Simplest Person Quotes

Your time on this earth is a gift to be used wisely. Don't squander your words or your thoughts. Consider that even the simplest actions you take for your lives matter beyond measure...and they matter forever.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.

Love is a necessity, just as lust is. Two instincts we modern humans have turned into our strongest emotions. Love gives us the desire to bond with a partner long enough to care for our children to an age when they can fend for themselves. Lust gives us the will to want to reproduce in the first place. These instincts are so deeply ingrained in our psyche that even with our advanced brains, they still govern us. We are now, for the most part, intelligent enough to decide who we want to love or have sex with. We can even control whether or not that sex results in offspring, but we can’t just ignore those instincts. From the simplest person to the most powerful kings, queens and presidents, our our lives are still governed by those two emotions.

It's sometimes easier to help others rather than helping yourself. The trick is to listen to your "self" as a friend. This may be the simplest change you ever make in life, with the biggest impact.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.

Sometimes it's right to meet in the middle, but sometimes, the simplest act of grace is to meet the other person where they are. That, that is love

Gavin Blake, you’re more of a man than any man I’ve ever known. You’re gentle. You’re kind. You’re strong and witty. You’re personable and warm, and you can reduce most females into blithering puddles of goo with the simplest words.

It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?

Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It’s the truth, and it’s the saddest and simplest thing. There isn’t just one person for each of us in the world. There aren’t many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn’t make a difference if you’re thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when.

Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....

But that's a way to go on loving--a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]

Consider that the simplest social interactions between two people requires performing an astonishing array of tasks: interpreting what the other person is saying; reading body language and facial expressions; smoothly taking turns talking and listening; responding to what the other person said; assessing whether you're being understood; determining whether you're well received, and, if not, figuring out how to improve or remove yourself from the situation. Think of what it takes to juggle all this at once! And that's just a one-to-one conversation. Now imagine the multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party. (p237)

For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.

Self-acceptance is a way of viewing oneself compassionately, without condemnation or justification. It is a starting point in life which makes other things possible. It celebrates the fullness of joy of being alive and of being who we are: accepting ourselves, however, does not mean embracing our neuroses or bad habits and celebrating them as if they were virtues. On the contrary, self-acceptance involves loving ourselves enough to accept painful truths about ourselves. . . . Self-acceptance is, at its simplest, the experience of one's self, here and now, as a complete human being, with all the glories and problems that condition entails.

The cause of human conflict is simple: one person dehumanizes another. One side sees the other side as unworthy. As long as people who disagree perceive each other this way, even the simplest details cannot be negotiated. But let each person bring to the other the attitude of respect and acceptance, and even difficult details can be resolved.

The simplest thing that can be said about any person, any relationship, is that it's not simple at all.

Do you want to know the answer? The easiest, simplest solution to all of your hiding, and purging, the end of your exhausting, isolating, repulsive routine? Just eat. Like a normal person.

The supreme art is the art of being happy with the simplest things and the greatest artist is the person who performs this art excellently in his everyday life!

Former pleasures meant nothing to me anymore. Life was a series of tasks to be endured, and even the simplest ones were painfully arduous. It took everything I could muster to cook a meal, wash the dishes, or do the laundry. My income was virtually nonexistent. My occupation was therapy.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass.

I think earning money is the simplest thing in the world once you learn how to do it

Direct, personal feedback really is the simplest and most effective form of motivation.

Your psychologists are not able to think in terms of a soul, and your religious leaders are not able, or refuse, to comprehend it psychologically even to its simplest degree. Metaphysics and psychology have not met, in other words.

The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. ‘In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.” Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within. Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’. Nietzsche called Buddha ‘that profound physiologist’ and his teachings less a religion than a ‘kind of hygiene’...’ Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside. ‘Be at least interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.’... In a mindful state one can choose to be aware of the ebb and flow of emotions and thought patterns instead of brooding on their content. Not ‘he did this to me therefore I’m suffering’ but ‘I notice that feelings of resentment and a desire for vengeance keep flooding my mind.’... ‘Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,’... ‘It is called ‘Bare’ because it attends just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses of through the mind without reacting to them.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge. This means that the damage caused by the bullying (the lowering of status and confidence) can continue, even after the bullying has ended.25 In the simplest of cases, the formerly lowly persons have matured and moved to new and more successful places in their lives. But they don’t fully notice. Their now-counterproductive physiological adaptations to earlier reality remain, and they are more stressed and uncertain than is necessary. In more complex cases, a habitual assumption of subordination renders the person more stressed and uncertain than necessary, and their habitually submissive posturing continues to attract genuine negative attention from one or more of the fewer and generally less successful bullies still extant in the adult world. In such situations, the psychological consequence of the previous bullying increases the likelihood of continued bullying in the present (even though, strictly speaking, it wouldn’t have to, because of maturation, or geographical relocation, or continued education, or improvement in objective status).

That was the greatest heart and the simplest that ever beat.

Working with the right person can make the toughest day go well, and working with the wrong person can make the simplest task excruciatingly difficult.

The word conscience covers as a matter of fact several different feelings; the simplest of these is the fear of being found out. You, reader, have, I am sure, lived a completely blameless life, but if you will ask some one who has at some time acted in a manner for which he would be punished if it became known, you will find that when discovery seemed imminent, the person in question repented of his crime.

More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.16 What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest—at least not when measured by average annual returns.

It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular. A systematic ribbon and button maker can become unpopular but essentially is not at all, inasmuch as he does not mean much by the very odd things he says (alas, and this is a popular art!). Socrates, on the other hand, was the most unpopular in Greece because he said the same thing as the simplest person but meant infinitely much by it. To be able to stick to one thing, to stick to it with ethical passion and undauntedness of spirit, to see the intrinsic duplexity of this one thought with the same impartiality, and at one and the same time to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and highest comedy―this is unpopular in any age for anyone who has not realized that immediacy is over. But neither can what is essentially unpopular be learned by rote. More on that later.

Easy as pie! Clever people get tripped up most easily on just such insignificant details. The cleverer a person is, the less he suspects that he’ll be tricked by something so simple. You have to trick the cleverest person with the simplest matter.

MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace...Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions...When government goes beyond this, that is, when government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie, unpeaceful.

I couldn't please everyone, there was no way to do that. But I could please myself. That was my conclusion, and I knew what pleased me. Having the freedom to make my own mistakes, to learn, to grow, to become a better person. Being here, in this house, with this guy, pleased me. My friendships pleased me. My hoodie made me happy. It was all the simplest things that mattered, and the future didn't have to be decided tonight.

And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

I am afraid of those who are too simple on the outside; for their vanities they wear upon their hearts. Better to meet a person who wears their vanities out in the open where you can see them! Than one who hides them in their hearts! For it is the stuff of the heart that is hidden; while the stuff on the outside is not. And we are all vain; the difference is where we put it! I would rather meet a person vain on the outside; while possessing the simplest of hearts.

The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.

He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.

You are never the same person you were before reading a book

The simplest way to silence your critics as a leader is to do what they claim you can’t do. However, be careful they don’t set you up to take fatal risks to please their criticisms.

To take the simplest example: one man laughs, and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another, who hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements, or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination, or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.

Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.

There is a way by which persons can keep their consciences clear before God and man, and that is to preserve within them the Spirit of God, which is the spirit of revelation to every man and woman. It will reveal to them, even in the simplest of matters, what they shall do, by making suggestions to them. We should try to learn the nature of this spirit, that we may understand its suggestions, and then we will always be able to do right. This is the grand privilege of every Latter-day Saint. We know that it is our right to have the manifestations of the Spirit every day of our lives.

Generalized Stockholm Syndrome results from having one’s physical and/or psychological survival threatened by one or more individuals and then being shown kindness by other individuals who are perceived as similar to the threatening individuals in some ways. Generalized Stockholm Syndrome is explained in its simplest form by two psychological concepts: Graham’s Stockholm Syndrome theory and stimulus generalization. Graham’s theory predicts that, because the victim is suffering despair and needs nurturance as a result of terror created by the threat to survival, he or she bonds to the first person who provides emotional relief. The bond is particularly likely to develop if the person who provides emotional relief is the abuser, because kindness by the abuser creates hope that the abuse will stop.

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711

I question the value of our civilization when I see that our public representatives have lost hold of the simplest, strongest truths. Nothing demonstrates the emptiness of a person’s mind more than putting party loyalty above principle.

It is now time for us to ask the personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, ‘What shall I do Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the Philippian jailer, ’What must I do to be saved?’ Clearly we must do something. Christianity is no mere passive acquiescence in a series of propositions, however true. We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord … At its simplest Christ’s call was “Follow me.” He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause … Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to renounce all lesser loyalties … let me be more explicit about the forsaking which cannot be separated from the following of Jesus Christ. First, there must be a renunciation of sin. This, in a word, is repentance. It is the first part of Christian conversion. It can in no circumstances be bypassed. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin … Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed, and habit which is known to be wrong … There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever renounce, but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what is wrong, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told his followers to pluck out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if it caused them to sin. We are not to obey this with dead literalism, of course, and mutilate our bodies. It is a figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the avenues along which temptation comes to us.

Perspective - Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a false messiah. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect. Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't. A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, it feels an impulsion....this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reason and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons. You are never given a wish without being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you. In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities." The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be. Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't. Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends. The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution it not generally understood by less advanced lifeforms, and they'll call you crazy. Everything above may be wrong!

She is what I feel to be a good person in the word’s simplest and plainest meaning. Which includes lashing out with her claws on some occasions when others may consider it improper—I don’t give a damn whether Ginny is “proper” or not; I like her. I like her values.

The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn't seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those who can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher he was 'half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.' I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean.

Whatever you touch will touch you back. The simplest way that I can try to explain it is that when you spend time touching the core of the earth, soaking in the stars, communing with the moon, aligning with the elements, working with the gods and spirits—it changes a person.

Her description of a perfect day sounds perfectly ordinary: “I will sleep long, have a relaxed breakfast. Then I’ll go out for some fresh air, chat with my husband or with friends. I might go to the theater, to the opera, or listen to a concert. If I’m rested, I might read a good book. And I would cook dinner. I like cooking!” These are the dreams of a person who had not been truly free for the last sixteen years. Though no longer young, Merkel is spry enough to enjoy the simplest of pleasures: country rambles, leisurely meals with (nonpolitical) friends, and music and books instead of charts, polls, and position papers. These pleasures will not replace the satisfaction of outsmarting a foe with her legendary stamina and command of facts. But, never one to ruminate over feelings, she will observe her own reaction to this new life with a scientist’s curiosity. In the short term, she is likely to spend time near her childhood home in the province of Brandenburg, where she first learned to love nature and which she still regards as her Heimat, or spiritual home. She’ll travel, too. Among her stated dreams is to fly over the Andes Mountains—an idealized destination; a metaphor for freedom.

Each simplest act, each hidden intention, had to be cut to the Rule and polished and perfected like the tiny stones of a mysterious mosaic which had no meaning when looked at one by one, except that one by one they fitted together and suggested a pattern. The pattern was the formation of the nun but she was too close to see it.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

As you get older, you realized that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing...He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.

Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term making love, for example, in favor of older, more hilarious locutions, such as rumpty-rumpty, quaffing, and bonker bang. A good orgasm is referred to as a bone-shaker. Her ass is a rumdadum. Her crotch is a slittie, a quim, a quim-box, a quimsby. Her breasts are boobs and tits, boobies and titties, her twin girls. At one time or another, your penis is a bong, a blade, a slurp, a shaft, a drill, a quencher, a lancelot, a lightning rod, Charles Dickens, Dick Driver, and Adam Junior... In the grip of approaching orgasm, however, she tends to revert to the contemporary standbys, falling back on the simplest, crudest words in the English lexicon to express her feelings. Cunt, pussy, fuck. Fuck me, Adam. Again and again. Fuck me, Adam. For an entire month you are the captive of that word, the willing prisoner of that word, the embodiment of that word. You dwell in the land of flesh, and your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.

His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs.

The Simplest Act Can Change the World Growing up in a cold and distant family, I have struggled my entire life with letting people into my life and my heart. I wake up each morning telling myself to do one small act of kindness for another person. I have seen how even the simplest act can change someone’s day. If all I can give that day is a smile, that is enough. When we are feeling at our worst, nothing can make us feel better than trying to make someone else feel better. —Sue

It was not an easy discipline to master, for it involved surrendering my own needs and interests to subservience to his. “Watch a mother with an infant, any kind of a mother, human or beast. There you will see this done on the simplest and most instinctive level. If one is willing to work at it, one can extend that same sort of perception to others. It is a worthwhile thing to do, for it conveys a level of understanding of one another that makes hate almost impossible. Seldom can one hate a person if one understands that person.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

How, I wondered, could you regain a poetical frame of mind at times like this? I came to the conclusion that it could be done, if only you could take your feelings and place them in front of you, and then taking a pace back to give yourself the room to move that a bystander would have, examine them calmly and with complete honesty. The poet has an obligation to conduct to conduct a post-mortem on their own corpse and to make public their findings as to any disease they may encounter. There are many ways in which they may do this, but the best, and certainly the most convenient, is to try and compress every single incident which they come across into the seventeen syllables of a Hokku. Since this is poetry in its handiest and simplest form, it may be readily composed while you are washing your face, or in the lavatory, or on a tram. When I say that it may be readily composed, I do not mean it in any derogatory sense. On the contrary, I think it is a very praiseworthy quality, for it makes it easy for one to become a poet; and to become a poet is one way to achieve supreme enlightenment. No, the simpler it is, the greater its virtue. Let us assume that you are angry: you write about what it is that has made you lose your temper, and immediately it seems that it is someone else's anger that you are considering. Nobody can be angry and write a Hokku at the same time. Likewise, if you are crying, express your tears in seventeen syllables and you feel happy. No sooner are your thoughts down on paper, than all connection between you and the pain which caused you to cry is severed, and your only feeling is one of happiness that you a person capable of shedding tears.

Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow? These twelve questions are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace.

Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal, and popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where individuals and groups most actively assume their responsibilities, and, consequently, where the morals of admittedly imperfect human beings are constantly improving; where trade, assemblies, and associations are the least restricted; where labor, capital, and populations suffer the fewest forced displacements; where mankind most nearly follows its own natural inclinations; where the inventions of men are most nearly in harmony with the laws of God; in short, the happiest, most moral, and most peaceful people are those who most nearly follow this principle: Although mankind is not perfect, still, all hope rests upon the free and voluntary actions of persons within the limits of right; law or force is to be used for nothing except the administration of universal justice.

The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry... The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical went and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea... The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalities itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and projected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of learning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it’s worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we’re surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

I meet this American government, or its representative the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; that is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with, —for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel,—and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government.

A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout an organization carry.

People either get this or they don't. Everyone's destiny is different. It is not so about what we carry but how we carry it that defines each one of us. There are lots of 'uncommon' factors contributing to a person not achieving his goals. We only talk about the common ones like lack of focus, commitment and all. You will agree with me that as complex as the world now is so is the human mind; if a person can learn to think in the simplest of manners he is more likely to reach his goals. No one is an exception, before you point a finger, ask, "Will my criticism contribute to the complexity in that person's life or or empower him?" Discipline nowadays is not solely based on your ability to take action but on your ability to step into greatness in the simplest of ways

Communication is the most essential and also the most ignored solvent and, simultaneously, medicine of life. If you communicate well with the planet, you will have better mental health. If you communicate better with your body, you will have better physical health. If you communicate well with others, you will have more financial abundance. Even the simplest job can't be acquired without good communication. But when you are alone, that communication turns inwards, and can improve or decrease the value you offer your own life. If you don't know what you say to yourself, listen only to those who speak what you need to hear. Your own life depends on these choices. Your feelings tell you what you must know about yourself - they're not a goal but a tool for personal evaluation.

However people sincerely call on me, I come to them and fulfill their hearts’ desires. They use many paths to reach me. It might sound philosophical, but we can make it a little clearer by saying that God, the Supreme One, the Incarnation, is not a person. Then what is God? Simplest to understand is that God is the peace in us. We are born with joy. We are peace and joy personified. We are purity personified. Unfortunately we seem to be ignoring that. We’re ignorant of our own true nature. So we run after things to make us happy and to find peace. Behind all our efforts, our basic motive is to find happiness and thus to find peace. All our actions are for that good. They need not be religious. We’re all working toward that happiness. Even all these wars, fights and competition are ways people look for happiness. Even when people steal things, they think they’re going to be happy by stealing. So the ultimate motive behind all our actions is to find that joy and peace. That’s what Krishna means when he says, “Whatever people do, ultimately their interest is in me.” When he says “me,” it means that peace: “I am that joy. I am eternal. Unfortunately many don’t realize that I, as peace, am already there in them.” Sometimes you put on your earrings and then forget them. Then you spend hours pulling out all the drawers until somebody comes, pinches your ears and says, “Here they are.” It’s the same way spiritually. Peace, or your true Self, is something subjective. You look about for it outside of you as some object, something different from you. That’s why you miss it. If occasionally you seem to be enjoying some happiness or peace, that’s nothing but a reflection of your own peace within.

Stereotype threat, then, is one way our national history seeps into our daily lives. That history leaves us with stereotypes about groups in our society that can be used to judge us as individuals when we’re in situations where those stereotypes apply—in the seat next to a black person on an airplane or interacting with minority students, for example. The white person in that situation will not want to be seen in terms of the stereotype of whites as racially insensitive. And the black person, for his or her part, will not want to be seen in terms of the stereotypes about blacks as aggressive, or as too easily seeing prejudice, and so on. Fighting off these possible perceptions on a long airline flight—or more famously, perhaps, in a school cafeteria—could be more than either party wants to take on. They just want to have lunch or get to Cleveland. Avoidance becomes the simplest solution.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it’s worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we’re surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone. “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. “Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone,” wrote the Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Sadhana The higher possibilities of life are housed in the human body. The physical body is a platform for all possibilities from the gross to the sacred. You can perform simple acts of eating, sleeping, and sex as acts of grossness, or you can bring a certain dimension of sanctity to all these aspects. This sanctity can be achieved by bringing subtler thought, emotion, and intention into these acts. Above all, remember that the grossness and sanctity of something is largely decided by your unwillingness and unconsciousness, or your willingness and consciousness. Every breath, every step, every simple act, thought, and emotion can acquire the stance of the sacred if conducted recognizing the sanctity of the other involved—whether a person or a foodstuff or an object that you use. Of all the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logic of the traditional Indian namaskar. It is a means of harmonizing the system. So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!

Along with saying no, the easiest thing you can do to become more influential is just ask. Ask more often, ask more directly, and ask for more. People who ask for what they want get better grades, more raises and promotions, and bigger job opportunities and even more orgasm. This might seem obvious but apparently it isn't. Most people do not realize how often they are not asking until they start asking more often. Whenever our MBA course ends and students share the biggest thing they have learned - after we have done so much together - the most common answer is “just ask”. The full realization comes from practice. What if you’re not sure how to ask? Just ask the other person. Seriously. One of the simplest and most surprising influence hacks is that if you ask people how to influence them, they will often tell you. Most of us are reluctant to ask because we fundamentally misunderstand the psychology of asking and we underestimate our likelihood of success. In one series of experiments, employees were more likely to turn in mediocre work than to ask for deadline extension, fearing their supervisor, would think them incompetent if they asked for extra time. But they had it backward: Managers saw extension requests as a good sign of capability and motivation. Pg 64, 65

Humans are cognitive misers because their basic tendency is to default to Type I processing mechanisms of low computational expense. Using less computational capacity for one task means that there is more left over for another task if they both must be completed simultaneously. This would seem to be adaptive. Nevertheless, this strong bias to default to the simplest cognitive mechanism-to be a cognitive miser-means that humans are often less than rational. Increasingly, in the modern world we are presented with decisions and problems that require more accurate responses than those generated by heuristic processing. Type i processes often provide a quick solution that is a first approximation to an optimal response. But modern life often requires more precise thought than this. Modern technological societies are in fact hostile environments for people reliant on only the most easily computed automatic response. Think of the multi-million-dollar advertising industry that has been designed to exploit just this tendency. Modern society keeps proliferating situations where shallow processing is not sufficient for maximizing personal happiness-precisely because many structures of market-based societies have been designed explicitly to exploit such tendencies. Being cognitive misers will seriously impede people from achieving their goals.

The first cut at the problem—the simplest but still eye-opening—is to ask how much income would have to be transferred from rich countries to poor countries to lift all of the world’s extreme poor to an income level sufficient to meet basic needs. Martin Ravallion and his colleagues on the World Bank’s poverty team have gathered data to address this question, at least approximately. The World Bank estimates that meeting basic needs requires $1.08 per day per person, measured in 1993 purchasing-power adjusted prices. Using household surveys, the Ravallion team has calculated the numbers of poor people around the world who live below that threshold, and the average incomes of those poor. According to the Bank’s estimates, 1.1 billion people lived below the $1.08 level as of 2001, with an average income of $0.77 per day, or $281 per year. More important, the poor had a shortfall relative to basic needs of $0.31 per day ($1.08 minus $0.77), or $113 per year. Worldwide, the total income shortfall of the poor in 2001 was therefore $113 per year per person multiplied by 1.1 billion people, or $124 billion. Using the same accounting units (1993 purchasing power adjusted U.S. dollars), the income of the twenty-two donor countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2001 was $20.2 trillion. Thus a transfer of 0.6 percent of donor income, amounting to $124 billion, would in theory raise all 1.1 billion of the world’s extreme poor to the basic-needs level. Notably, this transfer could be accomplished within the 0.7 percent of the GNP target of the donor countries. That transfer would not have been possible in 1980, when the numbers of the extreme poor were larger (1.5 billion) and the incomes of the rich countries considerably smaller. Back in 1981, the total income gap was around $208 billion (again, measured in 1993 purchasing power prices) and the combined donor country GNP was $13.2 trillion. Then it would have required 1.6 percent of donor income in transfers to raise the extreme poor to the basic-needs level.

It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them. It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished. Yet human needing is historical, and who can predict what forms the needs of the spirit may take? There is a loss of nerve in the premature announcements of the death of the spirit, the easy condemnations of materialist aspiration in capitalist society. Western societies have continued the search for spiritual consolation in the only manner consistent with the freedom of the seeking subject: by making every person the judge of his own spiritual satisfaction. We have all been left to choose what we need, and we have pushed the search for private meaning to the limits of what a public language can contain if it is to continue to be a means of communication. We have Augustine's first freedom, and because we have it, we cannot have his second. We can no longer offer each other the possibility of metaphysical belonging: a shared place, sustained by faith, in a divine universe. All our belonging now is social.

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.

Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life. But that is beyond the control of any of us. If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58. He was speaking of Christian ministry, but Tolkien’s story shows how this can ultimately be true of all work. Tolkien had readied himself, through Christian truth, for very modest accomplishment in the eyes of this world. (The irony is that he produced something so many people consider a work of genius that it is one of the bestselling books in the history of the world.) What about you? Let’s say that you go into city planning as a young person. Why? You are excited about cities, and you have a vision about how a real city ought to be. You are likely to be discouraged because throughout your life you probably will not get more than a leaf or a branch done. But there really is a New Jerusalem, a heavenly city, which will come down to earth like a bride dressed for her husband (Revelation 21–22). Or let’s say you are a lawyer, and you go into law because you have a vision for justice and a vision for a flourishing society ruled by equity and peace. In ten years you will be deeply disillusioned because you will find that as much as you are trying to work on important things, so much of what you do is minutiae. Once or twice in your life you may feel like you have finally “gotten a leaf out.” Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others. Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks. I just said, “If you know all this.” In order to work in this way—to get the consolation and freedom that Tolkien received from his Christian faith for his work—you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work? (That is, why do we need to work in order to lead a fulfilled life?) Why is it so hard to work? (That is, why is it so often fruitless, pointless, and difficult?) How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel? The rest of this book will seek to answer those three questions in its three sections, respectively.

It's impossible to measure love, but that doesn't stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?

He then found Perazzoli, who happily offered assistance. What a relief, he thought. Unfortunately Perazzoli didn’t seem to know how to work a personal computer. DOS seemed as foreign to him as Greek. Shannon’s hopes of building NT were dashed. Out of pity, he showed Perazzoli one of the simplest DOS operations—how to copy a file. It was like breathing life into a clay figure. Perazzoli suddenly ripped through a combination of commands that resulted in a completed build of NT. Then he explained to Shannon what he had done. Perazzoli’s directions made sense. Shannon left thinking that Perazzoli “must be like Einstein. He can’t answer a phone but can code like crazy.” Shannon

The history of our race and personal religious experience run so closely parallel as to seem to a modern observer almost the same thing; both tell of a being at first scattered and blind and utterly confused, feeling its way slowly to the serenity and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose. That, in the simplest, is the outline of history; whether one have a religious purpose or disavow a religious purpose altogether, the lines of the outline remain the same. The

The simplest person who worship God is wiser than the supposed wisest people who worshiped a worthless substitute.

Zimbardo could not see the brutality himself because he was already too deep into his chosen role of Warden and lost his exterior view of his sociological “experiment”. He could not see clearly what was happening. More recently, Zimbardo has acted as a consultant to one of the arrested soldiers in the recent Abu Ghraib prison torture. He never denied the culpability of the individuals involved but was certain to bring up the lack of oversight and structure. In his recent book he states “Aberrant, illegal or immoral behavior by individuals in service professions, such as policemen, corrections officers, and soldiers, are typically labeled the misdeeds of “a few bad apples”. The implication is that they are a rare exception and must be set on one side of the impermeable line between evil and good, with the majority of good apples set on the other side. But who is making the distinction? Usually it is the guardians of the system, who want to isolate the problem in order to deflect attention and blame away from those at the top who may be responsible for creating untenable working conditions or for a lack of oversight or supervision. Again the bad-apple dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. “A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.” Zimbardo isolated 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. I found myself in all of these seven steps, to a greater or lesser degree. They are: 1) Mindlessly taking the first step. 2) Dehumanization of others. 3) De-individualization of self (anonymity). 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility. 5) Blind obedience to authority. 6) Uncritical conformity to the group’s norms. 7) Passive tolerance of evil, through inaction, or indifference. In hindsight, I can see each one of these points were present in the apple barrel of Scientology that I lived through.   Acknowledgments                     There are numerous people I would like to acknowledge for their support and encouragement during the very difficult task of going back to some dark places in my past to get this book written. They do no want their names used, but they know who they are, and my appreciation is deep and well known to them. I would like to thank Jeferson Hawkins for both his Cover designs and other help along this road. I want to acknowledge Bernice Mennis, Ben Bashore for their personal help over the years. There is much I can say about Vermont College, but the simplest is that they gave me the environment, freedom and courage to study what I needed to write

Picture the athlete at the starting line of a race—adrenaline pumping, energy flowing, muscles tightening, skin aglow with anticipatory perspiration, heart beating faster and faster, the mind focused on only one thing: the starter’s gun and the race. Now, picture the person about to enter a social gathering. He or she approaches the door, behind which a number of people are talking, laughing, having fun—adrenaline pumping, energy flowing, pulse beginning to quicken, the mind focused on anticipation: “What will happen when I enter the room?” “Will I see anyone I know?” “What will they think of me?” What do these situations have in common? The answer is anxiety. For the athlete, anxiety is channeled into energy that just may win the race. By allowing the anxiety to play a role in gearing him or her up for the race, the athlete is making good use of the natural fight-or-flight response. For the partygoer, it is not so clear. If that person is willing to let being “keyed up” or “excited” be a positive kind of energy flow, then any initial nervousness or uncertainty will remain manageable and nonthreatening. But if the physical sensations of anxiety become distracting and the thoughts obsessive, the party guest is in for a difficult time. Similarly, a person who prepares for an important meeting may feel a kind of nervous energy in gearing up for negotiations. But if that same person, although well prepared, allows interactive inhibition to keep him from suggesting a solution, questioning a point, or voicing an opinion, he will feel a real letdown. When holding back becomes a habit, the pervasive feeling of “Oh no, I did it again” may lead to a lack of enthusiasm that interferes with productivity and job satisfaction. The truth is, we all want to be heard without—if we can reasonably avoid it—being rejected or embarrassed. How to resolve this dilemma? First, by understanding anxiety in its simplest terms. The more you understand about anxiety, the more you will be able to control it. Remember, social anxiety is not some abstract phenomenon or indelible personality trait. It is an explainable dynamic that you can choose to control. Let’s look more closely at the athlete. For that person, in that situation, anxiety is normal and appropriate. In fact, it is crucial to effective performance. Without it, the physiological workings of the body would fall short of what is required. In the second example, anxiety is also appropriate. But it can become negative if the person begins to worry about what is going on inside the room: “What are they laughing about?” “Will anyone talk to me?” “Am I dressed right?” “Will I seem nervous?” At that point it’s the degree of incapacity—the extent to which the anxious feelings and thoughts prevent interacting—that becomes the most important issue. (In the workplace, these thoughts may run to “Have I done enough research?” “What if I can’t answer my boss’s questions?” “Can they tell I’m anxious?”)

Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. The simplest definition of instrumental rationality-the one that emphasizes most that it is grounded in the practical world-is: Behaving in the world so that you get exactly what you most want, given the resources (physical and mental) available to you. Somewhat more technically, we could characterize instrumental rationality as the optimization of the individual's goal fulfillment. Economists and cognitive scientists have refined the notion of optimization of goal fulfillment into the technical notion of expected utility. The model of rational judgment used by decision scientists is one in which a person chooses options based on which option has the largest expected utility.' One discovery of modern decision science is that if people's preferences follow certain patterns (the so-called axioms of choice) then they are behaving as if they are maximizing utility-they are acting to get what they most want. This is what makes people's degrees of rationality measurable by the experimental methods of cognitive science. The deviation from the optimal choice pattern is an (inverse) measure of the degree of rationality. The other aspect of rationality studied by cognitive scientists is termed epistemic rationality. This aspect of rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world.' The two types of rationality are related. Importantly, a critical aspect of beliefs that enter into instrumental calculations (that is, tacit calculations) is the probabilities of states of affairs in the world.

Troubleshooting is a form of advance problem solving, which few people excel in performing. Troubleshooting is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem, where the symptoms of a problem in a complex system can have many possible causes. Problem solvers rely upon prior experience to determine the potential causes, and employ the process of elimination to detect the actual causes of a problem. The troubleshooter must always look for the simplest solution while considering the possibility that there is more than one fault. Every organization needs a person whom is adept at troubleshooting, analyzing, and resolving problem with an ingenious solution, or novel argument. A person who can see multiple sides to any dilemma, and structure a series of useful elucidations for consideration possesses an optimistic nature.

Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise they crash the plane. Unlike researchers, they were selected for survival, not complications. So I saw the less is more in action: the more studies, the less obvious elementary but fundamental things become; activity, on the other hand, strips things to their simplest possible model.

Tufty, a recently arrived border terrier, jumped up on her lap, licking her face. Leeda pulled him close, suddenly, and held him, sinking her face into his ears, feeling the warmth of his body against hers, feeling guilty that he wasn't Barky but also feeling happy that he was there. She couldn't imagine holding another person that way. It was love at its simplest.

…Mma Ramotswe stepped forward and put an arm around Patience’s shoulder. “Mma, “ she said, “I see you.” It was the oldest and simplest of African greetings: I see you. It implied so much more than it said, though, because it meant that Mma Ramotswe saw not only the person standing before her, but all that lay behind her – who she was, where she came from, how she felt.

The search for the divine in its simplest terms is the search for that portion of the creative universe that intersects with you personally.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

We do not grow much from joy and pleasure, and we do not learn much from winning. We grow and bloom from our pain and from the lessons of the self that we learn from our pain. Humans, like the simplest organism, take whatever steps that may be available to avoid pain. Sometimes we deny its existence, bury it. The purpose here is not to set out some easy panacea for mental health. I am merely suggesting that to become aware, to become open to ourselves is the first step toward becoming a person and learning how, in the end, to become open to others. It is that magic that begins to build the powerful horse we need to win.

There is a logic principle called Occam’s Razor. It states that, all else being equal, the simplest explanation is most likely correct. The explanation that alcohol is an addictive substance is far simpler than the convoluted theories (none of which we can prove or satisfactorily explain) around personality and physical and mental defects leading to alcoholism.

There are many theories about why teams of four to six work best, but the simplest is ego. With about five people, there's always enough oxygen in the room. It means on average that every person gets to speak once every five times, which is enough for everyone to feel they are at the center of things. At this level of participation, their pride can be invested in the team instead of focused inwardly on themselves. The US and other national armies made similar observations about the magic of small unit sizes, and it's the basis for how they've trained soldiers since 1948.1 Larger groups were less likely to fire their weapons to defend themselves, but if they were trained in small units, their rates of fire increased. From this perspective, a team of ten to twenty people is unlikely to function in the same way as a small team does. It's likely that smaller units will naturally form despite what the organization chart says.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I’m essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic.