Keep yourself to yourself. Not quite in a god temper? Take a little time—count five-and twenty. Our souls are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, or our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves. A man of few words speaks few in vain. Frequently do we labor to secure the things that debase us into slaves, and overwhelm us with calamity. Weak men, who, meddling with things too high for them, do suddenly fall into distractions; which distractions do not only unman men, but they run upon desperate ventures to obtain they know not what. Is it meet to think that a little child should handle Goliath as David did? Or that there should be the strength of an ex in a wren? There is something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a young man’s strength before the object of his first true love. It is the abasement of the real before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real takes vengeance of the man for having trodden it under. The strength of a king is the love and friendship of his people. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything impossibly beautiful, strength has much to do with magic. It requires much personal strength, standing alone against the well-armed batteries of all one’s friends. We can see strength and not simply weakness. That means we emphasize the active quality of the left hemisphere, but in a way quite different from the exaggerated over intellectualization and overachievement drive that have so characterized it in the past. We work with the intentionality that is basic to every person. To cope enhances one’s ability to survive.

There are dormant and hidden assets in every person and within each situation, needing only some kiss of awareness to be awakened and made know. I am not strong enough to put the whole World right, however, even in our weaknesses, we are still strong. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know what masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. The World is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. We can see people in process and not simply as finished products. Each experienced event both constitutes the effect of a configuration from the past and acts as a cause for further configuration in the future. Development and change are more fundamental than stasis and completion. Expectancy, the investing in and waiting upon that which lies ahead, influences the meaning and the management of every present. We have been imbued with “the breath of life” and thereby cannot be active in “our” World. Even in our arrivals, we are still on our way. What power is able to hold in chains a mind ardent and determined? What power can cause that man to die, whose whole soul commands him to continue to live? In battles there ought to be a doubtful fight and desperate end; in pleading a difficult entrance and a diffused determination; in love a life without hope and a death without fear. When provoked, the gentlest spirits are the most determined. It is natural for people, when they set their hearts upon anything, to think everybody must see with their eyes. When the journey lieth forward, it is unwise to look back. We can see places of caring and not merely individual needing care. The setting in which people interact are alive. They influence what does and does not happen. They predispose what can and cannot happen in those circumstances. Healing arises from within the system of interaction. 

Joy has come to live with me. How can I be sad? Happy people tend to have an elevated level of status in the community because they display a picture of mental health. Also, when you are able to brush off negative energy, or not let it ruin your day, even if you have a stern personality, it elevates your status in the social environment. Those who like to hurt others and bully, even if they do not realize it are annoying and looked down upon. After a traumatic event, many individuals experience distress and symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This distress may be highest when dealing with memories, thoughts, feelings, and situations that are related to the trauma. Exposure therapy is a type of treatment that helps one decrease distress about their trauma. This treatment works by helping one approach trauma related thoughts, feelings, and situations that one has been trying to avoid due to the distress that they case. Repeated exposure to these thoughts, feelings, and situations helps reduce the power they have to cause distress.  

It has been proven that strong emotions can block pain. And that is why sometimes when people are weak and not feeling well, if you upset them, the rage in their bodies will overcome the pain and suddenly they become strong. This also suggests that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety. It is kind of like exposure therapy, people may try to hurt you over and over by exposing you to painful memories, like reminding you of a death of a loved one, or making fun of your energies, but after they do it so much you build up a resistance to the stimuli and overcome it, so they lose their control over you. It is the body’s natural way of protecting itself. Kind of like when people insult you frequently or act strange around you, eventually you build up a resistance and ignore it because the body takes sudden and drastic measure to solve an intractable problem.

In order to benefit from prolonged exposure, it is helpful to learn about the common reactions to PTSD. Education allows you to learn more about your symptoms and understand the goals of treatment. It really helps a person to understand why they feel nervous or uneasy, and learn not to run from problems when there is no real threat. Also, one must learn to control their breathing, often times when we become upset we have breathing problems, but must take deep breathes in, through our nose, hold them for a few seconds and release them through our mouth, until are muscles are relaxed. Also, real World practice is helpful. Practice approaching situations that are safe, but which you have been avoiding because they are related to the trauma. An example might be someone who avoids driving because they were in a bad accident. It is suggested to drive when there is less traffic on the road, until you become comfortable again.   

In the same way, people wonder why some are celibate. Some do this to protect their bodies, others become they are a sexual trauma survivor and they may avoid getting close to others. So they may start off by just being in close proximity to others, and until they meet someone they vibe with and feel that they can trust. Sometimes talking about trauma over and over with a therapist is called imaginal exposure. Imaginal exposure will usually help one gets more control of their thoughts and feelings of the trauma. Over time, an individual will learn that they do not have to be afraid of their memories. It may be hard at first and it might seem unusual to think about stressful things on purpose. The ideal is to help one make sense of what happened and have fewer negative thoughts about. For instance, people may make fun of you for getting injured and losing a lot of blood and make jokes about you have a period, when it was actually from a traumatic injure. The more you hear it, the more you let go, and you make even make jokes about it to remove the stigma and let them know they are not bothering you. It also shows them how ignorant they are.   

The amygdala is a cluster of brain cells that determines whether a sound, image, or body sensation is perceived as a threat. The higher one’s serotonin levels are, the less likely you are to feel fear, which will make you less likely to become aggressive or frozen in response to potential threats. So if you are suffering from trauma, it is important to do healthy things that please you like smelling the roses, getting exercise, or listening to soft music. This will stimulate the serotonin levels in your brain, naturally, and make you feel more at ease without medication. And that is why some people find walks in the park so pleasant. The social environment interacts with brain chemistry and just being around other people and making eye contact with them has been proven to increase serotonin levels. However, when people are manipulated into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy, it makes their serotonin levels drop. In contrast, chemically enhancing serotonin levels has been shown to elevate the rank of former subordinates.  I am at peace and rest in the knowledge of love and the divine.  

Human beings tend to not like things to be complicated. We want the answers, the reason, the formula for making things work. That is true mostly when we are feeling mentally meticulous (sometimes we really need to digest the material and think about it) and also when the search for answers is dangerous or painful—when we might have to “go through hostile territory” to get answers. So, I tend to look for simplification. I try to find a common denominator, a theory reduced to a concise paragraph, statement, or better yet, to s simple phrase. And since my favourite subject is myself, I try to simplify my own behavior, as well. Men and women are endowed with every gradation of courage, from the calm energy of reflection, which is rendered still more effective by physical firmness, to the headlong precipitation of reckless spirit; from the resolution that grows more imposing and more respectable, as there is a greater occasion for its exercise, to the fearful and ill-directed energies of despair. Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity. People have a tendency to stereotype or categorize people. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his own reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will and whose ideas will come and go at his command. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people. Let us not imagine evils which we do not feel, nor injure life by misrepresentations. If the majority—however that is defined—do things in a certain way, then what they are doing is right, and what the others do is not. Behavior defined this way is called a statistical norm. If we all agree that fifty-one percent, or two-thirds, or ninety percent represents the majority, then the behavior of that percentage becomes the norm.  

 Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best hell-makers. Whereas the best of our Heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception, for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of our experience. Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: –reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire. We cannot just accept the majority’s opinions of behavior as defining what is right, moral, good, or normal. The nature of men is always the same; it is their habits that separate them. Much of the Sacramento media acts like wild animals and they lie like it is their native language. Perhaps the problem is simply that people in different places do things differently, and that my “different” behavior might be acceptable in another culture or land. This is the cultural relativity position, which assumes that there are no absolute rules. Even today, when the laws forbid it, it is “normal” for reporters to hack personal email, stalk, and slander private citizens. However, still disapprove of or even feels horrified at the idea. So, there is something to be said for relativity. There are cultural patterns in each society and social class that appear strange to people outside of the group. However, this does not tell us if there are any cross-cultural (universal) patterns of “normal” or “abnormal” behavior.  

Hazing, or an initiation, rite, is defined as any humiliating or dangerous activity expected of you to join a group, regardless of your willingness to participate. Almost 2 million high school students, 48 percent of all students who join school groups, are hazed. Of these 2 million students, more than 800,000 were hazed when they joined their sports team, almost 560,000 were hazed by a peer group or gang, almost 300,000 were hazed when they joined a music, art, or theatre group, and almost 250,000 students were hazed when they joined a church group, and 80 percent of college athletes had experienced some form of hazing. Hazing purposely subjects prospective group members to a series of activities, often ludicrous and sometimes dangerous, designed to test the limits of physical exertion, psychological strain, and social embarrassment. The list of silly, stupid, or dangerous, illegal, and even lethal activities actually required by some groups as a rite of passage into groups is long. Examples include holding someone unexpectedly, while someone else hits them in the back of the head as hard as they can; taking students to the river at night and holding them by their arms and legs and you swing them and threaten to drop them in the river; abandoning students on mountaintops or in remote areas in bitter cold conditions without suitable clothing; repeatedly punching the stomach and kidneys of students who forget their parts of ritual incantations; incarcerating initiates in a locked storage closet for two days with only salty foods, no liquids; forcing initiates to abuse alcohol or illegal drugs. So as you see, what some communities deem as normal would be seen as insane and illegal by others. For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. 

Prudent people in other’s matters are not always judicious in their own. Understanding oneself requires a break from assumptions that tend to generate a sense of security associated with self-definition, self-structure, and predictable continuity. Healing allows one to know one’s being prior to any attachment to the image of self, and allows acceptance of the loss of any such image and its relations as the discovery of oneself as a while. The object that was imagined as self is merely the assumption of continuity as a center for perception in time and space. You are not the same person that you were ten years ago. Typically, there are attempts to conceptually enhance this current self by seemingly adding to it a sense of value, good qualities, pride in accomplishments, and security or established existence. Healing is an invitation to a wholeness that already is in process. Wholeness does not have to be constructed or manipulated into being a person. A creative and vital theory and practice emerges in which the traumas of human life are not taken as defining of self-nature. One’s true being is what remains with the dissolution of the false self-oriented dichotomies from which human dilemmas develop because it is simply a defensive façade—one which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, being a mere appearance of being real. 

Rather than reifying (making something abstract more concrete or real) a recurring thought about a continuing entity, insight into human nature is seen to be discontinuous, a break with the past. Thus, discontinuities of life are assumed to be moments in which new openness is possible. Rather than trying to regulate life so as to avoid discontinuity and maintain security, challenges to the previously assumed security are taken as significant moments of present learning. When we move forward and allow ourselves to be loved and love others, the continuity of the self as a normalized assumption of suffering is released.   Relationship is now a field of being, and human relations are mischaracterized if considered as exchanges between separated entities—each one is getting something from another, or manipulating another into giving something that required. When I have courage, I can look at my feelings and do not have to be afraid of them; I know I can handle them and take responsibility for them. I am willing to take this risks, to let go of past points of view, which may no longer be useful, and explore new ones; I am willing to be joyous and share my experience with other, as I experience myself as willing and able to be spontaneous, resilient, resourceful, and cheerful. In this state, I can be a contributing member of society.

My courage sometimes is still more in my head than in my head. However, it is often easy to move from any of the lower feelings up to courage merely by affirming our bravery to look at and handle our feelings. The fact that you and I even want to understand our feelings increases our self-esteem. Despite all of the negative programming and despite the fear, courageous people go forward in life, with no guarantee and not even the knowledge that things are going to get better. They just have faith and trust that it will, which increases our self-respect and respect towards others because it removes a sense of entitlement when one knows that they are responsible for their own feelings, and success. If we are willing to put forth the effort, we can obtain what we want. People who are brave are supportive and encouraging of others, and this allows them to be able to give and receive, which keeps them in balance. Brave people give because others are not looked at primarily as a means of help, survival, or support. When we are in a state of courage, we sense our own inner power, strength, and self-worth. We know that we have a capacity to make a difference in the World, not just gain something from it for ourselves. Because of the inner self-confidence, we are much less concerned with security. The emphasis is not on what people have, but upon what they do, and have become. Brave people grow and benefit from new experiences and are able to admit mistakes without indulging in guilt and self-recrimination. We look within ourselves and examine our belief systems, ask questions, and seek new solutions. 

Nothing can be so great a discouragement to learning, as to find a fellow with only simple nature to guide him, who shall have the impudence to know the same things that learned men have studied so many years to attain the knowledge of. Juries have the effect of placing the control of the law in the hands of those who would be most apt to abuse it. The laws of nature having made one man wise and another man foolish, this strong and that weak, human laws should reverse it all by making another man wise and one man foolish, that strong and this weak. Safe behind that impenetrable shield the law, the scurviest rascals upon Earth make a scurvy use of their scurvy tongues.  Take a break anytime you feel yourself slipping back into old feelings of anxiety, shame, depression, anger, or fear. The arm of the las reaches far, and though its movements are sometimes slow, they are not the less certain. Be sure that all who are enraged against you will be ashamed and disgraced; those who contend with your will become as nothing and perish. Your patient instructions are turned into wisdom, warm blood, and regulations. I thank you for your painstaking cultivation. You, like the second Sun, bring us Sunshine and wisdom. People who need to approach their painful memories through some kind of activity instead of intellectual contemplation often prefer to use the process of investigation and verification. You can do this by talking to others who share the same family history, or were part of very similar families, to investigate and verify your memories.   

I had spent too long dreading the weekends. On weekdays, I was quite content with my life and my relationship. I went to work, had occasional dinners out with friend, went to my spouse’s weekly chorus rehearsal, and worked out at the fitness club on the way home from work three times every week. I also enjoyed my nightly phone conversations with my spouse. We spend almost every weekend together. Ryan and I love going for *drives in the country, hiking, and movies. We cook together and spent hours talking about the weather, plants, life, and architecture. The World smiles when you smile. There is a will to live, and that is fueled by human concern and human companionship. My heart is waiting and waiting. I love lilac you present me most and you are white lilies in my heart. I miss you, every second, every minute in every day. I dream of you, every second, every minute at every night. I have been laughing with you, full of tender feelings; I have gained your elation which only love gives you. You are going to be alright. I do not force my presence when you prefer privacy. I just let life flow, and this creates a genuinely human relationship. With such an invitation from you, reaching out in love is what matters most. When together we experience a sense of continuation with our healthy lives.

You are a living person, one who is respected, cared for, shared with, turned to, relied upon. There is a sphere of sharing when you take my feelings into account in making decisions and carrying on activities. Encouraging behavior possess much real psychic space. Even if the choice is which shirt to wear. Concrete decisions and specific acts are what have enabled us to experience ourselves as a part of life. My love falls in your White Squall, splashing a beam of blue moonlight onto your Albatross. And in this moonlight, your love floats into my heart. I love you for your absolute sincerity. You add something of extraordinary value in my life. You have such warm hands. I hope you are going to be with me when I get colder and colder, right here and right now. Deliver us from sudden death and let me know my end. The point of these petitions is a plea that death not come prematurely and without warning. We want some time to assimilate the reality of God. We want enough time to act wisely in relation to these responsibilities that are ours. We want time to learn to die. We want to participate in and own that which is at hand. I give you my sense of humor, my ability to see life in ways others do not, my genius at putting others at ease, and my gift of lifting a bit of the burdens others bear. I bestow upon you my gift to mystify others with imagination, warmth, peace, purpose—life itself! 

There has been someone rather than no one; there has been something, rather than nothing. And the pain of having lost does not need to diminish the joy of having had. Life is lifted up and thereby becomes part of our truly human destiny. Our faith always looks beyond our little lives to the larger life in God. We are beings of the soul and there is something within us that does not die. You are like the wind in the Spring, tender and warm, blowing gently into my chest and wrinkling my heart. For thou who sleeps in stone and clay, heed this call, rise up and obey, trek on through the Mortal door assemble flesh and walk once more. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body expresses a long way of life. The union is ephemeral. May our hearts be closely together and inseparable forever and display God’s potentialities. We are part of the fabric of the Universe—all are restored to meaningful relatedness. In life there is always more than dreams. You with my hope take wisdom and knowledge and greet honesty, goodness, and resolution. Our best is worth forgiveness for those realities and is worth preserving so that which matters most does not officially go down the drain. Our love is something neither moth nor rain can consume. Life and love are the intensity that flood us in the presence of Heaven. The painful loneliness of unconnected living mirrors the fact that only human responding can heal that most human hurt. I hope someone I love will hold my hand—closeness is greater; love is greatest! 

Thinking of you fills me with energy. I longed to be to you something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to your eyes and brain; and the longing betrayed itself in my reply. Take a few minutes to relax your body and mind. Begin to think about something that makes you happy. Now think about something in the past week that bothered you. It could be something that happened at work, or something a friend told you, or something that annoyed or disappointed you. It could be something you read or saw in the newspaper that upset you. Now, move back in time. Allow yourself, without thinking too long about it, to pull up a memory from your childhood, one that is not really bad or good—something more or less routine. Detach yourself from the experience by pretending that you are the cameraman filming this event for a movie. I was wondering if I should be able to have a work with you before the special snatched us away. The appeal of your helplessness touched in me, as it always did, a latent chord of inclination. It would have meant nothing to me to discover that my nearness made you more brilliant, but this glimpse of a twilight mood to which I alone had the clue seemed once more to set me in a world apart with you. Now, put yourself into the mind of someone who wants to get all the details right. What does the camera see when it films you as a child? Do not go back and become part of this. To my exasperated observation you were only too completely alive to them. You were perfect to everyone: subservient, good-naturedly watchful, brightly companionable, and you harmonized yourself with your surroundings.

We have not since Sunday walked at the castle, and that episode was still so vivid to me that I could hardly believe you to be less conscious of it. However, your greeting expressed no more than the satisfaction which every young man expects to see reflected in masculine eyes; and the discovery, if distasteful to my vanity, was reassuring to my nerves. Hang it, Ryan, I thought you had given me the slip: I have been hunting all over for you. You seem disdainful by your acquaintances. When you saw me, you became alert and expectant, and your lips parted in a smile at whatever I was about to say, and your very back conscious of the privilege of being see with me. You leaned against the window, a detached observer of the scene, and under the spell of your observation, I felt myself powerless to exert my usual arts. I continued to face you in silence, my glance was vacant. Opposing forces, values, and interest are balanced in such a fashion as to keep pleasure in check, and the means to this balance is the budget. Economics becomes the management of pleasure. It is natural to seek more and more satisfaction by consciously, deliberately maximizing all gains at a given moment through budgeting. This position, where we are now, opens the door for consumer economics: the manipulation of goods and services through attaching them to pleasurable states. It also leads to the situation in which money itself becomes a commodity to be sought after, money doing business on its own detached from any relation to the soul of the World.

The psychic starvation brought about by removing soul from the World produces insatiable greed, for when the World is no longer surrounded with soul a vast emptiness intervenes that must be filled. Over the last four hundred years the people in the World have become psychopathic—very successful, very adapted, very clever, but lacking the feeling of affliction. The reduction of soul to economic psychology has made the World sick. Now there is so much sickness to care for it may force us to forget ourselves and return to the World to recover its soul. We are provided with an opportunity to enter into a new age of the soul, a new care of the World soul. As the individual freedom becomes more conscious, group life become less so. However, as freedom strengthens so does the seeds for a new kind of group life, a conscious community of soul with the World.  We can learn another one of the laws of consciousness: Fear is healed by love. High levels of consciousness are in themselves capable of healing, transforming, and enlightening others. Letting go the block to love, our capacity to love increases progressively, and loving energy has the capacity to heal ourselves as well as others. The only drawback to these types of healings is that often the healing is sustained while in proximity to a person capable of radiating high levels of love, but the illness returns when people leave that presence, unless they themselves have learned to elevate their own consciousness. With your love, you create a warm and friendly group.

In this big family, the Sunshine, the sound of the song, and cheerful laughter are everywhere and every moment. I missed you, respected teacher! Cherished in my heart are your urgings like the Spring breeze, the drizzling rain, a bunch of bells ringing in my heart forever. As masters, they appear in a supreme form in which every personal element has been converted into something supersonic, almost remote from the World, or at least not involved in it. One rarely, if ever, meets the happy or suffering individual, through whose joy-filled, sorrow-filled eyes the other Worldly glimmers in a unique personal sense. In this intimacy we find ourselves undivided. When we experience being our wholeness, we are not afraid to experience the truth of the moment, regardless of how things look to the judging mind. The words heal. You taught me how to welcome what feels unwelcome, and that has made all the difference in my life. What I want is to be awake and directly experience deep intimacy with what is. To experience something directly is not to discharge it, deny it, act it out, redirect it, repress it, represent it, judge it, analyze it, make commentary about it or understand it with mind.  We might picture love to be like Sunlight and negative thoughts like clouds. As we consistently let go of resisting our fears and allow them to be surrendered, the energy that was tied up in the fear is relinquished and now becomes available to shone forth as the energy of love.

My love is complete within me, and the Love of God binds itself to me, and will not let go, and we shall journey through life hand in hand. I shall sit in your Presence and learn the wondrous things you will tell me; for you are God. Love sits within me. The increasingly dehumanizing aspects of many jobs and, perhaps, the threat of nuclear or environmental disaster are other sources of uncertainty and anxiety. Thus, people have become more and more anxious, and more willing to admit their feelings of uncertainty. Many are looking for ways to be more open in their expression of affection toward other people (and to receive affection in return), partially as an antidote for this increased anxiety. A person who has experienced a great deal of love early in life has fewer fears and a head start, and this love is intrinsic within all of us. By the very nature of our being and by the very nature of the life energy that flows through us and empowers us to breathe and to think we all have that same vibrational energy level of love within us. As we discover love, we discover true happiness. The greatest good which his mind is able to conceive should be affirmed as a part of his everyday experience. The light of love shines on our daily life and the lighting turns the mediocre gullies and lush forest into legendary mirages. So deep is my love that I am controlled by emotion instead of reason. Your love-lit eyes are like sparkling stars, dispelling loneliness from my heart. All who rage against you will surely be ashamed and disgraced; those who oppose you will be as nothing and perish.