Something that helped me while going through several years of living in the basement of my own home, taking care of my littleone more than my spouse, while suffering from no income.. but giving all of me to my daughter while my wife who suffers bipolar and post traumatic stress, who worked nights and had affairs and went back to drinking continued to do her best to make me feel like I was worth less than the air I was breathing….

The thing that helped me, was to understand that…..

I asked for this… This was part of my contract with life..
This was part of my universal lesson, which was to give me the lessons I needed to keep in the forefront of my mind while I am going through every adversity that comes my way..

• How am I going to accept this?
• How am I going to allow, and or let go?
• How am I going to be completely okay with me through it all?
• What the hell am I supposed to learn from this?
• What power am I giving away from the inner peace that always resides within?
• How do I reclaim that inner peace that overcomes all things and all people?
• How do I accept that this is what I asked for?
• How do I love myself, and let myself, my innerself know, that everything is going to be alright?
• How do I love myself unconditionally at all times?

Can I really afford to let anything outside of myself dictate how I am, how I feel, what I think, and how I react?

Detachment… with love if possible.
Detach with indifference if needed.

No not nothing is capable of doing anything to me that I do not allow… what am I allowing? why? who? when?

I’ll be upfront with you.. suicide was a considered option for many times during that period… It has even snuck up on me even after I was removed from my home…

For me…
This no longer is an option… life is too precious, and if the only person I give completely to is my daughter, then that single life is worth giving my presence to.. for me…

I feel your pain and want nothing but to hug you through this… but sharing of myself is the best way I can do that…

We asked for this, it was part of our agreement when we chose to enter into this plane, through the family we chose at the time that we chose into the lineage we chose, the environment we chose and those around us whom we are in contact with… we chose all of it…

Therefore, I’m ultimately responsible for everything that happens in my life.. everything… and every-one in it for that matter…

Life is adverse, suffering is optional…

Until the next post
Stay loved

Killed himself, he was suffering from depression…

O how often I contemplated this over and over again in my own life…
Yeah I’m putting it out there, why?

For the simple reason that I believe many have these thoughts and deny them. They refuse to let others know, and the result is a suffer in silence syndrome.

Why do we go on? I don’t know, I don’t know why some persevere and why others don’t. At the end of one episode, I spent a month overdosing over and over again in hopes of a release from life entirely never to return. I had no way out that I knew was possible.

That was in 1986, quite a while back. I was blessed with a confrontation that asked if I was willing to see an alternative. With nothing left to lose, I accepted the offer.

I would, love to tell you I’ve never looked back since. But I would be lying and well, one thing I’ve been in my writings is transparent. No, you don’t need to know my business, no You don’t have the right to be in my business.. I share it willingly, why?

I don’t know why really… Maybe my words will touch someone and they too can see its worth a shot at sticking it out one more day, and then let the days add up until the desire to leave this place has passed.

Maybe…

Sometimes there really seem to be no way out, we allow ourselves to close our worlds into the such confined places that nothing comes in and nothing goes out.

And even when we’re putting ourselves out there, encouraging others, hearing the thanks and gratitude from others for sharing their time and lifting them up being told we’re awesome day after day. Our walls are impervious to everything good that wants return our blessings, why?

For most, we’ve developed a habit, an emotional, physical and yes spiritual conditioning over time that doesn’t want to be given up. We feel less than perfect, less than normal less than human. And god forbid we know others know what we’re going through. That would only make us feel worse. So we don’t tell anyone… no one, not family not friends, no, not no one, no way.

I would love to offer anyone reading this who feels like they’re not only stuck, but cannot possibly see no way out from their current situation, but…

The truth is we have to commit ourselves to the possibility that there is another way first. We have to accept that this is a very real life threatening condition we’re facing and if we don’t allow the ability to consider the possibilities of alternatives, then we’re going to follow through and we’re going to check out.

Thats just a fact. We’ll be just another statistic. People, are suffering from torture, real physical bodily harm torture at the hands of lunatics and even famlily members. People are being sent to jail for money & living in real life threat of imprisonment for money…. Money we don’t have… It’s just fuckin money for godsake!??!?

And thats just a touch, not to mention those who are being seriously tortured emotionally by friends and family and peers and even strangers…

To all these, I say there is a way out. Sounds insane, but we’ve been living in insanity for so long that the possibility of something other than what we’ve been living seems more fantasy than reality, and I completely agree with you.

It does sound unreal, but ts very very very real… I’m a fuckin living example that its real. I live for another day. And sometimes, THATS ALL I live for, just one more day…

You deserve just one more day, we all deserve just one more day, please for godsake give yourself one more day and reach out and let someone hold your hand and lead you to something Anything other than checking out

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/Default.aspx

Thats just one way, there are thousands of others, if we’re just willing to give another minute to our thoughts, just long enough, just…. long… enough…
It’s possible, its more possible than we can currently imagine…

Stay alive, please, we need you, your friends need you, you’re family needs you… I need you!

In Memory of Trey Pennington 09-04-2011

Let me wipe my tears long enough to see the keyboard and tell you, you think you’re alone, but you’re not, you think you’re the only one who’s going through this shit, you’re not, we’re out here, we’ve been there, and we’re alive to tell you you’re not alone.

I implore you beautiful soul; one more day, just reach out and give it one more day.

I love you always…

I think I completed around forty five to seventy books in about 2 years. All based on the Edgar Cayce readings. For a time I would focus on one topic, divulge all the related books on that topic and then move on to the next.

Meditating as instructed, praying as suggested and living in what I thought was a temperate maximum between the 12 steps and higher conscious living…

There is one maybe two, okay two things that I kept having a serious problem with. One was that I was a broken spirit, and the second was, I didn’t know how I could be repaired.

Act as if. This was a powerful action step.
Since I was told that feelings are not facts, I accepted that and applied the wisdom to act as if my feelings were something I could not trust.

After all, when you have nothing to dull your senses, everything is raw, so living in a constant reactive state to life, kinda makes us what we today term a drama queen. Every little thing hurts. A friend was always telling me that at times the pain was so intense, that even her hair hurt. It was just an analogy, but damn if I didn’t relate to that sometimes myself.

Thoughts vs Feelings: The chicken & the egg syndrom.

Apparently we have thoughts that make us feel and we certainly have feelings which stir-up thoughts of all manners… So, which comes first?

Have you ever had a feeling that wasn’t driven by any particular thought at all? They may be rare occassions, but they do seem to happen, at least to me they have. I mean all of a sudden we’re either sunk to our depths for absolutely no reason whatsoever, or we’re calm and completely sublime for the same damn reason.

If there are no thoughts which engage us, from where do these rushes of emotions derive? And why?

Obviously we can think ourselves sick. Like worrying… I’ve learned that worry is a direct result of fear, and fear is a direct result of doubt. Subsequently doubt has its origins in lack of faith, and faith being the belief in things unseen, has its own wonderment.

But feelings are quite queer bedfellows if you’ll pardon the expression.
They’re untrustworthy, in my honest opinion, not that I place all my faith in the concept of mental reason, which certainly has its own pitfalls.

But feelings.. and thoughts… How do we know which is which?

If I said to you “I feel like a lowlife piece of shit.” Is that a literal that can be taken as a physical description? Or is it a thought formed by some simili used to desribe how I Think of myself?

I think I’m happy… What does this mean? Have you ever been asked how you felt and used this phrase as a response? You THINK you’re happy? Really? I might be apt to disagree with your self examination there buddy.

I had a friend corner me once and have me repeat several times how I felt, as I responded each time with they way I felt, he pointed his finger either to my head or to my gut. Based on my responses, I had quite the knot on my head when we were done with this little excercise..

So it seems, that I completely felt with my head… at the time. Which made sense to me, because for a mojor portion of my life I was expressing all my emotions with one single emotional response, and that was with anger.

Why anger? Its indestructible, or so I thought.

I am statements, I am happy, I am angry, I am joyful, I am sad.
Each of these describes emotions, somewhere some over-intelligent individual decided that men and women have a distinct difference in the number of emotions bettwen them. While a man may have say 26 emotions, it was suggested that a woman has up to but not limited to 117 different emotions…

Really??? Really? Where the hell did all these emotions suddenly appear from?
We’re one single human race bestowed with thoughts and emotions, how is it there is such an imbalance between men and women? I’ll postulate that there are only a certain degree of emotions between either side of the species…

The categorical difference is in processing of such things as events and connecting them to different emotions to develop new meaning for the original base emotion set. But don’t take my word for it, if you think there are more emotions for one than the other, remind yourself to ask the feel question and see whether they are thought based or gut based.

I ran this by a friend, and while I agree men are basically wired in ape brain fashion, if we were to ask a man in touch with his emotions whether he had less emotions than a woman I think the unbeliever would be surprised at the response.

I feel like you’re not respecting my space.
I feel you don’t love me
I feel I’m the only one who does anything around here

These are not feelings.. do you think they are? …{To Be Continued}

Until the next post
Stay focused

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Which means, those who choose to express Free Will over any other influence, will still experience the influence of others who are not so devout to their ownership of such a gift. God help us.

Being an Aries, having the rising sign of Mars lately has been at an all time high when it comes to the madness of Mars.

One challenge seems to be compounding upon another.
Financial challenges, family challenges, spiritual & emotional challenges… I’d go into it, but…

Oh what the hell why not, another Dark night of the soul for me last night. I’d had it, I’m fed up. The cards have been giving me what I wanted to hear. And they seemed to continue to get more enlightened as to their meanings.. Yet the current situation for this soul has increased in the negative.

So when I asked what it all means for me, I pulled The World.

Now, There’s a thought going round to claim your responsibility for everything that happens in your life. Everything. But after a while, like decades, it seems that this is just plain bullshit. Maybe its true maybe it isn’t.

I started recalling all the things out of my control which happened to me.

Abusive parent, lack of a productive grounded role model, unprotected from predators, denied audience with people of the cloth, betrayed by family and friends, falsely accused too many times to account here.

I once tried to get work in Vegas through the union as an electrician, the deal was to get the lead from the union hall, get in and start organizing. I made it clear, I’m not organizing until I’ve gotten a foot hold on some stability, I’m a family man for godsake. Help me get straight and I’ll start spreading the word.

Nine W2′s later in one year, shop after electrical shop would let me go after 3-4 weeks after hiring me because they got word I was organizing… But I wasn’t. Three weeks to a month is not what I call stable.

And the one shop I went to outside the hall kept me on, but a pattern was showing itself from within the ranks which I couldn’t help but notice. Those who asked for a raise, within a week received a pink slip. So when my foreman came to me and asked why I wouldn’t ask for a raise, I was very clear in my knowledge. “Because I need the job, I’m not stupid and don’t you frickin dare go and ask for me…” Three weeks later he asked for me…

I got my slip…

I made a break, knowing the only path that was ever narrowing, was my exit from existence. I made a desperate call and got a ticket back to NY.

Meditating and praying every day & night. for 2.5 years sleeping on one of those roll-up foam chair / bed things and no steady work outside of some time with Radio Shack. Where I became the radio shack answer man before there was one. Remember the RS Answer Man?

Anyway things started looking up. I took a $5 / hour job with some computer company and began my career with information technology.

After 9 months of no raise and very little to send back to my daughter and no way of getting my own place I bounced. Took a chance with a company called Banctec. Became a support person for every make and model desktop – laptop on the market from Hewlett Packard, Dell & Compaq to Sony and Toshiba. I became a hardware, software support expert.

But the pay sucked…

So I bounced again, took another chance with Compucom for a spell as a contract employee.. Time was up and they chose someone else instead of me. But I was pointed to their competitor Entex, where I moved through the ranks briskly and wound up in a project management position.

When I started Entex had a whole floor in a building on Madison Ave. Within three years the office was a ghost town. So I know it was only a matter of time before I was next on the cutting floor.

So I bounced once again.

This little adventure worked out that every-time I bounced I got at least a $10k raise in my income. This last bounce pushed me to a $20k raise.
But  I had to go independent contractor, incorporate and deal with 1099′s.

Yes things were looking up. Or so I thought.

3 months into the new location at the world trade center, I did a roll-out where we replace old hardware with new for every department of Deutsche Bank

So we get a department with a semi big-wig. Everything was per protocol, back ups, builds, restores and finally the roll-out with a warranty disclaimer to not do anything physical or software wise for at east 48 hours… They decided to negate the warranty. And all the new machines were going down left and right.

I did the right thing and extended the support for 3 days after the allotted time and they were still having issues. Finally we got everything back to normal. But that wasn’t good enough and the bigwig made a call to another bigwig and my head was on the chopping block.

Demoted from my position to satisfy the bigwig client and I was eventually bumped to a new location. This time pure on the floor support for an advertizing company called Foote Cone & Belding, or something like that.. FCB for short…

All was doing okay.. again I had assumed it was…
Some guys who were on top of their game were getting axed, and many months later were still out of work… The signs were not looking good.
I get a call to fix a palm pilot that wasn’t syncing properly and kept crashing in its process… I have to admit I got a weird feeling when they closed the door to the office and let me do my magic.

20 minutes later I’m done and out of there, everything back to normal. Until three days later I say hello to the person with the palm pilot and get a real nasty glance back. “Da hell was THAT about?” I wondered.. I found out…

Some idiot had called that client and made some totally stupid remarks in a sexual tense and went on to mention items that were in her palm pilot.
They made me the only one with that information so I was the the only likely culprit. Now I’m being told I’m to be let go because the client won’t continue the company’s contract unless I’m gone…

I’ll add this, before my termination it was discovered that the owner of North Point Communication the owner of FCB, had a younger family member VIP, who had made several of these calls to several female employees of FCB and she was one of them, but that didn’t matter. He was untouchable. And I was. So…. off with my head.

I had just gotten back from my honeymoon when this happened.

Also, no lawyer will take this case, your guilty even if proven innocent.

Great….

Remember Banctec? They lost major contracts with Met-life one of their biggest clients. Left the hardware support thing and outsourced everything to India. Now does Healthcare and Imaging processes..

Entex? Was bought out by Siemens Intl. who scraped the whole company.

Compucom? Flailed a little longer than Entex but fell to its own demise and became an after thought. Never to be seen again.

FCB? Another after thought. Bought out by Adbrands.net, but God only knows what that means.

Six months no work, no leads and I’m floundering cause unemployment is just about up. I get a call from a friend of a friend. “C’mon on down, I have a client who totally messed up their network and can’t get any reports done.”

I’m there in a heart beat. Within the third visit it became apparent that this friend of a friend had very little clue as to what to do for this company. In fact it seemed every-time he came the original problem got fixed but spawned new and exciting problems for the client.

Approached by one of the clients consultants, I was asked if I would consider a position. “Absolutely!” I exclaimed. One of my first duties was to relieve said friend from his constant calls to this company. I had enuff problems cleaning up their home-built network for this little known international company to last an IT tech’s lifetime without some Seagull consultant coming in making a lot of noise and shitting all over the place.

Within 2 months the Mail server dies and their network is cutoff by AT& F’n T and we’re back on dial up as fast as I can get the damn thing going… I got a hold of a dear friend and wizbang genius who was on his own to restore the mail-server and get it back in place.. Thus earning me a warm spot in the heart of the CFO of the company.

I’m tooling along now, life is great, I’m hiring friends who were out of work and building my team of support for this watch company who was slowly selling themselves to their outside accounting firm.

Not to mention the owner has now inherited the company from his father who built this little empire from scratch and literally owned the building on the corner of Queens Blvd and Northern Blvd. This new owner who has the not so, secret reputation of being a womanizer only hiring secretaries who are lets say, well proportioned in the exaggerated?

This owner who asks me if we’re secure, if our info is safe. Apparently he has some apprehensions… Well even if you lock down and secure the data best you can, you still can’t rule out human potential. “Hard copies are impossible to secure unless you have the resources of a defense contractor” I tell him.

I’m suddenly witnessing catastrophic levels of layoffs within the company. Huge areas which were teaming with life are now becoming ghost towns… Hmmm.. this looks frighteningly familiar. Heads of departments who once thought they were going to retire within a year or two are severed from their positions…

To make matters worse, one of the so-called friend I hired is making suggestives to female employees and not only getting busted for them but decides to hand over a laptop that used to belong to a female salesperson who just got the axe… All this in less than a months time.

Bye bye Dan, it was nice, but not so nice… Why? Because it happened on my watch. Not to mention, I had just mortgaged a house and we just found out a week ago, we’re pregnant.

MZ Berger Watch Repair and Design; Gone. They were the leading income earner in that area of Queens NY & second in the industry only to Bulova.

Out of my control…

I won’t go into my wife who was on Paxil when I met her, post traumatic stress from the irreparable abuse and torment of her father and others, medically diagnosed as bipolar who forgets conversations at the worst opportune times, who was at 9/11 next to building 7 smoking a cigarette when the second one hits… during the pregnancy the following year, has full blown panic attacks, after the birth of our angel, who was born on my 40th, goes into postpartum depression and makes my life a living hell as if it wasn’t already without any of her help.

Nor will I go into the insanity my first daughter had endured during my lack of presence… That one I won’t go into at all… just hurts too gotdamn much and makes me homicidal.

The struggle continued for years like this afterwards.
Another smash in the face like these occurred in 2008 with another bounce that I wrote about sometime back.

You can read that here..     Confused No More

and it’s followed up here..  You Think You know My Story

So yesterday was yesterday, and tomorrow is tomorrow and right now I’m divorced with a second darling daughter. This one I get to see unlike my first whom every time I got a chance to save to visit something would take the cash away.. Education loans, taxes, medical attention you name it, it came and made things harder.

Is there a moral to the story? You betcha!
Life sucks and you move on.

And to think.. there really are people out there who really would trade places with me. Am I grateful? Yes. Why? “Expletive” if I know.

All I know is…
1.)  Ya can’t keep a good man down &…
2. )  I am the proverbial Come Back Kid.

Purge & Release Time | The Respite:

Obviously, no tale like this can go on without a counterpoint.
Beat down and bruised, our egos continue their travells learning new ways and means to take our lives and turn them every which-a-way.

Situations pass, some take longer than others. Are there some good times in there? Hell yeah there are! Are there times that absolutely made you feel like the world was your oyster? Yes, yes indeed there were!

Can you allow the past insanity to be just that, the past?
Yes, I’m sure you can.

Can you allow tomorrow to be unwritten with no connection to the past?
Yes, I think you can do that too…

Being practical and being a realist doesn’t mean that unpredictability doesn’t happen.
In fact, it happens all the time. Change happens in the blink of an eye, and yes sometimes it does take longer than one would like.

The change we create in ourselves though. This can take as long or as short a time as we decide.  Our personal power, our Will Power if you like, is ours to dominate. It’s ours and no one elses.

If we commit to our decisions, and act upon those commitments, then change can only be experienced and not a wishful dream wafting in the breeze.

Today this very day, I am in control of my Free Will, I erase whatever emotional attachments I have to the past, and go forth accepting that this is just my story. One of thousands I have accumulated over this lifetime. But a story of our lives is not finished until our last breathe is taken, and even then, how  we’ve affected others can live on for centuries ye even a millenia if we stay commited and true to ourselves.

The rest is still unwritten….

Until the next post
Stay focused

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Gonna plug my other site: The Tarot Side of Life
The last post goes into something I haven’t done ever.
I did a reading for the 7  Chakra centers: It kinda explains the above horrorscope pretty well, I think its worth a read…

Laterz

Dan~

I hate the New Age Movement… Whoa Dan Hate is a very strong word!

Heh heh… Who or what told you that a word was strong or weak?
Exactly by what authority do you come by this intelligence?

Yes, language is powerful and yes that which comes from the heart and out of the mouth can do both amazing and terrible things.

When I frst learned of this New Age thing I was just getting into Edgar Cayce and Carl Jung and getting my act together after some rather long years of shadow play…  It seemed that NAM was some form of an answer for civilized living amongst ourselves..

Do you know what civilized means?
1. Bring (a place or people) to a stage of social, cultural, and moral development considered to be more advanced: “a civilized society”.

It means the ability to determine whats acceptable or not.
But by whom or what basis or to what end is this moral development to be created?

Your ability to determine whats acceptable is only as powerful as your ability to Judge for yourself.

Not, what the moral majority has shoved down your throat as acceptable.

For too long the packages you’ve been sold in what is acceptable or not has been a tool for conformity..
Control.
Leaving your sense of judgment completely out of the picture, or in your own hands for that matter.

Robert Cialdini has proved this over and over again in his book Influence.

In it, there is proof after proof that we follow the crowd, or even one person who has altered their perception that you have taken notice of.

It’s our laziness that has led us to this demise, unwilling to take a personal stand on what we truly think feel and believe. Between right and wrong, life and death, worth and worthlessness

I’ve personally watched this event of mindless judgment within my own family of born again Christians who swear up and down what Truth is. As if they’ve swallowed hook line and sinker what they’ve heard others preach instead of coming to their own conclusions.

God forbid you should have a contrary thought in your head. You have strayed away from the truth in their minds and hearts.. and they pray for you to see the light???   “No Offense CuzBro”

Okay.. Why Dan? Why are you off your rocker? I give, spill it already!!

I’ll quote my father who recently had this to say to me;  “Your mother and I pray for you night and day Dan, but God isn’t moving fast enough…”

(Sigh…) 1. You’re praying wrong. 2. You’re not asking what it is YOU are supposed to learn.  3.  Fast enough for who? You? Me? God?  …

There are really only 2 things left aside from my daughters that I truly have a life long passion for. One is spirituality and the other is the well being of others.

I don’t know, its just something thats been in my blood since like forever.
It’s the protector in me, the father in me, the mother in me, the warrior in me.

This I know.. Truths are Truths whether you believe them or not.

It’s my personal Truth to seek these out and install them into my everyday. The more I live these truths, the better I will deal with life on its own terms.

Life.. now there’s a term… The New Age Movement would have you believe that only joy and happiness are the Truth to life. Ummm… I’ve read the Bible front to back. I have found very little joy and happiness in that book either lived or experienced.

Everyone in it seems to be enduring some sort of moral, social or personal crises.

I think the only persons who got through the book unscathed was Enoch and Melchizedek.

First off…
Enoch was an Alien, and Melchizedek was a Ghost, so go figure that one out?

As for Jesus? I doubt anyone can live his life and not be killed by the inhabitants of this planet. God help him if he ever does return is all I have to say.

For now, the whole of Earth is connected and is now one land. That means the saying “a prophet cannot not be accepted in his own land”, now covers the entire planet. So where can such a person (or any real prophet) come from to be accepted? Where? I ask…

Okay back to the matter at hand:

10 thing the New Age Movement Sucks From Your Life

1. Your Ability To Think For Yourself.
2. The Truth About Life
3. The Truth About The Law of Attraction
4. The Truth About The Universal Laws
5. The Truth About Living In The Now
6. The Truth About Your EGO
7. The Truth About The Earth or Gaia
7a. The Truth about the Sun
7b. The Truth about the Moon
8. The Truth About Why You Are Here
9. The Truth About Fear & Doubt
10. The Truth About Lack & Abundance

And finally; as an aside, to think “happy thoughts” and you will have a happy life.

You ever tell a child not to touch something? Whats the first thing that child wants to do? Excatamundo!

We all want what we can’t have, don’t deny it sister I see you smirking from here… You tell me I can’t have something and I suddenly can’t get that something out of my head.

The thing is, if we tell ourselves we can’t have something, suddenly its gospel, and neither heaven nor hell is gonna move that thought into the contrary position, without a deliberate act of sheer determination & personal Will

Why Do Bad Things Keep Happening To Me? I Just Want To Be Happy!

I can’t stand Charlatains… trying to be careful here, as I judge so too shall I be judged.. but oh to hell with it.. Spirituality is as sacred to me as someones recovery from alcohol or addiction and their spiritual program of recovery.

If you feed people the wrong stuff, not only are you messing with their lives, you may just send them to their death.

Did you know that sugar pills are still a multi-million dollar industry? Thats right, more people get cured from placebos than actual prescriptions.. Why do you think you keep hearing those little disclaimers in prescription pill commercials…

Well, if you haven’t heard them, I just triggered your mind to hone in on those words, Placebo and Sugar-Pills, whenever you watch a prescription medicine commercial… sorry bout that.

“It is your faith which has healed you” J b4 the C. circa 2000 years ago..

Faith: The belief in things unseen

The thing about the sugar pill is the power of belief. Charlatains thrive on your ability to believe. Not only in them but in what you can do with what they have, even if its contrary to the truth.  Get it?  They lie to you and you believe in the result, therefore whether they are real or not doesn’t matter…

Be discerning about what you see, read and hear.

Some of us cannot get anything from placebos, we’ve been round long enough or just have the wiring inside to KNOW bullshit when we see it. And I’ll sneak this in healingchakras.com is run by two charlatains. There I said it…

I’ve watched the campaign, read the info, took the test got the downloads, read the emails, interacted on their facebook page and was given the chakra7 system.
This is one of those things that is littered with so much dog & pony snake oil nonsense I’ve ever watched since the advent of evengalistic healing tents.

I’m not saying this so you’ll buy the audio I created, actually I could care less if you did. Personally I think its more important that you be aware of the nonsense thats leading you to decisions you would normally not be so blind to make.

You want to improve your life, great, who doesn’t?
You want to be more yourself around people? Of course? Why wouldn’t you?
You want to have more passion and energy?
You want to be able to speak from your heart without fear of anything?
You want to begin to seek inner truth for yourself?

Then…

Take what works for you and leave the rest.

Accept the balance of your life, the Light & the Shadow are equals to your true growth.

If you are right you’ve no need to be angry, If you’re wrong, you’ve no right to be angry.

Your habits are tools, they are disciplines matured.

If you want to change your habits, the average time for most people is 21 days for the foundation, 90 days for maturation. Continue on after that and you’ve developed a discipline.

Take it One Day At A Time. You didn’t get where you are in One Day.
So remember, Easy Does It.

Commitment, Desire & Passion are keys to growth and progress, lack one of these and you’ve entered the viscous cycle of “doomed to repeat”.

Your Truth is as valuable to you as another’s truth is to theirs.

We are all the same, but different.

Those who matter will not mind the new you, and those who mind don’t matter.

Until the next post
Stay focused

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The Conscious, the Subconscious and the Superconscious.

Some time back, close to thrity years ago I had an amazing incident occur …

(yes, I have had quite a few in my life).

Like an idiot, I wanted to hang out with my friends, but I didn’t have any money to get intoxicated or even catcha buzz. And I hate being the odd man out.

So, hyper-intelligent me got to thinking, since no one was coming home for a few hours, I could water down the (gaggh) vodka with the blue label so it would appear to not have been touched, and none would be the wiser… you following this?

I don’t remember finishing the second screwdriver I made, in fact there’s a (whole lot) of that night I don’t remember. For the sake of keeping to the point of this story, I’m going to omit the epic long tale that ensued during those 7 hours and lead you right to…

The moment when I was sitting peacefully, quiet as a church mouse and off in the distance…

I could hear yelling, it was the kind of yelling that had no pause to it for breath. It was so odd, and it was getting louder by the second. I wasn’t panicking, I just thought it strange.

Suddenly it got so loud I felt like I was falling, and as I was falling the yelling became deafening. “YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH…!!”

It was so damn loud I wanted to start yelling myself, until I realized…

(I was).  I, was the one yelling.

I sounded like I had been castrated.
I opened my eyes and I was still yelling, only I was finishing a sentence…

“YAAAAAAAAAH GOTTA PEEE!!!!”

How bizzarre, I had came out of [the blackout] yelling “I had to pee”. Apparently those of sounder mind had decided to strap me to a rolling gurney and I was unable to get up and relieve myself… (How rude!)

The instance I’m referring to is that very point, where I seemed to be observing myself, apart from the lunatic strapped to the gurney. That was the physical manifestation of me. And yet I was also hearing and feeling apart from me…

• How the heck does that happen?
• Why did that happen?
• And most of all, can I do that again…

Obviously I was physically functioning, albeit not in a manner that suggested I was sane at the time. But functioning nontheless.

Some conscious level was animating my physical body, while another conscious level had decided that was no place to be…

Now.. I don’t want to get all Eckhart Tolle on you… going into the whole “self vs. ego thing.”

In a bit, I’ll show you a really easy way to test this for yourself.

But if you don’t already know about the different levels of consciousness, then boy-o-boy do you have a lot of catching up to do…

In the book “WHAT SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRES REALLY THINK, KNOW AND DO”
In one of their chapterrs they outline the levels of the brain… [much of which I don't really care for and think that things like this really do more damage than help...]

U SE THE THREE TIERS OF THE BRAIN
The brain seems to be divided into at least three sections: the conscious, the subconscious and the superconscious.

The conscious mind is where our daily thinking takes place in making decisions and trying to solve problems. The conscious mind can call up ideas, experiences and beliefs from the subconscious which is where all our experiences and beliefs are stored.

The subconscious operates 24 hours a day and can handle any number of problems. One way to stimulate creativity is to consider all aspects of a problem, and then ask the subconscious to find the answer by 3 p.m. the following Friday, i.e. sleep on it!

The subconscious can be used to solve problems or rise to challenges or instructions from the conscious mind. The superconscious mind has access to knowledge and experience beyond one’s own knowledge and experience. The superconscious is the source of creativity, excitement and intuition. The superconscious mind is stimulated by clarity, strong desire, solitude and strong emotions.

(Here’s where I have a complete disconnect) The SuperConscious, does NOT GET stimulated. At least in such a way that YOU may be able to percieve, unless you’ve decided to listen to the Superconscious.)

It is maintained by some people that any desire that can be transmitted to the superconscious must be brought into reality by the superconscious mind.

Focus and concentrate on your crystal-clear goals. Drive those
goals into the superconscious. Desire to achieve your goals in life.
Reflect in solitude on goals, problems, challenges, opportunities.
Drive a great deal of emotion into your desires.

(This is also way off base… Everything in the material will be placed into the thought area.
Which by definition is the layer of the mind called consciousness, what you reflect on and meditate on will be placed in the layer of mind called the subconscious. As you achieve higher levels of consciousness, you are able to move within planes of consciousness.

Just because you focus on something has absolutely no bearing on where that focus really goes, unless its of a higher nature of service to that conscious state you are attempting to interact with.)

The superconscious will reward you with blinding flashes of the obvious, the people, information, and circumstances required to achieve your goals, and unexpected chance events which will enable you to get the results you require. Remember that any goal or desire which you can drive into the superconscious must be brought into your reality.

(End of said quoted material)

So why write such if its completely untrue?

It sure sounds nice doesn’t it? Thats exactly the reason it was written.
The subconscious itself (will) reward you, if you have given it sufficient material to work with. The more vague you are, the more vague the response. The more specific you are, the more specific the response.

That being said, YOU are the catalyst to achieving anything. I’ve heard it mentioned thousands of times in my studies.. “Mind Is The Builder” and “Thoughts Are Things”.

Most likely you’ve heard it said or read somewhere, “As A Man Thinketh…” Well,  the same principal applies here.

Case in point, I’ve been studying copywriting, and one of the coolest tricks I’ve read and succesfully applied is the method of “drop everything and take a break.”

After devouring as much content about the product or service, the benefits the features, the backgrounds… everything.. before you write a single word, just stop and walk away from the whole project.

The subconscious is now allowed to work its magic.

And it does… The following day or even week, I sit down and everything comes like a tidal wave of information that gets written in a single sitting like a man on fire… Before I know it I have the rough draft of the very essence of what I need to get across to the reader. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone in the copywriting industry, its a known and well recognized phnomenon…

And this very fabric of achievement can be done with most everything. Albeit with a measure of latitude considering the material you’re digesting and the outcomes you’re looking to achieve.

Now: how do you test this for yourself? Mind you, You’re not going to find this anywhere ever.
Trust me, I came about this on my own, but it’s really profound I promise.

I want you to sit and read these words carefully with determination.

With your imagination you are about to feel two of you. The physical you, and very slowly the mental (observer you) just slightly, ever so slightly just to the right of you… Not so much that you’re sitting next to yourself, but more like you’re almost looking over your shoulder or ear to ear with yourself…

Take your time and feel the difference between you physically and you mentally (the observer you)… Are you getting the splitting sensation? I know this is hard while trying to read. You may feel free to take a moment and try this without reading for a bit and feel the seperation occur.

……….(Pause now and try to do this without reading)……….

Have you felt it? If you are more spiritually inclined this will have quite an effect upon you.
If you are not spiritually inclined, you may have felt nothing or had trouble doing it..
It’s not your fault, your just more left brained and need more time is all…

But those who have felt the shift, if you still doubt me, try this now…

If you can…

Exactly what I had said to do before butthis time shift your mental self (observer you) to the left. Now, try and move and feel your mental (obsever) self moving left. Where the physical self is to the right of you and the mental self is now shifting to the left just ear to ear…

Thats it..  ….(Pause again and really try to do this)….

Well???

It wasn’t so easy to do now was it?

What the heck was that all about?

Did you get a rubberband effect? Like you kept snapping back to center or back to the right of your physical self?

Yes I developed that portion to totally mess with your head, I won’t lie, but also to make a very distinct and powerful point.

This was the battle of your left and right brain in conflict. Where logic vs. creativity or imaginative and intuitive parts of your processing seem to repell each other naturally.

I want to congratulate you though, in all honesty. You have taken a very critical step in achieving, not only an altered state of consciousness, you have literally witnessed the current limitation of that perception of consciousness. And in doing so, you’ve begun to actually shift yourself to a greater awareness of yourself.

I have an audio series which helps facilitate even greater level of awareness.

You can find it here : http://danlopez2012.com/TheGiftofTones/

Until the next post…
Stay Focused,
Dan Lopez

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Only to find, after you’ve purchased that sweet little set of wheels, that same vehicle is ALL OVER THE PLACE???

Speaking of wheels;

It seems to be happening with me for a current project I’m working on. It’s not that surprising, well.. scratch that..

It was very surprising.

To be honest, when I saw the recent competitive offering I was very intrigued as to what and how it was being promoted and delivered and everything else regarding the particular information…

This is a spiritual product.. now, since I’ve been in the spiritual practice for well over 20 years, I feel I have ascended some measure of levity in the arena.

Meaning I take it somewhat seriously, not in the stoic sense, but I’ve considered most teachings to be very honorable, and if taught wrong you’re basically messing with peoples lives.. And THAT I don’t agree with.

Now, I’m going to tangent for a minute, so bear with me here..

One of the reasons I’ve had a hard time promoting myself over the last 3 years in any sense of the term is because of one of the traditions in the spiritual practices I attend.. One which states,

“This is a program of attraction rather than promotion”

Good heavens!!!

Mind you, this isn’t the only reason, but it is the one I continuously felt in my head every time I went in the direction to get my name out there in the internet world… Locally just being myself was, just that, being myself.

While the world of internet marketing seemed to vibrate invariably towards making money and all that entailed, I felt a very sincere disconnect.  I’m not about making money, I’m about helping, of being of service, of getting you through those areas I’ve experienced and overcame.

I live modestly, I enjoy the peace and surroundings of being in nature with family and friends. I love to be loved, I don’t think anyone really doesn’t.. but promoting with what feels like artificial insemination, that if, you love me I’ll make you rich, was not something that resonated with me.

Have I made money online?

Oh yeah, at my best I was able (and is readily confirmed by Marc Goldman of Goldbar.net) to create the tune of ten thousand dollars net per month, just in affiliate email promotions alone.

But, if you’re looking for (make money crap) from this site.. sorry.

On the other hand if you’re sincere and honest about getting through the confusing tumultuous parts of life, this site WILL help you see things differently. I just need to do a better job promoting, ha ha.

So back to that New Car Phenomenon…

An old project came to light that was shelved after a client decided to vacate the land of the spiritual… And as of late, it was suddenly something of great interest to those looking to know more about their spiritual centers.

Off I go to start the process of taking what I had, and building a solid promotion around it.

Then from out of the blue (which is what always happens, a bit on that in a moment) a dear friend sent me to an optin with an awesome Robert Caldidni  slash Glenn Livingston approach to engage you to know more about your spiritual centers..  The Chakras as they are termed.

The phenoenon explained;

Everything is here, always was here, the more involved you are with anything, the more you will intuitively become aware of that which you are involved in. It’s not the universe talking to you or things suddenly appearing out of the ether whenever you engage in something deeply…

You are just more in tuned to what you have put a lot of energy into.
So it’s extremely natural for you to become that much more aware of the same car as yours, the same house colors as yours, the same dress you’re wearing on an unflattering body, or even a body that may (in your eyes) out shine you… It’s just a natural acuity to something you attached your emotions to.

That being said let me digress…

Skeptical and intrigued at the same time, I went through their process to find line after line of misinformation and sheer nonsense about “the what’s and the how’s” about what can and can’t be done concerning your spiritual centers.. and they seemed to be more geared towards sucking you into the tribe than actually bringing you to new levels of understanding.

They obviously did a great job, for over 200,000 people have taken their test and signed up for their report.  So, of course I want to know how the hell they do that…?

Well, I went the full boat and purchased the program after getting the results from the test..  I needed to know exactly what I’m up against, since the selected reviews were of course, positive.

My greatest source of disdain;

If you’ve been in the self -help buying side a while you may have seen the charlatan procedure which the promoter used an old method of false activity to create social proof (in this case) the spiritual openings .. weak vs. strong,  by doing the “hold your hand up and say your name, now say a different name.. say I am [your name] while holding your hand up,”  I’ll now push down on your hand… and now say someone elses name, and I’ll push down on your hand, you see how you were stronger with Your name than with another name?

OMFG I wanted to .. well lets say  I got a bit emotional.

Why?

This dog & pony show, for the uninitiated is amazing in its results.
It’s proof positive that what you do, think and feel, effects you physically, mentally and spititually…

Or…

It just proves that if I apply pressure to a certain area along your arm I can exact the results I want with the help of gravity. See?

I don’t mess with people’s reality,  spirituality, recovery, or with their lives. To me, this is the greatest of misgivings one can do to another.

On a side note;

Your imagination is the next thing to your faith. Without imagination you most likely have little or no faith.

On another note;

The placebo is an amazing tool.  So if you are experiencing results from disinformation in the positive… Who am I to judge? Your faith alone [and nothing else] has healed you.

 The Gift of Tones, something I’m working on, has been getting awesome reviews so far.
It’s being polished up and just about ready for promotion.
I’m actually having a lot of fun doing it, which tells me “I’m either on the right path or I’m insane. ”

• Do you meditate?
• Are you sensitive?
• Do you indulge in woowoo?
  lol, no other way to describe that one..

Reason I ask is, I created some recordings a while back, when a friend of mine was helping a blind person… We wanted to send them the recordings so they would be able to open their spiritual centers (Chakras) The recordings actually contain the sounds made of the centers opening, and I added some binaurals along with colored tones to facilitate that which could not be seen…

I gave them to a friend, whom I helped facilitate the activation of her Merkeba… If you haven’t done this, I could show you, no problem…

My question is, if you know you’re sensitive.. (not a major factor, but I found that those who have shifted a bit helps) would you want to review the recordings? They’re numbered and in mp3 format so to improve use on available devices… if so.. just let me know.

They’re 3-5Mb each
They’re 35minutes long in total
They’re numbered
And they are kinda powerful…

Don’t listen to them at normal volume lvl’s, lower your volume to 2 or 3… and use headphones…

There are no vocals voices or subliminals involved.. someone was concerned about that, so I thought I’d place that disclaimer in there…

I’ve recently released them publically and currently seeking reviews…

Simlpy  Enter Your Email Below And Complete Your Order On The Following Page…

E-Mail *

 

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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Umm, seriously though…

As an avid reader, practitioner of the Edgar Cayce material, I would read the term long-suffering over and over and think… Why? I mean WTF? Why Suffering? Why Long? Life can really suck, but why be happy about that?

I would associate it with… the unfeeling, or lack of at-onement with God. Or the unachieved ability to speak with the Creator. Or I would associate it with hardships, poverty, chastity ….

Until recently I was okay with this line of thought, and then I wasn’t okay with it any longer.

It became as a thorn in my side. I would see the term and say to myself, “This is just not right”… Inherently including long-suffering into my spiritual journey is not something that I wanted. At least n this framework, not any longer.

After all, I had just come into the realization that I was about to publicly embark on helping people with their own journey’s as I have done privately for years.

And here was this term which was inevitably going to come up for others as it had come up for myself. I mean, let’s face it, long-suffering, God help me!

The very word “Suffering and Long” together themselves hold absolutely no good predisposed definitions to any sane person in this world that denotes being happy as the ultimate goal in life.

So, to settle things once and for all I went and scoured the Edgar Cayce readings for the definitions of Long Suffering and came up short for several weeks…

Then after putting the matter to rest for a time, a renewed curiosity emerged and I was off to seek out this terms definition once more…

Here’s what I found.

Long-suf·fer·ing  adj. Patiently enduring wrongs or difficulties.

Well now, this is something I can, not only identify with, but I can wrap my head around and apply understanding to.

You see from what I had known in the past, long-suffering was one of the fruits of the spirit.

What???
A fruit of the spirit is to suffer???

Well…

When you consider that you have very little control over people, places and things.. then ummm yes. It is. It is a gift to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic and be completely at peace.

It is a gift to enter into the subway station at rush hour get packed, pushed and shoved into a sardine can for an hour everyday  and still maintain a sense of inner quiet calmness.

It is a gift to be at peace as our children stray and go on to engage in matters we disapprove.  So they may learn their lessons themselves without our intervention or interaction..

It is a gift to be beset by adverse conditions and remain calm.
It is a gift to be at peace when you get to that closed restaurant you’ve invited your friends to and still have a jovial heart to say “Oh Well, that sux, how about pizza?”…
It is a gift to be in a crisis and be the coolest head in the crowd.
It is a gift to have a flat, or breakdown in the worst place at the worst time, and be at peace. Knowing upfront, this will pass.
It is a gift to let another go completely off their rocker and not be affected by their words or actions. It is most definitely a gift indeed.

How many other conditions can you come up with where the peace in your heart has carried you through, or you wished you had the peace within to have experienced things differently?

We can call upon the gift of long-suffering and enjoy it in an instant.
Or, we can play the drama queen and blow everything out of proportion.

The choice is ultimately yours to do as you wish.

My mantra this year has been; “Perception Is Nine Tenths™ “

I can either see things the way so called normal people see things.
Or, I can hold the gift of long-suffering and enjoy more moments that would otherwise baffle not only myself but the so-called normal people as well…

It would be a crime for me to spout fluff, and say “Try it… you’ll be surprised at the shock and awe this brings to others and their sudden change in how You are being perceived.”

But the truth is long-suffering is a gift.

One that would be well to be accepted and then practiced and then lived like second nature.

For many in western society, life is simple, but it is only as easy as we allow it to be.

Until the next post…
Stay Focused,
Dan Lopez

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I have.. and it wasn’t always put in a positive light.

When I was eight-going-on-nine, my life shifted from so-so to horrific. For me, it was hell on Earth, for others
it looked like life as usual.

Nice well-behaved kid, nice loving family yada,
yada, yada…

Well, behind closed doors, there’s a life that’s
never seen by anyone outside the nuclear family unit.

What happens in the family stays in the family.
Nothing controversial is to be shared
outside of the family. We kept to ourselves.

Does any of this (any of it) sound familiar? If so,
pay attention… it’s important you hear this.

As a child of hispanic origin it was quite normal to be
a child of an alcoholic. As such, there are many disturbing
accounts that occur in such an environment.

So many, they have become the lifeblood of my current
trade as a writer.

As I picked up much of the traits of my parents, it became
apparent to authority figures I simply had a problem.

What that problem was, wasn’t their concern. They only knew
I was the only one that had to change it. Change it?

How the hell was I supposed to change living in fear?

How was I supposed to know whether I was going to see
the light of day after I went to sleep? I never knew
what was going to come through that door at 6PM.

Having to explain the bruises and marks on my face to
teachers always left me screaming inside “PLEASE HELP ME!”

But all I could say when approached was “I slipped,” or, “I’m
just clumsy I guess.”

One night, I was told to get on my knees and face the wall
and if I moved I was going to be killed. I believed it.
I believed it so much, I told my brother who was next to me
I loved him and to never forget me….

And I passed out from the fear.

I later went through my own bout with the disease of
addiction and got into as much trouble as possible.

I think by the time I was thirteen, I disowned my own family.
I rarely went home and when I did it was
after everyone was asleep, and I was gone
before everyone was awake.

After a final battle which sent my father flying down a
concrete stairwell, I wound up in the Queens General Hospital
psyche ward, where they told my parents I probably wasn’t
going to ever be released, and they should make
appropriate arrangements.

Fast forward some twenty-odd years later.

I’m twenty years “sober” or “clean” or whatever
you care to call it. I’ve two beautiful daughters from two
disastrous relationships. And I’m writing for several arenas
as clients allow… Life is good.

It wasn’t always such but I survived.

That’s just one story. Albeit a short one…but its mine.

Do you have a story?
Of course you do.

Every story impacts another person’s life. And yours
has the ability to do the same. We need these stories to
help each other connect with one another, and heal
one another and let each other know that we are not alone…

Let us help you tell your story. Come listen to some amazing
stories and see how YOU can use them to help
build or EXPLODE the life you want to live.

It’s easy, just follow the link below and we’ll
show you how. Just hop on over for this Free Series Today:

http://www.thankgodi.com/cmd.php?Clk=4313323

Stay Focused,
Dan Lopez

PS. Listen to some amazing people Like
Self-Help Legend, John DeMartini:
(his secret past may suprise you)

Best Seller Maker, Warren Whitlock:
(who unlocks the secrets of bestseller status)

Internet Marketing Legend, Willie Crawford:
(Willie completely drops his guard and tells all)

To listen to these and more click the link now
before they decide this information is (TOO Telling)
and ask us to pull it down…

http://www.thankgodi.com/cmd.php?Clk=4313323

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Today? Heh Heh… Today, this day some decades ago, would prove to be a huge challenge…

Sitting slacker style at the dining room table doing, what I remember to be, my homework, I was completely oblivious to what I had started only minutes ago..

My brother and sister sat quietly opposite me and my father was on the living room couch mindless as usual watching some newscaster ramble on about the state of things at the time…

That’s when I heard it, I wasn’t quite sure what I was hearing but it wasn’t normal. That’s what I kept telling myself, (that can’t be normal.) But I had no idea what it was until I looked up and my heart dropped a thousand feet.. Black smoke was pouring out of the kitchen as the crackling sound became louder and louder…

I jumped from my seat and bolted into the kitchen to see my poor chicken patties had blazed from their pan of oil, roasting the entire stove area..

The range was a black melted mess the clock on the wall was dripping streak of plastic and the ceiling… The ceiling was nowhere to be seen, hidden by the majestic black cloud of smoke and soot heralded by the eight foot flame still roaring from the pan I had absentmindedly placed there only minutes ago.

Pushing passed my fear, knowing I was about to get my ass whipped for this one for sure… I ran to the pan and grabbed the handle, lifted it off the stove while it still roared violently, flames engulfed my face and I put the pan on the linoleum floor fast as I could…

Can you just picture the floor melting from the heat?

I tried 2 more times to get the pan under control but it was just too much for me and had to be placed on the floor a few more times before I made it to the sink..

Where I, like the genius I am, proceeded to run water into the pan to squelch the flames… Of course, that did what you might expect and I got even more scorched in the process as the flaming oil leaped out with the greatest nasty hiss I’ve ever heard in my life… This time I could not only feel but smell the stench of burning flesh as my mind raced to come to some conclusion of the insanity I had created.

In what seemed like a flash my father was in the kitchen with me and threw a towel over the pan and stopped the flames… If I hadn’t been burned all over, I think he would have killed me on the spot…

But the thing is….

My mother hated that kitchen and to this day Thanks God I destroyed it and gave her the excuse to give it a much needed overhaul.

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Damn good question, and some of the responses that followed, while, well intended, didn’t (to me) seem like anything that made the questioner have anything to walk away with…

And since everyone in the discussion group went on and on? I didn’t have a chance to put my 2cents in. I wish I did… In fact, that question has haunted me since I heard it asked…

(If You have a special way to address this, I seriously think others would love to know also.. So, please add your comment below)

You see, I had just come up with 20 years clean that night, and feeling like I had the answer, I was more than happy to share it… But my higher power had other plans. Yes… I’m in the recovery movement

So, my ability to share was not there, and my ability to listen, was tainted with the noise in my brain.

Kind of a shame, if you think of it, cuz I could have caught something I needed to hear.

Having gone through what I considered an emotionally messy divorce with a 7y/o in the middle, I had been battling with that issue now for a year. And it only recently has come to a head. Where I can wake up each day a little brighter than the last 9 months.

Hell, to be honest, it’s really more like the last 8 years.

So how do I put the past behind me?

It got to a point where I was tired of hearing myself. I needed to start looking deep into exactly what I was doing. Was I looking at the past and reliving it? Or was I sitting right here, right now, and understanding that (what) I was allowing into my head, was not reality, but a memory. A memory I was still reacting to as if it were happening in real time. But it was no longer a reality it was history. Past history & sometimes, recent history.

So why do I have to react to history?

Sometimes this happens when I think about the outbursts of my father… I can see him going into tirades about things of the past that others have a conflicting opinion about contrary to his…

It’s quite embarrassing sometimes…
I watched him rip into my know-it-all brother-in-law.
And while part of me was elated, most of me wanted him to just shut the fuck up.

But I watched, and I observed in silence, as I tried to understand (that part) of me that (is) just like this raving lunatic. “I have this trait”, I said to myself… I don’t like it, no sir, not one bit. Definitely not one of my shining attributes for sure.

But there it was, my father was out of his gourd, reliving his own memory and defending it like it was a child that had been manhandled by a stranger. If you ever defended your child or witnessed a parent doing so, (you get the picture.) There’s nothing stopping you from standing your ground and letting the other know that, under no uncertain terms are they beyond your wrath.

You know? Sometimes we have repeat offenders. These particular memories like to show up randomly at the liberty of their own discretion. These are the ones that usually set me off the easiest.

Usually they are wrongs done to me. Or scenarios, which have caused me great self-loathing, or just painful moments that I wish, had never occurred.

For instance, I have had a few times in my youth, where I felt unprotected and open to abuse from outside of the family with no means of defense or retribution.

In fact when I went to my family and gave account of the deeds done to me, I was denied it ever happened and that I must be imagining things…

When these thoughts return, they hit me like a car accident. Out of nowhere, unprovoked and devastating. Before I know it, all manner of emotions run through me like a whirlwind and none of them good ones. I’m left re-victimized. I’m angry, sad and scared. My heart is racing and I can’t tell what’s happening to me or recognize reality of the here and now. I’m no longer present.

I think this is termed best as (post traumatic stress). But I could be wrong, I would love to tell you that I’ve been able to rid myself of these. But like so many people, I also have much work to do.

This is the past, but it’s alive in the here in now through my own thoughts.

Thoughts…

I heard someone say, “Anger is sadness unbound”.

Most profound statement, the account mentioned that there is no anger per se. Its origin is that of sadness. Personally I think you could throw in a good dose of doubt and fear into the mix. But that’s just for me..

Depending on the situation and the frame of mind of the individual.

But getting back to (putting the past behind you), this only comes with time, with forgiveness, acceptance and with surrender to the past.

In order that we can see today, right now, that which is set before us…

Today I can stop most of my offending thoughts, best that I can by asking myself…

“WAIT, where the heck am I?
How am I?
What is around me?
What day is it?
What time is it?”

As I force myself into answering these questions, I am no longer in the loop of thought I was just in… I’ve shifted my focus. I’ve evoked my Free Will.

Right now?

I’m here, I’m in good health.
I’m lying down cranking out this writing while my lovely daughter is snoring her brains out… Ha haaa. Oh shhh…

There’s a phrase “it only gets better with time”, and nowhere is it more pertinent than it is to this particular situation. Putting the past behind you is a practice. Once you’ve done it a few times, you are able to do it quite regularly and move a little further towards functioning in the here and now, despite whatever event slams you sideways…

The faster you (do) put things behind you, the faster you can get on with what really matters to you. I think anything after that is like beating a dead horse. Either you do it, or you suffer unnecessarily for as long as you continue this behavior.

Maintaining a reactive state to your past history. I don’t know about you, but I would like to think, I have better things to do than continually looking back and live there as if it were happening right now, like a spliced movie in an endless loop going over and over and over again.

It’s not like I’m cured of this, but today I can honestly say I do it a hell of a lot less than I have over the last eight years…

(Now really, I do think others would love to know how you deal with the past.. So, please add your comment below)

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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So, I thought it might be fun to bring them out here as well…

I originaly came up with 25 as I was requested to, but I added a few at the end…

Deep breath… Here we go!

1. I’m into self discovery… (No, not the touchiing kind.)

2. I’m really good company, unless I’m around people

3. I live in the woods, but I’m from the city.

4. I became an electrician, because I was thrown across my bedroom from playing with paperclips and my outlet.

5. I love Science Fiction, because Non-Fiction is just too fantastical.

6. When I’m alone, I’m rarely by myself.

7. I started to love customizing the electronics in my guitar, more than I loved playing the guitar.

8. I practiced playing guitar every day for an hour or more, religiously for 5 years.

9. I once, could hit the same notes as David Lee Roth, and Ozzy Osborn. (Those days are Way Gone.)

10. The first time I got behind 2 turntables in my friends basement,
I stayed there for an hour throwing 15 records together and my friends
thought it was one album being played while they were talking to each other.

11. I found out that having friends on social networks is not the same as knowing them.

12. I get caught with tears in my eyes watching movies that touch me personally.

13. I get along better with women than I do with men.

14. I seem to love the idea of self help, more than I like helping myself.

15. My father once took me to the rifle range, where he stood straight up and
hit a target 100 feet away with bad eyes, no rifle scope and a 1960 year old rifle.
From that moment on, I was hooked. I wanted to be a professional marksman.

16. I’m the youngest grandfather in my family.

17. On 9/11, My ex wife was standing next to building seven when the second plane hit.
I watched the second plane hit from an office window across the river.

18. At 18, I was the oldest virgin among all my friends.

19. I can drink a whole pot of coffee a day and still not understand why I can’t sleep.

20. My friend stayed the night once, and told me, that when she got in a cab the next
morning, the cab-driver asked her if I was as good as she had heard.

21. The things I used to do all night now take all night for me to do… (doesn’t apply to me.)

22. I still dance alone in my house like no ones watching.

23. I love Godiva Dark Chocolate Truffles. (almost as much as coffee)

24. I love flying, I’m just not crazy about landing.

25. I can be extremely smart and extremely stupid at the same time.

PS: I read Tarot cards.. I’m pretty damn good at it too…

25a. I talk for hours about spirituality, meditation, the akashic records and bible passages.

25b. I can talk for hours about firearms, target practice or marksmanship, re-loading and hunting.

25c. I’m an uber technical geek when it comes to computers, the internet and online marketing.

25d. I can build a house from scratch (if you give me enough coffee)

25e. Thinking of writing a book titled, “The Dirty Angel At Dante’s Gate™”

Sheesh.. that’s enough for now…

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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It recieved such a welcome response I thought I’d share it here. I paraphrased it a bit cuz , well just because it made for an easier read. Hope it helps someone out there.

The beautiful and very talented Mj.Schrader from http://mjschrader.com shared on FaceBook;

If you want something, find out what it takes to do it. Divide that down into manageable steps and go for it! YOU are a Rockstar! You can do it!

Then the question came;
What if you don’t really know where to start?
The “Universe” doesn’t always give you that info!

I responded;
That depends on What it is you want to start, want, desire or are passionate about…  Start by achieving clarity, narrow it down to the exact thing you want to achieve. The less vague you are, the better chance your answer will make sense for you.

We tend to complicate everything, and the way we come to conclusions for the decisions we make, normally derive from simple deductions… so, keep it simple best ya can. Think in “obvious solution”, terms. eg; A cookie maker needs (What) to make cookies? A cookie maker needs (What) to sell cookies..

Simple basic application of self examination…

Sometimes weighing in decisions is a blip. We have solutions, but we don’t like them thar soulutions we got. So we wait for them, like the ones we have are going to change, which, normally they don’t. No one knows what tomorrow will bring, but if we take ONE step in any direction, we open up to possibilities that we would never have come by standing still.

Then came the reply;
I am so in a flux right now, I want to change careers, but
I am just soo scared to basically fail, that it keeps me from even trying. I am too much of a perfectionist!

To wit I  responded;
You’re giving yourself your best answers, just reverse them to allow the clarity to come… I’m getting, “things are well with you” then what is the flux, you are placing upon yourself?

Remember:

“Passion overcomes all obstacles”…

When I had my 2nd daughter, SHE became my passion. I traveled 2 or more hours to and from work each day from South Jersey to Long Island City, NY, and when I got home, I gave all of myself to my daughter every night, throughout the night. Nothing, (no-thing) was more important.

Yeah, I lost boat loads of sleep, but I didn’t care, because I loved what I was passionate about.

I think I’m that way with helping others as well.

The other thing is FEAR.. or better termed, False Evidence Appearing Real…

If you have fear? What would your situation be like, with that or those fears, (there may be more than one in your situation), if fear was not in the equation?

Can you begin to imagine, the results you would like to have and hold and experience, IF fear was not present?

Write these things down, what payoff would you get from following your dreams?

What fears are holding you back? & Why?

Then, where did these fears come from? Can you remove the source of those fears? And moreover, what would it take to remove the source of the fears.

What if, your best loved friend or child came to you with these questions…? What would you tell them? Then… tell that to yourself.

Over and over again, like a mantra. Even if you don’t take any action at this time, these exercises can alter your perception and offer you new ways to view your life as it is right now.

Change is inevitable, fear is optional.

Here’s the original update :

http://www.facebook.com/mj.schrader/posts/104575012953609

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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Ken McArthur posted a touching Q&A on his blog which attracted a massive amount of interaction from his audience.  I’ll link to that post at the end of this article.

The theme was prompted by a prospect who was down on his luck and facing possible ejection from his home.

The request to Ken’s audience was, what should we tell this person?

Since the request was pretty vague, there were more mixed message responses, with even more vague acknowledgment to the situation, than there were constructive suggestions.

Fortunately, what constructive responses there were, allowed the individual in question to alter their perception and take action in the direction he was seeking.

But…
Why were there so many people out to lynch this person?

He obviously stated in the on-set of his request, that he didn’t want, or need a hand-out. Yet many were at the ready to nail this poor bastard to the cross for being in the situation he got himself into.

Lets break this down to its finite components, shall we?

The Who, What, Where, Why & How’s.
Why we tend to neglect the simple yet powerful application of this, is based more on the impatience of what we want to get done (get the message out), rather than the what we want to create (get the message across).

Still with me? Good, now pay close attention.

For this article let’s focus on The What.
The message to get across, in this instance, is to create a solution for the intended individual.  Similar to a Hot Seat scenario.

Why people get emotionally stirred up by this particular persons condition, is their own attachment to past events in their life or psychology which reflect similarities between themselves and the intended recipient. Clouding their judgment and creating a sideways reactions to the solution based on their own prejudice.

Sorry, I read a lot of selfhelp books… Onward!

Those who were a little more cool, calm and collected were able to take in the whole scenario, and respond accordingly and constructively. (see Mike Hill’s response at the bottom of this article)

Mind you, no one really enjoys suffering, especially if they’ve experienced it themselves.

You have an audience, the message you want to convey can be interpreted in different manners. It’s our job to deliver the message we want to get across with laser like precision to minimize the negative and accentuate the positive.

Unless of course, our job in the message is to agitate a pain point, then the negative response needs to be endorsed and complimented with the solution we are to get across.

Here, the message was framed in the words, “How Should I Respond?”
Depicting a problem from a victim’s viewpoint.

In Robert Cialdini’s “YES! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive”, he states; “by using negative social proof as a battle cry, they might be inadvertently focusing the audience on the prevalence rather than the undesirability”

Cialdini was referring to posters the local clinic had put up regarding what people fail to do will hurt them. Where the posters the clinic put up, gave social proof by way of average statistics. And now its become something socially acceptable as opposed to focusing on the solution to the matter and what can be done and what the audience should do. Now the clinic is wondering why the statistics rose in light of their posters.

What was focused upon or framed, was the condition of this invidual (the negative), not the solution (the positive) that could be brought about. Hence the hoof in mouth that many of the responders experienced.

This is not an isolated occurrence as I’m about to expose.
As I write this, I’m finding in my old writings, that I fail to lead the reader through to the specified action in a framed manner.

Where my viewpoints may be enlightening to the reader, the intended point gets lost, as it reads more like a journal than something applicable.

Did you get that? ‘Cuz I totally sucked in psyche class.

Writing copy, a blog or article post has the same power. If, and that’s a big (IF), we write with an intended action we want the audience to take, isn’t delivered, we won’t get the desired results and “Its All About The Results” now isn’t it?

Whatever our passion is, it’s the results we really get the payoff from.

So, what do You think would have been a different way, to deliver this request. One which would have increased a more positive response, rather than the bashing this person had to sift through.

Seriously, I want to know what you think…

Here’s the post Ken put up. It really is an excellent read.

http://kenmcarthur.com/?p=431

I’m very partial to Mike Hill’s response. You can find that here:

http://mikehillsblog.com/struggling-to-succeed/

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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How many times, during the day, do you have situations that stir up old feelings? How many times during a week, month a year?

It friggin adds up doesn’t it.

And how many times in life, if you sat down and wrote them, all the things that gave you the heebiejeebies, would you come up with? I’ll bet a lot.

Those feelings, brought on by past events tend to color your mood, your perception, your attitude, your self esteem and your self worth.

When I decided to release some history on the screen in an article, the words came flowing like a torrential food of emotions.

And as for the reader, those words were very effective in conveying the event I as writing about. It was a roller-coaster ride.

In fact…

It was so effective, some readers got headaches, some had to lie down, some wanted to know whether to “look over the precipice or jump.” (actual quote)

I wrote a headline to the story using a friends name, simply because I let him read the drafted versions. He responded very well to them.

I won’t lie, his name actually increased readership.

The shame of it, my lesson was, he wasn’t the focus of the article.

This gave the article a bit of confusion to the reader.

Bad Dan, never do that again.

I mean, I bet I could, so,long as I,
1. get permission,
2. kept the content congruent with the name.

Fortunately, Mark and I have a hint of history between us over the last 3 to almost 4 years now.. (whew…)

I removed his name and cleared the air, cuz gossipy cats were blowing things way outta proportion… I noticed they removed their little written public fits. So I’ll play nice.

Obviously, it came across like I was trashing the name on the title. And that was because, it was a hellish ride I took them on.

My dumbass forgot that, “The title frames the content.”

I wish I could go deeper into framing information, it is an extremely heavy persuasion technique, when delivered correctly to the right target.

But I’m going too far off the track already.

I’m setting myself free.

By listing things that have messed with me in one form or another… Getting them down where I can look at them.

Stepping back from what I wrote for a while.
Return and try to view them from a different set of eyes.

I can gain a completely different perspective on the bogeymen of my past. Basically, I’m taking a fearless moral inventory of myself.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some form of skeleton in their closet. Something they would rather not look at or revisit, as if it has some energy that will totally obliterate them if they were to cast their eyes in that direction.

Now, I have a dear friend who doesn’t think looking back is healthy.

But in the last 20 years, I have experienced and witnessed a transformation that occurs when this ritual is practiced.

It’s like an emotional, psychological enema.

The results are always astounding. You walk, like life not only has new meaning, but the weight of years piled higher than the sky, are lifted from your chest and you breathe, upright and ready for anything.

This, is the way to dethroning the ruler of your self-defeating habits, those internal struggles, those sleepless nights while the mind unleashes its unrelenting ravaging images…

Nope…

Not gonna sugar-coat it, it takes courage to face yourself.
If you can face yourself, you can face the world head on.

You ready to face your demons yet?

Well stay tuned, the best is yet to come…

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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I’m very sorry for what assholes you encounter. They will always be there, but more so, when they can hide themselves and act contrary to their open public persona’s.

The more attractive you are the more they appear. These bottom feeders are to be expected, not accepted, but expected.

I was recently called “online famous”, by a dear friend. While I was, of course, flattered, I thought I might give at least a part of my side.

I know heavy hitters because I promoted most of them through Goldbar.net which used to be a force among many in the email campaigns.

While I no longer am with Goldbar, I’m in the incubator to rebuild.

I don’t live in a very populated or close community. And If I’m close with my neighbors, I see them every several months apart.

That’s one of the reasons I went back to meetings even with close to 20 years abstinent from everything except coffee and cigarettes…

But I went back for the support, the friendship and the closeness camaraderie brings. In a non-judgmental atmosphere.
Something completely uncommon anywhere on this planet.

Ahh, so getting back to my social activity… I’m there, purely due to being lonely for company.

As for the ability to gain income from such?

At the time, I entered, with the only motive of engaging and befriending the marketers of the day.

So, if and when I rebuild my list, and create a new program, I have interested colleagues, or several channels to get the word out.

Alas, when Goldbar & I dissolved our relationship it removed my 30% royalties and left me penniless.

But I don’t begrudge or blame, its something that happened is all.

I am responsible for everything in my life, this is something of a mantra, I’ve been telling myself of late which seems to get me through the seeming insanity I used to feel like hell about.

I’ll continue…

Off I went to learn SEO, and overwhelmed myself, with trying to absorb 30 years worth of material in 2 months.

Burnout…

While, all that knowledge, from Goldbar affiliate marketing and membership building and email promotions was deeply rooted in me… All the SEO stuff was packed in on top of that.

I became the man who knew too much.

A shit metric ton of information and no where to start.

And then the abusive relationship with my wife came to a head.

Relenting to eliminate my constant urge to commit suicide was becoming a daily challenge.

If I had any self worth at all whatsoever, that was continuously stripped of my possession with every passing engagement with my wife.

These sessions of dehumanizing were worst felt when they were exposed with my daughter present.

Remember, I’m still responsible for everything in my life… I’m not a victim or traumatized, I don’t have a syndrome, or at least any that I can’t recover from. I am responsible for everything in my life.

But the head came when I was off to do a side job for a friend, and my wife didn’t believe me. She thought I was just leaving to get away from her… so she blew up and then physically attacked me…

Upon the 2nd or 3rd assault, I defended myself and threw her off of me. She stumbled back and said “that was all she needed” and called the cops to have me removed from my home.

Since then, I’ve mourned the loss of that marriage like the mourning of a living loved one who had passed…

And I’ve come out the other side of it. And propelled right back to square one.
In the beginning of my marketing experience I was told…

“STUDY Copywriting.”

Yes its going to take a while, but anything worth doing is worth doing wrong. Until I get it right.

So, I don’t have back deals going on, there are no secrets of the riches in marketing. Most of the stuff (out there) does work. It just takes time and effort, and, in many areas, money and outsourcing.

Other than that?

Long lasting, job crushing online income comes, (IMHO), not from Social anything, but from real world doing. Doing what has worked from the very beginning of advertising.

Not as the holy grail, not as the only trick in the bag. But as the best place to start.

If you can learn the art of salesmanship?

Everything else is just an added bonus to multiply everything you have to offer.

Then test everything, and fail quickly. Accept, what you learned, as what you “Got From” the effort you put forth. So, you can eliminate or apply and build from it.

Taking stock in yourself is the greatest thing one can do in any lifetime. Be brutally honest with yourself, and list things, and then try to think of them differently, as an outsider looking in would see your list.

This isn’t easy, and requires quite a stretch of courage, most people just don’t care to face themselves no matter how bad a life they’re creating for their loved ones and themselves.

I’m developing a short course to do just that. .. well honestly I wasn’t, but, do you think it would be appealing?

I would love to hear your opinion about what you would want to get from such a course..

Don’t be shy…
Here’s where you enter your suggestion or opinion in the comments below.

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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No, its not my daughter blasting her Nintentdo DSi like she loves to do. Its my own pc through my stereo.

Why? I’ll tell you why…

I used to be a deejay, don’t laugh!

In fact I’m not sure when that spelling came about,
we just spelled it DJ when I was spinning.

Now…

I don’t know if I really want to go back to deejaying.

It was fun as hell. I met some great people like Frank Garcia of Mainline Lighting & Sound.

A well known fact in our industry, but little known to you is,
Frank actually had the pleasure of being the MC and Deejay
for Eddie Murphy’s wedding, as well as a great many other
notorieties.

We got together in a tiny club in Jamaica Queens NY.
Club? It was really a glorified pub if you want to be honest.

Humble beginnings ya might say. Frank soared and
I was able to get into places like The Fun House, The UnderGround
as well as doing a college circuit for AMFAR.

Which was some benefit organization for Aids Awareness.
The college gig was awesome, we had acts come from all over
like Evelyn Champagne King, TKA, and a slew of others.

We setup and broke down each gig, and in between basically
womanized our way through it all… Well, I did anyways.

Yeah, I was a bit of a character back then..

But, it was grueling, we literally carried all the equipment
and records which (pound for pound) weighed as much as the
gargantuan speakers we had to lug around.

But, one thing a Deejay had to know which made him his own star?

The ability to segue songs, all kinds of songs, not just
dance tunes. We needed to know how to throw in 50′s tunes
seventies classics, Motown and R&B…

We made those little bits&pieces fit inside the breaks
that were in every dance track.

And it all had to make sense and keep the floor filled.

When the segue came in, you knew you had a winner when
you heard the crowd cry out “OHHHHH!!!!”

Club owners loved you and kept you by the amount of time you kept the floor filled.

The longer you kept that crowd going?

The more drinks were sold at the bar.
The more money the club earned

Hang on

Back to this crazy skill called the segue.

This is an art.

One, that I today, have come to learn, means everything.

As a writer, a would be copywriter, an email copywriter
and devilish list builder (just threw that in for shitzngiggles).

The segue has to make sense. It has to help complete
the story the pitch the benefit, the feature… Everything.

Without the elegance of delivering a killer segue, your reader has left the building.

Still with me?

I’ve begun to read my emails, my posts and to be certain.

I’m glad I do.

I now read them aloud. I can’t honestly tell ya
where I got that from, probably Gary Halbert.

But, I’m going to start reading them into a recorder.
And transcribe, word for word, what I sound like.

If you write posts, an articles, an emails or write copy…

Then you would be remiss to deny this practice in your
discipline.

Gary Halbert once said (and I know this to be true)…
that, as writers and copywriters, “we have clots between our brains
and our hands.”

What comes out of our mouths rarely makes it to the paper.
And we wind up, on paper, posts, ezines, what have you,
sounding nothing like the way we talk.

And to the reader, this becomes obvious instantly or instantly obvious.

Going back to being s Deejay?

Hmmmm… That would be an investment and a half to rebuild and relearn
this new mp3 digitized form of the old fun I learned to live.

But then again…

Once I have, one side of the headphones to my head, everything else will just disappear.

Tempting, very, very tempting.

If you want to know more about how to segue, get your dancin self over to the sign up form before I drop the bonus from the offer.

Until the next post.
Stay focused
Dan Lopez -TheUnguru

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by John G. Mitchell

Originally posted on American Hertage:

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1978/2/1978_2_3.shtml
Among the most common mechanical possessions in the households of America, outnumbering even the motor vehicle and possibly outnumbered itself only by the flush toilet and the television set, is a device which, having won the West and championed liberty over the years, some householders would now proscribe as the instrument of our collective undoing. In short, the gun. I mean rifles, shotguns, pistols, and revolvers, at least 150,000,000 of them tucked away in bureau drawers and attic cupboards or racked splendidly above mantel-pieces. There are big ones and little ones; Krags and Enfields, Springfields and Mausers, Mannlicher-Carcanos and M-1 Garands, Remingtons and Winchesters and Brownings and Berettas and Rugers and Lugers and Colts; guns for all seasons and reasons; guns to punch holes in targets and tin cans, coots and Kodiak bears; guns for their own sake, guns never used; guns as last line of defense against burglars and rapists, looters and lunatics; guns to be stolen by burglars and lunatics; guns for irate lovers, quiet patriots, raving assassins, earnest sportsmen, feisty poachers, gentle collectors; guns for the people who passionately believe that the U.S. Constitution gives them a personal right to keep and bear arms.

A number of institutions operate in behalf of the gun owners of America. These include the arms industry, the hook-and-bullet press, hunters’ groups functioning at the state level, and some half dozen national membership organizations whose involvement in the preservation of personal weaponry is often secondary to some other interest, such as the propagation of game species in order that hunters might have something better than tin cans on which to exercise their right to bear arms. In addition, gun owners are staunchly represented on Capitol Hill, in most statehouses, and generally throughout those rural jurisdictions where sheriffs still prevail along with rocking chairs and Bull Durham tobacco. It is a diverse constituency, this gunnery. With overlapping subgroups, it embraces 16,000,000 licensed hunters, most of the nation’s farmers and ranchers, countless edgy urban shopkeepers, and, by some estimates, as many as four of every ten heads-of-household in the land. No one institution could possibly speak for every Tom, Dick, and Harriet of them. And only one tries—the National Rifle Association of America, better known as the NRA to friend and foe alike, of which there are plenty.

The National Rifle Association was chartered in New York State in 1871, just over nine years after regiments of raw Union recruits were marched to the fields of Shiloh to match their marksmanship with General P.G.T. Beauregard’s finest Confederate squirrel shooters. The Northerners were armed for the most part with new, muzzle-loading Springfields. In the Union’s haste to bring the war to a speedy end, there had not been time enough to instruct the rank and file in the rifle’s proper use. As a result, some of the Springfields at Shiloh were recovered by Beauregard’s men in mint condition: dropped in the field and never fired. Similar humiliations occurred at Gettysburg and other Union shrines. After the war, commands not otherwise engaged in Southern reconstruction or Indian removal in the West promptly reverted to antebellum type, with much emphasis on close-order drill and nary a round at the rifle range. Some retired officers, however, remembered the lesson of Shiloh and began to speak of America’s need for straight shooters. These officers were the founders of the National Rifle Association.

“GOD GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE”

Over the past century, pursuing its charter mandate, the NRA has served with distinction as the undisputed alma mater of American marksmen. It has nurtured affiliate rifle clubs in every state, elevated competitive shooting to the level of true sport, encouraged excellence at arms in the military services, and prepared many a peacetime citizen for the difficult role of wartime rifleman. It has swelled from a modest cadre of Union veterans reminiscing in wall tents to an organizational colossus of 1,200,000 dues-paying members, 300 employees, $26,400,000 in securities, a multimillion-dollar headquarters building in Washington, D.C., 37,707 acres of New Mexican real estate, and (in 1976) an expense budget of more than $16,500,000, of which almost a quarter was spent by the NRA’s aggressive lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. The priorities of the NRA are reflected in this budget, and they are quite different from the pressing martial concerns of a century ago. For every dollar spent directly in 1976 on such placid programs as hunter safety education and competitive shooting matches, two were shelled out in the volatile arena where gun-owner “rights” and NRA goals are under constant attack by proponents of gun control.

The gun controllers compose a diverse constituency themselves. They include tough big-city chiefs of police, Eastern liberals and assorted do-gooders with college degrees, most respondents to Harris surveys and Gallup polls, some psychiatrists, widows of slain cops, and the anonymous authors of august reports by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, and the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. They also include U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Detroit Democrat who, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime in the Ninety-fourth Congress, held extensive hearings across the country in hopes of gathering support for a law that would have prohibited the manufacture and sale of “substandard” handguns, the so-called Saturday Night Specials.

In opening the first of those hearings in February, 1975, Chairman Conyers reflected on past frustrated efforts to enact effective legislation. The greatest obstacles, he dourly observed, were the “politically devastating lobbying activities of hunters and sportsmen, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association. … Today, there are more than 200 million Americans, 139 million of whom are of voting age. On the issue of gun control, the one million or so members of the National Rifle Association have had a staggeringly disproportionate amount of influence over the course of our federal policy.” And that influence prevailed right down to the bitter end of the Ninety-fourth Congress, at which time John Conyers’ firearms bill of 1976 was quietly buried without a floor vote in the yellow duff of election-year politics.

Meanwhile, internal rumblings were heard within the corporate body of the NRA. Despite its recent tactical victory in the Congress, there were curious rumors that certain NRA executives were “going soft” on the gut issue of gun control. It was said that the NRA brass was preparing to sell out to bird watchers and bleeding hearts. And finally there was talk of a palace revolt, if need be, to oust the offenders from office at the next annual meeting.

A singular image looms large within the national subconscious—a lone man with a rifle snugged in the crook of his arm, or a pistol in his fist. It is the Minuteman at Concord Bridge, Daniel Boone at Cumberland Gap, Jeremiah Johnson in the Shining Mountains, G’fcster at the Little BigHorn, Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, Alvin York in the Argonne Forest, and GI Joe on the beachhead at Anzio. The weapons change, but not the nature of the man—alone, fearless, confident, doing what has to be done in a world in which ambiguity is not allowed. And out of the past he whispers a rifleman’s verity: “God, guns, and guts made America free.”

But there are other voices, darker images: Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, young Charles Whitman perched in his tower at the University of Texas with three rifles, two pistols, one shotgun, seven hundred rounds of ammunition, and fourteen perforated human bodies on the campus lawns below him. For many Americans, the enchanted vision of the solitary gunner is shrinking fast. Yet scratch the subconscious of an NRA member and the chances are you will find yourself not in Dallas or Los Angeles or Memphis but in some place more absolute between the bridge at Concord and the bulkheads at Anzio Beach.

“GOD GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE”

There was a time not long ago when I believed we had pretty much had it with guns. I mean, as a nation. Guns were getting a bad press in the sixties. And so were hunters. A friend who edited a hunting-and-fishing magazine said he was thinking of changing the magazine’s tone by eschewing traditional bag-limit lore, the literature of vicarious slaughter. Hunters are “going out less,” he explained, quoting the title of a piece by novelist Vance Bourjaily which my friend had commissioned but declined to publish for fear of antagonizing his advertisers. He needn’t have worried. For despite all the adverse publicity, the antigun sentiment, the legislative efforts to make owning a gun as difficult as possible—and however less often Bourjaily himself may be going out to hunt—the fact of the matter is that Americans are going out as often as they ever did in postwar times. Each year there are more of them, and more of their guns.

Between 1960 and 1976, the number of licensed hunters in this country increased more than 14 per cent (to 16,300,000). This is only three points off the per cent of increase for the U.S. population as a whole during the same period. Not a bad record for the enduring Nimrod tradition, especially if one considers that, during those sixteen years, America witnessed its greatest loss of huntable land (to “Posted” signs and suburbanization). Moreover, dollar-volume sales of arms and ammunition continue to increase. Inflation accounts for much of this, but not enough to indicate any slackening in the number of units sold; not when rifle and shotgun sales of $269,700,000 in 1975 showed a 27 per cent improvement over sales in 1972, and surely not when handgun sales of $125,500,000 showed a 39 per cent gain in the same three-year period. These figures, of course, reflect only legal over-the-counter transactions. They do not include back-alley sales of Saturday Night Specials and contraband military weapons which no self-respecting urban guerrilla can afford to be without. Thus it would seem that quite a few Americans are not yet as fed up with guns as I had previously believed.

Statistically, it would be impossible to construct an accurate profile of the gun owners of this country. They simply refuse to be placed into neat little squares. It does seem feasible, however, to arrive at some general categorical conclusions about them. One might divide the lawful gun owners of this country into four parts. There are (1) hunters, (2) competitive shooters, (3) collectors, and (4) defenders. By weight of numbers, competitive shooters and collectors do not count for much, nor do they particularly trouble the sensibilities of the antigunners. This leaves the hunters and the defenders.

According to NRA executives, at least half their members are hunters; yet hunting, apparently, is not always the motive for a hunter to join the NRA. A member opinion survey last year, with more than 130,000 responding, showed that “the most important single reason I first joined NRA” was not “Hunting” (at 14.7 per cent, the second highest response) but “Protecting My Gun Rights” (at 47.7 per cent). Therefore, it seems that anyone who joins the NRA mainly to protect gun rights can be classified as a defender, whether he or she hunts or not.

Defenders no doubt constitute the largest sector of the NRA membership and the largest of the entire gun-owning public as well. This is not to say that all defenders are equally concerned first and foremost with protecting their gun rights. Some are. But others are more concerned with protecting themselves, their spouses, their children, their homes, their businesses, their land. They see themselves as decent, law-abiding citizens. But the System has failed them. They feel helpless. On the farm, where a rifle or shotgun can be as valid and valued a tool as any other, varmints prey on crops and livestock. In the city, there is crime in the streets and fear behind every double-locked door. Some people begin to suspect that even the police have failed them. They pick up a copy of NRA’s official publication, American Rifleman, and their suspicions are confirmed. The year is 1967, after the riots that wrenched cracks in twenty cities. Here in the editorial it says that New York City has a police force about the size of two army divisions and spends a million dollars a day on law enforcement, “yet its crime rate rockets.” The editorial asks: “Who Guards America’s Homes?” The editorial answers: Not the police but the armed citizen, the member of the unorganized militia—the defender.

Fears less conventional than a healthy concern for one’s own self-defense also haunt some defenders, and on occasion the NRA has not been reluctant to capitalize on them. An editorial appearing in American Rifleman in 1949 noted that a major objective of communist takeover strategy is to disarm the citizenry. “Communists,” the editorial explained, “have no overweening desire to be shot.” This was written at the height of the cold war, and in the political context of those times it may have seemed a word to the wise. The editors of Rifleman, however, are not always influenced by changes of international temperature; a version of this message was reprinted in the magazine as recently as 1973. Also in 1973, the readers of Rifleman were treated to a rehash of the “Rules for Revolution,” a document which has never been authenticated but which is held in some circles to be a Moscow advisory to Red undergrounds throughout the world. Even the late J. Edgar Hoover, in 1969, called the document “spurious.” Yet, according to the Rifleman, rule 10 calls for “the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.”

More recently, an irrational fear of communism has been upstaged by a new bogy-the People Control Conspiracy, in which a corrupt federal government, abetted by land-use planners and gutless judges, will seek to disarm the populace through gun registration. During the Conyers hearings in 1975, more than fifty measures were introduced in the House and Senate to curb easy access to firearms by persons who might misuse them. Most of these bills were directed specifically at the Saturday Night Special. None advocated total confiscation of all firearms. And none suggested that it would be in the public interest to disarm the police. But that, apparently, was not the interpretation of the executive staff of the NRA.

So the NRA sat right down and wrote its friends a letter. It ran four pages over the signature of General Maxwell E. Rich (ret.), then executive vice president (the top staff post) of the NRA, and enclosed with it were a four-part questionnaire billed as “our National Opinion Survey on Crime Control” and a plea for contributions to the “NRA Legislative Fund.” The letter addressed itself to the “terribly serious consequences of what the liberal press refers to as ‘Gun Control,’ ” then went on to state: “My friend, they are not talking of ‘Control’; they want complete and total ‘Confiscation.’ This will mean the elimination and removal of all police revolvers, all sporting rifles and target pistols owned by law abiding citizens.… Tell me, what would the crime rate be if the criminal knew our police were unarmed … ?” And just in case the subtleties of this announcement might have been missed, two enclosures echoed the major message. Question 2 of the so-called National Opinion Survey asked: “Do you believe your local police need to carry firearms to arrest robbery and murder suspects?” The solicitation card offered a check list: “Yes, I agree. If guns are taken from our local police and private law abiding citizens only the criminals will be armed.”

“GOD GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE”

Controversy did not always dog the affairs of the NRA. In the good old days a century ago, the riflemen simply addressed themselves to targets at the association’s range at Creedmoor, Long Island. There were team competitions and shooting tours of Europe and the British Isles. In one annual match, the prize was a Gatling gun, complete with carriage, valued at three thousand dollars. Ulysses S. Grant served one desultory term as NRA president in 1883-84. He was succeeded by General Philip H. Sheridan. Membership, however, remained small, and, by all accounts, the NRA might actually have gone under but for the fortuitous appearance in the U.S. statute books of Public Law 149. Signed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, it authorized the sale, at cost, of surplus military small arms and ammunition to rifle clubs meeting specifications of a newly created National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice. One such specification was that, to partake of the government’s generosity at arms, a club had to be approved and sponsored by the National Rifle Association. Two years later, as if to show that it not only could go to the top but also could stay there, the NRA signed up President Roosevelt, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and Secretary of State Elihu Root as life members. By the 1930’s, the organization was expanding into new fields-police marksmanship training, and later, youth programs in cooperation with agricultural and veterans’ groups. In 1940, after Dunkirk, with Hitler’s armies poised to strike across the English Channel, a plea was issued to NRA members to “send a gun to defend a British home.” And fifteen hundred members came through.

During and immediately after World War II, the NRA experienced a time of rapid growth, both in national prestige and in the size of its membership. President Harry S Truman in 1945 commended the organization for “assistance … in prosecution of the war.” A year later, nearly threescore senators, congressmen, generals, and admirals turned out for the NRA’s Diamond Jubilee dinner, at which General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower praised the group for being “utterly selfless in its aims. …” Such high compliments no doubt were a great boost to NRA recruiters; in 1946, membership practically doubled to 155,000.

If the American public had any perception of the NRA at this time, it was not a controversial one. By and large, the association’s principal activities seemed to remain where they had always been—down on the shooting range. But as the country followed new directions, so, too, did the NRA. By the late 1950’s it appeared that the main action henceforth would be played out not on the range but in the halls of legislative debate. Suddenly in the Congress there were people saying that the Federal Firearms Acts of 1934 and 1938-which had restricted the manufacture and sale of submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns and had regulated interstate commerce in all firearms and ammunition—were not sufficient to deal effectively with the nation’s soaring rate of firearm crime. Some people, in fact, were beginning to demand much sterner stuff: licensing of all gun owners, registration of sporting arms, bans on pistols and revolvers. In response, the NRA’s small and sometime somnolent legislative division, created in 1934 to make sure the federal lawmakers did not extend their restrictions beyond the realm of gangland weaponry, assumed a vigorous new role.

In today’s ongoing shoo tout over gun-control legislation, the ammunition preferred by both sides is the weighted statistic. One is assailed by a crossfire of numerical data as defenders and controllers blast away at each other’s conclusions. The controllers report that a handgun is sold in America every thirteen seconds and is the instrument of death in more than one of every two murders. The defenders reply that for every handgun used in a homicide, there are 3,999 others with no criminal taint. The controllers insist that 72 per cent of all homicides are committed by previously law-abiding citizens who shoot a friend or relative in the passion of dispute. The defenders counter with studies showing that the “typical murderer” is someone with a record of six prior assault offenses. The controllers say that the U.S. gun murder rate is two hundred times greater than that of Japan, where personal possession of handguns is prohibited, and also far greater than that of any other Western democracy, most of which require gun-owner licensing and/or firearm registration. The defenders fire back that the harsh penalties of Japanese law deter murder, and that in Switzerland, with one of the world’s lowest murder rates, national security dictates that military arms be kept at home within reach of every able-bodied male. So it goes.

And sooner than later, the argument boils down to interpreting the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which holds: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” The interpretation of the controllers is that the Second Amendment speaks to a collective right to bear arms, the right of states to maintain organized militias—in twentieth-century parlance, the National Guard. The defenders’ interpretation is that the Second Amendment speaks to the right of individuals to bear arms. They further argue that the Founding Fathers saw the Second Amendment as a means of protecting the independence of the states from tyranny of a central government and its standing army; and they are quick to point out that the National Guard today is controlled not by the states but by Washington—thus, the need for a true militia. “I ask who are the militia?” the defenders say, quoting George Mason of Virginia in his remarks on ratification of the Constitution in 1788. “They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officials.”

“GOD GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE”

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled only once in this century on questions of law arising from the Second Amendment. In United States v. Miller, heard in 1939, the court restricted its opinion to the narrow issue of whether, under the National Firearms Act of 1934, a sawed-off shotgun could be considered a proper weapon of the militia. The court opined: “[W]e cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.” In a recent pamphlet on the Second Amendment, the NRA said of the Miller decision: “The High Court was unaware of the fact that some 30,000 shotguns, including a great number of ‘sawed-off’ shotguns, were purchased by the U.S. Government for use in World War I as ‘trench guns’.…”

Despite such a moderate explanation for the high court’s oversight, the NRA’s stance throughout the long years of the gun debate has been defiant. Indeed, on occasion, it has pursued the fruits of retribution in the eye-for-an-eye style of the Old Testament, and woe unto them who would snipe from the other side. When CBS Reports broadcast its blatantly antihunting The Guns of Autumn in 1975, the word in the trade had it that the show’s original sponsors backed off because of NRA pressure.

“You threatened to boycott [the] sponsors, did you not?” It was Conyers, the congressional gun controller, and he was putting the question, for the record, to Harlon B. Carter, then the NRA’s lobbying chief.

“No, sir,” Carter responded.

CONYERS: That was not a problem?

CARTER: We talked to the sponsors, perhaps, or some of our members did, out in the United States, but we do not threaten boycotts: no, sir.”

CONYERS: … I see. And so the fact that the sponsors, in fact, peeled away was incidental or peripheral to your central activity in that regard?

CARTER: The answer to that lies in the reaction of about 20 or 30 million people, Mr. Chairman, of which we happen to be only the cutting edge.…

A similar disclaimer might well have been voiced by an NRA spokesman, when, a year or so earlier, the gunnery took issue with a policy of the national convention of the YWCA advocating the licensing of gun owners and the registration of firearms. In retaliation, the Sportsmen’s Alliance of Michigan had instructed its members to boycott the United Way and other sources of YWCA funding. Obviously delighted with its allies in Michigan, NRA’s American Rifleman inquired editorially, “Say Goodbye to the Y?,” described the alliance’s boycott, then suggested that “Others may follow suit.” Congressman Michael J. Harrington later observed in The Nation: “They may indeed, but they probably wouldn’t have if [Rifleman] hadn’t given the ploy national circulation.” (Before the boycott was imposed, the Sportsmen’s Alliance had suggested to United Way and YWCA that “an unbiased third party be named to arbitrate the differences,” someone “beyond reproach in terms of objectivity.” They even suggested a candidate: Congressman John Dingell, consistent foe of strong gun legislation and a member, as well as sometime director, of the NRA.)

The antigunners, of course, have played dirty, too—if not in the realm of financial interdiction, then at least in the martial art of public ridicule. One of their favorite weapons is a sort of pop Freudian psychology which holds the rifle, or any firearm for that matter, to be a surrogate phallus for impotent men. Several years ago, for example, the militantly antihunting Friends of Animals sponsored an advertisement attacking a proposed deer hunt in a national wildlife refuge. Addressed to “Rod Hunter, Sports Columnist,” the ad was headlined: “Hunters-Make it ‘Dear’ … not ‘Deer’ … will you … won’t you … can’t you?” Below were the signatures of Gloria De Haven, Lauren Bacall, Ali McGraw, and Joanne Woodward, among others. The gist of their message: “We’re not turned on by a show of masculinity which takes place in the forests. … We like guys whose virility holds on better proving grounds.”

Such below-the-belt assaults seem to have had some effect. At one recent NRA gathering in the Midwest, shrill bumper stickers proclaimed that “Rifle Shooters Have Longer Barrels,” that they ”… Make Accurate Lovers,” and that the place to do it is”… on a shooting mat.”

Possibly the most painful punch thrown at the NRA in recent times was a draft report on the future of hunting and gun control prepared at the expense of the Remington Arms Company. The blow was certainly not intentional on Remington’s part; it had merely wanted to obtain an impartial analysis of the future of firearms in America, and toward that end had retained the services of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park, California, firm. In turn, the institute assigned the project to one Andrew Lipinski, an analyst with a flair for colorful language. And somehow a copy of Lipinski’s first draft found its way to Jack Anderson, the syndicated columnist. Red faces at Remington, and wrath among chiefs of the NRA.

Lipinski minced few words. In his report, he found, among other things, that “many” hunters “detest authority and are not law abiding,” that NRA officials lack imagination in their presentations to Congress and the media, and that NRA “rightwingers are becoming increasingly isolated from the society of today.” Of the right-wingers, he added: “The blindfolds are of their own making. Dismissing unpleasant information about guns in society and denying integrity to those who are concerned about guns, they manage to survive in a bunker decorated with white hats and black hats, in a make-believe world of American ‘sacred rights,’ ancient skills, and coonskins.” Lipinski further noted of the NRA that “mutiny threatens within,” and that if the association should yield to the counsel of the “moderates inside,” then the ultraconservatives might split to a ” ‘give-them-no-quarter’ organization [such as]… the Citizens Committee on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.”

The same mutinous pot had been found a-brewing three years earlier by Robert Sherrill, author of The Saturday Night Special. In the book, Sherrill quoted a letter from “an oldtime NRA moderate” who identified chief lobbyist Harlon Carter as “the power behind the NRA.” Carter was depicted as having the support of William Loeb, publisher of the extremely conservative Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader and NRA executive committeeman. There was reference to a Carter-Loeb effort to isolate the NRA moderates. Carter’s life dream, said Sherrill’s informant, was to be NRA executive vice president.

Harlon B. Carter is a ruddy, blue-eyed, bald-headed sharpshooter, and his personal biography as issued by the NRA is almost as broad and bold as the American Southwest, where he was born sixty-three years ago. Among the many milestones listed are thirty-four years with the U.S. Border Patrol, and eight of those as chief; a tour of duty as Southwest regional commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; officer in charge of “alien enemy detention and prisoner programs” during World War II; “several million illegal aliens and hundreds of thousands of criminals” arrested by officers under his supervision; forty-four national shooting records with rifle and pistol; president of the NRA in 1965-67; election to the NRA executive council for life in 1967; member of board of directors of U.S. Olympic Committee, 1965-67; member of the Secretary of the Army’s National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, 1964-70; “Outstanding American Handgunner of 1977,” and executive vice president of the NRA, in which post, in the early hours of May 22, 1977, at Cincinnati, Ohio, Harlon Carter found himself installed by the vote of fewer than twelve hundred NRA life members.

The emergence of Harlon Carter as king of the gunnery—and if not of that, then at least of its “cutting edge”—is a measure not only of what the man has done with his life over the years but of what he has written and said as well. For a time in the early 1970’s he was a prolific contributor to Guns & Ammo magazine, wherein his forceful prose flailed liberal society, gun controllers, and the softies who would bargain away the people’s right to keep and bear arms.

In an article titled “Anti-Gun Hysteria Prelude to a Police State,” Carter established his credentials as a noncompromiser: “As long as we concur that any measure of gun control equates with some measure of crime control we are in agreement with those who would eliminate our rights. We would then again be backed into our defensive position, held for forty years, always losing a little here and a little there until finally nothing would be left us.”

As for legislation to ban the Saturday Night Special, Carter had this to say in Guns & Ammo:”… there will never be a time when strident voices among our opponents [described elsewhere in the piece as ‘dedicated gents with cold eyes and bleeding hearts’] will not be after our last six-shooter-then our rifle—then our shotgun. Don’t ever doubt it.”

And as for Richard Nixon, he was Guns & Ammo’s “The Shooters’ Man for ’72.” Wrote Carter that October: “I like Nixon. When a man supports the law abiding citizens’ right to keep and bear arms it is likely other virtues naturally accrue to him.”

Carter likewise projects an image of one who always knows absolutely where he stands, as in the following exchange with Conyers subcommittee member George Danielson of California:

DANIELSON: … Does [the] National Rifle Association still assert the position that [amendment] 2 of the Constitution prohibits government to, by legislation, infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms?

CARTER: We feel like that. The last word by the Supreme Court has not been said with respect to the second amendment.…

DANIELSON: Believe me, I am pleased to hear you say that because you do recognize that the Supreme Court has the burden of interpreting the Constitution.

CARTER: Oh, yes. I have always felt that way, right.

Yet within a year Carter was citing an NRA-sponsored poll which found that 78 per cent of the respondents believed the right to bear arms was a constitutional right; and in the New York Daily News, writer Hillary Johnson was quoting Carter as having said: “If 78% of the people believe that this is their right, then it doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court has held.”

Carter’s rise to power began in 1971, the association’s centennial year, when Executive Vice President Maxwell Rich began to speak of a “National Shooting Center” and the need to keep pace “with a changing world.” Also that year, NRA President Woodson D. Scott, a New York attorney, suggested that NRA headquarters might well be moved to avoid “adverse conditions in Washington.” One condition cited as adverse to the NRA was the high cost of competing with federal wage scales. Other conditions were left unstated, but everyone knew what they were, especially after an NRA lobbyist was fatally wounded by a thug with a gun and a staff editor was twice assaulted by armed thieves. After that, the NRA administration of Maxwell Rich couldn’t get out of Washington fast enough, and plans were prepared to move the headquarters staff west to Colorado Springs. The Springs would be convenient to Raton, New Mexico, where the NRA would soon purchase 37,700 acres and draw up a master plan for its projected $30,000,000 National Center. The “Shooting” Center? No, that word had been changed to “Outdoor.” There would still be shooting, all right, but there would also be programs in conservation and wilderness survival.

Guns & Ammo, meanwhile, had uncovered a startling bit of news. In its April, 1975, issue, Washington correspondent C. E. Clay ton revealed that “high officials” of the NRA were “considering a plan that would license every gun owner in the country. What’s more the proposal would apparently have the NRA be the federal government’s official ‘licenser.’ ” Maxwell Rich later conceded that such a proposal had indeed been circulated at NRA headquarters, but that it “definitely was not presented to the NRA Board of Directors.…”

With their confidence shaken in the Rich administration, some NRA members began to question the proposed activities at Raton and Colorado Springs. The Outdoor Center at Raton, it was said, might well become a haven for “bird watchers” and “butterfly netters.” And the move to Colorado Springs was seen as a ploy to dilute the effectiveness of Harlon Carter’s Washington-oriented Institute for Legislative Action.

These were the issues, then, as more than two thousand NRA members crowded into the Cincinnati Convention-Exposition Center for the association’s annual meeting. Only life members were entitled to vote. They voted to oust Maxwell Rich. They voted to oust most of Rich’s management team. They voted a one-year suspension of further spending on the Raton Outdoor Center. They voted to block the new headquarters at Colorado Springs. And with their voices rising to the rafters, they voted Harlon B. Carter into the most powerful post of the American gunnery.

Camp Perry is a National Guard facility located on the shore of Lake Erie northwest of Port Clinton, Ohio. It is a flat and rather monotonous piece of property, about six hundred acres all told, and is doubtless remembered with mixed feelings by thousands of Italian and German veterans who, relieved of their Mannlicher-Carcanos and Mausers at Anzio and other such places, were posted there as prisoners to sit out World War II. Camp Perry was discovered, after a fashion, in 1905, by General Ammon Critchfield of the Ohio National Guard, who was shooting ducks in a marsh when it occurred to him that, with a little landfill, one also might shoot at targets. The Ohio legislature agreed and appropriated twenty-five thousand dollars to purchase the first three hundred acres. Critchfield immediately informed the National Rifle Association that a splendid new shooting range would be available for the national matches of 1907. Drainage, of course, would be a problem. But the general was confident. “We’ll get the camp so dry,” he said, “the bullfrogs will have to carry canteens.”

Bullfrogs had no need for canteens when I arrived at Camp Perry last August for the NRA’s National Rifle and Pistol Championships. It had been raining hard. There were frogable puddles along the ready line, and riflemen fresh off the range were hanging their shooting mats to dry on their station wagons and vans. It was smallbore rifle week. Already, in three weeks’ time, the NRA had mustered nearly fifteen hundred participants through the National Police Firearms Instructor School, the National Shotgun Instructor and Coach Schools, the National Rifle Instructor School, and the National Pistol and Revolver Championship Matches. In progress were the National Smallbore Rifle Prone Championships, to be followed by the National Smallbore Position Championships, the Small Arms Firing School, the Junior Shooter Phase, the High Power Rifle Championships, the President’s Match, and National Trophy Matches sponsored by the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, and the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps cup matches. These would involve another eighteen hundred participants. Ed Andrus, the NRA statistical officer, said he figured that by the end of the final shoot, the total number of rounds sent down-range toward the butts would be close to one million. This estimate did not include the .177-caliber pellets fired from air rifles by the juniors. Andrus had just finished computing his figures when someone mentioned it was a pity I was here for the smallbore but not the high caliber. Later I asked NRA publicist Lee LaCombe what his colleague had against watching smallbore shooting. “Some people,” said LaCombe, “think it’s like watching paint dry.”

The shooting range at Camp Perry is the longest in North America, three-quarters of a mile end to end, with up to eight hundred yards between the firing line and the farthest lakeshore butts. In one smallbore match during my visit, 485 riflemen (and riflewomen, one must add) were on the line with their foam-padded cowhide shooting gloves and mats with double thicknesses of jute padding and aluminum alloy shooting stands supporting ammo blocks filled with the preferred British Eley Tenex .22-caliber long-rifle cartridges that go pfft when they leave the heavy barrels and splat on the targets a hundred yards out. And prrrrng, on the ricochet.

The undisputed champion of smallbore last year was Mary Stidworthy, a tall, twenty-year-old woman who holds the rank of private, first class, in the Arizona National Guard. After 640 rounds of match shooting, she was down only three-a shooter’s way of saying that she missed the center ten-ring bull’s-eye only three times out of 640 shots. At an awards ceremony in the Camp Perry theater, with flags of all the states fluttering from the proscenium arch and martial music blaring over the public address system, Stidworthy was proclaimed winner of the Metallic Sight Aggregate, the Any Sight Aggregate, High Service, High Lady, and National Championship. Harlon Carter presented her with a National Champion Trophy Match Rifle. To their left hung a huge and vivid oil painting of a buckskinned pioneer battling a redskinned warrior, hand to hand.

The sun was bright and hot the morning of my last day at Camp Perry. The puddles were evaporating, and over the transpiring wetness of the range quivered a slight oscillation—a mirage factor-which made this the sort of morning a target shooter would have been wiser to stay abed. “There are 132 recorded alibis for poor shooting,” NRA range official Dave Parsons was saying. “You’re fighting Mother Nature all the way.”

Parsons and I walked down along the range—“trooping the line,” he called it—as the smallbore people prepared their gear for the day’s match. Parsons is a retired army officer. He said he remembered the old days when there were special trains for shooters directly to Camp Perry and the men “piled off looking like a bunch of Mexican bandits.” And then he was speaking of other things, contemporary things such as handguns and crime: “Only 246 out of every million handguns are used illegally. And only three per cent of our criminals ever go to jail.… When the death penalty was abolished, the crime rate doubled. … In Russia, you know, young people receive more than 300 hours of military training while in school, and most of that is on the firing range.” We paused beside a spectators’ bench. A copy of the morning’s Cleveland Plain Dealer was lying there, front page up. Below the fold, the major story told of New York City detectives celebrating the capture of “Son of Sam,” the alleged .44-caliber killer of six who had circumvented the city’s Sullivan Law by having a friend ship him the weapon from Texas. Above the fold another story told of a Warren, Ohio, woman who had been slain by her abductor “in a blaze of gunfire.” The assailant, one Thomas Thompson, then shot and killed himself. Police said that Thompson apparently had been unarmed at the outset of the episode but had found the gun, a .22-caliber pistol, in his victim’s home.

On the range at Perry, now, the loudspeakers began to crackle and a voice called out: “Ready on the Right?… Ready on the left? … Ready on the firing line? … Commence firing.” And as the riflemen began to squeeze off their first rounds, I looked obliquely down the long line of prone bodies on the steaming grass and saw Harlon Carter striding our way, trooping the line with a smile for the sun and the sound of the Eley Tenex .22 bullets just a-going it.

John G. Mitchell, a field editor for Audubon magazine, wrote on the life and legends of the grizzly bear in our October, 1977, issue.

Link to original post located here:

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1978/2/1978_2_3.shtml

“GOD GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE”

Incoming search terms:

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Friend of mine, is about to join a group, similar to a community within selfgrowth.com

My friend is a master practitioner in the arts of healing, energetic and holistic in many areas such as physical, spiritual, emotional.

To get a foot in the door, my friend will have to create a free offering called the loss-lead deliverable. A report or audible or video which both introduces them as an authority and targets areas of interest to the market.

The question was, what should that be…?

This is me, giving a rare podium preaching;
(we now continue with the discussion now in progress…)

Think of it this way,,,
What problems do you solve…?

Everything you learned takes away pain of one form or another…

List those pains, and then prescribe you’re learned solution to each..

Then hammer which one would be most likely to be relieved first

Or list them all, pains and solutions…
Remember, keep it obvious to yourself, it may not be obvious to the reader..

That’s your job, to enlighten them…

Of everything you list, in the down-loadable or whatever
you deliver, give one thing away that has a proof concept.

Something they can do now, that will answer a problem of
some sort.. this creates credibility in the din of experts around you.

Say, you want to be focused, but don’t think you
know how to focus”

I say BS, you and everyone around you can focus…

Here, I’ll show you… {warning: this really works}

Take a long breath and exhale… now.

I want you to focus on your heart,

Place your hand on your chest and feel your heart,

Feel it until you can count the beats yourself…

Got it? Great…

Now, I want you to look at the nearest wall…

Can you see the patterns on the wall, what are they?

What color is the wall?

Are there paint marks? Is there texture, keep focusing until
you can easily recognize patterns…

Okay, now…

I want you to go back to your chest and feel your breathing…

Place your hand on your chest..
Feel your chest as it expands and contracts with every breath you take..

Do that for a minute, I’ll wait…

Feel the air leaving and rushing back in….

Listen to this…

You just, (not only), focused successfully, You did it
with 3 different things…

You say this was nothing?

In the beginning, I couldn’t do it.

And here, You, are doing it on the first try. You said you didn’t
know if you could focus on anything..

You see what I’m getting at?

No argument can compare to one dramatic demonstration:

–Claude Hopkins

That was a hyper condensed version, and would be better in audio,
so they can follow along rather than be distracted with the reading…

But its a simple giveaway they [the reader or prospect] can achieve on their own, which gives you credit, that you know what your talking about, and can help them further…

Say you have a little known remedy, don’t worry if its known in the esoteric circle… most people, even in the health and wellness of holistics don’t know everything..so shoot it out there anyways..

I don’t mind if you take that for your own.. It’s something I came across, so its not original to me either… I don’t even remember where I got it..

But, the execution of delivering something they can immediately apply,
creates an experience for them – the reader, that will set you apart.

Keep it simple…

Keep it obvious… remember.

It’s obvious for you, but not for everyone.

Here’s one serious trick… stop second guessing yourself, and just do things.

It doesn’t even matter what, as long as you start,
things will begin to work with the start of the energy being put forth.

Here’s the other thing… keep doing it… and keep doing it some more…

There’s a kind of drag that occurs, and it hits everyone.. either emotional, physical, mental even spiritual..

The discipline is to keep moving even when the drag is heavy. Its just way too easy to pause, and think your bending to be compassionate to life’s challenges…

To hell with that. This is a pattern that needs nurturing, and in order to continue to foster it, it must be continued through the hard points…

Whatever you give away free…? only let that one thing, be the “How to do”, everything else you mention in your giveaway is a “what to do”.

If they want to learn more about how to do,
they need to get with you in order to find out..

It’s shit or get off the pot time.

If you’d like to know more, sign up for my free daily sales tip
newsletter. Where you’ll also get my bonus training “The 7 Day Cash Machine”

Off i go!

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

My ad is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.

My ad, without me, is useless.

Without my ad, I am useless.

I must fire my ad true.
I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to email me.

I must cookie him before he cookies me.

I will…

My ad and myself know that what counts in this war is not the impressions we fire, the noise of our clickthrus, nor the IO’s we make.

We know that it is the sales that count.

We will sell…

My ad is human, even as I, because it is my life.

Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its markets and its target.

I will ever guard it against the ravages of spam and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage.

I will keep my ad clean and ready. We will become part of each other.

We will…

Before God, I swear this creed.

My ad and myself are the defenders of my wallet.
We are the masters of our enemy.
We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until victory is ours and there is no enemy, but profit!

Off i go!

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

He strained to glimpse the dream of his happiness fade from view.

She held him close as his liquid filled breathing,
too loud to be ignored any longer, consumed her faith for
the life they promised each other.

He knew it was over, soaked in his own life giving
river, at least an inch deep as he lay.

One last attempt, to let his love know he would never leave her,
at least not as a victim of circumstance…

In an almost etheric chill, the words whispered from his lips
like a wave of love by a mothers breath, “I’m not sorry…”

He finally said, as his head rolled and rested in her shuttering
near convulsing arms…

Tears washed down her blood splattered face, as she held the only
one, who loved every inch of her, like no other in her life.

No one knows what became of her after that night.

But, the rumors tell the tale of peaceful years, for innocents along those once blood ravaged streets.

Tales of a shadow that stikes fear into every manner of being, seeking easy prey among the citizens.

:::Epilogue:::

Thus the questions–

Sub-plotting-

And so on, and so on…

Crafting good stories isn’t as hard as one may think.

The copywriter I pay attention to the most is John Carlton.

John, has tattooed the fact that stories sell and writers write.

A good story will outsell any ordinary piece of copy hands down everytime.
If you look at any of John’s work, you’ll find a story, and a darn good one at that.

But the story isn’t the whole of it, it’s the grabbing your reader and bringing them into
the story which allows you to bend their will…

Don’t believe me?

Stories, written or verbal can and most often will, out live the ad itself.
The story doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t have to be short

But, the one thing, they all have in common is the evoking of emotion.

Listen to this line, by persuasion artist, Blaire Warren, in –

“27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding.”

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures,
allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

And how does one enable such reactions from their readers?

Stories…

Off i go!

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

The author of (Starship Troopers)…

After reading the Cat Who Walked Through Walls, in high school, I was hooked like stink on poop.

If you’ve ever heard anyone of a certain age, say or ask, if one “Groks?” You’ve been witness to a Heinlien fan.

It was Stranger In A Strange Land that led me to read every other novel he wrote.

Michael, the main character,(at least I think his name was Michael) was left on Mars and raised by Martians. These terrestrials of Mars obviously had an unearthly way about them.

When Michael returned to Earth, he was released into the public, under the eye of a select few.

The only problem, was the culture clash.

Michael learned how to focus, and allow himself to be completely into
what he set himself to do.

In fact, his focus was so intense, he was categorized as being “off the charts focused”.

I been waiting for that movie to come to the big screen for years.

But, since its one of those Jesus like themes, the religious backlash would be what’s off the charts, if it was ever to be released.

Kinda makes you actually WANT the movie to come out, just to witness the drama that would erupt.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make…

I’m writing to the wrong audience.

I’ve been trying to write to the IM audience. In truth, I love marketing, I really do. It took me a while to fully immerse myself into this arena.

While I honestly, have been successful in selling to a huge list, my particular  passion, is in an area, that doesn’t have a passion for marketing.

So, I’ve been feeling like a stranger in a strange market, the last few weeks.

I think, it may be time, to exit from this sites theme, to something more in line with where I am. I’ll still be giving guidance. Just, not to new-comers of online marketing, not in the general sense  anywho.

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

Not long ago, I was watching one of those big guru
launches. I won’t mention which one, they all seem to
have the same message after a while so it really doesn’t
matter which one..

What I (was) interested in…  Were the comments.

I think so much can be learned, more from the comments of
these launches, than from the actual launch itself.

I’ll list a few items here for you and (you can tell me) if any
of these ring true for you, okay?

Lets get started..

People generally don’t know, what to do next. They ask questions like;

“Will you be showing us the technical aspects of doing what you just mentioned?
I’ve taken a lot of courses where I have heard these types of strategies before, but I’ve been stopped by the technical aspects of implementing the concepts.”

Now, I personally read this, in the comments, repeated many times during a launch. And usually, there are no responses to these type of questions.

People don’t know how to set up there site.

They don’t know how to set up their domain, or they don’t even know the difference, between a domain and a website. Don’t laugh, this is a wide spread epidemic.

They don’t know what a hosting account is.

They don’t know how to point their domain’s DNS server to their hosting account.

They don’t know what Cpanel is, or how to set up the domain name through cpanel.

Don’t worry if any of these don’t describe you, cuz if they don’t? You should be watching something else. And I might just get to that later in this message.

Onward…

How do I install a WordPress blog?

How do I install a theme on my brandy new blog?

How do I make small changes on the blog so the search engines can find my important stuff?

How do I install plugins?

How do I work with widgets?

How do I monetize my blog? …

Seriously, these are all real commented items I see in many launches. And I want to to help all these people by replying to them all.

But, that would be insane. Why?

Mainly because, lots of these people, don’t come back, and see if there was a response to their comment.

Many, are just so frustrated with the simplest of to do’s, they simply leave. Or, follow the launch with baited breath hoping their question will be answered.

Only to get another email promotion, and begin their diatribe all over again.

After about 20 pages, or so, of reading these comments, I wanted to stop the presses. And just hammer out a product, that addressed all these fundemental issues once and for all.

I mean, I know first hand.
There’s nothing worse than, knowing you could, if you only knew how.

But, one thing I can’t stand doing is re-inventing the wheel.

J. Bak, is someone I honestly never met before. (I hate when marketers lie about their affiliations), so I won’t presume to ever do such. But, I  looked at his dead simple course. And, I’ll be damned, if he didn’t just answer every non-geek question I just listed, and then some.

From top to bottom, and a few miles in each direction. There were 111, clear cut videos, one for (every) single aspect. Oh, I know, one hundred and eleven may seem like a huge number of videos, but they’re all pretty short and straight to the point.

Leaving you with the ability to go forth and conquer in record time.
– Cheat Your Way to Blogging Riches, Even If You’re An Absolute Newbie: http://danlopez2012.com/getstarted/ –

If your stuck, on what to create for the market your in, watch what your competition is doing.

And pay close attention to the comments from the audience.

It’s definitely worth, doing your homework, allowing others to do the research for you.

Off i go!

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

As a kid I used to watch Japanese martial arts movies every saturday  afternoon and none of them ever yelled louder than Dora when she’s  asking if you know where something is…

Getting back to the story… There’s a fox on the Dora show named
Swiper. Obviously there’s a story there in and of itself but…

Dora’s been saying something marketers have been missing
for a long time now… Ya gotta stop swiping.

Well, at least at some point, it would be, in your best interest.

In 2008, as an email promotions manager, I was working for
an awesome service called Goldbar.net, I was just starting
out greener than a freakin martian in L.A.. A Total NOOB to online
promotions and a slave to the wiles of any marketer with at least
2-10 years successful experience under their belt.

Can you say impressionable? You Betcha.

It was kind of imperative (I was told) to join all the lists of
people in our industry. As we were poised, to promote enough offers
to take in at least $10k a month in commissions..

That was the goal, I did meet that goal within 2
months time, with my pathetic knowledge of email marketing.

Back then, I honestly tried to promote for our affiliations
with my own writing. But I honestly wasn’t ready.

The conversions sucked.

When I used the emails given by the owner of the products?
The conversions usually went through the roof.

After time, I wised up and looked for only the swipe copy they
provided, which was pre-tested. This means they already sent the emails
to their internal list. Sometimes to both internal (and) external lists.

Then they contacted you with the percentages and averages of the
email conversion for one or both.

Even back then I noticed the trend. Everyone, well okay, (Damn Near)
everyone was using the same swipe to send to their email lists as
well.

I would get, at least, 10 emails a day, with the same headline and
body copy as the one (I) just sent out. I wanted to shrink, literally.

Mind you, this was back in 2008.

It doesn’t seem like much has changed.

Except my personal inbox subscription rate has been pruned several times
over the years… It still seems to be overblown with the same headlines
from different sources promoting the same thing.

I would love to sit here and say, I became a great email copywriter
and eventually started writing my own email copy for affiliate offers
and shattered records against the canned emails going out there…

But that would be a lie.

Ben Settle basically wrote the book on affiliate email marketing with
– Affiliate Trump Card: http://danlopez2012.com/promo/AffiliateTrumpCard.php –

Truth is, I began work on other projects and pretty much walked
away from the email managers position.

Again, inexperience at work here.

In the end here’s what I did do.. I began to take all the similar headline
pimps and methodically unsubscribed from each and everyone.

After a while, every email they sent was all pitch with no one
driving the bus. There’s no substance, no one I can identify with.

I am totally guilty of this..

In the beginning I was writing to an audience.
Then after time, so many promotions came, that it was almost impossible to keep up. Let alone, give time to nurture my list, which had been responding to my emails with gratitude and admiration for my writing.

No sales, but they loved what they read. There’s a moral here somewhere…

Ahh, The moral. Now, I stick with that which readers love.
I write like I talk, the son of a Bronx born father with a genuine NY slang.

Sure, I’m not everyone’s Cup of Joe, and that’s fine. As I was told
years ago, If I’m Selling To Everyone, I’m Selling To No-One.”

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

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Pay Per Click, as the term states, is the means by which you advertise on an advertising platform like Google or Facebook or any number of organized advertising services.

The service shows your advert to people surfing the web on sites or the services web portal and this is called an impression, something you don’t pay for, you only pay when that person clicks on your advert.

While it IS true, you can, very well, lose your shirt in this
lucrative venture. If you fail to be diligent about it. This
is the defacto of quick research, quick testing, quick leads,
quick sales.

There is no faster way to attain immediate results anywheres
close to what mainstream gurus will teach you.

While instant results are achievable, the way to getting everything
ready is certainly anything but quick.

It is, by far, the only way to measure results with the least amount
of time involved. While, SEO mentors tout SEO as the easiest way to
get traffic. What they fail to mention, is that they all create ads on
Pay Per Click or (PPC for short) to test the markets response to their
offers before setting up a full blown SEO campaign.

Why do they do this?

Oh, those little secrets they love to tell the would-be high ticket prospect to get them into the “behind the curtain” upsell offers.

So.. on with the tips…

1. Target the ad for your product market. The closer you can lazer focus your message to market, the easier the reader can make a choice to click or not, depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

So say you’re in the pain relief market, what pain do you actually relieve?

Is it generic joint pain, knee pain, shoulder pain or elbow pain?

Don’t run just one ad for your entire campaign, Rather than using a catchall ad for elbow, shoulder and knee pain, have a different ad for each.

You only pay when people click. Multiple ads for the same destination won’t cost you more money, but they will give you more exposure.

What terms do you target?

It depends what you want sell… Think on it, you see the pain, you be the solution… what is the solution you offer that the pain sufferer seeks?

2. Determine your budget. Remember: as the name implies, you pay per click.
This is where the uninitiated get burned all the time, and the services you pay for will more than gladly keep taking your money, whether you were successful or not…

You get charged when a person clicks your ad. Not sure how many ways to say this.
So, spend as little or as much as you want, whether it’s $10 or $1000. I always start small and when the balance is right, I ramp up the spend, or close it down.

That’s why its extremely important to-

3. Track your ads carefully. On average, the best results are those that have been run the longest… While setting a daily budget for your advert is prudent, honest assessment of a success-failure rate, is determined over a week to month long campaign.

4. Be patient. If someone does click through, they may not buy the 1st time they visit your site, or the 2nd, or the 3rd. It can take multiple click-thrus to get loyal customers.  But, I’d rather use Pay Per Click than a magazine ad, which many people might read but won’t take action, and is much harder to track

5. Turn a profit. Remember, your main goal is to make money, not create traffic.
The PPC platform is built with you, the advertiser in mind. Getting customers to buy, so you, can pay for your advertising and get more customers is what this is all about. The PPC services want you to be successful so you can keep feeding the machine.

Final bonus tip…
Create the goal of intent. Within a weeks time, you’ll have returned enough sales to reinvest.  If you get traffic, but make no sales… stop the campaign and tweak the destination enough to increase conversions.

Essentially, 1 days payout (should At Least) return double the investment.
If within a day, you lose your investment? Stop the campaign at the pain point you’re willing to invest.

In business, this is called (sunk cost). As I just explained investors know and are willing to risk a certain amount of capitol into testing and research. But only to the extent that they have accepted what’s called a profitable loss.

Why is the loss considered profitable?

Because, they (the investor) consider everything they do, as a valuable lesson, and not a reson to cry in their soup.

This is also known as the art of failing fast.

So after reading this post, did you feel less knowledgeable than when you started? I was kinda hoping one would actually get something from it. Does it open up what to look at? What kind of questions or info you need to gather to do it effectively?

I’m seriously interested to get your thoughts on this, so comment below as soon as you can okay?

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

Well I may be wrong, but not too long ago I was watching some financial news channel and they quoted Warren stating that gold had already maxxed out. This is not the time to buy.

In fact the time time (To Buy) had passed some time ago.

Yet the flood of contrary information continues.
Lets face it, if an items worth doubles, where would you have liked to have been?

Me too…

If you watch TV for any amount of time, the message to market
seems pretty damn clear. Any network other than the news networks are clamoring for you to SELL Your Gold. While the news networks keep pounding Gordon Liddy for you to Buy Gold!

Are the networks under the impression that if you watch any other
channel outside the news networks, you Need to sell your gold?

Conversely if you watch the news networks, are you in position
To Buy?

I don’t know about you, but…
Me thinks this be B.S.

Now Now.. hear me out a minute…

There’s some crazy arse fear that the U.S. money system will
collapse and only those who possess gold will be the ones
who’ll make it out with everyone else dying all around them.

I don’t know why I think this is insane, but it is.

No one will know how to measure the actual value of gold once
the collapse has been established. I’m sure some knucklehead
somewhere will open his mouth and proclaim its worth and the
sheep will listen like the small minded usually will.

And that will be the end of that.

But as for every merchant being able to competently
assess, on-site, whatever worth, your little coinage maybe?
Like, how much gold, is actually present, (in) your gold. And all
that metallurgy testing, that will be required, to summize the
amount you’ll need for a slice of bread.

All I can say is “Good Luck with that.”

Will all this happen in our lifetime? Who knows?
Will it happen in our childrens lifetime? Again.
Who REALLY knows for certain?

In fact, it may just happen that you’re more likely to be killed for your gold, before you even get a chance to use it. Like I said though… who knows? Look at this this way, gold, it doubled from $800 to $1600 in record time right? And basically $1600 can roughly get you $800 dollars worth of gas at todays prices… Not even that, if you really think about it…

So what the heck do you think gold is (REALLY) gonna be worth when the bottom falls out? Who knows?

On the other hand, I do believe it wise to get back
to basics. Get back to family values, the rights and
wrongs of life. The respect and honor of keeping ones
word between each other. This by far can go further than any other
scheme concocted by the best of them.

In the meantime, stay focused on whats in front of you.
Be mindful of what the rumblings are, but don’t let
them consume you into hasty decisions.

Over the last few years, I’ve stuck with a decision I made,
about where my merchant account and email services were to
be hosted, and I’ve really no reason to leave that decision today.

–Goldbar: http://danlopez2012.com/goldbar.php –

While all the people with 6yr old stats and pretty pictures are squirly
about the future. I’ve been pretty secure that all my systems stay
intact, and on the back end of it all? Everyday is business as usual.

If you haven’t setup your business online yet?
You could do well to look into Goldbar to have everything setup
for you in one rocksolid, easy to implement, stable location.

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

PS: Please, please, please, please!!! Whatever you do? Don’t Buy Gold Stock! If you succumb to the whims of speach and do decide, its a match for you right now, get the real thing. Hard Cold Metal in hand, not another promisary note.

Incoming search terms:

• buffett on gold 2012
• why do not buy gold in this moment 2012
• don\t buy gold 2012
• what warren buffet think about buying gold?
• warren buffet gold
• dont buy gold in 2012
• dont buy gold 2012
• gold print ad
• print ads for gold
• warren buffet do not buy gold

Well… It’s 12AM over here so I’ll try to keep this short.
Pain is a great motivator. But its only the tip of the iceberg.

Today’s focus is on pain. (clarity)

Actually this is pretty interesting for any solution providers out there..

Lets take your pain, your market’s & your customers pain.

In selling the defacto for motivation is emotional, as in emotional pain.

Some time back I had a problem I couldn’t or wouldn’t face. I knew deep in my heart I needed to change something or I wasn’t long for this land of milk and honey. That was My pain.

The thing was, when I was offered the solution I was met with
the decision to either take the offer or suffer losses, huge losses.

I was already in some place I can’t even begin to touch
upon at this moment for lack of brevity. I’ve touched on that
in another post.

This (the pain) in and of itself is exactly what we need to plant
in our readers mind.

If my offer nails upon my customers pain enough, their
brain will inevitably multiply the experience and build the
desire for a solution. Stay with me here…

Not just any solution, although, if you craft the offer just
right and match the pain and surpass it with overwhelming
relief, (any solution will do) “Just fix me” Is what the reader
will be saying after we lay down the identifying nature of what
ails them.

The point is, the reader has to feel like they came to
the realization naturally. You with me?

Just because I identified something they already know,
naturally their BS detectors rise in defense of any influence
I may try to induce.

The solution has to include the reality of loss, should the reader
continue on their current path without my solution. And that loss
has to be relived in the readers mind like a movie that loops endlessly.

You ever worry on something and the scene seems to replay itself
in your head nonstop? That’s what I’m talkin about.

Onward…
Back to my story…

So I was offered a better way of life, a life free of the pain I was living, and freedom from the problem I felt there was no solution, available to me.

Sound like a win, win to you, doesn’t it?

Mind you…

I was to shell out $12,000 for this solution. Yep, 12 big ones.

And, I had to leave friends and family and
go travel upstate to Rome, New York near Schenectady
(I can’t even pronounce Schenectady), during a blizzard at the end
of winter for a month.

Was I sold on it? You friggin bet your ass I was.

This happened way back in 1986, so all this is water under
the bridge now. I’m just replaying this for analogy.

The thing is, there was no talk of work, there was no talk of
change, there was no talk of daily this that or the other thing.

All that detailed feature stuff was purposefully left out.

I was hammered with benefits, one after the other. After all…
All I needed to know was that this stuff worked and it was available
to me right there and then.

I knew it promised freedom, I knew it promised change and it was
a solution to my most agonizing pain that’s been keeping me up at nights…
(literally)

It’s getting late, so lets recap…

Does your offer reintroduce your targets pain?
Does it agitate that pain?
Does it put relief in your readers mind and you as the necessary source of that relief?
Does your offer outstandingly lay out the benefits
of whats available to your reader?
Does it induce fear? (I’m sorry, but its true.) get over it.
Does it include Fear of what will happen if they don’t act now?

I’ll have to continue this in my next post…
It’s 1AM and I promised myself I’d only write for an hour. Maybe I’ll include : How Crystal Meth increased my SEO?

I’m no copywriter, at least at this point, I was told years ago, it’s the one skill every would be success story should practice and apply to their marketing. If you want to know more about copywriting, you should look at: — Ray Edwards site — http://rayedwards.com —

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

PS: It takes years to be a true overnight success. At the least 2yrs. The ones I look up to, usually have at least ten years under their belt.

PPS: If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter now would be a great time to do so, no pressure. I gave hints yesterday about profiling your average reader.  I’m going to go deeper into the what and how to’s,  so you want to be sure not to miss out… Peace..

Incoming search terms:

• emotional
• emotional fear
• anxiety
• pain and motivation

I love my kids, they’re both girls which as you know is a whole different ballgame… My youngest girl is 7 and my eldest daughter is 20 now and living with her mom in Vegas… it’s a tough relationship, but we try…

They are the why’s of my life, whom without I’m less than I would be.  Love ya always…

okay, enough of that… Anywho’s.

I always wanted to be a writer, I think I have a few in me, and I’m plodding through the growth it takes to be the earner I need to be in the meantime….

I learned honesty the hard way…

I’m a recovering knuckle head with close to 20yrs clean & anything but serene, lol…

So getting honest was something I needed daily practice in. While journaling myself through the progress, to tackle all the defects of character I try to write about…

The vicious cycle of family dysfuntion had to stop with me.

I feel like I got my arse handed to me by some really
excellent resources, fellow marketers who just crush it.

How do They do it? Glad you asked..

Like the Nike slogon says, they “Just Do It.”

They don’t make excuses, they don’t second guess,
they don’t over think things, they keep it simple.
And they do it consistently.

Whatever it is they need to do, They Do.

Yeah I know, sounds vague and nebulous in the scheme
of things. But its the god-honest truth.

If you’ve studied marketing for any length of time
the one main thing mentioned over and over again and again
is the fact that…

If you do this, you get this.

That’s all there is, and thats all I’m out to do.
It would be in your best interest to do the same.

Yeah… I can get preachy, forgivs…?

I don’t mean to be…, but I know who’s been coming to the site and reading my rants.

No, its not that spooky, I mean I don’t know you personally, but the demographics I’ve been compiling give me a very clear picture of who my general audience is. (have no idea why that popped in my head)

I jumped around a bit, but I really need to get this out, as I’ve commited myself to improve my writing daily…  and by modeling my role models…

One of my favorite resources is a gentleman named Mike Hill.
Mike has a way of cutting to the chase. And he does it in a (from the heart) kinda fashion.

–Mike Hill’s Blog http://mikehillsblog.com/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up/ –

Personally I can’t get anough of that..

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

PS: I’ve commited myself to trying to get at least one post a day out, each containing at least one damn good tip and one darn good resource – after all… Writers write, right!?

Actually you can blame Ben Settle for this 30 day challenge I’m on, or you can thank him.

Peace…

Incoming search terms:

• honesty pictures for kids
• honesty girls
• Honesty kids
• honesty stories with pictures
• i love honesty

That’s what I heard from a caring citizen…

And you know what?

I’ve been trying to answer that for years…
Renee’ was one of the most sweetest, beautiful girls you
could have ever dreamed of falling in love with…

At the ripe ole age of eight, I was blessed to be with her.
We identified with each other on so many levels it was kinda scary by today’s measures.

Renée and I always felt better when we were in each others presence. I can’t even begin to say how much time we spent together but it felt like an eternity, until one day we got the word that she was moving.

Most of the time that we spent together we used to talk about how our families were behaving, how our homes had begun to turn into a battle ground.

Looking at the families in the early seventies, there was a lot of animosity about how the economy was affecting our current state of life. Changes were inevitable if they were ever going to keep up with the challenges.

This, was what the (Real) issue was in those days.

But at our age, we knew nothing of the way of the world and decided, internalizing things was easier, than grasping any other concepts… It was our fault.

Our fault that our parents were arguing, our fault that life wasn’t what we thought it should be, our fault that was driving our families to live far and away from our being able to see each other.

This was way too much for our fragile hearts to handle.

Mind you…

The truth was, she was only moving to the other side of Queens BLVD. A six lane monstrosity that stretched from Jamaica to Long Island City (the last stop before Manhattan).

But in our eyes, it may as well have been Chicago. Cuz at our age crossing the Blvd alone was suicide. Crazy right?

So when the word came she was leaving, we decided to take matters into our own hands.

Right in front of my apartment building in Queens,
we made a pact that we were going to leave this world together. We grasped each others hands, closed our eyes (well, I know I did) and laid down in the middle of the street, waiting for the inevitable.

That’s when we heard the screech & the angry concerned driver who had to a slam the brakes but ten feet before us.

I’ll never forget that day.. nor will I forget the year later while playing on that same street this really tall gorgeous darling riding up on her bicycle with long brown flowing hair stop before me with eyes buggin out of her head in stark amazement…

DANNY!?!?!

Holy crap, it was Renee’, and she was ravishing. Suddenly it hit me like a wall of raging flames…

“She was totally Out Of My League”.

A year had passed and she had physically & emotionally matured and I had basically stayed same ole “Shorty Lopez”.

We never quite connected again like we had before.

I blame myself for this, I had developed a wall of defense against heartache. Renee was the only one ever for me. But this was not the Renee I knew…

I had no idea how to transition and accept her metamorphosis.

I was even more crazy about this person than I was when I was eight. But, the loss of her presence and the return of this goddess had fried my synapse (the portion that said “Talk to her, You Idiot, she still wants you in her life!”)

Ahhh well.. nine year olds.. what can I say?

I came across an interesting article that I’m still trying to digest. But it seems to make a lot of sense…

I don’t know the person and I have no idea what I was doing when I stumbled across it. But it has a lot to do with breaking barriers…

Which I do have an affinity with…

– Changing Your Story –>
http://www.harmonyinandout.com/Blog/2010/10/22/changing-your-story/

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

Incoming search terms:

• first love
• my first love
• first loves
• beautiful girls with flowers
• firstlove
• images of first love
• FIRSTLOVES
• love killed me
• first love pictures
• you are the my first love

They do seem to have died down considerably.

Testing probably proved that once all the big
names have shared their databases with each other
there’s only so much fuel left in the fire to keep
sales flourishing.

But in another remote location of the info-marketing
universe, a distinct internet army is diligently making
their mark.

The more is less and less is more axiom seems
to build the tiny wonders of online marketing today.

Warriors of the information age have found a
formula that works like gangbusters.

They don’t need thousand dollar copy writers, or
huge monster lists, or a billion websites pointing
back to their offer either.

They don’t spend hundreds or thousands to get the
product to the final stage. They just get it done,
slap a few lines of text on a squeeze page and an
optin-box and they’re in business.

Just “how do they do it” you ask?

They do the obvious.

We all like clever ideas and ingenious plans.
We like bright colors and fancy speeches, awe-inspiring
delivery of matters that tickle our greed glands.

But the single most powerful action you can perform
today is to do the obvious. It’s a formula found in a
book that no-one cares to let you in on.

In other words…

The best book that I have ever read on marketing, is one
that was written over 90 years ago in 1916. It’s less than 60
pages long, there’s no jargon or graphs or complex research.

No, its not As a Man Thinketh
No, It’s not Think And Grow Rich
No, no, no, It’s not even The Science of Getting Rich

Come on now? Haven’t you read all these already?

The truth is, it’s more like a pamphlet.
You could finish it in one reading, but, you’ll
walk away with insights frightfully staggering to
the uninitiated.

Now the bad news.

Obviously it’s not easy to find and can definitely be
called a collector’s item.

This book has changed my life…
I’ve spent so much on marketing products and
nothing has ironed out exactly what’s been missing
like this book does. In fact the answers were so obvious
I literally kicked myself after reading it and
started taking action to resolve my issues immediately.

I think you will too..

Just Enter Your Name & Email Below To Get This Rare Jem Immediately Via Email
First Name
E-Mail
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Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru

Good question Marcy…
The answer to that is in the resources I offer.

I know first hand that some offers I refer to
are so over the top worth your time, effort and
hard earned cash, I’m willing to risk my
credibility on it.

Why?

Because, if you watch me closely, you’ll see that I have
deep rooted relatioships with those I promote.

Most of the friends I refer to didn’t know me from
Adam when I first came around.

I only promote those I’ve been in touch with the last few years,
whom I not only respect and admire, but who have taken time
out of their incredibly busy lives to point me in the directions
I needed to go… not to mention, they’ve also warned me against
directions I seem to be going.

Thus literally saving me thousands of dollars and hours.

I don’t know about you, but when I have a resource that
valuable, I think it’s only right to share my enthusiasm.

To me its not always about the money,
but doing the right thing for those I genuinely care about.

It’s called reciprocity…

Till the next post,
Be Focused…
Dan, the Un-Guru.

I recently asked a few people how they saw me as a person.
To collect a library of my personalities and gather tactical
information about my own persona as it is to be percieved by
the masses, and the market place…

Mind you, I am not a wit concerned of your personal opinions
of me in the least, (should I?) but I have a job to do and that job
requires that I appeal to as many of the most important of
subjects, my clients…

One of my friends mentioned his concern of a recent letter I
posted and as to the reason of such exposure to my depths…
As he termed it, “Why do you go down so far?”

In answer to his query I said, It’s where I come from. Its
of little concern to me, for I no longer live there. I have
seen it and it has passed, and I am at peace with it.

The past in its darkest measure allow me just that. A
place where I can deduce current affairs and react
accordingly. Anything less, cannot phase me in terms of
lifes challenges.

Not that challenges do not occur mind you… I just have a
better place to see them from.

And I learned a long time ago, the more you air them out the
more you are at peace with them. And the more you share them
the more audience you get from those who have accomplished
the same satisfaction of acceptance…

My job is to accept that life is neither hard nor easy,
and to get through it while raising my vibrations to the
betterment of life. And in the same respect raise your
vibrations so that you raise others as well just by them
being in your presence or in communication with you.

Sharing your trials is not something you wish to continue
expounding on incessantly however. Where the mind is the man
is. Do so and be done… If one cares to know..? Point them
to your resource if you deem they would benefit from it. if
not, do not…

I mean, Its not like I’m running for President for God’s Sake!

Once more I’m gonna lay this out for you, and then I’m gonna pull this down simply because its just too damn simple.

search engine keyword quality score

For years true seo specialists have been giving this information out, but there are many who think that backlinking and link wheels are the freakin holy grail, just because some guy named Cutts put the news out there that “It’s all about the links”

It’s NOT all about the links (not in its entirety anyways). In fact it’s all about the craft.
Seo is an art, and the only way to work smarter not harder is to make sure your Search Engine KeyWord Quality Score foundation is solid as a rock.

What does that mean for you?

Dan, I need to crush it, I mean really crush it on the search engines…

Then, when creating posts and articles for your site, pound the keyword phrases until you reach quality scores as close to 100% as possible.

Search Engine KeyWord Quality Score

Score Keyword 95.56% Keyword

search engine keyword quality score

Keyword Density 3.84%

* You need to have an H1 tag containing your keyword
* You need to have an H2 tag containing your keyword
* You need to have an H3 tag containing your keyword
* You need to bold your keyword
* You need to italic your keyword
* You need to underline your keyword
* You need to have an image to add ALT tag
* You need to have an internal link to your other pages.
* You need to add rel=nofollow to your external links.

I mentioned earlier that backlinks are not the holy grail, and I meant that. But if you have a solid foundation for your campaigns, then when you do a backlink campaign, you’re going to blow away your competitors by the shear fact that you crafted a solid patch of posts and articles that the search engines can’t disqualify. Why?

Search Engine KeyWord Quality Score Algorithms:

Because the root algorithms have not changed since the days of AltaVista.com’s (circa-1992) dominance in the market place.  Right now there are well over 200 on page factors that the current leader in the market place uses to determine your Search Engine Keyword Quality Score.

So the highest amount of time you put into crafting an item to satisfy the algorithms the better you are at achieving your goal.

But Dan, thats a crazy amount of work!!!

Today you don’t have to work nearly has hard as in the past.

Today you have some help to push the envelope when sculpting your wordpress blog beyond simple content bags, into a keyword based bedding of search magnetism.

I wish I had this tool years ago when I was studying the masters of SEO. But you can get a jump on the ease of retooling your already article and post ladened blogs with Seo-Pressor. This thing takes all the guess work out of what you need and what you already have.

What does Search Engine Keyword Quality Score Mean to You?

• It means no more creating new content to satisfy the engines, (unless you need to).
• It means creating high quality seo articles in record time with no more guesswork
• It means it visually shows you what you need to sculpt search magnets.
• It means higher placement on the search result pages
• It means more quality visitors to your site
• It means finally being able to build a list
• It simply means more money in your pocket

Obviously, I’m not crafting this page to crush it for seopressor. I have bigger fish to fry. (Smile With Me!)

Everything’s a work in progress. Which means, never put all your eggs in one basket. If your competition is really stiff, then “in site” linking and backlinking will treble the quality of your site with much less effort than your competitor. And while building those keep in mind the ever mindful page rank for marketing.

Search Engine KeyWord Quality Score is the only way to effect real change in the way you run your wordpress blog campaigns. Okay that was a bit more than 5 tips. I’m in full throttle on another project for a corporate client which means I have to stay as clean and non backhat as possible. I can’t think of a better way than with seopressor as a staple for each blogsite I create on the Internet landscape.

To your success!

Remember, Search Engine KeyWord Quality Score’s matter, so be mindful..

Incoming search terms:

• seo keyword scoring

Exactly what are these terms?
Why are they important in your everyday marketing strategies?

What is PR or Page Rank and why is it so important?

In a nutshell, its a quality score attained by a search engine,  namely google or bing or yahoo or ask but mainly referred to google since they’re the leading SE. search engine.

• The better you’re quality score, the more respect the SE’s give you.
• The better you’re quality score, the easier it is to get placement on SERP’s.
• The better you’re quality score, the more visitors you can attract.
• The better you’re quality score, the more oomph you can give to other pages or websites.
• The better you’re quality score, the greater your odds are at attaining higher earnings.
• The better you’re quality score, the greater your odds are at making any sales at all.

So, it would behoove you to do all you can to increase you’re quality score or Page Rank.

Some may argue that PR doesn’t matter.. and those shiesters are more than willing to make exhaustive claims to this matter, when they know damn well, they have done enuff backlinking from Hi PR sites to their single pages or whole websites just to get noticed by the engines, it’s what ( I ) did and…

Hell, its the first damn thing on their list of strategies for promoting their new sites.

The saying “If build it they will come” always comes to mind when I go over
these things with friends, prospects & clients. I was looking at some competing PR last year and I thought I’d share the results… If you can reverse engineer any of these cases, you can do better than all these sites…

For a Marketing Example:

PageRank Results		Order by (pagerank):RelevancePageRank Results (30):102030405060708090100
Showing search results in order of pagerank 577,000,000 results found MarketingVOX – The Voice of Online Marketing /10 Jul 16, 2009 … Online marketing, internet advertising and e-marketing news for media buyers. http://www.marketingvox.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites marketing (business) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia /10 Britannica online encyclopedia article on marketing (business), the sum of activities involved in directing the flow of goods and services from producers to … http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/365730/marketing View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites marketing: Marketing Project Home Page /10 OpenOffice.org: The Free, Open Source Office Suite. http://marketing.openoffice.org/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Marketing :: WetFeet /10 The four components of marketing are product, price, promotion and place. … For marketing positions in other industries, your best bet may be to network … http://www.wetfeet.com/Careers-and-Industries/Careers/Marketing.aspx View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Careers-in-Marketing.com: Your Guide to Marketing Jobs /10 Careers-in-Marketing.com brings you free information on key careers and jobs in marketing. http://www.careers-in-marketing.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Agricultural Marketing Service – Home /10 Includes six commodity divisions – Cotton, Dairy, Fruit and Vegetable, Livestock and Seed, Poultry, and Tobacco. The divisions employ specialists who … http://www.ams.usda.gov/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Direct Marketing Association: Telephone, Mail & Internet Marketing /10 Direct marketing news, research, conferences and jobs. For people doing direct, database, and interactive marketing. http://www.the-dma.org/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites LCB – Department of Marketing /10 Information about the department, research, faculty and programs. http://lcb.uoregon.edu/departments/marketing/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Guerrilla Marketing Online – The Official Site of Guerrilla … /10 Guerrilla Marketing Online the official site of Guerrilla Marketing and famed author, Jay Conrad Levinson. It is an online magazine for small business, … http://www.gmarketing.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites FMI | Food Marketing Institute | Home /10 Food Marketing Institute represents food retailers and wholesalers by developing and promoting policies, programs and forums supporting its members, … http://www.fmi.org/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Internet Marketing News | Marketing Pilgrim /10 Jul 13, 2009 … Andy Beal writes on search and internet marketing. http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Explore Rising Documents in Business & Law/Marketing | Scribd /10 Marketing plan for the iPhone 3GS – Entering the Chinese Market. … Learn how to optimize your marketing operations so current resources can generate … http://www.scribd.com/explore/Business-Law/Marketing View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Flickr: “marketing“ /10 Explore and refine this marketing list with our wonderful clustery goodness! … Award-Winning Email Marketing Used By Obama & 355k Small Businesses. … http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/marketing/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Web Marketing Today — E-Commerce, E-Mail Marketing, Internet … /10 E-commerce, e-mail marketing, and web marketing information for small business entrepreneurs, researchers, non-profits, and merchants interested in Internet … http://www.wilsonweb.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites marketing talk radio podcast /10 Listen to live and archived marketing talk radio podcasts on Blog Talk Radio – the leading talk radio network. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/search/marketing/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Email Marketing Solutions from Constant Contact /10 Email marketing software that makes it easy to create professional HTML email campaigns with no tech skills. Sign up for a 60-Day FREE trial. http://www.constantcontact.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites KnowThis.com: Marketing Tutorials, News, How-to and More /10 Jul 15, 2009 … Since 1998 offering FREE detailed tutorials, news and resources for professionals, academics and students in marketing, advertising, sales, … http://www.knowthis.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Marketing.com – Interactive Marketing – Online Marketing … /10 Make it Happen with Marketing.com – Distinctive Domain Name venues from different sectors to dynamically reach your target markets. http://www.marketing.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Business Marketing – Small Business Marketing /10 Business marketing – Read everything your need to know about small business marketing. http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/index.html View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Marketing Power – American Marketing Association /10 Marketing and advertising articles and tips, thousands of companies and firms, careers and jobs, and more from the official American Marketing Association … http://www.marketingpower.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites All About Marketing /10 Before you learn more about marketing, you should get a basic impression of what marketing is. See What's "Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, … http://managementhelp.org/mrktng/mrktng.htm View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Marketing – Marketing Strategy – Marketing Plan – Marketing … /10 Learn about marketing careers, the stages of developing a marketing plan, how to begin marketing research, create a marketing strategy, and how to market a … http://marketing.about.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites CDC – Health Marketing /10 Feb 9, 2009 … CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Marketing site. http://www.cdc.gov/healthmarketing/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites MarketingSherpa Home /10 Resource that publishes useful news, case studies, and best practices data about internet and integrated marketing. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Advertising, Marketing, Promotions, Public Relations, and Sales … /10 In small firms, the owner or chief executive officer might assume all advertising, promotions, marketing, sales, and public relations responsibilities . … http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos020.htm View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites BidVertiser – Pay per click advertising on sites of your choice. /10 Pay per click advertising – online advertising directly on sites of your choice, internet marketing solution for online advertisers. http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/BidVertiser/bdv_advertiser.dbm View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Sales Jobs / Marketing Jobs / Advertising Jobs /10 Search thousands of professional jobs from across the United States. Find jobs in sales, marketing, and advertising. Jobs from entry to executive level. http://www.marketingjobs.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites MarketingProfs – Marketing Resources for Marketing Professionals /10 One source for online marketing resources, marketing articles, online seminars, case studies, conferences and events for Marketing Professionals. http://www.marketingprofs.com/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Home – Business Marketing Association /10 The Business Marketing Association (BMA) focuses on the field of business-to- business marketing. http://www.marketing.org/ View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites Marketing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /10 Jul 14, 2009 … Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing View META Data – View Inbound Links – Analyze Links Cached Version – Similar Web Sites

End Marketing Example

Obiviously I’m considering trying to rank for some very daunting and extremely competitive keyword phrases here… Some of which I’ve actually no control of ever getting unless I’m like stellar aggressive in my marketing prowess… Which I can be if put to the task… just google [things to know about angels] or even [Focus Coach] Competition in the millions, but those were just personal challenges… Marketing phrases though are another matter which takes a bulldozer or better yet a linkdozer to push the barriers…

Now… I’m not big on doing reviews since the end result means a pitch at the end… And I don’t make reference to resources lightly. I know the shelf life of items can be pretty short. But this damn program is off the charts.

Seriously.. if you have a VA or a limited staff and you need to get some niche market sites up real fast?

Link Dozer does that and a whole lot more. It Easy! Its Fast! And its Killer Affordable!

But don’t take my word on it, check it out yourself. If it doesn’t look like the cats meow?  I don’t know what does…

Moving on…

Keyword stuffing [don't do it] is not being used in this case and I don’t recommend doing it..
There is a trick some have been doing in leu of that tactic though.

It’s the hidden <div> container tactic.

This tactic is crazy. If used properly it can do some very strange things for your rankings..

1. It helps if you have a student in a college with a .edu blog account or web page on such..
2. Get a boat load of relevent keyword rich articles with suacy titles. (I do mean a boat load)
3. Get the kid to post those articles on his site in some obscur folder.
4. Get some bizarre script that makes the browsers crazy thinking there’s something very suspicious with that webpage and warns you of a threat or possible malware attack being present and insert it on to those articles. (google still reads it fine, but prying eyes will get queezy and walk away no more the wiser)
5. Get all the links to those juicy article titles and line them up nicely in a div container with a coordinate off the page like div align=”-2200px” . In the code for the page you want to rank for, that container will never be seen…

But big G won’t even bother giving such a thing any notice because its just not there.
This is a black hat version of ranking for terms that white hatters use for ranking a site in every state by utilizing the hidden field for the 52 states listed in a drop down form for they’re KWF.

Maybe they’ll catch on eventually, but the iframe thing that BH’rs have been using got killed last year and this seems to be the prevailing get around for that…

Anyways.. the more pages you can generate a decent PR with the better you can develop a network of authority for your keyword phrases… This includes using 2.O properties.

Thinking of building an SEO Sniper training report, you interested?
Let me know.

Incoming search terms:

• content

cert-of-authenticity

Authenticity or Authentic may refer to:

* Authentication, having passed the tests thereof
* Authenticity (philosophy), a particular way of dealing with the external world, being faithful to internal rather than external ideas
* Authentic performance refers to a movement in classical movement also known as historically informed performance
* Authenticity (reenactment), in historical reenactment, a measure of how close an item, prop, action, weapon, or custom is, to what would actually have been used or done in the time period being depicted

The Authentic Self:

Authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. Authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character, despite these pressures. Different types of Existentialist philosophers see this process in different ways.

Integrity

Integrity-Meaning

Integrity in ethics

Ethical meanings of integrity used in medicine and law refer to a quality of “wholeness” that must be present in the human body and in the body of law, respectively. Such wholeness is defined by “sacred” axioms such as unity, consistency, purity, unspoiledness and uncorruptedness.

In discussions on behavior and morality, one view of the property of integrity sees it as the virtue of basing actions on an internally-consistent framework of principles. This scenario may emphasize depth of principles and adherence of each level of postulates or axioms to those it logically relies upon.[citation needed] One can describe a person as having ethical integrity to the extent that everything that that person does or believes: actions, methods, measures and principles — all of these derive from a single core group of values.

One essential aspect of a consistent framework is its avoidance of any unwarranted (arbitrary) exceptions for a particular person or group — especially the person or group that holds the framework. In law, this principle of universal application requires that even those in positions of official power be subject to the same laws as pertain to their fellow citizens. In personal ethics, this principle requires that one should not act according to any rule that one would not wish to see universally followed. For example, one should not steal unless one would want to live in a world in which everyone was a thief. This was formally described by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his categorical imperative.

In the context of accountability, integrity serves as a measure of willingness to adjust a value system to maintain or improve its consistency, when an expected result appears incongruent with observed outcome.

Some regard integrity as a virtue in that they see accountability and moral responsibility as necessary tools for maintaining such consistency.

In the context of value theory, integrity provides the expected causation from a base value to its extrapolated implementation or other values. A value system emerges as a set of values and measures that one can observe as consistent with expectations.

Some commentators stress the idea of integrity as personal honesty: acting according to one’s beliefs and values at all times. Speaking about integrity can emphasize the “wholeness” or “intactness” of a moral stance or attitude. Some views of wholeness may also emphasize commitment and authenticity.

Subjective interpretations

In common public usage, people sometimes use the word “integrity” in reference to a single “absolute” morality rather than in reference to the assumptions of the value system in question. In an absolute context, the word “integrity” conveys no meaning between people with differing definitions of absolute morality, and becomes nothing more than a vague assertion of perceived political correctness or popularity, similar to using terms such as “good” or “ethical” in a moralistic context.

One can also speak of “integrity” outside of its prescriptive meaning, in reference to a person or group of people of which the speaker subjectively approves or disapproves. Thus a favored person can be described as “having integrity”, while an enemy can be regarded as “completely lacking in integrity”. Such labeling, in the absence of measures of independent testing, renders the accusation itself baseless and (ironically) others may call the integrity of the assertion into question.

Integrity in modern ethics

In a formal study of the term “integrity” and its meaning in modern ethics, law professor Stephen L. Carter sees integrity not only as a refusal to engage in behavior that evades responsibility[citation needed], but also as an understanding of different modes or styles in which discourse attempts to uncover a particular truth.

Carter writes that integrity requires three steps: “discerning what is right and what is wrong; acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.” He regards integrity as being distinct from honesty.

Twitter

twitter_bird_bigger

Get short, timely messages from Twitter.

Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on an incredibly wide variety of topics.

Once reneowned by the users as the place where adults could talk to adults when there weren’t any local adults  around. In such a manner acquainted friends followed each other on twitter, helped each other on twitter and became popular on twitter.

danlopez2012-on-twitter-grader-top25

This must have pissed a lot of twitter originators off, because their users were becoming celebrities on their service while they were frantically trying to keep the fail whale at bay. The explosion of users was and still is alarming the attention of press and media alike.

But the poor originators couldn’t quite grasp a foothold for prospective buyers.

What does all this have to do with Authenticity and Integrity?

Dunno…  in fact I could freakin care less..  All I know is that there honestly seems to be a prevailing wind of  automated horseshit from once notables in the twitter community that were stalwarts of same…

Now rubbish and crickets abound the delirium once known as the peoples community.

Damn that sounds hateful.. I don’t hate twitter, its been very good to me. Made great friends and even best friends on there. But my mentors of marketing are all on a mass exodus… And to me, that means either they don’t get social media marketing, or they can no longer afford to waste their time there.

I’m guessing a little of both but enuff for an extreme change… and since focusing means changing or altering your perception wholly on the task at hand…  I’m going to take a hiatus from the delirium and crickets.

Peace out…

Incoming search terms:

• integrity
• integrity meaning
• meaning of integrity
• integrity in modern ethics
• what is integrity

I have a handheld ham radio.. and the memory’s internal battery died…  So, instead of getting a perfect replacement I bought an equivilant and tried to solder ends to it…

Mind you, this battery is the kind that looks like a quarter…  I killed the new one with all the heat from the soldering iron… well, not exactly killed it.. but it drained below the fresh voltage of 3Volts down to 2.9volts … so… what do I do?

I grab the old one and solder the new and the old together with a wire between them.. increasing the voltage to 4+ volts… but its only feeding memory and not the unit as a function, so damage would be nil???

Fingers crossed annnnd… done with all the soldering and the unit now holds the configuration after turning on and then off and then on again… Whoalla! Violla?

Old Ham radio is running once again…
A moral to the story????
Communication? err… umm no,,, not quite..

More like, thinking outside of the box and taking risks..
If I messed this up.. I basically killed a $200.00 radio.. that you can probably get for $50 on ebay… But still.. I’d be short one damn good handheld if I screwed it up.. I needed to take the chance though…

The chance to gain an inner feeling of determination, fearful courage and inner resolve to the task at hand… I’m mean, not just anyone can go and rip a radio apart, fix the damn thing with something other than required parts…

Sure.. it was a small victory, that many may concede to..   But with that said..
Just how many small victories do YOU experience a day?
How many chances do YOU take a day?

Angels With Dirty Faces…

Incoming search terms:

• RS HTX-202

Nominated for an Oscar and for a BAFTA award, Jasper Morello is a short feature made in a unique style of silhouette animation developed by director Anthony Lucas and inspired by the work of authors Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne. In the frontier city of Carpathia, Jasper Morello discovers that his former adversary Doctor Claude Belgon has returned from the grave.

When Claude reveals that he knows the location of the ancient city of Alto Mea where the secrets of life have been discovered, Jasper cannot resist the temptation to bring his own dead wife Amelia back. But they are captured by Armand Forgette, leader of the radical Horizontalist anti-technology movement, who is determined to reanimate his terrorist father Vasco.

As lightning energises the arcane machineries of life in the floating castle of Alto Mea, Jasper must choose between having his beloved restored or seeing the government of Gothia destroyed. Set in a world of iron dirigibles and steam powered computers, this gothic horror mystery tells the story of Jasper Morello, a disgraced aerial navigator who flees his Plague-ridden home on a desperate voyage to redeem himself.

Whaddya Think?

Dear Business-Builder,

Discouragement …

Feelings of self-doubt, insecurity and vulnerability …

Despair and depression …

Stark fear and blind panic …

It’s no secret that these and many other negative emotions are now haunting many of our prospects’ daydreams and nightmares.

Who knows?  Maybe yours, too.

It’s to be expected that so many people would be feeling poorly at a time like this.

But toxic emotions are business-killers … career-killers … income-killers.  Because whether we admit it or not those emotions – NOT reason – are the cause of most decisions we make; most things we do.  And when we’re feeling negatively, we tend to make poorer decisions:  Decisions that result in financial losses, lost jobs, bankruptcies.

Worse:  Scientists say toxic emotions also depress our immune systems, significantly increasing the incidence of fatal diseases among depressed people.

And of course, poisonous emotions also cripple us with deadly depression – the primary reason why last year, U.S. suicide rates began rising again for the first time in a decade.

What makes these unthinkable events even more tragic is that they are so needless … pointless … uncalled for … so unnecessary.

Because nearly all of the thoughts and feelings
that trigger these tragedies are outright lies.

I’ve often written about where emotions come from …

1. An event – something that happens to you or that you see, hear, taste, smell or remember – occurs.
2. Your brain passes information about that event through a “belief filter” you may or may not know you have about events like this one.
3. What comes out after your belief filter analyzes the event is called a “thought.” Sometimes, you’re aware of that thought.  Other times, it’s gone so fast you never consciously notice it.Depending on how accurate your belief filters are, that thought can either be fairly rational and accurate or wildly wrong.
4. Every thought – right or wrong – leaves a footprint in our bodies by causing our brains to release certain chemicals.  You and I experience those chemicals as emotions.

This is important stuff for marketers to know because, as I’m also wont to point out, the vast majority of the purchase decisions our prospects make are based on emotion; NOT on logic.

All they really need to survive is a lean-to, a fire and a recently deceased critter to cook.  Pretty much everything else they buy is to satisfy an emotional need.

This is why I often say that copywriters who focus exclusively on making rational arguments …

But who never give a thought to the prospect’s emotional state before, during and after reading a promo …

Are like a gaggle of gunfighters stampeding off to the O.K. Corral but leaving 90% of their ammo back at the saloon.

Now, though, as each of us processes a new daily tidal wave of bad news about the economy, it’s also time to consider how each one of your belief filters – and the thoughts and emotions they’re serving up – are affecting your businesses … your career, your income and your future.

Are your Belief Filters helping you?

Limiting you?

Or maybe even dooming you to failure?

The big secret most shrinks know is that the vast majority of positive emotions are rational; appropriate.  But the vast majority of negative emotions are just plain baloney – triggered by false beliefs we have about ourselves and the world around us.

Now, if you know anything at all about me, it’s probably that I am definitely no Pollyanna.   I’m hardly known for pulling my punches or gilding the lily.

For more than a year now, I’ve been warning you that the business environment stinks – and that the stench will only become more overwhelming in the months ahead.
Ironically, though, I consider myself an optimist when it comes to how this crisis will ultimately affect my family and my business.

Because I’ve taken inventory of my belief filters.

I’ve discarded beliefs I held that were misleading, false and outright lies.  And I’ve replaced them with beliefs that are more accurate and rational and therefore, helpful.

The belief filters I was given by my parents, my school and my church once told my brain that I was inconsequential; powerless in determining my own future.

According to them, I was little more than a pawn.  A victim.  “Fate” or “the gods” determined the path of my life.  Any success I achieved was little more than a lucky break allowed – whether intentionally or accidentally – by Providence.

And that meant it was probably only a matter of time before some outside force would destroy any success I’d achieved, render me a victim and give me what I really deserved:  To be dirt poor and alone again, much like I was growing up.

Imagine looking at  today’s business environment through those mud-colored glasses!  Imagine the toxic emotions I’d be having right now!

Lucky for me, some 20 years ago, my #1 client was sold to a bunch of drooling morons who began systematically killing the company and endangering my sole source of income.

Lucky for me, the disaster got me so depressed, I sought out and found a great man to help me deal with my depression.

Most of all, it was lucky for me that this great man helped me identify my idiotic belief filters … disabuse myself of them … and replace them with rational, realistic, accurate, HELPFUL ones.

That done, I suddenly realized that I have enormous powers of self-determination.  While outside events and other people may have some influence on my life, I and I alone have the greatest say – by far – in its ultimate outcome.

I also realized that the vast majority of events that others think are negative are really only chances for a new beginning … exciting changes … and new, probably even greater opportunities.

And most importantly, I realized that at any given moment in my life, I am far better equipped to deal with and triumph over even The Worst-Case Scenario than I was 40 years ago, ten years ago, or even yesterday.

The glass, she is much more than half full …

It would be dangerous enough if the problem was all in our heads.  If simply exchanging inaccurate belief filters for accurate ones was enough to vaporize depression and give us the positive outlook we need to succeed.

But in most cases, the events we witness are not even real events!

Think about it:  The simple truth is our perception of the world is almost entirely derived from what we see on TV, hear on the radio and read in the papers.

And because the media relies on sensationalism to sell subscriptions and get ratings …

And because negative news is far more sensational than positive news …

It’s no wonder that most of us have a distorted perception of what’s really going on around us!

Have you ever taken a moment to consider how many times politicians and the media have screamed “CRISIS!” at us during our lifetimes?

Well, let’s see …

In my lifetime, there was The Cold War crisis … the Cuban Missile Crisis … the Arab Oil Embargo Crisis … the Kennedy, Kennedy and King Crises … the Vietnam Crisis … the Summer of Crisis in ’68 … the Inflation Crisis of the ‘70s … the Iranian Hostage Crisis … the Reagan Budget crisis … the stock market crisis of ’87 … the AIDS crisis … the global warming crisis of the ‘90s … the crisis in Bosnia … the “Asian Contagion” crisis … the Oklahoma City bombing crisis … the bursting of the tech bubble crisis … the 9/11 crisis … the anthrax crisis … the twin war on terror crises in Iraq and Afghanistan … and now, of course, “The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Wow.  That’s a LOT of crises!  And I even left out some.

I’ll bet, if you were an alien looking at this list, you’d probably wonder how we managed to survive them all …

Let alone the impending crises that dominate cable TV; the “comet-or-asteroid-hits Earth” crisis … the “Yellowstone-super-volcano could erupt-crisis … the “massive-earthquake-could-render-all-life-in-the-Pacific-Rim-extinct” crisis … and more.

I’ll bet you all those crises have caused plenty of aliens to abandon their plans to invade and dominate Earth.

For one thing, the place is clearly a death trap.  And for another, they figure any species that could survive all those crises would surely kick their slimy little green arses all over the solar system!

Want to know a secret fantasy of mine?  OK, here goes:  I’d love to get hold of a major news outlet for one day just to see what effect reporting the positive side of the news might have …

• NEWS EVENT: The Commerce Department reports that retailers are cutting prices to attract customers and that profits are declining …MY HEADLINE: Consumers snapping up the bargains of a lifetime!  Saving 50% or more every time they open their wallets!  Most retailers still turning a profit!
• NEWS EVENT: Car companies and high-end retailers issue their earnings reports; they’re losing money …MY HEADLINE: Profits SURGING at job search companies like Monster.com … home-based business firms like Avon … and discount retailers like Amazon.com!
• NEWS EVENT: The Labor Department reports that unemployment has just hit 7.2%.  11.1 million American workers are now unemployed …MY HEADLINE: 92.8% of American workers getting paychecks!  139.9 MILLION are bringing home the bacon AND being paid up to 90% more than their counterparts overseas!

My point: The vast majority of all events are neutral.  It’s the media’s incessantly negative spin combined with our own negative belief filters that delude us into accepting a negative view of the world in general and our future in particular.

And that negative outlook and the toxic emotions that spring from it paralyze us … sap our creative energy … make us afraid to take risks … discourage us from doing what we must to triumph.

Everything changes once you change your focus.  Look for the silver lining; it’ll be there.  Look for opportunity when others are panicking; chances are, you’ll find it.

Become obsessed with finding the bright side; you’re gonna need shades!

Something to think about…

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

This was just Too Good NOT to share with my readers..

When you have a file full of facts at your fingertips, writing good copy is easy. You simply select the most relevant facts and describe them in a clear, concise, direct fashion.

But when copywriters don’t bother to dig for facts, they fall back on fancy phrases and puffed-up expressions to fill the empty space on the page. The words sound nice, but they don’t sell because the copy doesn’t inform.

Here’s a four-step procedure I use to get the information I need to write persuasive, fact-filled copy for my clients. This technique should be helpful to copywriters, account executives, and ad managers alike.

Step #1: Get all previously published material on the product.

For an existing product, there’s a mountain of literature you can send to the copywriter as background information. This material includes:

• Tear-sheets of previous ads
• Brochures
• Catalogs
• Article reprints
• Technical papers
• Copies of speeches
• Audio-visual scripts
• Press kits
• Swipe files of competitors’ ads and literature

Did I hear someone say they can’t send me printed material because their product is new? Nonsense. The birth of every new product is accompanied by mounds of paperwork you can give the copywriter. These papers include:

• Internal memos
• Letters of technical information
• Product specifications
• Engineering drawings
• Business and marketing plans
• Reports
• Proposals

By studying this material, the copywriter should have 80 percent of the information he needs to write the copy. And he can get the other 20 percent by picking up the phone and asking questions. Steps #2-4 outline the questions he should ask about the product, the audience, and the objective of the copy.

Step #2: Ask questions about the product.

• What are its features and benefits? (Make a complete list.)
• Which benefit is the most important?
• How is the product different from the competition’s? (Which features are exclusive? Which are better than the competition’s?)
• If the product isn’t different, what attributes can be stressed that haven’t been stressed by the competition?
• What technologies does the product compete against?
• What are the applications of the product?
• What industries can use the product?
• What problems does the product solve in the marketplace?
• How is the product positioned in the marketplace?
• How does the product work?
• How reliable is the product?
• How efficient?
• How economical?
• Who has bought the product and what do they say about it?
• What materials, sizes and models is it available in?
• How quickly does the manufacturer deliver the product?
• What service and support does the manufacturer offer?
• Is the product guaranteed?

Step #3: Ask questions about your audience.

• Who will buy the product? (What markets is it sold to?)
• What is the customer’s main concern? (Price, delivery, performance, reliability, service maintenance, quality efficiency)
• What is the character of the buyer?
• What motivates the buyer?
• How many different buying influences must the copy appeal to? Two tips on getting to know your audience:
  • If you are writing an ad, read issues of the magazine in which the ad will appear.
  • If you are writing direct mail, find out what mailing lists will be used and study the list descriptions.

Step #4: Determine the objective of your copy.

This objective may be one or more of the following:

• To generate inquiries
• To generate sales
• To answer inquiries
• To qualify prospects
• To transmit product information
• To build brand recognition and preference
• To build company image

Before you write copy, study the product – its features, benefits, past performance, applications, and markets. Digging for the facts will pay off, because in business-to-business advertising, specifics sell.

Robert W. Bly
Guest Contributor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

But one issue can derail your progress just about indefinitely.
That issue is family drama. Lord knows we have enuff distractions in life. And with this crazy economy, the last thing we need are more distractions.

The ones we create ourselves are bad enough. The ones from colleagues we can pretty much throttle with a teeny bit of discipline. The ones from our family though…..
Those are the ones which can be carried throughout our days, travels and even right in front of our prospects.

These “slices of life” as I call them are mostly fraught with disagreements, minor pressures [over-exaggerated] and in-law visitations… But some, are very serious even medically unsound.
I will not minimize the fact that families are not always perfect.

Enter the magic of indifference. No, I’m not saying to ignore anyone,
to lock yourself away or even kick your cat. You see… vying for attention is a human characteristic which will always be with us.
Without proper guidance and a few mental tools to cope, we are at the mercies of our family’s daily drama.

Some families, more than others..

With indifference, or detachment, we can allow ourselves to engage from a point of no emotion. To some, it may seem as though we deal with family with an empty head. Nothing could be further than the truth. Because I’m not a genius, I look up these things to make sense now and again.

de·tached  (d-tcht) adj.
1. Separated; disconnected: a detached part; a detached plug.
2. Standing apart from others; separate: a house with a detached garage.
3. Marked by an absence of emotional involvement and an aloof, impersonal objectivity. See Synonyms at cool.

in·dif·fer·ent  (n-dfr-nt, -dfrnt) adj.
1. Having no particular interest or concern; apathetic: indifferent to the sufferings of others.
2. Having no marked feeling for or against: She remained indifferent toward their proposal.
3. Not mattering one way or the other: It’s indifferent to me which outfit you choose.
4. Characterized by a lack of partiality; unbiased: an indifferent judge.
5. Being neither too much nor too little; moderate.
6. Being neither good nor bad; mediocre: an indifferent performance.
7. Being neither right nor wrong.
8. Not active or involved; neutral: an indifferent chemical in a reaction.

As you can see;
It’s not a bad thing.. its a neutral stance which can defy distraction
and rally you into action once your audience is no longer required from the family. Stay focused on your goal and plan of action, keep a list of distractions and apply a modest amount of detachment and indifference when needed.

Always forward
Dan–

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give — Winston Churchill

Incoming search terms:

• family drama
• neutral stance
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Washington Had Vision of Trials Facing Nation

For many years copies of Washington’s vision at Valley Forge as related by one Wesley Bradshaw, told to him by Anthony Sherman, have been in existence. The earliest publication was in 1859, 1880, in 1931 and is being printed once more. THE STARS AND STRIPES, December 21, 1950.

The last time I ever saw Anthony Sherman was on the Fourth of July, 1859, in Independence Square. He was then ninety-nine years old, and becoming very feeble. But though so old, his dimming eyes rekindled as he gazed upon Independence Hall, which he came to visit once more. “Let us go into the hall,” he said. “I want to tell you of an incident of Washington’s life — one which no one alive knows of except myself; and if you live, you will before long see it verified.

“From the opening of the Revolution we experienced all phases of fortune, now good and now ill, one time victorious and another conquered. The darkest period we had, I think, was when Washington, after several reverses, retreated to Valley Forge, where he resolved to spend the winter of 1777. Ah! I have often seen the tears coursing down our dear commander’s care-worn cheeks, as he would be conversing with a confidential officer about the condition of his poor soldiers. You have doubtless heard the story of Washington’s going into the thicket to pray. Well, it was not only true, but he used often to pray in secret for aid and comfort from God, the interposition of whose Divine Providence brought us safely through the darkest days of tribulation.
“One day, I remember it well, the chilly winds whistled through the leafless trees, though the sky was cloudless and the sun shone brightly, he remained in his quarters nearly all the afternoon alone. When he came out, I noticed that his face was a shade paler than usual, and there seemed to be something on his mind of more than ordinary importance. Returning just after dusk, he dispatched an orderly to the quarters of the officer I mention, who was presently in attendance. After a preliminary conversation of about half an hour, Washington, gazing upon his companion with that strange look of dignity which he alone could command, said to the latter:

The Vision

“I do not know whether it is owing to the anxiety of my mind, or what, but this afternoon, as I was sitting at this table engaged in preparing a dispatch, something seemed to disturb me. Looking up, I beheld standing opposite me a singularly beautiful female. So astonished was I, for I had given strict orders not to be disturbed, that it was some moments before I found language to inquire into the cause of her presence. A second, a third, and even a fourth time did I repeat my question, but received no answer from my mysterious visitor except a slight raising of her eyes. By this time I felt strange sentiments spreading through me. I would have risen, but the riveted gaze of the being before me rendered volition impossible. I assayed once more to address her, but my tongue had become useless, even thought itself had become paralyzed. A new influence, mysterious, potent, irresistible, took possession of me. All I could do was to gaze steadily, vacantly at my unknown visitor. Gradually, the surrounding atmosphere seemed as though becoming filled with sensations and luminous. Everything about me seemed to rarify, the mysterious visitor herself becoming more airy, and yet more distinct to my sight than before. I now began to feel as one dying, or rather to experience the sensations which I have sometimes imagined accompany dissolution. I did not think, I did not reason, I did not move; all were alike impossible. I was only conscious of gazing fixedly, vacantly at my companion.

“Presently I heard a voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn,’ while at the same time my visitor extended her arm eastwardly. I now beheld a heavy white vapor at some distance rising fold upon fold. This gradually dissipated, and I looked upon a strange scene. Before me lay spread out in one vast plain all the countries of the world — Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. I saw rolling and tossing between Europe and America the billows of the Atlantic, and between Asia and America lay the Pacific. ‘Son of the Republic,’ said the same mysterious voice as before, ‘look and learn.’

“At that moment I beheld a dark, shadowy being, like an angel floating in mid-air, between Europe and America, dipping water out of the ocean in the hollow of each hand. He sprinkled some upon America with his right hand, while with his left hand he cast some on Europe. Immediately a dark cloud raised from these countries and joined in mid-ocean. For a while it remained stationary, and then moved slowly westward, until it enveloped America in its murky folds. Sharp flashes of lightning passed through it at intervals, and I heard the smothered groans and cries of the American people.

“A second time the angel dipped water from the ocean, and sprinkled it out as before. The dark cloud was then drawn back to the ocean, in whose heaving billows it sank from view. A third time I heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ I cast my eyes upon America and beheld villages and towns and cities springing up one after another until the whole land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was dotted with them. Again I heard the mysterious voice say, ‘Son of the Republic, the end of the century cometh, look and learn.’

“At this the dark, shadowy angel turned his face southward, and from Africa I saw an ill-omened spectre approach our land. It flitted slowly over every town and city. The inhabitants presently set themselves in battle array against each other. As I continued looking, I saw a bright angel, on whose brow rested a crown of light, on which was traced the word “Union,” bearing the American flag, which he placed between the divided nation, and said, ‘Remember ye are brethren.’ Instantly the inhabitants, casting from them their weapons, became friends once more and united around the National Standard.

“And again I heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ At this the dark, shadowy angel placed a trumpet to his mouth and blew three distinct blasts; and taking water from the ocean, he sprinkled it upon Europe, Asia, and Africa. Then my eyes beheld a fearful scene: from each of these countries arose thick, black clouds that were joined into one. And throughout this mass there gleamed a dark red light by which I saw hordes of armed men, who, moving with the cloud, marched by land and sailed by sea to America, which country was enveloped in the volume of the cloud. And I dimly saw these vast armies devastate the whole country and burn the villages, towns, and cities that I beheld were springing up. As my ears listened to the thundering of the cannon, clashing of swords, and the shouts and cries of millions in mortal combat, I heard again the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ When the voice had ceased, the dark, shadowy angel placed his trumpet once more to his mouth and blew a long and fearful blast.

“Instantly a light as of a thousand suns shone down from above me, and pierced and broke into fragments the dark cloud which enveloped America. At the same moment the angel, upon whose head still shone the word “Union,” and who bore our national flag in one hand and a sword in the other, descended from the heavens, attended by legions of white spirits. These immediately joined the inhabitants of America, who I perceived were well-nigh overcome, but who immediately taking courage again, closed up their broken ranks and renewed the battle. Again, amid the fearful noise of the conflict, I heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ As the voice ceased, the shadowy angel for the last time dipped water from the ocean and sprinkled it upon America. Instantly the dark cloud rolled back, together with the armies it had brought, leaving the inhabitants of the land victorious.

“Then once more I beheld the villages, towns, and cities springing up where I had seen them before, while the bright angel, planting the azure standard he had brought in the midst of them, cried with a loud voice, ‘While the stars remain, and the heavens send down dew upon the earth, so long shall the Union last.’ And taking from his brow the crown on which was blazoned the word “Union,” he placed it upon the Standard, while the people, kneeling down, said, ‘Amen.’

“The scene instantly began to fade and dissolve, and I at last saw nothing but the rising, curling vapor I at first beheld. This also disappearing, I found myself once more gazing upon the mysterious visitor, who, in the same voice I had heard before, said, ‘Son of the Republic, what you have seen is thus interpreted: Three great perils will come upon the Republic. The most fearful is the third, passing which the whole world united shall not prevail against her. Let every child of the Republic learn to live for his God, his land, and the Union.’ With these words the vision vanished, and I started from my seat, and felt that I had seen a vision wherein had been shown me the birth, progress, and destiny of the United States.”

“Such, my friends,” concluded the venerable narrator, “were the words I heard from General Washington’s own lips, and America will do well to profit by them.”

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The disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior
involving putting your cranium up your rectum. Many victims contracted it in
2008 . . . but now most people, after having been infected for the past 1-2
years, are starting to realize how destructive this sickness is.

It’s sad because Gonorrhea Lectim is easily cured with a new drug
just coming on the market called Votemout. You take the first dose in 2010
and the second dose in 2012 and simply don’t engage in such behavior again;
otherwise, it could become permanent and eventually wipe out all life as we
know it.

Several states are already on top of this, like Virginia and New
Jersey , and apparently now Massachusetts , with many more seeing the
writing on the wall.

Please pass this important message on to all those bright folk you really care about.

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- the wealthy and so called royal families, along with well hidden secret power structures and the banking/oil/media cartels. He’s coined the phrase Problem-Reaction-Solution to describe how a hidden hand manipulates events on a mass global scale for an intended effect. One of the agendas of this so called global elite, says Icke and others, is the fulfillment of a vision for a New World Order, the same one mentioned often by George H.W. Bush while he was President. The outcome for average people and the simple minded folk of the world under this plan is not a sunny one. It’s the plan for increasing control over a peaceful, small population that is cut off from its awareness of divine potential. Crazy? People used to think so, more are finding out that there’s a man behind the curtain & things that seemed random, could actually be orchestrated events.

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There are some events in life which are to be honored, simply because you lived them.  Not feeding some egoic self pitifying emotion that does nothing but drain your life force from every oriface.  What the hell good is that?

But holding your heart high. And knowing what capacity you are capable of, IF you only let yourself experience life openly.  Casting the cares of doubt and fears of being hurt aside, so you may once again know love.

Once I thought I would enter the following into a contest.. but since I suffer from egomania with an insecurity complex that never happened.

But it is a good piece and I would like to share it with you.

If ever before we were to be

Our eyes before could never see…

We had our lives to live did we
And never before could we see

That events in time could not prevent
The eventual love proved immanent.

We both came from trysts of love
That neither our years would we begrudge

We had to see for ourselves in days so long to be
That despite our cries of agony
Our love was meant to be…

Behind the tears of growth of pain
We both had learned our hurt and shame.
We saw those that came and went
And trials of suffering ever spent.

*If ever before we were to be
our eyes before could never see…

we grew up fast we grew up quick
And many times we both got sick
Trying to find that peace of mind
Hiding through eyes of the blind.

Our lives have brought us schools of thought
And joys we both had ever sought
O’ too, The thrills of escape..
Of lives we both had learned to hate.

*If ever before we were to be
our eyes before could never see…

We collapsed beneath ourselves in time
for search of truth, for reason a rhyme.
We even Prayed to our God this time
To find that we — had walked a line.

Saved from ourselves our fettered souls
To be reborn, some say, truth be told.
To start anew and give a stake
Of our lives another– just might forsake.

*If ever before, we were to be
our eyes before could never see…

Among some friends whom we little knew
Some of which we care less too..

We met upon a day so new
And our friendship grew and grew and grew.

We talked and listened
and listened and talked
About nothing and little things & somethings…
we  could never balk.

*If ever before we were to be
our eyes before could never see…

And not before long we had a glance of life
Without pain or worry or even strife.

We had a feeling that this was it
Even if we fought, just a little bit..

We cared for our wounds and held each other close
And even made a home for which we could host

We even reclaim each other, every day
And “I Love you” are the words that we say.

And Now today Laura, I say to thee
I take thee my love, for my wife to be.

*If ever before we were to be
our eyes before could never see…

************************************************14yrs later…
And now after doing all in my heart and my power, as witnessed by too many…

I bid thee farewell…

And hello to the new chapter…

Hi Tony, Hi Clayton,

Dan Lopez here again, I wanted to retell my story as you
requested… So here we go…

It was dark, I thought I knew Dark? You may feel you know
dark also, well..

You don’t KNOW dark… give me a minute or two, and I’ll
tell you what I mean.

Few years back, my 2 year old daughter came into a rare life
threatening disease that made cerebral palsy look promising.

A few years before that! My teenage daughter was brutally
attacked and then ended her assailants pathetic life. Some
time before that, in my decent into despair. I spent two
months committing suicide. No–Not attempting, committing..

Only thing was—my body, it just didn’t know when to die.

I’d lost everything I had 4 times over, everything. I’ve been
homeless, a blackout drunkard, a delinquent, a druggie, a
thief and a stolen motor cycle riding beggar eating cheese
fries as my only meal with a glass of water every other day.

Three thousand miles away from everything I ever knew.
Sleeping under an abandoned carport of an abandoned dinner.

To me [and obviously to others]it seemed: The devil didn’t
want me and God wasn’t done with me.

You name it? I been there. And yet this is only a SMALL
short glimpse of the full depth of my darknened life.

Have You ever been that far down? Have You ever been there
really? Had those lost hope moments, episodes, seasons?

Are they behind you? Or ahead of you?

To think, it all started the night I came home from the
hospital. Newly born in ’63 and they stole every nursery
item my parents had in the apt. That Same Night.

The crib, the changing table, the bassinet the clothes the
blankets, the formula…. EVERYTHING.

Even the damn diapers…

Nothing, No, Not One other thing in the apartment was
touched.. Jewelry, stereos watches, cash… all that,
they left behind.

Just MY stuff was gone.

So, No silver spoon here, that’s for sure. Matter of fact
its quite the opposite, wouldn’t you agree?

So,,, Dark? I know dark. I’ve been there, its always
comforting to talk to someone who’s been there and who’s had
it worse than you. I know, I’ve been able to find others who
dwarf my dark ages..

In some corners of the globe I’m considered lucky.

In fact; Right Now?

THIS, this right here? Is the most Unbelievable time of My
life.

Over the years, I have journaled and blogged, and wrote
everything and anything that came into my head and through
the years developed a kind of following because of it.

Having been confronted with all I’ve experienced in life?
Only one thing could truly change my life forever… An that
was A Bonofied Miracle.

Recently I read this book called “Think and Grow Rich, by
Napoleon Hill”, then I read “The Master Key System by
Charles Haanel”.

I did, everything that I read to do, I did it.

In biblical terms, basically, I repented.
A more modern definition is I changed my mind
and my thinking and my behavior.

Then… not but a week later… An email came in the middle
of the night. SPAM? I hate SPAM, what is this NOW!? Business
in a box? Oh, what the heck?

People actually make money from this BS!?! How? Why?
Rubbish… Oh!? — Wait? Hey? I know this guy? No–Not the
author, but the services the author used to promote his
product.

I went to his wedding, and he was a musketeer at mine.. Er,
long story.. Involves swords and costumes and happier
times..

So, I reached out and got a hold of my old friend.

Marc Goldman

And the Miracles started to unfold…

He asks me if I would like to do a Joint Venture.
It seems.. He built a business from it.
And I have something he has very little of,
TIME.

And an untapped talent.
Writing.

Do You have an untapped talent? ‘Course you do, we all do..

He’s been a fan of my writing for years, following my once
popular blog now cobwebbed now in the Way Back Machine.

And now… 6 months later.

It seems, I went through all I did for a reason. People
relate to hardship and suffering. To an internal knowing
that it CAN be different. You want reassurance, you’re not
alone.

So, after One, just ONE Joint Venture?

NOW??

I help people, people like me who had, and have it hard, but
somewhere deep held on for dear life that it could and would
get better. In spite of ourselves.

I help people—build on those dreams and take charge of
their lives. With the simple click of a SUBMIT button, I
REACH OUT TO LITERALLY thousands to tens of thousands of
people looking to be where I am now.

Working from home, paying the bills, finally spending awesome
time with my family and doing things and going places.

Partnering with the best talents on the internet. Making
friends with the best names in the industry. And racking in
tens of thousands a month in sales.

Rags to riches?
Nooo…
this is Night VS Day!
this is Dark VS Light!

THIS IS DAN LOPEZ
Promotions Manager
http://DanLopez2012.com Can’t stop me now!! Woot!

Let Me show YOU how life can change…when You change!
And I’ll leave you with these facts thanks to Brian.

All comments are welcome.

Peace

Keep an eye out for my super ninja spider monkeys… they rock!

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Here’s what will happen next:

I will get be touch with you’re assigned contact having recieved the
agreement and questionnaire. After which time careful study of the questionnaire
will determine the mix of actions required by your team, or yourself if necessary.

If you have not filled out your questionnaire already, please do so now and return it as soon as possible.

Information regarding any agreement should already be in your posession, if not, please contact me as soon as you can to receive the appropriate agreement and questionnaire.

If you have not purchased a retainer yet one can be purchsed here.
This is a Level One Limited Time Personal Coaching Program

Once again we thank you for your patronage and look forward to serving you futher.

To Your Success,
Dan Lopez.

PS: This is a single (closed) promotion support consult created for a select few clients.
If you have found this page in error, but would like to inquire further prior to purchasing. Please submit your information to the contact page here::
http://danlopez2012.com/contact-us/

I will reply to your inquiry within 24 hours of submission, Mon – Fri.

Sometimes, what’s really holding you back

These are the very essences of beliefs.. how do I know?
Very recently I had to face one of the biggest beliefs that have haunted me since I was nine years old.

Because of the extremely sensitive nature of this belief
I can and will only divulge this info to those who care about
changing they’re own destructive negative belief.

I can tell you it was a statement, just one single solitary
statement.. which, by itself could have been fluffed off had it
been made at a different time of my life…

But since it happened during a very influential time, it became quite real. I believed it. I believed it because situations in my life
seemed to be proving that it was true.

Things just weren’t happening for me. Nothing was ever going right.
When things did go right, they seemed to be short lived and lasted only for brief periods.. to the point where hard times became a way a of life.

No matter the amount of effort I would put into improving myself,
my learning, my knowledge, my wisdom, my abilities and my professional skills… My belief lived on.

You with me so far?

Even as I write this I can literally hear the shadow of that statement being made in my minds ear with distinct clarity. The only difference
between now and my last thirty six years of living is…
It Is NOT True For Me Any More.

I can repeat the statement to myself today, right now and I can just feel within my heart of hearts that this is NOT true.

But only a short while ago, this was not the case. I was completely
and emphatically under the spell of this statement. It was true…
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was true..
How else could I explain my life? There was no other statement that could completely sum up he very fiber of my existence.

Until I changed it.

I’m not talkin about some fluffy little challenge here to overcome some little anxiety you may be experiencing now and again…
I’m talking a belief so debilitating that I literally would sit completely imobilized by the sheer weight of the belief. Unable to communicate or take action in any form.

I would isolate for very long periods..
I would be questioned by friends and family and have absolutely no answer for them. I would be stuck in my head for what seemed like hours weeks months and even years and still not be any where better than when I started.

This is the kind of thing that…
Counseling couldn’t help.
Therapy couldn’t help.
Reading couldn’t help.
Drugs couldn’t help.
Wealth couldn’t help.
Prayers couldn’t help.
Meditations couldn’t help
Affirmations couldn’t help.
Education couldn’t help.
Music couldn’t help.
Sex couldn’t help, well, for a time anyways.
Self help couldn’t help, nor could NLP practitioners.

Nothing, I mean NO THING would help.

After all for 36 some odd years I didn’t even know what the hell it was to begin with..

Then suddenly I started hearing things like
limiting beliefs
negative beliefs and
limiting negative beliefs..
Yeah, I know, same thing, but what the hell?

I mean, I lived a decent childhood up to a certain point, when all hell broke loose… As do most adolecents…
But this was, for many, a time when the adults in our lives were undergoing massive shifts in their own lives.. Things just sucked for everyone… Alcoholism was more than a way of life, it was life.
Child abuse was just a form of dicipline, living in terror was a norm.
Or just being ignored was actually a form of Gods Grace.

Now I may or may not be exaggerating a bit, I know of a few who were actually hospitalized during these times of their lives or even worse raped for some… being sexually abused was just another chain of events that proved the belief. When reaching out and trying to expose my tormentors I was rebuked as they were friends of the family and would never be expected to have acted out in such manor, so I must be delusional right?

Anyways…

I knew there was something wrong, but for the life of me
I could not in no definitive way place the exact point on what was
destroying me every living minute of the day.

Until one day it just hit me…
It was at a climatic time in my life…

[to be continued...]

[Breaking Barriers Continued]

I got tired of  this condition.
I couldn’t go any further in life.
I was going to find out what the heck this limiting belief  was.

I was so stuck in a rut, I couldn’t do any work.

Seriously, in defense of my past….

I’ve taken e-mailing lists and generated 10′s of thousands of dollars in revenue.
I had built content, webdesign and components to a flourishing $4 thousand a month membership site.
I’ve studied 30 years of search engine optimization, and within hours get placed on the 1st page of Google, Yahoo or MSN for almost any keyword phrase I wished.
I teamed up with a friend and helped generate 90 thousand unique visitors to a sales page in hours.

Bare with me here a minute, [this is not bragamony] this has to be said…

I’ve worked with the biggest financial firms in the industry.
I went from $5  an hour to $57 thousand in 2 years.
Then the dot-com bubble burst. And I jumped on a $50k job, and earned a $25k raise in 2 months.

I started from below algebra- math level to Calculus-II in 4 months.
Held over 67 certifications from hardware and networking vendors around the globe.
Went from electrical engineer to computer networking systems engineer in 3 years.
[Whew... those business cards sucked]

I then  made VP of IT in 6 months. [better looking business cards too]

I broke personal records and achievements I didn’t even know I could break.

And here I was…  lifeless, unable to think past my next meal, my next cup of coffee, my next breath.
It was as if my spirit had departed. And all that was left, was a lifeless husk of animal crap that couldn’t even be used for fertilizer.

What the hell was I telling myself, that I believed, so whole heartedly, I could no longer function?

I mentioned previously I wouldn’t divulge the exact statement…
Well, I changed my mind…

The statement told to me, when I was young, was:
YOU, Are A Worthless Piece of Shit, That Will Never Amount To Anything!

And I believed it.

That one little statement was repeated, like it was tattooed to my forehead.
I heard it in my thoughts like an agonizing subliminal tape from morning till night.

Never looking in the mirror for any length of time because it was just too painful.
Not while shaving or anything else. I couldn’t look myself in the eye.
There was no love there, only self loathing.

Because I believed, what wasn’t true.

I had to decided to take this shit to the street, as they say from my school days.
My accuser was coming and it was time for this viscous cycle to end.
If  I was to ever see the light of day and be the Me I am to be?
This had to stop now, once, and for all!

Separated from my wife and child, living in my fathers cabin,,, he was coming.
Coming to tell me it was time for me to pack up.
To make my broken down Corolla my permanent home.
No! This was ending, ending right here, right now!

I am NOT what was told me.
I repeated saying that, (I kid you not), 2000 times.
And the fear I had, I was about to face head-on.

At this point even if he DID make me leave.

I wasn’t leaving worthless.

I wasn’t leaving as a no amount to nothing future failure.

I was staying or I was leaving, a Man, god-dammit!

The details are so crazy, that when it came to the point of actually confronting my accuser..
It had actually dawned on me, that I didn’t need to get this person to tell me this wasn’t true.
I didn’t need ANYONE to tell me this wasn’t true..

I was freakin out.. for the 1st time in my life I was actually saying :
I’M THE ONE WHO NEEDS TO TELL ME, THIS IS NOT TRUE.

No One Else Can Tell You What Your Truth Is!!!

Only YOU Can Tell YOU What Your Truth Is!

YOU Are NOT Worthless!

YOU Have An Amazing Future [If] You Want To Have One!

“There is something wrong with me”

Break Your Barriers, Face Your Fears And Live Your Life..
Please, We owe it to ourselves.

God Bless You!

Dan–

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1 Two hour ride into the city
1a Email…
2 Two ninety minute meetings with two different teams
2a Email…
3 One thirty minute lunch
3a Email…
4 Four twenty minute calls with clients
4a Email…
5 Ninety minutes with the underlings
5a Email…
6 One stroll through production floors
6a Email…
7 Two hours of report on project status updates
7a Email…
8 Last minute review of next days agenda
8a Email…
Keys, wallet, cellphone, briefcase off I go…

Two hour ride from the city
Kiss betrothed
Toss Keys, wallet, cellphone, briefcase
Mail…trash, bills, trash, bills, trash, bill
Hi kids, goodnite kids…
Devour cold dinner
Brush
Relief
Email….
Hi Leno, goodnite Leno, goodnite dear…
Zzzzzzzzzzz…

Hit the alarm…
Pat the betrothed
Relief
Shower
Brush
Shave
Coffee…
Hi kids?… Where are the kids dear?… “They moved out years ago,
how many times do I have to remind you?”
[Sigh...]
Email…
Keys, wallet, cellphone, briefcase off I go…

1 Two hour ride into the city
1a Email…
Where’s my Email?

Fred? Fred, what are you doing here? Didn’t you get the email?
“What email?”
Fred… you were let go last friday…
“Which friday?”
Fred, last Friday. We down-sized, you’re whole department was let go…
“Was there a severance?”
No Fred, we voted that out years ago everyone got the memo..
Fred, Fred are you okay? You don’t look so good.
SECURITY!???!!

We’re here at the scene where Fred Iznotokayz was last seen carrying the head of department leader Bill Shoulduvknown …

Focused Fiction…

I have to admit when I first saw the trailers for the movie Legion I was a bit taken back.
I was dying to look back at my old studies of Angels and all that I remembered..
Then my brother emailed me concerning the trailer and the films implications.

And this is how it went..

(Q.) so who is Michael?

(A.)

Michael is an ArcAngel.. higher in rank than other angels.. Known as the the Lord of The Way.

Michael.. was charged to be the sole ArcAngel given rank high enough to do battle with the legions and of Lucifer himself, who lost his name and was given satan as a remembrance of the fall…

And only the Christ and the Creator of all may ultimately
defeat satan’s rulers, powers and principalities..

Also important to note.. that satan although removed from rank did not lose any of his stature in power or knowledge or beauty for that matter.. its written that he was as high ranked [being the holder of the light] as the Seriphim who are above the Cheribum who are above the ArcAngels..

*See “All The Angels In The Bible” by Herbert Lockyear…
*Also look at the Edgar Cayce readings regarding such..

(Q.) isn’t Legion the another name for Satan?

(A.)
Actually.. thats from a movie.. the actual account was taken from
scripture when a demon possessed individual was asked of the entity
to reveal itself… Legion is many, which is its true meaning..

Mark 5:9
Then He asked him, “What is your name?” And he answered, saying,
“My name is Legion; for we are many.”

Obviously “many” had decided to attach themselves to this person.

When the fall occurred many fell also, or legions fell..

For the Sons of God looked upon the daughters of man and
saw that they were fair, and took them wives…

*See ancient texts from the Apocrypha

This was only part of the fall, but is most noted of the written texts..

The actual fall according to E.C. readings, Lucifer was pissed and jealous that man was higher than the angels and that he & angels were to serve man..

*Is it not written that ye are gods?

“Psalm 82:6
I said, “You are gods, And all of you are children of the Most High.”

Who in turn, along-side served The Lord our Creator.

(Q.) Why are the Angels the bad guys and look like demons

(A.)

Angels/demons may appear before humans in any form they choose to manifest.

And then, again, poetic license on the part of the creators of the film..

It would be best if I’d seen the film to speculate on it in its entirety.

But to return to the question.. demons are what happens to lower angels who aligned with satan and decided to serve him. More than likely after the fall the wrath of tyranny began so they are held there.

(Q.) Is Michael the Fallen Angel?

No Michael is most certainly not the fallen or among them..

(Q.) His entrance sure does look like he is. And if he is, then humanity’s only champion is Lucifer?

Again poetic license on the part of the creators of this film.

(Q.)If God has sent them to destroy humanity, then isn’t it that humanity is the bad guy?
(A.)

# 2 Kings 19:35
[ Sennacherib’s Defeat and Death ] And it came to pass on a certain night that the angel of the LORD went out, and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses—all dead.

There is no writing anywhere that suggests that The Lord was sending angels to destroy man. But it would be an extremely easy defeat. Nor would it seem correct that He would send demons. Which obviously brings the confusion you mention.

Even in the last, the book of revelation, there is an extreme
mis-interpretation of whats being given.

The revelation was not prophecy of the end of days, but a map of sequential visualized events that occur in the spiritual centers of the body while one ascends through in meditation to get to the holy of holies and return to The Creator.

As to the bad guy, There is only One Creator who created all.. And everything is part of the Creator.

If we continue to deny our birthright, it is the same as aligning with
rebellion and the prince of this world. So the lessons continue until we get it right.

[Repose]

[Brother]
The unborn baby being the only hope for humanity reminds me of the
Seventh Sign with Demi Moore.

[Dan]
I agree they blatantly stole that metaphor from that particular movie.

[Brother]
These movies are meant to subvert God and instill in the audience a sense of dislike of God rather than step back and see that it is we who have fallen from His grace.

[Dan]
I’ve no doubt there is an alternative motive driving these types of
movies beyond mere entertainment.

[Brother]
I will see it as research into Hollywood’s next attempt at culling the
masses into group think.

[Dan]
I personally believe it goes beyond Hollywood’s pathetic think-tank.

[Brother]
I’m no theologian by any means, but I know that movies are used to
“teach us” what to think.

[Dan]
I’ve wanted to consider myself a theologian, but prefer to believe in the experience of application, rather than the study of theory speculation & application.

Better to know because you experienced it, than to say you know because you read/watched/heard it.

Care to chime in? Would love your take on the matter.

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Having a spiritual life is or can be lonely.

It’s not everyday we get to connect with like minded people who we can bounce and share thoughts without ego or judgemental attitudes. So when we do.. It’s a blessing. totally something to savour. My friend and I were doing such and it helps me amp everytime we talk.

So I decided to post one of our skype chats… It’s long though.. but would seriously love some feedback on the subject

[Friend]: I am preparing with my mentor for 2012

[DanLopez2012]: it would be well for you to do this

[Friend]: yeah…interesting things about to happen…

[DanLopez2012]: and will continue to happen thereafter..

[Friend]: whether GOOD or BAD we must be ready

[DanLopez2012]: the only bad to come about will probably be man-made

[Friend]: yes

[DanLopez2012]: I just feel bad for those who can’t even hammer a
nail.. or cut a piece of wood..   or kill for a meal.. eh heh.. worst
case senarios

[Friend]: I agree…

[DanLopez2012]: you ever watch man-vs-wild.. what a great show

[Friend]: no

[DanLopez2012]: watch it some time.. they have great scenarios that I
thought wee freakin SO valuable.. I mean even if you have an accident
and you are forced to make it with the skin on your back..

[Friend]: Cool…i will check it out

[DanLopez2012]: Just knowin ya have some knowledge to keep ya goin a
few more days or weeks from little known sources.. is awesome.. I
don’t consider myself a major survivalist but damn good stuff

[Friend]: it helps a lot

[DanLopez2012]: if ya don’t mind me askin.. in what manner are you
preparing for 2012?

[Friend]: Spiritual Level…

[DanLopez2012]: kinda got that part

[Friend]: how about u

[DanLopez2012]: rebuilding my relationship with Source,  raising
vibrations and being of help and of kind heart

[Friend]: cool…how are you doing this?

[DanLopez2012]: meditation, study and being round ppl on twitter..
kinda out in the sticks here so don’t get too much interaction with
ppl. If at all… specially during the winter months

[Friend]: Sweet! What are you studying

[DanLopez2012]: Just finished studying all the angels of the bible..
and continuing study… you gonna offer some info? Also working on
audios of a session of chakras being opened in succession.. I am
preparing sub audios to add that will allow ones self to get the
colors and audible tones of the colors embedded in the sessions

[Friend]: I have being Studying Science Of Being

[DanLopez2012]: is that like mindfulness?

[Friend]: Goes into detail about physical, mental, spiritual planes

[Friend]: I will get you a copy.

[Friend]: Book I is a summary in 7 lessons. The other Book is 27
lessons

[DanLopez2012]: who’s it by?

[Friend]: Baron Eugene Fersen

[DanLopez2012]: ahhh got it.. will look at it, thanks

[DanLopez2012]: The triune system of 27 lessons for the correlative
development of the individual.

[Friend]: Yes…

[Friend]: FOCUS on SPIRIT,LIFE,LOVE,TRUTH

[Friend]: MIND

[DanLopez2012]: Mind is the builder, spirit is the life, physical is
the result..

[Friend]: MIND alone CAN get you to SPIRIT…MORE of all
TRUTH,LOVE,LIFE,MIND the CLOSER to Spirit you will be

[Friend]: I mean “MIND alone cannot get you Spirit”

[Friend]: MIND alone is LUCIFER

[DanLopez2012]: ego is of the fallen

[Friend]: Yes…MIND alone is egotistic. Once the MIND awakes from the
DREAM. Mind connected with LOVE

[DanLopez2012]: lately, I’ve been struggling with the wording.. things
like the Dream and the Illusion.. thats all well and fine.. but its
not given for practical application of reason.. If this reality is all
we know.. then this dream is our living reality.. not that which is
unseen.. for we do not dwell in the spirit as naturally as we do in
this reality or sojourn.. I’m no swami.. and I’m not big on parables..
When these so called enlighten ones can’t speak plainly [not sayin
Eugene doesn't speak plainly] I meditate on it.. and if I’m not given
insight.. I dismiss it as mumbojumbo… it may be good mumbojombo that
others can resonate with and thats excellent.. it just doesn’t with
me… My friend Jeri studies A Course In Miracles.. I love the darn
thing.. but when they go into speaking of the illusion.. I guess Im’
not there yet.. so I catch an attitude LOL!!

[DanLopez2012]: I’ve come to understand, that consciousness is in
levels..

[Friend]: No worries…that is why we are.

[DanLopez2012]: the conscious, the sub-conscious, and the super-
conscious

[Friend]: We are stuck in this Thinking that keeps us in this mess. So
our thinking must change

[DanLopez2012]: just connecting with the subconscious is something..
getting to the superconscious is the goal.. bringing the infinite to
the finite

[Friend]: We can only get a glimpse

[Friend]: Fortunately I have experienced the ONENESS

[DanLopez2012]: ur not alone there

[Friend]: It was amazing

[DanLopez2012]: brought me to tears uncontrollable

[DanLopez2012]: I can’t even begin to describe it

[Friend]: This is when I knew that this PHYSICAL reality was an
illusion/dream

[DanLopez2012]: words just fail me

[DanLopez2012]: lol, its still OUR dream/illusion to be lived.. I
mean.. what does this revelation bring you? Knowing this is a
dream/illusion.

[Friend]: I know what I need to work on

[DanLopez2012]: lol

[DanLopez2012]: I’m not makin fun.. trust me..

[Friend]: lol

[Friend]: I know what I can experience NOW

[DanLopez2012]: That which brings the disturbance and the lack of
peace from they mind thy heart, that is whch is to be addressed in
self

[Friend]: Thy Heart is not the Issue..It is thy Mind

[Friend]: that needs to make PEACE

[DanLopez2012]: you think your heart is impervious?

[DanLopez2012]: be sure, the prayerful request for purifying thy heart
is not a light matter

[DanLopez2012]: it is not called a hardened heart for nothing

[DanLopez2012]: It is the whole of ones-self that need administering
of thy thoughts and actions through daily living that brings the peace

[Friend]: What causes the Heart not to be in Peace

[Friend]: We need to considered the Learn behaiors

[DanLopez2012]: thine experiences in the earthly plane.. it is thy
will which brings forth such that would hinder thine heart with
affliction

[Friend]: But what influences thy WILL

[DanLopez2012]: I’m just sayin.. I ask.. do not think Mind is of the
devil, it is not.. the ego, is of such matters.. what we keep our
mind on is what makes the difference.. for Mind is the builder

[Friend]: From my perspective and metaphoriclly speaking the
EGO/DEVIL/(mind alone)

[DanLopez2012]: then to lose ones mind is to render ones-self whole?

[Friend]: LUCIFER is a TWIN

[DanLopez2012]: there is no twin in he that has fallen.. his
exclusive, the light bearer once named and has lost that name from the
fall..

[Friend]: LUCIFER/MIND…must AWAKEN and realize THY FAULT

[DanLopez2012]: You were created as a co-creator with the Maker of
all.. a companion..

[Friend]: so was LUCIFER/MID

[Friend]: MIND

[DanLopez2012]: Our true dominion is the universe. That is our
rightful place of abode.. Returning to our Creator is our goal.
Lucifer is not of our creation.. we can in no manner come near , tho
He who lives in us has subdued all the earth therein and is mightier
than he.. through Him by Him may we go forth fearless

[DanLopez2012]: He who is the word, was with Him who created all from
the beginning…

Friend]: Exactly

[DanLopez2012]: So… bring HIM who has subdued the prince of this
world into thine heart into thine mind and leave Him to His work which
He has begun in us

[Friend]: metaphorically speakin yea

[DanLopez2012]: I am with you we must change.. we must ever endure to
seek and keep seeking.. Truth and light

[DanLopez2012]: To change our thoughts, and awaken to our true
spiritual consciousness

[DanLopez2012]: to bring the closer relationship to the creator, to
walk in the spirit

[Friend]: It is not easy…but the Soul keeps calling me OUT

[DanLopez2012]: expand if you can

[DanLopez2012]: out of body?

[Friend]: Sometimes the Ghetto Behavior kicks in and I got to remind
myself to get of it

[DanLopez2012]: well.. that changes with your environment.. and even
then it will take some time.. or more aptly put.. practice.. for it is
not all to be goody goody, but to be good for something

[DanLopez2012]: As you attract more of those who are like minded[sorry
for the pun] the ghetto behavior will not find its place..

[Friend]: My practice is to pull myself out as soon as possible

[Friend]: Because Ghetto peeps have to learn from somewhere

[DanLopez2012]: Ahhh.. so you are to be a teacher among your brethren

[Friend]: Yes my FAMILY was my Practice ground

[Friend]: It is well worth it:)

[DanLopez2012]: and what part of this ghetto behavior do you wish to
eliminate?

[Friend]: sometimes I run low on patience with some peeps doin stupid
shit

[DanLopez2012]: its fear.. in nature, in love there is no room for
fear, so fill yourself with love.. when it arises.. step aside and
whatch it.. do not fight it but be aware of it.. and then recognize
its start and eventual end..

[Friend]: yup…this is practice i am doing

[Friend]: it is not easy at times…

[Friend]: especially when your drained

[Friend]: I’ve got to pace myself and regenerate

[DanLopez2012]: if you love yourself, then the love of self will bring
forgiveness of self, when the forgiveness of self is in full then the
forgiveness of others will come naturally.. for it is harder to
forgive self than that which is outside of self..

[Friend]: the LOVE within

[Friend]: I got to remind myself the Energy in put will come back 10x

[DanLopez2012]: the tests always come when we are weak.. that is why
we must call upon and lean on and trust in Him.. which Glorifies
Himself in our weakness

[DanLopez2012]: throuygh Him we are strengthened through Him we may
overcome our weaknes and that which assails us from without and so
from within

[DanLopez2012]: I am certainly not alien to that your plight by any
means trust me

[Friend]: yup…easier said than done theredore we are in these
playgrounds to play so that  we can surrender and realize it is just a
playground

[Friend]: When we realize it is a playground from HIM we can
ENJOY,LOVE, and TRUST

[Friend]: Then I realize the Playgorund was just a DREAM/ILLUSION…

[DanLopez2012]: Damn I’m good… Actually, its easier Done than Said,
for once it has been done, so the practice has begun.. and we may be
more than conquerors!

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Now, I could go on and on about the implications of the matter being discussed at the top of this post. But personally I think I’ll place my thoughts underneath.

This was shot at a Conscious Life Expo this year and goes into great detail about many aspects relating to consciousness and the hidden iconic history repeated in every culture. Well, thats what I got so far 20 minutes into it.

Here’s The Full Length Video; It’s approx 1:36 minutes long and gets pretty intense about 20 minutes into it.

My thoughts? lol I haven’t.. ahh finally..yes! I have watched the whole thing. And whilst I have a very clear understanding of Edgar Cayce material. I have to admit I was biased towards David for a few years. Mainly because I had my own slant on what Edgar would be doing this time around.

If you don’t have time for the whole video in one sitting just listen to 3 minutes from the end of the video which basically says it all in a nut shell. Something we all should be aware of and actively conscious of..
[audio:http://danlopez2012.com/audio/last3minutes.mp3]

Just goes to show that, sometimes, its more important to know what’s needed than what’s wanted. And since I have an affinity with 2012 since my early 20′s I’m compelled to share with you some views that you either can stomach or not.

Like the air: we see it not, but take it away & we die.
We cannot see it, but we know it exists.

Our consciousness also exists, we see it not. But without it we fail to BE.
Guess I’m trying to hit on the nerve that just because you don’t believe in a thing does not mean it does not exist.

In the program, David touches on a lot of things from sources that are not availabe such as physical proofs or living testimonies sworn witnesses. Especially concerning the Montaulk Project and the Philidelphia Project,and some references to the NWO & well… a lot of references were covered in a very short amount of time.

But just because you have witnessed something you could not explain and tried to tell others who would not believe you, does that mean you didn’t experience it?

Of course you did. Am I right or am I right?

Anyway.. It gives a huge historical finding on the peniel gland and its epic tale of secrecy thats right in front of our very own eyes. Incredibly researched and light shedding evidence. But the last six minutes pretty much clinched the whole deal for me.

Have you ever witnessed a talk or listened to a speaker or watched a movie and SUDDENLY something struck you to your core, it struck you to your heart, where you knew, I mean “YOU JUST KNEW” it was truth because you’ve felt it again and again but didn’t know how to express it? The last 6 minutes brought me to tears.

I’ve witnessed and experienced unexplainable things in my life. Things by material man’s standards should not be and are the stuff of imaginings. Only, I’ve had witnesses. And on one ocassion witnesses a mile wide. But thats for other posts.

Mind what you are focused on. Meditate regularly, bring & breathe peace into your life. Watch your perceptions.. things are going to be quite interesting from here on.

Till next time.

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Can ya stay focused now!?!?
I just wanted to test the actual response rate of the
hundreds who are actually skipping of the page in droves
because they’re actually looking for some Torrent something or other.

Well here’s to you.

Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2005 – Gimme Remix

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Have you ever noticed that sometimes, you are thinking of a person you haven’t seen in a long time; then in a few minutes, you received a call from them?

That is not merely coincidence. It is the power of your thoughts showing themselves to you.

Your thoughts influence your reality, so if you learn how to turn all your positive thoughts into something real, do you realize what amazing things can happen to you?

Everything starts with thought. Ideas are the reason why things are discovered, buildings are made and inventions are inspired. Even your actions are preceded by your thoughts. You eat because you think you are hungry. You applied for a particular job because you think you can handle your duties.

But have you ever noticed that sometimes, you are thinking of a person you haven’t seen in a long time; then in a few minutes, you received a call from them? That is not merely coincidence. It is the power of your thoughts showing themselves to you.

Your thoughts influence your reality, so if you learn how to turn all your positive thoughts into something real, do you realize what amazing things can happen to you?

You can become richer, enjoy blissful relationships, have a rewarding career, or attain near-perfect health. Most of all, you’ll be delighted as you can look back and see how you have molded your life exactly how you always wanted it. This level of satisfaction will make you happier and more invigorated.

	The relationship between thoughts and reality.
	Astonishing steps to turn you thoughts to reality.
	The unfailing power of desire.
	How to test your wants to change your life.
	How to make your dreams come true, literally!
	Remarkable ways to reach your goals easily.
	The proper way to concentrate and visualize to achieve anything you want.
	The miraculous power of belief.

Introduction

I have a message for you. You were born with an amazing and immeasurable power.

This power has made you what – and how – you are now. You may be unconscious of it, but with this power you have created your present reality.

Yes, everything that you are, have experienced and are experiencing is a result of this power.

But as many people are unaware of this power, sadly, they have unconsciously used this negatively. With this negative use, they have made less of a life than what they deserve, full of heartbreaks, failures and disappointments.

Thankfully, it is not too late. If you are one of these people, you can learn to use this power positively to re-create your reality.

This book will make you aware of this power and help you use this power to be what you want, do what you want, and have what you want. It will help you create a life you may have once thought impossible.

The Relationship Between Thought And Reality

“I think, therefore I am.” - Rene Descartes

This amazing and immeasurable power you were born with is your ability to turn your thoughts into reality, or mind power.

Everything started with a thought. In fact, everything made on earth was first a thought – the houses we live in, the airplane, the light bulb, and more. All actions are also preceded by thoughts. The action of applying for a job, for example, is preceded by the thought “I think I’ll apply for this job.”

This may already be common sense to you – each thought you have in your head usually materializes when you act. But here’s the twist – even if you don’t act, your thoughts can materialize.

For example, was there a time when a person suddenly popped into your mind, and soon after, you saw that person, received a call from that person, or heard other people start talking about that person?
Or, for the people who are constantly fearful and worried about getting robbed or getting their belongings snatched, are they not the ones who are unfortunate enough to experience such things?
Generally, doesn’t the positive-thinking person also have positive people and circumstances in his/her life? On the other hand, the negative person finds himself/herself around negative people and negative circumstances.

And just as thought influences reality, reality can also influence thought, which can in turn influence reality again (THOUGHT — REALITY — THOUGHT). For positive people, this cycle reinforces the good things in their lives – when the good they have thought about comes true, they feel happy, validated and encouraged to keep thinking positively, and thus, manifesting more good things in their lives. And, for those with truly powerful minds, even when their thoughts do not materialize immediately, they do not allow themselves to get discouraged. They just press on until things turn out the way they want them to.

On the other hand, this cycle of thought-reality-thought can be vicious for people who think negatively. When their negative thoughts come true, they believe them and thus continue thinking negatively until these thoughts materialize again. The process repeats itself unless the person chooses to break the pattern.

If this sounds a bit too simplistic and dubious to you, try thinking back on your life. When you are in a good mood or are generally happy, how are things around you? How are the people around you? The events in your life? And, on the opposite side of the coin, when you are feeling low, what happens to the people around you and the circumstances you are in?

Think about the instances where you expected an outcome – or doubted a possible outcome. Either way, didn’t things happen the way you perceived them?

Your thoughts have power. This power is not very different from that of a sorcerer or a magician, whose magic spells first started out as thoughts.

For sorcerers, the relationship between thought and reality is quite a simple, straightforward concept. The only distance between thought and reality for them is a spell. Once they have cast their thoughts into a spell, they already expect a particular outcome.

In the same vein, the distance between your thoughts and reality is the energy you put into your thoughts. Notice, for example, that whatever occupies your thoughts most becomes real. Or when you concentrate hard, what you think about materializes. Especially when you believe it will happen.

French philosopher Rene Descartes’ immortal quote rings true even in today’s context. You thought, therefore you are what you are right now. When you are thinking, you are creating. You are like the sorcerer or magician who casts a spell – you are creating an outcome.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to use this power and know why some thoughts materialize and why others don’t.

How To Turn Your Thoughts Into Reality

“The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!” – Lord Byron

Think back to a sorcerer, witch or wizard you have watched in a fantasy movie or on television. How do they look when doing magic? “Focused,” “determined,” “concentrated” are the words that may come to your mind. For witches and wizards with wands especially, do they not look like they are channeling and pouring their energy at the tip of their wands to cast a spell?
In addition to how focused they are, they also look free of distractions, doubts, fear or anything that can get in the way of their spell-casting. Should their will waver, their magic may weaken or may not work at all. Their power is diminished at the same time their minds lose focus.

The same principle also holds true when you are thinking to create reality. The more focused you are and the more energy you give to your thoughts, the more likely it is that they will come true. And if you allow fear, doubts or any negative thought to rule your mind, then you will have a difficult time turning your thoughts into reality.

In the following pages you will learn how to give power or energy to your thoughts and clear your mind of blocks that prevent you from manifesting your thoughts.

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“I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.” – Zig Ziglar

When a sorcerer casts a spell, he has a very specific outcome in mind. And he has very particular words for it to happen. To release balls of fire, for example, a sorcerer uses specific spell words with the exact intention of creating the fire as he wants it to look.

You would not see a sorcerer floundering and calling out vague words that would pass for a spell. For those who even change a syllable of the spell word, the consequences can be disastrous, achieving an entirely different result.

Like a sorcerer, you have to be very specific with the thoughts you want realized. If you are not specific, you might not get it. Or, you might get it but not really get it – meaning, the outcome is not as good as you wanted it to be. Or in some cases, the outcome may not really be good at all. The cliché “Be careful what you wish for” is actually true.

One joke is a good illustrative example of the last point:

A man rubbed a lamp and a genie appeared.

“Your wish is my command,” the genie said. “What is your wish?”

“I want to be irresistible to women!” the man exclaimed.

“Wish granted.”

Poof! The man turned into a Visa credit card.

So, how specific should you be with what you want? As specific as you can get!

The way to make a dream specific is to turn it into a goal. A goal is a dream in detail, with a deadline. You have your list from the magic wand exercise – it is now time to make these items specific. To illustrate the difference between a dream and a goal, see the sample statements below:

DREAM

1. I want a bigger, beautiful house.

2. I want to be rich.

3. I want a more fulfilling, high-paying job.

GOAL

1. I will move into my new white two-storey house with six bedrooms, a pool, a library, and a tennis court at [location] by March 30, 2009.

2. I will have one hundred million [currency] in my bank account by April 30, 2015.

3. I will be working at [company] with a salary of [amount] by January 3, 2008.

See how specific goals are? Setting definite deadlines is particularly important – not only does it let you take responsibility and gives you a sense of urgency – not to mention excitement – it also gives more power to your thoughts. How, you may ask?

Compare a goal that has a deadline with a goal that does not have one. Often the goal with no deadline gets stuck in the “someday” part of a person’s mind. And sometimes – or most of the time – that “someday” never comes.

So, take out your magic wand list and start clarifying your dreams into goals. Some items may be easy to clarify, while others may take longer as they may require research.

Going back to the sample statement on the job above, notice how very specific it was phrased when it was considered as a goal – it already had a particular company and salary. Before arriving at that goal, though, the person had to first find out what their dream company was and determine their ideal salary.

In many major, life-changing goals, you need to do research first to determine what you really want. To get your dream house, for example, you should know in detail what it would look like and determine its ideal location.

The idea of doing research may look like a lot of work and can even appear boring at first for some, but you have to do it in order to set clear, specific goals.

If it really feels like a burden doing research, you may have to go back to the question, “Do I really, really want this?” Maybe you are not as passionate about your dream as you originally thought.

If you are really passionate, though, researching may not appear much of a chore but a process you may actually enjoy. If it still feels like a bit of a burden even though you know you would really like to achieve your dream, think of researching as shopping. You are given an array of choices – be it of fruits, vegetables, sweets, clothes – and you just have to choose the one you like best from each group.

In the same manner that you are setting specific goals, set goals for specific areas in your life as well – relationships, career, money, spiritual life and leisure. Do not be afraid to turn your seemingly impossible dreams into goals. Remember that you have the mind power to achieve that, as you will find out later.

A note of caution, by the way – at this point where you are setting goals, do not think about how you are going to reach them. Doing so might even distract you and get you so stuck on the how that you would not be able to see the end result. Just concentrate on making your desired outcome as clear and specific as possible in your mind.

Once you have written your goals down, you can now read them aloud. Declare them, the way a sorcerer shouts a spell. Feel the power coming from your words. Do you sense a sudden shift in your energy or your perspective?

You can also declare your goals in the presence of a close friend. Notice how you feel at that moment. Do you not feel power and a certainty that your goal will materialize now that you have declared it to another person?

Now that you have the power of passion and clarity in your thoughts, you will learn about a magical tip that will further intensify your mind power and accelerate your progress in realizing your dreams.

Magical Tip #3: Visualize

“When you visualize, you materialize.” - Dr. Denis Waitley

Aside from concentration, a key principle in using magic is visualization. Even while sorcerers’ spell words are already specific, sorcerers are also able to hold an image of the outcome they want in their mind. If, for example, a sorcerer chose to release balls of fire, he can see the red-hot, angry, dancing fireball very clearly in his mind even before he casts the required spell. And the fireballs materialize exactly the way the sorcerer imagined them.

Once you have stated your goals in a clear and specific manner, the next step is visualization. Put simply, visualization is the process of purposefully creating images in the mind to consciously – or unconsciously – manifest into reality. Visualizing makes your goals even more specific. If you think passion and stating your goals clearly have already given your thoughts considerable power, I would like you to know that visualizing can increase that power by at least a factor of ten.

Surprised? Remember the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A picture can easily show what may take many sentences to explain or even ideas that cannot be totally captured by words.

In fact, pictures may be the best representation of physical reality. This is why visualizing your goals makes them very powerful – you are bringing them closer to manifesting into physical reality.

Motivational speaker Bo Bennett calls visualization “daydreaming with a purpose.” This is how easy and natural yet focused the process of visualization is. Unlike a daydream where you may leap from one scene to another in carefree fashion, you purposefully choose the scenes you will include when visualizing.

Merely choosing images and scenes related to your goal, however, is not enough. To achieve your goal, your visualized images should simulate reality as closely as possible. The more realistic they look, smell, taste, and feel, the greater the chances for them to come true – and fast!

Think back to your magic wand list. Can you think of corresponding images for each goal you wrote? With those, you can now start visualizing!

Here are some tips on how to visualize effectively:

1. Turn your goal into an exciting movie. If a single picture is worth a thousand words, just imagine how powerful animated pictures – even a short film – are. And, abiding by the principle of simulating reality, moving images are definitely closer to reality than still ones.

Here’s what you need to do – choose one of the goals in your magic wand list and picture a scene where you have already achieved that goal exactly the way you want it. What is the setting? Who are the people involved? What is happening? What are you doing? How do you feel?

Let it unfold in your mind the way a movie does – only, you are the lead actor. And, like any good actor, let yourself feel and act the way you would at that moment.

For example, you may imagine going home to your dream house. You just moved in the day before, and the contentment and excitement you feel at finally living in your dream house are very strong. Before going inside, you let your eyes feast on the exterior and bask in the moment that finally, this house is yours! You feel the solidness of the doorknob as you turn it. Upon entering, you smell your favorite food cooking. You take note of the details in the interior of the house, later focusing on a favorite of yours – like a particular painting or a rocking chair. Your spouse greets you with a hug and you fill each other in about how your respective days went. Later, when you talk about the house, your spouse exclaims, “This really is an amazing house.” You smile and say, “And now it’s ours.”

Notice that the scene above entails the use of other senses aside from sight. In creating your mini-movie, injecting sensory experiences makes the scene even more real for you. Employ smell, taste, touch and hearing, as applicable.

Also, in the usual movie, there is a musical score and special effects, among others. If appropriate, you can have a musical background to your mini-movie. You can also make some objects stand out through sharper color or by putting them on close-up.

Though this may appear obvious, I would like to stress that when imagining your mini-movie, always make sure that you are in it. Remember, your images should be very specific. Visualizing only your dream house without you in it may bring you to circumstances where you see your dream house but do not get it. Or, if you regularly visualize looking around your dream house with you considering buying it, you may indeed find yourself in that situation but never get around to buying it. What you include and exclude in your movie can make the crucial difference.

2. Relax. When imagining your movie, do so in a relaxed state. Get into a comfortable sitting position, close your eyes and breathe deeply. Focus on each muscle of your body and let each relax one by one. Keep breathing deeply until you feel you are fully relaxed. A relaxed mind and body will allow you to focus more on your mini-movie.

After imagining your movie, take several deep breaths again and slowly open your eyes.

3. Visualize repeatedly. This is particularly helpful for long-term goals. Repetition makes your visualizations all the more powerful, especially if you make it into a habit. Make it a point to imagine your mini-movie at least once daily, upon rising in the morning or before going to sleep. Ideally, you should do it both in the morning and at night.

4. Gather photos or drawings that show you with your goal manifested. To further help you in your visualization, cut out pictures or draw the images that can best represent the outcome you want to achieve. Choose very specific pictures as much as possible – and make sure that you are in the pictures!

For example, you may cut out a photo of a beautiful place in a country you want to go to. Put a photo of yourself on that picture afterwards to help you visualize that you are indeed there right now.

Make a habit of looking at these pictures everyday. You can put them on your bedroom wall, where you can see them upon waking up and before sleeping. Or you can put them in a notebook or binder and bring them with you so you can look at them whenever you feel like it. You can also scan them and set them as wallpaper for your personal computer.

With effective visualization, how can you not reach your goal? It is just a matter of time before it materializes. And, with very intense, vivid and frequent visualizations, goals can actually materialize at an astonishing speed.

Remember, though, that passion for your goals – especially long-term ones – is essential, especially when you start visualizing them. As visualization takes up a part of your time every day, make sure that you really want what you are visualizing so that you will take time for it regularly.

To summarize all the elements of effective visualization, I give you these words from management thinker and educator Jim Collins:

No matter what. Wherever your mind wanders, it seems to turn up at the same Field of Dreams. It’s the vision you wake up with in the morning, and it’s the last thing you picture before you fall asleep. Everytime you think of it, the idea in your head seems to get more vivid, filled in with more detail: You not only want to win a gold medal at the Olympics, you not only can see yourself standing there on the podium, but you can also feel the goose bumps as your national anthem is played; the tears are in your eyes. (That’s how real a dream can and should be).

Yes, that is how real your dream should be.

Magical Tip #4: Believe

“Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that so it goes on flying anyway.” - Mary Kay Ash

A sorcerer has belief in himself, in the spell he casts and the magic from the universe from where he draws energy. The true sorcerer knows, even before he casts the spell, that it will materialize.

A sorcerer trusts the universe, the power of magic, and his own power.

The same principle applies to you. To make your thoughts materialize, you have to believe – really believe – in these three things: 1) the universe, which overflows in abundance to give you what you want, 2) the power of the mind, and 3) yourself.

1. Believe in the abundance of the universe.

Everything you ask for is yours for the taking if you just believe that the universe can give it to you. Everything you can want – everything anyone can want – the universe can provide.

Maybe you are feeling doubtful upon reading this. Has not the world always suffered from lack, from scarcity? And, on a personal level, maybe you have suffered from bad things or unfortunate circumstances. Or maybe you have been settling for just good enough.

But the truth is, the universe can give more than enough for everyone. The mindset of lack and disbelief in abundance is the poison that prevents you and other people from living in abundance. At one point or another, in one form or another, you may have heard some or all of these limiting beliefs from your family, teachers, elders, and peers:

“Life is difficult.”

“You must work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to get what you want.”

“There is not enough for everyone. You have to compete or take from others to get what you want.”

“Be satisfied. What you’ve already got is good enough.”

“It is selfish to ask for a lot.”

Variation: “It is selfish to ask for more when others are suffering and don’t have much.”

But no matter how much these ideas have been impressed on your mind, you can begin to change your circumstances right now. Begin to believe that the universe is overflowing with abundance.

Here are two exercises to help you start believing in the universe’s abundance:

Exercise # 1

Write down all the good things in your life or things you are thankful for right now. Focus on the general as well as the specific aspects of your life – your family, friendships, school or work, extracurricular activities, etc. It could be something permanent or something in the moment, like an event or an experience. Recall briefly the good feelings you had – or still have – for each item.

Do not stop until you cannot think of anything else. Review your list and realize just how much the universe has already given you even though you may not have consciously believed in its abundance. And how much, much more it can give you.

Exercise # 2

Sit down in a comfortable position, close your eyes and breathe slowly and deeply until you feel you are fully relaxed.

Imagine that you are in a beautiful natural place – like a forest, mountaintop, waterfall, or anything that suits your fancy. Walk around the place and bask in its beauty – breathe in the air, smell the flowers and touch the living creatures there. Feel how all living things there live in harmony – the animals getting more than enough to eat and drink, the plants and trees getting enough sun and water. Repeat this process in as many beautiful places you would like.

Then let the images of nature slowly fade in your mind’s eye. Now, picture yourself walking towards a huge feast. The table is very long, heaped with all kinds of delicious food. All the people, dressed in fine clothes, are eating and dancing to very lively, upbeat music. You look down at yourself and realize that you are also dressed in finery. You join in the festivities and marvel how the food never seems to run out and how all the people are very happy.

You can do variations of this exercise. Use your imagination to create a world where everyone is living fully and abundantly.

You can also make affirmations, especially when you feel your old beliefs surfacing. Below are a few examples. You can also create ones of your own.

“The universe has more than enough for me and everyone.”

“I am living in abundance right here, right now!”

“I was born to live in abundance!”

“Life is getting better and better for me everyday.”

Continue to believe in the universe’s overflowing abundance and see for yourself more and more good things coming into your life.

2. Believe in mind power.

As mentioned in the introduction, you were born with the power to turn your thoughts into reality. This may be difficult to grasp at first, and you may even be tempted to think that such things are only the stuff of fantasy. But this power is very natural, much like how we learn to walk and how birds learn to fly.

Acknowledging this fact will help you believe that what you want will actually be yours. Set a goal, focus passionately on it, visualize and believe it will happen and nothing can go wrong. Belief is essential, as no matter how focused you are and how clear your visualization is, any kind of doubt can seriously prevent your goal from materializing.

Doubt blocks your power and the manifestation of your goals. Worse, if you put your energy into visualizing the opposite of what you want, then it will most likely happen.

Again, in one way or another, in some form or other, you may have heard any of these statements expressing doubt:

“That’s impossible!”

“That has never been done before.”

“Persons A, B & C were only able to [accomplishment]. How can you go beyond that?”

Believing in these statements would only prevent you from living the life you want. If you believe in the power of the mind, nothing is impossible. In fact, it is the people who refused to accept these statements who did the impossible. And some did it not only for themselves but for the world.

Imagine the early humans. The concept of fire or heat must have been impossible at first. They were used to eating raw food, and kept themselves warm through animal furs and other means. But someone discovered fire, to the convenience of all.

Thomas Alva Edison also believed the impossible. He knew that there was a way to make a fully functional light bulb. Each time he failed, he knew he had just found another way of not making a light bulb, and he believed he would find the right way soon enough. It is thanks to him that we now enjoy light at night.

The Wright brothers knew that there was a way for people to travel on air – and they found it, to the convenience of people even a century later.

In fact, the seed of every greatness – an invention, discovery, wealth, success – is mind power.

To help you create a mindset of belief, you can use the following affirmations daily. Or, you can create your own.

“Anything is possible.”

“There is always a way.”

“Everything I want is now materializing.”

These affirmations will generally help you assume a more open, believing attitude. Meanwhile, to ensure that your specific goals will materialize, make specific affirmations after your visualization. You can say something like, “I believe this is now materializing,” and feel the feeling associated with that belief.

3. Believe in yourself.

This is an essential condition for your goals to be realized. Not believing in yourself considerably diminishes the power, or energy, of your goals. At some times in your life, you may have expressed these or other similar apprehensions:

“I can’t do it.”

“I am too young / old to do this.”

“But I’m not good at [skill]!”

“I don’t know anything about this!”

Now, if you find yourself thinking along these lines, recall your belief in the universe and in mind power – that anything is possible through the mind. If you believe this, why should you not believe in yourself? After all, you were born with mind power.

Vincent van Gogh said it well: “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”

Realize that the only limits you have are the limits you set for yourself. Other than that, you are a human being with powerful, unlimited potential.

You may also find the following affirmations useful:

“I have a special, amazing power to make my dreams come true.”

“I can do anything through mind power.”

“I can accomplish anything I want right now.”

“I can easily learn [skill] to get what I want.”

Feeling more powerful now? Yes, anything is indeed possible. But even as you are fired up now with your dreams and the possibilities, read on and find out how you can conquer more obstacles which might stand in the way of your goals.

Magical Tip #5: Accept

“If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.” - Author Unknown

A sorcerer anticipates and fully accepts the outcome of his spell. He accepts it naturally, much like the way we “accept” the air in our bodies when we breathe.

In the same manner, you should also accept the outcome, the realization of your goal – even before it actually happens. Accept it to be true. Claim it as yours already.

Now, you may ask, “Isn’t that supposed to be easy? Isn’t it natural to accept when it’s a good thing that’s coming to you?”

Ideally, it is supposed to be easy and very natural, like the analogy I gave earlier of “accepting” the air we breathe. Unfortunately, this is not always true. Some people actually find it hard to accept good things in life as they are experiencing negative emotions that block the flow of good things to them. When people feel low self-esteem, resentment, fear or guilt, it is difficult for them to receive from the universe.

Some people have been used to living in lack and hardships. This is usually a sign of a poor self-image or a lack of self-esteem wherein they consciously – or unconsciously – feel they do not deserve good things in life.

Worse, some may actually sabotage their own dreams – usually unconsciously. They may already be close to their goal when they suddenly do something that will take them away from it.

Such feelings of unworthiness usually spring from childhood and may come in the form of trauma from a single event or repeated events, at home or at school. The trauma may have a lasting impact on thought patterns, self-image and behavior even in adulthood.

To check if you are capable of accepting the outcome of your goal, ask yourself “Am I willing to receive this fully?” Are you in a light, happy mood whenever you think about your goal, visualize it, and imagine its outcome? Or do you get knots in your stomach, however fleeting? Do you sometimes feel – even briefly – that you don’t deserve the outcome when you visualize it? Do you feel guilt?

If you do find out that a part of you feels you don’t deserve the outcome of your goal, honestly ask yourself why. If this triggers a painful childhood memory, just allow the memory and the feeling to enter you and don’t fight it. Should you feel that you need help sorting out your feelings and memories in order to heal your past, though, seek guidance from a trained counselor you can trust.

As you remember that memory, you can close your eyes and acknowledge it in your mind. Address it and say “You have hurt me before and I have carried you for a long time. But I will leave you now. You no longer have any power over me.” Imagine walking away, feeling lighter and lighter with each step.

Another exercise you can do to heal your past is the “unloading exercise.” Close your eyes and imagine that you are carrying several heavy bags and loads of many kinds. (You can also do this in reality). Assign each bag or load to represent a painful memory in your past. Now put the bags down, one by one, and feel yourself getting lighter and lighter. After you have put all your bags down, walk away.

Now, to replace all the negative feelings associated with these painful memories with positive ones that boost your self-image, make affirmations about your worth every day, ideally upon waking up and before going to bed. Examples are:

“I am a unique, wonderful human being.”

“I am a special person worth loving and listening to.”

“I do not need to please everyone. I love myself and the people who matter love me.”

“I am getting better and better every day.”

“I deserve the best in life.”

“I have a lot to contribute and people acknowledge it.”

“I accept all the good things in life that come to me.”

To give your affirmations more impact, you can also do this in the second and third person – “Jane, you deserve the best in life” or “Jane deserves the best in life.” Phrasing affirmations this way are particularly powerful as the negative words that undermine your self-worth usually come from other people, either directly addressed to you or overheard.

You can reinforce these positive feelings with a self-appreciation exercise:

Close your eyes, take deep breaths until you fully relax then picture a person close to you talking to you and telling everything they like about you. Even if you feel embarrassed, try to call to mind truthfully what this person would say to you. After they are finished, reverse roles. Assume the identity of the other person, and while you are telling yourself what you appreciate, feel the feelings of warmth and appreciation this person close to you has while talking to you. See yourself through their eyes. Notice how you feel.

Even though you may have suffered for years from poor self-worth, rest assured that continuous daily affirmations and regular appreciation exercises can counterbalance all those. And each time you catch yourself thinking badly of yourself, say the opposite (e.g. I am not good enough ? I am more than good enough!). You can also recite one of your daily affirmations.

As you build up your self-image, you are also building up your mind power to make your dreams come true.

Usually related to low self-esteem, fear is another block that can stop your dreams from materializing. This is usually a fear of what will happen when your dreams have materialized. You may be fearing some negative things happening as a result of achieving what you want. Usually what people fear is more responsibilities and obligations (e.g. Having more money means more relatives will keep borrowing money from me) or how people will react to them (e.g. What if my friends become jealous?). You can also have fearful thoughts while on the way to achieving your goals.

Fearful thoughts usually magnify the expected result. The bad news, though, is if you focus on fear, then you will get more of it or what you fear might actually happen. Remember, you create your reality with your thoughts.

So if you find yourself thinking along the lines of the examples given above, face your fears head-on.

When you feel fear, do not resist it. Just allow yourself to feel it. Then ask yourself “Why I am afraid?” You can apply the “laddering” technique here, where you ask one question after the other. So you start with “Why I am afraid?” The answer may be, taking the example from above, “Having more money means more relatives will keep borrowing money from me.” Then ask yourself “Why am I afraid that my relatives will keep borrowing money from me?” The answer to that may be “Because I cannot say no” Then, “Why do I have a hard time saying no?”, the answer to which may be a painful “Because I hate it when I displease other people. I would rather be hurt than hurt others.” Asking questions will help pinpoint the main cause. And once you know what’s causing the fear, you can face it. In this case, the root is connected to low self-esteem, which may be addressed with the earlier exercises.

Aside from the “laddering” exercise, face your fear by asking yourself: “Realistically, just how bad will the result be?” Again, as previously mentioned, when we fear, we tend to make the big bigger and the scary scarier. Maybe it is not actually as bad as you think.

By doing these, you see your fears from a more realistic perspective and their power over you is considerably diminished. Remember to affirm once you have finished putting your fears in perspective so the negative feeling of fear is replaced by positive energy.

Another emotion that can prevent you from accepting the realization of your goals or of good things in general is resentment. As resentment is a negative feeling and is accompanied by negative thoughts, your power to create good things in your life is significantly diminished. It is you, not the person you resent, who suffers. Actor, writer and politician Malachy McCourt summed it up well: “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Search your feelings – is there anyone you bear a grudge against or have not forgiven? Be honest. After you have identified the person or persons against whom you still have ill feelings, you can now start throwing away your resentment in order to fully accept the good things in life.

This is what you can do – write a letter pouring out all your feelings to the person. Do not hold back. Write everything – do not leave anything out. After writing, throw away your letter or tear it up. Close your eyes and imagine the person in front of you. Tell that person: “You have caused me a lot of pain. But I am also causing myself pain by not forgiving you. Now I am letting you go. I forgive you.” Slowly walk away from that person.

A variation of this exercise would be to imagine the person in front of you from the very start with you pouring out all your feelings towards them. After unloading your emotions, take several deep breaths before acknowledging the pain you also inflict on yourself and say you now forgive them.

On the other hand, if you are the one who hurt someone or did someone wrong and you have not settled things with the person, your guilt also gets in the way of your receiving good from the universe. Talk with the person and apologize to them as soon as you can – even if they do not forgive you immediately, at least you can start letting go of your guilt. Believe that you can heal relations with that person.

In case you have lost all possible ways of communicating with the person or if the person has already passed away, you can do this short exercise to ask for forgiveness:

Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and breathe slowly and deeply. Imagine the person standing before you and find the words to make that person feel how sorry you are. Eventually see that person smiling and saying “I forgive you.”

Rid yourself of all negative feelings that weigh you down and fill yourself up with positive ones. With this new disposition, you can fully accept all the good that will come to you.

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“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers…” - Author Unknown

Sorcerers are in close harmony with the universe, particularly nature. In fact, they plan their spell-casting according to nature. For example, some magic is best done at the full moon or during particular seasons or at the alignment of certain planets. Potions require natural ingredients. People practicing magic usually have a close relationship with nature and are sensitive to the universe, as the universe is their main source of power. Some would even invoke the elements of nature in their incantation to make their spell even more powerful.

Like the sorcerers, you can also draw strength from the universe. Recognize that you are surrounded by its vast, immeasurable power. All you need to do is align yourself with the universe. To do this, you have to be more attentive to its messages. What kind of messages, you ask? These are often the things we take for granted, like coincidences or a flash of insight. Coincidences are a perfect example of a message from the universe. They usually have a message, if we would probe further. Coincidences are one way the universe gives us what we want. For example, you may be visualizing driving your dream car. A few days later, you run into an acquaintance you have not seen for years. You start talking and later you will not be able to exactly recall how it happened but you find out that he knows someone who is selling your dream car at a discounted price. You go that person and sure enough, it looks exactly like your dream car. It is your dream car.

What do you think would have happened if you just said hi to your acquaintance and went on your way? You would have missed that perfect “coincidence.” So, stay alert for these things.

In truth, there are no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. If you declare your intention of wanting something, the universe will bring people, circumstances and events your way to make it happen so long as you are specific, accepting and faithful that it will materialize.

Watch out for the following in particular:

1. Something that suddenly pops into your mind. Are there instances where a person, a place or anything else suddenly – and persistently – crosses your mind? Talk to that person. Go to that place. It might just be the key to your dreams.

2. Something that suddenly jumps out to you. You are walking in a bookstore or library and suddenly a book catches your attention. You do not know why – it just jumped out from the background from all the other hundreds of books there.

Read it. There is most likely a message there for you.

3. Sudden urges. You are on your way home and you have a sudden, unexplainable urge to take a different route. Take that route. You will probably find some surprises along the way.

Of course, these sudden urges should not be confused with impulses, especially buying impulses, like the urge of wanting to buy that dress or that gadget. You know why you want these things. Sudden urges from the universe do not usually have a logical reason behind them.

4. Frequent or sudden contact with certain people. Have you ever been in a seminar or any gathering where you find yourself making unintentional eye contact with a person there three times or more?

Or have you experienced seeing one person three times in one day in very different places?

Or, like the example given above, have you met a friend or someone you know whom you have not seen in a long time?

Talk to these people. Again, they may just bring you closer to your dream.

An exception, though, would be if you are attracted to the person and think of them regularly or constantly. Naturally, the universe will find ways for you to see that person. So your meeting is a result of your thinking and visualization, and not a bridge for what you want to materialize.

5. Dreams. Have you ever had a very vivid, recurring dream? Though interpreting dreams can be tricky and may require the analysis of an expert, you can make an attempt at analyzing your dream by asking yourself the following questions:

“How do I feel about this?”

“How would this compare in general to my life right now?

“Is this parallel to any event happening to me right now or one that will happen?”

Your sleeping dreams may not only show you the way to your waking dreams but may also be able to show you if you still have any blocks in your subconscious, such as doubt, fear or low self-esteem.

Generally, you are trying to develop your intuition here. Over time, it will be easier for you to watch out for any messages from the universe.

Be careful, though, that you do not mistake intuition for an impulse. While intuition usually springs from calm, impulse springs from a burst of desire, fear or desperation. To distinguish intuition from impulse, intuition consultant and trainer Nancy Rosanoff advises following what she states as the Universal Law of Three. She said that if a thought comes back to her three times, she does it. Intuitive thoughts and feelings are “insistent and persistent.”

So you do not have to act immediately, especially in situations where something is at stake for you. In some cases, though, you have to act immediately, as with the example given earlier – when you suddenly meet an acquaintance. You have nothing to lose in that situation so go ahead and act. It is big decisions like making an investment or choosing a partner that requires the application of the Universal Law of Three.

Continue to be alert for messages from the universe. Eventually, it will become second nature to you.

Magical Tip #7: Seek Support

“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.” - Mark Twain

Combined power is stronger power multiplied – sometimes tenfold. You can see this in the victory of sorcerers or other magical beings battling a common enemy.

Also, when a sorcerer seeks the guidance of a more powerful sorcerer, the sorcerer who asked increases his knowledge and power.

Likewise, the support of other people can dramatically increase your mind power and speed up the realization of your goals. Surround yourself with people who are supportive of you and who generally have a positive outlook in life. Stay away from or minimize contact with people who criticize, ridicule your dreams or do not believe in them. Avoid spending too much time with people who have a negative disposition – their blaming, whining and complaining can bring down the level of your mind power and optimism. However, when you feel you already have enough strong, positive energy to encourage and energize these people, then lift them up!

Make a mental note of the people you spend time with everyday. After that, take note of those you regularly spend time with in a week. Are these people supportive of you and do they have a positive attitude? Or are they generally negative, pulling your energy level down and making you feel bad after talking to them?

If they are positive and supportive, congratulations! The way to your goals has just been made easier. If they are not, if you want to keep a positive disposition, then you may have to consider spending less time with them. If the people are loved ones, possibly living under the same roof as you, then refrain from sharing your dreams and goals with them. If they start complaining, try to cheer them up or make them laugh (and try to make them see the humor in the situation, if you can!) to bring their energy levels up before they can bring down yours.

Keep spending time regularly with positive people. Expect that you will meet positive, successful people and visualize talking to them. Soon, you will have more and more positive people around you.

As long as you have these kinds of people around you, you can seek support from them in various ways. Here are some ways you can ask for support:

1. Ask a friend or someone close to you. Before making a big decision or doing something you are nervous about, like presenting a report to big clients, you can ask for encouragement, advice, or just good luck from a friend or someone close to you. Share your dreams and goals with people you know who will support you and not laugh at them. Just sharing while they listen will already fill you with energy, as listening is perhaps the simplest way to give support.

Whenever you are down, talk to a person who you know will listen and lift you up. Do not talk to someone who may sympathize with you but will complain about your situation for you. Your conversation may only let you dwell on the unpleasant situation, or worse, let you wallow in self-pity.

To get support on a regular basis, you can ask someone to be your “dream partner.” Share your dreams with each other and update each other on a regular basis on the progress of making your dreams come true. Also encourage each other on a regular basis, and most especially when the other is doubting and losing sight of their dreams.

2. Join or form a “dream group.” Much like the concept of the dream partner, a dream group helps its members achieve their goals. Aside from the usual update on the progress of the goal every meeting, you can also do group affirmations. For example, a member can stand up in front of the other members and say, “I am now happily earning a [amount] salary.” The group can reply “Yes, you are now earning a [amount] salary!”

You can agree to read a motivational book or article and discuss it at the next meeting to further inspire and motivate one another in achieving your goals. You can also invite a successful, happy person to one of your meetings and let them share their story.

With a dream group, the possibilities are endless. You can think up activities that not only support one another but also contribute to your personal growth.

3. Ask for a mentor. If you know people who are happy and successful, especially someone with great mind power, then by all means, talk to them! Ask for tips. Ask them to share their secret to success. They will be more than happy to tell you.

If you would like your conversations to be on a regular basis, you can also ask that person to mentor you. Mentors are especially helpful as they can give you valuable insights for decision-making or during times of trouble. Advice from your mentor can save you time and effort and also save you from heartache.

Aside from seeking support from people, you can also support yourself by reading self-help and motivational books regularly and attending success seminars, especially if they have a focus on mind power. All the knowledge and positive energy you get from these will help you reach your goal.

To get further inspiration, you can create your own “success notebook.” Write down your favorite quotes on success and positive thinking. Compile and paste articles related to success, especially articles about people who made it. You can also include poems and other literary works or anything related to success that strikes your fancy. Update your success notebook from time to time and look at it regularly, especially when you are feeling down.

If for example you still encounter negative people who bring your energy level down, recite affirmations that will help raise your energy again (e.g. All things good are coming to me right here, right now). Or, you can contact your dream partner or someone close to you for encouragement or to send you positive energy.

Keep in mind that you are not alone and that there are many people willing to help you and support you. Learn to seek support from the right people and observe just how much faster your goals are realized!

Magical Tip #8: Stay Positive

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.” – William James

As magic requires a considerable amount of energy, it should spring from a high-energy source. As mentioned previously, sorcerers need to be in a proper state of mind and have sufficient energy or power to perform effective spells.

Likewise, you should be in a high-energy state for your mind power to work best. However, this is not for a one-time spell or a one-time effort only. As said before, the more you think about what you want, the more likely and the faster you are going to get it. Ideally, you have to visualize every day. And you have to be in the proper state of mind to do it.

So, how do you get to be in the proper state of mind every day? By thinking, feeling and acting positive!

Positive energy = power. So the more positive you are, the more powerful your thoughts are!

So how do you keep the positive fire burning, day in, day out? Here are some tips:

1. Find something to be grateful for everyday. Every morning, when you wake up, be thankful for another day. Thank the universe for another opportunity to enjoy life, for a chance to achieve the things you want.

Remember the earlier exercise of making a list of the things you are grateful for? You can review your list every morning upon waking and every night before going to bed. Or, every day you can point to an item there at random and express your thanks for it.

During the day, you can also look for something to be grateful for, however small or big it is. It could be a call from a friend, a compliment from an officemate, a hug from a loved one and so on.

2. Refresh yourself in your sanctuary. Close your eyes, breathe deeply and relax. Picture your ideal place, a beautiful place where you feel safe, calm and relaxed. See the sights, hear the sounds, feel the feelings of actually being there.

It can be by the beach, with sparkling blue waves and pristine white powdery sand, with a fresh breeze blowing through your hair and the waves crashing against your feet. Or it can be in a meadow full of flowers bursting abloom in different colors, with brilliant butterflies and dragonflies flying from flower to flower.

Whatever that place is, it should be a place of rest for you. Stay in that place for a while until you feel light and energized. Visit that place regularly, especially when you feel stressed.

3. Affirm daily. The affirmation may not be specifically related to your goal, but a declaration of the good things in life in general like “Life is beautiful” or “Everyday is wonderful and full of surprises.” You can also boost your mind power and state of mind by affirming: “I can get everything I want if I ask” or “I am building the life I want.”

4. Look for the positive in every situation. Good or bad, know that there is always something good – and maybe even a golden opportunity – in every situation. Again, remember that there are no coincidences. Remember that everything happens for a good reason. So when your plans are cancelled or have to be changed at the last minute, don’t fret. There might be something else meant for you to do that day. Pay attention to the signs the universe will give you.

Should you have a hard time finding anything good in a bad situation, let go of the negative feelings you have as soon as you can. Remember that negative creates more negative, so do not dwell on it. Instead, focus all your energy on the positive.

5. Read motivational articles or books daily. Make this a habit, even if only for a few minutes everyday. The advice in these articles and books will not only give you ideas on how to reach your goal, it will also put you in a positive state of mind. And reading them every day will give you that positive feeling every day too.

However, if positive media can have a powerful impact, negative media can also do the same. This is particularly damaging if it lingers in your mind even after you have been exposed to it. And even if it does not, it can reach your subconscious. So if you keep watching a soap opera depicting poverty, for example, how do you think it will affect your mind power? Or your belief in the abundance of the universe?

So choose the shows you watch, the books and magazines you read, the websites you visit and any other media, more carefully. In case you still absorb a negative message – for example, you read about an accident in the newspaper – make sure it is not the first thing you see in the morning or the last thing you see at night. What begins and what ends your day should always be positive.

Music is also very powerful, arguably more so than words. Though you may like sentimental music, be sure that you also include happy, lively tunes for your ears regularly.

6. Lift others up. If you give energy, you get more energy. (Giving is discussed in detail in the next magical tip). Pay someone a compliment, listen to a friend in need, comfort a loved one, or simply smile.

Do you know that you can bless another person? Yes, not only when you say “Bless you” to a person when they sneeze. When you wish another person well, especially if you are saying it to that person directly, you are sending them positive energy.

Making others feel good can automatically make you feel good.

These tips may be hard to apply at first, but once you get used to doing them for some time, you will be surprised at how they will eventually become second nature to you. Aim to be positive daily for 21 days, and it will be easier for you afterwards. Doing something 21 times makes it a habit.

And once being positive is second nature to you, so will the manifestation of your dreams.

Magical Tip #9: Give

“In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.” - Flora Edwards

Some sorcerers and people practicing magic give offerings to nature. This is their way of thanking the universe, or a way of requesting support.

Remember that the universe is power, energy. When you give, you send out energy and the empty space in you where the energy had been will be replaced by the same – or even greater – energy. This space keeps you open for receiving from the universe. The nature of energy – and consequently, power from energy – is to flow. So letting energy flow from you will leave space for energy to flow into you. But if you refuse to give and hoard all the good things that come your way, the energy will get stuck in you and there will be no room for you to receive more!

So, whenever something good comes to your life, give back to the universe, particularly to other people – to loved ones, to other people you know, to strangers…. It does not have to be material things but it can be appreciation or support or simply your time.

Giving also keeps you in a positive frame of mind and can give you a sudden burst of energy – who does not feel good after giving willingly? This positive state will enable more good things to come to you. Again, remember that positive thoughts and feelings are good, so through your mind power, you will experience more good.

Here are some ways you can give:

1. Give appreciation. Find a way to thank and show your appreciation to the people you encounter everyday – your family, friends, co-workers and even strangers. Acknowledge the good they give or do for you. Sometimes just a simple but sincere “thank you” is enough, especially to the security guard opening doors for you or the salesperson standing on their feet all day. Make it a point to thank and show appreciation to every person who does something for you. You might just be the only person to thank them during that whole day. Not only will you give them a lift, you will get one as well.

Even when there is no occasion, you can show your appreciation to your family and friends by writing them a note or giving them a small gift. For your family, especially, you can show more affection through your words – or simply give more hugs than usual! Be creative! Find more ways to show them how much you appreciate them.

2. Give your time. Time is arguably the most valuable commodity and some say time is money. To some, giving time is even more difficult than giving money. So to give someone your time freely, without expecting anything in return, is a generous gift.

Spend more time with your family and friends. If you are a parent, take more time to listen to your child. Take more time to listen to your friends. Avoid looking unapproachable and being in a hurry all the time. Give ample time to the people you love.

Give time even to strangers. If your work is involved in sales or client servicing, take time answering questions from customers and clients until they are satisfied. Take time building relationships with them and showing them your appreciation.

Volunteer for a cause or join an organization that you feel would let you contribute to your community, to your country, or to the world at large. Make it a point to be active by committing regular hours to that cause or organization.

3. Give money. Or more appropriately – tithe your income. Each time you earn from your job or business, automatically set aside a portion for tithing – to your church, spiritual organization, and/or charity.

Should you be experiencing financial difficulties, keep tithing. Your trust in your mind power and the power of the universe will provide for your needs. There are inspiring stories of people who tithe even while under financial hardships and miraculously find themselves receiving money or help from unexpected sources that allow them to pull through.

4. Give to yourself. Yes, giving to yourself is still an outward flow of energy and will thus enable energy to flow back into you. While you are generously giving to others, don’t deprive yourself. Treat yourself from time to time. Buy an item you like, get a massage, or eat in your favorite restaurant. If you are used to buying items on sale or looking for bargains, buy something at a premium price for a change. Doing this shows that you are open to receiving good and better things. It is also a manifestation of your belief that the universe will give you more even while you spend a little more.

Give more to yourself and to others and see how more good things come to you.

Hold On To Your Thoughts, But Not Too Tightly

“Be infinitely flexible and constantly amazed.” – Jason Kravitz

There is a story of a boy who took care of pigeons. The first time he took care of a pigeon, he cared about it so much and was afraid that it would escape so he always kept it in a cage. When it was not in its cage, the boy was holding it and stroking its feathers. Though the pigeon was properly fed and looked after by the boy, it died. Aggrieved, the boy gave much freedom to his second pigeon, barely touching it and always allowing it to fly. The pigeon escaped. Aggrieved again and wondering what he did wrong with his first two pigeons, it took some time before he tried again. The boy kept this pigeon in a cage at first, feeding it regularly and stroking it from time to time. After some time, the boy allowed the pigeon to fly. And day after day, as the pigeon flew, it always came back to the boy. The boy was very happy that he finally found the right way of caring for pigeons.

The same principle applies to your thoughts. Hold them close to you, but not so tightly that they are “suffocated” and are never realized. Give them enough freedom to “fly” out to the universe. Holding on to your thoughts and dreams too tightly might be a sign of doubt or fear on your part. As mentioned in one of the magical tips, you have to believe – really believe – that your thoughts will materialize. Having this attitude will help you take a relaxed attitude towards your dreams – after all, you know they will come true!

Another reason why you should not be too fixated on your thoughts is that there might be something better the universe can give you. As mentioned in one of the magical tips, the universe has its own power. And it can actually give you something even better than what you originally asked for. So, when phrasing affirmations, always give room for something better (e.g. I am now happily earning a [amount] salary or even higher.). Be open to receiving more than what you asked for.

Consciousness teacher and writer Shakti Gawain, in her book “Creative Visualization,” aptly describes the feeling of letting go and yet taking control at the same time:

Let us imagine that life is a river. Most people are clinging to the bank, afraid to let go and risk being carried along by the current of the river. At a certain point, each person must be willing to simply let go, and trust the river to carry him or her along safely. At this point he learns to “go with the flow” and it feels wonderful.

Once he has gotten used to being in the flow of the river, he can begin to look ahead and guide his own course onward, deciding where the course looks best, steering his way around boulders and snags, and choosing which of the many channels and branches of the river he prefers to follow, all the while still “going with the flow.”

So hold on to your goals but not too tightly. Keep your desired outcome very clear in your mind but be open to a different one. The universe may just give you a very pleasant surprise.

Go For It!

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” - Dr. Seuss

So now that you know what you should do, what are you waiting for? Go use that mind power you are now aware of and make your dreams come true! Apply the magical tips you learned!

If you are not that confident yet or if you would like to put the magical tips here to the test first, you can start small. For example, you may visualize seeing and talking with a particular person. Or eating a particular food. Or hailing a cab, especially in areas with many people waiting for one. Put the magic to the test – and marvel at the results.

For as long as you are clear and specific with an image in your mind and with all the faith in your heart, you will get what you asked for.

And in case you do not get it the first time you asked, do not be discouraged. Try and try again! Mind power can be compared with a special skill like playing an instrument or taking up a course in college. You learn it. And you need to practice it as often as you can to really get it.

In case what you want does not materialize, you can ask yourself, based on the earlier magical tips, what exactly is stopping you from achieving your goal. Review your thoughts and feelings at the time you set your goal and visualized it. Did you have any doubts, even the slightest, that it will happen? Did you fear that you were not going to get it? Or even – are you afraid of possible negative consequences once you achieve your goal? Concentrate and try to get to the root.

Be sensitive to your feelings. If you feel anything negative after setting a goal, ask yourself why. If you identify the reason, you can face it head-on. If it is just doubt, guilt or any of the blocks mentioned previously, just review your affirmations and do the exercises in the magical tips.

To help you master your mind power, keep a notebook where you write each time you succeed in applying it. No matter how big or small, record each success you have in your notebook. It will give you assurance that indeed your mind power does work especially when you feel low in energy or are suddenly doubtful.

And remember, the universe is a very huge, very potent and very giving source of power. Trust that even the smallest effort on your part can generate massive results because you are riding on the power of the universe.

A Blessing

You are special, a masterpiece born with a power beyond your imagination. Whatever you think of yourself, you are much, much more than that.

You have the power to do what you want. To be anything. To have your heart’s deepest desires.

I believe in you. I believe in your mind power. I believe in the universe that will give you everything.

Whatever it is you ask for, you will have it. So long as it in tune with what and who you are to be and nothing can stand in the way of that reality.

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Are We Alone?