White. Laboratory. Body sensations few. Have trouble moving my limbs.

Look down. Horror. Shock.

Recognition.

It slowly dawns on me. The reality (is that what it is?) creeps into my consciousness bit by painful bit.

Accident.

There was an accident, that’s why I’m here. Something happened. Family? Wife? Daughter?

All gone.

I am property of the state.

More memories come flooding back. Natural, or drug induced?

Cold table. Steel. Gurney. Machines. Connected.

All I can move is my eyes. Blips, lights, humming, buzzing.

A door opens. Footsteps. Floor sounds hard. Soles of shoes sound hard. Two pairs. Walking up behind me. Peering over me, staring, investigating.

Eye contact.

“Do you think he remembers anything?”

“Maybe, let’s run the tests.”

They are talking to each other. Not to me.

They walk over to some instruments, glancing back at my (body?) as they do.

“Seems we had a success. Full simulation. Again?”

“Yea, let’s up the matrix this time.”

Eyes go blurry. Room fades. Now fades. I’m back (when?). I’m back (where?).

“Daddy!”

My daughter runs, and jumps into my arms. I just had one of those weird moments where you kind of brain fart. I grab her and hold her tight. Today is her fifth birthday party. At least it will be in thirty minutes or so. That’s when the invitation said to show up. Fifteen of her friends had already RSVP’d, well, their parents did at least. Five years old. She is growing quick. It only seemed like yesterday we were in the delivery room, her mom, my wife, screaming and crying at the same time, only to have that look of complete wonder and astonishment when they placed her in her arms.

“We have a girl!” she’d said to me through tears. Happy tears. Wonderful tears.

“Daddy!” she screams in my ear.

“Can we eat the cake yet?”

“Not till everybody gets here!” I say, putting her down.

“Hey!” I hear my wife calling me.

“Help me with this!” She is reaching down under the cabinet, getting the extra plates for cake and ice cream. She has trouble bending. I smile.

“Let me do that, be careful.” I say, patting her big stomach. Two more months.

I put all the plates out on the table, as my little girl runs around me in circles, signing. Not sure where she picked up that song from, but it sounds cute.

The doorbell rings.

“Daddy, they’re here!”

I turn to walk toward the door. My feet won’t move. Like those dreams where you try desperately to run, but can’t move. Why is this happening to me when I’m awake?

The doorbell rings again. Not the doorbell. An alarm.

Footsteps. Hard soles on a hard floor.

Please, not again. I want to go back. I can feel a tear running down the side of my face. I can move my eyeballs, but nothing else.

“Wow, look at this.” I hear one voice say to the other.

“Almost eighty percent.”

“Better than expected. Let’s try to change the algorithm. See what that does.”

No, no, please. I’m desperate to get up, to run, to flee, to end this somehow, but I can’t move.

The room starts to fade.

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If you have any phobias, here’s a quick and easy way to get rid of them. Actually a couple of quick and easy ways. Sometimes called the “swish” technique (although I think this term may actually be proprietary), and sometimes called something else, it can be very helpful in removing a non-resourceful response to an external event or trigger.

What is an external event or a trigger? Anything that you perceive in the world around you. A certain coffee cup, a person, a certain tone of voice. Anything that happens in the outside world, that gets into your brain through your ears, eyes, nose, mouth, or sense of touch.

The brain is an amazing computational device. Despite the incredible speed with which the Internet has been expanding recently, with any number of ways to connect and communicate, the entirety of the Internet is nowhere near the complexity and computational abilities of one human brain. Anybody who is worried that the Internet, or machines in general will somehow become “aware,” like “Skynet,” don’t’ fret. Our simple human brains which have been used by humans to throw rocks at moving animals for hundreds of thousands of years are much more advanced that any computer now, or in the future.

However, there are tradeoffs. It can’t do everything at once. Many times it sacrifices accuracy for speed. This crops up whenever we generalize, distort, or delete information between the outside world and our brains.

On the one hand, that is a great leap of evolution. You only need to learn how to open one door, and every other door in the universe (or at least on earth) is easy to figure out. Just look for the handle, and give it a turn, or a click, and you’re in.

However, sometimes, this works against you. If you are a little kid out for a morning stroll, exploring the wonderful world around your home, and a strange dog comes out of nowhere and starts barking, it can have the effect of making you terrified of dogs your entire life.

Or if you have to get up in front of your third grade class to give a book report, and you interpret the laughter from a couple of students as directed at you, rather than the nervous laughter that it likely is, it can have a profound impact on your ability to speak in public for the rest of your life.

The great promise of human development is to take all of these automatic processes, and raise them up into your conscious awareness long enough to tinker with them, so that when they sink down into unconsciousness, they no longer hinder you. In fact, it’s possible to tinker with them enough so that they support you, and make what used to be fearful, compelling and sought after.

Here’s how. The structure is to take an event, and relive it, but give the events different meanings than you originally gave them. There are many tricks and “procedures” that you can use to do this. One is the swish pattern. It goes like this. (For the sake of illustration, we’ll use the barking dog from some imaginary childhood.)

Go back into your past, until you see the dog. Run through events, slowly, right up until the dog came into your awareness. Either a sound, or a smell, or visualization. Find the trigger. Imagine you are some time traveler, and you are in that little kids head. What is the first thing that let you know there was a dog there, before you felt the fear? Was it a smell, a noise, a rustling off in the distance?

Ok, freeze that. Now come up with another picture, one that makes you feel as good as you can. A big bowl of ice cream, a Friday afternoon after school, going over to your best friends house for a sleepover, whatever you can think of.

Now take that previous memory, leading up to the barking dog, and right when you get to that “trigger,” immediately switch over to the positive, happy memory.

If you’ve seen the movie “Butterfly Effect,” this can be a good way to hallucinate this. Imagine yourself as a little kid, just about to get scared by the dog, but not quite, then suddenly switch to the other memory. If you do this enough times, it will start to happen every time you think of a dog, or see a dog.

Before, this is what happened in your brain. You heard a dog; your brain quickly scanned your memory to figure out how to respond, and found the original barking dog incident, and came back with a feeling of fear.

But if you do the swish pattern enough, with enough emotion, you’ll “short circuit” that process. Now when you hear a dog, you will search through your memory, and either come up with nothing, giving you a neutral response, or you’ll come up with the new positive, happy response. Naturally, the more you practice “replacing” the original response, the more of an effect it will have. Many people make the mistake of only doing this once, and wondering why it doesn’t “stick.”

That’s akin to practicing a new golf swing once and wondering why you can’t hit it perfectly every time. You need to put in several practice swings on the driving range before it becomes a habit.

As to how you actually do the “swish” where you replace one memory with the next, there are several ways.

One is to make a picture of the trigger memory, and then shrink it quickly and replace it with a picture of the new memory.

Another is to imagine the trigger memory as a picture, and then somebody pulling it from your head, as if it’s wrapped around your head with rubber bands, and then just before snapping it back into your brain, replace it with the new memory.

Another is to imagine Yoda standing behind you with a light saber, and every time the trigger memory pops up, he demolishes it and makes the new memory appear.

The more creative you get with this, and the more fun you have doing this, the better and quicker it will work.

Have fun.

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Once I was on this backpacking trip with a friend of mine. We’d planned this trip out for a few weeks, and had been really looking forward to it. It wasn’t a loop trip, which meant that we had to find somebody to drop us off at the trailhead, so that when we came out a week later our car would be there. We had decided to hike over this pass that was relatively tough, so we had to get in shape physically.

We also had to plan for a bit of cross-country, off trail hiking. We only had so many days off of work, and the particular semi-loop we wanted to do was a bit of a stretch. It was feasible given our time frame, but we would have had to hike quite a few miles every day, which wouldn’t have given us much time for fishing.

Our guidebook listed a “shortcut” that cut across a small pass, and saved us about ten miles of hiking. It seemed, (like most things do) good enough on paper, so we figured we’d give it a go.

Only when we got to the “shortcut” it involved walking over this huge field of large boulders. And when I say huge field, I mean like three or football fields huge. And the boulders were between the size of your desk, and your car. And, it was slightly up hill. Not only that but every third or fourth boulder would “move” slightly when you stepped on it, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

About a third of the way through this “shortcut,” I looked up to see my friend just barely within shouting distance ahead of me. Suddenly I started to feel anxious. What happened if I slipped on one of these unstable boulders and snapped my ankle? I might slip into a crevice between them and who knows how long before anybody found me? As I was carrying about a fifty-pound pack, each step was becoming more and more dangers. I looked up at my friend, and back down to the dirt trail below, which was still within view.

“Hey” I shouted. I waited. I shouted again. Finally my friend turned to look.

“I’m going around!” I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not, but I went back down toward the dirt trail. I wasn’t looking forward to hiking the extra ten miles around the next set up mountains, but it seemed better than possible snapping ankle.

What happened after that is something I’ll never forget.

Once I went on this date with a girl. It had taken me quite a while to get up the courage to ask her out. Finally I did, and she happily agreed. I figured I’d impress her with my culinary knowledge, and take her to a Vietnamese-French restaurant. The only place where I’d actually eaten snails, er, escargot. I had everything planned out. Next to this restaurant was a pretty decent cafe, and they were all within a few miles of her apartment. I had everything planned. I’d pick her up, take her to this nice restaurant, we’d walk over to the cafe, and I’d impress her with my stimulating conversation skills, and then take her home. If I were lucky she’d ask me in for a cup of coffee. (Whatever that means.)

I picked her up, told her all about how wonderful this restaurant was on the way there. Only when we got there, the place was gone. Burned to the ground. She looked at me with a, “now what?” look on her face.

I had this roommate in college who was a computer programmer. I always wondered why those guys would spend all night long programming, and typing in code. I never really understand how to program, despite taking a class in BASIC while I was in high school many years ago.

He explained that a programmer has to plan for all possible events, and come up with a way for the software to handle everything. He was trained well by his professor. He would write some code, present it to his prof, and the prof would do all kinds of things that he hadn’t expected, in order to crash the program. His particular favorite was to randomly type in as many keystrokes as possible, until the program just froze.

All the students in his class quickly learned that because you never know what is going to happen, you have to plan for everything, and then test it out. No matter how much you plan, there are still things that can come up that you didn’t expect, so you need to go back and program that into the software as well.

Biologists will say that the reason that the human species is so incredibly prolific is that we are incredibly flexible. You can travel to any remote corner of the world, any environment, any food source, and there’s a chance that humans have no only lived there, but thrived there. Caves, cliffs, houses made from ice, deserts, rainforests. We seem to have some incredibly rich and complex circuitry programmed into our collective human brain that makes us incredibly responsive to whatever happens.

An evolutionary biologist will tell you that just like my roommate kept presenting his computer program to his professor over and over again, every generation of humans has produced an iteration slightly better equipped than the previous.

A theologian or a deist will tell you our Creator endowed us with such incredible circuitry simply because that’s who She is.

Of course, my own personal circuitry seemed to be taking the night off, as I stared back at my date, for a while, and then just figured we’d skip the restaurant, and go straight to the café. They have food at café’s, right? The date didn’t come out as planned, in large part because I didn’t have a plan B, nor did I check with the restaurant (e.g. make reservations like any normal person would have), or at least drive by the place to make sure it was still there.

And when I came back down to the dirt trail, and started walking, it really started to sink in. I was all alone, in the middle of the wilderness, with no cell phone, and no way of communicating with anybody. Since we hadn’t planned on taking the long way around, we hadn’t purchased any maps or checked out any guidebooks for that particular area. I only had a couple of large mountain peaks as my guideline, and a trail that may or may not fork off into other trails. I basically had two large mountains to my left, that I had to walk around, and not only find the meadow that was between them, but find my friend who would be hopefully be waiting for me.

It took me about six hours to finally meet up with my friend again, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Luckily, the contour of the mountains and the meadow, and also the fact that there was a decent spring running up the middle made it fairly straightforward.

But during those six hours, I had some pretty interesting conversations with myself. Something I shall never forget.

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Once there was this guy who lived in the sewer. He didn’t really mind living in the sewer, as it allowed him to live a life free from the worries of most day-to-day frustrations and anxieties. He didn’t have much money, but he didn’t really need anything.

This particular sewer that he lived in wasn’t really a sewer, per se, it was a large stretch of pipe that led out to a river, which was about a mile from the ocean. Up the river were a couple of industrial plants, and had been built specifically so they could dump their toxic industrial waste in the river. The factories had been built well before any EPA rules had specifically forbid the dumping of sewage into the river, but one has to wonder about the foresight of somebody that would base part of their business plan on the ability to continually pollute a natural resource.

This particular pipe had also been built to dump raw sewage directly into the river, but the same laws which precluded the plant to dump toxic waste into the river also precluded the local town to figure out another way to deal with their waste.

So as it stood, the large pipe, which was about a half a mile long, hadn’t been used in several years, and had dried considerably. There were a few storm drains that led into he pipe, and the central character of this story had lived in the sewer long enough, and had learned to read the weather well enough to prepare for the rise in water.

The area where this all took place didn’t see much rainfall, well below average, so this guy didn’t have to worry about his home flooding too often. And since he learned long ago to stay away from the bottle, he wasn’t in any danger of passing out and waking up floating out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Contrary to what you’d expect, he was a pretty together bum, and put a good deal of thought into planning for the future. His future.

Our tale begins when he was out a night scavenging for food. He knew which were the good spots, which restaurants had decent leftovers in their dumpster. This was getting harder and harder, as many restaurants participated in programs that shared their food with the needy. Somebody from the local soup kitchen would come around and collect the leftovers, every night, so it was getting harder and harder for him to find unused food portions in the dumpsters.

You may be thinking that he could easily go straight to the source, the food kitchens themselves, but he learned that nothing was free. They all had their own philosophy and ideas about how a homeless man should be living his life. After about a week of free food, they grew comfortable enough with him to try and “counsel” him, and help him to “find a job,” so he could get a “decent place to live.”

As soon as they started in on that kind of helpful advice, he quickly found himself scavenging for his own food again, and heading back to his underground sanctuary.

As he was dumpster diving behind the Nigerian delicatessen (they were fairly new in town, and hadn’t been convinced by the local charity to give their leftover food yet) and found quite a bit of bread and cheese that were only a few days past their expiration date. Being a firm believer that expiration dates were only a recommendation, and not a hard and fast rule, he realized he hit the jackpot.

He went back home, and made himself a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. If you’re wondering how a bum living in an abandoned underground sewer can make grilled cheese sandwiches, don’t fret. He had quite a setup, an area with a bed, and a couple of mattresses. A barbecue, and a few pots and pans that he used occasionally to cook with. He wasn’t your stereotypical bum that cooked an open can of beans on the fire. He had done a lot of work to make his home livable and comfortable. And the most interesting part was how quickly he could move everything about the water line at a moments notice.

But after he’d eaten a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, he started feeling funny. Not, “I ate some bad food,” funny, but funny, funny. Not normal, funny. Something is really wrong with reality, funny. He started to see double, and his mouth and lips began to swell. He tried to sleep it off, but no use.

When he woke up in the next morning, his lips and tongue had returned to their normal size but his mind was completely frazzled. He still could think the same thoughts that he used to think, at least that’s what he remembered thinking when he woke up, but the thoughts he used to connect to things were different. Things that used to cause him fear now caused him to feel peaceful and tranquil. Those things that he never gave a second thought to now terrified him beyond measure.

Like when you are sitting there looking at this, and all of a sudden you feel you’ve been misled, or you’ve allowed yourself to be misled, and you are finally seeing things for the first time. You may look around and see the same things, but they take on completely different meaning. As if you are finally starting to realize what it’s really all about.

He decided to go back to the source and see if they could help. He would never have considered even making eye contact with the owner of a restaurant whose dumpster he had violated the night before, but today it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

He made his way back to the Nigerian delicatessen, and was surprised when they seemed to be expecting him.

“How are you old friend? You have finally come home!” A very large man said to him in heavily accented English when he walked in the front.

Old friend? Wasn’t this a new restaurant?

He found himself returning the embrace, first a little tentatively, and then slowly with more and more willingness.

“Please, tell us what you have learned here.” The large man asked him.

While he didn’t really understand the question, he found himself answering. And his answers astonished him. Not just their content, but the way in which they seemed to be coming from another person that he was watching across the room. Slowly but surely, this objective viewpoint slowly melted back into a subjective experience as he finally remembered everything. Who he was, where he came from, and what he had learned over the years. It felt good. Really good.

He was home again. It was time for the next phase. And it felt wonderful.

To be continued….

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I have a friend that lives in Korea. He’s never been to any other countries, and he told me the country he’d like to visit most is the United States. Not move there to live or anything, just to visit. I asked him why, and he gave me a rather peculiar answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a while. And after he told me of his answer, I never looked at the world the same.

I remember when I was in third grade, when we first learned about plate tectonics. How all the continents are like giant pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle that used to fit together snugly, as one large mass of land. And of course, due to the structure of the Earth, the land can float around, albeit extremely slowly, at least according to human standards.

I remember asking my teacher how that was possible. She said that even though the Earth appeared to be a solid object, we can walk on the surface without falling through, it’s really liquid underneath. Really hot liquid, and the surface is really sort of floating around. She described it as a giant pie that’s cooking in the oven. The top is solid, or becomes solid while it cooks, but the inside is always liquid, especially if it’s an apple pie. And if you look at one of those time elapsed movies of an apple pie cooking, the surface will seem to expand a little bit, and move around.

There are many metaphors that are based on the “solidness” of the earth. Solid as a rock, immovable as a mountain etc. But these metaphors only hold true when compared to the attention span of your average human society, which isn’t nearly as long enough to appreciate the fluidity of a mountain range. The English language has only been around, in various forms, for a few thousand years at most. A mere blink compared to plate tectonics.

I remember once I was taking a sales course in handling objections. We learned many different ways to overcome a client’s reason for not buying our product or service. These are pretty handy techniques, and can be used in a variety of situations. One of the presuppositions of being able to out frame somebody’s objection is nobodies objection is ever set in stone.

They might not be able to buy today; right this second, but they will someday, or at least they think they will someday, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. (Unless you happen to be a really aggressive door-to-door salesperson).

Whenever they give an objection, or a reason, or an excuse or whatever, you just say:

“Yes, but for how long?”

That usually throws them for a loop, and gets them thinking outside of their small “now” frame of not being able to buy. Once they start thinking in terms of some time in the future, when they will be able to buy (and their objection is no longer valid), you simply bring that feeling into the present.

“I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but for how long?”

“I’m not sure I like the color.”
“Yes, but for how long.”

“I’m just shopping for now, kind of looking around.”
“Yes, but for now long.”

Unless you’ve done something wrong and they’re ready to kill you, they won’t usually answer with “Forever!” before stomping off.

A flip side to this is to say a variation of “No yet?”

“I don’t really like the color.”
“Hmm. Not yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure if I can afford it.”
“Yea, not yet?”
(Note: for you conversational hypnotists, they won’t be sure if the “not yet” applies to them not being sure, or them not having any money)

If you have good rapport with your client/target/mark, these simple questions will get them out of right now, where all their problems are, and get them thinking in the future, when their problems have already been solved. Then they can take that feeling of already having solved their problems back to now, and the current situation will look a lot more doable.

Obviously, you can use this in any kind of conversation, for any kind of intention, so long as you have a win/win outcome in mind. Sales, therapy, seduction, getting your kids to clean their rooms, whatever.

So when I asked my friend why wanted to visit the states, it was for the simple reason to be able to look out toward the horizon, and see nothing but flat earth. Korea, being a pretty cramped peninsula, has many mountains, and no matter were you are in Korea, no matter which direction you look, (unless you are looking out over the sea) you don’t have to look for to see mountains.

But in the United States, there are plenty of areas with nothing but flat ground, and open sky. He wanted to be able to look out his window, or whatever, and see nothing but uninhibited views of the ground stretching flat seemingly forever until finally meeting up with the sky. And look to the right, and to the left, and see a perfectly flat horizon, endlessly expanding in both directions.

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Once there was a group of kids that had been sent on a mission. They were not to come back unless their mission was successfully accomplished. To do so you not only mean obvious failure, but also would indicate their lack of ability to take on further missions. They had been charged by the elders of their tribe, and had been on the road for some time. After they had set out, it had been quite for a while. None dared to speak, lest they violate the silent tension that clung relentlessly about the group.

At first the silent tension was troublesome. It gave rise to thoughts and anxieties of failure and rejection. But then the tension became accepted, then comfortable, and finally like an unseen security blanket that bound the group together. They would all fail or succeed together. To speak would snap the tension, and likely destroy any chance of success. Or so they thought.

Pain is an interesting thing. Biologists tell us the body evolved an inability to grow resistant to pain, as to do so would certainly not lead to reproductive success. Any creature from any species that had the ability to grow accustomed to pain may become injured, and not take reconstructive efforts. A bleeding animal wouldn’t lick it’s wounds and give it self the anti-bacterial effects of it’s own saliva. It would slowly remove itself from its own gene pool, and after only a few generations, any individual within the group with this “ability” would be extremely rare.

Other sensory input, on the other hand, that doesn’t require immediate attention can easily be temporarily ignored. Hunger, thirst, smell, slight discomfort due to outside ranges in temperature.

But emotional pain is a completely different ballgame. Neuroscientists are only just beginning to understand the role that emotions play in everyday human life. And even then the input they have is still a mystery. From a scientific perspective, emotions are nearly impossible to measure. You can’t very well hook somebody up to an emote-o-meter (unless you are a scientologist) and see what effects the different emotions have on physiological and biological functions of the mind/body/nervous system.

Until very recently, most scientists believed that emotions played on part in decision-making. Emotions were viewed from the Vulcan standpoint of getting in the way of logical thinking. It was believed that without emotions, we could always make the best choices, and never make mistakes.

Then a couple of surgeons had the opportunity to test this theory out during a particularly interesting brain surgery. The portion of the patient’s brain that was thought responsible for emotional feelings was temporarily “disconnected,” and since brain surgeries can be performed with an awake patient, they figured they ask him a couple difficult questions (like the kind you find in a high school ethics book). They were stunned to find out that he couldn’t even make the most basic decisions without the input of his emotions.

If you break everything down into either a pain or pleasure emotional response, and assume those are the drivers behind every decision, it makes sense. Your brain has this amazing capability of imagining several future outcomes of every single decision, usually unconscious, and checking to see what would produce the most pleasure, and the least amount of pain.

Luckily, through millions of years of evolution, things that keep us alive and safe, as well as propagate the species generally give us the most pleasure. Like good food, good sex, and a nice safe place to sleep at night. Things that put us in danger tend to give us emotional pain, like high places, loud noises, and tigers.

It can get complicated when our rational minds know that one particular choice is a good one, but it goes against our hard-wired programming from millions of years of evolution. No matter how scientifically sure you are that it’s probably not a good idea to have one more bowl of ice cream, it can be near impossible to squash your desire through willpower alone.

Of course, if you successfully avoid the ice cream enough times, you’ll build up a resistance to that evolutionary drive to continually eat whenever there’s food available. And pretty soon you’ll get used to expending emotional energy to suppress your million years old biological urge. So much so that when you do have an occasional bowl of ice cream, the “guilt” associated with it, which is really a temporary release of that emotional discomfort that you’ve grown accustomed to, is enough to mess up your pleasure of eating.

Of course, if you are trying to lose weight, this isn’t so bad. For many, to lose their craving and taste for something rich and calorie dense like ice cream would come as a blessing.

But what about more complicated things? What if you make a decision, one that requires some conscious willpower and faith in the face of unconscious resistance, but you aren’t nearly as scientifically sure as you were when you avoided the ice cream? When you put up with the emotional discomfort long enough, it’s easy to start to question your decision that you made earlier; no matter how sure you were when you made it.

It can be extremely helpful to set up some good anchors and targets to stay focused on, if you expect those tough times to come. Figure out exactly why you are embarking on your mission, and what the specific pay off will be when you get there. So when you do come across those rough patches, you’ll have something to focus on to pull you through. If you make a decision that isn’t really in your best interests, either because it’s not really your goal to begin with, or you aren’t sure what outcome you’re after, it’s extremely difficult to stay on track.

Make sure you take enough time to build your target, and make it as compelling as possible before starting on your operation.

When the group boys finally returned after a successful mission, they were given generous accolades from their tribe. They hadn’t known it, but this was a ritual performed on young boys to ease them into manhood. This had been passed down for generations immemorial, and in previous generations had been used to prepare young boys for the life and death struggle of the daily hunt. In recent times however, the ritual had gradually taken on a symbolic meaning, as the tribe had slowly evolved into a successful agricultural community, and hadn’t needed to hunt animals for many years. Nevertheless, they found it useful to send the boys on a quest, to give them a taste of setting their sights on something far off in the distance, going after it, getting it, and bringing it home.

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Once there was the group of people. They lived in a small, close-knit community that was similar to most other communities. They had an occasional weekend barbecue at somebody’s house, and they had a community swimming pool that most of the kids went to on the weekends during the summer time.

A few of the families had been living there for more than one generation, and it wasn’t uncommon for the kids to grow up, move away to college, and then come back and start their own family. It also wasn’t uncommon for the kids to leave for college, never to return again, except for the occasional holiday. New families would move in from time to time as well, and were generally welcomed without any undue scrutiny.

But that was before the incident.

Something happened which had irrevocably changed this small town from a safe place where kids could play in the street well past sunset to one of unimaginable terror and danger. A place where people knew it was foolish to even look out their windows past sunset,

Certain occupations that required their workers to be out after dark had to take extra precautions. However, these occupations were few and far between, as the demand for products and services that extended past sunset quickly dried up as residents learned that nighttime was best spent quietly inside, preferably in a room without windows. For if you happened to look outside at the wrong moment, and saw one of them for more than a split second, well, let’s just say it only happened a couple of times. And when the description of what happened after had quickly spread through this once happy town, people quickly learned to keep their heads down and their eyes averted after sunset.

For a short time after the incident, it was treated with nothing more than a peculiarity. A few scientists came in from neighboring universities to study what they thought was an interesting, albeit dangerous, phenomenon. What they found, at least that got in close enough to measure it, was beyond all human comprehension. Beyond all human logic and reason. Sure they had certain scientific instruments that measured certain pieces of data. Data they could later take apart and analyze back in their laboratory. But the implications of the data were absolutely horrifying.

Scientists base their whole method upon the idea that there are certain laws of physics, like gravity and electromagnetic radiation, that are absolutely true regardless of where and when in the universe they are operating. Sure many aspects of those laws may be outside of human understanding and experience, but they are rigid laws nonetheless.

Of course, many believe that laws are transient, and don’t always apply. One law of physics that holds true in this area of the universe over here, won’t necessarily hold true in that area of the universe over there. But those that believe in this kind of transient application of seemingly fluid physical laws don’t usually make it a point to build a career out of science.

Which is why these scientists are first were more than a bit puzzled when took apart their data. It just didn’t make sense. The anomaly seemed to emit certain levels of radiation and what they referred to as “electromagnetic shock,” although there was argument if this term was wholly appropriate. The entity seemed to sometimes obey the known laws of physics, and sometimes not.

This would be OK if it obeyed/disobeyed in a repeatable, predictable fashion, but the frequency that it seemed to switch “on” and “off” passed all statistical tests of randomness.

Then the “incident” occurred.

It flashed a burst of what would later be called an “enveloping incident.” It seemed to expand in size, and briefly enveloped a scientist who had gotten too close. It was only for a short fraction of a second, but it was enough. After it had retreated to it’s “shape” prior to the incident, the scientists himself exhibited all the signs of an entity that was no longer bound by seemingly unbreakable physical, chemical, and biological laws.

Brain synapses stopped functioning properly, muscle cells, transmission of nerve impulses stopped behaving according to the laws of biochemistry. Once he had become “infected,” he was classified as “entity number two” by his fellow scientists. Some who had worked with him for years. Even referring to “entity number two” was a stretch of the imagination.

At times he would appear somewhat close to human form, although in obvious physical and mental anguish. Other times “he” would simply be a cluster of improbability, unpredictable, and deemed too dangerous to measure.

This of course, had presented the scientists with a huge dilemma. Obviously, they had to keep this “incident” from repeating, but they all agreed that any form of matter that came close to it would be in danger of being removed from the laws of physics and chemistry. It would be turned into a ball of purely random energy, that didn’t behave in any predictable fashion.

So the government did the best thing they could. Which was to place an imaginary barrier around the town for hundred miles, and try and decide if they could contain the entity. As far as the townspeople were concerned, they would be left to fend for themselves.

As such, they were a fairly self-sufficient town, with enough farmland, and a source of water that they weren’t dependent on outside resources.

But that didn’t stop the terror, and the fear, and the absolute horror. Of being locked in with hell itself, floating around, slowly turning victims into itself, one by one.

To be continued…

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“Get! The! Fuck! Out!”
“Wait, what?”
“Don’t make me say it again! Get Out! Now!”
He picked up a baseball bat and came after me; I wasn’t sure why he was so angry. I’d been saying the same things to him for the past several years, pretty much this guy’s whole life. Most of the time he just took it, without doing anything. Other times it had the effect I’d intended. To manipulate him into action.

But not today.

I turned to walk out, pretty sure he wasn’t serious. Until I heard things start to break. First a lamp, then he flung the clay ashtray that he’d made at summer camp at me, barely missing my head. Then I felt the air whoosh by the back of my head as his baseball bat barely missed smashing my skull in like that one time we threw a two day old pumpkin off the top of the library at school. Those were good times. This wasn’t. I knew I had to get out of there.

Quick.

“If you come back, I’ll kill you.” It wasn’t a threat, or a warning, merely a statement of factual cause and effect. If it rains, I’ll get wet. If the Dodgers lose, I’ll be sad. If you come back, I’ll kill you.

So what happened all of a sudden? He’d never exhibited any behavior whatsoever that indicated he was the slightest bit angry at me, despite my crafty manipulations to get him to do exactly what I wanted him to.

Most people aren’t aware of how easily you can manipulate people. You just go to know what buttons to push. Which ones feel good. The one’s that they are desperate to have pushed by others, but spend a lifetime without experiencing it. And the ones they are terrified of having pushed, and spend their whole lives cowering in fear of somebody uncovering their horrible secret.

It’s an art form, actually. You don’t really ever have to actually push their buttons. You don’t even have to pretend you are about to push them, like the amateurs do. All you have to do is to allude to having the knowledge, and the will to push them. That is where the skill lies. In alluding to pushing them with the complete and honest capacity to have no idea what they are talking about should you get called on it. To act and communicate in such a way as to have several different interpretations, one of which is that there buttons are going to get pushed.

That way you can leave it to them to imagine what might happen, and be manipulated by their own fearful hallucinations and worst-case scenario interpretations of what you mean. Kind of like in baseball, where you throw an inside out curveball, which looks like an outside in curveball. The only intention of a pitch like that is to confuse the batter into leaning into the pitch. It’s one thing to throw a fastball at a batter. Everybody knows what’s up. That’s why both benches always clear, and there’s always a fight. Clear and obvious aggression.

But an inside out curveball that you trick him into leaning into, is not only aggressive, but it’s aggressive with covert intentions. The worst kind. The kind you’d have to have a lot of chutzpah to retaliate against. Because any retaliation would be met with plausible deniability.

“What? You think I did that on purpose? I would never do that! What kind of person do you think I am?”

That is the secret to pure manipulation. The tone of voice, the presupposed meaning of your sentence.

“Oh, you’re wearing that tonight.”

That way you can get somebody to change their whole outfit, or feel self conscious about it without even coming up with a reason.

“What, what’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, its..fine..I guess.”

A few short words can elicit a lifetime of shame and embarrassment, and make most people question their own decision. Since most people are motivated by fear, you almost never have to seduce the other way. Most everybody can easily be corralled their whole lives by the thought of their worse fears coming true.

Which is why when I got chased away with a baseball bat, I knew the jig was up. Because, you see, how I have nowhere to go. Since I’m not really a person.

I’m just a voice in that guys head.

Was a voice in that guys head.

Sometimes his second grade teacher, sometimes his mom, a couple of times his boy scout leader, once some pretty lady that worked in the ice cream shop downtown that yelled at him for spilling ice cream on the recently mopped floor. Being a voice in somebody’s head gives you great access to horrible memories, and you can pretend to be many different voices. You almost never get caught, and you always can trick your host into doing, or not doing, whatever you want.

Except the rare occasion, when you get caught. Most of the time when you get caught you are only questioned, sometimes argued with. But rarely threatened with a baseball bat.

Now that I’m out on the street without a host, I will probably die soon. We can’t switch heads. Once the jig is up, it’s up. When we’re gone, we’re gone. Does he have any idea how he will survive without me? I was only protecting him, after all. Protecting him from making foolish mistakes. Protecting him from embarrassing himself in front of his friends. Protecting him from doing something that he’d regret.

I’m starting to feel faint. Maybe I’ll sit down for a spell. Maybe he’ll come to his senses.

Wait, where am I?

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Once there were these two trees. They were regular trees, in a regular forest. But there had been a drought lately, and there wasn’t much water to go around. So the leaves on the trees didn’t become as green as they had in the past. They would still grow, but not as many as before, and they didn’t look as good as before.

The mood of the forest was one of general anxiety. Most of the trees weren’t as happy as they’d been before. They still talked about the same things that they’d talked about before, but their conversations didn’t seem to have the same level of positivism as they did before. And the conversations seemed to be about trivial things, rather than any conversations that easily lent themselves to the future.

These were particularly old trees, several hundred years old, and they had been through several droughts before, but this one seemed a little bit different. None of the ones that came before seemed to have as deep an effect as the current one. Sometimes days would go by and nobody would say anything, they would just let the wind slowly seep through what few leaves they had.

Which is how this story begins, on one of those days when there hadn’t been any conversation to speak of for a few weeks. One tree, who happened to be particularly young, compared to the other trees at least, finally couldn’t take it any more, and decided to break the silence with his nearest neighbor, who was much older.

“I’m thirsty.”
“We’re all thirsty.”
“How much longer do we have to wait?”
“As long as it takes,” the old tree replied, starting to get perturbed. He too, was worried.
“How long does it usually take?”
“Sometimes a few months, maybe even longer than a year.”
“Longer than a year?” the young trees fear was obvious. The other trees pretended not to notice, but somehow they felt the same fear as the young tree despite their age and experience.

“You can’t control the rains. They come when they come. All we can do is wait.”
“But what happens if they don’t come?” The younger tree was almost in tears.

A strong wind blew, as if the angered by the young trees immature demands on the weather.

“Can you control your leaves?” The old tree asked.
“Huh?”
“Your leaves. Can you make them any greener? By only your thought?”
The young tree paused, apparently trying this new concept out for the first time.
“No. I can’t.”
“Can you make the water from the earth seep up your roots any faster?”
The young tree didn’t try this time. He just shook his head.

“When the wind blows, do you have any choice but to bend?” he asked again. The other trees were listening with rapt attention.

“No. I just bend. I don’t have to think about it.”

“So it is with the wind, and the sun, the moon, and the rain. They happen when they happen, why we do not know. How we do not know. We only know that they happen, and it helps us.”

“But” the young tree started, but trailed off.

“Do you know what happens when your leaves fall?”

“No.”

“They turn into dirt. The dirt through which your roots grow to pull up the water that comes from the rains, which comes from the oceans far, far away. So you can grow more leaves. ”

The young tree looked to the ground, and his branches, and the sky, and finally back to the older tree.

“Will I turn into dirt?” He asked.

“All you see around you is part of the same substance. It came from nothing, and shall return to nothing. Some sooner, some later. Everything is eventual.”

The young tree didn’t understand.

“But, what about us, the trees. We will turn into dirt?”

“Yes. But not today.”

The wind blew once more, shifting the branches, blowing off the dry leaves, clearing the forest floor below. Then the skies opened up, and rain began to fall.

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There was this really cool movie called “The Butterfly Effect,” that came out a few years ago. They made a sequel that was OK, but not nearly as powerful as the original. The reason it was called “The Butterfly Effect,” was because of part of something called “Chaos Theory.” The name, of course is a misnomer, as Chaos means behaving without any set of rules. The chaos in Chaos theory though refers to not having any discernable rules or observable cause/effect phenomenon.

The weather is a great example of Chaos Effect in action. There are many different variables, and they are all strongly interactive. A change here, will effect a change there, which will in turn affect a change over, which will cause a change back here, and so on. Because we humans have a fairly limited capacity when it comes to having instincts for multi variable systems, it appears chaotic and impossible to describe even using our best computes. That’s why when they predict the rain, they give percentages rather than absolutes. No matter how sophisticated our machines and computers get, due to the nature of the system, we still have to guess about the weather.

The term “Butterfly Effect” refers to a butterfly flapping it’s wings on one side of the planet, and the effect rippling through the complex interactive meteorological system, and eventually causing a hurricane on the other side of the world.

It was also alluded to in a story by Ray Bradbury, where a group of scientists created a time machine. They were getting set to go on their first mission, but they were strongly admonished not to interact at all with anything they saw in the past, as it would have an unknown effect in the future. So they went back in time, and were looking around. One of the scientists saw a butterfly, and decided to collect it. This of course, violated the rules of “non interaction.” When they returned to the present, everything was vastly changed, language, society, government, everything. One butterfly changed the entire future.

There was even an episode of the Simpson’s where Homer had a time machine, and they kept trying to come back to the normal present, but kept messing up. In one particular future they came back to, it was raining donuts, but they had big tongues like lizards.

If you’ve seen the movie, “The Butterfly Effect,” you know it follows the same pattern. The character can go back in time and relive part of his past, and when he comes back to the present, everything is changed. Every time he comes back, everything seems good, until he discovers something horribly wrong, and he has to go back and change something again.

While that is only a movie, and the idea of a butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet is largely metaphorical for the complex interactions in nature, there actually is a way to go back and change part of your past.

The way we are today, our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about our capabilities are based largely on what we have experienced and how we remember our past. While this is horrible news if you come with a bunch of baggage from an unpleasant or abusive childhood, it doesn’t have to be that way.

This is because our past is not really as solid as we think. Our own personal histories are based much more on our interpretation of events rather than the events themselves. If we can go back and somehow give a different interpretation to the events of the past, we can change our present.

Some people can do this pretty easy in the present. They’ll be walking down the street, bump into somebody, get cussed out, and simply write it off as the other guy having a bad day, without taking personal offense. The same is possible with our past, even though it’s already happened.

When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of resources or a lot of experience, so there were only so many ways we could respond to bad things that happened to us. We didn’t have the adult experience to write it off as somebody simply having a bad day, as the example above.

If you have a particularly painful memory from the past, here’s a great way to “re program” your history.

Sit back, relax, and close your eyes. Drift back to that “event” that is still causing you problems today. Watch the event unfold. Watch it again, but freeze the frame every so often, and look at the other people involved in the event with a more adult, forgiving attitude. Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Maybe they were expressing their own pain the best way they could. Give them the benefit of the doubt as much as you can. Remember the wise words of Nelson Mandela: “Holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.”

Stay dissociated, that is, watch the event unfolding, as if you are some kind of ghost from the future watching it unfold. After you’ve given as much adult understand as you can to all the players involved, watch it again, but this time, step in and interact with your child self. Explain to your child self who you are (yourself from the future) and what is really going on. Tell them whatever all the other people are doing, it’s nothing personal. Make sure your child self understand.

Now for the cool part. Go back and relive that experience, but this time as associated as you can. Float into your child’s body, but this time, really feel and experience your future self giving you guidance and support as the event unfolds. As a child, listen to the advice of your future self. Run through this several times.

This may seem awkward, and perhaps even emotionally painful at first, but just like with any other exercise, you’ll get better with practice. Pretty soon you’ll be able blink yourself back into your past, and re organize your responses to what happened, and give yourself a much brighter future. Just like Richard Bandler, the co founder of NLP said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

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I remember once I was talking to a friend of mine in a bar. It was about halfway between afternoon and night, and there weren’t that many people there. We had met earlier by coincidence, and decided to hang out for a while. He started telling me these problems he’s having with his girlfriend. He says that he’s having the same problem with his current girlfriend that he’s had with all of his previous girlfriends. Right when they get to the “serious commitment” stage, he starts to do all these stupid things (stupid according to him) that he claims that he doesn’t know why he does them, and they invariably lead to fights. These usually continue until the relationship breaks up.

I asked him if he does these things intentionally, and he said that he didn’t. He said they were little things that added up over time, like showing up late or flirting with other girls when they were together. Eventually she would put him on the spot, because to her it would seem as if he wasn’t taking the relationship seriously. He would always claim that he was, she would press him, they would fight like that for a couple weeks or months, then they’d break it off. It was always her that broke it off, saying that she wanted something serious, while he didn’t seem like it, despite his objections to the contrary.

He claimed he has no idea why he does those things, and only starts to do them when the relationship is beginning to get serious. To an outside observer, it seemed to me to be a clear case of unconscious self-sabotage. Part of you wants something, part of you doesn’t, for whatever reason, so you are conflicted at a subconscious level, and this comes out in your behavior. It seems to me that my friend, despite his conscious objections, doesn’t quite feel ready yet for a serious, committed relationship, on a deep unconscious level and it comes out in his behavior. He is in his late twenties, and a serious committed relationship to a guy that age usually means giving up the single life for good.

I asked him if he really wanted that kind of relationship, and he said he really did, but he didn’t know why he was doing these things. I am by no means qualified to give advice on this, but it seemed clear to me (especially after a couple beers) that he had some issues regarding commitment that he needed to deal with before was able to go into a life long relationship with both eyes open.

I haven’t really known this guy for that long, and I didn’t really want to ask him about his childhood or if his parents were divorced, but I suspect something happened to him earlier that made him feel extremely and deeply conflicted about committing to one person for life.

I was reading this book recently about psychology, and the author was talking about this thing called cognitive dissonance. This is the amazing ability of people to be incredibly self-deceptive. Scientists, namely evolutionary biologists suspect this arose out of the need to constantly deceive one another. Back in the day (before agriculture) when people lived in small groups of a couple hundred or so, it became really important to be able to detect “cheaters” in the group. People that wouldn’t contribute their fair share would pose a serious threat to the safety of the group, so humans developed this uncanny ability to detect when others are lying, through body language and facial expressions.

So, the more we developed a sense for detecting liars, the better we got at deceiving. In order to better deceive our neighbors, we had to be able to deceive ourselves, so we wouldn’t give off any subconscious clues. It’s been time and time again that one measure of a psychopath is somebody that can tell a lie, knowing it’s a lie, and get away with it.

So we have this automatic capacity to easily deceive ourselves, not only to lie to others without getting caught, but also to lie to ourselves to protect ourselves from facing inconvenient truths about ourselves. Keep in mind that this is always happening unconscious. We don’t go around telling lies on purpose.

A good example is when two people meet in a bar, and “hook up.” In the moment, they really believe that they are “right” for each other, and that there is at least the potential for a relationship. In reality, the urge to have sex is so great, that the reality of the situation is ignored, and self-deception allows one or both people to believe that this encounter is more than it really is.

Many people know somebody that has been in an abusive relationship, one that is obvious to outsiders that they should get out of. But from the inside, they convince themselves that it would be better to stay. If they were to leave, they may have to face the thought of being alone, or rejected, or worse.

The secret is to be able step in and out of your own personal situation, and see things from different perspectives. In NLP they call this “associated” and “dissociated.” People that can see themselves objectively in a situation are “dissociated” while people that are seeing themselves from a person, subjective point of view are “associated.” One is not better than the other, but it can be extremely helpful to be able to switch back and forth to get a better understanding of the situation that you’re in.

People that are stuck in an associates state are the people that are stuck in abusive relationships, or people like my friend that always ends up self sabotaging himself without knowing why. People that are stuck in a dissociated state are people like Spock (who is a fictional character), and psychopaths who have no conscious or feelings or morals.

When you study NLP, you learn how to do this at will, so you can be in any situation, and check it from a dissociated viewpoint, to make sure it’s healthy and empowering, and then switch back to an associated viewpoint, so you can enjoy it as much as possible.

If you’re interested in learning how to use NLP in your own life to increase happiness, wealth, and positive relationships, click on the link below. This is a basic course that shows you exactly how to use NLP to structure your thinking so that getting what you want out of life is automatic.

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Once there was this old lady that owned this shop. She had worked there for a long time. Many years ago she had opened the shop with her husband, and would have supported him in any endeavor, provided it made enough sense. Back in those days it was considered quite a rebellious act to go against the status quo and start your own business from scratch, rather than to either follow in your fathers footsteps or to work for a large company. So in that respect, the particular business wasn’t her particular choice, but it had made sense at the time, and had made enough money to live a comfortable life, so she supported him all the way.

He, of course, passed away several years ago from various complications. She had been running the shop on her own for a number of years, due to his growing illness. So it was just natural that when he passed on, she would continue to do so. Sometimes, though, she wondered what would have happened had she not made the choices she did. She did have a decent life, several children, and grandchildren, all grown up and moved out. Having the shop kept her fairly busy, and there were plenty of times she wished that she had husband that had more a traditional business or work, one that wouldn’t require her support. She never shared these thoughts with others, for fear of coming across as ungrateful.

There was another choice, back in the day. When her husband had started courting her, there were also several others, of which only one was a serious contender in any measure. When it had come down to it, had they both proposed, she would have had a hard time deciding, but as things happened, her husband (obviously) was the first to propose, and back in those days, when an eligible suitor proposed, you just didn’t say no.

But she did allow herself to wonder sometimes. What would have happened if? If the other one had asked her first. He was being groomed to take over his fathers business, which was very large and very well established. She would have undoubtedly had a much easier life, and much more time to participate in high society affairs like watching the polo matches and such. But she never allowed herself to think those thoughts for very long, the mind seems to feed upon itself whether you wish you would have done things differently as well as when you appreciate your life for whatever it has brought you.

She was standing there, daydreaming like this, in her shop, when the strange gentlemen entered.

“Afternoon,” he said, tipping his hat. Strange, she thought, men hardly wear hats any more, let alone tip them to lonely old women in shops.
“What can I do for you?” she politely asked.
“Well, let me see,” he said pulling out a list. He looked at it briefly, and then handed it to her.
“Would you by chance have any of these?” he asked pleasantly.
She studied the list.
“Why yes, I think we have all of these items,” She said, leading him through the shop.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” He asked.
She paused, looking at him. He seemed quite young.
“I’m sorry, I can’t say that I do.” She said, more than a little bit curious.
“That’s OK, most people don’t. At least they like to pretend so.”
She wasn’t sure what she meant. She set the basket of items next to the register, and began to ring them up. It was still the same cash register from when the shop originally opened. When she was about halfway finished, he reached out, putting his hand on hers. It was ice cold. She unconsciously recoiled, and then was ashamed for her rudeness.

“I’m sorry, I…” she began.
“It’s ok.” He paused, waiting for her to understand. She looked him in his eyes, which betrayed a confidence and quiet determination well beyond his apparent years.
He reached out, one more and extended his hand. He held his hand as they did back in the day when polo matches were all the rage, and men and women both wore different hats for different occasions.
She understood.

“Is this how it ends?” She asked? More than a little nervous.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be there before you know it.”
“There?” She said, suddenly confused, worried, terror stricken.
“You’ll see.” He said, smiling.

Finally, she reached out, and took his hand.

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Once there was this pumpkin. He was a normal pumpkin, and went to a normal pumpkin school, like the rest of the kids in his neighborhood. His parents had tried to get him into one of those special schools for gifted pumpkins, but he didn’t think he passed the final entrance examination. They didn’t feel bad, neither did the pumpkin, as almost every pumpkin tries to get into one of those special schools, but very few make it. So his parents as well as he were in good company. Many parents teach their kids early on that the trying and failing is ok, so long as they try. That way, when the vast majority of the kids don’t get into the pumpkin school, they can feel proud of themselves for putting forth valiant effort.

The way the schools are set up, in case you aren’t familiar with them is that they are government run schools, and are completely paid for. There is a whole section of the pumpkin government devoted to the enrichment of its citizens. To that end they’ve created a panel of experts that teach the most cutting edge subjects. The school is a state of the art facility where most scientific and technological advances are made.

Many kids secretly don’t want to get into the advanced placement school. That would mean leaving their friends and family, as the school is located near the central government. Once they finish the school, they are required to spend no less than 5 years teaching at the school and further developing the curriculum. For a young pumpkin just entering into adolescence, this is an awfully large commitment.

Of course, the kids enjoy bragging about their scores, and comparing them to one another. Because they are completely meaningless if they aren’t accepted into the special school, the teasing and posturing of the young pumpkins is accepted as a normal part of every day school life.

Most pumpkins finish their primary education without moving on to higher levels. The pumpkin economy is sufficient to provide many well paying jobs to blue-collar pumpkin workers. Because these jobs are so plentiful, most pumpkins can easily find a way to make a living very near where they grew up.

It’s not uncommon to find neighborhoods with two and sometimes three generations of families spread throughout. Which is why the pumpkin of this particular story was overwhelmingly upset when he learned he was accepted, just barely, into the special pumpkin school. That meant ten years away from his friends and family. Five for the school itself, and five for the teaching commitment that came with it.

Of course, he knew very well that after finishing his teaching commitment, he was pretty much set for life. While many pumpkins stayed and taught at the special school after their commitment was fulfilled, it was by no means expected or even depended on. Virtually all the pumpkins that fulfilled their teaching requirements found extremely lucrative jobs in the technological fields, some even sitting on boards of directors of several large international conglomerations.

However, that didn’t appeal to our young pumpkin hero at all. He didn’t want a prestigious job in ten years. He didn’t want to start teaching at a prestigious university in five. He didn’t want to study there next fall. He wanted to stay right where he was.

He was in love.

They had begun hanging out together at lunchtime last spring. They had started sitting together at lunch, the way kids do. As time went on, they started sitting closer together, some days even exchanging a few words. Then one day, for some reason that neither of the cared about, when they showed up to their normal lunch table, it was only the two of them.

Of course they were both very nervous. But once they started talking, their nervousness was quickly replaced by the excitement of discovering new feelings and emotions that you never knew existed. Soon they started meeting when they knew it would only be just the two of them, if for only a few minutes. Sometimes they would talk about their math homework; sometimes they wouldn’t talk at all.

But now this young pumpkin had a decision to make. His acceptance letter, as a matter of law, would be reported to his school administrator. It is quite an honor for any school to have one of its students accepted to the government school of higher learning. Of course, attendance wasn’t compulsory, but no pumpkin had ever turned down such an opportunity. To attend a school, at no charge, with a virtual guarantee of economic success in only a few years. To do so would be unthinkable.

But that was just what the young pumpkin intended. The feelings he experienced when he was with his new girlfriend were far more wonderful than any ideas of economic success on the other end of a long, boring, ten-year separation from his friends and family.

But how in the world would he tell them?

One day he was moping about down at the park, when one of the elder pumpkins spotted him.

“What’s wrong?”

The young pumpkin explained everything, feeling a strange sense of relief at unloading his problems to a complete stranger. This was the first he’d told anyone of his predicament.

“That is a tough one.” Said the elder.

He paused, and the young pumpkin waited. After a deep breath, the elder turned to him and started.

“Many folks would tell you that young love is fleeting, that it doesn’t last. That you should focus on long term success, rather than short term feelings. That it is an honor and a privilege to be accepted to that school. That you have a duty to your family, to your school, to society to fulfill your destiny, as they’d say. To fulfill your talents. To use your creative gift to give to others what they may not be able to get for themselves.”

This is exactly what the young pumpkin was afraid of, and precisely what he didn’t want to hear.

The elder continued.

“Many will tell you tales of opportunities missed, of dreams that went unfulfilled. And they will tell you that if you do not take this opportunity, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

The young pumpkin, although depressed beyond measure, was ready to accept his fate. His young mind was no match for such rhetoric from such an old and learned pumpkin.

“But here is one thing they will most assuredly not tell you. Their motives are selfish. They care not for you, but only for their own memories of their own lost opportunities. They see you on the cusp of success, and recall all of their failures. All of the times they could become great, but failed. In you they see their only chance of redemption, if only vicariously.”

The young pumpkin wasn’t sure he understood.

“It is a self perpetuating myth. An idea that isn’t true. They made a choice, and it didn’t turn out very well. So they see you, and by urging you to make the same choice and follow the same, expected path, they are hoping you will heal their wounds. Society is filled with people like that. Telling you what is right. Telling you what should be done. People seek comfort in the conformity of others. It helps them to believe that even if the choices they made didn’t bring them the happiness they expected, they are the common choices, and therefore the right choices.”

“Here is wisdom, young pumpkin. Many will tell you to make your choice based on what you want, and not what others want. But they forget to mention that that can only be done when you accept full responsibility for the outcome of your choice. And never expect others to undo what you’ve done. Ever. Ask yourself one question:

Can I live with it?”

The young pumpkin thought. Thought about ten years of doing things other people wanted him to, followed by who knows how many years doing who knows what. Could he live with that?

Then he thought of his friends, his family, his girlfriend, and the life he would likely lead should he turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.

The decision became lucidly clear. He smiled, and walked home.

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Recently I’ve been reading this fascinating book by Steven Pinker, called “The Language Instinct.” If you are at all interested in language, psychology, or how the human brain is structured, you can’t go wrong with this book. In it he treats language as an instinct, rather than a learned ability. One of his supporting arguments is the existence of what seems to be a universal grammar that is common throughout all languages. There is an underlying structure that all languages follow, regardless of how isolated the culture is, how advanced or how archaic. This suggests that we have some kind of structure pre-wired into our brains for learning language.

There have been many scientists and psychologists who maintained that the human mind was a relatively blank slate, and it could be filled in depending on the environment and the surrounding adults. This argument holds that children need to be explicitly taught things like grammar and word order, and how to correctly identify dogs and trees. What Pinker argues very successfully in “The Language Instinct,” is that there is a structure that already exists, a structure that already has the blueprint for nouns, verbs adjectives and so out.

While there are about a billion different tangents I could go off on, there is one thing in particular that I’d like to talk about in today’s post. Chomsky is a linguist who made fantastic advanced in linguistic theory. He was the one that first suggested that if an alien came to Earth, and analyzed all the world’s languages, they would determine that we all speak the same language, just many different dialects. The structure of all of the world’s languages can easily described as on similarly structured language.

Other scientists have studied various cultures, with the intent to find, or uncover a “universal culture” like the “universal grammar” described by Chomsky and others. The results are striking. If you’ve ever traveled to another country, especially one where English wasn’t the primary language, perhaps you’ve experienced some kind of “culture shock.” Or even if you’ve watched documentaries on TV of some guys running around in loincloths in the jungle, still living like they did hundreds of generations ago. You might come to the conclusion that those cultures can’t be more different than modern western culture.

In Pinker’s book, he lists two full pages of elements of the “universal culture” on Earth (determined by anthropologist Donald E. Brown), and here are some highlights (purely chosen at random):

Language

Value placed on articulateness, gossip, lying, manipulation, humor, humorous insults, poetry with respective words of similar nature (e.g. rhymes).

Non Verbal Communication

Meaningless sounds used to convey meaning (e.g. cries, squeals, etc), generalized facial expressions communicating basic emotions (fear, happiness etc), guessing intent from actions, flirtation with the eyes, use of smiles as a friendly greeting.

Sex

Huge interest in sex, various methods of expressing sexual attraction, sexual jealousy.

Family

Families centered around the mother and the children, and one or more men.

Fears

Fear of loud noises, fear of snakes, fear of strangers.

Status

Social status based on age, and economic achievement. A fair amount of economic inequality, division of labor by sex and age. Domination of men in the public sphere.

Government

Coalitions, reasoning, generally non dictatorial leaders, (usually temporary, e.g. new leaders every so often), a common agreement of right and wrong, laws, retaliation, punishment, the existence of conflict (which is usually avoided at all costs). Property, inheritance of property.

Etiquette/Beliefs

Hospitality, special feast days, sexual modesty (e.g. sex in private), discrete elimination of bodily wastes, supernatural beliefs, magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex, rituals, rites of passage, dream interpretation.

I’m reminded of a story (passed around on the Internet, sourced to some book on sociology) of a strange culture that practiced a particularly odd custom. It was described in great detail and sounded very strange and out there. Until the end, when you read the punch line. It was a description of the procedure westerners use when we go to the bathroom to take a dump. But the way it was described sounded like supremely spiritual and superstitions custom that only some goofball tribesmen do in National Geographic.

The takeaway, at least for me, is that no matter who you compare yourself to, some guy chasing his dinner with a poison blow dart gun in some South American jungle, or some uptight trader on Wall Street wearing a five thousand dollar suit, you can’t help but to realize that we humans are much, much more similar that we are different.

As Joseph Campbell concluded after his life’s work studying the world’s various mythological stories, we all come from the same factory. We all have the same hopes, fears, dreams and obstacles to overcome in our daily life. In every chest, beats the same heart. At the end of the day, we all just want some peace and safety, and hopefully a few people to share it with. Something to think about when you bump into that weird guy on the street that you swear is from another planet.

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So the other day I was hanging out downtown. Maybe a week or so ago, I can’t recall the exact date. I had originally gone downtown to see the latest movie that has finally made it’s way to my neighborhood, only to find out that the time listed on their web page was incorrect, so I had an hour to kill. I hadn’t planned on hanging out any longer than it took to see the movie and head on home, so I didn’t bring a book or anything to read. I don’t really like just sitting in a coffee shop unless I have something to read, so I figured I’d just wander around for a while.

I came across this stretch of road where the street performers usually hang out. It’s on this covered area where cars and bikes aren’t allowed. It’s only for pedestrians to wander around. The performers are the normal kind, mostly amateur musicians belting out some tunes they’ve either written or borrowed from somebody. There’s usually this guy with this white parrot that he’ll put on your shoulder and take your picture for a few dollars, or a few hundred yen as the case may be. Once in a while they’ll be somebody doing magic or juggling or something.

That particular afternoon is a rather interesting show. It was this man/woman team that did all these really cool unicycle tricks. They had all means of props and costumes and personalities they would switch in and out of all the time. They even borrowed members out of the audience to involve them in their tricks. One trick involved several guys laying on the ground, and then this girl ride at them and somehow jumps them with her unicycle. She spent all kinds of time building up to the actual trick, which in and of itself was very entertaining. I was impressed with her skills. Although she spoke very little, she communicated quite a great deal. I was reminded of the episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy dresses as Harpo Marx, and then the real Harpo shows up. They are both on either side of a partition, and they do a bit where they each come out from either side of the partition and are strangely mirroring each other exactly. They do this several times, and the joke, of course, is who is the real Harpo and who is the imposter.

The jig is up when the real Harpo drops his hat, and it magically returns to his hand. Lucy of course, doesn’t have that trick hat, and hers falls to the ground.

As I was remembering this episode of a performer pretending to be another person pretending to be another person, while watching a performer putting on different personas at will, I was amazed at people’s vast capacity for self-deception. Now before you accuse me of being a cynic, I don’t mean self-deception in any negative sense. Self-deception is a hugely useful trait that has undoubtedly been passed down to us through successive generations of people that have slowly increased their effectiveness in surviving in a harsh environment.

A recent medical study showed that children have the capacity to use their imagination to make pain physically go away. There are thousands of documented cases of hypnosis being used in place of anesthesia in surgery, dental procedures, and other cases of pain control.

That gifted performs such as Harpo, Lucy, and that lady doing the unicycle trick can tap into that capacity is truly a gift to humanity. I’m reminded of a course I took once in hypnosis. The instructor started out by asking who the best hypnotist we’d eve encountered was. Most people couldn’t really think of any. When we all thought of hypnotists, we all assumed he was talking about a stage hypnotists, or a therapist or something like that. He surprised us when he said George Lucas was an example of a great hypnotist.

When you think of hypnosis of being way to capture and focus your imagination on a particular topic, that makes perfect sense. If you go to see a hypnotist to quit smoking or lose weight, he’ll sit you down in a comfortable chair. You’ll lean back and he’ll start talking to you in a soothing voice. And as you listen to this voice, and start to feel yourself sinking into that chair you are sitting in, you will start to forget about things that you used to worry about. You will start to let those thoughts that normally bother you slowly drop off the edge of consciousness as you let those other thoughts take up the main stage of your mind. Once you are in this relaxed, focused state, the hypnotist will start giving you suggestions, suggestions you will hopefully take as authoritative and truthful, and affirming. Such as you only breath fresh clean air, you only eat healthy food, you respect your body, and you get plenty of rest every night and so on.

Compare that to seeing Star Wars. You are sitting in your comfy chair, relaxed, leaning back. The everyday distracting thoughts are drifting away as you are focused a created reality that you will lend your thinking to for the next couple of hours. The lights dim, the crowd hushes. Then you see the words on the screen:

A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away….

And magically, all conscious connection to normal reality is gone, and your imagination is handed over to Lucas as he takes you on a Campbellian tale of epic proportion.

Of course, this human capacity is a double-edged sword. Just as we can give our mind over to a false reality for entertainment, or to temporarily dull pain, we can also fixate our minds on things that don’t help us one bit. Fears that aren’t true, limitations that don’t exist, and anxieties about events that likely will never happen seem to take up a lot of space in our brain. The trick is to not be too quick to let go of our critical factor when such images seem take hold of our minds.

Nobody likes the skeptic who continuously points out all the violations of the laws of physics or the plot holes of an otherwise decent movie. But that skeptical attitude is exactly what we need to kick out the false fears and seemingly but untrue reality that has taken up residence in our minds.

If you are having a good time, let it be. But if you aren’t, and you suspect a negative false reality has snuck in past your conscious gatekeepers, try asking yourself these questions:

Is It True?
How do I know?
How would I know if this wasn’t true?
Who would I be if this were false?
What could I do if this was false?
Can I find any evidence that this is false?
Is this true for everybody, or just me?
If this is not true for them, how can I make it not true for me?

And see what happens.

Have fun.

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There was this prominent business leader giving an interview on a famous talk show. He had built several large companies, and had enjoyed massive amounts of success with them. It wasn’t always this way. We often make a mistake of perception when we see successful people. We assume that they were always successful, or they have some kind of secret edge that the rest of us don’t’ have. Maybe they were lucky enough to attend a prestigious university, or just enjoyed a string of lucky breaks.

But here’s some news that a lot of us don’t like to hear. A poll was done with successful, independent business owners. And when I say successful, I mean they were making enough money to live a good life, without any financial worries or difficulties. Wondering if they have enough money to buy something is not usually a concern for these people. The poll was to determine exactly how long it took for them to be successful. One question that was asked to help determine this was how many businesses they’d started before they started making serious money. The average answer was over ten.

All these successful people had, in some form or another, started at least ten businesses that ultimately failed before they finally found their niche.

Ten.

The reason I say most of us don’t like to hear this is because most of us are completely terrified, some even to the point of inaction, of the very thought of failure. Trying and failing, for some of us, is our worst nightmare. We imagine some horrible memory from our childhood, often vague and distant, but painful nonetheless. We imagine ourselves a little bit into the future, trying something new, and then suddenly imagining all the horrible things that will happen if we aren’t successful. Then the fear and anxiety kicks in, and we come up with a million reasons, or rather excuses, why we don’t want to try. Most of these excuses are self-delusional. See if you recognize some of the more popular ones:

I don’t have time.
I don’t have enough money.
People from my background (whatever you think that is) can’t do that.
I’m man.
I’m a woman.
I’m (insert your ethnicity here).
As soon as I (insert your lame excuse here) I’ll do that.
I’m going to get started next week.
As soon as I get a raise at work.
As soon as I get a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/partner.
As soon as I pay off my credit cards.

The bottom line is all these are just excuses to cover the real reason we are afraid of trying. A mistaken belief that we formed before we even learned to speak. Since the first time we cried, and our moms didn’t come and immediately pick us up, we had to come up a reason to fill the cause/effect mechanism in our brains. This belief was created, and ratified thousands of times during the most formative years of our childhood.

I’m not good enough.

The good news is that this is only true if you believe it. If you don’t believe it, and throw it out like the garbage that it is and insert a more empowering belief in its place, that will be just as true.

Then you’ll learn one of the most elusive, deceptive and at the same time most powerful secrets of human development and potential.

Mistakes and failures are the best things you can do to be successful, in anything you try. Instead of seeing “mistakes,” or “failures,” as proof of your erroneously believed inadequacy, you’ll see them for what they truly are.

Feedback from the environment in which you are operating. If you have a clear and solid goal of where you want to go, these mistakes and failures will be the things that keep you on track, and guide you toward you target like a heat seeking missile.

This famous businessperson in the interview was asked as simple question:

“How can I double my success rate?”

The answer was quick, straightforward and simple:

“Double your failure rate.”

The most successful people, in any field, understand this. Every action they take offers feedback. They look at every feedback as a golden opportunity to analyze their actions, compare them to the results that the actions created, and then to go back and modify their actions to get better results the next time around.

When you make this process a habit, success is inevitable. No matter what you are after, with this mindset, you will achieve it. It may take time, and you may not get there in the way that you thought, but you’ll get there.

And for bonus points, you can learn to enjoy the path. For those that have learned to enjoy the journey, as well as the destination, are the happiest people in the world.

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I was taking this self-development seminar once, and the guy was saying that thinking about your future is like driving a car. At least when it comes to comparing how much time you should focus on the future, versus how much time you should focus on the path. His analogy was the size of your windshield compared to the size of your rear view mirror.

It’s important to glance behind you from time to time, but it’s much more important to keep a keen eye on where you are going. You should dwell on past mistakes, or worry too much about things from your past that you can’t change. Accept it and move on. Even if others have treated you like crap, it never does any good to hold a grudge. I believe it was Mandela who said holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other guy dies.

OK, that makes sense. It also reminds me of another metaphor by Wayne Dyer when he said that the wake doesn’t drive the boat. The wake being the waves of water left behind a boat as it goes across the water. The wake is purely an after the fact effect, and has no bearing whatsoever on the future direction of the boat. OK, sounds simple enough. The past is the past, and should stay in the past.

But is it really that simple? Humans have some really powerful, and really deep hard wiring in our brains to learn and improve. That is one of the reasons we have become the dominant animals on the planet over that last couple million years. We have instincts, just like many other creatures (some say many many more instincts) but we also have the capability to learn. And many times, that learning is automatic, unconscious and completely outside of our awareness.

Just ask a little kid who performed the unfortunate, but necessary experiment of sticking his finger on a hot stove. He or she will learn in about half a second that stove with fire equals danger, and should avoided at all costs. In that particular example, the wake indeed does drive the boat. The wake I this case being the memory of pain the child will remember whenever he goes near as stove. His memory of the event, or the wake, will definitely mold his choices and thinking in the future.

If humans didn’t have the capability to learn from our mistakes, and the mistakes of others, we’d have been extinct hundreds of thousands of years. When Zog and Bog were out hiking around, and Bog got eaten by a tiger, Zog didn’t was any time remembering every single thing about the event, and committing it to memory for future reference. The location, time of day, appearance and sound of a tiger were all burned into his brain. Because of the magic of language, he was able communicate all of these things to his buddies back at the cave, so they wouldn’t make the same mistake as poor Bog.

So it seems that our history and experience really can have a powerful and profound effect on our behaviors, thoughts and actions as we move toward the future. It’s not quite as simple as the two metaphors described above.

But there is some good news. While it’s true that our brains will automatically remember things that caused us pain in the past, and remind us of those memories as we move close to experiencing those things again (usually in the form of vague anxiety), there is a solution.

Whenever we label something as dangerous, our brains remember the label we give to the “thing” as much as the thing itself. When the kid touched the stove, and Zog saw Bog get eaten by a tiger, the events themselves caused an automatic reaction. But in today’s modern world, our interpretation of events is what causes the emotional pain in many cases.

Things like public speaking, asking a pretty girl or guy out on a date, or asking your boss for a raise bring up feelings of anxiety and fear not because they are inherently dangerous situations (unless of course you actually have an experience of giving a speech at toastmasters, and were beaten within an inch of your life due to your lackluster performance) but because we labeled them as such.

Many times this label is as automatic as Zog’s was while watching his friend being eaten. But there is a cool trick.

There is so much in your personal history; you can re program your brain to “access” different memories whenever you go into a potentially worrisome situation. If you let your brain choose, it will go for the most safety, so it will find the scariest memories. Your brain operates on a “better safe than sorry” strategy, so it picks out the most scary and painful memories in order to keep you the safest.

But when you realize that you have billions and billions of memories to choose from to use as a reference when you go into any particular situation, you can train your brain to use more positive and enhancing memories rather than scary ones. This takes some time and some conscious work, but the rewards are enormous.

Imagine having to give a speech. Scenario one is relying on your brains automatic factory installed programs, which find the most horrifying experiences of your life regarding public speaking. You’ll likely get sweaty palms, heart palpitations, and feel as if you are about to vomit.

Scenario two is instead of automatically recalling all those horrifying memories, you consciously choose to remember all the times you’ve expressed yourself in public and gotten good results. Like I said, this can take some practice, but after a few times you’ll feel excited and happy, as if you are about to do something really fun and exciting, rather than dreading it.

And you can do all this purely through your imagination. Just imagine yourself giving as speech, and then quickly and consciously recall as many positive experiences and memories as possible. Keep switching back and forth in your mind, imagining a future speech, and then going back into your past and thinking of all those good memories.

And here is a bonus tip. If you can’t find any positive memories in your history, you can make them up. Your brain won’t know the difference. Find some memories that are kind of close, and then change them around so you can remember them differently. This will have be jus as powerful.

The choice is yours. You can either leave your mental programming the way it came from the factory, designed to be used by cavemen and cavewomen to survive from saber tooth tigers, or you can upgrade to the modern version, and consciously go in reprogram your thoughts and memories to serve you in exactly the way you want.

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I had this fish once a few years ago. Actually, I had several fishes. I don’t know what go into me, but I got the idea that I wanted to have a tropical fish tank in my apartment. And as luck would have it, there was a tropical fish store in the mini mall just behind where my apartment was located. I suppose there is a connection there; as the tropical fish store was right next door to the cleaners I took my shirts to. (Marketers take note.)

So I went in one Saturday afternoon, not sure what I wanted, and started looking around. I priced difference size tanks, equipment, shapes that would best fit in my apartment, etc. Finally I settled on size and a price, and now was time to pick the fish.

“I need some fish,” I asked the guy. He explained to me how the shop was set up. On the left, were fighting fish. Fish that can’t live with other fish or else they’ll kick the crap out of each other. On the right were passive fish, or fish that just stare at you bug eyed from inside the tank. Since I had in mind a tank with a bunch of different fish swimming around, I decided on the passive fish.

I remember once I took this public speaking class. The guy who taught it started it off with some story, which of course was a metaphor for personal growth. The story was told to him by his original teacher at this public speaking course. It was a famous course, and most of the instructors are former members who realized incredible personal growth through the course and wanted to continue their growth by teach others.

I’m not sure if they actually designed the course that way, or if it just naturally grew that way, but it seems to be a pretty good way to build your business. The people that teach others are people that were successful in it to start, so they really know the ins and outs. And the instructors are always being created, as more and more people join the course.

That way, they really only need to worry about getting new people to sign up for the course, rather than always be on the lookout or new instructors. It is kind of self-feeding business. Just put people into the funnel and they will either spread the word to other potential members, or become instructors themselves.

This particular public speaking class has been around for many years, at least fifty or so, and has slowly grown through this method. Unless you know somebody who’s gone through the course, you likely haven’t heard of it. Of course, if you are looking for one of the best public speaking courses around, you’ll likely find this one, if you do any kind of searching.

Anyway, this guy went into a fish store, and noticed that there were several different sharks. Some sharks were pretty big, while other sharks were kind of small. At first the guy thought maybe they were different breeds or species or whatever the word is that they use to classify sharks, but then he noticed that they were all very similar in appearance. They only differed by size.

So he then assumed that maybe some were younger, and some were older. But when he asked the shopkeeper, he was surprised.

These sharks only grow as big as their cage. It has something to do with their swimming patterns. They don’t have air buoys like other fish, so they can’t just sit and float. They need to keep moving. If they are confined to a relatively small area, they won’t grow very big. They have evolved this as a way to not out strip their resources. If they are in bigger tank, or a bigger area, then they grow bigger.

Of course, the sharks really have no idea that they are in a container; they just swim around and are automatically constrained by their boundaries. Those with larger boundaries expand to meet them, and those with smaller boundaries stay small.

He asked what would happen if you took a small fish and put it into a larger area. The shopkeeper told him that they would naturally adjust, and grow bigger. He said that’s the interesting thing about sharks, is that they are like people in this regard. They are always growing to match their boundaries. If they want to grow bigger, all they need to do is increase the limits of their boundaries, and they will naturally expand to meet them.

But like most people, sharks sit around and wait for somebody else to put them into a bigger container. They expect some outside force or entity to change the shape of their cage. Some people have figured out the secret. That our cages are really only a figment of our imagination. All we really need to do is imagine that our cages are bigger, and we will expand accordingly. Most people never figure this out, and are always waiting for somebody else to guide them by the hand to bigger and better cages.

Once you know the secret, you can just re-imagine our limits until they are big enough to contain all the goals and things you want to achieve in life.

That’s when this guy realized he was at the first day of a public speaking seminar, and the instructor was giving them a kind of pep talk. Over the next twelve weeks, they would be expanding their comfort zones considerably through the practice of public speaking. And they would learn the best secret of all.

All of your boundaries are set by your fears of what you think is on the other side. When you face those fears, and realize they are only figments of your imagination, you boundaries or comfort zone will expand immeasurably. Which is exactly what they learned at this public speaking seminar.

The funny thing is that I think the shopkeeper made a mistake. Because even though I picked all passive fish, from the passive fish side of the store, it didn’t take long for one fish to eat all the rest. I started out with about six fish. Every other day or so there would be one more fish missing.

And all I had left was one fighting fish that had been mistaken for a passive fish, which was now proudly the only fish in his tank.

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Once upon a time there was this rabbit. He was like any other normal rabbit, except when it came to chasing down carrots, he was a little bit afraid. When he was a young rabbit, just at the stage when rabbits learn how to dig for their own food, he set out to find his first carrot. He’d watched his parents dig up carrots, and thought it seemed pretty easy, so he figured it was time he could dig up his own, and not have to follow his parents around.

Now when it comes to rabbit and carrots, there is a huge window in the time that they get food from their parents, and when they learn to dig it up on their own. What makes it particularly confusing is that just around the time that rabbits start learning to dig up their own carrots, they start to learn how to make more rabbits, if you know what I mean. That can thoroughly confuse the issue with most rabbits.

It’s kind of tough growing up as a baby rabbit whose parents haven’t yet learned how to dig up their own carrots. Then you have a situation where grandma and grandpa rabbit are digging up the carrots for everybody. It sort of gives some time to the parents, sometimes. It’s not uncommon for several generations of rabbits to be alive at once, as everybody knows how good rabbits are at multiplication.

It’s not uncommon at all for a rabbit to live his whole life and never learn to dig up his own carrots. Of course, this story is about one young rabbit, and how he learned to this.

The first time he set out, he was really excited. He’d seen his dad do it plenty of times. His dad was known as the local expert in finding carrots. It’s not as easy as one would think. Most of the carrot lives underground, with only the green part sticking up. It’s easy to miss a good patch of carrots, and it’s easy to pull up a bunch of weeds that don’t turn out to be anything.

What happened to this young rabbit was particularly frightening. He set out by himself, because in case he pulled up a clump of weeds, he didn’t want to be laughed at by those older than him.

So he found a clump of green stuff, that he thought was likely a carrot. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and then he pulled with all his might. What he found horrified him. It was a carrot, but it had already been partially eaten. There was a squirrel that had gotten in and eaten it from the ground up. And he squirrel was still eating it, and caught completely by surprise by the rabbit. He reacted accordingly, and snarled and hissed at the rabbit. Now, had the rabbit spoken squirrel, or the squirrel spoken rabbit, they likely could have come to an agreement about splitting the carrot. But as it was, the rabbit fled in terror.

That was over a year ago. And since then, all the rabbit’s friends had learned to dig up their own carrots. Every time the rabbit ventured out to find his own carrot, he remembered the snarling and screaming squirrel. He would find a plump carrot just begging to be dug up, but would lose all his nerve. He would scamper home, empty handed and depressed.

One day he was on is way home, and he ran into his grandfather. (Or maybe it was his great grandfather, he couldn’t tell).

“What’s up?” Said gramps.
Young rabbit tried to ignore him.
“Still worried about that squirrel?” gramps asked. Young rabbit was shocked. He didn’t realize that anybody knew. Gramps chuckled.
“Old Chester once got scared off by a rock, thought it was a monster. Couldn’t dig carrots for years after that.”
Young rabbit felt a little bit better, but he didn’t know who Chester was.
“And Marvin was scared by a squirrel as well. But he learned a secret.”
“What secret?” young rabbit asked.
“Squirrels are all bark and no bite. They only scream at you so you’ll be startled enough so they can run away. They never, ever will fight over a piece of food. They’re actually pretty smart when you think about it.”
“What do you mean?” young rabbit asked.
“Just look around,” gramps said, waving his paw at the vast countryside where the rabbits lived.
“There’s enough food here to last everybody hundreds of generations. Why in the world would you fight over a small scrap like one carrot?” gramps said, laughing.

Young rabbit thought about it.

“Like take that small green shrub, pull it out and take a look at it.”
Without thinking, young rabbit turned around, grabbed the green leaves sticking out of the dirt and gave it a yank. A nice, plump carrot came out.

“Now take a look at that one, is it any different from that one over there?” Gramps said, motioning to another clump. Young rabbit turned, grabbed and yanked. He held the two carrots together. They were identical.

“Just look around, I’ll be in an hour you could find hundred just like that. Do you really think a squirrel would want to fight a rabbit over something that is so abundant?”

The young rabbit thought.

“No, I guess not.”
“So how many carrots can you eat in a day?”
“I don’t know, maybe one?”
“Well now, you’ve got two. Why don’t you find a nice pretty girl rabbit and give it to her. I think you know what comes next.” Gramps winked and hopped off.

Young rabbit thought. So many carrots to pull. So many girls to give them to. He suddenly realized why all the rabbits around him seemed so happy. He smiled and hopped off.

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I had a friend once that never learned how to ride a bicycle until he was in high school. He never explained why, but I suspect his parents were a bit on the goofy side. They were in this strange religious, or maybe even cult, I’m not sure. Now that I think of it, it probably wasn’t a cult, because he said that he sometimes went to some of the meetings, and sometimes didn’t, and there wasn’t ever any pressure one-way or the other. So I guess it wasn’t cult.

But they did have these really weird views, and they seemed to change from time to time. For a while his parents were on this kick where they bought all these water ion machines. I’m not exactly sure what they did, but they were supposed to somehow “resonate” the water with the earth’s natural magnetic field in order to harmonize with its naturally occurring resources. I’m not even sure if I know what that means.

Another time he told me they literally ate dirt. Not that they would go into their backyard with a spoon and get down on their hands and knees and dig in like on that TV show, but they take dirt, and put it through some sort of high tech ionic sifter that somehow took the vital ingredients that the FDA is covertly removing from our food. Supposedly there is a grand conspiracy going on how the FDA (a secret arm of the covert clandestine operations group) is secretly getting humans ready for the great population decrease.

There is some secret committee comprised of different leaders from various government agencies that was assembled shortly after World War II. These members have been watching the Earth’s population grow, while keeping an eye on our precious resources. Back in the sixties they were faced with a decision. Either get everyone to cooperate and share the resources, or simply get rid of over half the people on Earth.

They tried various projects that were funneled through different third party organizations in the seventies to get people to conserver resources, and go green, and all that, but it didn’t catch. So they began to come up with a plan to get ready to basically slaughter half the people one earth.

Apparently the swine flu vaccine is merely the first wave in this attempt. They are seeing how obedient people will be to take a vaccine. Then in a few years, they will slowly come up with new illnesses, and new vaccines, that people will naturally and eagerly get in line to receive. Then they will introduce various elements into the food and water supply. These elements will combine with antigens developed over years by these “false” vaccines, and create a massive and deadly worldwide epidemic that will basically eliminate two thirds of the world population.

Only those that receive the “real” vaccine, those that are chosen by the government based on their class and social standing will be spared.

Of course, all this information comes from the parents of a guy who didn’t learn how to ride a bike until he was in high school, so the information is highly suspect. I doubt it would even make it as an X-files episode, as it is filled with too many holes and inconsistencies.

It always amazes me the incredibly far-fetched stories that the human mind can easily believe. I was listening to a radio show once and the host described something he called the “Elvis Factor.” This is based on the idea that ten percent of American’s believe that Elvis Presley is alive and well someplace.

But it also means that ten percent of people will believe the weirdest things. Alien abductions, secret chemicals in the water designed to de-testosterone men, even subliminal sexual messages in Disney cartoons. Of course, these all may very well be true.

They also may be false flags to get people used to them, so when the real deception comes, nobody will know.

Or it could all be a huge waste of time to even worry about these things. I suppose discussing secret alien-government conspiracies makes for interesting reading on the Internet when there’s nothing on TV, but when you take all of these theories and look at them objectively, somebody’s got to be full of crap.

The moral of the story is, as always, check the crap that’s in your head. If it is entertaining, and helps you deal with the anxieties and stresses of daily life, then by all means, suit up with your tinfoil hat. But if it gets in the way of getting what you want out of life, dump those ideas and get some new ones. Here’s some to get you started:

• There is a huge galactic conspiracy for you to get lots of sex
• There is a secret consortium of businesses designed to make it easy for you to make money, you just have to discover the secret.
• There is a clandestine group of Aliens from planet Xchylon that are in cahoots to watch you and make sure you don’t make any goofy mistakes, like joining an MLM

I’m sure you can think of others. That is all for now.

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A long time ago, a lot of ancient and primitive civilizations had some kind of “coming of age” ceremony. There are still remnants of that today in both the Jewish and The Catholic traditions, and likely a few others of which I’m not qualified to speak of.

But the ones from before, way before, were much more significant. Simply because the tribe depended on the full adulthood of all it’s members in order to survive. There needed to be a clear line between children and adults. The children were dependent on the providers, and the adults were the providers. If an adult still had some childish characteristics, and depended others more than he or she was able to provide for others, then he or she would be a detriment to the group. Perhaps even cast out.

So societies developed rituals, and traditions where boys became men, and girls became women. With women it was fairly easy. By giving birth a child, the girl would swiftly transform herself from a dependent to a provider. With a constant reminder of how close death was, this became fairly easy.

With men it wasn’t so easy, so they needed to develop a coming of age ceremony. Not like today, where they are mere echoes of those of the past, these were real and life changing events. Boys were dragged of and forced to spend days in the wilderness, alone. Given hallucinogenic drugs, forced to hunt and drink the blood of their prey.

When they left, their mothers wept. Because they knew that the boys would never return. They would come back forever changed into men. Men that were no longer dependent on their mothers or the tribe, but providers, hunters, and killers.

They went through this transformation by facing their deepest fears. The fear of isolation, separation and death. The ultimate rejection. By facing their fears and overcoming them, they became more powerful than they thought possible as boys.

By going through this fear facing life-changing transformation, they transformed themselves from receivers, to creators.

With modern society, this has all but vanished. There are a million ways to avoid your fears and remain dependent on others. It is relatively easy in today’s modern society to remain a child your whole life, expecting others to provide for you. Your girlfriend, husband, government, society in general. These can all be crutches that keep you from reaching your greatest potential.

Society is no longer dependent on every single person making the transformation from childhood to adulthood. In fact, arguments may be made that today’s society functions more efficiently if only a small number make the transition to be creators and providers for the vast majority who are content to remain dependent receivers their whole lives.

In ancient Rome, much is spoken about how powerful and innovative their government was, by few are aware of the vast majority of people, Roman citizens, were basically on welfare. Completely dependent on the state for their livelihood.

And so it has been for that last few thousand years. The only way to make the transition from childhood adulthood is to make the choice yourself. Nobody will do it for you; nobody will drag you to a cave and force you to face your fears. Nobody will allow your child to die if you can find enough food. No tigers will come and eat your baby if you don’t watch after it 24/7.

If you want to become and adult, and realize your true human potential you need to stop relying on free gifts from others. Free support, free dependence. Get rid of the notion that everybody deserves X.

That can be harsh idea to accept. But once you accept the idea that the only way you get X is to figure out a way to secure it for yourself. That may mean paying money for it, or entering into an agreement with somebody else, where they give you X and you give them Y, whatever they may be.

The fear is that if you give up expecting free X from somebody, (e.g. free parental love from a partner, free money from the government) that you will never get it. That you will be left out in the cold, rejected and abandoned.

The truth is that is exactly what you need to feel to make it to the other side. To face your fears, and realize what Rocky Balboa said to Clubber Lang in Rocky III holds much truth:

“You ain’t so bad! You ain’t nothing!”

And then you will realize that on your other side of the fears you’ve created in your mind, there is a world of abundance waiting for you to readily give you anything that you properly ask for through your behavior and communication.

The choice is yours. You can be safe, or you can be free.

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I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she was unloading some of her problems on me. I guess that’s what friends are for. They weren’t really any life threatening problems, just the kind that build up, and if you keep them that way they can explode in an unhealthy way, so it helps to find someone to complain to. Which is pretty much what she was doing. Boyfriend problems, boss problems, parent problems. It seems like the entire universe was conspiring against this poor girl.

It got me thinking of a seminar I went to once. (One great way to allow people to vent without getting too emotionally involved is to let your mind drift to other things while they are venting.) This guy was talking about the value of negative thinking. Up until that point, I had always assumed that negative thinking was bad, and should be avoided at all costs. But this guy had a different take.

He said that everything we do naturally has a purpose. Some believe that purpose was put there by God, others (like myself) believe that purpose slowly evolved over time through natural selection, still others (like the guy teaching this seminar) believe in a metaphysical combination of the two. There is some life force that was present right at the big bang that inhabits all of us, and there is a purpose to all the crap we have to go through.

Anyway, he was explaining that negative thinking is a natural outcome of human’s special ability to think and plan for the future. Some biologists think this all started when humans started using tools to hunt animals. We had to kind of plan ahead when we threw a spear at our dinner as it was running away. The brain had to develop a way to accurately predict where the animal would be in a few seconds, and throw our spears accordingly.

This grew into our ability to plan for the future based on current events around. The way it works is the brain will sort through all of our possible choices, and then extrapolate all those choices out into the future, and create several likely scenarios and present them to our imagination. Based on what we imagine, we choose our behaviors accordingly. This happens pretty quickly and unconsciously. When we make a decision that has the potential for a negative outcome, we get nervous an anxious about the future. When we choose behavior that has an almost guaranteed positive outcome, then we get really excited about the future.

This guy at he seminar was saying that our negative thinking about the future can be a powerful warning sign to indicate some problems that may come up. Since we can never be really sure of anything, he was saying to give yourself the luxury of following your imagination for a while, and see what terrible things might happen, and plan accordingly to minimize any bad outcome.

He kept referring to the famous quote by Mark Twain, (which I’m paraphrasing here) “I’ve experienced many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Which means that rarely do our worst fears come true.

By allowing yourself to slip into negative thinking can be helpful if you consciously think and plan to avoid the negative outcome. It can be a bad thing if you allow your fears of the future to keep you from taking any action at all. That would be the often referred to condition of “paralysis by analysis.”

People that suffer from this need to plan everything in great detail, so they will be virtually guaranteed of a positive outcome. Of course, we all know that doesn’t always work that way. No matter how much you plan, stuff can happen to disrupt he best-laid plans.

The guy was saying that the people that are the most successful take a balanced approach. They respect their negative thinking enough to make good decisions, but they also respect the randomness of life to have a “Damn the Torpedoes, full speed ahead,” attitude when it comes to taking action.

People that rush in without too much thinking, with a “shoot first, aim later” attitude can be very successful, but they also have to be able to put up with a lot of setbacks and readjustments.

People that won’t even take the first baby step without being completely assured of safe and automatic success leave the starting blocks.

It’s that magical place in the middle where you can tune in just long enough to your negative thinking to put in a few safeguards, and then plow right on through life, confident you can handle and deal with anything that comes up along the way.

And by the time my friend stopped venting, she seemed to be feeling much better. She even had a couple of ideas on how to fix a few of her problems. She thanked me profusely for being such a good listener, and even paid for lunch. She seemed to be in a pretty good mood when we parted ways.

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The other day a friend of mine and me were talking about how different people deal with adversary. His girlfriend is currently going through a crisis at her work, and the people that are employed there are having some difficulties.

Because of the economy, it is quite obvious to everyone that business is slowing down, and although the owner hasn’t come out and said anything, changes are coming, and they aren’t likely going to be pleasant. It is a small operation, and they don’t have a lot of reserves to fall back on. Lately it has become evident, at least through the company grapevine, that making payroll every month is getting more and more difficult for the owner.

Now my friend’s girlfriend has a side business that she has been secretly cultivating for a few months, and she is almost at the point where the income from her side business is the same as her salary. So she has the luxury of being an observer without running around trying to protect her livelihood in any way possible. And she has noticed some startling, or perhaps not so startling things about her coworkers.

She said they basically fall into two different categories. The first category are the people that have faith in their abilities and skills to find employment elsewhere if need be. Then there are those that seem to be getting more and more terrified as the days go by. These people have been working for this small company for a long time, and don’t know how they will survive if the company has to start letting people go, and they are one of the people.

An interesting paradox is that the people that seem to be most relaxed and confident in their skills seem to be doing the most to try and help the company stay afloat. They are the ones putting in extra hours, trying to come up with creative solutions to generate more business and income. The ones that seem to have the least amount to lose if the company goes under seem to be the ones that are trying their best to keep it going.

The second group, on the other hand, is doing the opposite. They seem to have the most to lose if the company goes down. And paradoxically, their behavior more on pure self-preservation rather than trying to help out the company. They seem to be more worried about positioning themselves so they aren’t the ones that get laid off. And she says they are doing so in really underhanded, and less than professional ways. Backstabbing, gossiping, spreading rumors that are not true, banding together to smear the reputation of others. Their behavior seems to be making the problem worse.

I remember reading a book about human behavior many years ago. There are things called paradoxical problems that pop up frequently in the human experience. As we move through life, we encounter all kinds of problems, in various forms and levels of severity. How we deal with the problems that come up can define our lives and how much pleasure we can experience. Usually we come up with familiar problems that we’ve overcome before, so they can be a valuable learning opportunity to foster growth and the development of useful skills.

Other times, however, we encounter problems, and for whatever reason, our best response to the problem, one that we think we help, actually makes the problem worse. And the more we try and solve the problem, the worse it gets directly as a result of our actions. And of course we respond with more of the same, which makes the problem even bigger.

Of course, we rarely realize the problem is getting bigger because of our actions. We usually blame some other, seemingly external cause. Our situation, the behavior of other people, some general state of society, likes the economy or whatever. These paradoxical problems will persist until we “step out” of ourselves and view our behavior and the problem as if we are completely on the outside looking in.

The method described in this book explained how to do this. You need to figure out your objective, take some action, then step back and judge your actions from a third party perspective and see if they effected the situation in the direction that you wanted. Then adjust accordingly, until the problem is overcome.

The reason this can seem difficult is many times our response to situations are unconscious, and we really aren’t aware of what we are doing. For example, if you wanted to lose weight, and you decided to try a new diet. Through sheer will power you kept on the diet for a couple weeks, but then gave up.

After giving up, you felt dejected and depressed, and you turned to the one thing that usually gives you comfort. Food. This of course makes the problem worse. You’d likely keep it up until you decided to diet again, and of course the same thing happens.

The solution is to decide upon a clear objective. Losing weight is kind of vague; it will help to be more specific. How about losing while enjoying the benefits of good food? That might be easier. So next time you try a diet, you’d step back periodically and ask yourself if you are meeting all the criteria of your objective. Are you losing weight? Are you enjoying the food you eat? If both answers are yes, then you’d likely continue your diet, and you wouldn’t fall of the wagon, and get dejected.

If you were losing weight, but weren’t enjoying the food, then you’d simply adjust to a different diet plan, until you found one that satisfied both requirements.

By doing this, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about yourself. You are much more resourceful than you think, and you can overcome any obstacle you come up against, providing you look at it with the right mindset.

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The book is The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley. It addresses the issue of the evolution of sex. Why sex? Why are there two sexes, instead of reproduction without the need for two genders? How and why did humans evolve such a big brain compared to all the other mammals? What is so special about us?

The more questions Ridley asks and answers with evidence and theories, the more questions are seemingly brought up.

One interesting paradigm that grabbed my attention was the idea of verbal communication. One of the arguments behind humans huge brains (compared to the rest of the animals) is the evolution of language. What then, was the driving force behind language? What is the purpose of language?

Most people will automatically say to communicate. Ok, so why communicate? Why did those who were able to communicate with words better off than those than weren’t? Monkeys and other apes are still doing fine without the need for exchanging thousands of words on a daily basis.

One reason that was suggested is that the reason for language is to not to simply convey information, but to persuade. Children cry because they want their mothers to perform a certain action. You tell your husband the garage door is open because you want him to perform a certain action. Kids come home from school and shout, “I’m hungry!” because they want their moms to perform a certain action.

Politicians give long and eloquent speeches about health care because they want people, (and other politicians) to perform a certain action.

TV is filled with programs designed to keep you sitting in front of the TV long enough to watch the advertisements, which in turn will do their best in thirty seconds to convince you to perform a certain action (BUY NOW! OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY!)

When you consider that the all of the language that comes out of your mouth, and all of the language that goes into your ears is designed to persuade, then it makes sense that you should learn certain techniques.

Techniques to persuade others, in an ethical, win-win manner, and techniques to guard against the inevitable persuasive messages you hear on a daily basis.

One way to guard against persuasion is to ask yourself “How will I benefit?” and listen for the answers. Be careful, because one powerful way that persuasion works is to convince you that you have a need, when you really don’t.

If, when you ask yourself “What’s in it for me,” the answer is to fulfill a need that was only recently generated, watch out. Somebody is pulling your strings.

The best defense is a good offense. Be clear on what you want, and when you plop down in front of the TV, be clear of your intentions. Passive entertainment is fine, so long as you don’t open your mind to easy manipulation by advertising Jedi knights.

If you have a list of solid goals, both short term and long term, this can be very powerful in resisting temptation. Just ask yourself, when presented with an opportunity, “Will this help me get closer to my goal of…” and listen for the answer. If it does, then by all means, buy that product. But if it doesn’t then be careful.

The unfortunate truth is that most people simply do not have a list of solid goals, so when they hear those persuasive messages, all they have to go on is basic human needs: Food, sex, companionship, feeling appreciated, moving away from pain and toward safety.

These triggers are all too easy to manipulate when you don’t have a solid idea of how you will fulfill them.

When you make a solid decision to figure out a list of powerful goals that you’d like to achieve in life, it will be much harder for you to be persuaded by unethical marketers. Keep that in mind next time you switch on the TV.

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Let’s say somebody mentions to you that you have to give a presentation at work next week. You weren’t expecting it, so what happens? If you’re like most people, you’d likely get nervous, anxious, even fearful. It’s no secret that speaking in public is the biggest fear for most people.

But what if you were able to have a different response? What if your automatic response was much more supportive and resourceful? What if instead of getting fearful and anxious, you felt confident of yet another opportunity to share with others your incredible awesomeness?

Well, there’s a simple way to reprogram your brain to respond however you like to situations like that. It takes only a few minutes to learn, and about a minute to practice it, whenever and wherever you like, the only exception being while driving, but you can do it at stoplights.

You may have even heard of it. It’s the famous swish pattern from NLP, and it’s been around for many years. Probably because it is so easy to learn and teach, it’s likely the most popular of all NLP procedures.

Here’s how you do it.

First, think of something that gives you a feeling of anxiety. For now, pick something that’s not that big a deal. Once you learn the procedure, you can move on to bigger things.

Got it? Ok, now what triggers that anxiety or emotion? Is it a picture you make in your mind, a sound, and somebody’s tone of voice? Take a few moments to get clear.
Got it? Ok, good. Put that picture or sound or whatever it is in your left hand. Move your left hand so it is completely outside of your peripheral vision.

As you slowly move your left hand closer to your face, with your palm open, allow the feeling of anxiety to grow as your hand get closer. Do this a couple times to “set” your anxiety response to your left hand motion.

Ok, clear your head. Think of something neutral, like banana chicken ice cream.

Now, think of something that gives you a really good feeling. Confident, playful, self-assured. Whatever it is, from anywhere in your past. A great golf shot, or when you told that joke that went over really well that one time, or that time when you made that special person feel really good.

Do the thing with that good feeling, and your right hand. Slowly move it closer to your face, palm open, and allow that good feeling to swell, as it gets closer.

Ok, now clear your head with another mental bowl of strawberry pizza.

Now the good part. Bring both hands so they are outside your peripheral vision. Slowly bring your left hand in, and just as it creeps across the threshold of sight, and you begin to feeling the attempted awakenings of those old unhelpful emotions, immediately drop your left hand and bring your right towards your face, and allow the full brunt of those new, powerful, helpful emotions to overwhelm you, like that gust of hot wind as you walk out of the freezing cold casino into the hot desert of Vegas, or that wave that came out of nowhere and crashed over you, destroying your plans to wade in slowly.

Do this several times. After about ten times or so, you should begin to automatically feel those new feelings and emotions whenever you think of that old trigger. You’ve effectively kept the same trigger, but changed the emotions that it triggered.

If you only this once, it can be helpful, but unfortunately it usually wears off after a couple days. The trick is to keep doing this every few days for a few weeks, until the old emotional response is completely gone. The stronger the old emotional response, the longer it will take.

The good part is it only takes more than a minute at first, when you set your left and right hands, and choose which emotions you want to replace with what. Once you got that down, you literally do this ten times at every stop light on your way to and from work.

And once you prove to yourself that this really works, you will be amazed how much more resourceful you can program your mind to be. The opportunities for self improvement and self-development are limitless.

Have fun.

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I saw a guy (at least I think it was a guy) off in the distance. Part of my walk takes me through a large area where there are many rice fields next to each other. Each are privately owned by the surrounding neighbors, and I think they’ve been in the respective families for quite some time.

As I saw this guy way off in the distance, I couldn’t help but to wonder about him and what he was doing. I think it is really interesting when things like happen.
You’ll be moving along, on whatever path you are traveling on, and something in the distance will pop up. And because it is fairly evident that your paths will eventually cross, you naturally become curious about this, whatever it might be.

Sometimes this isn’t too pleasant. When you see something up ahead, that you will eventually come across, it can cause fear or anxiety. A police car at a traffic stop, a person that doesn’t look very safe, or maybe a hungry tiger waiting to eat you.

You can also look into the future and see things coming up that won’t likely be very pleasant. And the closer you get to them, the more anxious you can become.

I was at a seminar several years ago, and the fellow giving the lecture was explaining that fear and anxiety are largely imaginary. Of course if there really was a tiger waiting for you, that would be different. But more often than not, according to this guy, whatever is causing you anxiety is usually not nearly as bad in real life as it is in your mind.

The trick is to look at approaching events and situations the same way you’d look at some old guy in a rice field you were eventually going to pass by. Based on all my experiences in passing old guys in the street, there is a high probability of safety. Consequently, when you approach something with a high probability of safety, it’s easy to be relaxed and just let things come as they may.

And paradoxically enough, those things that do go bad, and really do create uncomfortable situations, more often than not it is your anxiety that you brought to the situation that did the damage, rather than the situation itself.

The trick is to approach everything with the same, laid back and relaxed attitude of approaching an old man in a rice field. That way you’ll be much more open and likely to see resources that you can leverage to you’re advantage.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. One trick is to simply stop thinking about what might happen in the future and only pay attention to now. A good way to do this is to simply follow your breathing, and pay as close attention as you can to the physical sensations in your body.

Of course, with more practice, this gets easier and easier, and pretty soon you’ll be as cool as cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce in every situation.

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He was not a domestic kitten; he was what some people would call feral or wildcat. He lived in a fairly suburban neighborhood, and if he were lucky, people would give him scraps, but as he was getting older and older, and les and less cute, that was happening less and less frequently.

Before it was easy, he’d see a mouse, and chase it only for fun. Most of he time he wouldn’t kill it, because then it would stop running away, and it wouldn’t be fun to chase it any more. During those times he never chased out of hunger, because there was always a kind neighborhood kid who would put out a bowl of milk for the cute kitten.

The first time he had gone for three days without any food. The way it happened was kind of automatic, instinctual. He was chasing a mouse for fun, (or so he thought) and when he got close to it, something clicked inside him, and he immediately devoured the little rodent. While he was eating it he felt incredibly proud and adult like. He had chased down and killed his first meal all on his own.

But soon after that, he found another bowl of milk. He wasn’t sure if it was for him, or for another cat, but there it was. Free food. So, of course he ate it. And somebody saw him, and thought he looked cute. They even took pictures of him, and put out more milk the next morning.

Pretty soon, he had forgotten all about the mouse that he’d caught, and how good it’d made him feel. He soon fell back into the lazy habit of trying to look as cute as possible in order to secure a bowl of milk.

That was over four days ago.

His stomach was emptier that it had ever been. And how something completely strange happened when he saw the movements of a mouse out of the corner of is eyes. Instead of getting that playful feeling of, well, cat and mouse, he felt something completely different and unexpected.

Fear.

What if he didn’t catch the mouse? Before, when he was only chasing for fun, it didn’t really matter if the mouse got away. It’s not like it was important.

But now, what if he chased the mouse, and he couldn’t catch it? Would he go hungry? He might even starve to death. If the neighborhood kids saw him chasing and eating a mouse, they certainly wouldn’t think he was cute, and the free bowls of milk would stop for sure.

He saw two mice, and because he hesitated the mice quickly scurried away before he could even get into proper hunting position.

His fur was getting dirty, and he was starting to get skinny. He was becoming more and more weak with every day. The children and old ladies who gave him free milk were now terrified of him; certain he was carrying some kind of horrible disease.

He had all but given up hope, when he saw a very ferocious, very lean and strong looking alley cat. One that he was almost afraid to make eye contact with, for fear of being killed on the spot.

“How long has it been?” The alley cat asked.
“Six days.” The young cat replied.

“How many kills?”
“One.”
“Accident?” the old cat asked.
“Yea. I was just playing, and then before I knew it, I was eating.”
“Yea. That happened to me to the first time.”
“Really?” the young cat perked up. Maybe there was hope after all.

“Yea. Then like you, I went a while without catching anything. I was afraid. Like you probably are. Then something just snapped. I had a moment of clarity when I realized that if I don’t kill, I won’t eat. Embrace your wickedness. You will be a much more skillful hunter if you chase for the kill, rather than chasing for fun.”

“But what if I fail?”

“If you don’t hunt, you already have. By hunting, you’ve absolutely nothing to lose, and everything to gain.”

Very soon thereafter, this young cat became a killing machine, and dominated his neighborhood.

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The biggest cause of stress is the idea that you have lost power, and something outside of you, be it your job, your financial circumstances, your relationships, and has control over you. You have lost choice.

Researches have determined through experiments that losing choice and a sense of power leads to immediate increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate. It would appear that maintain control of your own choices is a simple way to immediatley reduce stress.

The good news is that although the above mentioned experiments were done in such a way that the test subject really did lose control, in normal every day there is a simple way to maintain that control through some simple and quick exercise that combine breath and thought, causing them to be deceptively powerful.

First is the way to breath. Breath in slowly, through the nose. Take a long, slow, deep breath. Hold it just for a moment, and then release it through your mouth. Make the exhale a little bit longer than the inhale. And while you are inhaling and exhaling, keep the tip of your tongue firmly planted against the roof of your mouth, just behind your teeth, as if you are preparing to make a “la” sound.

Next is thought. Take three breaths, as described above, and think three different thoughts for each breath. You’ll want to break each thought in half, and think the first half during the inhale, and the second half during the exhale. Here are the thoughts.

First: “I release…the past.”

Second: “I release… the future.”

Third: “I choose…now.”

By releasing the past, you remove all guilt and anxiety associated with things that happened before, either by your choice or not. And by releasing the future, you effectively remove any worry or doubt regarding anything. By choosing to exist only right here, right now, and asserting your choice in the present, you will gain an enormous amount of centeredness and personal power.

You can do this as often as you like, as your desk at work, at a red light, even sitting in a meeting while your boss is droning on about something. The more you do this, the more it will become a natural part of who you are, and it won’t be long until your stress levels are significantly lower, giving you the peace of mind you deserve.

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My friend was telling me about a problem that she was having. She had recently taken up photography, and was really interested in taking many photos. She was really intrigued by a modern artist who takes photos mainly of people. She was greatly inspired by his work, and really wanted to increase her skill in that area. There was one problem though. She was told in one of her photography classes that it is in extremely poor taste, and in many cases illegal to take peoples photographs without their permission. For her this was a huge problem, because she is naturally shy and can’t really find it easy to see an interesting person and then just approach this person to ask if she can take their picture.

She had all these wild imaginations of bad things that might happen if she just approached strangers and asked to take their picture. She was having problems with this, so she decided to approach her professor and ask his advice.

What her professor told her really surprised her. He told her that all she needed to do was to get clear in her own mind first, why she wanted to take the other persons picture. Did the colors of their clothing match well with the background, was their a unique couple, where they sitting in nice environment, did they have a particular friendly expression that would create feelings of happiness when people saw the photo? The professor said that all she needed to do, was to ask her self these questions, then simply to go and introduce herself, explain that she was a photographer, describe why she wanted to take the persons picture, and then ask their permission. He told her that it would also help of she created some business card with her name and email, so in case they had any questions later on they could contact her. He also made sure to instruct her to ask for parents permission if she wanted to take pictures of kids playing in the park for obvious reasons.

She thought about this, and then tried it. She was amazed at the response she got. While a few people said they didn’t really want to have their picture taken, most people did. And many times when others saw her taking pictures of couples, or children on bicycles, they asked her if she was working for a magazine. And something really interesting happened. Because got into the habit of giving out her business cards, many people started contacting her for actually business purposes. When she first started, all she wanted to do was to take some pictures that would be nice to look at. Then she created a web site, and put up many of the pictures on the web site. Pretty soon she started getting many offers to take pictures for birthdays, retirement parties.

What started out as a hobby, turned into a lucrative business for her, all because she figured out exactly what she wanted, and just approached people and asked them if they wouldn’t mind participating.

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It’s like when I was in a fish store once, looking at the various fish. On one side of the store, were all the fighting fish. These were fish that you don’t put into a tank with another fish, because they will fight and fight until one of them is eaten by the other fish. The other side of the store is lined with passive fish. Passive fish are content to stay in a tank with many different kinds of fish, and get along well without ever feeling the need to eat each other. I noticed on the side with the fighting fish that there were two sharks, that looked as though they were the same species, or breed, or whatever you call fish, but they were much different sizes. Much different than you would expect from a parent and child. It was as though one of them was a miniature version of the other one. Of course because they were on the side of the fighting fish, they were in different tanks.

Sometimes when you try and see what is really going on behind something that looks different than you think it should, you can be amazed at the complexities that are all around us every day. When you look at this, you might see one thing, but when you look again, you might see something completely different. I’m not sure if you’ve had this experience before. It’s kind of like Déjà vu, when you see something, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. You feel that feeling, and get those sensations, and those allow you to remember those things that you’ve been thinking about for quite a while. It’s those things around you can get really interesting, and you start to really become curious about this. Like you really need to find out more , and discover the truth. Many people, like you, have the courage to follow through on your natural curiosity, while others are content to sit and wait and see what happens.

So when I asked the shop owner why the sharks are different sizes, he said it was because of how they grew up. If you put a baby shark in a small cage, it will only grow to the size of the small cage. But if you put a baby shark in the big cage, it will grow to match the size of its big cage. And the interesting thing is, even if a shark is an adult, and you switch to a bigger cage, you will see an increase in growth when you increase your cage size. Even better is when you get rid of the cage altogether, and roam free. Then you can grow to monstrous proportions.

Which is what happened to the elephant. While he didn’t grow to monstrous proportions, he realized that rope that was holding him to the tree was no match for him. One day there was a fire, and he looked down at the rope decided that it had served its purpose. It had kept him safe long enough, but if he continued to ignore it, it might actually cause him harm. So he quickly broke it, and after he found his freedom, he went and helped the other circus animals and performers escape. He has been roaming free ever since.

How about you?

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