A Midwest Journal

Here’s a new book, just published on Lulu. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the original “Go Thunk Yourself!” Another tool you can use in your arsenal to solve your day-to-day problems.  Many of these essays may seem familiar, since you’ve seen them on this blog. (Don’t worry, I’ve left plenty of controversial material in there for discussion and raised eyebrows.)

Here’s the back cover, so you can get an idea:

Through all the books I’ve studied and lectures listened to – as well as my own research and tests down this line — it has become very clear to me that we each already have all the Freedom, Happiness, and Peace we could ever want. It’s just sitting there waiting for us to recognize its presence in our nature. Just waiting for us to let our own light shine.

That’s the secret people have been looking for all this time, the one which the self-help guru’s will sell you unlimited books, CD’s, video’s, and personal consultation to help you find. But I think, like Dorothy with her slippers, you eventually find that you’ve had the solution all along. And also like Dorothy, you have to make the journey before you’ll believe it’s that simple.

All this data has been known through the ages, hidden in dusty tomes and remote library Archives. Only in our modern Internet Age has all this become available, literally at your fingertips. It has as well become not only easier, but absolutely vital that each person take what can be grasped and experienced from this “virtual buffet”, and let the rest go. And as you now have to choose for yourself, the truth within will to start shining out on its own.

The trick is this one, simple datum:

The limits you have, the only things holding you back, are those you have accepted.

And these limits are all additive, not natural.

All the Freedom, Happiness, and Peace you want is already found within you, so to speak. It isn’t found by attending certain political rallies, or as a martyr for some cause. There is no government which can guarantee you any amount of freedom. No amount of money can buy it. No specific inherited DNA allows you to have more or less Freedom than the next fellow. And, likewise, no external person or thing can, of itself, actually limit your Freedom, even in the slightest.

The amount of Freedom, Happiness, and Peace you can have is dependent on yourself. You set your own limits to what you experience, every second of every day in your lifetime.

(From the Preamble)

And the Table of Contents:

Table of Contents

Part I – Masterworks on Personal Freedom 1

Prelude 1

Forward 6

Introduction 12

Dale Carnegie – Certainty is Key 18

Napoleon Hill – Fuel A Burning Desire 25

Charles F. Haanel – Understand The Universal System 31

Wallace Wattles – Give Value in Excess 45

Earl Nightingale – Know The Strangest Secret 51

Serge Kahili King – Live Lessons from Long Ago 62

Part II – Releasing Your Freedom Essays 70

Section I – Getting Started 70

An Introduction to Lester Levenson’s Releasing Technique 70

The Way: How to Begin – as Freedom Takes Over Your Life 74

How to Get Everything You Really Want Out of Life – Easier Than You Thought… 77

The Great Releasing Technique Experiment – Freedom with no cost 80

How you Release – Simply, Easily, Effectively. 83

The 7 Simple Steps to Releasing for Personal Development 86

Be the Author of Your Own Life Story. Truth and Responsibility 89

Section II – What This Can Mean for You 92

The Less Important Live Among Us as The Greatest. 92

Speed up and Get There Faster Without Moving at All. 94

The Unimportance of Importances 96

Get Everything You Want by Giving Everything Away 99

How to Make Your Own Luck 102

The Universe is One Big Joke – and We are the Punchline, not the Butt of it. 105

How I Get Rid of Nagging Worries and Stress 107

Section III – The World is Just as You Create It 110

All God’s Children are Kahunas… 110

Love and Life Without Limits 114

What We Are All After is Both Different and The Same 117

The Trick is to Get the Ego to Undo the Ego, the Mind to Undo the Mind 120

Taking the Easy Way Out to Personal Freedom. 123

How to Take Control Over Everything that “Happens” to You. 126

How Does Helping Others Help Me? 128

Section IV – Ultimate Freedom is Already Within You… 130

Not Just a Board Game: Live for Others in Order to Improve Your Own Life 130

How You, Me, and the World Around Us Actually Works 134

Lester Levenson and the 7th step of releasing 137

Getting Your Life in Order – Cleaning Your Room 139

How You Can’t Win Them All, and Why You Shouldn’t Try 141

How Can “What am I” Achieve My Personal Freedom? 144

What is Your Path – How do You Find Your Way? 146

So Now You Know Your Path – What’s Next? 149

Part III – Freedom Summary and Action Steps 151

One workable approach 152

Daily Schedule 153

Additional Resources – Addenda 155

Basics of Releasing 155

Cults and Governments: Make Money and Prevent Freedom 159

Introducing Median-omics – The Study of Life in the Middle 168

A Commentary on Haanel’s Master Key System 178

Additional Resources – Links 269

Of course the author has to do all the heavy lifting on this promotion, so I’m busy at this now.

It’s currently available on Lulu, so go and visit for yourself.

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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.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

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

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This  may be best discussed as a complete theoretical concept – figuring that the people who read this will find it intuitively, all buried in some stretched mathematics. They’ll skip down to the best part – and others who aren’t ready won’t see it at all, but just think I’m over the edge… Which I am, after all.

And this essay is also kept overlong on purpose – just to show the point that most people won’t actually use the data. The vast bulk of Internet users live on instant gratification and won’t bother. Those who are willing to suspend disbelief and do the hard work of research to follow their heart – those are the ones who have that very tiny chance of making it.

It’s not any government who is going to help you find your freedom. Nor any particular belief-system. Just you…

Natural Distribution, the Bell Curve, and Life

This is a natural distribution which you see in nearly everything around you. It tends to pull order from chaos if you can line up the data with the right comparative. (Told you this would get thick real quick…)

Now, any of these distributions has the 20/80 Pareto Principle in it, which then breaks down again around 2-4% on each extreme edge (20% of 20%).

The problem with philosophy and enlightenment is actually their continually reducing results, as these 2% limits continue to interact all the way along. These chain-react all the way up the line. Naturally.

Consider this natural distribution as showing how each level toward attainment works – only a very small handful in every “level” will actually achieve what they are seeking.

Levels of Enlightenment based on natural distribution

What is easily observable is that only a handful of people actually are successful in life. Earl Nightingale laid this out in his Strangest Secret – only 5% in that study were actually able to make a success out of life. Everyone else wound up either just “scratching by” or on the Welfare dole. Of course, these statistics were out of the 1050′s, but these have been examined later and found to be the same percentages.

Between 2-5% actually make a successful life.  (.02 chance)

Now, taking this on up, you’ll then see that the really, extremely and outrageously successful people are just 2% (or so ) of those. The very rich are just about 1 in 10,000 – or close to 2% of 2%. (.0004 chance)

On up from that are the very, very successful, or the uber-rich. These are about 1 in 100,000 or so.  (.000008 chance)

And if you want to wind up on the richest person on the planet list, you are going to have to apply another 2% to that – about 1 in 10 million. (Giving you a .00000016 chance.)

This is what drives scams along. I was just talking with a former scam-coach (he found out he was working for scammers after he had been there for awhile and discovered their actual statistics.) He pointed out their business model actually consisted of finding and selling dupes a bill of goods which had them build their own ecommerce site. Only about 2-3% of these finished building their site. Another 2-3% of those actually made their original investment back. And out of that tiny amount, only about 2-3$ of those then made a real “killing” from whatever they chose. This last bunch are then interviewed in the infomercials (long with scantily-dressed, buxom “hostesses”.

This is also then the same control and approval methods which various companies use to get you buying their products and continuing to support their services. This is the phenomenon which makes “consumers” – which are literally “people who use it up” and customers, which are “creatures of habit”.  (But that is all covered in my lesson series on how to scam proof your life.)

The deal is that they hype these “actual examples” to get you sold on the idea that you could do it. However, the FTC had to crack down on these, which would then tell you that the average results are in fact that you just lose money with these deals. Some to the tune of over $30,000…

Natural distribution and spiritual enlightenment

Same goes for making “saints” out of “sinners.” While both of those terms are inaccurate, they really give us the same points of digression people follow who are going to make their way out of this mess we call humankind existence.

The vast bulk of the people have no clue what’s really going on. They live average lives going to work most of the week and paying out their income to support an average lifestyle, buying and paying off stuff that makes them feel secure. The government takes a huge chunk, as does their union (if they are in that shrinking minority), and more than half of what is left of what they make are sent to the black holes of insurance and finance companies. The average hard-working American, due to credit cards, usually has nearly nothing left to show for their life’s work – which is the exact design of advertisers, finance companies, and any government.

Now, about 2-4% figure out that they can actually improve their lives. These are the people who buy self-help, spiritual, and personal development books/tapes/seminars. The bulk of everyone else gets by with going to church on a regular basis. (The reverse minority are nihilists, who just consider life’s all a loss and that it is basically pain.)

Out of those 2-4% who know there’s a way out, only 2% of those will actually work out what their path needs to be in order to “go free” and “make it”.

And only about 2% of those will then stick to it and follow that path.

But of those finalists, only 2% will actually get enlightened in a given lifetime. Or about 1 in 10 million. Most of these keep it quiet, so you don’t hear much about them. (Follow the Christ’s works and you’ll see the problems he had with charismatic popularity and word-of-mouth advertising.)

That gives us a scale of:

• The mundane “Muggles”
• The Perceptive
• The Genius
• The Skywalkers

Now, the scale doesn’t really quit there, but the levels above enlightenment can’t be described in our words – they can only be intuited or imagined.

Churches, Self-Help Guru’s, and Money

Now, this also explains why there isn’t any money in philosophy and why real spiritual extremists (the guys who made it all the way out like Lao Tse (wrote Tao Te Ching), Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ) – none of these cared a hoot about money or even civilized society as it existed.

They were at or above that 4th level.

So in order to “do” anything with this metaphysical/spiritual stuff on a wide model – society wide – you have to have a lot of people working at the lower levels to keep people involved in it. Not that this either makes or prevents people from achieving actual enlightenment – but it’s a key point of having support groups for those who are between the 1st and 4th levels.

Any government, loosely defined, is a support group. Mostly devoted to the darker side of survival – but still, it supports those contributing to it (particularly those in power).

In all these, people pay their dues and follow along as best they can. They all know that if they keep to what they are seeking, they will find it.

Now, additionally, you won’t find the uber-rich being the enlightened, either. They are still looking for themselves (or looking out for themselves.)

You see, once you get into the third level (Genius), money doesn’t matter. You’ve got all you really need. And most of the reasons people have for keeping this fiction called Money going no longer apply to living – at least Genius’ see it that way. If they need it, it’s there. Otherwise, skip it – not worth investing the energy into it. Look up the lives of Sun Tzu, the Christ, and Siddhartha and you’ll see they just skipped the whole idea of money and what it “can buy”.

Genius live in the intuitional – everything gets provided at that level. But there’s a curious caveat as well. Levenson pointed this out in the beginning of his “Fireside Chat” series, which Larry Crane published. When a person is getting everything handed to them, they have to keep going and move above that level. Or catastrophe happens. We saw this recently in one famed self-help guru who was in the middle of a process where he was pulling in around $400,000 – and some people died. Now he’s charged with manslaughter.

You have to move beyond money or anything it buys, or any identification with a body – and that puts you into that next level, of real enlightenment (Skywalkers).

But there are people around these Geniuses who can “make money” off their existence and actions. And many who know that they have to keep this going in order for them to finish finding their own route to salvation, so they have to build churches and maintain followings in order to support their lifestyle. This doesn’t say anything is bad about this, it’s just a fact of life that “things” cost money. Especially if you don’t get that you actually do make things show up around you – the money aspect is just a frivolous additional exercise. Like Wallace Wattles – what you need will show up for you along the existing lines of trade and manufacturing.

The trick to beating the natural distribution and achieving Enlightenment

The trick is that while there is a small minority of truly brilliant, there is also a minority of the equally-brilliant-but-criminally-destructive.  And these two balance each other out. It’s that old yin-yang thing. The middle route (quite Zen) is the way which actually wins out.  The criminal are those who are really keeping this planet down. It’s their offset which makes this distribution model the way it ends up.  If there were no offset, we’d simply all go free in short order. And it’s the fact that criminals simply can’t get it, so are always lop-sided and off-balance. Their base is destruction; they are always self-destructive to themselves and everyone around them.

But for all those people who are working as scammers and ignorant dicto-crats (North Korea, Uganda, anywhere people are being starved into submission) – mafia types which infiltrate (and run) governments – these are all equalized in the society as a whole, very effectively and at great expense, by honestly for-good-only organizations (Red Cross, among others) and everyone-wins, top-manager networks like CEO Space.

That’s the real reason for support groups like churches, social networks, and clubs like the Optimists. They need your help to keep the balance.

It’s our top minority (extremists) who are able to make it out in spite of. But you also see that the noise the lower end makes is what keeps the whole thing a mess – and so keeps this distribution pattern in place. So only the very few can make it out. (Now, eventually, it’s possible for everyone to make it out – but that’s a complete other story…)

[An interesting sidebar is that the "Middle Ground" is where the enlightened "skywalkers" find themselves. To these, there is no "evil" and "good", but just the whole Zen experience. From that viewpoint, this whole essay is completely an excess. Listening to Alan Watts explains why and how this is.]

How to get yourself enlightened is by NOT going after it

Essentially, you can’t get there from here.

Practically, the leap from Muggle to perceiving your own path out is as wide as perceiving there are geniuses and then becoming one.  And the gap between an operating genius and becoming an enlightened skywalker is even broader.

Again, there is a trick to this. This middle road can’t be described in any of our languages. It can’t be taught; it can’t be studied. It has to be experienced, which is the way of all truth. You can’t “work” at this, you can’t pay anyone to help you achieve it. You can’t stumble on this by accident (although there are plenty of synchronous serendipities to take advantage of — or not.) And when you know you’re there, you are.  Meanwhile, you simply know that something isn’t complete, and so you are still looking…

So don’t think I’m anything above being a genius. If I were, I wouldn’t be writing this – it would just be obvious and not needing the telling. I can only tell you the obvious steps you might or might not take to get up to the level you can then make your own “leap of faith”.

Route to a top end?

Intuition and your own Imagination are apparently the only effective skills you can develop in order to get up to that point.  At least the most effective known at this writing. You can derive such a path from studying as close as you can to what true Masters have said.  But you have to listen to these with your heart.

The trick is to get beyond having to “know” what is going on. You have to get beyond knowing, and find your own intuitional sense.

Of course, this goes beyond printed matter – but you won’t need it by this time, according to sources found to date. The Tao itself is a bit of a comic book, since it says that what can be spoken or written isn’t the Tao – and then continues on to tell all about it…

This starts to explain some of what we are running into in trying to discover this path – and why it’s so “hard” to do. Because you have to give up all the effort you’re expending to find everything you’ve been looking for. (This is as it’s really been there all along…)

Practically, you have to use whatever you are using to get enlightened to un-do their very fact and effectiveness of those exact tools. You won’t need them after that point, anyway. The impossible first becomes possible, and then they both become the same.

Again, words fail here as a description. But the reason for this is because you don’t need them any more. (And because this essay is of course supposed to be motivational, and get you to do something.)

You go to, and then beyond, the level of a Christ, a Buddha, a Master. There are obviously levels beyond just achieving the level of an enlightened being coexisting on this planet. Obvious.

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And we’re going to have to leave you with that. Nothing else needs to be said – or effectively could be.

Cheers.

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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.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

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

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After over half a century on this planet, I’ve come back to the point of realizing that you can only chase your tail so long. Ultimately, you see the senselessness of it. (Now if we could just get that across to our government cronies, both elected and appointed…)

That snark aside, there are a few basics I’ve settled on as basic to everything else.

You may have noticed that I’ve been working over Alan Watts’ lectures and books recently. Right after I’d been working over Levenson’s, Dwoskin’s, and Crane’s material on the Sedona releasing techniques. And that was all after boiling down Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Wallace Wattles, Charles Haanel, Earl Nightingale, plus Serge Kahili King (and now, back to Max Freedom Long – soon to be released as a newly re-published edition on http://gothunkyourself.com).

As I’ve privately admitted, I have little else to say in this area. It’s all over, done, kaput, finished.

But was I actually done with the subject of self-help after all this time I spent in Scientology, Christianity, and all of the above? Yes and No. What remains is application. It’s easy to know about Zen, and some like Watts found it a life’s purpose in studying everything they could in order to lecture and write endlessly about it. But there is a wide gulf of application that remains. Putting all this stuff to use.

It’s not enough to know and write. It’s also necessary to do. Walk your talk and all that.

Now, I am going to tell you right now that I don’t believe in all this stuff I’ve been writing. And, as I cover in my upcoming “Freedom Is – (period)” – your own mileage may vary. Your own path “up and out” of the morass you put yourself in will require different digging and climbing tools than the person climbing next to you.

For me, I have essentially two points:

1. The world around you is as you create it: “You become what you think about.” “The world is what you think it is.” This simply means that the world is your dream to make into reality. And this key point actually creates the rest. If you are here in this space, reading this, you are an individual. Quite different from whether you forward the concepts of the Tao and Levenson, who both hold that you are part of a greater Being and this world is more the sliver stuck in a thumb than actually surrounding you and affecting you.

Of course, this takes some practice to get used to. But you can start with realizing that there isn’t really anything but the “Now” and both past and future are constantly shifting depending on your current creative thoughts. At the extreme end of this, all the physical laws around you only work to the exact degree that you believe in them and hold that faith. Which of course explain all the miracles and magic which we occasionally confront.

2. Empirically, the Golden Rule works and applies to everyone. Again, the Huna, “We are all connected.” So that what you do for or against someone else is what you do for and against your self. Being critical of someone is a useless action. So your own progress, toward whatever goal you might have, is dependent on helping others achieve whatever goals they themselves would seek.

Of course, that means you have to allow others to have the right to think their own thoughts. And create their own lives. Or even destroy them. Doesn’t mean you can’t try to help them live it better – but about 3% are going to work hard at doing themselves in regardless, just the way this place is set up (empirically, anyway.) The “poor will always be with us” – because that is their choice. No amount of Welfare or education or charity will cure it.

I also consider that the rest of the basic 7 Huna principles hold true, as they are workable – to me at least. As long as I believe in them, they’ll keep working and explaining stuff I come across. But you can take them or leave them – your choice.

There are various corollaries which follow – that all the Freedom, Happiness, and Peace you could possibly want are already available. That the only limits you experience are your own. “All Power comes from within.”

So I don’t see that there is a great deal of writing still needed in this area. I have a couple more books to get out (Long’s work, “Freedom Is – “, and finishing up “Get Your Self Scam Free”). After that, I have lots of cartooning to draw and cross-reference in my blogging. Making fun of all the seriousness around us would seem to be a valuable commodity to have. As far as commodities are valuable at all…

But your life is your own. And what you consider how you can live life best is also only up to you. Like me.

I’ve found a deep and lasting peace. Now we can really start to have some fun.

Like Forrest Gump, “…and that’s all I have to say about that.”

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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.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

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

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