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Think about this: You are a human being, the most complex organism in the world. You think and behave. You communicate and you need. But what if all we needed were the essentials of life, whatever the essentials are? Can you define the essentials for yourself? And if you had these essentials, would you be happy?
This is about your life. This is about your time on this planet. What are you going to do? Will you be remembered? How long will your obituary be?
This is your life, what do you want to do? Has it ever occurred to you to do what you want to do? Not that I am suggesting shirking responsibility. But who are we responsible to first, someone else or ourselves? Of course we are responsible to ourselves first, how can we not be? Charity begins at home. Take care of yourself before you take care of others. Of course, if everyone could take care of themselves, then we wouldn’t need charity would we? So those of us who can take care of ourselves should feel lucky, good, independent, fortunate, excited, and the list of good feelings goes on.
You see you are lucky; you can do anything that you want to do. You have choice and free will to make your life anything that you want it to be. You can succeed and fail at a tremendous amount of things in an average lifetime. You will have memories that are just yours and no one else’s. You are a unique individual, and what you do with your life is up to you. Don’t think so? Let me share with you that it is never too late to start something that you really want in your life. Your success is up to you, and how you live your life is up to you.
What you contribute to the people around you and your community is up to you.
This is your life, not someone else’s. You are here for you and no one else.
Do you think this sounds selfish? Is it bad? If you do not take care of yourself, then who will?
The first notion that I would like you to firmly believe is that this is your life, not someone else’s. You make choices for yourself first, not other people. If you are not happy, then the people around you will not be happy.
This is your life. This is your time on the planet - use it for you.
Now this may include doing things for other people, and that is great. It may include doing things just for you, and that is great. Most of us do things for ourselves and other people. Many of us do things for people we don’t know when we give to charity. Some of us do things in public office, or do things for non-profits, or do things that are good for other people, and we don’t expect a large monetary reward. Others of us work to go up the corporate ladder and expect our work to pay off so that we can become rich and enjoy things that perhaps others will not; such as the objects around us, private jets, private boats, estates, and so forth.
Not all of us have the same wants and needs as other people, and why is that? Why don’t all of us want the same thing, to have everything and be waited on hand and foot? Is there enough in this world to go around? Do we have plenty, or is the world short on resources?
Do you have a scarcity mentality or one of abundance? Remember that this is your life, and you can think it any way that you want to.
It is quite apparent that we don’t think alike, that everyone is different from everyone else. To prove this all you have to do is look around and observe.
So if this is your life, why not be free? Why would we subject ourselves to others’ will? Well without going to the philosophy of absolute freedom, we do seem to need certain rules or laws to abide by, otherwise there would be some amount of chaos - not that there isn’t chaos now.
But to have individual freedom and live among people there does seem to be a need for certain character and values.
But this is your life; you can think it any way that you want. But there are consequences to our actions, because we have relationships with others in our society.
So where does this put us all at the end of day? We each have our own life and we should live it the way we want to. We have relationships in this world that we have to acknowledge and be aware of. We can think any way that we want to think. We can think abundance, or scarcity. We can think kind or mean, good or evil. We can have our own success or we can have our own failure, and we can participate in how much success or failure we can have. It is up to us. Our futures are up to us, and our past can be recreated right now by what we decide to do now and in the future.
It really is our life, and what we want to make it is up to us. But let me ask you a question: Do you really know what you want?
If so, can you tell me right now what it is that you want? Stop, do not go forward until you tell me what you really want in life right now.
Can you do it? Do you know what it is that you really want, or do you need to take a time out to figure out what it is that you really want?
I really wanted a philosophy company, and that is what I have right now. People told me that I couldn’t have a philosophy company because it would not make any money . And I say a philosophy company is just the right thing; everyone has a philosophy. Just ask someone if they have a philosophy of life. Sometimes they will say no to begin with, but if you dig a bit you will find that people do have ideas about how to live their lives - all of us do. We may not think of them as our philosophy, but these ideas we have that control our life are indeed our philosophy. It is not other people, nor laws, nor politicians, nor our families or friends, but we ourselves who control how we think and what we believe.
We don’t have to have moral fiber, or good relationships with anybody. We can be gangsters. We can take from the poor and give to the rich. We can wage war on other people and destroy and kill. In fact we do this bad stuff on a regular basis, in the name of God, State, or whatever philosophy we are ascribing to at the time.
Have I convinced you yet that this is your life, and that you can do anything that you want to do?
Well maybe I haven’t done that job yet, convinced you that you can do and think anything that you want. I will say it again: you can have and think anything that you want. But it takes some effort from you. Or you can choose not to put forth that effort. It is your choice.
It is your choice to be anything that you want to be. But what is in that unconscious mind of yours?
I have a friend who just moved from Hollywood to Beverly Hills. He had a long day and as he was driving home he put himself on automatic pilot, like so many of us do. As he was driving he all of a sudden realized he had driven to his old address, where he no longer lives! Oops, time to turn around and go back to the place that you live.
How can you drive through city traffic and end up where you used to live instead of where you do you live? You have to fight red lights, left turns in traffic, mountains of traffic. Wouldn’t something move your unconscious mind to consciousness somewhere along the line on the drive, making you say “hey, I am driving to the wrong place!”.
Have you ever done this? Ever driven home on automatic pilot? How many things do we do that we are not conscious of? We set ourselves on automatic pilot and then away we go. Do you think about how you get dressed in the morning, do you think about how to write with a pen or pencil? How many things a day do we do that we don’t think about. It is a lot. Our unconscious or sub-conscious mind takes over and allows us to do things that we don’t need to relearn.
Once we learn something and it becomes embedded in the sub-conscious mind, it can become automatic. If it weren’t that way, how would we survive? You cannot learn everything every day and be effective. We have to learn things, put them in our mind and let them be called into action while our machines do what is necessary for us to do new things, and stimulate new thoughts.
It is your life, because everything that you put into your computer to use is what you decide. Or did you decide to let someone else tell you what to believe?
When I was a young person we often heard stories about how we would go to the movies and there would be special subliminal messages that would be put into our minds so that we would crave a soft drink or popcorn. And then we would tell stories about how the movies or television put in subliminal messages so that we would buy things. I think this was a pretty common thought when I was growing up, and I am not sure anyone believed in that kind of mind control. Who knows, maybe there were subliminal messages and maybe there still are in today’s media. But I don’t think you need a subliminal message when you can have conscious messages put into your mind by yourself and those take hold just as well if not better than anything else that can be put in there. You have this incredible fertile thing called your mind, and it will do anything that you want it to do. As a matter of fact, as we have talked about, your mind can do anything that you want.
So clearly it is your life. And as much as this is your life, it is also your choice to do whatever you want in your life.
You have all of the opportunity, so why do you have that negative thought? Is it because you do not believe in yourself?
Why not? And who told you how to believe? Now that created quite a storm around world headquarters of Life Motivations yesterday. We started a discussion of religion and what organized religion is or is not. And someone in the office said atheists were really a religion, and just existentialist.
I beg to differ: atheism is not a religion, and existentialists have nothing to do with atheists.
Allow me to tell you that an atheist does not believe in God. Period. So you can believe or not, it makes no difference to me. I personally believe.
An existentialist believes that an individual has choices in life and that the universe is not a closed system, but a universe that is open to all beingness and free will, and that the possibility of God could or could not exist based on the free will of the individual. (I am shortcutting here, but I hope you get the picture.) An existentialist could believe in God or not.
So the two are not the same.
Which brings me to T.J. Simers, that great sports writer for the LA Times, who has his own show after ours on XTRA sports AM 570 Sunday mornings.
Now I have never met Mr. Simers, but I understand he is a big fellow and has a couple of opinions about the world. Very good. He had an opinion about a Mr. Frank Robinson in his column in the LA Times last Tuesday.
Now I have met Mr. Frank Robinson, the manager of the new Washington team that was in first place today, early in the season.
Now it appears that Mr. Simers has had a run-in with Mr. Robinson. That is hardly news, I think the whole world has had a run in with Mr. Robinson- in fact I think that Mr. Robinson is an accident all by himself.
When I was a young kid, 25 years ago I met Mr. Robinson and his wife one day when he was coaching the Giants. He was not pleasant and if he is still with the woman who was his wife at the time she was not pleasant either. As a matter of fact I would call them grumpy, nasty, ugly (on the inside) terrible people. He actually cured me of being a baseball nut, so I could get on with my life and have one (a life that is more than just watching baseball - however if you are an existentialist, that could be a life for you.)
And I noticed like Mr. Simers observed that Mr. Robinson had a limited vocabulary. (I stopped watching as much baseball after meeting Mr. Robinson and started learning a vocabulary, and it is still a work in progress.) It is a good thing he is good at baseball.
Which brings me back to religion, and atheists, and existentialists, oh my! It brings us back to what and whom you believe in. The only thing we think you should absolutely believe in is yourself. If you believe in God, why in name’s sake would He or She decide to make you a sniveling little creature? And what kind of person should you want to be.
So why would you want to be nasty all of your life to other people? Why are some of us nasty to ourselves? And what should we believe in? If you grew up in a religious atmosphere, I see nothing wrong with that as long as at some point you examine the beliefs that have been handed to you. As a potential existentialist I would say to myself that I think this belief might work and this other one may not.
The world today is becoming more secular, and I personally don’t think this is a bad thing, but many people think this is the downfall of civilization. The church and many religions have had, say, a couple of centuries to figure out how the world can be a better place. And many religions today encourage violence among people. Some of the great wars in history have been religious. Can religion be dangerous?
Front page of the LA Times yesterday: Mormon sect takes young boys and drops them off on the road like unwanted pets and tell them to never come back home.
Front page of the LA Times the day before: suicide bomber kills 20 innocent people, as Muslims fight a religious war.
And the brutality goes on in the name of God, and people because they are different are considered bad right here in the good ol’ US of A.
And who should you believe in? What God should you believe and who is going to force you to believe in that God? It should only be you.
Milton the great poet said, “Man can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.”
Do you think that Saint Peter is waiting at the pearly gates to let you into the Four Seasons, or condemn you to Motel 6 for the rest of your eternal life? I mean, I already have my cell phone programmed to call the Four Seasons at the Big Island. Yahoo! That’s where I want to go. What about you?
You see we can believe in ourselves, and I think we must think for ourselves. In so doing we can have the type of successes that we want and quite frankly, (no pun intended) live quality lives (whatever that is). With Success Philosophy, it is up to you.
In our world we can have anything that we want. In no other time in history has so much change occurred and continued to occur to allow the individual the ability to become successful at the accomplishments that they want.
We all have tremendous opportunity and the ability to live a life never before imagined. Don’t you want that for you and your children?
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