I wasn’t sure what awesome thing I was going to say about this simple book, but I guess I’ll just say that (even though I’m not as shy or hostile about money as I used to be), I was surprised how practical Richard C’s mindfulness and common sense tips are to the world of everyday life and getting on with things. The psychological community doesn’t have to be shy and hostile about money; the business community doesn’t have to be empowered-but-still-neurotic normies, you know.

People don’t believe in coming together, right now, but if we make it? We will.

…. (Habits) Public transport isn’t as usable in most areas of the United States, except for special trips maybe, and cars don’t have to be bad, but I get it. My commute or whatever is very brief, not like a suburban professional commute, but it is one of the most angst-y parts of my day: it’s one of the most unpredictable and triggers my irritable monk nerve. (Unpredictable? Bah, humbug!) I need to transcend my person history pattern.

…. I doubt that Eckhart Tolle read all the Richard Carlson books—he reads very few and kinda involved, theoretically books, and his reading is only one part of his theory/life—but it is cool that Richard C calls mindfulness “presence”, basically. (They just came to that both of them independently, right.)

But how connected work is to the rest of life, right.

…. “Avoid ‘if only, then’ thinking”—ie, If only a bigger house or whatever, then happiness.

On the one hand, you can totally ignore the big house question if you want, but the way to really get it if you want is a little different—and the total opposite of ‘if only, then’: ~I am happy, therefore, I will have a big house.

(shrugs) Right? Try it. It’s a lot better than, “I promise to be miserable until”, don’t you think?

…. And yeah it’s the principle, “ask for what you want, even if you might not get it”—sketchy things can happen out there, and people don’t always get what they ask for from life. I still feel like just the asking from life and bringing your best game, brings its own reward, regardless of what happens in the arena because you left the safety of where you once were.

…. But yeah: “Remember the Whole Story”. I have goals around money that I don’t often see all that much progress around day to day, but the reason I have those goals at all is because I had success with my other goals, right. Sometimes things semi-predictably go wrong—I had a feeling that Mercury starting the slide into retrograde, (actually, it was specifically the Mercury-sliding-into-retrograde full moon eclipse) would make the short-game company, (smash the consumers! World capitalist revolution! Down with our customers!) kinda finish crafting their insult list and try to smash and grab what they could get realistically, right: actually, it ends up that it was more like: “punish the customer now. Figure out how that helps anything at a latter time”, right….

But yeah: the other day the guy basically had this attitude was he was going to punish me for asking where the vegan yogurt was, while he was packing out the regular yogurt. It was challenging because he didn’t just want me to know that he didn’t care: he really wanted to engage—he really wanted you to know that you were wrong, right. I ignored him: but it was a process.

So yeah. People out there, right….

But the whole story is, you know: I may be like a younger person financially speaking because of my earlier struggles, but just stepping out into the world at all—where people for some ill reason think that they’re going to get ahead by cheating you and punishing you—was the result of my earlier goals being basically successful…. It would actually be hard to just list all the roads I came to a successful end to, right…. Everything else that happens is just part of the adventures in the sequel to the original story, so to speak. A lot of people probably wouldn’t even read the sequel, but they’d be like, Yeah, that kid was alright.

…. It’s like that scene from that movie, the third Michelangelo Antonioni movie in that trilogy—and almost the only M.A. scene that had like a fucking purpose, right; slow movies are great, but if they’re subtle to the point of not saying anything, right…. But yeah there’s the guy, the rich guy, and he lost all his money (or whatever) because everybody lost all their money (or something), because the market got all sad and decided to nom on everybody, right~ and the guy just sits down at a table at a cafe and as he’s getting coffee or whatever Italians drink after they just lost a lot of money—it looked like coffee, only maybe it was like, ~Italian~, right—and he doodles these little girl doodles of flowers or whatever, and then pays and leaves his little doodles behind, like…. Well, tomorrow I make money again like before, basically.

Basically.

…. And I would like to grow to the point where being criticized unfairly doesn’t cause me stress, right. I do try to grow and change when I see that I made a mistake, and I do know that there are times when I stress myself totally out of poor mental-emotional performance, right; I don’t deny that like most people. But being criticized by someone who has nothing to offer me, so to speak—I can kinda de-escalate, but I feel a burn, right. And when someone causes a real problem—like someone has something to offer you~ punishment~ only they can’t also offer you non-punishment, right—I can take advice about what to do, but I can’t, like…. Like there’s the involuntary reaction of pain, and then there’s realizing it’s bullshit and slowly letting it burn out, kinda turn down the flame of pain, right…. Like a comedian talked about feeling a physical pain when people disliked her, and initially I thought that wasn’t me—because it’s like, it used to be something I had no control over, right: I had like, an open-ended, commitment, right~ to feeling pain: like a sort of psychotic goodie good boy version of being Edwardian-conscientious, right…. I’m very different now. But yeah, I’d like to be able to take unfair criticism—just venting and abuse, right; because it will occasionally happen in spite of everything, occasionally ~because of~ everything you do—and kinda be able to go to yourself, You’re stating criticism but your views aren’t really valid: so no action is necessary. I mean, you wouldn’t tell people that verbally, but you also wouldn’t tell them verbally, right: I am in pain…. I wish you not harm, and it will end…. But I’m feeling an involuntary clenching, inside…. ~I mean, they’d just jump on the table and scream, Voldemort was my favorite character from the Lord of the Rings! ~ right? People can be totally coo coo like Coco Puffs, you know….

The next stage is just even when people actively try to fuck with you, to just be able to smile at them and look at it as merely a practical affair, you know. And part of that is going to be the craft of my spirituality, and not the—I do kinda view Christianity as the old religion, even though it’s not the first one, or whatever—not the craft of guilt or perfection and the rest of it, right…. Pessimistic religion, right. Which is a challenge, not least because I can be quite the pessimist myself, which is why those societal teachings are hard to shed…. But yeah, it’s not all a matter of words and reasonings, because that’s what’s in place: “my, why ~this~ reaction? Almost as delusional as a normal person!”—but all the body and craft of trained emotions, right. But even to read Richard Carlson rather than really…. You know, perfection, guilt, fear, “justice”, judgment, you know—the old religion…. (And loyalty: loyalty is a lot like fear and all the rest of the guck—I don’t think that people have to be alone in a world filled with gods and men and many names: but loyalty is like, “What would happen if I were alone?”—it’s guck….)

…. I mean, pity is a fucking Charles Dickens word, right, but: when people criticize and judge, usually they have basically nothing to offer you, right, because they’re just judgmental, critical people without a whole lot of good shit in their lives, so there’s the obvious practical thing of like, you know…. I mean, someone with nothing comes to you looking for help that’s one thing, someone with nothing comes to you with like that Mussolini stance, like: I may not be the greatest evil tyrant yet, but my acting coach says not to give up!…. Right, I mean, these people criticizing you have nothing to offer you, right, and even if they take a swipe at you, your life is never going to be as fucked as theirs, basically…. And the pity is like, you know: unfortunately you can’t help people who don’t even realize that you’re not a loser—but at least you don’t have to live inside their head, right? (shrugs)

But yeah: I tend to experience the Aries energy from my chart as like childish play, you know, trying to balance my thought-energy…. But yeah, sometimes when people get hoomi at you, (as opposed to humane, right), it’s hard not to just feel a burn; I could literally be wondering how I could end the situation in order to help both of us, at least so that I never heard from the monkey hoomis again, right, but: I mean, that’s my mind, in my body I just feel a (metaphysical) burn: I don’t even know what it is.

Just to see a dispute as a practical affair, right, or a spazzy critical judgment flown in your way as a practical affair, right…. The way that Gandhi could be like, The British make a law that punishes my skin-color; this is a practical affair that requires my full attention!

Right: like I am not Gandhi, yet…. Just to be a tree, right. Sometimes I’m like a leaf.