Ignore Negative People Quotes

People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.

Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

It is very normal for one ugly weed to not want to stand alone.

You CAN'T STOP people from thinking negatively about you, but you CAN STOP them from affecting you. Just ignore them.

I also think you can end up ignoring, and even losing, the positive things in your life by focusing too much on the negative. That’s a huge drain, as well as a waste of time. When you think about people, you give them power.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in. 2. Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others. 3. Death ends a life, not a relationship. 4. Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. 5. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too-even when you are in the dark. Even when you're falling. 6. As you grow old, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, its also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

Take control of your destiny. Believe in yourself. Ignore those who try to discourage you. Avoid negative sources, people, places, things and habits. Don't give up and don't give in.

Never be afraid to offer a smile; sure the risk is that a few foolish people may misinterpret your kindness as weakness, but the sweet reward is that as you make new friends and encourage others, the foolish have ignored the fact that you have already shown them your teeth.

A lot of people will ignore positive words when they are down and accept negative words. Those people never get better.

You gotta know that People will say a million negative things about you before they mention 1 good thing, don't be surprise if they never said that 1 good thing about you.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are.

Life has a positive and negative side. Happy people ignore the negative side

There are a whole lot of religious people in America, including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious discourse—when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.

I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me. Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time. Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE ADD ADULTS 1. Do what you’re good at. Don’t spend too much time trying to get good at what you’re bad at. (You did enough of that in school.) 2. Delegate what you’re bad at to others, as often as possible. 3. Connect your energy to a creative outlet. 4. Get well enough organized to achieve your goals. The key here is “well enough.” That doesn’t mean you have to be very well organized at all—just well enough organized to achieve your goals. 5. Ask for and heed advice from people you trust—and ignore, as best you can, the dream-breakers and finger-waggers. 6. Make sure you keep up regular contact with a few close friends. 7. Go with your positive side. Even though you have a negative side, make decisions and run your life with your positive side.

My Venus is damaged, or in exile, that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such People are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists. This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness—lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semiconsciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.

Nobody really enjoys having to pacify their feelings. It's too much like failure; it reminds you of weakness. but feelings don't want to be pacified, either. They want to be fulfilled. You fulfill your positive feelings (love, hope, optimism, appreciation, approval) by connecting with other people, expressing your best self. You fulfill your negative feelings by releasing them. Your whole system recognizes negative feelings as toxic. It's futile to bottle them up, divert them, ignore them, or try to rise above them. Either negativity is leaving or it's hanging on - it has no other alternative. As you fulfill emotions, your brain will change and form new patterns, which is the whole goal.

BLESSINGS ARE IMMEASURABLE You can Lose a child Or a parent, The love of your life, A good job, A game, A deal, A bet, An idea, Your favorite thing, Money, Your best friend, A moment, An opportunity, A chance, Your keys, Your mind, Your health, Your identity, Your virginity, Your religion, Your shirt, Your license, ID or Passport, Phone or phone number, Hope, Faith, Luck, Your pride, Or your house, And feel like You've lost everything, And keep on losing. Stop Counting losses And start counting your blessings. Only then, Will you discover that losses Are easier to point out And count Than blessings, And that blessings Outnumber your losses For they are truly Immeasurable. It is only normal that People count losses with Their minds, And ignore To count blessings With the graciousness Of their hearts.

When you’re feeling insecure, you typically don’t notice the hundreds of people around you who accept you just the way you are. All you notice are the few who don’t. Don’t ever forget your worth. Spend time with those who value you. No matter how good you are to people, there will always be negative minds out there who criticize you. Smile, ignore them, and carry on. You might feel unwanted and unworthy to one person, but you are priceless to another.

Morphic field. That's what it's called when a certain kind of energy pattern is repeated over and over until it creates something like an aura. This prison, for example. All of the hatred, ignorance, pain, humiliation, and greed constantly being put out by everyone here has created one hell of a negative morphic field. The thing about morphic fields is that they behave like magnets. Like attracts like. It draws more of the same energy to itself, and it touches everyone who comes here. The people who come to see me immediately feel disgust, anger, and repugnance for the kind of people they have to deal with here. It also explains why every new batch of guards who come to work here are a little more brutal and ignorant than the last. As the morphic field grows increasingly worse, it draws in the kind of people who resonate with it.

When people wield accusations of privilege, more often than not, they want to be heard and seen. Their need is acute, if not desperate, and that need rises out of the many historical and ongoing attempts to silence and render invisible marginalized groups. Must we satisfy our need to be heard and seen by preventing anyone else from being heard and seen? Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say? Do we ignore everything, for example, that white men have to say?

Instead, I realized that people are allowed to say whatever they want to me about my weight, but it’s entirely up to me how much power I let those words have over me. I’m not obligated or required to accept negative commentary about my looks. I’m not less confident or honest for ignoring that it’s there. I’m just confident enough to know it’s not true.

At times we need to ignore people and move on. Their negativity and criticism can provoke you to build a house next to theirs and keep arguing for the rest of your life.

Never allow anyone's hate towards you, ignorance, drama, or negativity to stop you from being the person God has called you and created you to be.

I would like to ofer some exercises that can help us use the Five Precepts to cultivate and strengthen mindfulness. It is best to choose one of these exercises and work with it meticulously for a week. Then examine the results and choose another for a subsequent week. These practices can help us understand and find ways to work with each precept. 1. Refrain from killing: reverence for life. Undertake for one week to purposefully bring no harm in thought, word, or deed to any living creature. Particularly, become aware of any living beings in your world (people, animals, even plants) whom you ignore, and cultivate a sense of care and reverence for them too. 2. Refraining from stealing: care with material goods. Undertake for one week to act on every single thought of generosity that arises spontaneously in your heart. 3. Refraining from sexual misconduct: conscious sexuality. Undertake for one week to observe meticulously how often sexual feelings arise in your consciousness. Each time, note what particular mind states you find associated with them such as love, tension, compulsion, caring, loneliness, desire for communication, greed, pleasure, agression, and so forth. 4. Refraining from false speech: speech from the heart. Undertake for one week not to gossip (positively or negatively) or speak about anyone you know who is not present with you (any third party). 5. Refraining from intoxicants to the point of heedlessness. Undertake for one week or one month to refrain from all intoxicants and addictive substances (such as wine, marijuana, even cigarettes and/or caffeine if you wish). Observe the impulses to use these, and become aware of what is going on in the heart and mind at the time of those impulses (88-89).

In neo-classical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires: what economists call "maximising utility". The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere "externalities" to the model, with no reckoning of the cost - at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appears factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, these factors may be the most important of all.

...he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to apply what they had learned there—lock, stock, and barrel—within Egyptian academia. For people like them, “progress” and “the West” were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the great Western values—democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation’s heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved.

It is ignorance that is at times incomprehensible to the wise; for instance, he may not see 'the positive person' or 'the negative person' in such a black and white way as many people do. A wise man may not understand it because, as a catalyst of wisdom, but not always wise in his own eyes, even he can learn from and give back to fools. To think that an individual has absolutely nothing to offer to the table is counter-intuitively what the wise man considers to be 'the ignorance of hopelessness'.

It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, “Oh, if I were young again.” You never hear people say, “I wish I were sixty-five.” He smiled. “You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five. “Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.

I hope I’m being clear, I didn’t say I hate feminists, that would be weird. I said I hate feminist. I’m talking about the word. I have the privilege living my life inside of words and part of being a writer is creating entire universes, and that's beautiful, but part of being a writer is also living in the very smallest part of every word. ...But the word feminist, it doesn't sit with me, it doesn't add up. I want to talk about my problem that I have with it. ...Ist in it's meaning is also a problem for me. Because you can't be born an ist. It's not natural... So feminist includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda... ...My problem with feminist is not the word. It's the question. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist?" The great Katy Perry once said—I'm paraphrasing—"I'm not a feminist but I like it when women are strong."...Don't know why she feels the need to say the first part, but listening to the word and thinking about it, I realize I do understand. This question that lies before us is one that should lie behind us. The word is problematic for me because there's another word that we're missing... ...When you say racist, you are saying that is a negative thing. That is a line that we have crossed. Anything on the side of that line is shameful, is on the wrong side of history. And that is a line that we have crossed in terms of gender but we don't have the word for it... ...I start thinking about the fact that we have this word when we're thinking about race that says we have evolved beyond something and we don't really have this word for gender. Now you could argue sexism, but I'd say that's a little specific. People feel removed from sexism. ‘I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple. ...You don’t have to hate someone to destroy them. You just have to not get it. ...My pitch is this word. ‘Genderist.’ I would like this word to become the new racist. I would like a word that says there was a shameful past before we realized that all people were created equal. And we are past that. And every evolved human being who is intelligent and educated and compassionate and to say I don't believe that is unacceptable. And Katy Perry won't say, "I'm not a feminist but I like strong women," she'll say, "I'm not a genderist but sometimes I like to dress up pretty." And that'll be fine. ...This is how we understand society. The word racism didn't end racism, it contextualized it in a way that we still haven't done with this issue. ...I say with gratitude but enormous sadness, we will never not be fighting. And I say to everybody on the other side of that line who believe that women are to be bought and trafficked or ignored...we will never not be fighting. We will go on, we will always work this issue until it doesn't need to be worked anymore. ...Is this idea of genderist going to do something? I don't know. I don't think that I can change the world. I just want to punch it up a little.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18) I came from a family of wonderful people who nevertheless struggled with how to be happy. There were many things we didn't know about living in peace. We mixed our love with fear. What I experienced in my childhood family seemed to color my life with confusion. I joined the Church at nineteen. Though my conversion was real, many of my emotions continued to be out of harmony with gospel teachings, and I didn't know what to do about them. I was not at rest. As a young mother I felt that I was only barely keeping my distress from leaking out. But it did leak out. I struggled to be cheerful at home. I was too often tense with my children, especially as their behavior reflected negatively on me. I was perfectionistic. I was irritable and controlling. But I was also loving, patient, appreciative, happy; I frequently felt the Spirit of the Lord, and I did many parenting things well, but so inconsistently. Sooner or later the crisis comes for good people who live in ignorance and neglect of spiritual law. The old ways don't work anymore, and it may feel as though the foundations of life are giving way. If we don't learn consistent, mature love in our childhood homes we often struggle to learn it when we become marriage partners and parents.

Dare to rise, when all voices behind you say you can’t get there, ignore them and move on… it’s not about the talents and gifts you have; it’s about how wise you optimize them!

People will always talk. Just make sure the negative things they say aren't true. It makes it easier to laugh and ignore them.

Education being a change of behavior as a result of experience brings about wisdom and knowledge. While knowledge comes from what we read or study, wisdom comes from what we observe and experience. The purpose of education is not to affect negatively but to positively affect. When I see people using whatever wisdom or knowledge they have to cheat, I see an abuse of education all borne out of ignorance.

I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources. Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is: "Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance" I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes. The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable. For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, to name one such example, used an fMRI scanner to study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive. By skillfully managing their attention, they improved their world without changing anything concrete about it.

In this second half of life, one has less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again those old rash judgments, holding on to old hurts, or feeling any need to punish other people. Your superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions. You do not fight these things anymore; they have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego based, counterproductive, and often entirely wrong. You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly.

During depression, negative thoughts find a way to stay in your mind by convincing your brain that they are more important than the positive thoughts. Just like a virus, depression develops survival mechanisms. It convinces you that your positive thoughts are just delusions and ignorance.

Two things that annoy me, are; people who are positive out of ignorance, and people who are negative out of bitterness, People who are neither usually get along with me and agree with most of what I say. But People who are one of the two think I'm the other and at the end get confused totally.

Seeing the goodness in someone does not imply ignoring their difficult qualities or unskillful actions. Rather, we can fully acknowledge these difficulties, while at the same time we choose to focus on the positive. If we focus on the negative, we will naturally feel anger, resentment or disappointment. If we focus on the positive, we will forge a connection to the person. Then as we look at their negative traits or actions, we do it as their friend. If two friends are looking at such difficult things, they do so standing side by side. This mirroring quality, whereby we 'reteach a thing it's loveliness', is one of the greatest attributes of metta. The power of metta enables us to look at people and affirm the rightness of their wish to be happy; it affirms our oneness with them. The power of love reflects both to ourselves and others the manifold possibilities available in each moment.

Yet to define genes by the diseases they cause is about as absurd as defining organs of the body by the diseases they get: livers are there to cause cirrhosis, hearts to cause heart attacks and brains to cause strokes. It is a measure, not of our knowledge but of our ignorance that this is the way the genome catalogues read. It is literally true that the only thing we know about some genes is that their malfunction causes a particular disease. This is a pitifully small thing to know about a gene, and a terribly misleading one. It leads to the dangerous shorthand that runs as follows: ‘X has got the Wolf-Hirschhorn gene.’ Wrong. We all have the Wolf-Hirschhorn gene, except, ironically, people who have Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. Their sickness is caused by the fact that the gene is missing altogether. In the rest of us, the gene is a positive, not a negative force. The sufferers have the mutation, not the gene.

Achievement and competence. People fall prey to addiction more readily when they lack positive motivation to achieve or work. Children need to learn that accomplishment is important and within their reach, not solely for material rewards, but because people should make positive contributions to the world and other people and because it is satisfying to make such contributions and to mobilize one’s skills effectively. Participating with children in constructive activity, like reading, building, or gardening—and encouraging independent activity whenever feasible—are strong precursors to achievement and competence. Consciousness and self-awareness. Addiction is the result of accumulated self-destructive behavior that people ignore, just as unconscious acceptance of any negative syndrome ingrains that habit in people’s lives.

The relationship between humanity and work involves money, but in something of a negative correlation. The jobs and roles that are the most human and would naturally be most attractive tend to pay nothing or close to nothing. Mother, father, artist, writer, musician, coach, teacher, storyteller, nurturer, counselor, dancer, poet, philosopher, journalist—these roles often are either unpaid or pay so little that it is difficult to survive or thrive in many environments. Many of these roles have high positive social impacts that are ignored by the market. On the other hand, the most lucrative jobs tend to be the most inorganic. Corporate lawyers, technologists, financiers, traders, management consultants, and the like assume a high degree of efficiency. The more that a person can submerge one’s humanity to the logic of the marketplace, the higher the reward.

You know, of course, that as prophesied by Moroni, there are those whose research relating to Joseph Smith is not for the purpose of gaining added light and knowledge but to undermine his character, magnify his flaws, and if possible destroy his influence. Their work product can sometimes be jarring, and so can issues raised at times by honest historians and researchers with no “axe to grind.” But I would offer you this advice in your own study: Be patient, don’t be superficial, and don’t ignore the Spirit. In counseling patience, I simply mean that while some answers come quickly or with little effort, others are simply not available for the moment because information or evidence is lacking. Don’t suppose, however, that a lack of evidence about something today means that evidence doesn’t exist or that it will not be forthcoming in the future. The absence of evidence is not proof. . . . When I say don’t be superficial, I mean don’t form conclusions based on unexamined assertions or incomplete research, and don’t be influenced by insincere seekers. I would offer you the advice of our Assistant Church Historian, Rick Turley, an intellectually gifted researcher and author whose recent works include the definitive history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He says simply, “Don’t study Church history too little.” While some honestly pursue truth and real understanding, others are intent on finding or creating doubts. Their interpretations may come from projecting 21st Century concepts and culture backward onto 19th Century people. If there are differing interpretations possible, they will pick the most negative. They sometimes accuse the Church of hiding something because they only recently found or heard about it—an interesting accusation for a Church that’s publishing 24 volumes of all it can find of Joseph Smith’s papers. They may share their assumptions and speculations with some glee, but either can’t or won’t search further to find contradictory information. . . . A complete understanding can never be attained by scholarly research alone, especially since much of what is needed is either lost or never existed. There is no benefit in imposing artificial limits on ourselves that cut off the light of Christ and the revelations of the Holy Spirit. Remember, “By the power of the Holy Ghost, ye may know the truth of all things.” . . . If you determine to sit still, paralyzed until every question is answered and every whisper of doubt resolved, you will never move because in this life there will always be some issue pending or something yet unexplained.

Not many people know this desperate need to be put back together again. I have been split like the atom, and the effect on my psyche was just as powerful. Part of me is missing, even if it can’t be seen with the naked eye. A coin is not complete without both heads and tails. All of the negativity and unsavory characters in this environment only serve to make the exceptions shine all the more brightly. It causes you to appreciate kindness and consideration even more. When those with an inner beauty make their way into this hellish reality it shines forth like a beacon, and we denizens swarm to it like bugs to a zapper. In a very real way we’re starving to death, and these bright spots in the darkness are the only thing that can fill the hole. On an average day there is nothing kind, generous, caring, or sensitive within these walls. The energy directed at you is hatred, rage, disgust, stupidity, ignorance, and brutality. It affects you in mind, body, and soul, much like a physical beating. The pressure is relentless and unending. Soon you walk with your shoulders slumped and your

Instead of a healthy environment where she is heard, acknowledged, nurtured, loved; she instead feels ignored, fearful, belittled and responsible for the adult’s well-being. In these families, spontaneity and laughter are replaced with rigidness, the inability to engage in honest communication, an abundance of secrets and a proliferation of rules – spoken and unspoken – that all work together to help everyone cope with the tension in the home. Individuals are often enmeshed, meaning they are too entangled in the other’s emotions. One person feels responsible for the other. Boundaries are often overlapping or nonexistent. Addiction is often involved, but not always. All of this negativity, hostility and emotional confusion make the child scared, insecure and eventually angry. It is a fact, however, that many people who are struggling with codependency are also saddled with addiction of some kind. The two are deeply intertwined in many cases. But this is not a universal scenario. If you are battling addiction, you most likely are also caught up in codependency and may not even know it yet.

Preemptive or preventive war is now accepted by both political parties. It is also accepted by all branches of our government. Likewise, assassinations, secret military tribunals, and torture are now identified worldwide as policies acceptable to the US government and the American people. The image of the US throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East, is more negative now than at any time in our nation’s history. Many Americans have at the same time exhibited a general willingness to give up liberty for safety. We have ignored the warnings of the Founders that the loss of liberty leads to the loss of security as well.

Bubble: A safe space where people that don't like to be confronted with the consequences of their actions live. Often known as the perfect environment for those that are too immature to assume responsibility for their lack of realistic perception, and instead focus their energy in maintaining an image of perfection to the outside world, while hiding their real thoughts, quite usually very sadistic and selfish. Bubbles can easily blast when a small portion of truth or justified anger hits one, so people that live inside a bubble are particularly sensitive to those that tell them things they can't comprehend, even, and in particular, when such things are correlated with their immoral social behavior. And as people that live inside a bubble need the bubble as much as they fear the outside world, they often blend unrelated words with their own nonsense to keep the danger of having a bubble exploded far from sight. This includes being an hypocrite when calling one ungrateful, offending someone while calling such individual aggressive, and using negative depreciation with arguments that fit their agenda of keeping themselves within ignorance while bringing others further to that paradox. People that live in the bubble believe anything they hear but always assume that their beliefs are independent, as the bubble stops them from seeing further and admitting something they can't see or accept. Therefore, until the moment in which everyone will be happy to have a microchip attached to their brain and google glasses stopping them from seeing the world as it is, the bubble will be known as a transitory stage, between an unempathetic dumbness and being a brainless humanoid vegetal on two legs.

In most ancient cultures, there must have been an intuitive understanding of this process, which is why old people were respected and revered. They were the repositories of wisdom and provided the dimension of depth without which no civilization can survive for long. In our civilization, which is totally identified with the outer and ignorant of the inner dimension of spirit, the word old has mainly negative connotations. It equals useless and so we regard it as almost an insult to refer to someone as old. To avoid the word, we use euphemisms such as elderly and senior. The First Nation’s “grandmother” is a figure of great dignity. Today’s “granny” is at best cute. Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?

If we start to think about trust as a public good (like clean air and water), we see that we can all benefit from higher levels of trust in terms of communicating with others, making financial transitions smoother, simplifying contracts, and many other business and social activities. Without constant suspicion, we can get more out of our exchanges with others while spending less time making sure that others will fulfill their promises to us. Yet as the tragedy of commons exemplifies, in the short term it is beneficial for each individual to violate and take advantage of the established trust. I suspect that most people and companies miss or ignore the fact that trust is an important public resource and that losing it can have long-term negative consequences for everyone involved. It doesn't take much to violate trust. Just a few bad players in the market can spoil it for everyone else.

Then, consciously decide that throughout the day: 1. I will be as cheerful as possible. 2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people. 3. I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes. I will place the best possible interpretation on their actions. 4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if successes are inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be. I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality. 5. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. 6. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day. 7. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible. 8. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” that I can do nothing to change.

Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it. ■​“No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning. ■​“Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman. ■​Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” ■​Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively. ■​Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you. ■​If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”-oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders. CHAPTER 5 TRIGGER THE TWO WORDS THAT IMMEDIATELY TRANSFORM ANY NEGOTIATION

I have outgrown many things. I have outgrown relatives who gladly offer criticism but not support. I have outgrown my need to meet my family's unrealistic expectations of me. I have outgrown girls who wear masks and secretly rejoice at my misfortunes. I have outgrown shrinking myself for boys who are intimidated by my intelligence and outspoken nature. I have outgrown friends who cannot celebrate my accomplishments. I have outgrown people who conveniently disappear whenever life gets a little dark. I have outgrown those who take pleasure in gossiping and spreading negativity. I have outgrown dull, meaningless conversations that feel forced. I have outgrown those who don't take a stand against ignorance and injustice. I have outgrown trying to please everyone. I have outgrown society constantly telling me I'm not beautiful, smart, or worthy enough. I have outgrown trying to fix every little flaw. I have outgrown my tendency to fill my mind with self-doubt and insecurity. I have outgrown trying to find reasons not to love myself. I have outgrown anything and anyone that does not enrich the essence of my soul. I have outgrown many things, and I've never felt freer.

Try not to be the hater. Try not to be the person who tears down someone else's work. The world needs more people who contribute their gifts and share their work and ideas. Working up the courage to do that can be tough. Support those who display that courage and vulnerability. Even if you don't enjoy their work, at least appreciate the fact that they did something. It's easy to be passive and complain. It's much harder to step into the creative arena and bring into existence something from nothing. And nobody needs permission to create. There aren't any prerequisites to contribute to the world around you. You just need to choose to build something and follow it through, and get out of your own way (limiting beliefs / self doubt / excuses). Too many people die with great ideas inside them. Let them out! It's all fleeting castles made of sand anyways. What do you have to lose? If you do find yourself on the receiving end of negativity, the choice is still yours to not react in anger, to accept that opinion as 1 out of 7+ billion and keep being true to yourself, as that is truly all that matters. You can either be judged because you created something or ignored because you left your greatness inside of you. Your call.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Whatever arises in and through the body does so, as we have seen, in accordance with the operation of karma. Karma holds our locked-up awareness, the larger buddha nature, of which we are only partially aware. Whatever of our karmic totality has not made its way into conscious awareness abides in the body. At any given time, a certain aspect of that totality begins to press toward consciousness; the totality intends that this come to birth now. It might not be pressing toward awareness until just now because, before this moment, it was not ready to do so, having been held at some deep level of enfoldment. Again, it may not have appeared in consciousness because, though ready to emerge at a certain moment as a step in our development, we have resisted it and pushed it back into the body. Either way, at a certain point, there is a pressure from the body toward consciousness, to communicate whatever, in the mysterious timing of our existence, is needed or appropriate. If we resist what is appearing in the body, at the verge of our awareness—and most of us modern people do habitually resist in order to rigidly maintain ourselves—what is trying to arise is pushed back, denied, and again held at bay in the body. There it resides within the shadows of our somatic being, in an ever-increasing residue—as that which our consciousness is in the continual process of ignoring, resisting, and denying. Residing in the shadows, all those aspects of our totality that are being denied admittance into conscious awareness continue to function in a powerful but unseen way, being reflected in the nature, structure, and activity of our ego. This process roughly corresponds to the psychological concept of repression, but there are some important differences. For one thing, the activity of the ego in “repressing” experience is seen here as ultimately not negative, but dynamic and creative in function. In our life, the ego emerges out of the unconscious as the field of our conscious awareness, the immediate domain in which our experience can be received and integrated. At the same time, the ego moderates what it takes in, resisting that which it is unready and unable to receive. There is much intelligence in this. An ego that is too rigid and frozen cannot accommodate the experience that is needed in order for us to grow. But an ego that is simply overwhelmed and pushed aside by experience cannot integrate the needed experience either. Spirituality, it would seem, depends on an ego—a field of consciousness—that can change and grow with the needs of our journey toward wholeness. Thus it is that spirituality is not about “getting rid of” or obliterating the ego, but rather about enabling the ego into a process of openness, increasing experience, death, and rebirth, as it integrates more and more of the buddha nature and itself becomes more aligned with and in service to our own totality. A buddha is not a person who has eliminated or wiped away his or her ego, but someone in whom the ego has integrated so much that there is no longer any room for individual identity at all.

People are free. Well, they can't fly on their own . . . but pretty much whatever they can think up, they can make happen. When they're sleepy, they can sleep. They're free to start or quit whatever they're doing whenever they want. And the only reason they don't is because things like social norms, laws, traditions and sentiment get in the way. Running naked through the streets . . . conning old people . . . killing . . . everything’s possible if you ignore morality. That's why they insist on teaching you cooperation and ethics when you're young- But the world is set up to force people to fight, cheat and steal as a default. Trying to live with that contradiction is torture. But in so many places happiness and sorrow are traded like stocks on wall street. What will it take for everyone to be happy? Who knows? But if a kid could figure it out, war would've gone extinct long time ago. I'd hate to trust the entire thing to politicians. They're just old men who have to dance to public opinion. The world is the embodiment of human nature exposed . . . There's no way for everyone to be happy. Happiness is relative anyway . . . and people want it that way. Evil is relative too. In order to protect her, a mother can turn into a demon. And it gets held up as inspirational. People go to war to protect kin and country. It's the same thing. Even if you pretend to be good fundamentally everyone has some negative aspects. It's amazing that no one knows that. Why? People have become so adept at excuses and shifting the blame . . . that they never even consider the possibility that they're culpable for their own problems.

The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate. Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be. As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it. That form of positive thinking is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. The adult who remains hurt without being aware of it makes this residual defence of the child into a life principle. The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: what is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future? Many approaches focus only on the second half of that healing dyad without considering fully what led to the manifestation of illness in the first place. Such “positive” methods fill the bookshelves and the airwaves. In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this fear to dominate engenders a state of childhood apprehension. Whether or not the apprehension is conscious, it is a state of stress. Second, lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress and one of the potent activators of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response. Third, stress wanes as independent, autonomous control increases. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces more powerful than he is. His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has “chosen” his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.

An old man wearing a red seed cap was saying, "Little lady, one day you'll remember the days people told you that you had nice legs as a good memory." Adam braced for the explosion. It was nails and dynamite. "Good--memory? Oh, I wish I were as ignorant as you! What happiness! There are girls who kill themselves over negative body image and you--" "Is there a problem here?" Adam broke in. The man seemed relieved. People were always pleased to see clean, muted Adam, the deferential Southern voice of reason. "Your girlfriend's quite a firecracker." Adam stared at the man. Blue stared at Adam. He wanted to tell her it wasn't worth it--that he'd grown up with this sort of man and knew they were untrainable--but then she'd throw the thermos at Adam's head and probably slap the guy in the mouth. It was amazing that she and Ronan didn't get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff. "Sir," Adam started--Blue's eyebrows spiked--"I think maybe your mama didn't teach you how to talk to women." The old man shook his head at Adam, like in pity. Adam added, "And she's not my girlfriend." Blue flashed him a brilliant look of approval, and then she got into the car with a dramatic door slam Ronan would have approved of. "Look, kid," the old man started. Adam interrupted, "Your fuel door's open, by the way." He climbed back into his little, shitty car, the one Ronan called the Hondayota. He felt heroic for no good reason. Blue simmered righteously as they pulled out of the station. For a few moments, there was nothing but the labored sounds of the little car's breathing. Then Noah said, "You do have nice legs, though." Blue swung at him. A helpless laugh escaped Adam, and she hit his shoulder too.

You never talk to the pitcher when…” He shook his head. “You just never talk to the pitcher when--” “I just wanted to congratulate him on a good game--” “It’s not over ’til it’s over,” Chase said. “You jinxed me,” Jason said, crouching down in the corner, pressing his palms against his forehead, like he’d been struck with a migraine headache. “You don’t really believe that superstitious--” His head came up so fast, and his stare was so hard that I stopped. He did believe. He really did believe. And judging by the way the other guys were looking at me, they all believed. I backed away, not knowing what to say. I’d just felt sorry for him because he was being ignored. The guy at bat struck out, and Brandon was next. Bird had her fingers crossed while clutching the wire of the fence. “I think I just made a big mistake,” I said, my voice low. “Yeah, I heard you. According to Brandon, you’re never supposed to use the term no-hitter in the dugout.” “Well, I wasn’t technically in the dugout.” “But your words traveled into the dugout. Close enough.” “Great. You don’t really think I jinxed them, do you?” Brandon struck out, the first time he’d struck out since playing for the Rattlers. When he walked by and glared at me, I found myself wishing Harry Potter was real, sitting in the stands, and could turn me into a rabbit’s foot. I didn’t really believe in bad luck. I believed we made our own luck, but I also understood the power of positive or negative thinking. If you think you’ll lose, you’ll lose. The next inning, when six batters in a row got base hits off Jason, the coach put in a relief pitcher. By that time, even people in the stands were looking at me like it was my fault. Someone suggested I sit behind the dugout of the visiting team.

All this emphasis on youth—I don’t buy it,” he said. “Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves… “And, in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don’t know what’s going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you’ll be sexy—and you believe them! It’s such nonsense.” Weren’t you ever afraid to grow old, I asked? “Mitch, I embrace aging.” Embrace it? “It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, “Oh, if I were young again.” You never hear people say, “I wish I were sixty-five.” He smiled. “You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five. "Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow. “And Mitch?” He lowered his voice. “The fact is, you are going to die eventually.

Romance novels, rom-coms, non-tragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to. This, right here—more than anything else—is why people love them. The banter, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice … that’s all just extra. It’s the structure—that “predictable” structure—that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you relax and look forward to better things ahead. And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that. Hope. Sometimes I see people grasping for a better word than predictable to describe a romance. They’ll say, ‘It was predictable—but in a good way.’ I see what they’re going for. But I’m not sure it needs pointing out that over the course of a love story … people fell in love. I mean: Of course they did! I don’t think it’s possible to write a love story where the leads getting together at the end is a surprise. And even if it were, why would you want to? The anticipation—the blissful, delicious, oxytocin-laden, yearning-infused, building sense of anticipation—is the point. It’s the cocktail of emotions we all came there to feel. I propose we stop using the hopelessly negative word predictable to talk about love stories and start using anticipation. As in: 'This love story really created a fantastic feeling of anticipation.' Structurally, thematically, psychologically—love stories create hope and then use it as fuel. Two people meet—and then, over the course of three hundred pages, they move from alone to together. From closed to open. From judgy to understanding. From cruel to compassionate. From needy to fulfilled. From ignored to seen. From misunderstood to appreciated. From lost to found. Predictably. That’s not a mistake. That’s a guarantee of the genre: Things will get better. And you, the reader, get to be there for it. It’s a gift the love story gives you.

The culture generated by peer-orientation is sterile in the strict sense of that word: it is unable to reproduce itself or to transmit values that can serve future generations. There are very few third generation hippies. Whatever its nostalgic appeal, that culture did not have much staying power. Peer culture is momentary, transient, and created daily, a “culture du jour,” as it were. The content of peer culture resonates with the psychology of our peer-oriented children and adults who are arrested in their own development. In one sense it is fortunate that peer culture cannot be passed on to future generations, since its only redeeming aspect is that it is fresh every decade. It does not edify or nurture or even remotely evoke the best in us or in our children. The peer culture, concerned only with what is fashionable at the moment, lacks any sense of tradition or history. As peer orientation rises, young people's appreciation of history wanes, even of recent history. For them, present and future exist in a vacuum with no connection to the past. The implications are alarming for the prospects of any informed political and social decision-making flowing from such ignorance. A current example is South Africa today, where the end of apartheid has brought not only political freedom but, on the negative side, rapid and rampant Westernization and the advent of globalized peer culture. The tension between the generations is already intensifying. “Our parents are trying to educate us about the past,” one South African teenager told a Canadian newspaper reporter. “We're forced to hear about racists and politics…” For his part, Steve Mokwena, a thirty-six year-old historian and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, is described by the journalist as being “from a different world than the young people he now works with.” “They're being force-fed on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch.on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch. You might argue that peer orientation, perhaps, can bring us to the genuine globalization of culture, of a universal civilization that no longer divides the world into “us and them.” Didn't the MTV broadcaster brag that children all over television's world resembled one another more than their parents and grandparents? Could this not be the way to the future, a way to transcend the cultures that divide us and to establish a worldwide culture of connection and peace? We think not.

Until knowledge becomes part of you, it is not possible to talk about awareness, or true understanding. Everything must come from and into an organism. Theories are only valid when made organic — ”organic” as in "part of the body". The knowledge that has to be learned and followed like a discipline is useless. It doesn't matter which amount of knowledge you absorb or in which variety. Knowledge can’t be remembered all the time in the same proportion that is kept, not all of it, and not all of it at the same time. As a matter of fact, when knowledge is not assimilated above personal interests, that same knowledge is already corrupted. When knowledge is seen as a means to a goal, either it is in obtaining something from the outside world, or passing some test, this knowledge has not become organic but merely used as a tool. That's why so many people avoid being confronted with their ignorance and react angrily when faced with their contradictions, which is quite obvious when we compare what they learn and what they say. You see this everywhere, in teachers, politicians, religious groups, and so on. And then you wonder why are people not honest. But they can’t understand honesty as much as they can’t understand their own ignorance. The stupid are not aware they are stupid, and that’s what really makes them stupid. When someone is too stupid, ignorance is replaced by arrogance. And then this person feels like the world is a bit threat to survival at an individual level. We call this attitude being egotistic. But you can’t stop being an egotistic when suppressing your emotions, or imagining that everyone is a source of negative energy but you. As a matter of fact, you commonly see the egotistic drop into apathy precisely because they confuse the work they must do on themselves with the anger they feel for the world as a whole. Have you ever noticed how easily people turn to anger when you ask them a question? That’s a reaction of someone moving from apathy to fear. On the surface this person is acting like a rude individual, but the emotions behind this behavior are those one feels when watching a horror movie. They are afraid of their own feelings, and project this fear as an aggression. Now comes the interesting part: Who are they attacking? They are attacking precisely the one that can help them, because only such individual will ask the right questions. An individual on apathy and lack of interest, can’t ask anything that is interesting or motivating. So we come to an interesting paradox in society, that those who can uplift others, end up being perceived as a threat to them. And that’s the simplest way to explain insanity.

Mr. Sales: These days, the days are passing very quickly. Mr. Conscience: But you have no work? How do you spend your day? Mr. Sales: Yes, but we have so much to worry about, believe me every hour is passed in worrying about having no work. Mr. Conscience: But what keeps you busy? Mr. Sales: Well,Team-work keeps us busy, we keep ourselves busy by calling other colleagues whose worry level is still not as high as ours, and we try to bring their worry level to our level. Mr. Conscience: But don’t you think we should try harder? Mr. Sales: Yes, I believe we should call them more often and increase the fear factor. Mr. Conscience: No, I am talking about the clients? Mr. Sales: Clients are also doing the same thing within their teams, so they don’t want to listen to our share of worries. Mr. Conscience: No, I am talking about sales? Mr. Sales: Oh sales, yes we do try to extend our service to people who demands our service. Mr. Conscience: But don't you think that you should be calling the clients to show them a picture of better future? Mr. Sales: But the clients ignore our calls, they like politicians never give us a proper reply, they make us call them again & again. Mr. Conscience: So shouldn’t you call them again and again, since you have no better work to do? Mr. Sales: You mean to say apart from petrifying other people about their future, but what about my ego? My ego can’t take a Negative response every time. Mr. Conscience: But they are not saying no to you, they are saying no to your product, which suggests your inability to convince them. Mr. Sales: No, I can convince them about bad market conditions, only thing they don’t get convinced is about buying my product. Mr. Conscience: Don’t you think a positive approach to life can save you from many setbacks? If you start your day positively, encouraging people around you, telling them that things are bad but together we can get-over this phase. You can also spend some time in knowing your clients, reaching out to many, looking for new sources. Remember a body tired of hard work sleeps better than a mind tired of worrying. Try new things, learn new tricks, enlighten your mind with knowledge and you will do good. Mr. Sales: But what about worrying, I must worry also about my future? Mr. Conscience: Yes, worry is good if it involves efforts, only worry is like an opponent provided with every opportunity to win. Win and loss are part of life, but losing without a fight is a sin. Mr. Sales: Calling his colleague, hey listen today my conscience was trying to lecture me about useless worrying, I think we should be more positive. What, you don't have any sales yet, see I told you earlier, the market is very low, everyone is struggling, sales has no future..

core beliefs are foundational beliefs about the world that we usually form in childhood. These are reinforced throughout life by our perceptions. They are generalized and absolute, though they can be completely false. People tend to focus on new information that confirms existing beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them, making core beliefs hard to change. Negative and dysfunctional core beliefs can act as drivers for dysfunctional assumptions and negative thoughts. For example, a core belief that “I’m unlovable” may lead to assumptions about the success or appearance needed to ensure love from others. Core beliefs often relate to achievement and relationships with others. Assumptions and core beliefs can be challenged and altered with a similar approach to automatic thoughts.

Freud appears to realize that logically one cannot prove a negative—one cannot prove that God does not exist. The only real defense of his worldview is to discredit its alternative. Thus, Freud undertook a systematic and sustained attack on the spiritual worldview. He attacked it with sledgehammer blows. He wrote that the “tales of miracles . . . contradicted everything that had been taught by sober observation and betrayed too clearly the influence of the activity of the human imagination.” He asserted that the Scriptures “are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications”; he said no intelligent person can accept the “absurdities” or “fairy tales” of believers. Freud wrote that the doctrines of religion “bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity,” that the specific doctrine that “the universe was created by a being resembling a man, but magnified in every respect . . . an idealized superman . . . reflects the gross ignorance of primitive peoples.

Diversity is a very popular business topic today while the negative side of diversity, discrimination, remains a touchy and sensitive topic. Even in organisations which follow the letter of the law in terms of not discriminating against any individuals, it is common for people to show prejudice and bias...Have the courage to stand out from your colleagues by being very open to and comfortable with all kinds of diversity amongst your colleagues and stakeholders. When you sense someone is being ignored or marginalized spend time with them and bring them into discussions encouraging them to speak up as needed.

Personal ignorance leads to a negative impact on the society.

Never ignore the negative people; they are the mirror to show you, your positiveness.

Guy Kawasaki, the well-known marketing specialist and venture capitalist, also thinks that we shouldn’t be afraid of polarization. Large companies search for the “Holy Grail” of products that appeal to every demographic, socioeconomic background, and geographical location, but this “one size fits all” approach rarely works and often leads to mediocrity (and vanilla ice cream). Instead, Kawasaki believes, we should create products that make specifically identified groups of people very happy and ignore everyone else. The worst-case scenario is inciting no passionate reactions from anyone — no one caring enough about a product to talk about it at all, either positively or negatively.

For the sake of clarity, I would like to reduce the discussion in these first five chapters to its simplest form. First of all, we choose our partners for two basic reasons: 1. They have both the positive and the negative qualities of the people who raised us. 2. They compensate for positive parts of our being that were cut off in childhood. We enter the relationship with the unconscious assumption that our partner will become a surrogate parent and make up for all the deprivation of our childhood. All we have to do to be healed is to form a close, lasting relationship. After a time we realize that our strategy is not working. We are “in love,” but not whole. We decide that the reason our plan is not working is that our partners are deliberately ignoring our needs. They know exactly what we want, and when and how we want it, but for some reason they are deliberately withholding it from us. This makes us angry, and for the first time we begin to see our partners’ negative traits. We then compound the problem by projecting our own denied negative traits onto them. As conditions deteriorate, we decide that the best way to force our partners to satisfy our needs is to be unpleasant and irritable, just as we were in the cradle. If we yell loud enough and long enough, we believe, our partners will come to our rescue. And, finally, what gives the power struggle its toxicity is the underling unconscious belief that, if we cannot entice, coerce, or seduce our partners into taking care of us, we will face the fear greater than all other fears – the fear of the death.

Seeing the Worm Instead of the Apple Another thought pattern that makes you keep your partner at a distance is “seeing the worm instead of the apple.” Carole had been with Bob for nine months and had been feeling increasingly unhappy. She felt Bob was the wrong guy for her, and gave a multitude of reasons: He wasn’t her intellectual equal, he lacked sophistication, he was too needy, and she didn’t like the way he dressed or interacted with people. Yet, at the same time, there was a tenderness about him that she’d never experienced with another man. He made her feel safe and accepted, he lavished gifts on her, and he had endless patience to deal with her silences, moods, and scorn. Still, Carole was adamant about her need to leave Bob. “It will never work,” she said time and again. Finally, she broke up with him. Months later she was surprised by just how difficult she was finding things without him. Lonely, depressed, and heartbroken, she mourned their lost relationship as the best she’d ever had. Carole’s experience is typical of people with an avoidant attachment style. They tend to see the glass half-empty instead of half-full when it comes to their partner. In fact, in one study, Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel and one of the leading researchers in the field of adult attachment, together with colleagues Victor Florian and Gilad Hirschberger, from the department of psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, asked couples to recount their daily experiences in a diary. They found that people with an avoidant attachment style rated their partner less positively than did non-avoidants. What’s more, they found they did so even on days in which their accounts of their partners’ behavior indicated supportiveness, warmth, and caring. Dr. Mikulincer explains that this pattern of behavior is driven by avoidants’ generally dismissive attitude toward connectedness. When something occurs that contradicts this perspective—such as their spouse behaving in a genuinely caring and loving manner—they are prone to ignoring the behavior, or at least diminishing its value. When they were together, Carole used many deactivating strategies, tending to focus on Bob’s negative attributes. Although she was aware of her boyfriend’s strengths, she couldn’t keep her mind off what she perceived to be his countless flaws. Only after they broke up, and she no longer felt threatened by the high level of intimacy, did her defense strategies lift. She was then able to get in touch with the underlying feelings of attachment that were there all along and to accurately assess Bob’s pluses.

Carefully avoided in many scientific discussions, conferences, government reports, and papers is the issue of human population. Indeed, in many conferences it is deemed to be a subject that is out of bounds. Rising numbers of people, and their desire for higher standards of living, put increasing demands on natural resources. More people are chasing a fixed or declining stock of reef resources: the area of the planet on which coral reefs can grow is limited, after all. In one sense it is really that simple. Some places have a human population doubling time of only 15 years, which reflects medical advances and its highly desirable accompaniments such as increased survival of people, especially infants. However, this means that current scientifically calculated solutions for a particular section of reef shoreline, for example, are negated when the population doubles. Thus the solution is no longer a scientific one, but has become largely a social and political one, and one of planning or zoning reefs and other resources as noted above. Human numbers are a part of the equation, and if we ignore any part of an equation then we cannot solve it.

Human rationality drives our powerful desire to come to a clear and accurate understanding of reality and to behave in accordance with what we discover. Grasping reality matters deeply to human functioning, even to human sanity. When what we are offered in the Bible or what is reinforced by Tradition seems to contradict what we observe to be real, evangelicals have often been taught to submit to Scripture and Tradition and ignore the facts in front of us. But this kind of religiosity not only takes us into intellectual dead ends, it can also hurt people—as when our texts seem to require us to put a grossly negative moral construction on the fact of nonheterosexual sexuality.

From the standpoint of Tao” all things are one. People “guided by the criteria of their own mind,” see only the contradiction, the manifoldness, the difference; the sage sees the many disappearing in the One, in which subjective and objective, positive and negative, here and there, somewhere and nowhere, meet and blend. For him, “a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction” (pp. 33-33). The sage “blends everything into one harmonious whole, rejecting the comparison of this and that. Rank and precedence, which the vulgar prize, the sage stolidly ignores. The universe itself may pass away, but he will flourish still” (p. 39). “Were the ocean itself scorched up, he would not feel hot. Were the milky way frozen hard he would not feel cold. Were the mountains to be riven with thunder, and the great deep to be thrown up by storm, he would not tremble” (pp. 38-38).

Neurodivergent Checklist Time Blindness: Many neurodivergent people have trouble properly perceiving time as it passes. It either goes by too quickly or slowly. The perception of time depends on the level of stimulation the neurodivergent person is dealing with. It also can vary depending on what you’re focused on. If you’ve ever found yourself unable to account for time, you may be neurodivergent. Executive Dysfunction: This is what you experience when you want to accomplish a task, but despite how hard you try, you cannot see it through. Executive dysfunction happens for various reasons, depending on the type of neurodivergence in question. Still, the point is that this is a common occurrence in neurodivergent people. Task Multiplication: What is task multiplication? It happens when you set off to accomplish one thing but have to do a million other things, even though that wasn’t your original plan. For instance, you may want to sit down to finish some writing, only to notice water on the floor. You get up to grab a mop, and on the way, you notice the laundry you were supposed to drop off at the dry cleaners. Stooping to pick up the bag, you find yourself at eye level with your journal and remember you were supposed to make an entry the previous day, so you’re going to do that now. On and on it goes. Inconsistent Sleep Habits: This depends on what sort of neurodivergence you’re dealing with and if you’ve got comorbid disorders. Most importantly, neurodivergent people sleep more or less than “regular” people. You may also notice that your sleep habits fluctuate a lot. Sometimes you may sleep for eight hours at a stretch for a week, only to suddenly start running on just three hours of sleep. Emotional Dysregulation: With many neurodivergent people, it’s hard to keep emotions in check. Emotional dysregulation occurs in extreme emotions, sudden mood swings, or inappropriate emotional reactions (either not responding to the degree they should or overreacting). Hyperfixation: This also plays out differently depending on the brand of neurodivergence in question. Often, neurodivergent people get very involved in topics or hobbies to the point of what others may think of as obsession. Picking Up on Subtleties but Missing the Obvious: Neurodivergent people may struggle with picking up on things neurotypical people can see easily. At the same time, they are incredibly adept at noticing the subtle things everyone else misses. Sensory Sensitivities: If you’re neurodivergent, you may be unable to ignore your clothes tag scratching your back, have trouble hearing certain sounds, and can’t quite deal with certain textures of clothing, food, and so on. Rejection Sensitivity: Neurodivergent people are often more sensitive to rejection than others due to neurological differences and life experiences. For instance, children with ADHD get much more negative feedback than their peers without ADHD. Neurodivergent people are often rejected to the point where they notice rejection even when it’s not there.

Reframing is a powerful way to change our children’s perceptions about life—and our own. How we choose to see things affects the way we feel things. Realistic optimists don’t ignore negative information; rather, they simply focus on the other information at hand to write a richer, more loving story about themselves, their children, and life in general. Reframing can change our experience of the world, and it makes our own and our children’s lives happier in the process. Passing on the skill of reframing to our children may be one of the greatest gifts we can give, fostering future happiness for them and for following generations. Empathy is an essential, and essentially human, tendency. While the level of empathy in our society has dropped and the level of narcissism has increased, research shows that we are wired more for empathy than for selfishness. By being less judgmental and shaming, we can better understand the vulnerability in ourselves and in others, which brings us closer together, forging deeper,

The Old Testament is characterized by the affirmation of God’s sovereign kingship. God is sovereign as Creator and Sustainer of the earth and all that dwell therein; as Judge; as Redeemer of Israel; and in relation to all nations and peoples. Yet the created turned against their Creator. The earth reels under the consequences of human rebellion. Human life is characterized by violence, injustice, unrighteousness and misery. Israel itself was shattered by cataclysmic wars, most notably the war with Babylon that destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, displaced the royal family and ended in the exile of her leading citizens, forcing Israel into a seemingly endless period of occupation at the hands of pagan armies—in Jesus’ time, the Roman legions. Thus the later Prophets are redolent with a deep yearning for salvation, in the deepest and most holistic sense of that word. In Isaiah, it is based on God’s forgiveness, and it is eternal. It includes deliverance from oppression and injustice, from guilt and death, from war and slavery and imprisonment and exile. It includes peace and justice and forgiveness. The promise is that salvation is coming—for Israel and ultimately for the world, for societies, for families and for individuals. This is where the hope of a Messiah is located in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Old Testament hope of salvation is not merely for an eternal salvation in which our disembodied souls are snatched from this vale of tears. Nor is it merely for physical justice while fellowship with the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is ignored. To the extent that Christians adopt any kind of body/soul, earth/heaven dualism we simply do not understand the message of Scripture—or of Jesus. God’s salvation is the kingdom of God, and it means that—at last—God has acted to deliver humanity and now reigns over all of life, and is present to and with us, and will be in the future. The New Testament will bring a greater emphasis on eternal life, but it will not negate the holistic message of deliverance. The only possible response to this good news is great joy!

Do you have people in your life who are putting you down? Are there people who do not support you or ignore you? Are there people who are negative and tell you that you cannot do it? You need to minimize or remove those people from your life.

Dr. Kristin Neff said in her book, entitled Self-Compassion, that showing compassion to yourself is not different from showing compassion to other people. First, in order for you to show compassion for other people, you have to realize that they are suffering. You cannot feel compassion for them if you ignore them.

People must be right sometimes, must feel good sometimes, or we’d never have a herd. They would just give up. The occasional rightness fosters false confidence, reinforcing the crowd’s wisdom. It is plausible deniability for TGH. It is how TGH repeatedly sucks the crowd in, makes them ignore negatives, then doles out maximum pain and suffering.

For that matter, you might also try watching less TV in general; studies have shown that the less negative TV we watch, specifically violent media, the happier we are. This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from the real world or ignoring problems. Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news.32 That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly. Exercise

POSSIBILITY -“All things are possible to those who believe. -“The scripture declares that without hope people perish, but with hope they not only survive but also prosper.” -“People place limitations upon themselves, because they think they know who they are. Imagine, what greatness the world will discover if they knew what they can become.” -“If we understand the power we have to call things into being, then our minds will become our laboratory for creative possibilities and the universe will be the marketplace for our resources.” -“The only limitations we have are those we place upon ourselves due our lack of knowledge of our greatest gift… the power to use our mind, and the negative stories we tell ourselves.” -“As long as you keep dreaming ideas will continue to flow.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims POSITIVE THINKING -“Positive thinking can change body energy, suppress negative thoughts, and creates a positive outlook on life.” -“Studies have shown that positive thinking helps with stress management and can even improve physical health.” -“Positive thinking does not mean, you bury your head in the sand and ignore life's unpleasant situations. What it does means is, you approach unpleasantness with a more positive and productive attitude.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims -“The power of positive thinking can give life to your dreams and change your destiny. The first step to happiness and self-assuredness, is making the decision to be so. “People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be”. Abraham Lincoln -“One of the greatest barriers to positive thinking is a negative attitude which comprises of the following: anger, doubt, hate, fear, worry, resentment, selfishness, pessimism, distrust, feeling of needy, loneliness and frustration.” -“When it comes to Positive thinking, the mind can be compared to a garden… In a garden, weeds will grow continuously without effort.” They will never stop growing so, you have to work non-stop to control them. Good productive plants however, will require continuous focus, effort, time and energy in order to achieve a good harvest. Likewise, you will never be able to stop negative thoughts from entering your mind, but you will have to learn to control and replace them. Positive thoughts on the other hand, are like good productive plants. In order for them to enter, and take root in your mind, you have to make deliberate and not stop efforts.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims

Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent. I cannot force myself to love or honor my parents if my body rebels against such an endeavor for reasons that are well-known to it. But if I still attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, then the upshot will be the kind of stress that is invariably involved when I demand the impossible of myself. This kind of stress has accompanied me almost all my life. Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feelings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones. The realization that I cannot manipulate my feelings, that I can delude neither myself nor others, brought me immense relief and liberation. Only then was I fully struck by the large number of people who (like myself) literally almost kill themselves in the attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, without any consideration of the price this exacts both from their own bodies and from their children. As long as the children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s own personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception. A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception. When

Ingrid Seward Ingrid Seward is editor in chief of Majesty magazine and has been writing about the Royal Family for more than twenty years. She is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in the field and has written ten books on the subject. Her latest book, Diana: The Last Word, with Simone Simmons, will be published in paperback in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. Although Diana assured me that she was happy and finally felt she had found a real purpose in her life, I could still sense some of her inner turmoil. When we were gossiping, she was relaxed, but when we moved on to more serious matters, such as her treatment by the media, her body language betrayed her anxiety. She wrung her hands and looked at me out of the corner of her starling blue eyes. “No one understands what it is like to be me,” she said. “Not my friends, not anyone.” She admitted, however, that there was a positive side to her unique situation in that she could use her high profile to bring attention to the causes she cared about, and this, she assured me, was what she was doing now and wanted to do in the future. But it was the darker, negative side that she had to live with every day. After all this time, she explained, it still upset her to read untruths about herself, and it was simply not in her nature to ignore it. “It makes me feel insecure, and it is difficult going out and meeting people when I imagine what they might have read about me that morning.” Diana had no idea how much she was loved. To the poor, the sick, the weak, and the vulnerable, she was a touchstone of hope. But her appeal extended much further than that. She had the ability to engage the affections of the young and the old from all walks of life. That summer, she wrote a birthday letter to my daughter that read, “I hope for your birthday you managed to get those grown-ups to give you a doll’s house and the cardigan and the pony hair brush you wanted. Don’t believe their excuses.” She wrote similar letters to thousands of other people and always in her own hand. The effect was magical. “Please don’t say anything unkind about her. She’s my friend,” our daughter instructed her father. That, I think, explains the extraordinary outpouring of grief we witnessed when Diana died. Her appeal was as simple as it was unique. Diana touched the child in each and every one of us. She wasn’t the “people’s princess”--she was the people’s friend. The words of a London cabbie still ring in my ears when I think about the week after her death. “We’ll never see the like of her again,” he said as he dropped me off near the ocean of flowers outside Buckingham Palace. He was right.

When you attempt to change, if you’re part of the 92%, this happens: 1. You decide to change. 2. You are scared of the change, but determined to do it. 3. You start. 4. You hit a wall. 5. You stop your new action and fail to achieve change. This almost always happens at the beginning. You don’t really know what to do; you lack skills and/or knowledge. You are destined to struggle at first. After the first failure, your doubts awaken anxiousness. You try again, you fail again. Your doubts get stronger, your resolve weakens. You lose your enthusiasm for the change, and your efforts from this point are half-hearted. Half-hearted attempts have even less likelihood of succeeding, so you fail again and your negative attitude is reinforced. The problem is that you expected significant results too soon. That’s the curse of instant gratification at work. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a visible change in your body shape two weeks after starting a new diet. If it’s a balanced diet, not some Tic-Tac hardcore regime (only two calories), you can reasonably expect to lose maybe four pounds. Two is more realistic. Let’s say three on average. Even if you are a skinny fellow like me, three pounds is just 2% of your body weight. That loss will be almost invisible. That result may not seem enough for the effort you are making. Well, it is actually a great result. If you keep that pace, you would lose 78 pounds in a year. That’s visible even on obese people. However, you’ve set your internal evaluating mechanism to expect much more in a shorter time. You had the picture of your skinny bikini or 6-pack self in your mind, but all you see in the mirror is your same old flabby self. What is more, you’ll usually take intensive action when you begin something. You’re keen! You want results! You use this initial enthusiasm to apply massive effort. A very restrictive diet! A lot of exercises! It’s no wonder that after two weeks of such hard work you decide (at least subconsciously) that it’s not worth it. Do you see what’s happening?

escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. Over the past four decades, extensive research led by Staw shows that once people make an initial investment of time, energy, or resources, when it goes sour, they’re at risk for increasing their investment. Gamblers in the hole believe that if they just play one more hand of poker, they’ll be able to recover their losses or even win big. Struggling entrepreneurs think that if they just give their start-ups a little more sweat, they can turn it around. When an investment doesn’t pay off, even if the expected value is negative, we invest more. Economists explain this behavior using a concept known as the “sunk cost fallacy”: when estimating the value of a future investment, we have trouble ignoring what we’ve already invested in the past.

Inasmuch as God is the father, I am the child. I have not emerged fully from the autistic wish for omniscience and omnipotence. I have not yet acquired the objectivity to realize my limitations as a human being, my ignorance, my helplessness. I still claim, like a child, that there must be a father who rescues me, who watches me, who punishes me, a father who likes me when I am obedient, who is flattered by my praise and angry because of my disobedience. Quite obviously, the majority of people have, in their personal development, not overcome this infantile stage, and hence the belief in God to most people is the belief in a helping father -a childish illusion. In spite of the fact that this concept of religion has been overcome by some of the great teachers of the human race, and by a minority of men, it is still the dominant form of religion. Inasmuch as this is so, the criticism of the idea of God, as it was expressed by Freud, is quite correct. The error, however, was in the fact that he ignored the other aspect of monotheistic religion, and its true kernel, the logic of which leads exactly to the negation of this concept of God. The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or his mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations, to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God. God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world, of love, truth and justice. He has faith in the principles which 'God' represents; he thinks truth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of his human powers -as the only reality that matters, as the only object of 'ultimate concern'; and, eventually, he does not speak about God -nor even mention his name, To love God, if he were going to use this word, would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which 'God' stands for in oneself. From this point of view, the logical consequence of monotheistic thought is the negation of all 'theo-logy', of all 'knowledge about God'.

Most people experience some amount of anger. You might feel like an angry child losing Santa Claus. In thinking over the time spent being faithful, there can be rage over the damage done — life lost, negative self-image, ignorance about the world and real life, guilt and suffering, denial of pleasures, missing skills, hurt relationships, spoiled careers. If you have parents who used religion to justify severe discipline, or if you suffered actual abuse at the hands of church leaders, you could be very angry.

Almost any positive good [positive liberty] can be described in terms of freedom from something [negative liberty]. Health is freedom from disease; happiness is a life free from flaws and miseries; equality is freedom from advantage and disadvantage.. Faced with this flexibility, the theorist will need to prioritize some freedoms and discount others. At its extreme we may get the view that only some particular kind of life makes for ‘real freedom’. Real freedom might, for instance, be freedom the bondage of desire, as in Buddhism and Stoicism. Or it might be a kind of self-realization or self-perfection only possible in a community of similarly self-realized individuals, pointing us towards a communitarian, socialist, or even communist ideal. To a laissez-faire capitalist, it is freedom from more than minimal necessary political and legal interference in the pursuit of profit. But the rhetoric of freedom will typically just disguise the merits or demerits of the political order being promoted. The flexibility of the term ‘freedom’ undoubtedly plays a huge role in the rhetoric of political demands, particularly when the language of rights mingles with the language of freedom. ‘We have a right to freedom from…’ is not only a good way, but the best way to start a moral or political demand. Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one. The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the 'autonomous' or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect. For this individual, the ultimate irrationality would be to alienate his freedom, for instance by joining a monastery that requires unquestioning obedience to a superior, or selling himself into slavery to another. The self-image may be sustained by the thought that each individual has the same share of human reason, and an equal right to deploy this reason in the conduct of his or her own life. Yet the 'autonomous' individual, gloriously independent in his decision-making, can easily seem to be a fantasy. Not only the Grand Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. A little awareness of ethics will make us mistrustful of sound-bite-sized absolutes. Even sacred freedoms meet compromises, and take us into a world of balances. Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds. For sure, there will always be difficult cases. There are websites giving people simple recipes on how to make bombs in their kitchens. Do we want a conception of free speech that protects those? What about the freedom of the rest of us to live our lives without a significant risk of being blown up by a crank? It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.

Today a main trouble of my society is that, some of people have internalized their demons which are basically weakness of their character or soul or identity etc, whatever you name it, doesn't matter, and presenting themselves to outside world as if they are free of all negativity in themselves and an ideal personality which should be incisively repleced by reception of either releasing or taking under control of their demons, for example by ignoring and degrading them..

I'm not making any claims here about whether secularization was good or bad-I'm simply saying that in my experience studying cultural history, people never simply let go of religion, they rather find new things to guide their behaviors and actions: essentially, they create new religions our of secular things. In the late 1800's, this new guiding force was science, and faith in science as a means of solving all the world's most complex problems (even today we call the study of government political science, so you can see that this mindset still pervades our society) allowed people to indulge in the fantasy of germ whack-a-mole. And, of course, handwashing and antiseptic techniques do reduce contagious disease transmission, so fortunately and unfortunately (yes, I mean both at once), the fallacy of playing whack-a-mole with germs reaped positive rewards to some extent, but also allowed society to take the delusion of a germ-free life too far. This sort of thinking is a logical fallacy called an 'appeal to ignorance.' An appeal to ignorance occurs when we have been doing something to ward off a negative effect, and when said negative events never happens, we are all too easily able to assume (possibly incorrectly) that our actions prevented the negative event from occurring.

If you’ve ever suffered the accusations of people who objectified you as an emblem of darkness, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been haunted by the opinions of your friends, it wasn’t your fault. If they’ve ever assumed the worst of you, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been judged by your own parents, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been treated as an outcast, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever made a decision based on an opinion, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been labeled, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a love triangle, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been heartbroken, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep, it wasn’t your fault. As you suffered and grew up, your soul got stained, your heart got shattered and your body paralyzed, which drove you into a deep state of slow sleep. As you opened your eyes, the atrocities of your past were glistening over your eyes and you knew, you had lost yourself in a place of utter darkness, but there was learning to be done in the cold dark. Like seeds of plants shaded by dirt, you twitched with the want to rise. As you grew tired of the shadows, you climbed into a world that was finally making room for light. Room for you and for all your truth. You ignited not in the light but in the distant shadows of the dark. In your chaos, you found clarity. In your suffering, you found purpose. You didn’t ignore the pain. You gave it reason. You used it. You reveled in it. As you began your journey to redefine yourself in misery and pain, your heart grew fonder but you didn’t give up. As stones of suffering came to dance, your feet took flight, the sun tried to burn you down, but God threw a shadow over the horizon and you saw a ray of hope and chased your way over the mightiest slopes. For a long time, you thought being different was a negative thing; but as you grew older, you started to realize that you were born to stand out, not blend in. Now, when people put a label on you, you find comfort in your true self because, in the end, you are proud to be who you’re. You’re a survivor. You and I come from completely different places, our world is a parallel space and we speak different languages, but one thing I’m sure of is that my heart beats the same as yours. At end of the day, we’re all meant to be who we are; Our True Selves.

Freud can help here. He reminds us that what the psyche cannot handle, the mind represses. In a world where one does not exist, being ignored and, at the same time, being the subject of daily acts of violence, is difficult if not impossible. The mind, or rather the psyche, represses the reality of what is happening in order to survive. Furthermore, one’s psyche may also repress the truth that one is working-class in order to survive. The working-class artist who trades in her past, her history, family, community, and self for a sleeker, more palatable version of herself, who tries to pass as middle-class (or upper-middle class in Anthony’s case), is only doing what culture and society tells her to do. Neoliberalism assures us that we are all born equal, each of us with the same access to material, cultural, and social capital — and that there are no social classes. To insist otherwise is to appear ungrateful, negative, depressing, and often mentally ill. Indeed, to blame one’s inability to “succeed” in neoliberal society (to blame systemic forces rather than one’s own personal failure) is to set one’s self outside the all-pervasive neoliberal system. Pointing out the unfairness of the system, is, in a sense, a form of giving up and dropping out of the game. The “boot-straps” trope is just that — a trope, a lie. And yet it’s what most people still believe. This splitting of the self speaks to the contradictory nature of this book and its subject.

On a related issue, my father used to say, “Let negative energy fly out open windows. Don’t take it on.” Sometimes your kids, spouse, or coworkers will make negative or irresponsible comments, and instead of taking it on and trying to resolve it, ignore that it was even uttered. It’s like giving people a free pass for something they said in the heat of the moment. Let it fly out an open window instead of closing the window and letting it bounce around the room. You’ll both get hurt.

ignoring our emotions is not healthy, either. Doing so can cause people to engage in negative behaviors that are detrimental to themselves or loved ones, behaviors such as drinking, eating, working too much, gambling, or other such bad habits.