Life Blueprint Quotes

It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.

You're going to meet many people with domineering personalities: the loud, the obnoxious, those that noisily stake their claims in your territory and everywhere else they set foot on. This is the blueprint of a predator. Predators prey on gentleness, peace, calmness, sweetness and any positivity that they sniff out as weakness. Anything that is happy and at peace they mistake for weakness. It's not your job to change these people, but it's your job to show them that your peace and gentleness do not equate to weakness. I have always appeared to be fragile and delicate but the thing is, I am not fragile and I am not delicate. I am very gentle but I can show you that the gentle also possess a poison. I compare myself to silk. People mistake silk to be weak but a silk handkerchief can protect the wearer from a gunshot. There are many people who will want to befriend you if you fit the description of what they think is weak; predators want to have friends that they can dominate over because that makes them feel strong and important. The truth is that predators have no strength and no courage. It is you who are strong, and it is you who has courage. I have lost many a friend over the fact that when they attempt to rip me, they can't. They accuse me of being deceiving; I am not deceiving, I am just made of silk. It is they who are stupid and wrongly take gentleness and fairness for weakness. There are many more predators in this world, so I want you to be made of silk. You are silk.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.

If we misread the blueprint of our life, we need not be ashamed of backtracking on our chosen options. Admitting to mistakes may make us human and maybe great again. ("Sisyphus' hardship on the hill")

During the play-act of life, errors can clash with our conventional truth and compel us to prepare new ground for another truth concept that will replace the old truth model. Be that as it may, let us fly on the wings of our inspiration, value the day, enjoy the now, and be ready because the new blueprint may only remain valid until it dies by natural death on its turn. (“Measuring space”)

Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose." "You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that much more in common. Diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It's like they're part of your blueprint. If something's wrong with you, you can usually trace it back to them." I nodded and kept writing. "But," she said, "even though you're stuck with them, at the same time, they're also stuck with you. So that's why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they're the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not.

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.

One of the enemy’s blueprints for our lives has to do with timing; he finds you at the most vulnerable moment in your walk with the Lord. That is part of the blueprint he uses upon believers today.

When what you value and dream about doesn’t match the life you are living, you have pain.

How can you follow your heart, unless you know why you have allowed it to be empty for so long and didn't have the courage to fix it?

The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.

There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.

You are the architect and building contractor of your future. Use your thoughts as an architect uses a blueprint. Think about every detail. An architect not only thinks about the rooms in a house but also the types of windows, the size of closets, the location of outlets, and so on. Nothing is too insignificant. Think big and think detailed!

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day the blueprint of your life would begin to glow on earth, illuminating all the faces and voices that would arrive to invite your soul to growth. Praised be your father and mother, who loved you before you were, and trusted to call you here with no idea who you would be. Blessed be those who have loved you into becoming who you were meant to be, blessed be those who have crossed your life with dark gifts of hurt and loss that have helped to school your mind in the art of disappointment. When desolation surrounded you, blessed be those who looked for you and found you, their kind hands urgent to open a blue window in the gray wall formed around you. Blessed be the gifts you never notice, your health, eyes to behold the world, thoughts to countenance the unknown, memory to harvest vanished days, your heart to feel the world’s waves, your breath to breathe the nourishment of distance made intimate by earth. On this echoing-day of your birth, may you open the gift of solitude in order to receive your soul; enter the generosity of silence to hear your hidden heart; know the serenity of stillness to be enfolded anew by the miracle of your being.

Becoming a leader is the same as becoming a fully integrated human being,

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

You’ve got one life, one shot, and all the power to make it happen. Get ready to dream big and live big. It’s all up to you. And it starts now.

Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity - and nothing more? Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an exorbitant price? Is it not mockery?

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations.

What separates people who made their dreams come true is not setting goals to achieve a life the way they expect it to be, but how they expect to be, in order to achieve it.

Great leaders get people to admit the truth because they know that dreams are buried under the lies they tell themselves, in order to feel okay with giving up.

You don't have to apologize for loving someone or wanting a life that no longer fits your blueprint. The beginning phase of reclaiming your life always starts with apologizing to yourself, then apologizing to others for wasting their time because of your fear based decisions. The truth is when we eliminate fear we often find the real path we were meant to be on.

Karma simply means we have created the blueprint for our lives. It means we are the makers of our own fate. When we say “This is my karma,” we are actually saying “I am responsible for my life.

Between life’s stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.

We build model ships in bottles, whispering life into the toothpicks and wire; we make plans and blueprints for the one we hope is coming. And come they do. Fleets of vessels. Battleships and barges. They arrive on the horizon, flags to the sky.

People who made their dreams come true didn’t simply go after it. They changed the person they were, in order to fit the type of person that would live that type of dream.

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben’s Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What? A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.

Life happens when you least expect it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a blueprint in your back pocket.

At a basic level, your personal mission has to be rooted in the story of you, the sum of your life experiences, and what you want to achieve in the future. It is like a blueprint for your life that is filled with action verbs and themes that you associate with achieving a sense of abundance, and which extends beyond material resources.

And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father--the man holding the brush--and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't.

A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might put the aims and the solution unrealistically high – in the same way that folktales tend to be about kings and queens – but this is because it is better to aim for the moon and get halfway there than just to aim for the roof and get halfway upstairs.

The beauty of practice is that it transforms us so that we outgrow our original intentions—and keep going! Our motivations for practicing evolve as we mature.

The destination is not the journey. The destination is the person you choose to enjoy the journey with.

Trust your inner guidance and follow your heart, for your soul has your blueprint and the universe has your back.

Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity-and nothing more? 'Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an exorbitant price? Is it not a mockery? Should one pay? Seven years in the army and seven years in the camp,twice seven years twice that mythical or biblical term,then to be deprived of the ability to tell what is a man and what is a woman--is not a price extortionate?

But her features were arranged exactly how some primal aesthetic blueprint in his head envisioned beauty. It made her look oddly familiar, as if he had long known her and now she had walked back into his life. Impossible, that.

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Soul ties. The thing that can make you hear an old-school slow jam and think of somebody you haven’t seen in years. Soul ties. The thing that makes old people who’ve been together for years finish each other’s sentences. Don’t you wish mama had told you when you were young that, when you lie with someone, you lie not just with her body but also with her soul? And whatever condition the other person’s soul is in, you are guaranteed to take a piece with you—whether you want to or not. Instead of being amazed at her booty, you should have focused on her mind.

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

Uncomplicated birth seems to be the blueprint for coping with all later difficult situations in life. Various complications, such as prolonged and debilitating delivery, the use of forceps, or heavy anesthesia appear to be correlated to specific problems in dealing with future projects of all kinds. The same is true for induced birth, premature delivery, and Caesarean section.

but memories aren't always honest, our clearly weren't. They are filtered and viewed through whatever lens we need them to be. And you don't make decisions on that. You can't build a life on blueprints of memories alone.

Within our core self is an indelible blueprint of unrivaled individuality—the singular being that each of us exists to express. In this three-dimensional movie called “Life” there are no stand-ins, body doubles, or understudies—no one can fill in for us by proxy! Realization of this truth alone eliminates the need to imitate, conform, limit, or betray our loyalty to the originality of Self. Imagine the relief of removing your carefully crafted masks fashioned by societal forms of conditioning and instead responding to what comes into your experience directly from your Authentic Self. One of the first principles to honor in your relationship with yourself is to respect and trust your own inner voice. This form of trust is the way of the heart, the epitome of well-being.

When God created you, He already had a plan for your life. Before he brought you into this world, He had already put together a blue print for your life. Your responsibility is to figure out what that blue-print is and run with it.

Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.

In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

If you decide that what God is asking you to do with your life is just too much on you and is just a little too inconvenient, then you will never see the miracles he has for you.

We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life.

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

My mother had failed to give me a better life than hers because she didn't have the blueprint to show me what my best could look like.

In the library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life.

Dr. Kunkel’s teacher, Dr. Jung, believed that archetypes are blueprints of the basic human qualities we all share. The archetypes themselves are undefinable natural patterns or forces that shape life in all ages and places. They cannot be known directly, but archetypal themes and images appear in myth, fairy tales, dreams, and fantasies. We tend to think of ourselves as unique individuals, and to a great extent we are. But just as there are shared patterns that shape our physical existence, such as having two arms and legs, two eyes, ten fingers and toes, so there are underlying patterns that shape our psychic existence.

Earth society has programmed us to keep our heads down and remain as these mindless drones. Everyone tells us we all have to follow the same blueprint: You gotta go to school. Graduate. Go to college, if you want the best job. Get married. Make babies. Work some more, get promoted. Then you retire. We want, and want, and want, and then we die. Then people say, Oh, what a great life that person led. But that's not living. It's just a way to exist.

At the Integral stages of development, the entire universe starts to make sense, to hang together, to actually appear as a uni-verse—a “one world”—a single, unified, integrated world that unites not only different philosophies and ideas about the world, but different practices for growth and development as well.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

But the way she pressed her forehead against his, and opened her golden-brown eyes, and looked into his as though he was the sun her life orbited around, stopped him from ever saying as much. So he simply stood, his forehead pressed against hers, looking into the face he knew better than his own circuitry--and THAT he had blueprints for.

Dreams are the blueprints to the things we want. They never come to life if we don’t put in the work to make them happen. Nothing you really want just falls into your lap. The obstacles in the way to realizing your dream tend to fall out of nowhere. Nobody wants those.

When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.

The life you make is the life you will have. Your decisions are your blueprint.

You’ve got one life, one world, and one person to get a hold of.

God’s Word is the divine blueprint that shows you how to build every part of your life.

Especially at a time when one's life was new, roots helped.

Sometimes the things that destroy you, become the architectural blueprints which make your mind royal.

An effective correspondence leaves no room for confusion between you and your clients.

But the American people did not deserve to be used as guinea pigs in some real-life experiment.

In this sinful world, there is no such thing as enjoying life; not in a world where everybody is happily having a bubble bath of sin. John 14

Okay, so there’s just you. Your goals, your career, your crew, your prospects, and your God. All together, chillin’. Before the house, the apartment, the kids, the boyfriend, the wedding, the night you crossed over with your frat brothers, there’s that pivotal point of asking your heart, “Who am I, really? What do I really like? Do I want to change for someone else? Is my soul mate right now, somewhere, finishing this sentence and completing my thoughts?

If supernatural life in God's paradise is more important than natural life on earth, then the day you received Jesus Christ is more important than the day you were naturally born. Jon 3:6

Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution...the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.

Part of our skittishness about Christian perfection is linguistic confusion. The English word "perfect" has absorbed the Greek notion of "teleos". When the Greeks looked at a building's blueprint, they pictured the building whole and complete. They envisioned the blueprint finished down to the bathroom tile and announced, "Ah, this is perfect." The problem is that "teleos" suggests that perfection is something we can build or achieve. The Hebrews looked at the same blueprint more practically. They envisioned the process of building from hard hats to hammers, from scaffolding to skylights. "Ah," the Hebrews said. "This is perfect." The Hebrews and the early Christians understood perfection as a process, not a product. Our identity as Christians depends upon life lived in relationship with God, not upon the quality of our achievements.

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

We like to keep separate the evils of our national past from the sacredness of our ideals. That separation allows us to maintain a pristine idea of America despite all of the ugly things we have done. Americans can celebrate the founding fathers even when we hear John Adams declare to King George, “We will not be your negroes” or learn that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so consistent in his defense of freedom. We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it. But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society. The ideas of freedom and equality, of liberty and citizenship did not apply to us, precisely because we were black. Hell, the ability to vote for the majority of black people wasn’t guaranteed until 1965. The value gap limited explicitly the scope and range of democratic life in this country. So when folks claim that American democracy stands apart from white supremacy, they are either lying or they have simply stuck their head in the sand.

Was it worth while to lay— with infinite exertion— a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps, measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference— about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Ever more complex life forms input information from sensors such as eyes and ears and process the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and then act on the world, by outputting information to muscles, for example. As some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I regard it a triumph that we, who are ourselves mere stardust, have come to such a detailed understanding of the universe in which we live.

In summary, parents matter, schools matter and life experiences matter, but they don't make a difference in shaping who we are. DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference, accounting for 50 per cent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects.

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.

Then they get these jobs and worry about promotions. It’s a vicious cycle, and not because it’s a rat race. I’m pretty sure that some rats love racing. The reason this sort of life is brutal has little to do with its fast and exceedingly demanding pace, but a lot to do with the fact that it allows so little time and space to think about what is it that we truly want.

The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be. Each of those women has begun to live from her imagination. Here’s how: Each honored her own discontent. She did not dismiss it, bury it, deflect it, deny it, blame it on someone else, or tell herself to shut up and be grateful. She heard her Knowing whisper “Not this,” and she admitted to herself that she heard it. She sat with it for a while. Then she dared to utter her inner whisper out loud. She shared her discontent with another human being. Then, when she was ready to move from Not this to This instead, she dared to call upon her imagination to tell her the story she was born to tell with her life. She dreamed up what it would look like to have her specific version of truth and beauty come to life. She looked for the blueprint she’d been born with, the one she’d forgotten existed. She unearthed her unseen order: her original plan.

The influence of these scientist-politicians was of late years not often on the side of liberty: the “intolerance of reason” so frequently conspicuous in the scientific specialist, the impatience with the ways of the ordinary man so characteristic of the expert, and the contempt for anything which was not consciously organized by superior minds according to a scientific blueprint were phenomena familiar in German public life for generations before they became of significance in England.

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came drought, war, pestilence, and epidemics. Since the connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to their eyes, these gods appeared inscrutable, and people at their mercy. But with Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC–ca. 546 BC) about 2,600 years ago, that began to change. The idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered. And so began the long process of replacing the notion of the reign of gods with the concept of a universe that is governed by laws of nature, and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read.

Be merciful. If it is a mess, let it be a mess. If it feels like you can't do this today, stay put and explore that feeling. Let your mindfulness co-opt everything in your experience. Unless you are in significant emotional or physical pain, stay put with no-matter-whatness. Keep realiging with the intentions of your practice: kindness, diligence, presence, attention, relaxation. Be a work in progress while holding this blueprint. The feeling of its being difficult is actually the sensation of your life evolving. Embrace it.

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder. Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn’t the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher. [...] The basis for the future of education must lie in schools and inspiring teachers. But schools can only offer an elementary framework where sometimes rote-learning, equations and examinations can alienate children from science. Most people respond to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, understanding, without the need for complicated equations. Popular science books and articles can also put across ideas about the way we live. However, only a small percentage of the population read even the most successful books. Science documentaries and films reach a mass audience, but it is only one-way communication.

A horoscope is a specific map, or picture, of the heavens that is cast for the date, time, and location of your birth. The positions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the sign that hovers at the horizon, are all placed around the wheel of the zodiac to reveal the intricate mathematical relationships that portray your personal blueprint and potential for development. This map can reveal your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual gifts and challenges, and you are always free to grow and change, according to your own volition. Also noteworthy are the nodal points, or the locations where the path of Earth and the path of the moon intersect, forming what is known as the “head and tail of the sky dragon,” or the north and south nodes. The location of the celestial dragon in a chart is of utmost importance, for it indicates the direction in which you are moving to achieve the fulfillment of your personal destiny, as well as the place in the past that you are emerging from. Once you are born into physical reality, you unfold your life within an imprint of cosmic energy that embodies a plan of intent and purpose, a plan designed and approved by you. Throughout

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92). --For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts

Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object. Other things merely sit in place, waiting to be pushed or pulled around. Even non-human animals mainly follow the instincts and behaviors that characterise their species, Sartre believed. But as a human being, I have no perceived nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along... having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder. Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn’t the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher.

Even though our physical reality is more like an illusion, it is still the "illusion" that helps us evolve, so we should take it seriously. Giving up in life or committing suicide because we found out that our reality works like an illusion is not going to help us evolve back to Creation. Committing suicide is one of the worst things you can do because it can cause your soul to become stuck on Earth with little awareness of what is happening. You can be stuck in an illusionary reality that seems to keep replaying itself for centuries. Some of us like to refer to these lost souls as ghosts. Being in this lost state of awareness will not free you from pain and suffering, but will stunt your spiritual evolution which is one of the worst things you can do to your soul. DNA creates our external reality because

Perinatal phenomena occur in four distinct experiential patterns, which I call the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). Each of the four matrices is closely related to one of the four consecutive periods of biological delivery. At each of these stages, the baby undergoes experiences that are characterized by specific emotions and physical feelings; each of these stages also seems to be associated with specific symbolic images. These come to represent highly individualized pyschospiritual blueprints that guide the way we experience our lives. They may be reflected in individual and social psychopathology or in religion, art, philosophy, politics, and other areas of life. And, or course, we can gain access to these psychospiritual blueprints through non-ordinary states of consciousness, which allow us to see the guiding forces of our lives much more clearly.

Remember to incorporate rhythms that give you time to stop and think and live intentionally. The work week already has a regular rhythm built into it. It is called the weekend. Make sure you have a weekend. Not all jobs are Monday through Friday, but make sure that you have some time off of work each week to spend time with friends and family. You may think you’re getting ahead by working extra hours, but you’re not gaining anything—you are only trading your life now for something later—something that may not materialize. If you have to work two jobs or extra hours to pay for education or just to put food on the table, you still need to make some time for rest or you will burn out. Fun is not a luxury—it clears your head so you can do better at your job when you go back to work. Therefore, make sure you schedule time for relaxation, fun, worship, and prayer.

To some extent, most of us are unconsciously driven by our ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is simply a set of ideas in the mind about how we should show up, how we should look, feel, behave, think. This collection of ideas and mental images is created out of fragments of highly charged experiences with important love objects in our lives, and out of the messages we receive in our interactions with the world as we grow. It remains mostly out of our awareness. The blueprint for the ego-ideal is first laid down by parental injunctions about how to be, or how not to be. These highly charged messages are taken in whole. They become the foundation of our scripts for life. The ego-ideal is certainly capable of modification and change, but for most of us it's deeply hardwired into our unconscious by the time we enter early adulthood, and it matures only marginally in later life.

the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who “gets things done” but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to “what is going on right now” between men and women, with one another and with God—this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful “without ceasing.” I want to give witness to this way of understanding pastor, a way that can’t be measured or counted, and often isn’t even noticed. I didn’t notice for a long time. I would like to provide dignity to this essentially modest and often obscure way of life in the kingdom of God. Along the way, I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life: the pastor’s emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives—these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. No trying to be successful. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops, and comes to birth is unique to each pastor. The only modifier I can think of that might be useful in honoring the ambiguity and mystery involved in the working life of the pastor is “maybe.” Anne Tyler a few years ago wrote a novel with the title Saint Maybe. How about Pastor Maybe? That would serve both as a disclaimer to expertise (that if we could just copy the right model, we would have it down) and a ready reminder of the unavoidable ambiguity involved in this vocation. Pastor Maybe: given the loss of cultural and ecclesiastical consensus on how to live this life, none of us is sure of what we are doing much of the time, only maybe.

He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-room apartment on the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during the winter months of 1925 and then, when summer came, in various inns on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve. Behind the prison gates he had had time to range over in his mind not only his own past and its triumphs and mistakes, but the tumultuous past of his German people and its triumphs and errors. He saw both more clearly now. And there was born in him anew a burning sense of mission -- for himself and for Germany -- from which all doubts were excluded. In this exalted spirit he finished dictating the torrent of words that would go into Volume One of Mein Kampf and went on immediately to Volume Two. The blueprint of what the Almighty had called upon him to do in this cataclysmic world and the philosophy, the Weltanschauung, that would sustain it were set down in cold print for all to ponder. That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we have seen, deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward a glorious German destiny.

Yes, our social and economic circumstances shape decisions we make about all sorts of things in life, including sex. Sometimes they rob us of the power to make any decisions at all. But of all human activity, sex is among the least likely to fit neatly into the blueprint of rational decision making favoured by economists. To quote my friend Claire in Istanbul, sex is about 'conquest, fantasy, projection, infatuation, mood, anger, vanity, love, pissing off your parents, the risk of getting caught, the pleasure of cuddling afterwards, the thrill of having a secret, feeling desirable, feeling like a man, feeling like a woman, bragging to your mates the next day, getting to see what someone looks like naked and a million-and-one-other-things.' When sex isn't fun, it is often lucrative, or part of a bargain which gives you access to something you want or need. If HIV is spread by 'poverty and gender equality', how come countries that have plenty of both, such as Bangladesh, have virtually no HIV? How come South Africa and Botswana, which have the highest female literacy and per capita incomes in Africa, are awash with HIV, while countries that score low on both - such as Guinea, Somalia, Mali, and Sierra Leone - have epidemics that are negligible by comparison? How come in country after country across Africa itself, from Cameroon to Uganda to Zimbabwe and in a dozen other countries as well, HIV is lowest in the poorest households, and highest in the richest households? And how is it that in many countries, more educated women are more likely to be infested with HIV than women with no schooling? For all its cultural and political overtones, HIV is an infectious disease. Forgive me for thinking like an epidemiologist, but it seems to me that if we want to explain why there is more of it in one place than another, we should go back and take a look at the way it is spread.

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras. These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us. There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts. We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.