds are fertilized with their parent’s assumptions, beliefs, religion, opinions, biases, prejudices, judgements and supercilious viewpoints and conclusions about life.  It’s not their parents fault.  Since forever, every human parent has fed their little pukey-poop-puppets their own indoctrinated bullshit version of life.  

☛  Life is a bunch of projects, things to do until dead, an endless potpourri of hustle and hurry, a do this, no, do that instead.  I absolutely fathom the secrets of this life.  It’s an endless array of prodigious forays, a nettling vexation of strife.   And when a long day is over, after all of my pain, I go to bed tired, having lost all my fire then wake up and do it again.  I want breakfast, lunch and dinner, and something between to do, and then when I die, I’ll give a high-five, and decompose just like you.

☛ If brainwashing during a human’s milk-sucking-years wasn’t enough to drive humans insane, along came their weird uncles, crazy aunts and goofy friends spouting their cockamamie opinions and beliefs. Humans might have survived that onslaught, but then came schooling, culture, society, vanity advertising and Hollyweird injecting their self-serving propaganda.  The murder of human minds as sane thinkers was not an accident.  It was a premeditated and preordained and a done-deal-conspiracy by humans to turn other humans into  mindless, obedient, and productive societal drones–and it worked.  If a human thinks it did not work, it is proof that it did.

☛ Everyone wants to be happy except humans who are happy being miserable. They don’t like happy humans.  They think happiness is a disease and misery is the cure. If misery is the cure for happiness, that explains why so many humans are happy trying to make other humans as miserably happy as they are.   So the bottom-line is, unhappy humans don’t like happy humans because happy humans are not as happily unhappy as they are.

☛ You can’t make everyone happy, but you can make everyone mad. How come?  Because happiness is an inner-condition, a decision, which means, if you get mad, you’ve made no decision to control your inner-condition, and instead are controlled by outside conditions (this is true of .999999% of humans.  The .000001% who are happy no matter what happens are judged nuts by humans who are nuts, but think they’re not nuts. Or as Kurt Vonnegu said differently, In an insane society, the sane are considered insane.

☛ Let’s start at the beginning.  Once upon a time there was only life doing life its way.  Over time life morphed into everything, trees, bugs, snakes, cartoons and rhubarb pie.  Eventually life transmogrified into a species humans call humans.  After that pretty much everything went to shit.

☛ If a human has a way life must go, sorrow is all it will ever know.  

☛ If a human has no way that life must go, joy is all it will ever know.

☛ From the moment you ejected from your prenatal escape pod your mind was bombarded with the mystical cosmic boondoggle that is earth-life and the nefarious nonsensical absurdities that pass as human thinking.  Your electro-plasmic consciousness creates the very delusion you call earth-life which mysteriously arose when two lost galactic orgasmic dumpster-divers mistook earth for an intergalactic bordello.

☛ Earth life is a mind-field that generates comical cosmic brain farts, and human thinking is its bullshit bank.  Watch your step.  Be aware that there are delusional or demented popcorn brains that promote, sell and encourage the putrification and petrification of  minds with the goofy concept that feelings, hope, belief, and faith are substitutes for actually experiencing truths. Belief and faith are tools to prove a supposed truth, not substitutes for a truth.  Don’t rest on belief and faith.  “Prove all things, but only hold fast to that which proves true.”

☛ Just because life is a hodgepodge of obfuscation and mystification doesn’t mean that you have to stay encumbered by your inane befuddlement about yourself and life.

☛ TRUTH is the authority.  Authority is not the truth. If a human gets truth from an authority,  rather than ferreting out truth for itself, that human is a believer, a faith junkie who can never be sure that what he believes is the truth.  That human is a leaf in the wind.

☛ Do not trust a human mind. At your best, you too are blind.  Prove everything that you can.  Don’t fall prey to a con-man.  Best intentions can turn foul.  Best be wise or learn to howl.

☛ Human’s nonsensical irrelevant and illogical screw-loose thinking only proves that humans enjoy delusional bliss as long as life goes their way, as long as they can control others, reap profits, or kill things they have no desire to understand.

☛ Humans that believe life should bend over and let them have their way with it (that life must happen their way for them to be happy) need something that will magically suck the stupid gas right out of their heads and put it where the sun does not shine.  However, these thoughts aren’t that something.  Most humans who are mad, just get madder reading these thoughts.   These thoughts get even more logically irritating and they can provoke emotional midgets to go berserk and start shopping at Walmart.

☛ If your thoughts drive you nuts, this book will roast those nuts.

☛When humans are ready to receive all things with thankfulness, and always be pleasant inside and enjoy all that is life (instead of having cares and concerns and getting annoyed, irritated, upset, angry, worried, stressed and afraid when they do not get their way) it’s usually because they have suffered enough painful consequences.

☛If you are not be ready to learn by wise counsel, you will most certainly continue to learn by the things you suffer.

☛ I always admit when I don’t know a thing, or when I am wrong, and should that ever happen, don’t be surprised if I avoid you. These thoughts are for entertainment only.  Should you actually have been entertained, good and well.  However, if by some moronic miracle you actually believe you gleaned anything useful from this work, you might want to see a psychologist so you can justify complaining about every little inconvenience you suffered, until the inglorious day when your wrinkled butt sits on a porch slowly withering away while your addled brain wonders, “ What the hell was life all about?”

☛I can’t recall if this book fell from the sky or if I found it in a cave or if it was dictated by an alien or is the result of a bean induced brain fart.  However, it doesn’t matter where it came from because humans are the evidence that prove human thinking drives humans nuts.  Though the book presents solutions, your results will vary depending on your desire to dump your parent’s quirky programming, dump your religious, cultural and societal indoctrination, and dump your government school’s brainwashing and economic propaganda.  The good news is, the success rate for curing human insanity is at 0% for humans who have not experienced the oneness and connectedness of life. With that said, insanity is underrated (which is detailed throughout this book).  Insanity is the very thing that makes earth-life entertaining, so don’t rush to become sane.  You might start an avalanche of sanity and ruin the insane entertainment insanity provides which would just piss-off the universe that went to a lot of trouble creating nutty, goofy and funny humans.

☛The supreme rascal and arbitrator and pooh-bah of life, likes jokes, made humans, hasn’t rested or stopped laughing since (now don’t get all religious on me...you can’t prove your religion anymore than I can prove I was once reincarnated as a doorknob).

☛If too many humans do not enjoy all that is life, or are bored with life, perhaps it’s time for an alien invasion of the pancake people from the planet Syrup, or a Twinkie famine or some  fast-food pestilence, however, it might be easier to get a hobby, like learning to play the piano in a foreign language.

☛Survival is overrated.  

☛Are you a frustrated and troubled soul, filled with worry, fear, and dread? And though among the living you breathe do you walk as if you are dead?  Do your shoulders droop and hands hang down?  Is mournful your very best smile? And though your mind is ever as nuts, is your heart overflowing with bile?  Are you inclined to pity yourself?  Is your pillow soaked in tears? Would you even have a life without your misery and fears?  The MIRACLE CURE is what you need; with it you’ll no longer whine. It will cure your woe am I looks caused by your I am screwed mind.  If perchance in your pain you should ask, “This cure sounds really great; what must I do to profit from it before it is too late?”  My answer true, if you please, is this (though you may not feel to do) smile and say a kind word to someone whose woeful as you.  Give of yourself and do a kind deed (a secret gift will do) and give among the needy poor, to they who are blessed less than you.  And then like sunshine warms a cold day, you will feel in your heart and soul, a glowing light that makes the dark bright and takes away your woes.

☛When it’s a done deal when it’s a fact and you can’t undo it because that’s that, you have two choices: You can resist that which you can’t change, get upset and angry, condemn and cast blame, or you can surrender to that moment in time and deal with it pleasantly with clearness of mind.

☛Belief and faith are tools to prove or disprove things, not substitutes for  things.  When you experience a thing, belief and faith have an end concerning that thing.  Believe all things are possible, but only  accept things you have experienced and you’ll be less likely to be deceived.  Accepting that which has not been proven true, is illogical, irrational, and nonsensical and is what many humans do.  They believe stories that  have not proven true.  The wrong use of belief and faith are just two of life’s ways to make sure earth-life stays captivatingly notorious, wacky and deadly.

☛If the untold truth were told, humans who rely on belief and have faith are lazy, unknowingly, deceivers, and self-delusional liars spewing things that are not in their experience, things they do not actually know, things they have no first hand knowledge of and no experience about (though they often say they “know,” when in fact, they merely trust their feelings, trust what they believe, or have faith in).  Belief and faith are in the gossip, here-say, rumor category–inadmissable in a court of law.  Why?  Because, “I believe he did it, or,  I have faith that he did it,” is delusional mental mush with no value except for alerting other humans that those humans look at life through belief-and-faith fogged spectacles, which, luckily, gives everyone else a head’s-up so that they can try to deal with them without them getting offended and killing non-believers (believe it or not, the wrong use of belief and faith is a scourge on earth).

☛If a human is programmed, brainwashed and indoctrinated, or is mentally and emotionally constipated or too full of itself, or takes itself and life too seriously, and if it is looking for a book so it can feel insulted and offended so it can rant and rave about how much it is suffering, this book is its huckleberry.

☛Your goal is not to suffer life but to enjoy life.  Your goal is to enjoy life so much that all the miserable people will think YOU are the one that’s nuts.

☛Humans tend to get irritated or upset with thoughts they don’t agree with–with thoughts that run contrary to their indoctrination.  Humans have a perfect right to their naive, juvenile, unlearned, low-information or ignorant assumptions, opinions, biases, prejudices, theories, philosophies, theologies, conclusions, beliefs and judgements about life, however, no human in the history of ignorance has ever dodged the consequences of their nonsensical  thinking.  

☛A closed mind (a mind that thinks it knows things it has not actually experienced) produces a self-made prison-garden of noxious weeds and a wasteland of possibilities crushed.

☛It’s thrilling to know that human mistakes of judgement help make earth-life a spook alley of self-induced consequential terror that keeps earth a boiling, seething cauldron of perplexing mystical impossibilities. Why is it thrilling?  You wouldn’t enjoy life if it wasn’t.

☛The energy that is life is boundless, limitless and infinite, whereas human life, is bound limited and finite.  Knowing the difference should give you caution against trusting to your own understanding about life.

☛You might want to question life’s intelligence.  After all, it did become humans, and humans build and drops nuclear bombs.  Oh well, “That’s life.”

☛A human that doesn’t suck is always pleasant company and easy to get along with; never gets irritated, upset or angry; is never  concerned, worried or afraid; is never nervous, anxious or stressed; has no regrets, no likes, no dislikes, no opinions, biases, prejudices, beliefs, judgments or conclusions; is not  attached to and not entangled with or identified with any person, place or thing;  has no physical, mental, emotional needs, wants and desires that must be met, and IS ALWAYS PLEASANT INSIDE no matter how unpleasant it is outside.  If you are like that, take your pulse.  You’re probably dead.

☛Using words to explain things creates conundrums, contradictions, enigmas, oxymorons, duality, contrast, opposites, pimples, warts and mental compost. Words (thoughts) are inaccurate representations of what reality isn’t.  The only somewhat accurate reality is what you sense, without translating what you sense into mental mush.

☛Humans are bound by the limited reality created by their body’s senses and their limited mental interpretations.   Human thoughts are but stored memories from birth written on the blank slate of human’s silly putty minds.  What humans sense and think are clouded, shrouded and inexact facsimiles of what reality really is, often made kookier by injecting belief and faith.

☛Humans who do not examine the content of their minds (thoughts, beliefs, judgements, biases, prejudices, opinions and conclusions) and do not dump their bullshit, will never be free from their mental and emotional hell-ride, yo-yo swings and crybaby eruptions.  They  will never be free from their mental and emotional self-created hell, insane asylum, nut factory and crybaby prison, and they will live their whole lives in their delusional minds until they’re liberated from them when they become something worthwhile and useful:  compost.

☛Success is not determined by how much wealth, fame, power or education you have in your fridge.  You are having a successful life if you feel pleasant and are loved and appreciated by everyone and everything.  If you feel pleasant inside and are pleasant outside even when people and life are unpleasant, you are enjoying a successful life, unlike humans who stub their toes or get a paper cut and think hell has descended to personally torment and torture them, and in return they create hell for everyone within spitting distance.

☛Humans want to be happy. To be happy, they must stop thinking irrationally, stop thinking that life has to happen their way.

☛In an insane society that seeks pleasure by doing and doing and doing, the blissfully content who do nothing, nothing, nothing are thought insane.  Considering the state of the world, if doers stopped doing, then you wouldn’t need so many benevolent doers undoing what selfish doers do, which is serving themselves at the expense of others.

☛Life is this way:  If a human is pleasant company, it is welcome company.  If it is unpleasant company, its very presence is a magnificent fart.

☛If you are frequently unhappy, you did it.  Life had nothing to do with it.

☛Pleasantness is an inside job, not an outside condition.

☛All your problems are mental and emotion problems.  All your problems are personal problems.  Stop being your problem. Accept the way life happens, the way life works.

100☛Thinking is useful in moderation.

☛Thinking is a terrible master, but a useful servant.
☛Do unto others as you want done to you is a practical rule that most often proves true. If you’re selfish and mean, a creep in disguise, may the pain that you suffer open your eyes. If you’re kind and loving, a saint in the flesh, the joy that you give is the joy that you get.

☛If you turn instant crybaby or feel irritated, upset or angry when life doesn’t happen the way you want, you have a chronic and recurring case of Life Sucks.

☛ If your mind turns sour-puss and pouts when you critique it; if your mind rants and raves  and calls you names when you criticize its thinking and beliefs, and if your mind bounces from Jekyll to Hyde when you take a humorous poke at its irrational and diabolical plans to take over your world one brain cell at a time, then maybe it’s time for you to reflect on who is the boss–you, or your mind and the bullshit you’ve been fed since birth.

☛When humans think, trouble isn’t far behind.  When humans believe, hell breaks down the door, and when humans have faith, the devil is in the details (hope, belief, faith, feelings are tools to discern truth, not substitutes for truth–us them properly and they are miracle workers.  Use them improperly and you can justify killing everyone).

☛Life is more joyful when you consciously experience life, instead of mind-screwing it by living in the memory of your past-failures-to-comprehend-the-reality-that-is-really-life.

☛Living your life in your mind (memories) is a poor substitute for actually living life. Try to live life consciously in the present.  Let the dead rest.  Don’t live life in your mind.

☛If your brain is full of  air-pillows and bubble-wrap, you’re a mental and emotional package en route to the dead-letter office of life.

☛Fix what’s unacceptable and accept what’s unfixable or your life as a handy-man needs fixing.

☛Accept what can’t be changed, by accepting that you can change, and be happy when things unchangeable and inevitable happen.

☛Don’t kick against the pricks of life and people won’t call you a prick (because you won’t be one).

☛Humans have more joy, peace and happiness if they control their thoughts and emotions.  To change deep-grooved thought patterns takes time, takes work, takes consistency, concentration and focus, and some humans just don’t want to do the work.  It’s much easier for them to continue their miserable way of looking at life.  Maybe it’s best to leave them in their misery, and spend your time with humans who actually have working brain cells and want to use them for something besides a doorstop and a complaint department. No need to waste your time on the Dumb and Dumber Dipsticks of Life. Leave them alone and let their suffering be their teacher. When they’re ready, they’re ready, until then, sharing wise counsel is like throwing pearls before swine.  They will turn and rend you, or at the least, they’ll tell you to mind your own business (which is good advice). Better to just give them this book and watch them eat it.

☛If you do not watch and control your every thought, word and deed you’re like most humans.  You’ll arrive at the end of your life and blame the wrong human.  If you watch your thoughts you can work on your mind to not be nuts.  If you refuse to work on it, you can always use your mind for squirrel bait.

☛Words create mental slaves.  It’s not called spelling (casting a spell) for nothing.

☛YOU are the Genie in the lamp.  You make the wish and fulfill it. Getting what you wish for is like magic.  The universe (life) is intelligent.  It will respond.  Be wise.  Be careful.  You may get the folderol you wish for.

☛By now you have noticed, and maybe complained to yourself, that some thoughts are repetitious, merely restating things using different words or sequences of words.  You’re right.  Remember how you learned the Times Table?  Rote learning.  Repetition. Though admittedly, repetition wasn’t my intent.  I just like to write. I figure if I practice enough, and go back to school, I might be able to get a D- for trying.

☛Knife and mind are tools.  If a knife has a mind of its own and cuts without permission it’s dangerous.  If a mind thinks without permission, its owner is a fool.

☛Life is life, the rest is perspective and attitude, and as if that’s not enough to drive you nuts, you may also have Crybaby Disease. THE SYMPTOM:  You freak-out when life doesn’t happen your way.  THE CURE:  Accept that life will not always happen your way.  HOW:  Don’t kick a flat tire.  Don’t give the flat tire your energy–no thoughts, no emotions. Don’t get irritated, upset or angry.  Just fix the freaking tire instead of freaking-out and kicking the freaking tire.  Kicking the tire only makes it mad.  And if you kick the tire you are entertainment and should get a job as a circus clown.  Don’t be a clown.

☛Humans are crybabies.  Crybabies litter the landscape like soiled underwear and you can’t go anywhere without stepping in one, and since hunting them is illegal, they stalk humans.

☛You might be a crybaby if you let your thoughts free-range and feed off your unbridled needs, wants and desires, and you will stay that way until you decide to bridle your self-centered, vain, prideful and egotistical appetites by controlling the thoughts that also make you an obnoxious jerk.

☛A crybaby requires a never-ending supply of pacifiers to be happy and if it doesn’t get them it will have a toxic emotional meltdown and poison everyone who couldn’t find the door fast enough.

☛There are humans who think everything is a crisis and complain, bellyache, whine and rage through life, and are, for all intents and purposes, professional crybabies who can’t seem to come to grips with the reality that  life will not cater to their every fancied need, want and desire, when in fact, compared to many people, they have good lives, great lives, even awesome lives, better lives than the kings and queens of yesteryear and better lives than most people on the planet today.  Don’t be a professional crybaby.  Do it for free.

☛Wrinkles and dehydration are two symptoms of crybabies.  The worst symptom is no blind dates.  Crybabies can’t have blind dates because they have no friends that will pawn them off on people that their friends (that they don’t have) don’t like.

☛You will meet people who turn mean and ugly when they don’t  get their way or get what they want.  You will work with people who get irritated, upset, angry or violent when life doesn’t meet their expectations.  You may even marry a person who turns sour and venomous when vexing things happen to him or her.  And you may birth and raise little humans who are never satisfied, who cry, moan and complain and never grow-up.  And if that’s you.  Congratulations!  You’ve developed a unique and cherished talent sought for  by no one, which is, to live in hell before you’re dead.

☛If you are not a crybaby you are worth a million Prozac.  If you are one, don’t stop taking them.

☛You might be a crybaby if your attitude is graveyard depressed and you think life is a smelly dumpster in a greasy alley and you spew a funeral halo and have a decomposing aura.  If that is you, then not only is it not fun being you, it’s not fun being near you or doing anything with you (burying you is the exception).

☛A crybaby is like a yo-yo.  One moment it’s up, the next it’s down.  A Yo-Yo hates experiences that do not fulfill its physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs, wants and desires, and it gets angry during experiences that do not validate its beliefs, values, opinions, conclusions, and expectations, which means planet earth is a Yo-Yo factory.

☛The most common nut (and the least palatable nut) in the nut bowl of life is the crybaby nut who complains to get what it wants and complains when it gets it.  Complainers are the black holes of life sucking joy out everyone’s lollipop.

☛If you are a crybaby and at the astronomical bad Las Vegas odds you want to stop moaning and groaning when not having sex, the military has a cure.  They need targets.
 
☛If there were fewer crybabies trolling social events I might go again.  When I used to go, and they started complaining and whining, I’d say, “Would you like some cheese with that whine?”  

☛People who live with a crybaby have mastered the ability to walk on eggs, which is lucky for crybabies who would otherwise be instant omelets.

☛Being a crybaby is not as bad as being an emotional-drama-pimp. However, of all the energy-vampires, crybabies get more suck per mile than any other suckers.

☛Everyday is a wonderful day because nothing has to go my way.

☛Crybabies have firecrackers for brains and everyone they meet carries a lit match, and if you spark them, they will ignite and explode in a New York minute (3 seconds).  When that happens I say, “Please excuse me if I don’t hang around for the fireworks. I have to go throw myself on a cactus.”

☛Most people would rather watch reruns of reruns of bad sequels than watch a crybaby take an emotional dump when it doesn’t get what it wants.

☛Homegrown crybabies are not as bad as birthed crybabies.  Homegrown crybabies were programmed to fear life.  They think life is trying to hurt them and kill them (which it is) thus they are jumpy, nervous, uptight, stressed-out, high-strung and extremely volatile and live on the edge of an always deteriorating cliff that people would push them off if they could get away with it.

☛Crybabies destroy families, friendships, and careers, and then, after destroying their lives, they join Crybaby Anonymous because only other crybabies will suffer their childish, juvenile and destructive behavior, but only if they bring punch and cookies and leave early.

☛You can tell you’re in the presence of a crybaby when you hear its mantra, “Hey...I’m here.  Let’s talk about me, about my life.  I have needs, wants and desires that need your attention, and I didn’t come here to hear you babble about your inconsequential life.”

☛If you think people should love you and coddle you for your unstable mental and emotional pimple explosions, you’re not just a crybaby, you’re a looney-tunes character.

☛There are as many varieties of crybabies as there are broken pacifiers, broken homes and destroyed lives, though extreme crybabies don’t notice until they’re six feet under and wondering why people are peeing on their grave.

☛Sneaky Crybabies are like Halloween tricker-treaters pretending to be who they are not.  It isn’t until after they are in a relationship that they take off their masks and you discover you’ve been tricked and get no treat.

☛Whiny Crybabies spray and pollute a room worse than skunk-stink.  Whiners dish out disharmony when they pout and mope and sulk. They lack appreciation and are so self-centered they think humans were invented to take them for a walk and pick up their poop.

☛Complaining, fault-finding, negative crybabies, judge and condemn. They walk and talk unfiltered gloom and doom. If it’s your misfortune to run into one (and you will)  hopefully its emotional support duck wasn’t hurt; you won’t be as lucky.

☛Mean-Spirited Crybabies are cruel and brutally shrewd.  They build themselves up by mentally, emotionally and physically pulling and pushing and tearing you down.  They are the dinky dicked bullies on the playground of life.

☛Con Artist Crybabies lack empathy and use their minds, emotions, and bodies to manipulate, trick,  scam, bamboozle, deceive, lie and steal.  They can’t understand why the people they’ve bamboozled don’t appreciate their free screwing.

☛The most common sound of the crybaby species in the wild is, “LIFE ISN’T FAIR!”

☛When a baby is born it gets spanked and cries.  Adult crybabies never got over it.  They just keep on crying and get emotionally louder, and if you spank them they like it.

☛Crybabies tend to be illogical, unreasonable and disconnected from reality–those are their good points.

☛There are real crybabies and fake crybabies.  Real crybabies come with bad-baggage.  They arrive here genetically screwed-up. They are prideful, arrogant, self-important, overbearing, insulting, abusive, vain,  conceited, in love with themselves too much, egotistical, begrudging, resentful, envious, jealous and greedy (if it wasn’t for all that they’d just be ordinary jerks).  Fake crybabies bought into bad-baggage as a way to deal with life.  They become narcissistic chamaeleon crybabies and politicians.

☛The U.S.A. is the Crybaby Capital of the World.  Everyone accepts the reality that on their worst days all humans are crybabies and yet most them realize they have to try and deal with each other nicely, or use the only option that always works–murder, which historically is the only thing humans have perfected.   However, you might prefer a smile, a laugh and a mighty chuckle and admit that life is nuts, humans are nuts and crybabies are Democrats, Republicans and the devil incarnate when they don’t get their way.

☛Why are humans, crybabies?  Your parents began programming you with the sounds of snowflakes melting on an open fire.  Immediately after your birth your parents reacted to your midnight mindless shrieking by asking (during the torturous experience)  “Remind me why we had this kid?” and then they inadvertently continued to program you to be forever-after a crybaby by catering to your every discomfort, and then, under penalty of law they were forced to endure and suffer you until their glorious release when you turned forty-five and moved out of your bedroom which they immediately turned into an indoor swimming pool filled with sharks.

☛When you were a baby you screamed when you got physically uncomfortable and someone cared for you so you’d be comfortable and shut-up.  As a child, you cried when you got emotionally uncomfortable and someone indulged you so you’d be satisfied and shut-up.  As a youth, you belly-ached when you got mentally uncomfortable and someone counseled you so you’d feel gratified and shut-up.  As a teenager, you complained when you got spiritually uncomfortable and someone guided you so you’d feel at peace and shut-up. And now as an adult you cry, scream, belly-ache and complain when life doesn’t cater to your every silly need, want and desire and everyone wishes you’d shut-up.

☛Life doesn’t care if you cry, scream, belly-ache, complain or go nuts.  Life is neutral; life is impersonal; life is unbiased and life doesn’t care what you think it IS,  or what you think it should be.  If you are still a programmed-crybaby it is because your conditioning, indoctrination and brainwashing  from  youth  are  working  and it  can be summed up in this:  Most people will not depart from their childhood indoctrination and programming.  Which means, if you do not remove your program of unrealistic and irrational expectations of what life  should be, and reprogram yourself to accept life for what it actually is, you will not only be miserable most of your life but you will exit life the way you entered, a crybaby (and even God is freaking out in case St. Peter messes up and lets you in).
56.  You don’t want to be a crybaby.  You want to be at peace and happy all the time, but you’re not.  What’s the problem?  You are the problem.  Why?  Because you have not taken control of your mind, thoughts,  emotions, body, and life-energy.  Why not?  Either you didn’t know you could or you do know you can, but you won’t, and if you won’t, you are why 12 out of 10 people say 150% of humans are nuts.

☛Without mind, without thought, life is not what you thought.  Without words, without names, life is all that remains.  No judging, no complaint, no devil, no saint.  Joy is all that you’ll know, as you reap what you sow.

☛On rare occasions when humans think rationally, logically and clearly, they are pleasant, but if just one itsy bitsy teeny tiny micro thingee doesn’t go their way they get despondent, depressed and kill a perfectly good case of beer and declare, “Ya gotta suck it up if you don’t want life to suck.”

☛Be at peace with how you deal with life, and be at peace with how others deal with life. Not everyone is at the same place on the journey.  However, if you feel to make a change, it’s probably your time.  Don’t lament or regret the past, better just to learn from it and move on, after-all, whatever you did seemed like it was the thing to do at the time (and it was, for you) even though you might of been better off not trying to dry your hair by sticking your head in the micro wave.  How’s bald working for you?

☛Since what you think determines much of what your life is like and will be like, try not to give it much thought.  It’s not important.  Ignore the counsel that “As a man thinketh so is he.”  Never try to control your mind’s thoughts (nor your emotions from which they spring).  Be like most humans who never give a thought to controlling their thoughts–just let the media, government, religions, and schools do it.  What could go wrong?

☛If you are only happy when life goes your way, and you want to make others happy, don’t visit them when you’re unhappy.

☛ If you’re not at peace with what you have, you won’t be at peace with what you get.

☛Serious people are a serious threat to human happiness.  They hate happy and content people.  Why?  Because they think things are important.  Mostly they think they are important.  They think everything is serious and important.  Stay away from seriously serious people.  They would be better off in the only sane place on earth, an insane asylum where at least everyone knows they are seriously not nuts.

☛You have the power and ability to control your mind, emotions, body, and energy (It’s not taught in schools.  Even your parents may not know....I mean....just look at them).

☛Life is life, the rest is attitude, and if you take life personally or make it personal you’ve traded the reality that is, for the reality you created in your mind, which makes you the author of your misery.  The good news is, when you die, they bury your misery creating attitude with you so you can enjoy it on the other side of I don’t believe in reincarnation.

☛Life is half pain and half pleasure. If you can’t enjoy the pain, half your life will be sorrow. When things happen that you don’t like,  say to yourself, “It is what it is,” (and don’t add crybaby commentary like, “Boohoo...WaaWaa...I’m screwed...poor me, life sucks”).  Accept what is.  Accept life for what it is; deal with it; get over it and move on and continue to live your life.  No one likes crybabies except  Kleenex stockholders.  Try to screw them.

☛To earth your bound, your journey to commence.  Take with you this dictum sound into a world of recompense: How you view the world, is your world.  And on a side note, why do humans need to know where they came from, why they are here and where they are going?  It’s a fool's quest. If you don’t know, you don’t know (and belief doesn’t know either). The stork did it and the sickle dude is going to undo it.  There!  Now you know, and during a “What’s life all about?” mental crisis, any story you believe that brings you comfort (whether religious or secular fiction) serves its purpose.  However, if you can handle the reality that is life without fictionalizing it, you’ll be able to enjoy all that is life, which really pisses off the humans who need bedtime stories.

☛Earth is a death world.  Death fuels life. You can’t eat if you don’t kill.  If your diet (it’s called die-it for a reason)  includes animals you can get someone to kill them for you.  If you’ve got money, human animals will pluck the gizzards out of murdered chickens and you can just buy your chicken corpses at a grocery store. If you eat fruits and vegetable you can get someone to rip and tear them out of the ground for you so you can skin, dice, slice and broil and boil them alive.  Yes, the living kills the living and eat them, and from the rotting leftovers grows new life. Mother-earth kills her offspring.  It’s just Mother Nature’s loving way. She will kill you with heat, cold, wind, fire, famine, drought, earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, tornadoes and hurricanes or with her ravenous tear you apart and spit out your bones animal kingdom, or she’ll bug you to death one bite at a time or she will eat you alive with her micro-organisms that love to feed at the human-body buffet until you’re bare bones.  Mommy is a mass-serial-killer and she eats her babies.  Life is a picnic and you are the main course and your children are dessert. Welcome to your warm and fuzzy mother-earth home (no wonder humans are nuts. It’s because our “mother” is nuts and the nuts don’t roll far from the family nut tree).

☛ Nothing in life is negative or positive unless you think so, and then it is so....for you.  You cannot think something is positive without thinking the opposite is negative.  There are no one-sided coins.  You cannot have up without down.  Thinking positive or negative divides reality into something it isn’t.  Reality  is what it is (well it was until humans invaded and decided that negative is stuff they don’t like, and positive is stuff they do like, and if it moves, kill it and let the flying spaghetti monster sort it out).

☛If you draw conclusions, have opinions and judge life you will learn that you are not as smart as you think you are.  Why?  because you keep changing your opinions, conclusions and judgements about life, which means, your previous thoughts have become clown thoughts, which means your future thoughts may well be you still playing the clown.  Keep an open mind; be less sure, and maybe people will laugh at you less (though you are hilarious entertainment, especially your beliefs).

☛Life was what it was; life is what it is; life will be what it will be.  There is no value in regretting what was, getting mad about what is, or being anxious, worried or afraid about what isn’t, which includes the future.  Regret, anxiety, worry, and fear are debilitating mental energies that vex the mind and make living a plague and kills joy, peace, happiness and your last bottle of Vodka trying to get happy, which means everyone’s screwed when you get back to your sober miserable self.

☛Stress has a price.  Stress exacts physical, mental and emotional penalties.  You pay for stress.  It’s not free.  There are consequences.  How do you stop stressing?  Stop expecting life to be different than it is since you can’t change what is because the moment it is, it’s the past and you can’t change the past unless you're a Hollywood actor in a science fiction movie.  Try to be real, not surreal.

☛If your quest for life is not joy, peace, happiness and pleasure then perhaps it’s sorrow, fear, sadness and pain.  Since very few people are on a quest for pain, how come so many people experience it?  If you experience pain you are not in charge of your mind and emotions. A person WHO IS IN CHARGE OF HIS MIND AND EMOTIONS EXPERIENCES NO PAIN (or you rubbed Preparation H butt ointment on the wrong orifice).

☛Opportunity to learn and expand, to test oneself, adventure-into-the-unknown, mystery, suspense, excitement, chance, fortune, luck, gamble, challenge, risk, hazard and danger, are the spices-of-life that make life worth living, and in the end, you’re gonna die anyway, so go for it, give it all you’ve got, or do the next best thing, die a couch-potato.

☛What is YOUR purpose in life?  Choose one, and that’s your purpose.

☛What is THE purpose of life?  There are over a thousand philosophical, metaphysical, New Age and theological beliefs each claiming to be the one and only true circus.  You can wear any clown outfit you like.

☛Liberation is the ultimate goal in life.  You are liberated when you are at peace, happy, joyful, blissed-out and ecstatic no matter what happens; you are liberated when life does not have to happen your way; you are liberated when you have no expectations that must be met, when nothing bothers you; you are liberated when you are at peace whether you eat or not; healthy or not, live or not.  You are liberated when you need nothing (needing pizza doesn’t count).  

☛There’s nothing wrong with getting irritated, upset, angry, violent or throwing a raging hissy-fit that a good heart-attack or human-attack can’t cure in a micro-second.  And remember, if you hang around angry people you are nuts, and if you are angry “people” you are the plague everyone needs to avoid like the plague.

☛Worry, fret, and stress are signs you are a self-abusing control freak whose imagined fears could trigger the bullet you are trying to dodge.

☛If you order a Smoothie Chocolate Carmel Double Foam Shaved Iced Latte and get a Triple Onion Garlic Espresso instead, and you go insultingly ballistic you obviously don’t like espressos. But the best part for your audience is, you’ve just exhibited and paraded your uncontrolled mind and emotions for everyone to see and laugh at (entertainment like that is priceless, like watching a snow flake melt right in front of you).

☛Life will mess with your expectations. It may deny you your needs, wants and cherished desires.  If you set your heart unequivocally on the outcome of your expectations life will break your heart.  Don’t do it.  Have expectations but be at peace with the outcome (outcome is like having a baby.  You don’t know what it’s gonna be like, but you change it’s diaper anyway).

☛If you were dead, would people’s lives be more joyful?  Do family and friends run when they see you coming?  When you enter a room does everyone have to go to the bathroom and never returns?  If so, you have either become an unthankful, ungrateful, never satisfied sourpuss, complaining needy crybaby or a backstabbing, prideful, vain, self-aggrandizing selfish narcissistic ego-maniac who thinks life is about me, me, me.  If people run when they see you coming, it’s not a marathon, but you’re still not invited.

☛You may think your thoughts stay in your head, but they don’t.  Thoughts vibrate in you and around you and go out from you and they affect everything near you, especially your face (have you looked in the mirror lately).  Thoughts are like a tuning fork.  The best tunes are the ones that build instead of destroy; lift instead of cast down, encourage instead of depress.  Thoughts fuel and ignite feelings and emotions. Try not to blow yourself up.

☛If you accept life for what it is and don’t complain about what it isn’t, people will think you’re not thinking like a human.  It may be the best compliment you’ll ever get.

☛No one arrives at a destination on a road he did not travel.  Where you are today, you traveled the road that took you there.  Rich or poor, powerful or powerless, famous or infamous, educated or ignorant, at peace with life or at war, your thoughts were the roadmap that took you there.  In the past, you may not have been aware of your destination, but today, you watch the signs–your thoughts–faithfully, as if your happiness depended upon it, which it does.  There is no doubt that your thoughts took you to where you are today, and they will take you to where you will be tomorrow.  Be the watcher of your thoughts.  Be the guardian at the gate of your mind (or take directions from your wife who actually knows how to get there).

☛Humans take great pride in their accomplishments, but in truth, you did not design yourself.  You were born with physical, mental, emotional and character attributes–you arrived programed.  You did not give yourself your stature, looks, sex,  health,  intelligence, personality, emotions, attitude, determination, tenacity,  willpower, talents, strengths, and weaknesses. And now,  if by chance, you are a strutting cocky peacock about your awesomeness (while putting-down others) you’re definitely a self-centered moron.  In addition, you also did not determine your birth circumstances, not the time, the place, the family, the religion, the culture and the society you were nurtured and raised within, so.... again, in truth, your pride is misplaced, your vanity is a mental illness and your egotistical moronic chest thumping is a special kind of stupid.

☛Depending on how nuts your family was, the odds are, you’re just as nuts.  Whatever nutty values your family valued were your values when you were too young to beat them up, and those values are difficult to throw in the dumpster and forget.  They are the ghosts of family-past that will haunt you forever throughout all eternity plus two weeks.  Your family didn’t mean to do it. They too had their brains washed in a septic tank of delusion.  Welcome to life’s cesspool of crazy beliefs and conclusions. If you’re sick of swimming in it, you now know how to get out:  Light a match and watch your beliefs, opinions, biases and prejudices blow-up in the face of the reality you have yet to experience.

☛Is it fun being you? Is it fun being with you? It is if you have a sunny disposition.  It isn’t fun being you or being with you if you have dark cloud disposition or if you have any other disease or plague or are a joy destroying pestilence.

☛If you were for sale would anyone buy you?  How much would you pay for you?

☛If the people who know you could sell you, how much would they ask?  (He pouts; she sulks; he mopes and she boobs and then he gets irritated, upset, angry or violent when things don’t go her or his way.  He is mean, prideful, egotistical, self-centered,  vain, selfish, greedy, demanding, miserable, uncaring, unappreciative, arrogant, unthankful, quarrelsome,  depressed,  a complainer,  seldom satisfied, difficult to please, stressed, needy and a can’t be trusted backstabbing whiny uptight bundle of fun to be around when asleep, in a coma or dead.  FOR SALE:   “I’ll give you a hundred bucks to haul it off.”

96.  If the people who know you could sell you, how much would they ask? (He smiles; she laughs; he grins and she jokes and he never gets irritated, upset, angry or violent when things don’t go her or his way. He is kind, caring, helpful, cheerful, generous, charitable, calm and at peace, enthusiastic, upbeat,  positive,  pleasant, fun to be around, easygoing, undemanding,  congenial, thankful, appreciative and lives on the bright-side of life (most crybabies want to kill people like that). FOR SALE: “Priceless.  Not for sale.”

97.  The earth will never satisfy your every desire; never fulfill your every want; never meet your every need; never grant your every wish; never match your every expectation; never agree with your every thought; never submit to your every opinion and never bow to your every judgement, but  it will take you unawares, attack you and spit you out on the razor  edge of your fears. Though people may plan, work and accomplish many wonderful things, earth’s nature and the nature of some people always try to destroy what others have created.  The earth is a beautiful and a marvelous resource and people are often noble and self-sacrificing, yet in an instant, the earth can turn violent and take back its resources and men can turn vicious and descend into greed.  Thus by nature’s storms and the selfish nature in some men, the world is bathed in blood and tears.

98.  Earth life is a struggle for survival in a world where nothing comes easy and all things have a price.  Between birth and death, you experience disease, accidents, violence, and loss.  Your actions and the actions of others create conundrums that complicate your days and vex your nights.  From rising to setting sun each day is commotion, turmoil, and uncertainty.  You hope, desire and plan, but in a sudden turn of events your hopes may be crushed, your desires may go unfulfilled and your plans may be ruined.  As your world disintegrates around you, you realize that many things in life are beyond your control.  If the truth were known, you spend many of your days in sorrow even as you hope your future will be endless joy.  Yet as time passes you learn that life is a seething cauldron of perplexities, an overflowing crucible of endless troubles and that change is the only constant.

99.  Humans scheme, deceive, cheat, lie,  steal, burglarize, rob, abuse, assault, fight, enslave, imprison, torture, rape, kill, murder and make love to assure there will be enough new humans to continue the carnage.

100.  From the moment you are born the world challenges you to a physical, mental and emotional war.  The question is, are you going to take up the challenge or be a crybaby all your life?  Remember, life is not what you think it is unless you think it is what it is.

101.  Life is pain.  Stuff happens.  People do things.  Get used to it.  Better still, appreciate it.  See the value.  See the benefit.  If you won’t do that, at least look at life as an adventure and rise to the challenge, or you can look at life like it’s a  sour, rotten, smelly, putrid shit trip only to be outdone by your sour, rotten, smelly, putrid shitty disposition.

102.  Every experience you have only has the energy you bring to it and put into it, and when you have experiences you dislike or hate, your attitude determines what else you create.

103.  If you think your “normal” ego is trouble, wait until you meet your Ogre.  He’s in there.  He’s bad.  And he eats his prisoners. Don’t wake him. DON’T BE AN OGRE.  An Ogre is a human ego gone mad.  The human ego can turn Ogre faster than a sugar high.

104. In mythology, ogres are disgusting, cruel and monstrous fiends.  In real life, an ego turned ogre, exploits and brutalizes its victims.  Ogres are slaves to their needs, wants and desires.  They are seldom satisfied.  They are seldom at peace, are implacable, always on the hunt, merciless and bloody.  They get easily offended, irritated, upset, angry and violent when they don’t get their way or don’t get what they want.  Sounds human, doesn’t it?  It sounds human because it is human. Man’s base nature is a crabby self-destructive ogre. It is the ego that gets programmed, conditioned, indoctrinated and brain-washed from youth, and it can turn ogre faster than a bull seeing red.  An ogre is the enemy of your peace.  An ogre is the one that commits suicide.  An ogre wages war because it is at war with itself.   An ogre is an empty container,   an empty vessel that needs to be filled constantly, usually at the expense of someone else.  An ogre can never fill its own emptiness.  An ogre is egotistical and has a puffed-up opinion of himself.  An ogre’s thoughts are selfishly-self-centered.  Its thoughts are based in pride, vanity and greed.  Ogres are egos gone mad.  To some degree, they are the insanity that is in all men but only in two women at last count (the poll was conducted by women).

105. Your battle for sanity is between you and your ogre.  An ogre changes by suffering the consequences of its thoughts and actions.  It learns to think better thoughts and thereby gets happier results.

106.  If you are not happy with much of your life or life in general, it’s very likely your ego-ogre-mind “hates” you, which is self-evident if your mind feeds you thoughts that are the enemy of your joy, peace, and happiness.

107.  You are NOT your mind.  Your mind is NOT you.  Your mind IS a tool.  DON’T BE ITS FOOL.

108.  The demanding voice in your head is coming from your untrained mind (whether it’s its own thoughts or thoughts it picked up or thoughts projected to it).  Your mind is a “separate entity” living inside you, and, the real you has to deal with it.  Your mind was given a name at birth.  It is the name you answer to, but the mind is NOT the real you.  Your mind only knows what it has learned, its program, and it’s all memory.  Your mind’s job is to follow its program.  Your mind is only at peace and happy when working to achieve its programmed objectives and goals.  Your mind has an appetite.  Your mind seeks to please itself. Your mind always wants more.  Your mind loves to rule you.  Your mind is demanding.  Your mind uses you to satisfy ITSELF.  Your mind does not like you when you go against its wishes. Your mind is like an unruly child.  Your mind wants what it wants and it will make you miserable if it doesn’t get what it wants NOW!  Your mind gets irritated, upset, angry and violent when you challenge or oppose it. Your mind only cares about you as long as you are its faithful servant.  Your mind is egotistical, self-centered, selfish, vain, prideful and arrogant.  Your mind is sneaky, conniving, scheming, a con artist, deceptive and a liar. Your mind has a temper and it throws fits and makes scenes to get its way.  Your mind broods,  frets, worries, gets  concerned,  anxious,  apprehensive, nervous, afraid  and  has regrets.     Your mind  sulks,  pouts,  mopes,  stews,  brews,  whimpers,  weeps, cries, balls, howls, shouts, yells, screams, and shrieks.  Your mind is THE CRYBABY and if you have NOT trained it YOU are most certainly its lackey,   junkie and goffer.  HOWEVER,  if you have trained your mind, it is YOUR SERVANT AND BEST FRIEND (well...until it gets Alzheimer and Dementia and then you and your mind are both screwed).

109. If you want to get even with or torment your vampire-ego-ogre-mind or if you want to discover its true nature deny it a cherished need, want or desire.  Try not eating for ten days.  It will rise to the challenge.  At first, it will dismiss your idea, hoping you’re not serious.  If it thinks you are serious, it will denounce your efforts and point out all the reasons why it’s a bad idea.  If you persist, it will plead with you, and if that doesn’t work, it will call you names not even heard at a sailor’s convention.  If you still persist, it will get serious, and that’s when all hell breaks loose and you’ll discover what a delightful devil it can be and just exactly who's going to be boss.  It’s an exciting ride on the wild side.  Give it a shot.   “Lock & Load!”  You’ll win if you don’t give up.

110. Beware of the vampire-ego-ogre mind and its many voices.   Especially the voice that tells you it’s OK to go on a beer diet as long as you drink and smoke while practicing road-rage.

111. You are free to choose your thoughts, but never are you free to choose the consequences.  The law of thought is an immutable and unchangeable law: thoughts create in kind.

112.  Beliefs create virtual reality experiences that humans think are serious and real, when in fact, life itself is a virtual and unserious reality (except in the minds of serious people) which is, of course, very cool, because without beliefs and without believing and without taking this virtual reality seriously, we wouldn’t have the awesome adventure that is life.  We could have just stayed in our other virtual reality home.  Thank the virtual God that virtual people take this virtual life seriously, for without them we would have less to laugh about.  However, if seriously serious people would take life and their experiences a little less seriously they would seriously enjoy life more, and they would not be so seriously nuts.

113.  Your vampire mind sucks.  It will bleed you dry and leave you at a buzzard picnic.  An energy-vampire-mind will kill you and never complain about its own suicide. A vampire mind is an untrained mind that lives in the darkness of its unrestrained desires, and, it loves to bite the hands that feeds it–your hand–and drain your life force.

114. Your untrained mind is your master and you are its slave. Humans hate to submit to a dictator or slave-master or an insane boss, but, for some insane reason (only understood by a drunk circus clown) if it is your mind who is your boss and orders you around, you submit like a paid flunky.   You jump to obey its demands,  thrilled just to satisfy its every need, want and desire as if you are its Three Wish Genie.  An uncontrolled mind is a vampire-mind sucking your peace and happiness by treating you as its, stooge, toy, janitor and all-around loser, and if you let it treat you like that your life will absolutely be worse than living with your dead to slowly composting mother-in-law.

115.  Don’t let your mind play you like a ping-pong ball.  Take charge.  Be the paddle.

116.  Everything was going fine.  Life was good for Jack, and then in an instant his world crashed, burned, exploded and disappeared in a vapor of black smoke because he went berserk.  Days later when he thought about what he had done, Jack realized that it wasn’t by chance.  He had reacted without thinking.  He knew that his response was the fruit of the thoughts he had been thinking most of his life (there are no details in this story because the details vary from person to person, but the results are the same, lives turned upside down or destroyed).  This could happen to you....may have already happened to you.  Raging or going berserk never resolves problems in your favor.  Whether it’s a minor situation or a monster event, your reaction to them may determine whether you get what you want or get what someone else thinks you deserve.  Don’t do the berserk thing.

117.  Little things bug little people.  Most people handle big natural disasters quite well, on-the-other-hand, little things, daily little things, like relationships, challenge most people to their limits.  And what hurts a relationship most is what people say or don’t say and how they react and respond to each other.   Letting your mind lose its  peace, its cool; get its panties in a bind, get it feathers ruffled; stress out; go ballistic and flip-out creates deadly blowback that results in broken hearts, mental, emotional and physical problems and destroys lives more than any disasters except marriage (just kidding dear...here, smell these flowers).

118.  If there was a way to be in charge of your life without being in charge of your mind and thoughts the government would have discovered it by now and taxed it or outlawed it.

119.  To be the master of your thoughts and create the life you want you must be the guardian at the gate of your mind.  You must monitor your thoughts each moment you are awake and replace debilitating, destructive, judgmental and pessimistic thoughts with enabling, constructive, loving and optimistic thoughts until they close the casket on your avatar.

120.  There are many things in life you cannot control.  Your thoughts are not one of them.

121.  Until you stop crying about what your life isn’t and starting enjoying what your life is you will be miserable every time life doesn’t go your way.

122.  There are thoughts worth thinking and thoughts worth dumping.  Most humans need a really big dumpster to dump their really big dumb thoughts.

123.  It’s not the thoughts that run through your mind that create problems.  It’s the thoughts you empower by entertaining, playing and toying with that cause your problems.


125.  Some people challenge themselves with formal education, business, politics, sports or conquering a neighborhood or country, but there is no greater challenge than to conquer yourself, conquer your mind, and there are no greater rewards or benefits.

126.  If your thoughts are not the master of your fate, and you the master of your thoughts, who or what is?

127.  When people tell you they have problems, they are not talking about the real world (though that’s what they think).  What they are talking about is their inner-world of thoughts. With their thoughts they have labeled what is going on in the real world as difficulties,  hardships, and problems, and, having so labeled them with their thinking, it’s the truth, for them, and for them only.  Whatever label you give to your experiences is your reality (this truth is evident when two people have the same experience but place different labels on them. One person calls his experiences adventures and opportunities and enjoys them while another person labels his experiences as troubles and problems and is miserable.  When you stop looking at your experiences and circumstances as problems and view them as adventures, your life will change, “...and they lived happily ever after”).

128.  A plane carrying two guys crashes on a snow-topped hill.  To their surprise, they are alive ‘cause neither got too killed.  One takes a broken wing and skis a most awesome drift.  Two gets mad, not at all glad, enraged he falls off a cliff (perspective is everything).

129.  Brother and sister going to visit their dying pop.  Their car breaks down, makes a loud sound, comes to a grumbling stop.  The car gets fixed and purring, but at hospital too late.  Sister depressed, failed-heart is the guess, exits to the pearly gates (stress kills).

130.  I relive my nightmares and regret my every fling.  Dumb thing to do, just makes me blue, ‘cause it don’t change a thing.  Yes, life is a potpourri, mixture of pleasure and pain.  Pity and regret double the stress, cause mind and body to strain (thoughts affect health).

131. I once had a lot of friends, family that loved me too.  But I complain about my pain, they avoid me ’cause I do.  I get upset and angry and irritable as well.   Argue a lot, fight on the spot, my life is a living hell (thoughts and their results affect relationships).

132. I used to be good looking, but I prematurely aged.  These old age spots are awful thoughts, I think I am their slave.   And now a final thought before I go away: life is real grand or a migraine head-slam, depending on what my thoughts say (perspective and attitude are everything).

133.  The only benefit complaining has is to reduce your life to the level of misery only experienced by people in bouncy rubber rooms.  Complaining is a disease and the only known cure is a spanking which some people enjoy, so now what?

134.  If you complain you are insane.  Complaining doesn’t make sense.  It’s illogical, irrational, unreasonable and a waste of time because it doesn’t accomplish anything except to raise your blood pressure and kill you, which is only beneficial for people who don’t like you.  Stop helping them.  Complaining has physical, mental, emotional and spiritual benefits people are still hunting for.  Complaining fouls the air around you and is unpalatable.  Complainers have lots of friends who never visit them.  Complaining and misery live in the same house, and it’s a hell house– living death.  A lot of people enjoy complaining.  It’s free entertainment and worth every penny.

135.  Gripping, bellyaching, squawking and bitching about something that happened in the past (you were born) is happening (you’re slowly molding) or will definitely happen (your eyeballs will grow hair) is loony, loopy and nuts.  What value does it have?  And if you complain about what might happen, you are certifiably nuts but can become a youtube sensation.

136.  Instead of complaining, accept your reality in the moment: If you’re sick, you’re sick.  If you lost your job, you lost your job.  If you can’t pay your bills, you can’t pay your bills, and if you’re balding, get a toupee.  Learn from your experiences and work to have better experiences but quit boobing about it.  Only babies like boobs (OK...that may not be true).

137.  When you stop whimpering, sniveling and blubbering, people will like you again.  Your family will enjoy being around you again.  You will glow bright and be energized and your health will improve and you may even look like Phyllis Diller (Google it).

138.  If you refuse to accept life for what it is and instead complain about what it isn’t, your reward is pain. Stop expecting life to be what it isn’t.  If you don’t stop, life will kick your butt over and over and over again until it finally kicks your butt into a premature grave that even the worms won’t eat because you're pure poison.

139.  It is NOT complaining when you point out problems that need solutions or give constructive criticism–however, it is complaining if you do it to demean, debase or ridicule people.   Don’t complain.  It stinks worse than your best gas.

140.  If you are suffering it’s because your thoughts are at odds with what is happening.  Do you really enjoy rolling snake-eyes in the mental crap game of life?

If life isn’t going your way maybe you’re going the wrong way.

141.  If you fight life and the world and kick against the pricks, you will get hurt, lose, and pay a price.  The price is your joy, peace, and happiness.  The price is your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.  Don’t be a prick kicker.

142.  What you think is true, has great power over you, and belief as well can make your life a living hell, or heaven on earth, depending upon your mirth.  Your thoughts and beliefs feed your joy or your grief.

143.  If I am blue, boohoo or sad and can’t seem to find my glad, I name again my blessings sure and then I am woeful no more.  It’s my thought, not my circumstance that causes me to slouch or dance.  I am aware, compare my place in the life of the human race, and realize I could be off worse if I were mulching in a hearse.

144.  As simple as it sounds, the cause of your unhappiness is also the cure. Thoughts are the cause and thoughts are the cure.  Thoughts cause misery or happiness.

145.  You can cure your unhappy mind.  You can take charge.  You can be the boss.  All you need to do is cut off its nuts, which means YOU quit being the nut that feeds it and submits to its thoughts. Quit playing victim to your mind’s nutty agenda that makes you so happy being miserable.  You decide what thoughts to play with.

146.  Don’t think thoughts that get you upset or make you angry.

147.  However, if your misery makes you happy there’s nothing wrong with you, so you’re good to go.  If complaining is your joy, go for it.  If discord and strife is your peace, strive on. If you think life should be a miserable experience, be its guest (and may your consequences rest easy on you in the nut orchard).

148.  What I thought is what I got and what I got I thought.  Wise am I if I don’t blame an outside cause that’s not.

149.  If I have thoughts I do not like I tell them to take a hike.  I think thoughts that inspire, avoid the ones that stir my fire.   Mean thoughts create mean words, better that they’re never heard.   Some thoughts might make me mad; I don’t think them, keeps me glad.  I think thoughts that make me smile, keep them in my mental file.  If kind and loving thoughts I do, I’m always happy, never blue.  I live life the way I think, in peaceful joyful wonderment.

150.  Your mind can only entertain one thought at a time. So the key to your peace (when something happens that frustrates you) is to replace a “Life sucks!”  thought with, “Yeah,  I know, my leg fell off; so does this peg-leg make me look fat?”  Of course, you don’t have to be at peace with your new one-legged reality.  Instead, you can turn your life into a complaining, sulking, depressing whinefest, and if you get good at it you can make everyone around you happy too, when you leave.

151.  Every time your mind thinks a thought that might stir your fire and cause you to become irritated, upset, angry, violent, stressed, worried, afraid or depressed, immediately replace it with a thought that promotes your peace, like, “I really like hot dogs.”

154.  Each human life has twists and turns, potholes and bogs.  Should our paths cross I will be gentle, kind and loving so that I will not be a pothole in your life.

155.  I live life on the edge of wonderment, not in the depths of despair.  I live life enthusiastically.  I live on the bright side of life.  I refuse to be care-filled, pessimistic, gloomy, despondent or depressed.  Stuff happens.  People do things.  That’s life.  I can’t control everything, but I can control my thoughts.  I can choose my attitude, and I choose to be optimistic about life.

156.  There are no mistakes in life, and if you think there are, that’s no mistake.  Judging life is like a blind man taking pride in what he doesn’t see.

157.  You can’t know up if you haven’t been down, and you don’t know square if there’s no round, surely you know this is true.  You know pleasure because you know pain, and you know loss because you know gain, which makes you nobody’s fool.

158.  If it takes a world of peace for you to be at peace you are not ready to live in a world of peace.  Anyone who desires peace can be at peace when peace is all there is.  When you can walk a war world in peace you can be at peace in any world.  If you are waiting for a world at peace before you will be at peace, you wait in vain.  Every person is his own world.  There can be peace in yours.

159.  There is a joy so profound, a peace so serene and a happiness so bright that he who possesses it lives in a different world.  If you do not now live in that world, you can enter it by changing the thoughts that created the world you live in today.

160.  Every day is a good day to die.  If you are afraid to die, you are afraid to live.  Whatever you fear, that is your prison.  Today is a good day to die and a good day to live without the fear of dying.  Refuse to be afraid.  Refuse to live life in a prison of fear.  You are free to embrace life fully, to challenge life and yourself, to walk into the dark of the unknown and bask in the light of adventure.  No one lives forever and no one knows the day of his dying.  If you fear your dying day (knowing not its schedule) you will fear every day.  Life is for living, not dying.  Let the day of your dying wait its turn, and when it comes, embrace it like an old friend returning to greet you for your next adventure.

161.  I appreciate what I have and don’t complain about what I don’t have.  I appreciate what I can do and don’t complain about what I can’t do.  Whatever I focus my attention on increases.  Whatever thoughts I entertain attracts more of the same.  What I complain about increases.  What I am thankful for increases. I decide what to think and talk about, and forthwith, affect those things.  I have the benefits that come with receiving all things with thankfulness and not the detriments that come from complaining about everything.

162.  You are flexible when dealing with life so that you will not get bent out of shape when people and earth do what they do without your permission...again.  Being flexible makes life easier for people who have to put up with you and it makes your life less twisted.

164.  The most valuable work you will ever do is in your mind.  Many of the things that show up as your life began in your head.  Everything that you think is important and everything that you value and everything that you appreciate is the direct result of the work you have done in your mind.  All your likes and dislikes, all your needs, wants and desires, and all your goals and ambitions are the result of what you think, how you think about yourself, people, places and things.  Every aspect of your life is subject to your thoughts.  Nothing passes through your mind that you don’t eventually become aware of.  Why?  Because what you think shows up as your life.

165.  If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and what you behold is ugly maybe your beholder is broken.   It is what it is, deal with it.  It was what it was, let go of it.  It will be what it will be, don’t worry about it.  If what you do is not motivated by love, your motivator needs fixin’.  If your smiler is broken you have an internal, not external, problem.  If you want to be miserable adopt someone else’s idea of perfection.  If you rage against things unchangeable, unalterable and inevitable or something that has already happened you are experiencing true insanity.  All truth is subjective.  If you don’t believe it, try explaining something without subjecting it to your way of looking at it.

166.  If you are ill, sick, diseased, disabled or dead; if you are in danger; if your spouse leaves you or cheats on you; if you lose your job, career or business; if you came in last in the spitting contest; if you are homeless, hungry, destitute, enslaved or without cell service; if you are unappreciated, unloved, have no one to love, are alone and lonely, get no respect, are hated; if your life is empty of challenging and stimulating experiences; if you have not accomplished anything; if you are robbed, burglarized, in an accident or your toilet backs up and soaks your butt or you’ve been attacked and are bleeding to death and don’t know where your pet monkey is, for sanity sake, can’t you at least enjoy it?

167.  Your mind has a mind of its own.  Sometimes it thinks thoughts without your permission–thoughts you don’t like.  When you realize you are thinking thoughts that don’t serve your joy, peace, and happiness (or anyone’s) replace them with thoughts that do.  Entertain only kind thoughts that serve you and others.  Always know what you are thinking.  Be the GUARDIAN at the gate of your mind.

168.  I plan my day and work my plan, but some days, the day has its own plans, and those days were some of my best days.  Sometimes surrendering to the day is the best way.

169. What you FEEL when not thinking, when not interpreting or fighting life, is PEACE.

170.  Are your views not different today than yesterday?  Perhaps they will be different tomorrow as well.  Has there not been a time when you thought you were right and later found out you were wrong and laughed at your perception?  Will there never again come a time when you will laugh at yourself? Yes, you will laugh, for your knowledge and understanding increases each day and your views will change in days to come.  You are on an amazing journey of self-discovery, so you will not hold fast to today’s thoughts about things, for tomorrow you may be laughing at yourself, and truly, you will enjoy the laugh.  As to others, are they not also on a journey of discovery?  Yes, so you will laugh with them, but never at them.  You will always be their joy and never their sorrow.  Wisdom says, only laugh at yourself (this book doesn’t count).

171.  Humans tend to have a herd mentality.  They have herd values, herd cultures, and herd norms.  Because of that, it is an udderly undocile and dangerous undertaking to buck the  herd.   If you  turn on the herd and  feed them  new ideas they may turn on you and stampede and trample you, or they may take away your grazing-rights.  Herds are not bully about ideas that discombobulate their vested interests.  Hobnobbing herds with strong political, ethnic, cultural and religious beliefs must be approached with extreme caution.  It is often best to leave them alone to continue feeding on their accepted common fodder.

172.  If the universe doesn’t love you, why are there peaches?

173.  If you believe in an after-life this is for you:  I passed beyond the world today, crossed to the other side, and walked among the living there who recently had died.  There are no frowns, no furrowed brows, no worries and no fears.  There are no lonely hearts yearning to return to here.  They’re happy there, their joy is full, with family and with friends, and meadows green and clear blue skies and peace that never ends.  In loving memory they recall, with fondness they embrace, their journey in a troubled world among the human race.  Those days are done, no trials now, no more hearts of stone, for all is love and love is all in that eternal home.

174.  You are special and exceptional.  In all the universe there is just one you.  Yes, you are a sole-original-non-duplicated-solitary-one-of-a-kind-singularly-exclusive unique being.  Obviously, you are in a category of your own all by yourself, and if that is not exceptionally special, what is?  The universe went to a lot of effort forming billions of exceptional and special people just like you, but of course, no one is exactly like you but you, which makes you an exceptional and special you.

175.  You are what you think, which is why there’s only one of you.  You are what you think, which is why you feel like you do.  You are what you think, which is why you believe that way.  You are what you think, which is why you say what you say.  You are what you think, which is why you like or dislike that.  You are what you think, which is why you act the way you act.  You are what you think, which is why you smile or why you frown.  You are what you think, which is why you are up and sometimes down.  You can choose what you think but you can’t choose the consequence which makes what you think the most important thing in the world because what you think makes your world.

176.  Where does your mind spend its time?  Two men on a beach watch the sunrise.  One says, “See how the sun glows and shimmers.  It’s like a Christmas ornament.  I can’t tell if the ocean is sinking or the sun is rising.  What a marvelous nature show.”  He then turns to his friend and asks, “What do you think?”  The friend keeps looking at the sun and says, “I’m not thinking about the sun rising. I’m experiencing the sun rising.”  Sensing the moment is different than thinking the moment.  When you are thinking you hardly notice the day.  It vanishes, almost as if it had never been, and unnoticed and gone are many years as if in an instant, and hardly are you able to recall them.  Too much thinking and not enough sensing makes invisible the simple joys of life.   Think less, experience more.

177. You are healthy and getting younger every day.  You are in excellent health.  When you look in the mirror you look awesome; you are invincible; you are brilliant; you are inspired; nothing can stop you.  You are on top of the world, first-class, par-none, a home-run, grand-slam and touch-down rolled into a package called you.  You are the inspiration you need.  You are your biggest fan.  You are your own cheering section.  You are the parade.

178.  I am who I think I am which makes me who I am.  Life is what I think it is which makes my life what it is.  The thoughts I think about myself and life create my personal reality.  If I think I am awesome, I am.  Whatever I think is true is my truth no matter what others think the truth is.

179.  Today is the best day of your life.  No matter what happens to you today or what you do today, today is going to be the best day of your life.  How do you know that?  Because you do not compare yesterday to today.  Today stands alone.  The past is the past and the future is not here, but today is your day.  It is here, it is now; it is all there is.  And even if today is your last day, it will be your best day.  Yes, today is perfectly your most excellent day.  It is a wonderfully awesome and delightful day, and, it is the only day you have for sure, for no one can claim tomorrow until it is today.  Today, right now, is the best day of your life.

180.  Expect the best be at peace with the rest.  What sense would it make to expect less than the best?  It would be nonsense since the best can only happen if you expect the best to happen.  If you decide to climb a mountain but don’t expect to make it, why go to the trouble?  You expect to finish what you start and you expect the best at the finish, and you are not going to let contrary thoughts undermine and sabotage your plans and kill your desires.  And you don’t hang around people who stomp on your expectations.  Expect the best and be at peace with the rest.

181.  There are as many realities as there are people.  Every person lives in his own world.  At any moment, I am just one thought away from experiencing a different reality. My life will be the same tomorrow if I think the same thoughts as today. How can I be happy if my thoughts make me miserable?  If I want to enjoy the day for what it is, instead of what I think it is, I stop thinking.  When I unchain myself from my thoughts, there’s just me experiencing life.  If you live in a mental prison, your thoughts built the bars.

182.  Some days you have to jump-start yourself by jumping up and down and twirling and yelling, “I’m alive, alert, awake enthusiastic!”  If you want to feel enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.  It’s that simple.

183.  How, but by light is dark discerned?  Where is knowledge, understanding, and wisdom without opposition in all things?  How many heroes without villains?  How many noble and selfless without the ignoble and selfish?  What can be known without opposites?  Can you know hot without cold; high without low; left without right; in without out?  Without opposites there would be no knowledge, no value, no appreciation, but,  ignorance would abound, so without opposites, you would not know you are joyful, at peace or happy. Ignorance never was happiness.  So be thankful for the dark and the light–they are teachers.

184.  You are always true to yourself.  You cannot but to thine own self be true.  Who is this self you serve?  Is it not the self that seeks joy, peace, happiness, and pleasure and to be at peace with itself?  Avoid pain, seek pleasure; avoid sorrow, seek joy–to this all are true, thus all are true to themselves.  You can adopt a code, convention, standard or set of values and swear it by oath, yet should you fail, you are but being true to yourself?  No matter how hard you try, you cannot but to thine own self be true.

185.  What if nothing is important?  Thinking something is important is just that, thinking, and thinking something is important doesn’t make it important except you think so.  Thinking nothing is important frees you from everything, which leaves nothing, which is important.  Thinking nothing is important destroys the ego’s opinions of what is important, which is very freeing and very important to they who think that’s important. Because other people believe certain things are important, I treat them kindly, like I would a child who believes in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny.

186.  No one has to be like you, think like you, believe like you, act like you, dress like you or have your values.  Surely one wonderful you is enough, and for that reason, you value other people’s wonderful individuality.  You would be bored to tears if the world had billions of people just as wonderful as you.

187.  If it’s conditional, it ain’t love.  “I love you...if you obey these conditions...”   Conditional love is self-serving.  It serves a person’s personal needs, wants and desires.  If it’s conditional, it’s self-love, and it has no respect for another person’s individuality.  Ultimately, love is respecting people’s individuality and the nature of life and the power which sustains it.

188.  The only thing standing between you and happiness is you....and your programmed thoughts.

189.  You are always in the right place at the right time and never in the wrong place at the wrong time.  There are no accidents in life.  Everything plays its part perfectly in the cycle of life. If you were supposed to have done it, you would have done it.  If you are doing it, you are supposed to be doing it.  If you are yet to do it, you will yet do it.  If you were supposed to have prevented it, you would have prevented it.  If you were supposed to have been there, you would have been there. The universe did not come about by chance or happenstance and neither did you or anyone else nor lives intersecting in time and space.

190.  You are not a respecter of persons. You know you did not give yourself your looks, stature, health, intelligence, tenacity, willpower, determination, talents, propensities, strengths, and weaknesses, nor did you determine the advantages or disadvantages of your birth.  Because you know this, you do not make fun of people.  You do not belittle or demean them.  And you do not hold people in high esteem regardless of their wealth, power, importance popularity or education.  You treat everyone as kindly as you can, as kindly as they allow, and you do not judge them.

191.  Life is just life until your thoughts make it personal.  Life is just life until you believe it something different.  Life is just life until you judge it otherwise.  Life is just life until you dress it up in your thoughts.  Life is just life unless you don’t  think so and then you create expectations that drive you nuts....which is also life being life, which means we live in a perfectly nutty world.

192.  If you are bored with life it is because you will not leave your comfort zone.  The biggest challenge in your life is you.  Playing it safe may mean you live a longer boring life.

193.  Each person does right in his own eyes.  You experience life through your eyes, according to your perspective even as everyone else values their own perspective.  Your point of view is no more important to you than another persons is to him.  You try to do right in your eyes and everyone else does right in their eyes, and being aware that your sight is less than perfect, you judge less and enjoy life more.

194.  If you live your life to fulfill other people’s expectations, you are living other people’s  lives, not your life.  People know when you are not being genuine.  Because they know it, they have power over you.  They know that you will do things to be accepted.

195.   Life is a conundrum.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too.  You can’t have it both ways.  You can have your cake or eat your cake, but you can’t eat your cake and still have your cake.  And if you eat your cake you need milk.  But you can’t have your milk and drink it too. Conundrums are usually resolved when you take too long trying to decide what to do (someone comes along and eats your cake and drinks your milk).  If you don’t decide what to do, life will decide for you.

196.  Try to enjoy your age.  You may never be this old again.

197.  Joy, peace, happiness, and pleasure is the human quest, but only a controlled mind secures them.

198.  The reason you act the way you act is because you think the way you think.  If you don’t like the way you act, stop thinking the way you think.  When you have thoughts that make you angry, stop thinking them and be still, or start thinking thoughts that make you happy.

199.  “THANK YOU VERY MUCH”  is the thought I think when something happens or when I do something that challenges my peace, serenity or bliss.  Sometimes I preface my “Thank you very much,” with, “Holy Shit".

200.  Knowing a thing is not the same as doing a thing.  To take charge of your life you must take charge of your mind which takes practice and repetition, and, and, and if you really want to enjoy life more, you will keep practicing.  You will not give up.  You will keep practicing until you conquer your mind, until you are the jealous watcher and gatekeeper of your mind and its thoughts and the master of your life.

201.  You know life will not cater to your every need, want and desire, nor fulfill your every wish.  The question is, why get angry or depressed when you don’t get what you want? (It doesn’t do any good and doesn’t serve you).  Why will you not accept reality?  Why MUST  life go your way for you to be happy?  Logic and reason say, work to make your life the best and expect the best, but be at peace with the rest, be at peace if your expectations go South and you wanted to go North.  And, put your heart into it, but don’t set your heart on it, because....if it doesn’t work out, you’ll just break your heart.  Most people don’t want to get sick, but they do, and most people don’t want to die, but they do, and to kick against the pricks of reality, to kick against things that cannot be changed, is nuts. You don’t expect a monkey to be anything but a monkey, that would be insane, and you don’t expect a deer to act like a gopher, that would be crazy, yet, if you expect life to be and do anything but what it is and what it does at any given moment, that’s kinda crazy and insane and nuts too, for life will always be exactly what it is, and people will always be who they are and do what they do, and if you’re not good with that, you are nuts.  Try not to live on the wackadoodle side of human thinking.

202.  How many tears must you cry before you learn that happiness is internal, not external?  If you want life to make you happy you will be wanting and waiting forever.  Happiness is an inside job, and The Thoughts You Think will determine whether you are at peace and happy or at war and miserable, which is why happiness is an inside job.

203.  You may be fooling yourself thinking that you are in control of your mind and are using it successfully to pursue happiness, but you don’t realize that when you are unhappy it is caused by the very mind that you think you control.  Your unhappiness is proof that you really don’t know what’s going on inside your own head.  If you are not in charge of your mind and its thoughts, who is?

204.  Your thoughts help make you and reveal you.  If you don’t like what you’ve made or what they reveal, change your thoughts.

Snowflake said,  “All I need to be happy is to get everything I want and nothing I don’t want.  I want to look perfect and be perfectly healthy.  I never want to have an accident and never feel pain.  I never want to be bored.  I want exciting experiences.  I want to be at peace.  I want someone  to love, and  someone  to love me.   I want  friends  that  are  kind  and supportive.  I want respect and freedom and I want to do worthwhile things.  I just want the perfect life, and then, and only then, will I be happy.  So yes, I want to be born into a loving family, a free country, to never get sick, to have high intelligence, impeccable common sense, world-class talents, movie-star looks, bags full of money, to never be in danger and to never have to deal with mean people.  All I need to be happy is to never be denied my every need, want and desire.  Is that too much to ask?”

“Of course not,” I said.  “Perfectly rational request from a snowflake.”

“Thank you,” said Snowflake.  “Though I did do something that I shouldn’t have done.”

“But you did, and it’s in the past,” I said.  “Learn from it; deal with it; get over it; move on.  Forget about it.”

Snowflake said, “You know, it’s life’s fault that my life is screwed-up.”

“No, it’s not!”  I said.  “It’s your fault.  Life is what it is, day in, day out.  Stuff happens.  People do things.  That’s life.  If you think your life is screwed-up, think again.  It’s your screwed-up thinking that is screwing-up your life.  Quit the blame game.

Snowflake said, “Something happened that I did not want to happen.”

“Oooh...you wanted something different,” I said.   Well, guess what, it is not different.  It is what it is and no one cares what you wanted or what you thought it should be.  The only time life gives you what you want is when you want what life gives you.”

Snowflake whined,  “Nobody likes me.  Nobody helps me.  I am suffering and nobody cares.”

“Stop depending on others,” I said.   “Rely on yourself.  If there are no solutions to the things you think are problems, stop thinking of them as problems and think of them as adventures.  Accept what IS.  Sometimes you actually have to eat what you cooked or what someone else cooked for you.  And if you’re stuck in the kitchen, do the dishes, and while scrubbing the pots and pans try not to think ‘poor me’ thoughts.  The only place they are rewarded is at the ‘Poor Me Oscars’.  Try not to get nominated.”

Snowflake cried,  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I’m probably going to lose my job, my house, my kids and my pet kangaroo.”

I said, “Living in the future complicates the present.  If those things happen you will be without your job, house, kids and pet kangaroo.  Deal with it. By now you should know that the  only  real  freedom  you have in life is the ability to choose  you r thoughts;  choose what to think; choose how to look at life; choose your mindset; choose your point-of-view; choose your perspective; choose your attitude.  You know you have that power.  Try using it,  ‘cause you’re driving me nuts.”

A WILD VACATION SPOT:  Imagine you live on a world where there is only harmony and peace, a world without risk, disease, injury and death, a world where everyone gets along, no vanity, conceit, pride or greed and no mean people.  Imagine that everything you need is provided instantly, at a thought, and as a result you get bored, and so you pop-into The Universe Travel Agency.   You read a poster: “DEATH WORLD.  TO ESCAPE YOU HAVE TO DIE.  THE EARTH ADVENTURE.  IT’S HOSTILE AND VIOLENT.  THE ULTIMATE PAIN AND PLEASURE EXPERIENCE (you need mental counseling to go).

Having read the sign, you sign-up and enter the departure room and are told, “Welcome to The Earth Adventure–the wild west of the universe. I hope you enjoy your adventure.  And just because you paid to go there doesn’t mean you won’t pay dearly while there.  Earth-life is tough.  You shouldn’t have come if you’re a crybaby, but since you chose to do it, you might as well try to have a good attitude about it because you’re stuck here until you’re dead.  And don’t forget the disclaimer you agreed to: I promise not to sue anyone when I get back.”  

If you are going to trust your beliefs, if you are going to believe the religious stories you have been told about the meaning and purpose and destiny of life, consider the  EARTH ADVENTURE STORY.  It is not much worse than many religious-belief-fables and better than some.  On the other hand, since belief is like taking a wild guess into the imagined wild blue yonder about a before, during and after-life (since NO ONE knows for sure) it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you cover it in chocolate and put a Maraschino Cherry on Top and enjoy it.

From Instinct to Intellect to Intuition to Liberation to Infinity and Beyond,
IN THE MEANTIME, stop freaking-out when life doesn’t happen your way by accepting that
life will not always happen your way.

How do you do that?  By not entertaining, not pondering and not playing with thoughts that destroy your joy, peace, and happiness.

CONTROL YOUR MIND.  QUIT LETTING YOUR MIND POOP ON YOUR PARADE
QUIT LETTING YOUR MIND USE YOU FOR A TOILET.  QUIT LETTING YOUR MIND GET AWAY WITH ITS NONSENSE & FOOLISHNESS.  CONTROL YOUR MIND.

The greatest victory you will ever have in this life is when you liberate yourself from your mind’s nuttiness.

Thoughts create conflict and pain. Thoughts separate, contrast, categorize, and divide life–people, places, things.  Thoughts destroy the oneness and unity of life.  Thoughts take what is and twists it into what it isn’t.  Thoughts create personal and untrue realities, and the result is self-deception and delusion.  No thought.  No conflict. No pain.

IF YOU ARE NOT NEEDING YOUR MIND TO ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING TELL IT TO SHUT THE HELL UP.

FOURTEEN THINGS I TOLD MY KIDS BEFORE THEY WERE OLD ENOUGH TO CHASE ME.

205.   I know you can’t talk yet, but you can hear, and though you might not understand what I’m telling you, here goes anyway: you were born because your mom and I didn’t take our parents advice, so, in two moths, happy first birthday. Oh, and If you think your life sucks now, wait until you have to change your own diapers and do the dishes.

206.  Incase you’re wondering, we love you, why else would we put up with your shit.

207.  Right now you’re cute and cuddly, but that will change way before you become a know-it-all stupid teenager, which is why I’m keeping a jaundiced eye on you.

206.  Your life is temporary.  Try not to take it too seriously.  Someday you’ll be as dead as everyone else, and no one will care where you’re buried except land developers.

210.   Someday we may be friends, but not until I recover from your teenage years.

211.   Of course, we wanted you, but things change.

212.   Of course, you can move home, just let me get my stuff and get out.

213.   Being a teenager is a disease.  Age is the cure.  It doesn’t always work.

214.   If you tell me one more time that you didn’t ask to be born, I'm going to tell you the truth, "We didn't ask for you either.  We asked for a nice kid."  Feel better?  I do.

216.   All humans are family, so don’t be surprised if I treat you like you’re nuts too.

217.   If you ever think you’re important, and life can’t do without you, you really are nuts.

219.  If you examine yourself, and life, you will discover that human-life is a short, persistent and temporary illusion, a virtual-reality game.  As you dig deeper, you will be enthralled and taken away with the beauty, grandeur and awesome mystery that is life, and wonder how it came to be.  And if you give it enough thought, you still won’t know, but at least you’ll understand why the wackadoodle side of human thinking is so prevalent and entertaining.

On a practical day-to-day basis when dealing with people, you have to judge and draw conclusions, however, inside you can be pleasant about it, even if outside you have to be stern, strict, exact and demanding with people (and with those people that require you to be stern, strict, exact and demanding.  In other words, be practical and as nice as people will let you.