Tag: honesty

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Your Most Important Best Day

The Game of “Best Day of Your Life”

In the comedy movie, “The Water Boy”, in the last scene of the movie, the movie’s hero, Bobby Bouchet, has just gotten married to Vicki Betancourt. They are both outside of the church preparing to leave (on a riding lawnmower LOL). Their friends are also outside the church and are shouting encouragement and good wishes to the two newlyweds. Before riding off into the sunset, Bobby Bouchet shouts to his friends with complete conviction, “This is the best day of my life.” As you review your life, decade by decade, are you able to say with equal conviction what that one best day of your life was?

The “Best Day of Your Life” game is an interesting and illuminating exercise in thought and feeling. I played this game and could not narrow it down to just one single day. I think each decade that goes by it becomes increasingly more difficult to do that. What I did do however was adjust the rules of the game. I allowed myself to choose decade by decade what my one best day was. In each decade there were many really good days, as well as many bad ones (and some downright horrible) but this game requires you to choose that one best day. Even splitting things up into decade by decade, it still took some deep reflection, completely free of the expectations of any other person. As I am sixty-eight years old, I came up with seven best days. As I am guessing for a number of reasons that I have one decade left, there is still time for one more “grand finale” best day.

I have already chosen what that final best day will be. It is what I call “Culmination Day”. It is that day that has already happened in my mind. It is that day that I am sitting at my desk, with a cup of coffee, looking out the window and saying, “Thank you Father. It is done.” It is the day when all the pain, all the suffering, all the obstacles are mere footnotes in my history as I feel the unbounded joy of seeing that all of my conscious manifesation choices have come into fruition.

Now Substitute Your Face For That of Ponzi

OK, so what’s the purpose of this game you say. Why should you bother to play it? Answer: Because it forces you to be one thousand percent honest with yourself about what day or days in your life brought you true inner joy. Many times humans may say things or do things or even think things based on the expectation of others. In doing so we execute a con job on ourselves. In the image above you see Charles Ponzi, the con man who originated the flim flam known today as a Ponzi scheme. Boy does he ever look the part of a huckster con man. His photo reminds me of those guys who used to sell vegetable choppers on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Looked great as he was demonstrating it. Then when you got home you saw that it was a piece of shit. I still remember my father cussing up a blue storm when the chopper broke within five minutes of using it. Anyway, in the best day game you penetrate the outer crust of bull manure and reveal to yourself truths, truths that you can build on to make your life better. You can stop with that royal con job that you do on yourself better than even Charles Ponzi ever could.

Your Future Most Important Day But Right Now

Your best day for any decade can be but does not have to be a typical life-changing event such as a birth, or a marriage, or a healing, or a career move or, well, you get the idea. It can be something quite simple and unassuming. For example, in the decade between birth and ten years old, I like most children had good days, bad days and days somewhere in between. The very best day that I can recall however was a day that I spent at my grandparents’ house on the lake with my Mom and brother. We all didn’t go around holding hands and singing Kumbaya, but on that particular day, as a kid, with my mother and brother and grandmom and grandpop, I just felt such love surrounding me, infusing me, that I begged my Mom to stay late because I didn’t want the day, or the feeling to end. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. It was just a feeling but it was a feeling beautiful beyond description.

To get back to the answer to the question of – why bother? – it is because you can productively use the feeling that you felt on that best day to bring about a desired manifestation in your life right now. Identify your desire. Then go back to the feeling you felt on that best day. The happenstance that caused that day is unimportant. What is of the utmost importance however is how you felt on that day. Feel it. Feeling the feeling of it. Then step into your current desire as if has arrived to you transferring your joy from the best day event to the manifestation of your current desire. Once you have sufficiently felt your current desire as realized and natural, then wait for Universal Intelligence to bring about the means to the end. And give thanks that it has really happened, because it has.

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For Good Health —– Quarantine Your Excuses

The 1980 movie, “The Blues Brothers”, starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd and an all star cast, had both great music and really hilarious scenes. One of those scenes involved Belushi and Ackroyd using a tunnel to get to their car and avoid being captured by the police. As they are walking through the tunnel suddenly a mystery woman who has been trying to kill them all throughout the movie appears and is armed with an M-16 rifle. It turns out that it was Belushi’s ex-fiance that he jilted at the altar. She is after revenge. She tells Belushi that is about to die, stating “You betrayed me.” Then he drops to his knees and pleads the following. ” No I didn’t. Honest. I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God!”

I think at one time or another we have all played that scene. Excuses are deadly. They kill honesty. They kill personal responsibility. They kill growth. They kill credibility. When something goes south in your life, they throw a sheet over your bedroom wall mirror and tell you to look everywhere else, look anywhere else, but don’t look at yourself. As long as the excuses keep flowing, your troubles will keep on growing.

Excuses are fundamentally different than reasons. Reasons are real. Excuses are phony. What is meant by that is that sometimes motivation, focus and determination may still not be quite enough. There may be legitimate reasons why a specific desire has not yet been achieved. You may bear responsibility for caring for a child with multiple handicaps where your daily free time is counted in minutes rather than hours. You may be caring for an elderly parent who has issues that require huge chunks of your daily time. You may be mightily struggling to pay the bills each month with just keeping your head above water a much higher priority than learning the perfect swimming breaststroke. You may only have a handful of energy left every day after tending to work, chores and things that crop up. These may be considered reasons. Excuses are when you do have some time, you do have some resources, you do have some ability, you do have some opportunity and yet, you still make the choice to do something else other than go after your desire. Then you use excuses to execute the con job. Even if legitimate reasons exist however, you can still do whatever you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are at. Even if it is just some tiny little thing each and every day that you can do (ie., a five minute scientific prayer), it will make a positive difference in your life.

When you say to yourself, “Enough with the excuses already…Enough”, and just throw them overboard as useless cargo, you will feel an immediate jolt of lightness and that wonderful feeling of being in greater control of your precious life. You will suddenly find yourself dealing more effectively with any legitimate reasons that your goal has not yet been achieved. You will be pleasantly surprised to discover that even your overall physical health will improve thus increasing your inner storehouse of energy.

Deal with the reasons as best as you know how to do. Use everything and anything in your personal arsenal to work past them. At the same time, get rid of the excuses. They are not serving you. Wherever you are on your life journey, putting those phony excuses in permanent quarantine, will immediately put you in a better place.

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Smedley Darlington Butler: True American Hero

On this Veterans Day holiday, it’s a perfect occasion to talk about a true American hero that you have never heard of — Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. He is one of only nineteen badass soldiers who have ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor – twice. And he just may have been resposible for saving American democracy.

Butler grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was educated in Quaker schools. He entered the Marines as a teenager and served for thirty-three years, moving up through the ranks to major general. Wounded in combat and a recipient of not one but two Congressional Medals of Honor, Butler retired from the military in 1931 as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

In 1924, the corruption in the city of Philadelphia was so bad that the mayor asked President Coolidge to release a military general on a leave of absence to fight the corruption as police chief. He sent General Butler who did indeed reduce corruption, so much so that the mayor fired him in 1925. You could almost hear the mayor say in a back room somewhere, “I wanted him to fight corruption, not eliminate it”.

After his retirement, Butler maintained contact and popularity with veterans and was a strong promoter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). He was disgusted at the way that then President Herbert Hoover refused to meet with the 1932 Veterans Bonus March protestors and how Hoover used Army calvary to disperse their campground. Although Butler was a Republican, he campaigned tirelessly against Hoover’s re-election.

In 1934, Butler exposed that he was approached by a middle man for powerful banking, Wall Street and industrial interests. They wanted to gauge his interest in leading a conspiracy (being a front man) to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt and establish a fascist dictatorship of the sort that was taking place in Germany and Italy at that time. When Butler exposed the plot, it was quickly and quietly dissolved. All the big shots behind it stuck together and called it a hoax and fake news. Congress held hearings on the matter but the puppet masters effectively quashed any subsequent action regarding the plot and it became a forgotten footnote of history.

Throughout the 1930’s, Butler continued to speak out against the big corporate interests who he said actually pulled the strings of the puppet politicians. In his 1935 book, “War Is A Racket”, he wrote, ” I spent thirty three years in active military service ….. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.”

The military-industrial complex, that was first identified and warned about by President Eisenhower, has now grown to epic proportions as generals and admirals in retirement slide directly from retirement to the boards of giant defense contractors. People of General Butler’s truthfulness, character and honesty are needed now more than ever.

General Smedly Darlington Butler, (1881-1940)— A Man of Remarkable Achievement, Uncompromising Integrity and Rock-Solid Incorruptability — A True American Hero.