I met a couple of my buddies for lunch the other day. Some guys I hang out with sometimes. We were talking about the recent economic conditions, and how messed up they are for everybody. Our particular industry that we are in is slowly spiraling down the drain. A few years ago, in this one particular niche, there was plenty of demand that would easily support any old shop that decided to open up. You didn’t need much experience, or even business knowledge of savvy. If you just sold this particular product, you could make money.

Things like that happen all throughout a normal business cycle. For any particular product or service that is offered by a bunch of different companies, it can be tough to separate the exceptional services from the mediocre, and even the lucky. Whenever there is a general economic boom, you could swing a dead cat a hit a slew of successful businesses.

Similarly in the stock market. In the roaring nineties (and even as far back as the roaring twenties), anybody with half a brain could, through some real experience, convince themselves they were a savvy investor, as pretty much any tech stock, especially Internet stocks, were doubling every couple months as a matter of course. Of course, then the bubble eventually burst, and wiped out a lot of so-called “savvy” investors.

So it is with any market boom/bust cycle. On the boom side, anybody can set up shop, make tons of cash, and convince themselves they’ve discovered the secrets to a successful market. But the true winners are the ones that survive the bust and continue to make money.

Like the particular industry my friends and I are involved in, ten years ago, any housewife without any education could set up shop and make a decent profit. But with the economy shrinking, as many peoples disposable incomes, making some purchases are no longer no-brainers. People are actually forced to make some hard choices how they spend their money.

We noticed this old guy sitting next to us, and he was kind of going alone with our conversation. He wasn’t eve’s dropping or anything, it was just a quite café without a lot of other people, and he seemed to be nodding along with certain parts of the conversation. Slowly he kind of joined the conversation.

That in and of itself is an interesting thing. There’s the guy who shows up to a few people who are talking, and interjects himself rudely, and tries to hijack the conversation. Perhaps you’ve seen this guy at a party or a bar. Then there’s a guy who happens to be in the area, and slowly over time, your conversation circle slowly expands, like some kind of social amoeba or something.

Anyway, this old guy happened to be a farmer, and he was telling us how farmers every year must make a tough decision on what to grow. Because the planting time to the harvest time is quite a few months, a wrong decision can have some pretty harsh results. If you belong to some kind of system where the government offers some kind of guaranteed protection, where they’ll buy your stuff at a certain price, this isn’t such a big deal. But they only offer a certain price for certain products. And the government price is usually on the low side. So while it’s safe to farm that way, at least in this neck of the woods, it is anything but lucrative.

Which is why many farmers attempt to grow things not on the government approved list of guaranteed purchases. While this is entails a lot more risk, the rewards are much better. The rub is that you have to predict six or eight months ahead of time what the market will be like. Of course, if you grow some kind of product that is always in high demand, then you’ve got yourself a good business. But then again, there’s always competition for that same product ever year.

So you’ve got to not only accurately predict what the market demand will be, bit you’ve got to have a pretty good handle on your competition as well.

There’s much more that goes into farming that just planting seed and waiting for them to grow. This farmer was telling us that they too, experience the same boom/bust cycle. Somebody will start to grow a new crop, and it will do very well. Then the next year they’ll be even more demand, and more farmers growing that same product. But then a few years down the road, the market will be saturated, and they’ll be more supply than demand, and the farmers that joined in too late in the game will be left holding the bag. Literally. A bag of product that they can’t sell.

The secret, he said, (which we listened to intently, as this was some old guy who’d been around the block a few times) was to always be aware of your circumstances, and your abilities. He said a lot of farmers get stuck in growing the same thing year after year, and get dependent on market demand. When market demand turns sour, they have no place to go. But those that are always successful always keep something hidden in their back pocket. Always have an idea in the back of their mind for a new crop or a new product in case the market suddenly turns.

To some people, a field of dirt is a burden that can only produce corn or wheat or whatever you’re used to producing. But to others, a field of dirt is pure magic, and will grow whatever seeds you plant. If you keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities, and choose wisely, and plant the right seeds, you will have an extremely lucrative harvest year after year after year.

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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 had this pretty cool revelation, or idea, this morning while I was out walking that I’d like to share with you. It’s one of those ideas that make perfect sense until you try to explain it to somebody else, and then it sounds like utter nonsense. Hopefully this won’t happen here.

It’s based on some basic ideas from biology as well as some concepts from metaphysics. It is also based on the underlying assumption that all of the interactions between matter and energy in the universe obey specific laws all of the time. There is zero room for randomness. Of course, often times we humans with our limited range of perceptual abilities and logical reasoning are ill equipped to deal with most of these laws, so many times they can appear like some kind of voodoo black magic or white magic or law of attraction or however you like to describe your favorite metaphysical laws.

It’s also based on the idea that smaller systems, which follow certain rules can collectively make up larger systems which may or may not appear to follow the same rules. For example, the laws of Newtonian physics are vastly different than Quantum physics. Of course, they are different sets of systems on two totally different scales. So the laws are the same, they are just scale dependent. Like a speed limit in a small town is vastly different than on the interstate, they are still laws enforced by the same entity.

Ok, where was I. Oh yea.

DNA. This is the building block of all life. The core of life on earth. Billions of years ago, there was no life on earth, and then something happened. Either by an intervention by a deity, or aliens, or a random strike of lightening, DNA was created. And it started to reproduce. Again and again. Every strand of DNA that exists today, in every living entity, is a combination of strands that came before it. Humans get half from mom, and half from dad. Some other organisms, like some simple plants reproduce themselves exactly. Nevertheless, all DNA is copied and pasted from one or more of its predecessors. All the way back to the original one.

How exactly does DNA work? It is this long strand of chemical, shaped like a twisted ladder. They call it a double helix. Then somehow, it untwists, so it looks like a normal ladder. The rungs of the ladder separate, and expose their raw ends to the inside of the cell soup. And within that cell soup are certain amino acids that come up and link together with the raw ends of the ladder. The amino acids link individually to the raw ends of the ladder, and then join to each other. Then they collectively uncouple or detach from the ladder. The ladder then re attaches to itself, and coils back up. The new protein, formed from the single amino acids that came down and joined together is now floating off to do whatever job it was made to do. DNA is incredibly long, and it has four different types of “rungs.” So whatever small stretch of the DNA decides to uncoil, will make a different protein. DNA is like blueprint for your body. Your brain.

DNA uncoils, and exposes its raw “blueprint” for the protein to be made. Then the protein is filled in by whatever is available in the surround cell fluid, or soup, or whatever you call it on that microscopic level.

Ok, now here’s the part that seemed to be much more insightful on my morning walk while the sun was just peeking over the mountains. Suppose your personality behaves like your DNA. Whatever part you decide to open, or expose, will be filled by whatever is around you. If you expose fear and anxiety, you will create fear and anxiety. If you smile and wave at people, you will receive smiles and waves in return. If you are growing in the womb, and your DNA is continually unraveling a blueprint to create brown eyes, that is it is “attracting” specific amino acids to link up into proteins to build brown eyes, you will have brown eyes.
If you continually expose part of your personality that builds happiness, you’ll be surrounded by happiness. So how do you do this?

The things that link together to build the proteins for brown eyes are the amino acids that link together in a specific order. There is nothing mysterious or esoteric or metaphysical about it. You put the right amino acids in the right order, and you’ll get the same effect again and again and again.

What about happiness? If happiness is the end result, what are the building blocks? What are the smaller “bits” like amino acids that when linked together, will create the exact same happiness, again and again and again?

Behaviors and communication. A specific strand of DNA exposed in the microscopic soup will attract the right amino acids to make the right protein.

A specific collection of behaviors and communication, when exposed to the world around you, in the right order, will produce the same happiness again and again and again. When your DNA wants to grow some hair, it unravels that part of itself, attracts the right amino acids, and they hook up together to make some hair in your hair follicles.

When you expose the right behaviors and communication in the right order, you will attract the right responses from people that when linked together, will build the same result every time.

Now, of course, people aren’t robots who will respond automatically the same way every time, but you’d be surprised how repeatable most of our behavior is. If you scream “fire” in a crowded movie theater, nobody is going to come up and shake your hand. If you offer a genuine smile and say “hi” to a stranger, they aren’t likely to punch you in the face.

Most people will respond pretty much the same way to the behavior and communication you project. So if you want a different result than you’ve been getting, change up or experiment with your behavior and your communication a bit, and see how the results you create will differ.

Probably the biggest take away from all of this is that you are largely responsible for the world you live in. By changing your behavior, you can drastically improve the results you’ve been getting, whatever they are, or whatever they want them to be.

And just as DNA is so fricking long it has taken scientists years and tons of money just to list it’s sequence, your personality is much more complex and abundant. If one part doesn’t work, you can easily try on something else.

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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 went to a lecture once about how to interpret dreams. The famous Dr. Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, along with Dr. Watson, gave it. The lecture wasn’t about how to look into them like tea leaves, but rather how the brain was structured and why dreams have such a disjointed story line to them.

I don’t know if you remember you dreams. I usually do, at least for the first few minutes when I wake up. Unless it’s a particularly strange dream that seems to have obvious symbolic meaning, I’ll usually forget it in a few moments. Usually by the time I get to the bathroom. Sometimes, though, I’ll have a dream that has obvious significance to a problem that I’ve been giving a lot of conscious thought to, and many times the dream will contain a solution. When that happens, it’s pretty lucky.

Some people completely discount dreams as meaningless jumbles of random images that they can’t remember. Others treat dreams with as much respect as Neo treated the Oracle. I once saw this huge book, over a thousand pages, filled with dream symbols and what they mean.

That is another whole discussion in and of itself. If I dream of a purple teapot, and you dream of a purple teapot, do they have the same significance? Do they mean the same thing? I would suggest they don’t, but many think that they do.

The whole of Jungian psychoanalysis is based on the idea of “archetypes.” After listening to many hundreds and perhaps thousands of patients, he noticed they many of the same images appeared when they described their dreams. That led him to his theory of archetypes, or some kind of large, shared symbolic library that all of us have access to. This is the idea of some kind of “superconscious” or “infinite intelligence,” as Napoleon Hill described it in “Think and Grow Rich.”

If you read any work by Joseph Campbell, he comes to the same conclusion, that we all share a similar set of symbols and stories, but his reasoning is different than a “superconscious.”

If you aren’t familiar with Campbell’s work, he studied mythology from several cultures around the world, and discovered that they are all very similar in structure. The stories are the same, the characters are the same, and the underlying messages of the stories are basically the same. His reasoning was that since all humans share similar structures in our brains, and a similar experience of how we come into the world and learn to fight for our survival, we al develop the same stories and symbols, regardless of which culture and time we come from.

A good example would be a pasta machine (A what?). A pasta machine. Imagine you have a pasta machine that is set to produce a certain kind of macaroni. You dump in your pasta mix, hit the start button, and then out comes the macaroni. You put the macaroni in a bag, and stick it in the cupboard to eat later. Then you clean the pasta machine and put it away. Somebody else comes along, and makes another batch of pasta. Except they use completely different ingredients, so it comes out smelling and looking and tasting different. But they don’t change the filter on the pasta machine, so it comes out looking the same as your macaroni. Same length, same shape, same curvature. And then they stick it in the cupboard next to yours.

This happen several different times, until there are about twenty different bags of pasta in the cupboard. Then somebody steals the pasta machine and sells it at a garage sale to gamble on dog racing, or something. A few years pass, and the house I bought buy an amateur scientist. He happens to be from Mars, and doesn’t know a thing about pasta. He notices that despite having different flavors and smells, each pasta is shaped the same way.

So he assumes that all the pasta came from the same source. The same person made all the pasta. There must be some grand wizard that has some mysterious combination of all the different pasta’s. He starts to imagine what he great god of pasta must be like to have create all these different kinds of pasta from the same source. There must be some “super pasta source” or “infinite dough” somewhere to produce all these similar pasta.

Of course, his theory is incorrect. Different people made different pasta using different ingredients that they bought from different stores. They just squeezed them all through the same filter that they were too lazy to change.

Campbell’s conclusion was similar. We are all squeezed through the same filter. Namely the process of being born, struggling for several years learning to walk and talk and wipe our own asses and make money and buy food, and keep people from stealing our stuff. So consequently, we have similar ideas and visions and symbolisms about the world.

To him the idea of a superconscious is merely a placeholder in our minds to describe the confounding fact that despite never having come in contact until the last few hundred years both eastern tradition and western tradition both developed mythologies of giant dangerous dragons, which were both basically huge snakes or lizards.

The Jungian would explain this as some deep superconscious symbolism of a dragon being evil (even in the garden of Eden the snake was the bad guy) because of some metaphysical cosmic reason.

The Campbellian would point out that coming up with a mythology of huge dangerous reptiles would be natural if you live in an area where some seemingly small and harmless animal like a snake could kill you with one bite, hence giving it some mythologically dark properties.

Which brings me back to Dr. Crick. He was explaining that we have such messed up dreams because of the lattice structure of the brain. Everything isn’t neatly stacked into different piles separate from each other. All the information is cris-crossed all over the place. So remembering one thing may cause you to remember something completely different (Just like on Monty Python).

His theory was that dreams are merely a kind of disk defrag that our brains do naturally while we sleep. However, there have been many people throughout history who have solved complex problems, and made breakthrough discoveries by paying attention to their dreams.

It could be the when we have problems, we know the answer on some level, but we just don’t know how to express it. Because our brains are largely based on images, the solutions naturally come to us through all the various pictures and memories that we have stored in our brains.

For example, the guy who invented the sewing machine had a dream he was in the jungle, and the natives were throwing spears at him with holes in the tips. The guy that came up with the structure for benzene, and pretty much started the whole study of organic chemistry dreamed of a snake eating its tale.

Whether our dreams come from some collective intelligence, or they are merely remnants of our evolutionary past, they can give us very powerful messages. You just need to be creative enough to interpret them. A good strategy would be to ask yourself a question while you are falling asleep, and just pay attention when you wake up. Perhaps you dreamed the solution in the form of images and weird story lines.

The bottom line is that whatever you think about dreams, they can be a powerful tool that most people never choose to utilize. Just by asking some good questions as you fall asleep, and paying attention to any answers that may come in the morning, you might find yourself creating all kinds of good things in your life.

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The other day I was having this conversation with a neighbor of mine. This guy is pretty old, and was talking about well his kids were doing. He had three sons, and they all went to university, got decent jobs, and are now married with kids of their own. The guy seemed to be bragging about his kids, but I could detect a little bit of sadness. The guy’s wife died several years ago, and he lives alone. Hence his frequent chats with me and all the other neighbors. The guy is lonely. But he somehow knows when to cut a conversation short; he seems to have a sixth sense of doing this just before he starts to wear out his welcome.

But not a bad kind of lonely, like some old people. I had this neighbor once that was always eager to talk with you, but she gave off this really strong vibe of desperation. As soon as this lady started talking to, you had to figure out a way to make an escape. If it were up to her, she would talk to you for hours on end. Sometime she would knock on my door with a really weak excuse, when it was obvious that she was looking for somebody to talk to.

Reminds me of a story that people tell sometimes about Milton Erickson, who was a world famous hypnotherapist back in the fifties and sixties. There was a woman, in her sixties, who was old and lonely like the two people mentioned above. She went to Dr. Erickson for help, and he gave her some advice. It was a variation of the old “if you want to make a friend, be a friend,” advice.

Since was particularly fond of a type of flower, African Violets, and grew quite a bit of them, he had a pretty interesting idea. Her assignment was to read the Sunday newspapers, both the obituaries, and the announcements. If somebody that lived in her neighborhood passed away, she was to bring them a bouquet of African Violets as a condolence. She wasn’t supposed to hang around very long, or try to make friends. Just show up, give her condolence, offer the flowers, and leave.

Likewise, if she saw a good piece of news in the announcements, such as a wedding, or a graduation, or a new baby, she was to put together a bouquet, and bring it over as a gift of congratulations. Again, the assignment wasn’t the same. Show up, give her congratulations and the flowers, and split.

She was to do this every week, at least once. Keep in mind this was back in the fifties, when it wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to do this kind of thing. If you tried this today, somebody might call the cops or something, depending on the neighborhood.

At first she was incredibly nervous and worried that she would be rejected. She was afraid that people wouldn’t want her, or her gift. So the first couple of times it was very hard. But once she got over her nervousness, and realized that most people are generally very friendly, and will happily accept well wishes from strangers, so long as they don’t have any ulterior motives.

Pretty soon she was doing three, four, even five trips every weekend. As the weeks and months went by, she found her self very busy with her little operation that was actually getting quite big. It didn’t take her very long for her loneliness to disappear as she learned one of life’s most valuable lessons.

The best way to help yourself is to help others first.

Of course had Dr. Erickson told her this as some vague platitude, she would have agreed, and not changed much. But he broke it down for her into a simple task, so that she would discover this lesson for herself.

And years later, when she died, thousands of people crowed at her memorial service, and she got quite a write up in several newspapers:

African Violet Queen Mourned By Thousands

Not bad for a lonely old lady. Just goes to show what a simple effort to step outside of your comfort zone just a little bit can do. To see what you can offer to others.

It’s important to remember that she never hung around after she gave her bouquet of flowers, expecting immediate thanks or gratification. Erickson was explicit on this. Let the reciprocity slowly build throw the strange effects of karma.

For some reason, it reminds me of a movie called “The Tao Of Steve.” A movie that is particularly popular among those that would like to me master seducers of women. It was about this guy that was poor, overweight, and not all that attractive. But he was wildly successful with women. His motto was simple.

Be excellent, be gone.

Meaning never hang around waiting for people to say “thanks,” or tell you what a nice person you are. Do good things for others simply for the feeling you get for doing them. Then get the hell out of Dodge. If you are patient, your rewards will come. With much more magnitude and much more significance that you could ever imagine.

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I used to watch this TV show when I was a kid, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. “I Dream of Genie,” was the title. I watched it for two reasons, one because the girl that played the Genie was super hot, and was always wearing these sexy genie clothes. And two because I thought it would be awesome to just cross your arms and blink your eyes and make something come into existence. To have some sexy genie dressed in skimpy genie clothes doing that for you is pretty much a secret (or not so secret) dream of all men.

That is a pretty common theme in human history. Much has been written about metaphysics and alchemy. Alchemy is a specific category of metaphysics where you take any metal, and turn it into gold. This would be similar to today’s “law of attraction” and other metaphysical manifestation techniques. Most people would like to attract more money.

The whole concept of metaphysics is interesting to me. I see it as kind of a vague placeholder in our imagination to describe things that are just outside our realm of understanding. They aren’t really magical or mystical or beyond our capabilities, just outside of our normal every day realm of the cause and effect reality that we think we live in.

A couple of examples. Most of our physical laws make sense, but only because we see them happening on a daily basis. When we see something that “makes sense,” what we really mean is that it matches our experience, so it doesn’t require any extra thought to describe it.

The first time kids study gravity in school, it can be a little bit unfamiliar, kind of like a fish studying water currents. When you show a diagram of planets and the sun, it’s pretty easy to make the leap. Of course the math, which is pretty complicated, is another issue.

It can take an extraordinary imagine to figure out laws that aren’t so obvious. Maxwell was a physicist who came up with a bunch of very complicated equations that described electromagnetic radiation. These are both light waves and magnetic waves. These can’t be seen, so you have to have a very highly developed imagination to play around with pictures in your head and then describe them with complex mathematical equations that actually prove to be true when applied to everyday things like electricity and photo voltage measurements.

One of my favorites is when quantum physicists and solid state physicists were having a hard time describing these small spaces that had an extraordinary large number of particles bouncing around. They could pretty easily describer one or two particles, but after that, the math got exceedingly complex.

Then one guy thought of an idea. Instead of thinking of the system of a boatload of particles stuffed in there, each with it’s own mass and charge and spin and whatever else properties particles have, why not think of it as a system with a couple of holes, with all the properties associated with particles assigned a zero value? (To physicists, zero is as just a valid number as 43).

Well, it worked. It described the system perfectly and made the math a lot easier. All by pretending there was this hole there bouncing around, with zero mass, and zero charge, and zero spin, and zero whatever else particles have.

Ok, back to metaphysics.

My own personal belief about metaphysical laws is they are very similar to the holes in the above example. The “law of attraction” and other metaphysical laws of manifestation are simple placeholders to make our thinking about complex issues much simpler, much like the math was made simpler in the hole theory.

Example.

You are a salesperson. You’ve been around salespeople for a while. You’ve been around really good salespeople, and you’ve been around pretty cruddy salespeople. You are an average salesperson, but you’d like to improve your skills to become one of the best. You have two options.

Option One

You study sales book after sales book. You attend sales seminars. You take notes after every sales call, and analyze every sentence. You even ask some customers if you could bring in a video camera and tape yourself so you can later watch it and analyze your body language, your tone of voice, your inflection, the actual words that you use, etc etc etc. You buy some expensive statistical software and collect as much data as possible from every single sales call. From time of day, what color suit your wore, what color clothes your customer wore, where you sat with respect to North and South, the number of minutes that elapsed before you “asked for the sale,” every possible piece of data you collect, and plug into your software. Then on a weekly basis, you look at your sales, and tweak your performance to slowly and gradually improve your sales.

Option Two

You read a book on the law of attraction, and affirmations. Before going to sleep every night you tell yourself “I am the best salesperson at my company.” And just like all the books say, you put feeling and emotion into your affirmations. And just like the books say, when you go about your day, you release your affirmations to the superconscious, or whatever, and wait for the changes to take place.

So which do you think would work better? Believe it or not, method two would work much better. Not because of any mystical law or anything, but because of the massively powerful computational powers of your brain. When you tell your brain enough times that you want to be the best salesperson at your company, really program yourself to do that with powerful emotions, it will automatically do everything outlined in option one. But it will be doing it all unconsciously, so you won’t really notice. From a conscious mind point of view, you are only doing affirmations every night, and then magically in a couple months, you are the number one salesperson.

This requires a couple of things. First is a goal that is within your grasp based on your current situation. If you have sales experience, it’s pretty easy to go from average to excellent. Second, you are surrounded by some good salespeople, so you brain has something to model your behavior after.

This is the number one reason people fail when they “use” the law of attraction. They are either giving their brains some vague instructions, so it doesn’t really know what to go after, or they are giving specific instructions, but not exposing themselves to examples of how to get there.

When you make sure both of these are present, a clear objection, and sufficient examples of how to get there, with properly constructed affirmations, you can pretty much allow turn over any goals to your unconscious and let it soak up the behaviors from people around you.

Of course, this requires that you have the underlying beliefs that you are capable of actually performing the objective you claim you want, but that’s for another post.

For now, whenever you choose to do affirmations, remember the more clear you are the better, and the more examples you expose yourself to, in as many forms as possible, the better. That way you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

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Have you ever been really curious about something, I mean like really insatiably curious? Like maybe when you were a kid, and it was a couple days before Christmas, and you saw a big box under the tree, and you couldn’t help but to wonder what exactly was inside this?

Or maybe your birthday was coming up, and you could tell the people around you were behaving kind of strange, like they were planning something really big, but were trying their hardest to pretend that everything was normal?

Curiosity is a huge driver for discovery and self-growth. Of course sometimes it can be dangerous, which is why the expression “curiosity killed the cat” somehow made its way into our collective unconscious.

But is curiosity really that bad? Curiosity was the spark that caused Edison to try and try again until he found a filament that worked in the light bulb. Curiosity is what sparked the Wright brothers to keep at it until they reached success.

When we are kids, we are insatiably curious, about every single thing. We want to touch, feel, look at taste everything around us. Whenever I see kid on the train, they are always looking around at all the people, out the window at the passing scenery with a look of complete astonishment and wonder.

The adults, on the other hand, almost always have their heads down, as if they are terrified of making contact with another human. They usually have their heads buried in a book, or staring intently at their cell phones, as if they are anxiously waiting for the results of the World Series or something.

Why does that curiosity stifling expression about the cat make it’s way into our consciousness? Why, or how, do we learn that it’s dangerous to want to explore and find out about new things?
If you have kids, you know the reason. At first it’s cute when a little kids running around checking things out. But if you are a normal adult, and aren’t financially well off enough to sit and play with your kid all day, you’ve got other things to do. And like any normal adult, you love your kid and would be horrified if he or she came into any sort of harm.

So the natural response then, is to chastise and admonish kids whenever they start to behave in a way that may prove to be dangerous, or messy, or cause problems.

Don’t touch that!

Put that down!

Don’t put that in your mouth!

Clean that up!

While this may be making our lives more convenient as adults, it is killing our kid’s creativity. Buckminster Fuller once said that every single person is born a genius, but 99.99% of us are de-geniused by the time we grow up.

The point here is not to let your kids run amuck and create all kinds of damage that you, as the adult, will have to fix. There likely isn’t any better way, unless you are super rich, and have no hobbies, or any other interests other than following your kid around all day and fostering their creative genius.

No, the point here is for you reading this to reach inside and find that insatiable curiosity that you gave up on long ago as too dangerous, too embarrassing, or to scary to express, for fear of incurring the wrath of the adults around you.

You are the adult now, and you can choose to listen to those who may criticize you, or you can choose to ignore them. You can reach inside to that little kid that still lives deep in your unconscious and let them know it’s safe to pick things up and examine them. It’s safe to look at things in different ways; it’s safe to explore your world.

New and better ideas, even those that work are not always accepted at first. Some are outright rejected, and can take time before they build momentum. Many a creative genius gives up all too soon simply because the rewards aren’t immediate and immense.

Sure, for every ten new ideas you come up with, 9 of them might suck. But that one out of ten will make it all worthwhile. Progress is not made by people sitting around waiting for others to figure stuff out. Progress is made by those willing to take risks and to try new things.

When most people get the wisp of a new, creative idea in their heads, it is quickly silenced by fears of “what if it doesn’t work,” or “what if I fail?” or even “that’s stupid.”

The secret is to train yourself to think like President John F. Kennedy, and not ask yourself “what if it doesn’t work,” but instead to courageously ask yourself

“What if it does work?”

And let your creative genius run wild with the possibilities.

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Before we start, let me say that I’m not using seduction in any underhanded or manipulative sense. Whenever you are interacting with another person in hopes of eliciting any kind of romantic or sexual interest in them for you, you are trying to seduce them.

Women try (usually extremely successfully) to seduce men through their expert use of clothes, feminine behavior, conversation skills, and the attention they give to a man. Men try (many times unsuccessfully) to seduce women through buying dinners, taking them on expensive dates, and sometimes through dishonest promotion of themselves.

This doesn’t have to be so incredibly difficult and frustrating. People have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, and at last count there are over six billion of us. Of all the things we are supposed to be doing, making more people seems to be high on our list of priorities. So it’s not like dating, seduction, and creating sexual relationships are any secret voodoo that breaks any moral code of society.

So how do we do it without destroying our ego in the process? First a couple of inner game tricks, and then a couple of outer game tricks.

Inner game is whatever goes on in your mind before you even talk to your love interest. The things you say to yourself, the things you believe about yourself, and what your capabilities are, everything in your history and the interpretation you give to those events.

The first thing to do is get rid of any guilt in wanting love and sex. You are human. You have needs. And the main needs or desires of humans are food and sex. Without those two main drives our planet would soon be populated by penguins and grasshoppers, and all the other animals. We’d be gone. So step one is to embrace your sexual desire. It’s normal, it’s natural, it’s expected.

Step two is to realize that everybody else has that same desire. But just like your desire for food, you are gonna like some things, and not like others. If you go to a buffet and scoop up a plate full of pizza instead of fried chicken, does the fried chicken get its feelings hurt?

By realizing that everybody has their own unique set of desires, likes and dislikes, it’s easier to understand the dating game for what it is: A huge numbers game. If you look at it as a numbers game, and have fun meeting as many people as possible in search for someone you click with, you’ll have much better results.

The problems come up with people have these deep fears that when they get rejected, it is because the other person has some kind of super human x-ran psychic vision. They look into your heart and soul, and can instantly judge you and everything about you. When you get rejected, they have quickly evaluated your whole existence. As a consequence most people are operating with about a 50 percent intention of finding someone, and a fifty percent intention of protecting their ego. This makes normal conversation difficult, as everyone is trying to protect themselves as much as possible from getting hurt.

The paradox is that when you really let it all hang out and be your true self, you will become more attractive than ever. One of the reasons people love babies so much is that they express themselves without giving a damn about how people will react to them. Think about the most attractive and charismatic people you’ve ever met, were they quite and reserved, or outgoing and gregarious?

So lets review your inner game. Step one is to realize that everybody wants some. (Just like that Van Halen song.) Step two is to realize that not everybody will like everybody. The goal is to find out if you are each others type, not to try and persuade each other that you are each others type. Big difference.

Ok, outer game time.

This is your behaviors, social skills and social intelligence. It helps to realize that these skills should always be thought of as works in process. You will never get to a point where you are socially eloquent enough, or can read another person or even a room well enough. Lifelong learning.

Step one is to meet people and give them a chance to get to know you. Take charge of the conversation, and give them a chance to find out about you. Go slow, and escalate only when they are ready.

Escalation is when you slowly move the relationship to the next level. Anywhere you are, you should always be testing, very carefully, to see if the other person is ready to kick it up a notch. Slower is better, but not too slow.

Escalation can be anything. If you are talking to an attractive person in line at the supermarket, ask for their phone number. If they hesitate, at all, that means they aren’t ready. No problem. Move on. Allow them to keep their comfort level and their own criteria intact. Don’t try and push them beyond their comfort level.

Or you’ve been talking to somebody in a bar for an hour. You might suggest going to a smaller venue, which is within walking distance.

Or maybe you’ve been messaging back and forth online, you might suggest and voice chat on Skype.

Or maybe you’ve passed by the same person every day at school. The next step would be to make eye contact and smile, or even say hi.

The thing to remember is whomever it is, think of the next step to move your potential relationship forward. Slow, and easy to accept for the other person. And keep moving slowly forward. Let them get used to the idea of you. Most people don’t like change. Unless you are a drop dead rich supermodel, people are likely to be put off if you come on too strong. When you give them time to get used to the idea of you, you will have a lot more chance of success.

Ok that was only one step, but here’s the review. Meet as many people as possible, and always look for opportunities to escalate, to see if they are as into you as you are into them.

So how do you know when you’ve found the right one? You have no more desire to go and meet other people. And they are escalating you as much as you are escalating them, if you catch my drift.

Now go and have fun.

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This short article is basically about how to ask anybody without having to fear any rejection. It requires that you somewhat know the person, and know a little bit about their interests. This means you have spoken with them at least on one previous occasion, either one on one, or in a group, under any context where you were able to exchange any personal information.

If you only know the person’s name, and haven’t ever spoken to them, this method will still work, but you’ll have a greater chance of success if you know at least a little bit about their interests.

Ready? Ok, lets go.

It’s actually pretty simple. Remember, this guide is to help you ask them out; everybody has their own likes and dislikes. There is a chance they will decline your offer. The secret is to realize that by asking out as many people as possible, you will greatly enhance your chances of finding that one special somebody to fulfill all your emotional needs and sexual fantasies.

Let’s say you’ve spoken to them once before in a group conversation, and you have discovered that they like dogs. What you need to do is find some kind of safe, semi-public activity that involves dogs. Look in your local newspaper and find a dog show, or one of those events where people get together and have their dogs run through obstacle courses. Find out when they are having it, lets say next Saturday at 2 PM.

Next time you see the person of interest, here’s how you ask them out.

“Hey, how’s it going? Say, I thought about you last week.”
“Oh really?”
“Yea. I read where there’s going to be a dog obstacle course contest this weekend at such and such park. It sounds pretty cool. I’m going to go check it out.”
(Pause)
“Would you like to come?”

And then let them answer. Simple as that. It’s important to actually go to the even with or without them, and imply that through your question. They are just coming along for the ride. If you ask them out on a first date, and you make it seem like they will be the center of attention, they might feel too much pressure and decline your offer.

But when you make it sound like something that you are going to do anyways, and they are only coming along for the ride, then they will feel a lot less pressure, and say yes. Especially if it’s during the afternoon, in a public place like a park.

You can do this with any kind of interest they have. Just figure out a semi-public place to do something semi-related to something they are interested in. The most important part is to frame the outing as something you are doing anyways. Even if they say no, you’re not really getting rejected, because you are going anyways.

Then while you are at the park, watching dogs, or whatever, you can talk some more, find out other things they like. You can even suggest going to get a cup of coffee or a drink after the dog show, and who knows what will happen?

Of course, you can also use this method with somebody you barely know, but you are running a risk of asking them to do something they have zero interest in, or worse. If you ask the checker at your local supermarket to go with you to a dog show, and she happened to have been mauled as a child by her neighbor’s pit bull, she probably will say no.

But even still, you won’t get the one getting rejected, your plan will. It’s still a lot easier than asking somebody you barely know out to dinner. They will usually only say yes if they find you attractive right off the bat, and they have enough self confidence and self esteem to hang out with somebody they barely know for an hour or so. That can be pretty nerve wracking.

The big secret about dating is that it is a completely natural thing. Most guys will like most girls, and most girls will like most guys. Once you get past the initial nervousness, pressure, anxiety of the whole first date, you can relax and get to know one another.

And that is when the magic happens.

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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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What was really amazing to me was how brand new everything was. I know when you go shopping at an electronics store, you expect everything to be new, but I was surprised anyway. I mean super clean, like the whole place had been sterilized or something. The whole place had that fresh out of the box feeling to it. Like when you buy something, and it has that protective plastic film over the display, and you don’t want to take it off because you want to keep that brand new feeling.

I wandered over into the mp3 section, and was impressed with how much those things have changed over the years. I have an iPod I bought a few years ago, and it is completely outdated. Compared to the one they had on sale there, mine looks like it was made in the sixties.

When I was a kid, they were still making eight track tapes. I had a stereo that played both vinyl records and eight track tapes. And that was fairly advanced for the day. Today I routinely see people on the trains listening to mp3 players that are smaller than my credit card.

What is truly intriguing, at least to me, is that despite the drastic changes in the delivery of music, the music itself hasn’t changed much. Sure there are different bands with different songs and music, but the overall structure of music hasn’t really changed. They still play with the same instruments, the songs are about the same length, and the same chords are used. The songs are still about the same things. But the way music is delivered is completely different. You can buy all your music online, and download it straight to your mp3 player or iPod, without ever needing to handle anything physical, other than your musical storage device.

The musicians, on the other hand, still play with the same instruments, using the same notes, and the same recording equipment. The message is the same, but the method of delivery has been completely changed.

Like if you were sending smoke signals using Morse code versus sending a text on your cell phone. The origin of the message, the thoughts in your brain are the same, and the receiver of your message will still respond in the same way. Despite the structure, the content remains the same. In other ways, it’s the opposite. The content changes, but the structure remains the same. I’m a big movie fan, and despite different characters, and writers, and actors, and even wildly different plots, the story structure of modern movies really hasn’t changed much.

It’s been said that there are really only seven different kinds of stories, and every story you will ever read or see or hear about will fall into one of those categories. In that respect, it’s as if we are completely unaware of structure, and only pay attention to content.

In the end I decided not to buy a new mp3 player, as the one I have I really only use as an alarm clock, and to listen to when I exercise in the mornings. For some reason, I really don’t enjoy listening to music when I’m out walking around or riding on the train. I either like taking a book, or starting up a conversation with a random stranger. That always seems to be more interesting. At least to me, anyways.

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After a few years, she started to notice that her sales, and her customer base were fairly consistent. After the first couple of years where moved out of the red and started to make a profit, her profits slowly increased every year, until recently. In the past three or four years, her profits had been almost exactly the same. She started seeing the same customers come into her shop, and she noticed she was selling the same arrangements to the same people during the same times of year.

Even valentines day she noticed the same people come in, that she usually only saw once per year, and by a dozen roses or some other traditional arrangement. Her original satisfaction that she had enjoyed when she started to make money was starting to grow into a complacency that she hadn’t expected. It wasn’t long before she saw her dream turn into another routine that she did on a daily basis. Gone were the times when she was able to generate good feelings as she headed into she shop every morning. More and more often, she would wake up sometimes with a feeling of just another day at work.

She started to notice this attitude among her customers as well. She wasn’t sure if it was she that was affecting them, or they affecting her. It was like everybody was trapped in a routine that they couldn’t’ escape from. Pretty soon the flowers themselves stopped looking so pretty, and began to take on a mundane everyday part of the background feeling to them.

She didn’t’ really notice this, as things like this usually sneak up on you slowly, and before you know it, something that was exciting is suddenly normal and you feel like you’ve always been doing this. You don’t really want to stop, because you’ve been doing it for so long, and it seems that the only that is really keeping you going is inertial. It’s like you are in some kind of a daze, doing the same things over and over again without any real feeling to them.

Then something terrible happened. Her neighbor’s daughter was hit by a car. She was rushed to the hospital and into surgery for three hours. After a long horrible wait, the doctors said she would be fine. It was close though. Her parents were obviously relieved. The flower shop lady decided to visit this little girl in the hospital, as she always exchanged a few words with her on the way to work.

What she saw in the hospital shocked her beyond belief. She had never been in a hospital. She was lucky enough to never have been sick, and although she was happily married, she didn’t have any children. What she saw was the abundance of flowers in the hospital. And she saw looks of happiness on people’s face that she had never seen before in her flower shop. When she visited the little girls room, she couldn’t help but to burst into tears at what happened. The little girls room was filled with flowers bought for the little girl by all of the neighbors. All from the lady’s flower shop. She didn’t notice this at first, but when she walked in, the little girl, who was still recovering from a painful three-hour surgery, beamed at her.

“Look at all your flowers! Did you know you had so many pretty flowers?”

And she did know, and she did notice. And she never forgot.

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They three guys watched with great interest as they observed different people doing different things. Some people would walk in and order, and sit down and the food was brought to them, others stood and waited, and still others walked in straight away and sat down. Once they even saw somebody walk in, and linger around near the front, and then some woman came out and led him to a table.

The three guys that were watching tried to formulate a theory about how the restaurant operated. At first, they thought that the difference was due to the socio-economic level of the people that came walking to the shop. They assumed that rich, upper class people got served better and with more respect that poor lower class people. But then they saw a few guys in expensive suits walk in, place their order, wait at the front for the order to put placed own in front of them, and then carry it themselves to a table, that sometimes they had to even bus themselves a little bit before sitting down.

And they saw a couple guys walk in that seemed to be wearing very old, very inexpensive clothing, and even smelling as though they hadn’t showered in a while. They saw a few of these guys treated with ultra first class treatment.

Then they decided that maybe it was due to the level of attractiveness of the people that came in. They figured that really attractive and sexy men and women that came in would receive first class treatment, while normal guys and gals might get the brown bag treatment. Then they saw some average guys receive first class treatment, and some people that looked as though they could be models of movie stars waiting at the front for their orders, which they had to carry themselves back to the table.

After weeks and weeks sitting outside, and formulating theory and theory, only to see it disproved, they finally they decided to experiment. They drew straws to see who would go in first. They the guy that was chosen to go in first, was very nervous. He wasn’t sure how to act, or what to say. He walked in, and stood around the front, waiting to see if somebody would lead him to a table. Nobody did. Then he went up slowly, and noticed there were no menu boards above the registers. Why didn’t they notice this before? He slowly walked up to the counter. The girl behind the register smiled at waited. Nervous, frustrated, anxious, he turned and ran.

The next guy went in two days later, after much discussion, they looked through the windows, watching what people were eating. Finally they decided that he would walk in, and order a cheeseburger, french fries, and a coke. Then he would wait and see what would happen.

Finally, it was his turn to walk in. He was even more nervous that the first guy. He timidly walked up to the register, and ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a coke. The girl behind the register smiled, tapped a few buttons on the mysterious looking object, which they assumed had been a cash register, but now the second guy wasn’t so sure. Why hadn’t they noticed this before?

“For here or to go?” she asked helpfully.

He looked around, trying to get an idea of what to do. He saw beautiful waitresses taking orders from plain looking sitting patrons, he saw rich businessmen reading the newspaper waiting for their take out order.

“um, to go.” He managed, wanting to leave as quickly as possible. Before he knew it, his food was placed down in front of him in a non-descript paper bag. He grabbed it and left as quickly as he could

Now the three were more dumbfounded that ever. This something strange happened. The third guy saw his next door neighbor walk in, pause and two stunning waitresses came out and led him to a large booth next to a huge window with a view of a beautiful waterfall. Why hadn’t they noticed that before? They were shocked. They watched as the third guys next-door neighbor made his way through a seemingly exquisite fourteen-course meal, complete with some kind of French appetizer they thought was only an urban legend. Frustrated beyond belief, because the third guy new what an absolute dweeb his next door neighbor was, walked in, his frustration overpowering his anxiety and fears.

“I’d like the best table you have. And four of the most gorgeous waitresses that have ever walked the earth!” he proclaimed in a loud and confident voice.

Before he could even inhale after his outburst, four of the most gorgeous waitresses came walking out, wearing brilliant evening gowns.

“I want the largest booth in the place, with a view of the ocean.” He didn’t know why he asked for an ocean view, that’s just what came out.

“Certainly,” said the apparent head waitress. They led him to a booth, and he was amazed to see the most gorgeous beach view he could ever imagine.

Filled with confidence, he ordered every possible luxury item he could possibly think of. The waitresses merely scribbled furiously on their pads, and nodded their heads in agreement. After they left, he noticed his neighbor smiling, looking at him.

“This place is great, isn’t it? I don’t know how it works, but they will give you whatever you ask for. I don’t know why they don’t advertise this place; I guess they don’t want it to get too busy. You kind of have to figure it out on your own. But not matter what you want, all you have to do is ask for it, and they will be happy to give it to you. They funny thing is, is that if you are unsure of what you want, they will be unsure of what to give you, and then you’ll usually end up getting something that isn’t worth much of anything. But the more you know what you want, the more eager they will be to give it to you.”

For some reason, the third guy felt a little reluctant to tell his friends about his discovery. Some things, he reckoned, are much much more rewarding when you discover them on your own.

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So after several drinks and appetizers of various ethnicities, we decided to part ways. I don’t remember what time it was, but it was later than the last train, so I had to find my way back to the main station to catch a taxi home. Since I was in an unfamiliar part of town, I kind of meandered around through alleys and side streets. I wasn’t too worried about what time I made it back, and crime in my cit is relatively low, so I just was kind of content to wander around and lazily make my way back home. You know how you do that, when you have a vague destination in mind, but you aren’t really concerned with how or when you will arrive. For some reason you just want to take your time with this, and enjoy the experience. Sometimes I think it’s times like this that are the most rewarding, because for some reason you can be open to opportunities that you would normally overlook.

Once I was driving to a friend’s house. He was having a party so I wasn’t really concerned with what time I got there. It was a bit of a drive, and he was a good friend from a ways back, so I knew there would be a couch or a spare room I would be able to use. So I was just taking my time driving through the mountain roads, stopping here and there to check out the views. He had just bought a nice house up in the mountains, and I had never been there before, so I wanted to take my time and enjoy the scenery along the way. Sometimes we go through life just too fast with tunnel vision, missing out on all the cool stuff that is around you.

So there I was looking through the windows of closed shops when I saw him. Or heard him, as he came up from behind me. Judging by his voice, he was a good 5 or six meters behind me, and I could see his vague reflection the glass of the retro clothing shop window I was trying to look through. (I don’t know why, I’ve never really been a fan of retro clothing.) He said something that was both vague and interesting. Vague in that I didn’t know exactly what he meant by it, and interesting in that I wanted to turn around.

“You can take small steps when necessary.” Is what he said.

“Excuse me?” I asked, turning around slowly.

“Small steps. I don’t know where you are going, how could I, but you seem to be going somewhere. Some people have a fear of moving in the direction of their destination, afraid that they will make a mistake. But you can take small steps if you need to. That way if you make a miscalculation of direction, you can easily change course to put yourself quickly back on track.”

“Oh, um, thanks.” I said, still not sure what he was talking about. He seemed to want to say something else, so I waited for him to speak.

“Awaken from the dream.” He finally said, after giving me a seemingly long once over.

“Huh? What dream?” I asked, checking the palms of my hands for some reason.

“That which you fear, that which you think you are afraid of, that which you think you lack, is all an illusion. You have everything you need. Right here, right now. You don’t need anything else. Everything you see comes from within.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so for some reason I turned and looked back inside the vintage clothing. I was surprised to see that his reflection was no longer there. When I spun around, he was gone. A thousand questions ran through my mind. Was I imagining it? Had I drank too much? Was I too sleepy? Suddenly it hit me. Whoever, or whatever he was, it didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter, because I had a feeling that the words he spoke made sense. And when you think about it, the speaker of the words is really different than the words themselves. After a while, the words themselves are all that matters, so you can imagine this speaker as being whoever you want. And that can open the door to all kinds of opportunities. Now.

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We walked in, and there were several tables set up with different crystals on them. I went over and picked one up, and suddenly noticed a strange sensation. I turned around, and the shopkeeper was looking right at me. The other people in the shop were grinning, as if they knew what was coming. I suspected she pegged me as first time customer and decided to give me some hocus pocus sales pitch to try to get me to buy some crystals or incense or tarot cards or something.

The power of the spirit has found you! The crystals are a manifestation of the love of the universe! You think you have chosen them, but they have chosen you. You must listen to your intuitions and let them guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of their advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of infinite intelligence that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

The people in the shop were grinning, as they had apparently heard her say this to others. I was impressed at her acting abilities, and chose a couple crystals. One rose quartz and one purple one (I forgot the name already.) My friend and me went on our way.

Later that day, we were in a different part of town. There is a government building, and sometimes on the steps people will come and preach. Usually from some type of Christian angle. They kind of remind me of my days in university, where some weird guy would stand on the steps in front of the cafeteria and go on and on about the dangers of fornication.

The guy that was there, I had never seen before. So we stopped to hear his monologue. As soon as we stopped, he looked directly at me, which was kind of spooky. Everybody around was smiling, I guess because they were glad it was me and not them he was aiming his sermon at.

The power of the Lord has found you! The Bread of Life is a manifestation of the Love of the universe! You think you have chosen it, but it has chosen you! You must listen to your soul and let it guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of your soul’s advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of God that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

I felt a bit confused, as I slipped into an uncomfortable feeling of Déjà vu. Has that ever happened to you? So anyway, he had some basket that he was apparently asking for donations. Everybody was looking at me, as his sermon was directed at me. I didn’t have any change, so I put in the two crystals I had bought at the shop before. Everybody seemed to take that as hint, and began filling up his basket with red and purple crystals. Which was strange, because I think he might have been hoping for some money. I don’t know what he is going to do with all those crystals.

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I saw one shop the other that I hadn’t noticed before, and I had to take a look inside. You know how when you see something, you immediately become interested, and you tell yourself that you have to look inside this to find what’s inside. And the more you look, the more you want to find out more. Which is exactly why I thought that very same thing.

So I looked inside, and there were several hundred different stones and crystals. Some were made specifically for jewelry, or accessories. How they take something and craft it to be ornamental and put on display. And then there were other stones, which were still in their raw form. Many different crystals. Stones that were more for their symbolic use rather than their ornamental use. Perhaps even metaphysical, as they had several charts on the Chakras and which stones went with which Chakra. (Lately, my favorite Chakra during meditation has been the Sacral Chakra.)

This reminds me of a psychic I met at a party several months ago. She said she was only an amateur, hobbyist kind of psychic, as she didn’t do it for a living. More for party tricks. She had a deck of Tarot Cards, and I asked her to give me a reading. She dealt all the cards out, and gave me an interesting reading. While I don’t remember the specific cards she dealt, I remember what she said about them, because it was absolutely true:

You have had some trouble in the past, and you are afraid that as you move into the future, these same things will trouble you. But you don’t realize is that some of these troubles form your past can actually turn into benefits if you take them as the experience that they were meant to be. And when you think of your future, you are looking forward to some things, but others you’d rather not think about, and perhaps even wish that some things that are coming in your future would just disappear, while other things that you would really like to happen, you are afraid that they won’t.

I asked her how she knew that from the cards that were dealt, as the cards were fairly ambiguous. She again shocked me with her insight:

Meaning is illusory. What you meaning you give is really a reflection of what is inside you. As you change within, so you will change without. The meanings you give will change over time, just as you will change over time. What you think is fearful today, may be funny tomorrow. And what you think is funny today, may be fearful tomorrow. Never trust the meaning you give, only trust your experience.

I was pretty amazed that such a “hobbyist” psychic would have such insight, but there it was. She said her real job was a very popular hairdresser at a local salon. She’d worked at one of those places where all the hair technicians are independent contractors, and they have to pay to use the shop. She had been there for several years, and was always in demand.

I ended up buying two crystals at that shop, one for my third Chakra, and one for my fifth Chakra. In hope that they would bring me what I was after. Sometimes I carry them with me, so I can remember what the fortuneteller said.

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So I was on this bus ride, and I was sitting next to this guy who was reading this book on esoteric philosophy. Just judging by the way he was reading the book, it seemed to be a deep subject. He would read for a few moments, and then look out the window, as if in deep thought. Then he would get his look of recognition on his face, and then turn back to the book. He did this several times, until I finally got up the courage to ask him about the book. I could only see the partial title, and I’m not even sure then if I could make out the title correctly.

He said it was a philosophical book about human emotions. The particular section that he was reading, and kept looking out the window to digest, was based on some writings of some ancient Indian scholar. He said the name a few times, but for the life of me I can’t remember even how many syllables it contained, let alone how it was pronounced. But he said that humans are basically transmitters of our emotions. That when humans come into contact, we communicate long before the first words are spoken.

If you are in a particularly high vibrational state, that is if you are holding “good” emotions predominantly in your body, like confidence, acceptance, appreciation, you will be primarily attract the emotional energy of others, as it matches your emotional energy. The converse is also true. If you hold more “negative” emotions, like fear, anger, jealousy, and judgment, you will attract those emotions as well.

He also said that if you have a mix of the two, negative and positive, like most people do, whenever you come in contact with another person or a group the “average” emotional energy will generally win out. He said that the transfer and commingling of emotions among people could be treated almost as a science. The secret to attracting people in your life that you want to support and help you, is to first become that which you want to attract.

He said that many people fool themselves into thinking they are emitting positive emotions, when in reality they are emitting emotions of need and lack, and they have convinced themselves otherwise. That is why this is such a hard concept to understand, because of our strong ability at self-deception.

He said that the real secret is to first understand yourself, and your emotions before trying to worry about those of others. Once you get a hold on your own emotions, the rest is easy. Because once you dig deep enough, and hold your emotions positive, that is all you will attract, and the rest will disappear. I asked him exactly how to do that, and he said that he hadn’t gotten that far in the book.

I told him that you should keep reading, until you can discover the secret here. Then find me and tell me about it. He just laughed and went back to his book, as if he knew something that the rest of us don’t, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If you have any secrets, please share them, so we can figure his out.

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There is a way to change these messages to give yourself incredible confidence, self esteem, and personal power. When you finish reading this article, you’ll easily be able to create simple affirmations that you can use to propel yourself to automatic success. There are three simple rules to learn, so that your affirmations will have a maximum effect.

Rule Number One: State Them in the Positive.

You want to focus on what you want, rather than you don’t want. Instead of focusing on losing five pounds, focus on being your ideal weight. Instead of focusing on quitting smoking, focus on breathing fresh, healthy air with every breath. Instead of focusing on quitting eating ice cream for breakfast, focus on eating healthy foods that support a healthy body.

Rule Number Two: State Things in the Present Tense.

Instead of saying “I want to weight 150,” pounds, say “I weight 150 pounds.” Instead of saying “I want to cut back on the number of sweets,” say “I only eat healthy food.” Instead of saying “I will quit smoking next week,” say “I only breath fresh clean air with every breath.”

Rule Number Three: Avoid “Be” verbs and use Powerful Action Verbs

Instead of saying “I am confident,” say “I behave confidently in every situation.” Instead of saying “I weigh 150 pounds,” say “My behavior easily supports a healthy weight of 150 pounds.” Instead of saying “I am a non smoker,” say ”I treat my lungs and body with respect and always inhale clean, fresh air.”

If you can, try this now. Choose something that you want  to create in life, and apply these three rules, and say it out loud. How does that feel? The more empowered you feel, right now, as you say your affirmation is an indication of how you will take it as your truth the more you say it. When you say something that causes you to feel a strong emotion, your brain will be much more likely to accept it.

The best time to say these is as you fall asleep at night. This can be a golden opportunity to powerfully program your subconscious for automatic success generation. Ideally, you want to live your life so that you can naturally and easily get what you want without a lot of effort. For more articles to easily help you achieve greater success like this, you can join many others like you, and read some more articles here.

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This person could understand that the secret of life was not in waiting for things to happen, but to make them happen. This person realized that there was  a large amount of randomness in everyday life, but the secret was not in what you received, but in what you did with it.

Of course, you may have already realized this well known but rarely applied truth. You may have heard that this is the secret behind the success of everyone who has actually applied this rule on a consistent basis. And you are probably already aware that this is not really a rule, or a law, rather than a particularly useful hallucination that if applied correctly, can lead to untold happiness and achievement not thought possible under the way that you used to look at things.

Mystics and Guru’s throughout time have well understood that the ability take what appears to be real and mold it according to your intentions is the metaphysical truth that lies beneath all bliss. When you take on this truth as your own, you will be well on the way to achieve dreams beyond comprehension.

This person was aware of this, on a deep level, but not consciously. He lived for a long time, according to the old model of reality. Until one day, he stumbled across a truth that was at once overwhelmingly simple and extraordinarily powerful. With one simple thought, he was able to adjust his perception of reality just enough to see the truth. That reality is really a reflection of your thoughts. What you think, becomes your reality. Your thoughts are your world.

When this person realized this, the world changed from an overbearing system of rules and regulations and fears to a vast playground of opportunity and bliss.
Never again was this person able to live life according to the old model. Because once this person saw the way things really worked, it was inconceivable forget the new found freedom.

If you are feeling a bit of familiarity, like a dream that you swear you’d had before, don’t worry. It is meant to be that way.

Because the time of revelation is now, and this person, is you.

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And try as you might, you just can’t get the other person to see things this way. No amount of arguing, convincing, masterly designed powerpoint presentations can sway them. You may as well be banging your head against a brick wall, for all the good you are doing.

But what happens when you stop, now, and consider that there may be a whole new level of communication that you are forgetting about? What if you could realize that there is a layer of communication that supersedes mere logic and cause effect language? When you realize that exists another set of language skills at a completely different plane of thought, you can begin to leverage that to your advantage. When you do this, you will naturally begin to persuade people at will.

What I’m talking about is the language of structure. Language structure is very difficult to wrap your mind around because it is designed to take place outside of conscious awareness. Linguists have known for years, thanks to Noam Chomsky, that there is a ‘deep structure’ to language that children pick up automatically, without any conscious thought whatsoever. In other words, children consciously how to say words like ‘horse,’ television,’ ‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ and so on. But when they begin to string words together, the grammar rules of how to do this is completely unknown. Many scientists agree that we have some kind of ‘grammar structure’ organ in our brain, that is preprogrammed to learn grammar at a completely unconscious level.

Because people learn and use the structure of language at a deeply unconscious level, you can use this to your advantage. For example, it has become widely known, due to the work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, that people take in, and express information through three main channels. Eyes, ears, and touch. Or to use the technical terms, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. We also use words that are based on these senses in our speech and our writing.

Some people rely heavily on visual words: See what I mean? I can’t get a clear picture of what you are talking about. That idea is not clear to me.

Others are use more auditory words: Nice to hear from you again. I hear what you’re saying. Mexican food? Sounds great! Have you heard the latest news?

Still others use mainly kinesthetic words: I haven’t been feeling myself lately. I feel you, I really do. I feel uncomfortable with that idea.

Most people use a combination of all three. The trick is to listen to the person you are trying to convince, and pay attention to which category they rely on most. Then just simply use words from that same category when you are convincing them how great your idea is. You’ll be amazed not only how well this works, but how incredibly sneaky it is, because nobody will have any clue that you are doing it.

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While they are starting to build cars that can parallel park themselves, I think we’re still a long way off from having cars will automatically drive us to our destinations.

But what if you were to discover a way to easily drive you to your destination? Almost as if by magic? How would you like to be able to program you brain to naturally find things so it would automatically make it easy for you to get what you want out of life? It’s a lot simpler than you might imagine. Are you ready to learn how?

The Chinese refer to it as ‘Future Memory.’ Ben Franklin (you rememeber him, right?) referred to it as a ‘Daily Review.’ It’s easy to do, and a lot more powerful that it appears.

First you need to establish a list of strengths, things you like about yourself, and another list things that you would like to get rid of. Bad habits, thoughts, beliefs. Make both lists as long or as short as you want, but make sure you have at least three on each list.

Now make a list of things you want to achieve. Make them good things, but not too far out there. For example, to lose 10 pounds would be ok, or lower your golf score by 5 points would be fine.  While you should always feel comfortable to set big goals, for this particular exericise, choose something small. After you easily prove to yourself that it works, you can naturally move on to bigger and better things.

So now you have three short lists, right? Here’s how it works. After you finish your day, sometime shortly before you go to sleep, review your lists. You can do this by hand or on the computer, either way is fine, as long as you write it down.  On on page, you should have your three lists. On each page after that make three columns, labeled stregths, weaknesses, and goals. Have a separte sheet or document for each. Under each column, write what ever you did that day to:

1) Decrease your weaknesses
2) Increase your strengths
3) Move toward your goals

The important thing is to remember any thing, any small thing that is a step in the right direction, no matter how small you think it is. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, and you normally eat a whole pint of ice cream while watching TV at night, and on that particular day, you ate the whole pint MINUS a thimblefull, that is fantastic. Write it down. Feel proud. Feel gratitude. Thank yourself. Likewise with your strengths or weakenss. ANYTHING is fine.

The key here is to build momentum. The more you do this, the easier and more natural it will get. And you will likely see yourself changing in fantastic ways as if by magic. But because you are likely to start small, it’s best to keep this list a secret until you are comfortable enough to brag about your fantastic accomlishments to your friends. If you make sure to spend just a few minutes every night, you will slowly build momentum until your strengths far outweigh your weaknesses, and your goals will begin to appear almost automatically. And your friends will naturally wonder why you have suddenly become so successful.

And please remember to check back often, as I will be updating this site regularly. And while it’s good to keep the above technique a secret, feel free to share this site with your friends, because it really feels good to help people out.

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What I’m talking about is the power of your chakras. Chakra means ‘wheel’ in ancient Sanskrit. They are are tiny vortexes of energy throughout your body that once harnessed, can give you tremendous power. In this article, I will present a basic overview of the chakras. In subsequent writings, I will explain each one in detail, and give you a specific meditative practice that you can easily customize to your own life and desires.

Everybody has seven chakras, and each has a specific function. When a specific chakra is healthy or ‘open,’ you will experience ease and abundance in that particular area of life. Following is a brief overview of each.

The first, or Root Chakra, is located at the base of the spine. This chakra is associated with physical safety. Food, shelter, and physical health.  The associated color is red. When this chakra is open, you will feel completely safe on a physical and material level.

Next is the Spleen Chakra,and is located beneath your naval. This chakra is associated with sexual expression, reproduction, and rejuvenation. The associated color is orange. When this chakra is open, you will easily be able to express and accept yourself as a sexual person.

Third is the Solar Plexus Chakra, and is located at the solar plexus. This chakra is associated with creativity. The associated color is orange. When this chakra is open you will easily be able to think of new ideas and be able to resourcefully solve problems in creative ways.

Fourth is the Heart Chakra, and is located in the middle of your chest. This chakra is assoicated with compassion and empathy. The associated color is green. When this chakra is open, you will naturally be able to emphathize with others and to understand others’ points of view.

Fifth is the Throat Chakra, and is located in your throat. This chakra is associated with communication. The associated color is blue. When this chakra is open, you will be able to communicate powefully with others and be able to express yourself with authority.

Sixth is the Third Eye Chakra, and is located just between and above your eyes. This chakra is associated with intuition, and can be a powerful doorway to your higher self. The associated color is indigo. When this chakra is open you will develop keen intuition about yourself, others, and the future.

Seventh is the Crown Chakra, and is located at the top most point on your head. This chakra is associated with a host of good metaphysical stuff, including new beginnings, connection to the divine and the superconscious. The associated color is purple, or white. When this chakra is open, you can develop a deep sense of knowing, and sometimes be able to feel a deep connection with the infinite.

So now that you have a basic understanding of the chakra’s and their importance, you can naturally imagine what you can do when you begin to harness their power. Be sure to check back often, as I will be adding more articles on specific ways to open your chakras for greater benefit. And because you now have an understanding of this and how you can benefit, please share this with others so that they, like you, can also use it to improve their lives.

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Aw, crap. You wake up. You were dreaming. It was a great dream. Why did you have to wake up? What was it about, anyways? Oh well. You roll over, and go back to sleep. Maybe in the morning you might be able to remember something about the dream, or perhaps only that you’d had one.  Perhaps you share with many others the trait of never being able to remember your dreams. “Do you have dreams?” Your friends may ask. “Uh, yea, but I never remember them.” You answer.

Well, if you don’t make the effort to remember your dreams, you are missing out on perhaps one of the greatest tools around for you to receive insights that can give you an edge not only in your relationships, but in your goals, your future, and even your direction towards the afterlife.

There are several theories as to why we dream, the meaning of dreams, what causes dreams.  It’s generally agreed upon that there are five types of dreams.  I’ll cover those in another article. For now, let’s discuss the importance of getting into the habit of being able to easily remember your dreams.

Despite all the varied theories as to the purpose of our dreams, there is plenty of evidence of them being helpful to people in the past. Robert Louis Stevensen is said to have been able to harness his dreams to come up with stories for his wonderful novels containing deep psychological and moral significance. Kekule, the German Chemist, was able to discover the chemical formula for Benzene during a dream of a snake eatings his tail. Even the invention of the modern sewing machine, by Elias Howe, was inspired by a dream of hostile natives throwing strangely shaped spears. 

So how can you tap into this power?  Firstly, as you realize that dreams contain powerful information, you will naturally be more inclined to recall them when you wake up. And the more you get into the habit of taking a few moments when you wake up to review the nights dreams, the more they will stand out in your mind.

Next is to create a dream journal. For now, you don’t need to worry about how to understand your dreams, the only important thing now is that you learn to remember them. The easiest way is to create a dream journal. Nothing complicated. Just whenever you wake up, jot down a few ideas from your dreams. Simple facts. The situation, people, what was happening. And make sure to thank yourself. That way you can more easily get into the habit of being able to remember key parts of your dreams.  This skill will naturally get better over time as you learn how rich and wonderful your dreams are. Once you can harness the ability to remember your dreams, the next step is to find out what they mean. More on that later. For now, just focus on spending a few minutes a day on something that can naturally turn into a lifelong and powerful resource.

Remember to check back for more articles, or link or share this site because I will be posting more about how to interpret your dreams. You will be amazed at how well being able to remember them will help you so much this can feel like you have a spiritual guide coming to you every day with a helpful message.

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Sound familiar? Many people over the centuries have realized that the underlying truths of these statements, once harnessed, can powerfully provide not only material riches, but better relationships, increased happiness, and peaceful wisdom. Would you like to tap into these? Would you like to naturally and effortlessly use these principles to enhance your life and those of your friends and loved ones?

The Law of Attraction has been getting a lot of press lately. Perhaps you’ve seen “The Secret.” Perhaps you’ve seen a few Abraham Hicks videos. (If you haven’t I cannot recommend them enough.) If not, don’t worry, you still can quickly and easily tap into the source of power to achieve wonderous results.

Be careful. You won’t be able to make money appear in your wallet. You won’t blink your eyes like on “I Dream of Jeannie” and make a sudden stampede of elephants appear in your living room (although I admit that would be pretty cool.) However, if you focus on things you can control, you will be light years ahead of every other law of attraction practitioner who is mixing their realistic and unrealistic desires. Because you know these simple secrets, creating your new reality will be a snap. (Or a nose twitch, if you prefer.)

It works like this. The more you focus on your desires, the more you will program your brain to automatically seek out what you are looking for. It works from the reticular activating system of the brain. Have you ever bought a new car, lets say a red Honda, and then suddenly saw it everywhere? That was that reticular activating system at work. Here’s what happened. When you bought the car, you were suddenly able to feel really good about the car. You had thoughts of red ‘Honda=good.’ So your brain naturally responded. You sent it a message, ‘red Honda=good,’ and your brain automatically complied by bringing into your attention all the red Honda’s that were already there anyway, but you didn’t notice, because you weren’t thinking ‘red Honda=good.’

When you program your brain for something that you want, rather than what you already have, it’s exactly the same process, it just takes a bit longer. Let’s say you want a new job. So you program your brain with the exact conditions you’d like in your new job. Pretty soon your brain will be looking all over the place to find things that will satisfy the conditions that you specified. The cool thing about this, is that because your brain is so smart, it will find things you wouldn’t normally think would lead to a new job. And because it’s doing all this looking around for you while you aren’t paying much attention, these ideas come to you as intuition. So after you start to program your brain for things you want, make sure to pay attention to your intuition, because it will definately point you in the right direction.

And as you begin to transform your thoughts into what is possible, you will naturally start to realize that because you are powerful beyond measure, there is no limit to what you can achieve. It may seem to be slow at first, but stay with it. The more you notice and appreciate your inevitable small successes, the quicker you will gain momentum and confidence in your abilities to create your world exactly as you desire it.

Make sure to check back often, as I will be updating this site with articles to easily and quickly improve your life. And feel free to share or link this site with others, because what can be better than a world where everyone practices the principles of abundance?

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Have you ever had these thoughts? Evil blobs of mind poison that instantly crippled any short lived hopes you’d had of maybe being able to make a friend?

Well, you are in luck, because I am going to not only show you a foolproof way to start a conversation with a complete stranger, but how you can make them do all the talking, and end up thinking you are the stunning conversationalist.  Ready? Let’s go.

You will need three basic tools.

1) How to form a tag question.

2) How to ask interesting, open ended follow up questions.

3) Basic body language reading skills.

First thing you need to do is approach casually, and stand a few yards from them for a couple of minutes.  Just find any old excuse to go hang out near their “space.” While you are standing there, notice something interesting about the environment. The trees, the weather, anything that makes you think, just a little bit, wow, cool. Let’s say you see a cool leaf on a tree. (This is just an example, if there are no trees in your situation, this probably won’t work out so well). Look at the leaf, imagine out how cool it is. Try and think of all the stuff that’s happened since the big bang, and here this leaf is right here, being all leafy.

Now you make your move. Bust out your brilliant tag question.

“Wow, that is a really cool leaf, isn’t it?”

Be sure when you say the “isn’t it” part, you don’t make it sound like a question. Make it sound like a statement. And smile. Next come your wicked body language skills. If the person responds with “um, yea” and looks like he or she just found a cockroach in their kool aid, then move on, the conversation is over. If they look at the leaf, and then at you, you’re in. Bonus points if they match your smile.

Next you ask your open ended question. About anything that’s easy to talk about, the surroundings, party, bar, study session, whatever.

“So what do you think about….” and insert any old topic. Then as he or she is speaking, watch their face for signs of life.  Whatever they say when their face lights up, grab it.

Watch them talk, watch their face, and ask them for more information about things they seem happy about. Nothing too personal. Some good questions are:

How do you feel about..

What do you like about…

What is your favorite part about…

Just pick out a few words here and there, follow up on them while you speak, and they will think you are the greatest conversationalist since Dale Carnegie. Make sure to throw your name out in there someplace, don’t wait for them to ask. They’re probably nervous. It’s not everyday people get approached by a wicked word master like you!

Make sure to come back often, and tell your friends, as I will be posting several “How To..” articles that can easily improve your life in many ways.

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Yea, yea, I know. Just about now, you’re probably wondering what it is that I might be trying to sell you. Or perhaps your are hoping that I have something to sell, so you can buy it, and immediately use it to create such powerfully wonderful feelings that you can’t help but to imagine how fantastic the world will change once you realize these largely overlooked truths.

Well, I have good news, and I have good news, depending on how you look at it. (Yea, I know, that doesn’t make any sense).

The first thing you might want to do is take a deep breath. Slowly. And another. And one more. Good. Now ask yourself.  What do I want? Got it? Ok. Now ask yourself again, what is important about that? Wait, it’ll come. Got it? Good.  Now one more time. Relax, no hurry. Take a deep breath if you need it. Ok. Ready? Ask yourself one more time, what is important about that?  These are called your values. And guess what, pretty much everbody can see the same values inside. Love. Respect. Safety. Recognition for a job well done. Acceptance. Peace.

And since you can now fully understand not only what other people want, but realize that it’s the same thing that you do, how many ways do you think you might look at people differently now? When you know, really know, that deep down, despite all of our differences, we share much more that we are even capable of imagining. And when you breath into that perspective, and look at people from that source of wisdom, what happens when you become aware that as you discover similarities in strangers that you’d never even noticed before, you will automatically be able to share an unconcious bond that can cut through all mistakenly percieved differences?

Not only will people wonder just exactly why you stand out, if only a little bit, but they will feel compelled to feel a desire to start a conversation with you just to see what you are all about.

So I’ll leave the choice up to you. Will you consciously take on this new perspective, and see how many ways you will discover it already making your life easier and smoother, or will you just stand back, and simply notice the obvious results?

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Kind of like when you fly on a commerical airline. Like when you are flying over a city, the residential part. And you can look down, and see how everything is really well organized. Especially if you compare the experience you can remember, now, of when you drove to your friends house for the first time and when you looked around. Everything seemed strange and out of place. Were you supposed to turn right at the gas station, or left? Everything seemed so difficult back before they were putting talking GPS maps in all the cars. How were we able to find your way around?

Another thing I think is really cool when you fly on a commerical plane, at least when you remeber to ask for  window seat. It sometimes is frustrating when you forget to ask for what you want, you know? But the interesting thing to me is how many people have swimming pools. When you look down, they are obvious. Which is another wierd thing. If you are still confused, and driving around looking for your friends house (assuming you took the right turn back at the gas station), you can’t tell who has a pool, and who doesn’t. You can’t even tell who has lawn furniture. But from a different perspective, things you wouldn’t have noticed before turn into things that you can’t miss.

It’s like when you meet somebody for the first time.  You can’t help but to look at the outside. Thier clothes, their speech patterns, they way they gesture with their hands.  I had a friend who told me that it was really important to keep an open mind when meeting people. She always said that although it’s really easy to judge by looks, its much more useful, if you want to be resourceful to kind of withhold judgement for a while. Give the person time to get comfortable, you know, like when you are able to express yourself without worrying about what other people think. She said that this was the best way. If you do this, you can really develop good relationships with people.  And that is important, right?

Of course the plane landed safely, and we all got off, and unpacked our bags. I had probably the most enlightening vacations of my life. At least up until now. How about you? What insights did you discover on the most enlightening vacation of your life?

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Then my friend starts telling about this guy that he knows. It seems he really likes this girl, but he just can’t get up the nerve to go and talk to her.  He said that whenever he sees her, he can think of good things that he wants to say, but when he gets close, he starts to imagine all the bad things that might happen, and those overpower the good things. In his mind, at least. So I say, “Well, next time you see this guy, why don’t you..” and then my friend interrupts me, and says that he hasn’t seen this guy in like two months. And I say “Oh, so he’s one of THOSE kinds of friends.” And my friend nods and says “Yea. Low maintenance.”

Like the kind of person that you can go for three or four years with out seeing this person, and then next time you happen to bump into them, you are able to instantly remember good times, like you just got off the phone, chatting and talking about remembering good experiences. And then when you see them, you can just pick up where you left off, and everything is cool. And my friend said, “yea, just like that.”  So I asked him if he knew or had met the girl, and he said he did, and I said “so is she cool?” And he said “Yea, she’s totally cool.” “So it’s all in his head?” “Yea, it’s all in his head.” And I suggested that maybe he should just relax. Because I’m sure you know that good things happen when you stay out of your own way.

So anyways, the guy takes off on the wave, and it instantly becomes clear that not only does the guy know what he’s doing, because he expertly barrel rolled himself out just at the right moment, but it turned out he was the guy we’d been talking about. And right after a great ride, he came up to his spot on the beach where his girlfriend, apparantly, was waiting. “Is that her?” “Wow, yea it is,” he said with a chuckle. He waved, she waved, then I waved. Then we went and got some tacos, which is another story.

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