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“We all experience life in three phases: the past, the present, and the future. I must examine the past in order to apprehend how to conduct my present affairs, and from the present learn how to create a more enlightening future. William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet and Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850 said, ‘Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.”

“Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person’s metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls.”

“We are the product of our past. We start each day where we left off the day before. Changing the way we dress, where we work and live, or even changing a name does not alter our basic constitution. Transformation of the self requires a radical alteration in the way that we perceive the world and derive meaning.”

“The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas implementing change can establish internal harmony and instate joy in a person’s life.”

“Talking to oneself is a recognized means to learn, in fact, self-speak may be the seed concept behind human consciousness. Private conversation that we hold with ourselves might represent the preeminent means to provoke the speaker into thinking (a form of cognitive auto-stimulation), modify behavior, and perhaps even amend the functional architecture of the plastic human brain. Writing out our private talks with oneself enables a person to “see” what they think, a process that invites reflection, ongoing thoughtful discourse with the self, and refinement of our thinking patterns and beliefs. Internal sotto voice conversations with our private-self provide several advantages, but most people find it difficult to maintain self-speak for an extended period. Internal dialogue must compete with external distractions. Writing allows a person to resume a personal dialogue where they left off before interrupted by outside stimuli. A written disquisition also provides a permanent record that a person can examine, amend, supplement, update, or reject.”

“We become the product of our recurrent thoughts. Writing is one method of explicating upon our thoughts, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas, and editing our fragmented beliefs.”

“Disturbing encounters in life spur reflective thinking that jars a person from his or her exhausted ideologies and way of living. A person who lives passionately will develop a philosophic outlook because the road of excess leads to knowledge. Enthusiasm will frequently make a person look foolish, and result in intermittent periods of despondency and self-questioning, yet only exuberance and a degree of risk-taking leads us to wisdom.”

“Self-knowledge is the foundation stone of every principled person, and any changes of a person’s mutable character commences with an extensive course of self-evaluation. Personal evolution is a product of the independent choices we make. Progress in the development of oneself depends upon how honestly a person judges oneself, and what corrections a person makes to align their character with an ideal version of a self.”

“Despite the personalization of life’s events, all people largely experience the same general transformative stages of life and eventually we all encounter a row of similar tragedies. We do not experience identical lives or exemplify replicable personalities. Every person is a receptacle whom is capable of experiencing the full gamut of the entire human condition. Our lives act as a period of apprenticeship, which we devote laboring to discover the truths that we can live by.”

“Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person’s unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person’s exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought.”

“We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.”

“Self-mastery involves a studious account of all aspects of human life and developing a comprehensive philosophy for living without fear or anxiety throughout the remaining years of a person’s life. A person must live within the limits of the human condition, which does not justify giving into all of our destructive impulses or living a pleasurable and guiltless life. Self-mastery does not require a person to live a life without passion; rather, it entails channeling vibrant personal passions into living in a virtuous manner of created beings.”

“Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates.”

“We script our own psyche. We each journey alone. The path that we take through life proves to be every person’s supreme test of mental, physical, and emotional stamina, and the final determiner of his or her intellectual, ethical, and spiritual attainment.”

“People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle. The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas”

“Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.”

“Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.”

“Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.”

“There is no pre-mapped intellectual topology path leading to truth. Truth is a process of conducting a searching investigatory dialogue with oneself in an attempt to examine and discern the contents of a person’s own mind. Every person must ask himself or herself what is essential in life.”

“Each of us is the enactor of our personal saga; we create the phantom of the self. We are the principal character in our personal story, as well as witnesses and reactors to the storylines of other persons whom we adore. We are each the composers of our evolving personal story; we are the protagonist of our personal life story.”

“Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.”

“Although our intrinsic nature and unconscious processes, which defy human cognition substantially influence us, every person possess a liberal dosage of personal autonomy to determine the ultimate essence of their existence. Nature’s endowments enable every person to declare their determined purpose, and deploy the human allotment of free will to pursue their driving passion. With courage, creativity, and effort every person seeks to realize their ultimate embodiment.”

“Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.”

“The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.”

“Wrecked and despondent at midlife, I need to undertake a strict personal evaluation that will lead to personal transformation. I must be willing to start afresh and attempt to make myself anew. In order to begin all over and not culminate in the same deadhead rut as before, I admit to harboring personal insecurities and boldly confront my greatest fears. In order to establish an altered foundation that will support a revised self, I commence by asking the pertinent questions. If I run fast enough and long enough, can I quash slavish personal demons and capture an elusive self? Can I exercise the self-discipline to eliminate the artificial screens that I hide behind in order to peer out at the formidable world? Do I possess the personal audacity to explore unfamiliar terrain and the internal grit to dual the primal flex of nature’s power while accepting on equal terms the thrall and tragic beauty of surviving in a violent habitat?”

“Do I live out the remainder of my life striving to increase a mental storehouse of intellectual knowledge or by expanding a state of conscious awareness? Should my ultimate goal be to decode all the paradoxes in life or nurture a state of cognitive awareness? Should I strive to develop internal peace, silence, and tranquility? Must I rely upon the intuitive self to reconnect innate root structure and link myself to the essential means of living life deeply? By courageously striving to conquer illicit personal desires, can I develop a state of mirror-like purity of consciousness that allows a person to serve as a gracious and unbiased witness to the surrounding world?”

“The greatest gift that one generation bestows on its successors is striving valiantly to make every day of a person’s life count by working to enhance human knowledge and teaching what we learn to willing learners. Every generation of human beings owes a debt of immense gratitude to the forerunning generations who worked to solve problems that bedevil humanity and for exhibiting a profound reverence for all forms of life.”

“What insistent questions must I ask and answer in order to uncover the essential truths for personal survival? Can I frame the crucial questions that self-revealing answers might stave off instant disintegration? Can I find a subject of intellectual investigation worthy of creating an enduring legacy? How do I eradicate from a secretive, brooding, and shut-in mind the insidious and incapacitating thoughts that turned me into an inert maumet or an empty-headed person? Must I accept the rheum of my timid meagerness? Alternatively, must I expunge all mucus remnants of my diseased former self? Can I shock myself awake from a zombie-like state of spiritual deadness? Can I create out of the phlegm of a frozen mind a new Adam that walks and talks for me? By destroying a former self, can I save myself and create a vessel of lifeworks that carries a stream of earnest thoughts into the minds of future readers?”

“Should a person devote their efforts to achieving their maximize potential, or dedicate their talent and abilities to accomplishing worldly projects that improve other people’s standard of living? Is it possible to be happy irrespective of the lack of financial remuneration obtained through personal efforts? Can a person attain happiness by discovering, developing, and honoring their aptitude and skills, working diligently to improve their own life and other people’s lives, while also striving to integrate all divergent aspects of their personality into a unifying self, i.e. integration of the id, ego, and superego? Can a person achieve a happy and meaningful life by pursing an artistic life of creation? Does granting ourselves free rein to produce artistic embodiments depicting the elemental evil underling our base nature rivaling with our preening desire to engage only in goodness inevitably give birth to our textured spiritual awareness?”

“Is it absurd compulsively to labor in an effort to express the present crucible of our earthly reality conjoined with our punch-holed dreams? Does penal work on a chain gang dull the senses or does all honest work give birth to a person’s creative sensibilities? Must we actively participate in all the evocative activities of life or risk becoming forever stymied by indifference, self-doubt, and by the petrifying summons of self-loathing? Is it absurd to dismiss ourselves and dejectedly resign ourselves to occupying a windowless soul? Must I accept living as an emotional midget? Should I capitulate to stumbling along frozen in a daze of bewildering hopelessness? Alternatively, can I impose a moratorium upon my present suffering and attempt to discern a better way to live? What is the correct path to end suffering and discover joy? No one else is interested in my story, but I still feel an irrepressible need to shape the tale of my travails into a storyboard format.”

“Can a person live without hope? Must a middle-aged man such as me who underwent a bevy of loss and failure aim to summon the interior moxie to watch the sunrise on each new day while wearing a faint smile of hope? Must I stoically resolve to endure bearing the weighty load of previous personal debacles? I gain nothing by wallowing in self-denunciation. Guilt and shame exact a severe tithe. I cannot lead a worthy life by tumbling into alcoholic numbness or a drug-induced pit.”

“Human life might be predestined or susceptible to a modicum of alteration through a determined act of free will. Who is the warden controlling my fate? Can I create a new self-governing overseer to guide me through an underground tunnel of repressed desire? Can I inculcate myself from a diseased mind by discovering freedom from suffering? Can I chisel out a paradigmatic way to live righteously? Can I cut a groove in my heart and discover the lightness of soul that I seek? Can I discover a hidden key of enlightenment that allows me to manumit my enslaved spirit? Can I put an end to the atrocious evilness that haunts my existence? Can I burn a neural route through my brain that releases the intolerable pressure searing my tattered soul?”

“Human evolution is essentially the progression of information gathering (knowledge) and consciousness, or the advancement in wisdom. A wise person is willing to learn at all stages of life by using their cognitive abilities open-mindedly to examine contradictory beliefs, and rationally meld various schools of thought into a living philosophy, developing over time a logical and systematic method to maintain and evaluate oneself in order to assist a person not merely survive but thrive.”

“Regardless of the physical world that a person finds himself or herself mired in, everyone can attempt to control the angle of their psychological reference point through constructive self-evaluation and by conscientiously refining their heightened cognitive viewpoint in order to revise and upgrade their mental autobiography. Apprehending our self and assessing our place in the world is an inherent activity of all human beings. Each one of us must make our own way and determine how to fit into a world that is constantly changing. Each of us posits our perception of a self and makes conjectures regarding how the world functions.”

“Our genetic map makes us human. Our physical and emotional genomes establish the baseline for us to operate. When we strike out in the world, we seek out vivid encounters with other people and nature that speak loudest to ourselves. What we make of our brilliant experiences modulates who we become. The way we think, feel, and express emotions enables us to personalize our experiences.”

“In order to make a lasting contribution to humanity, we cannot allow other people’s expectancies to limit our development or restrict our dreams. We must live our own lives unaffected by other people’s expectations.”

“Self-image is the product of our very own spin machine. Revolutions of long-term memories and the gyrations of short-term thoughts fabricate the epicycle of our present self-image. Once a synchronized self-image is developed, the human mind exhibits a tenacious tendency to maintain that centralized self-image through selective recall of prior events and by displaying a corresponding perception bias in interpreting present day experiences. In short, once we come to a firm belief of what we are, we exercise various mental and emotional prejudices to confirm and sustain our self-image.”

“Dangerous falsehoods prevent a person from maturing into his or her essential self. Recognizing personal fictions is the first step in self-healing and personal transcendence. Americans tend to focus on obtaining exterior symbols of success rather than working to awaken their consciousness. Valuing people by their usefulness and richness discounts the innate dignity of humankind. The quality of a person’s consciousness determines his or her capability to experience bliss. Ego gratification represents the darkest part of human nature.”