Let’s Question Our Beliefs About Life
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Good evening.
It’s been interesting to listen to people talk about what this class is going to be like. And I’m not sure anyone knows including myself. Who’d like to think somewhat about the whole concept of life. Because we tend to think of life in segments, often in one segment such as a particular life experience. And in dealing with the concept of life, we often come up with some very interesting beliefs. Beliefs relative to age, beliefs relative to either the presence or absence of life, and beliefs that can cause us difficulties and keep us from expressing life to its fullest extent.
If you stop to ask yourself, what do you think about life, life itself, your life? How do you see life? Often we tend to move in a very much physical way in our thoughts about life. We see life as a process of growth, from infancy, to the child, to the teenager, and then moving forth through the educational process of growing up, getting a job, often getting married, having children, completing their education, retiring, and dying.
And if this is all that there is, and I suspect this is what the author of that song a few years ago had in mind, Is That All There Is? Then we can understand why people have a sense of futility often about life, sometimes a sense of frustration, and even boredom.
If we begin to look at life as a continuous process, a process that did not begin at birth, nor does it end at death. A process that includes birth and death and rebirth and regeneration. If we look at life from this broad perspective and seeing all the different elements of it, it enables us to be much more excited about the whole process of life. Because we can actually exist without ever really living. When we go only through this normal procedure of life, often we do not truly live. We seem to just go through stages and nothing much happens.
Do you ever find that life becomes dull and uninteresting? Certainly, as true students this should not be the case. What does it mean to you to live? How do you see yourself in relationship to life, and to the process of living? What does life mean to you? For these are questions that no one can answer for you, because we each have a different attitude toward it.
Often, we have not even given consideration or even intelligent attention to the whole concept of life. We’re in the midst of it and yet we haven’t even stopped to think what we are in the midst of. Tied in with this life as a process, then we would need to move into perhaps a little deeper self-exploration and ask ourself, “what is the purpose of our life?” Not in a general way. Because it’s easy to talk in generality. It’s true students are remarkably good at this. We need to get specific.
What is the purpose of my life? And in order to answer this question to any extent, we have to start asking ourselves some other questions. What do you believe about life? Do you believe that life is simply a very short span of existence? What do you believe about the life as it expresses through your body? Do you see your body as subject to deterioration, to aging, to all of different types of influences from the outer?
How do you see your connection with other life? Because there is other life other than human life, with which we are involved?
Often, we try to unravel the mysteries of death before we ever get around to considering life. And you will often find, just as last night I found in the telephone conversations over radio, people are much more interested in reincarnation than they are in living.
And sometimes with our new interest where we are no longer so afraid to talk about death, we get involved in that also, yet ignoring the real process of living, of working, of developing, of bringing forth the potential that is within us in and through our life’s experiences. We can consider a broader aspect of life, and also our individual life and how we fit into this broader concept of life.
So it would seem most logical and reasonable that we have a good understanding of life, and that we began to start to live fully and effectively and dynamically, right here and now as a first step. It’s all right to consider the other parts of the process of life, and they are very interesting, but I doubt of any more interest than life and living today should be.
You are a living soul, here to unfold the divinity that is within. Here to unfold the unlimited potential of God. And in doing this, we discover that life can no longer be lived just from an outer perspective. But to truly live, we start on the inside. Life is lived from the inside out, and not from the outside in as we often attempt to do.
There are many barriers to the expression of this true nature of ours. There are many barriers to the expression of our divinity. Not outer barriers. These outer barriers are but the result. There are wrong beliefs that we entertain. Wrong beliefs about our bodies. Wrong beliefs about our minds. Wrong beliefs about the effect of age upon the mind and body.
And we must learn to get rid of the wrong beliefs. To overcome them if we are to get into the flow of life. Because life is a flowing, moving activity. It is never stagnant. And you find that just as stagnant water gets somewhat dangerous to use, so is a stagnant life. Because the deterioration sets in, because growth is no longer happening.
People often die because they have no reason to live. Not because it’s essential. But they have refused to grow, refused to express the inner divinity. And therefore, they see nothing else to life.
If we consider life as the movement of God, the movement of the Holy Spirit through man, we can begin to see it as an energy force. You have all kinds of energy within you. Sometimes we get a little out of perspective because instead of talking and thinking and speaking in terms of this unrestricted, unlimited energy, what do we do? We talk about our lack of it.
We go through the process of a number of hours of work and go home in the afternoon. And what’s the first thing the starts entering your mind? Probably tiredness, or the desire to stop this flow of life. Because remember, life regenerates itself, if we are willing that it be regenerated. And it does not mean that all activity must cease in order for it to be regenerated. It may mean that there is need for a change of direction, and a change of interest.
But if we begin to look upon life as this moving forth, see it somewhat as a river, because the waters continue to flow. And as your ancient philosopher says, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” Because what happens? The water is changing. Just as the flow and process of life is always changing, if we are allowing ourselves to be involved in this process of life.
As we are created spiritual beings, we are also created with the power of choice. We can choose to grow and to unfold, to stay in tune with this process of life, or we can choose to try to sit still. It doesn’t work very well, but we often try it. And we stagnate, because we are controlled by the old beliefs and the old concepts that have nothing at all to do with the truth.
The characteristic of life is growth. And growth brings forth change. Unfortunately, we have entertained many beliefs about change when we get to be adults. As people become adults, they often feel like, well, they’ve gotten their life stabilized in a certain way, and that’s the way it should be from then on. But that is not to be in tune with life. Because life is a continuous movement and flow and there are going to be changes in the life of any person that is continuing to grow and to unfold.
Examine your present concepts about yourself, about your body and how it is to serve you, or not serve you. Because many people have made their body their enemy. Many people find that they have great difficulty because their body does not seem responsive to them. Often, nothing more than the obstructions that beliefs and wrong beliefs have established. What do you believe about age? Consciously or unconsciously, we have lots of concepts and beliefs about age and what’s supposed to happen to us as a result of the movement of hands around the clock.
Do you ever stop to think about your beliefs about age? We start conditioning children about age from the time they’re born. When a child is very small and he goes to his parent and he wants to do something, one of the traditional excuses for not letting him do it is what? “You’re too young.” And then a few years later, he’s excited about something else and he is behaving as you think he is a little bit younger, and then suddenly, “You’re too old to behave like that.”
So you’re making him conscious of age. That is totally unnecessary, because age has nothing to do with it. We have 40-year-old infants, because of lack of maturity. Just as we have 40-year-old, 6-year-olds. Because the maturity has set in, in some areas of life. The understanding is greater than many adults. We need to be careful that we do not develop a time-bound consciousness in which we decide what we can’t do, and what we can do, because of time alone.
How long do you think you’re supposed to live? We can think ideally forever, but do you really believe that? What’s the traditional belief about age?
[Audience:] Three score and 10.
Three score and 10. This has been handed down through the ages. Somebody wrote it in a book and from then on, we’ve been trying to fulfill it, and have done a pretty good job. And we look at people who extend themselves over that time limit, and you’ll talk about how great they are for their age. Leave out the age. They may be great. But why do you have to tie it to the age concept.
Do you ever notice that if you look up the word time in Webster’s Unabridged dictionary, that you will find a whole column and a third of somebody’s efforts to even define what time is. What is time? Where did it come from? It’s an invention to fan, is it not? It is not a power or a force. And because our beliefs, we have made time a power and a force in our life. Time is important to us. It enables us to order and to regulate our lives in many ways, but it should not set limits upon us as far as the extent of our life and our living is concerned.
Not only do children get indoctrinated to this concept of age, but age has become one of our adults most logical sounding, reasonable excuses. Your child asks you to do something that’s a little bit physical that you want to do, so what do you say? I’m too old. Would be much more truthful to say, I don’t want to, rather than using age as an excuse. We would begin to see a greater movement and activity of life within us if all of us would stop ever using age as an excuse.
Often people go for years getting very little exercise, doing not much at all with their physical bodies. And somehow somebody triggers something off within their thinking and feeling and they think, well, I’ve really got to do something about my body. I’ve got to do something about myself. So instead of using wisdom and good judgment, they go out and expend energies nearly all day in some kind of physical activity. Well, naturally the next day, what happens? It hurts, doesn’t it. And you get stiff and you get sore.
So what do you contribute that to? Usually age. You’ve heard that very meaningless expression that says, “I’m not as young as I used to be.” And we have used age as an excuse forgetting that when we were 16, if we had been doing nothing all summer and suddenly got back into sports practices and so on, we ached also, because of lack of use. Nothing that had anything to do with age. Remember the saying that you’ve seen, I’m sure in many places, more people rust out than wear out. Because of our lack of use, we experience all kinds of difficulties within the body.
So perhaps we need to begin to challenge our concepts, not only about life and the extent of life, but age itself. And remember that life is responsive to you. It is responsive to the movement and the activity within your mind. And it is through this movement and activity within your mind that you can truly learn to live all the days of your life instead of simply existing.
Often because of our lack of understanding and our wrong beliefs, we somehow get the feeling that our body is operating independently of us. But remember you are the authority that your body responds to. You are giving it instruction. You are giving it direction, whether good or bad. And it’s very responsive to what’s going on within your thinking and feeling nature. The more we are able to keep our minds bright and alert, the more we are able to identify in our minds with this universal creative energy, the better our body responds.
Remember that anything regarding life that you have learned that is wrong, you can also unlearn. And just because you have believed something for the last 50 years, there’s no excuse for believing it for the next 50. Because our beliefs should be changing, should they not? Or are you still suffering from that illusion that when you became an adult, you knew it.
Because somehow we have to get to that point that we realize how little it is that we know. Through the activity of our mind, we can expand out, and begin to perceive of a broader range of life. A life that transcends bondage to time and bondage to age and began to move into a greater flow.
If you have not read the book, Live Youthfully Now by Russell Kemp, I would highly advise it. It’s one of the finest books I have ever found, relative to these concepts of life and of youthful living. Because there is no reason for mankind to have to go through life half alive. We should be involved in the process for we are told that he has set eternity in their hearts. This is a long time to be bored and tired, isn’t it?
And we need to challenge anything that is keeping us from feeling vital and alive and alert and awake and aware in life. Because, remember not only does your body have intelligent cells and not only is it responsive to you, but your mind is also.
And this is another one of those areas where adults have certainly come up with some wrong attitudes. And that is with the belief that as you get older, it’s harder to learn and harder to remember. If you don’t want to bother to remember people’s names, don’t. But don’t use age as an excuse. It has to do with our interest, and our determination and what we feel of as a need to remember.
Have you ever noticed that you don’t forget those things that are really important to you? That are vital to your existence. But the things that don’t seem so important at that time, we have a tendency to let them just move out of our mind, and then we tend to use this idea of age and as an excuse.
Your body is filled with something like a hundred thousand billion intelligent cells, and cells that have the capacity to renew themselves, to replace the old and worn out with the new and the perfect. And the renewal process is constantly going on. You are constantly casting off the old and building the new. But you can even cast off disease cells and build more disease cells unless, you are changing your thinking and feeling. But as you are building and integrating health and life field ideas into your mind, as you get rid of the old and the defective, you replace them with the perfect and the good.
So we do go through a transforming process in the body itself as a result of the renewing of the mind. See the tremendous possibilities that you have to begin to tune into this flow of life, to activate the life forces within the body And then to give expression to it in vital, meaningful ways. The quality, the character of your thoughts is affecting the state of your health.
Often we have used poor health as another excuse. And after all, poor health is a socially acceptable excuse, right? Who can blame you for not doing something you don’t want to do anyway, if you’re sick? But if you’re perfectly well, then what do you say? You don’t have a socially acceptable excuse, at least we haven’t made it that way. And often we have tended to be weak enough that we don’t know how to say no. So therefore we get sick in order to get out of unpleasant situations. We get sick as an escape from having to take a strong stand often.
If we experience disturbances within the mind, we find these ultimately out picture within the body itself. And certainly, we are seeing today a renewal of the concept of the relationship of the mind and the body. Because you cannot really separate one from the other. And to think that you can simply treat the body and do something with the life and the body and not do anything in the mind, is simply bringing forth maybe a superficial healing, but it’s not going to last. Because you are one being, you are not just a body that’s treated independently of you as a consciousness and as a mind.
How do you see yourself in relationship to life from this standpoint? Do you see your body as filled with energy, with strength and vitality? Do you see yourself as vigorous and alive? Sometimes people move so slowly in life, you have to look twice to see if they’re really alive or not. Because they’re not really tuning into the life forces which are activated through use.
Have you ever tried to lie down until you really got rested enough that you felt like getting up and doing something? Didn’t usually work, did it? Because sometimes you just get more tired. Because usually what happens is, we have to start the use of energy in order to generate more. And energy is generated with use, not with total inactivity. And this is not to say that the body does not need a normal amount of rest for an individual unique body. But in many cases, we get so much rest that the body functions from a sense of tiredness and exhaustion, because of lack of use.
Often, many of the emotional problems of people could be healed very quickly with some good, strong physical activity. Have you noticed how much faster you work when you’re angry, physically? This is why people often... When you get very angry at somebody and you know you can’t do anything drastic about it, you decide your bathroom floor needs scrubbing. Because it takes vigorous activity and you work fast and quickly. But we shouldn’t have to have anger generate a life with in us. We should be able to work from good emotions and good feelings and simply generate the life that we need.
Look into your own mind and heart to see if you have any attitudes that tend toward the lack of life. We might even call them anti-life attitudes. What habit patterns of thought and habit patterns of feeling do you have that indicate an absence of life or the belief that your body is not going to serve you as you desire?
So often we build great beliefs in the limitation of capacity. The limitation of capacity contingent upon a disease or age and so on. And unthinking people, in their desire to be loving and good, often do the worst thing possible for older people. They try to confine their activities. And you just watch people. You shouldn’t be lifting that. They’re intelligent beings, if they want lift it, let them to do it. Mind your own business.
Because you have people withdrawing from life because others don’t want them to live and it’s done in a sincere, honest attitude of caring. But it’s a bad way to care. To have to try to slow people down because of age, is a wrong thing. Let them handle life in their own way, with what they feel comfortable with. Not only that, it will save you a lot of hassles trying to get them to listen to you anyway. Because remember, it’s better for a person to move on doing the things they’re happy doing than to simply sit there and wither away doing nothing.
I remember some years ago when my father moved in close to my brother and sister-in-law and he lived for many years and worked on a farm and was always physically active. And so they really got caring enough that they were trying to slow him down, what was driving them nuts and him nuts too. So we finally came to a conclusion that even though he is 92, he does exactly what he wants to do and when he has had enough, he’ll quit. But to try to stop activity because we think it’s best for someone, is not doing them a service.
Remember, or maybe you’ve already discovered that sometimes what you think is best for another person isn’t necessarily so at all. Because you’re putting yourself in their place and you are not that person. People, adults have the power to determine what’s best for them and should be given that privilege.
So watch that you don’t tune in to this concept of the lessening of capacities and learn to allow people, yourself included to do what you feel like doing without having to stop and ask yourself, well, how old am I and does this fit into my age pattern?
Haven’t you ever noticed that lots of interesting psychology books that tell you what you’re supposed to do when you’re 40, and then what happens when you’re 50, and how the body is supposed to act and respond? I have a feeling that many people in our society are trying to fulfill the textbooks, and to live according to what they’re told, which is simply, somebody is thinking that may have nothing at all to do with the truth. There are certain other anti-life attitudes that we should be aware of.
One of them is the tendency to indulge in living in the past. You have all kinds of help in doing this. I’m not sure whether it’s on the market now or not, but a few years ago, there was a magazine on the market called The Good Old Days. Did you ever see that? Because it was extolling the glories of the past, which at that time, there were no more glorious and far less than those of today. But we have the tendency to go back and glorify the past, which in turn prevents us from making the most of today.
Do you have a tendency to live in the past? How often do you talk about experiences in the past? Whether negative or positive, doesn’t make any difference. Because you find often when people stop living today, when their minds have become inactive, all of a sudden they have to revert back over here to talk about what it was like to live. You should be so busy living a powerful and adventuresome life today that, that’s all the excitement you need. Because usually, the past is nothing more than a dream that we have a tendency to dramatize and has little to do with the way it really was at that time.
Another way you can begin to tell if you are indulging in the past, how many times do you tell the same jokes? Have you ever had any that you’ve retained the last 10 years? What about pat expressions that you use over and over and over again? This constant repetition. We need to be aware of these things so that we bring our living up to date. That we live where we are and that’s right here and right now. You have one time that you can live, and that’s today. And it’s up to us to live the most effective, dynamic life that we possibly can on a day by day basis.
Jesus said, “I came that you might experience an abundant life.” He didn’t say an abundant life after death. He did not say that your joy should be full at some nebulous time in the future. He was talking about living right then, just as each of us should be aware of living on a day by day basis to the very highest and best. We maintain anti-life attitudes when we allow ourselves to hold on to detrimental feelings of the past.
Certainly, every person that has lived many years has certain feelings that have come from the past. But to continue to indulge in them, to continue to live in them, keeps us from living today. These may be unpleasant memories. Some experience that we had that we experienced either great fear or a great sense of loss. And rather than working to erase these from our minds, realizing that we’re not even the same person today that we were then, and letting it go, we continue to indulge it.
The same thing is true of resentments and hostilities. Because of experiences in the past, we hold on to them. Do you ever stop and notice your strong dislikes and ask yourself where they came from and how long you’ve been holding onto your strong dislikes? It’s always interesting you can take people back in their experience and begin to look at their past, just as often in psychotherapy, we do go back and talk, find out some great emotional experience you had as a five or six year old that has caused certain reactions today.
But that’s not enough. Because remember today you are not that five or six year old, nor would you even have the same reaction to that experience that you had at that time. And yet, unless you deal with and get rid of the feeling, what happens? You take yourself at 30 or 40 or even 50, and continue to react toward a certain incident just as you did at five or six. This is stagnation. And it interferes with our awareness of life. It interferes with our ability to express life through the body and through the mind.
The past has no more control over you than you choose to give it. And when you’re willing to cleanse your mind of the past and let it go, you’ll be willing to move into a greater experience of living. Often, we find people holding on to the past in whatever way, whether it’s through feelings or memories or whatever, because of the lack of living today. They really don’t want to put forth the effort to live and to live well today.
A lot of this comes from a belief that I believe we as a nation suffer under. And that is, a feeling that somebody else is responsible. Somebody else is responsible for my happiness. What they do or don’t do is going to cause me to think or feel a certain way. But remember you have given up all ability as an intelligent being when you do this. Why should someone else’s problems or difficulties or misunderstanding determine how you’re going to think and feel about life? There is nothing on the outer that should determine your reaction and your experience in life. It is what is happening within you that will make the difference.
Another thing that happens that shows an anti-life attitude, is the fact that we have unconsciously allowed ourselves to get involved in what I term, lukewarm living. Do you ever find yourself reacting to life in a very lukewarm indifferent way? Much of this is because we have learned to be passive and watch the world operate, we think, rather than operating ourselves. How many times do people come home from work in the evening, just stretch out, watching TV, taking all of the stuff that’s happening, true or false, good or bad, into their consciousness because they have become passive?
I hope you’re not allowing the suggestions of these negative commercials to get into your mind, or you got problems coming. Do you ever stop and think that when you are just lying there, very passive, that you are taking, you’re not resisting, you’re taking these negative suggestions into your mind? This is what happens. This is the problem that we have with our bored 12 to 15 year olds. And you can become bored with life at that age because many of their parents have used TVs as babysitters. And life has become a passive thing, instead of an active experience.
So we need to be active. Man is made for activity. He is not made just to sit back and passively watch life move by. So look at the time you spend in passive living and see if this is what you’re really wanting in life.
Other anti-life attitudes come from prejudice. Do you have any prejudicial opinions? All of us do. And prejudice comes in many different forms, in many different varieties. But we often have great prejudicial opinions. Many of which, we have not thought through it all, but we’ve picked them up because those people around us believed that way, we thought that way and we just took them upon ourselves and have kept them with us all this time. And we keep them with us because we built in a nice defense that says, but I’ve always been this way, or I’ve always felt that way.
That’s the first indication you ought to start looking at it. Because when you’ve always felt a certain way, what does it indicate? That you’re not growing. That your understanding has stayed at one point, period. Anti-life attitudes can be overcome. But it takes some determined effort and usually some disciplined effort. We have tended to steer away often from this concept of discipline, because we’ve often seen it as something that’s undesirable. And all it really relates to is the idea of your ability to give direction to yourself and to operate within your established guidelines.
How many times do you hear people use such phrases, “I know I ought to, but...,” or “I wish I could?” All of these show a lack of discipline. If you wish you could, then do it. Because anything you wish you can do, you can do if you will put forth the determined effort. But it not only sometimes takes the outer physical discipline, it takes a mental discipline. And haven’t you ever noticed that it’s sometimes a little harder to, or seems harder to exert the mental discipline than the physical? You know why?
Because nobody can see what’s happening in there. And we have our own little defense system where if you’ve told somebody about your planned discipline, others can watch you on the outside. But we don’t need a watchdog at all. Because we can guard ourselves and begin to watch what goes on within our thoughts and feelings. And see that what goes on is compatible with the idea of effective living.
It is you who must exert the effort to overcome restricting and limiting beliefs about the body and about age and about time. Because remember, in those people, these beliefs have been around a long time. And they often fight a little bit to hang on, just as you have experienced when you try to get rid of an outer habit pattern, sometimes it’s a little tenacious than holding on. But remember, you are greater. You as a spiritual being are created to give yourself direction. And if you give yourself wise direction, it is not that difficult to follow through.
If you want to be able to move with the movement of life and to move in the flow of life, then learn to keep going to keep alive physically and mentally. Don’t just read those books that agree with the way you already think and feel. What do they do for you?
One of the things that happens, I believe notoriously with true students, they get into [inaudible 00:44:35] and they get so excited with all the beautiful truth books that they forget there’s a whole library out there of a lot of things that have nothing to do with that and can provide you with insight on what you’re learning in your truth.
So don’t become narrow. I think it’s rather intriguing that true students often accuse others of being narrow minded and in their own way, they’re just as much so. They just go in a different direction. Expand your mind out to be aware of many things and many ideas. Be willing to at least listen to someone or read someone’s opinions that differ from yours. You might find, you notice a few things. And you may still find that you don’t agree with a lot of them. But don’t just look for support of your own established ways of thinking. You cannot grow if that’s all you do.
I’ve often said that so often we get to the point that we think we know a great deal that, it’s very healthy to go into a large public library. And just walk down between the shelves and look at the titles on the shelves and see how many things you don’t know the slightest thing about. And yet the mind is being used for nothing. There are so many vital, interesting things to learn in our world that we should never be bored. Because in our one life experience, we really learn little about few things but we can begin to expand out if we are willing to put forward that effort.
We need to be interested. Interested in what’s happening around us. Sometimes we can become as true students, very self-absorbed. That we become actually self-centered. And we’re not even aware of what’s happening in the world. And we think this means we’re spiritual. Not at all. You’re here to upgrade your world and to apply your understanding in the world to make it better. And you don’t do this by walking around with your eyes closed. Some of your greatest education comes through nothing more than observation without judgment.
We tend to observe, but we make all kinds of judgments. But your growth comes when you learn to observe. You can learn more about human nature by observing people without judgment than you can about reading 500 psychology books. But remember observation without judgment. Because we have often conditioned ourselves to be very judgmental about what we see, and particularly where people are concerned. But if we learn to observe, we will expand the horizons of our mind and we will also expand our concept of life itself. We need to be interested and aware of our world.
Have you ever driven to work and not seen a thing on the way? Often we miss the beautiful scenery, whether it’s in spring or fall or whatever, simply because we’re so self-absorbed in getting from this point to that point, that we don’t see anything. We manage to stay out of the way of cars and that’s about it. An awareness of life is important. A sense of being alive and staying alert.
This is important to each of us. Because it’s easy to be bored, but it’s an individual matter. Nothing is boring. You are boring. Because when you are bored, there is a lack of activity within your own mind and you’re stagnating. When life seems dull to you, it is because you are dull, not because life is dull. And what’s happening within you is dull. Keep alive and alert and interested in life.
We need to be willing to talk to new people, to expand our relationships with people. Human beings have a remarkable tendency to get themselves in little groups and be afraid to explain and doubt and get to know many people. And what usually happens in little groups is people start meddling in each other’s lives. And this becomes destructive rather than a meaningful experience.
You certainly have through your awareness with of our [inaudible 00:50:48] program. So great possibilities of meeting lots of interesting people and learning lots of interesting things if you are willing. But if you center in with just one or two, you have missed what I feel is an important point of your whole experience.
Talk to new people, share ideas with other people. Because you will find that often, by so doing, you’re even re-living your own motivation in life. You get excited about things that before had not been exciting. You become interested in things that before you had no interest in.
We need often to renew our life motivation to get ourselves involved more fully in the process of life, where we’re working to achieve certain good. We have goals in mind that we’re working toward. We have ideas and ideals as well that we would like to see reproduce in our experience. But it’s essential to overcome our inertia.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is when you sit down just to stay there? It has said that one man’s most difficult things to do was to overcome that initial inertia. Haven’t you ever noticed that when you have a job that you know you need to do, that you really don’t want to, that thinking about it over several days time, is much harder than the actual doing of it that when you finally get to the point that you’ve got to do it. Wouldn’t it be great if we would learn to act upon ideas quickly and not sit back and dread.
And this is what had happens with students and papers they have to write. They have weeks to do [inaudible 00:53:20]. And what happens? They wait until that pressure point that it’s got to be now. By the way, I don’t accept late papers. So [inaudible 00:53:36] to do what you need to do. Don’t wait because there’s never going to be a more opportunity to learn. Your opportune time come when you decide that it is.
[the recording of the last two or three minutes of this talk is distorted and inaudible]
