A Midwest Journal

One might think so. Look how they are treating the people who elected them.

The conspiracists are having a hay-day – it seems to get worse with every new administration. I’ve even begun to think that the end of the Mayan calendar coinciding with 2012 was perhaps intended that way – it is an election year and all that…

If there is a self-esteem problem with the government, it is reflecting on the people it is supposed to serve. Look at these town hall meetings where the representatives are nominally supposed to sample their constituents’ collective pulse. Unfortunately, they were apparently sent out with talking points about how to “sell” the government health care reform package. And got widely booed. But then they booed back with Pelosi making references to brown-shirts and “astro-turf” (meaning Nazi’s and fake grass-roots). Unfortunately, the problem is within the government officials we elected to represent us.

So, by extension, their lack of self image is our own lack of self confidence and esteem.

But lets look over government closely. Government exists on a reverse Golden Rule basis. While you are treated only as well as you treat others, and so you get only as good as you give – our elected politicians can only give after they receive. That’s called taxes and pork-barrel spending.

Lobbyist seem to be an exception to this, since they have to deliver a service first in order to get sufficient fund so that they can donate them to re-election campaigns and get the favor of various officials so they can continue to give good service. Company’s with bad service, lobbyists or not, won’t stay in business long – people vote with their pocketbooks.

But government officials (not career employees) and lobbyists have that in common: government exists only to the degree that we put up with them. We give, and expect a return to the degree that we give.

The trick in this, if you study Wallace Wattles’ “Science of Getting Rich” – is that we’ve not actually “taken care with every single bit” of the job we expect them to do. We don’t ask to get a copy of the bills they are voting on in order that we can tell them our opinion of how they should cast our represented vote. We probably aren’t sending them a letter, email, or fax, or phone call about the issues of the day.

To the exact degree we don’t pay attention to them, they won’t then pay attention to us. And so they run on auto-pilot – and listen to lobbyists who see them on a regular basis to pay attention to them.

Now, just ignoring government might or might not make it go away. If people home-schooled their kids, or set up cooperatives to do this on local levels, then concern about public funding of schools would be negligible. If states didn’t accept federal “match this or else” grants, then we wouldn’t have to listen to government mandates for how states should do this or that.

There is a whole course in whether government is even necessary over at TOLFA.us – a fascinatingly logical approach to this.

With no (or severely limited) government, we’d be able to take advantage of more business opportunities – as well as home-based businesses. Simply because there wouldn’t be excessive taxation just to keep all those government employees and programs running.

And you’d be able to simply contract with your doctor for regular primary care without insurance companies and lawyers making your fees go out the roof.

To paraphrase Pogo: We’ve met the government esteem problem – and they is us.

Whatever we want to do for ourselves, it’s usually done more efficiently and effectively if it’s done on a individual or corporate basis than waiting for or expecting the government to get involved. (Katrina aid got worse after the government arrived.) Check this out for yourself and see if it isn’t true for you as well.

And we’d be able to get away from a very small, select group of people putting through some inane mandate that affects people who they don’t even know. Like the HSUS shutting down animal shelters and then killing all the animals in it – while they try to tell us all to be vegans. Or ACORN – what a mess. Not to mention what they are trying with Health Care instead of allowing more competition between state insurance companies and restricting lawyers from frivolous lawsuits (but you probably can’t expect elected lawyers do anything about that…)

My favorite approach would be to really pay attention to the elections and always vote the incumbent out. Public-enforced term limits.

But your own mileage on this may vary widely.

This doesn’t mean you should drop all your Sedona Method release technique approaches and quit releasing on the approval, control, and security that having a government might give you. Practically, we should just work at releasing on having a government at all. And then look what shows up. Allow ourselves to have an orderly, sensible, self-managed planet which lives at peace and constantly works to improve everyone’s abundance.

By working at this, making it a goal, we can all use our personal improvement skills to create this new age for humankind.

That is my hope and wish for this world. I am confident it succeeds.

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(And if this means putting a proxy gnome in your virtual garden – so much the better…)

This is really a very old, old concept which I’m about to bring up – you’ve probably already heard of it or some version.

The ancient polynesians would say, “There are no limits.” You might say they are just being over-optimistic, but practically, they are just saying that everything is connected to everything else.

In many religions, there is the concept that God is omni-present, and some take this further to say that God is actually part and process of everything out there – including you. (Which would explain how God is held to be all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.) So, via God, you are also linked into a massive network…

But lets get back to  you. Just take that simple idea that we are all connected. Not just all us humans, but all us everything. Surely, you’ve felt some connections at time with your pets or someone close (almost telepathic, it seems). And there are many, many stories of plants doing better with being shown affection in addition to water and fertilizer.

But rocks?  Well, we don’t need to go there for now. Just stick with living things for the sake of sensible argument.

The next concept is that if we are all connected, then anything which happens to someone else (or something else) also effects us. While this could explain the efficacy of the Golden Rule, it also tells why mobs happen, how areas can be affected suddenly by wide-spread illness (how the media and government are infecting more people with the H1N1 virus by constantly talking about it), how corporate and state-sponsored cults (Hitler’s Germany) can take place.

OK, if you’ve swallowed this line of thought this far, consider this:

We are all working to evolve and improve our lives.  So anything we can do to improve the conditions of things around us helps us improve personally.

While this last gives us a reason to treat our family and pets better, as well as tend gardens more closely, it also can extend to cleaning our rooms and lawns – which helps everyone feel more comfortable.

The point is that your own personal success depends on how you treat the world around you. No person is an island unto themselves. We all – each and everyone of us, right down to your pet turtle – depend on improving our own life through improving those around us.

Sure, you may not get a lot of feedback from your garden gnome, but keeping the dust off him and maybe touching up the paint every now and then will at least help others when they look at him. (Ugly, neglected garden gnomes don’t invite the good pixies to help you…)

And so that ancient art of designing and maintaining Japanese rock gardens has it’s place, doesn’t it?

As well does the complete wilderness, where Nature rules supreme.

Just wrote this for you to consider and ponder about your life and its interconnections.

Doesn’t mean you can’t stomp on bugs, but give it some thought next time…

And meanwhile, how about cleaning and tidying some area you live in just a little bit. Or spend an extra minute or so grooming your pet – at least give it some more pets and hugs.

Try it and see if your life doesn’t get better this way.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

What do you dream about? How do you look at life? How well do you sleep at night?

What “pops into” your mind, what you dream about – all these things are the result of how you thought in the past, how you’ve programmed your own mind to think.

But the good thing about this is that in order to change what you think about all the time, you just have to change what you’re thinking about now.

OK, let me fill in the logic of all this.

Your thinking process is composed of mental habits you’ve adopted. Shortcuts so you don’t have to re-figure out how to do things. Chronic anything, bad or good, is just a mental habit – a pattern you adopted.

Any habit can be changed. It takes about four weeks of regular action on a new line of thought. If you want to wake up smiling in the morning, all you have to do is to immediately start smiling first thing every morning for 30 days.

Hating whoever is currently President is also the same result – at some point, you’ve started assuming that this person couldn’t be trusted, so everything that person did or said was untrustworthy. And every thought about that person which comes up is tainted negative.

The trick is that when you pursue the negative about anything, you get more negatives showing up in your life.

To the degree you work on the positive, optimistic approach to anything, you wind up getting more good things into your life.

See Christian Larson’s books on this subject. This was the guy who wrote was was later adopted by Optimists International as their creed.

A recent earlier post here told you that a negative is only a misapplied positive – that you don’t shovel out the darkness, but turn on a light (an old, old proverb I first ran across in Haanel’s “Master Key System”)

And the reason I’m up in the middle of my night writing this is some sort of mental loop which kept giving me a “nightmare”.

But being rational, I saw that this was my own fault – I had adopted some sort of mental habit which was bringing me these “bad” thoughts – about some elected politicians, of all things.

Now this doesn’t mean I have to find good things to think about the government or our elected politicians (a clear, un-biased, logical explanation of how government and politicians actually work can be found at TOLFA.us, if you’re interested in sorting out your thoughts in this area.) My own personal policy on this was best summed up by Jesus: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…”

This is why I’ve always worked with individuals directly, in all the years I spent as a counselor and personal consultant – and now as a book writer/editor/publisher.

Any person – you, me, the people around us – they all can control their own thoughts on an immediate and longer-term (chronic) basis. All you have to do is to practice positive thinking to get more positive results in your life. While Dr. Norman Vincent Peale became famous for a book by this name, I’d suggest you read Larson above, or get a copy of Earl Nightingale’s Strangest Secret to understand more of the theory and practice of this idea.

“You become what you think about all day long” – that’s Nightingale’s simple statement of what he found in an old Napoleon Hill book he found in a Chicago used-book store.

If you are having nightmares, or bad thoughts entering your head during the day, you may want to change your attitudes toward whatever you’ve been thinking about.

If you are “stressed-out” over something (which is the prime reason for the bulk of dis-ease which settles in a body, proved over and over by a multitude of scientific studies) – this stress is arguably too many negative thought accumulated as habits in your mind.

All you have to do is to start changing how you think right now in order to change those “bad” thoughts which keep coming in on you.

Start smiling and you’ll start getting happier thoughts entering. You’ll find more happy things to think about. If you develop this as a simple method of approaching life, then you will start finding many better, more optimal solutions to the problems which come into your life.

And if you encourage others around you to smile when they face adversity – and to encourage others around them to do the same – our whole society could evolve quite rapidly.

Because life operates exactly as Earl Nightingale pointed out: You become what you think about. And his own prescription follows this – get a note card and write out on it exactly what you want to achieve, but write it in the past tense as if you’ve already achieved it. Now, on the other side of this card write the three lines from the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek and ye shall find, Ask and it will be given, Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” And then read that card – both sides – several times every day for 30 days.

That is the way life works, isn’t it? If you are looking for answers, you find them. If you are asking for trouble, it comes your way.

If you have nightmares, get up and start thinking about some great things you’d like to bring into your life. (And if you have a government job, you might consider finding a more optimistic line of work…)

But the more you think about the great things coming into your life, the more likely these great things will come to pass.

And if you cherish your nightmares, and like to lead a life out of a Stephen King novel – well, I’m not going to tell you to change anything… Life is full of choices and your current condition is only and directly the result of choices you’ve made. Any chronic condition you are experiencing – good health or bad, riches or poverty, happiness or sadness – these are all the result of choices you’ve made, which all began with how you chose your thoughts.

Take this advice: choose to change your mind. Put your attention on the most positive side of anything you face, how you can turn any adversity into your advantage. This is how you can win at anything you attempt. Look up winners and you’ll find that this was their constant attitude during any competition or effort – they only had attention on that positive goal they were going after.

I could go on for hours on this subject.

The deal, the bottom line is you. What you think right now determines your life and what happens to you from here on out. Fill your thoughts constantly with the negative aspects of the world around you and it will turn sour. Constantly find the optimistic side – that silver lining behind every dark cloud – and your life will be filled with joy.

Chose wisely. It’s your life you’re running from here on out.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”