Category Archives: Lessons

Misdirected Good Intent

If any of my blog readers, are in poor health, or generally unhappy, no one is asking you to pretend that those conditions do not exist. I hope to show you that even those unfortunate situations were created out of a misdirected good intent. In these blogs we will keep reminding you, however, that exuberance and high spirits are a natural part of our heritage.

We also hope to allow you to recapture those feelings, if you have lost them, and to give other ways of keeping those emotions fresh and intact. Blog readers will benefit in various fashions, according to their own conditions and intents, but every blog reader will benefit to some degree or another — and each blog reader will become reacquainted with those inner springs of vitality and wellbeing that are so important in human experience.

Concentrate upon the joys that you possess, keep your goals in mind, and trust the infinite intelligence within you to bring about the desired results. This frees your mind and allows improvements to continue without interruptions.

It’s our version of worrying that desired effects may not be brought into the present — that is, will not come into your close vision. When you feel that way, close your eyes, of only for a moment, reassure yourself that you can trust your vision — mental and physical — and that indeed your goals will be brought into clear focus.

Playing Consciousness At different Speeds

The analogy of the many speeds of consciousness actually fits in well with the actual neurological sequences upon which consciousness plays. As we know, everything alive is conscious — and even so-called dead matter possesses  its own variety of self-awareness.

In our terms, the rhythm of some kind of consciousness would seem exceedingly slow, so that a century might pass between one perception and the next. Other variations might seem amazingly quick — the perceptions following each other so swiftly that they would indeed escape our perception entirely; yet in the wondrous marvels of inner nature, all of these rhythms are connected one to the others, and in a matter of speaking — excuse the pun — they each balance each other.

It is not so much the actual rhythms that are manifested that make the difference in perception, but the absence of certain other rhythms, upon which perception ride.

Healing Energy

Mental exercises unusually go well except for the few instances, when we allow self-pity to grab ahold. It is extremely important that we concentrate upon those pleasures of life that we enjoy. Eating good food, experiencing the joy of reading, the joy of creative thought, the pleasure of friends, and so forth, for those benefits will then be increased more than a hundredfold.

All the improvements necessary are indeed happening at various levels of action within our mental and physical experience. Following and having faith that this is so — without worrying about how it will happen.

The conscious mind can direct bodily activity, but the body consciousness alone can perform those activities that bring forth life and motion.

The Present Becomes the Past

Apropos of our discussion concerning time.

The nature of universal creativity is so remarkable that it’s true reaches are literally beyond most understanding. The implications are staggering — so that the affair is almost impossible to explain.

The past, and every moment of the past, are being constantly changed from the operation point of the present. In our terms, the present becomes the past, which is again at every considerable point from the latest-present. Yet through all of this immense, continuous creation, there is always a personal sense of continuity: We never really lose our way in the distance between one moment and the next.

In somewhat of the same fashion the objects about us are constantly in motion, as we know. The atoms and molecules are forever moving, and in a way the electrons are the directors of that motion.

Our own focus is so precisely and finely tuned that despite all of that activity, objects appear solid. Now objects are also events, and perhaps that is the easiest way to understand them. They are highly dependent upon our own subjective focus. Let that focus falter for a briefest amount of time, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down, so to speak.

Remember that we are also objects, and also events, and as physical bodies our organs are also composed of atoms and molecules whose motion, again, is directed by the electrons.

The electrons themselves have their own subjective lives. They are subjective events, therefore, so there is always a correlation between those electrons in our bodies and those in the objects we see about us. Nevertheless again, subjective continuity itself never falters, in that it is always a part of the world that it perceives, so that us and the world create each other, in these terms.

When we change the past from each point of the latest-present, we are also changing events at the most microscopic levels. Our intent has also an electronic reality, therefore. It is almost as if our thoughts punched the keys of some massive computer, for our thoughts do indeed have a force. Even as sentences are composed of words, there is no end to the number of sentences that can be spoken — so “time” is composed of an endless variety of electronic languages that can “speak” a million worlds instead of words.

 

Dates are but designations applied to the days.

Mankind and womankind lived without such designations for a much longer period than he or she have used them. Animals, without such designations, still know their position on the planet itself, and they are aware of tides and the movement of the earth and planets.

 

Extremes

Our situations can be called extreme — but true extremes are far less fortunate. We have, for example, the extremes of poverty suffered by people in many other parts of the world — a poverty that stunts all kinds of growth, mental and physical, and brings about an early death. Or the extremes of disease, in which children are born without all the faculties needed for life, and — therefore also die an early death. Or those extremes when entire families suffer patterns of tragedy so whole numbers are wiped out at one time.

There are reasons for such cases, of course. I simply wanted you to know that many very severe extremes exist, that would make our lives seem most favorable in contrast.

The Body Consciousness

The body consciousness, on its own, is filled with exuberance, vitality, and creativity.

Each most microscopic portion of the body is conscious, strives toward its own goals of development, and is in communication with all other parts of the body. The body consciousness is indeed independent. To a large degree its own defense mechanisms protect it from the mind’s negative beliefs — at least to a large extent. As I have mentioned before in past blogs, almost all persons pass from so-called disease state back into healthy states without ever being aware of the alterations. In those cases the body consciousness operates unimpeded by negative expectations or concepts.

When those negative considerations are multiplied, however, when they harden, so to speak, then they do indeed begin to diminish the body’s own natural capacity to heal itself, and to maintain that overall, priceless organization that should maintain it in a condition of excellent strength and vitality.

There are also occasions when the body consciousness itself rises up in spite of a person’s fears and doubts, and throws aside a condition of illness in a kind of sudden victory. Even then, however, the person involved has already begun to question such negative beliefs. The individual may not know how to cast them off, even though he or she desires to do so. It is in those instances that the body consciousness arises and throws off its shackles.

With free will, however, it is not possible for the body consciousness to be given full and clear dominion, for that would deny large areas of choices, and cut off facets of learning. The main direction and portent, however, of the body consciousness on its own is always toward health, expression, and fulfillment.

The molecules, and even the smaller aspects of the body act and react, communicate, cooperate with each other, and share each other’s knowledge, so that on particle of the body knows what is happening in all the other parts. Thus, the amazing organization usually works in a smooth, natural fashion. Many body events that we think of in our society as negative –certain viruses, for example — are instead meant as self-corrective devices, even as fever actually promotes health rather than impedes it.

The main characteristic of bodily consciousness is its spontaneity. This allows it to work at an incredibly swift rate that could not be handled by the topmost conscious portions of the mind. Its operation is due to an almost instantaneous kind of consciousness, in which what is known, with no distance between, say, the knower and the known.

The act of seeing, and all of the body’s senses, are dependent upon this inner spontaneity.

Our “negative” dreams express left-over doubts and fears, and hold the concept that the poorest rather than the best outcome of any event will happen.

Secondary Personalities

People who have epilepsy are afraid of their own energy.

They do not trust it, nor do they trust the spontaneous portions of the self. They are afraid that left alone their energy might strike out against others, and so they short-circuit its use, having attacks that momentarily render themselves helpless.

People with so-called secondary personalities also fear their own energy. They divide it up so that it seems to belong to different personalities, and is therefore effectively, divided. In basic terms, true amnesia does not exist in such cases, though it appears to. The people involved are quite aware of their activity at all times, but they behave in a fashion that is not continuous — that is, the main personality does not seem to behave in a continual manner, but is broken up, or again, seemingly divided. This psychological ploy neatly prevents the so-called main personality from using all of its energy at any one time.

The individuals concerned pretend to themselves that they have no memory of the other personalities’ existences or activities. These personalities, however, store up their energy so that one personality often exhibits explosive behavior, or makes certain decisions that seem to go against the wishes of the main entity. In this way, different kinds of behavior may be exhibited, and while it would seem that many decisions are made by one portion of the self, without another portion of the self knowing anything about it, such usually is not the case. In fact, the main personality is able to express many different kinds of probable action, but the entire personality is prevented from acting with its full energy or power. Instead the energy is diverted into other channels.

All portions of the self are indeed conscious, and they are also basically conscious of each other, though for working purposes they may seem to be separate or isolated.

The idea of the sinful self will not be predominant in my blogs, but I certainly will delve into the many unfavorable concepts that are held by the various religions — concepts that certainly make many people feel that the self is indeed sinful rather than blessed.

The self is indeed blessed, and just the reminder of that fact can often short-circuit negative beliefs, particularly if they are not too deep-seated.

The Will to Live

The will to live can be comprised by doubts,fear, and rationalizations.

Some people, for example, definitely want to live, while they try to hide from life at the same time. Obviously, this leads them into conflicts. Such people will impede their own motions and progress. They become overly concerned about their own safety. If any of my blog readers feel this way, they may even hide these feelings from themselves. They will  concentrate upon all the dangers present in society in their own country, or in other portions of the world, until their own frightened overall concern for safety seems to be a quite natural, rational response to conditions over which they have no control.

What is actually involved is a kind of paranoia, which can become such a powerful response that it can take over a person’s life, and color all projects. If this has happened to any of my blog readers, you might recognize yourself in any number of different scenarios. You might be a “survivalist,” setting up stores and provisions to be used in case of a nuclear disaster. It may seem to you that you are quite justified in protecting yourself and your family from disaster. In many such cases, however, the people so worried about the occurrence of danger from the outside world are instead concerned about the nature of their own energy, and afraid that it might destroy them.

In other words, they do not trust the energy of their own lives. They do not trust the natural functioning of their bodies, or accept this functioning as a gift of life. Instead they question it at every point — even holding their breath at times, waiting for something to go wrong.

Other people may actually impede those portions of the body given to mobility, so that they limp or tighten their muscles, or otherwise tamper with their bodies so that the end result is one that requires a cautious, hesitating approach to motion. Some may even cause themselves to have severe accidents, in which they sacrifice portions of their bodies to retain a sense of false safety.

These rather self-deceptive feelings are not hidden deeply in the subconscious mind, as we might suppose. Instead, in the majority of cases they consist of quite conscious decisions, made at one time or another on quite surface levels.

 

They are not forgotten, but the people involved simply close their own eyes, so to speak, to those decisions, and pretend that they do not exist, simply to make their lives appear smooth and to save face with themselves, when they know very well that the decisions really rest on very shaky ground indeed.

I do not wish to simplify matters, but such decisions can be uncovered very easily in children. A child might fall and badly scrape a knee — so badly that limping is the result, at least temporarily. Such a child will often be quite conscious of the reason for the affair: he or she may openly admit the fact that the injured part was purposefully chosen so that a dreaded test at school could be missed, and the child might well think that the injury was little enough to pay for the desired effect that it produced.

An adult under the same circumstances might become injured to avoid a dreaded event at the office — but the adult may well feel ashamed of such a reaction, and so hide it from himself or herself in order to save feelings of self-esteem. In such cases, however, the adults will feel that they are victims of events over which they have little or no control.

If the same kind of event occurs with any frequency, their fear of the world and of daily events may grow until it becomes quite unreasonable. Still, in most such instances those inner decisions can be easily reached — but while people are determined to “save face,” they will simply refuse to accept those decisions as their own. People will to live, to act or not to act. To a large extent they will the events of their lives — whether or not they are willing to admit this to themselves, and they will to die.

Begin to understand that energy is the gift of this life — to be expressed, not repressed — and to understand, again that spontaneity knows its own order.

It is no coincidence, in our language, that the word “will” refers to the future, as in a line like “it will happen,” and also refers to the decision-making quality of the mind.

 

The Species Multitudinous Abilities

My human skill is as ancient as man and woman is, and indeed all of our arts, sciences, and cultural achievements are the offshoots of spontaneous mental and biological processes.

I choose my words quite carefully at times, because I realize the various interpretations that can be placed upon them. Perhaps the following explanation will express more clearly what I mean.

In the first place, as often mentioned lately, the reasoning mind is spontaneously fired. The species contains within itself all of the necessary spontaneous attributes that are necessary to form a civilization, for example. All of our reasoned activities — our governments, societies, arts, religions and sciences — are the physical realization, of course, of inner capacities, capacities that are inherent in man’s and woman’s structure. Take our theaters’ movie picture dramas. These are the materialization in our time of man’s and woman’s natural ability — a characteristic highly important in the behavior of the species.

Early man and woman, for example, spontaneously played at acting out the part of other animals. He and she took part of a tree, a brook, a rock. Acting became a teaching method — a way of passing on information. Man and woman always possessed all of the knowledge he or she needed. The task was to make it physically available.

People translate inner knowledge in many ways — through acting it out, through singing or dancing, through drawing images on cave walls. It was the intellect’s job to put such information to practical use, and thus the intuitions and the intellect worked hand in hand. Man and woman dealt then with spontaneous knowing in a more direct fashion.

It is very difficult to try to explain the various shadings of psychology that were involved. Early man and woman did act in a more spontaneous manner, more automatically, in our terms, but not mindlessly. If we remember the early blogs, then this information should fall into place, for consciousness emerged from the inside outward. Animals enjoy drama, and in their fashions they playact.

It was to man and woman to translate his and her inner information with a freehand. He or she is able to form many different kinds of cultures, for example. He or she puts his or her sciences and religions, his and her languages, together in multitudinous ways, but there must always be a translation of inner information outward to the world of sense, There still is. Man’s and woman’s capacities have not dimmed in the regard. Thinking, for example, is as automatic as ever. It is simply that our culture puts the various elements together in ways that stress the qualities of what we refer to as rational thinking.

When the species needs certain abilities, they rise to the fore, as in my case now. When we are painting pictures we are also translating inner knowledge. Early artists drew pictures to share the images they saw in their dreams. In a fashion they practiced dreaming in their sleep, and thus learned also to think in terms of the measurement of physical images, and to move objects around in their minds before they did so physically.

Poetry was an art and a science. It conveyed quite necessary information about man and woman and the universe. The same can be said of many cave drawings. What we had — what we still have, though we are not nearly as aware of it — was an excellent give-and-take between the inner and outer senses. Through chanting, dancing, playacting, painting, story-telling, man and woman spontaneously translated inner sense data into physical actualization. The physical senses only present us with clues as to our own sensitivities.

I translate what I feel without being consciously aware of receiving the material in usual terms, or of translating it. It has to be broken down, particularly to a time frame, and then into concepts that can take advantage of the world view that is held in our culture. Everything must be slanted to fit the viewpoint of creatures who believe most firmly in the superiority of matter over mind — who are immersed in a particular biological framework.

I cannot ignore those belief structures — or what I say would literally be incomprehensible. All of this is automatically  taken care of.

The species has multitudinous abilities, each necessary, each adding to the entire fulfillment and attributes of our people. Some individuals choose to specialize, following specific lines of abilities throughout many existences — accommodating these, however, to the times in which they are born. Both my wife and I have been speakers in that regard. The methods many change. We may “speak” through art or music, through trance activities, but we will specialize in the use of the inner senses, and in translating the inner knowledge of the species, bringing it to whatever level of ordinary consciousness that is considered the official one.

I know what sound is, my wife knows, what we consider sound is only one of sounds many spectrums. Beside translating inner images into paintings, for example, we may unknowingly be translating sensually invisible sounds into images. In a way quite impossible to describe, it would be true to say that my blogs actually translate multidimensional images into words. We have no words for the kinds of images I am speaking of, for they are not objects, nor pictures of objects, nor images of images, but instead the inner dimensions, each separate and glowing, but connected, prisms of knowledge, that have within themselves more reality than we can presently begin to imagine.

To a certain extent, I must travel from those mental realities into our comprehension, wrest myself free in order to form an ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-on-the-move entity that can blog here and be there mentally at the same time. So I am distant and close at once. That distance from my blog readers also represents the reaches, however, of the human psyche, and the vast corridors of psychological activity from which it is formed, and from which our world emerges.

For the worlds are so composed that each one is a part of each other one, and there is no disconnecting. There is no place or space, psychological, psychic, where those worlds exist apart from each other, so we cannot say that one is more highly evolved than another.

There are as many frontiers as there ever were, and there is no catastrophe that will annihilate consciousness, or put an end to earthly life. When we think in terms of earth’s destruction, or the ending of the world, we are thinking of course of a continuum of time, and of beginnings and endings. From our viewpoint in space and time, it seems that planets have come and gone, stars collapsed, and when we look outward into space, it appears that we look backward into time. There are great pulsations, however, in existence — pulsations that have nothing to do with time as we understand it, but with intensities.

In the deepest of terms, the world always was and always will be. It changes its patterns of activity, it comes and goes, but it is always itself in its comings and goings. To me, that is exceedingly simple — but as far as our concepts are concerned, it can seem to imply irreconcilable complications.

A small note to my blog readers– again — trust the great power of the universe that forms your own image, trust spontaneity, and the body’s natural urges toward relaxation, motion, and creativity, as these show themselves in their own rhythms.

The Daily Hypothesis

It would help all if we remind ourselves that our creative mind is at work whether or not we are aware of it, and regardless of what we are doing, and that such periods of dead time have the potential, at least, of accelerating creativity, if we allow our intellect to go into a kind of free drive at such times.

Each person has such a daily hypothesis — one that might be quite different for say, Friday than it is for Monday. We build our daily experience partially by such working hypotheses.

Many of the beliefs  that we have individually and jointly are somewhat relieved in the evening, in that they so often apply to the day’s activities, when the rest of the world seems to be engaged in the nine-to-five assembly-line world experience.

We do not project as many negative ideas upon the evening hours, and to same applies to most people to varying degrees. We are jointly free of limitations that might hamper us at other times of the day. We are  less visited by preconceptions of what we are supposed to do in any given hour of the day.

The natural, magical flows of our own rhythms are more often broken up in the daytime. This applies to many people as well, because of our ideas of what we should be doing at any given time, or what is socially respectable, proper, upright, even moral in limited terms.

We have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of our historic past, one in which our main activities are daytime ones. It seems only natural that early man and woman, for example, carried on all of his and her main activities in the day, hiding after dark. As a matter of fact, however, early man and woman were a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept. He and she also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his and her senses with high accuracy — the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

In any case, man and woman were not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night. It was agriculture that turned him and her more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

Many people’s natural rhythms, then, still do incline in those directions, and they are always kept operable as alternate rhythms for the species as a whole.

I have some inclinations in that direction, as do many creative people, but these rhythms are often nearly completely overlaid by culturally-learned ones. Cultures that were night-oriented appreciated the night in a different fashion, of course, and actually utilized their consciousnesses in ways that are almost nearly forgotten. I believe there are ancient fairy tales and myths still surviving that speak of these underworlds, or worlds of darkness — but they do not mean worlds of death, as is usually interpreted.

 

In a fashion, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the imagination under such conditions. It is not that man and woman stressed physical data less, but he and she put it together differently — that in the darkness he and she relied upon his and her inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion. The night portions of our personalities have become strangers to us — for as we identify with what we think of a our rational intellect, then we identify it further with the daytime hours, with the objective world that becomes visible in the morning, with the clear-cut physical objects that are then before our view.

In those times, however, man and woman identified more with his and her intuitive selves, and with his and her imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he and she put his or her intellect.

This meant, of course, a language that was in its way more precise than our own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events. There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his of her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe. Particularly in warmer climates, man and woman were naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his and her sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

We must remember, of course, that the use of clocks is a fairly recent phenomenon. Men and women thought in terms of rhythms of the time, of flowing time, not of time in sections that were arbitrary. So as far as creature-hood is concerned, we have adapted to a time environment that we ourselves have formed. Creative people, again, are often aware of those connections, at least at certain levels, and I have in particular always felt this way to some extent. We have largely buried our own natural feelings in that direction.

These rhythms are also more natural to us than we suspect. We often have freedoms, then, that we do not use — a 24-hour period that we use quite arbitrarily, one that is already sectioned for us by society — but only if we allow it to be. It can be used in any fashion that we wish.

Relaxation and Effortlessness

It is true, of course, that before the time of modern psychology man and woman had a concept of himself and herself that dealt with conscious exterior aspects only, although it has been written that until that time man and woman thought of themselves as a kind of flat-surfaced self-minus, for example, subconscious or unconscious complexity.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man and woman used the word “soul” to  include his or her own entire complexity. The word was large enough to contain man’s and woman’s experience. It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience. It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences — not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace. They were considered evil instead. The vast range of psychological expression, however, had some kind of framework to contain it. The saint and the sinner each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair. Psychological reality, for all of the religious dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience. It was in fact because the church so believe in the great range of psychological activity possible that it was so dogmatic and tireless in trying to maintain order.

Unfortunately, with the development of scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened. As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality. What could not be proven in laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

Anyone who experienced “something that could not exist” was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged. There is no doubt that the accepted dimensions of psychological reality began to shrink precisely at the time that modern psychology began. Modern psychology was an attempt to make man and woman conform to the new scientific world view.

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself. Evolutionary man and woman, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin — but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage — a heritage genetically carried, that led finally only to the grave. Psychological activity was scaled down in between life and death, then, even while the possibility of any after-death experience was considered the most unreasonable and unintellectual of speculations.

Any man or woman might rise in our democracy from a poor peasant’s son to be the President. Outcasts might become the socially prominent. The unlettered might become highly educated. The idea of achieving greatness, however, was considered highly suspect. The self was kept in bounds. Great passion, or desire or intent — or genius — did not fit the picture.

Now some peoples would not fit into that mold. They would take what they could from our technology, but in conscious and spontaneous ways they retaliated — and still do — by exaggerating all of those human tendencies that our society has held down so well. If we can have reason without faith, then indeed, for example, we will see that there can be faith without reason. When human experience becomes shrunken in such a fashion — compressed — then in a fashion it also explodes at both ends, one might say.

We have atrocious acts committed, along with great heroisms, but each are explosive, representing sudden releases of withheld energies that have in other ways been forbidden, and so man’s and woman’s mass psyche expresses itself sometimes like explosive fireworks, simply because the release of pressure is necessary.

Even our poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in it’s fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: “How is faith not real, then? We’ll change your laws with it. We”ll turn it into power — political power. What will you say then? We have been laughed at for so long. We will see who laughs now.”

Fanaticism abounds, of course, because the human tendencies and experiences that have been denied by the mainline society erupt with explosive force, where the tendencies themselves must be accepted as characteristics of human experience. Iran is an example for the world, in explosive capsule form, complete with historical background and a modern political one. Modern psychology does not have a concept of the self to begin to explain such realities.

Now, in the world we early formed our own beliefs and strategies. In midlife we are presented with a recognized overall vitality of materials. This is mean to reorient our attitudes. Some don’t realize, that we are not merely being presented with an alternate view of reality, but with the closet approximation we could get of what reality is, and how it worked, and what it meant.

I have been very gentle in my treatment of our mores and institutions — for I do not want to be against our world, but for a more fulfilling one. In future blogs I will be discussing how our ideas can be applied by the individual in terms of value fulfillment, so that individuals can begin to reclaim those dimensions of experience that are indeed our right heritage.

For my blog readers, I want them to remember the idea of effortlessness, because with the best of intentions some have been trying too hard. I want them to remember that relaxation is one of creativity’s greatest champions — not its enemy. He or she is naturally gifted with the quickness of body and mind. Remind oneself that it is safe to express his or her natural rhythms, to remember the natural person. Our most vital inspirations are effortlessly ours. I want us to see how many of our beliefs are the result of the old framework, for in that way we will find ourselves releasing ourselves ore and more, so the our own strengths come to our support.