Sign Up for
Free Buzz
NEWSLETTER

A Peek Inside

 

Chapter 1

How We Really Are

Every human, from the start, is a “living potential.”  Depending on the nature of a person’s choices in relation to what is right, true, and loving, that person will manifest positive or negative behavior.  The nature and quality of our behavior are the result of the kinds of intentions we are holding and the choices we are freely making.  The fact that we can always change our intentions and choices, means that we can change our behavior and life experiences any time we are sincerely willing to do so.  Most of us do not want to change our negative ways, so we choose to believe many lies about how we are and why we behave as we do. 

Medical science has always refused to see or recognize that the essential cause of human behavior is a person’s “intention and choice.” 

For most of the 1900s, medical experts were divided into two behavior camps.  One group believed “nature” caused human behavior, the other believed “nurture” produced behavior.  They considered no other options.  The debate among philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, researchers, and educators heated up in universities and research centers.  Scientific evidence began to show that neither side was correct. 

In the early 1970s, the “experts” struck a compromise.  We began hearing that human behavior resulted from a “complex combination of biological and environmental factors.”  This new explanation was an attempt to make two wrongs a “right.”  However, two wrongs have never made a right and never will.  Combining aspects of nature and nurture and claiming that the combination is a “newly realized cause of behavior” is ludicrous.  The fact that this new assumption lacked scientific proof did not seem to matter.

Medical professionals hold false ideas because (consciously or subconsciously) they are trying to cover-up the truth about the cause of human behavior.  Now, many are saying that genes are at least “partially influential.”  Some go further and insist that genes are the “sole cause of behavior.”  If genes were the cause of human behavior, identical twins, who have identical genes and chromosomes, would always behave the same, yet, they never behave the same. 

As for other biological factors such as “brain chemical imbalances” being the cause of mental and emotional disorders, there is no rational or scientific basis for this assumption.  Interestingly, there is no medical test to determine a brain chemical imbalance.  Believing brain chemical imbalances are at cause is similar to a religious belief, a hoax, or invention.  The idea only benefits the medical and pharmaceutical industries and others with vested interests in controlling and deceiving.

If “factors in the environment” were the cause of human behavior, children reared in the same family, with the same parents and siblings, growing up in the same neighborhood, attending the same schools and religious centers, exposed to many of the same friends, teachers, and clerics, and living in the same social-economic environment should behave the same.  They never do.  Getting our true nature right is extremely important.  It is necessary if we are to ever correctly understand our behavior, our dysfunctions, and ourselves. 

Essentially, human beings are “choice machines.”  From conception, every person possesses natural innate abilities to be aware, to form intentions, and to choose freely.  These three key capabilities make us fully responsible for our every intention, thought, feeling, action, and reaction. 

Our innate psychological abilities have several functions.  They enable us to discover and know right from wrong.  They make it possible to be aware of physical realities in our environment.  They make it possible to be aware of psychological realities about others and ourselves.  However, these abilities are a two-edge sword.  They make it possible to freely choose and function in right, loving, honest, lovingly responsible, and healing ways.  Alternatively, when we choose to be selfish, they help us to behave in wrong, dishonest, irresponsible, negative, and destructive ways. 

A human is comprised of two interrelated bodies: one is physical, the other psychic-energetic.  Together, they form an interconnected, inseparable, unified, interactive whole that we refer to as “I.” 

A chain of command relationship exists between our most important human components.  That order does not seem to be reversible.  The “I,” our essential self, rules over and orchestrates all of the voluntary aspects of the self: the will, mind, emotions, and physical body. 

The will is the origin of a person’s intentions and choices.  With our personal will, we create and process our intentions and choices that direct and orchestrate our physical and psychological activities.  These are always under our subconscious direction.

All of our conscious and subconscious mental, emotional, and physical actions originate with our subconscious intentions and acts of free will.  The concept of the human will as a basic part of our humanity has gone out of vogue and disappeared in the “responsibility-free” times in which we live.  The fact that people constantly make choices freely no longer seems to matter.

Intentions are the most important and most influential factors in our personal mind.  We use intentions to create actions. 

Intentions and choices are “driving forces” behind thoughts, attitudes, urges, drives, feelings, actions, and reactions.  Intentions and choices reflect how a person is choosing to be, not what he or she is essentially.  At bottom, every human being, from conception, is “pure potential.”  We are living expressions of our intentions and choices.  We freely choose them.  They precede and dictate all of our actions. 

Everything we do, we first intend to do, then, we choose to do it.  This is an unalterable truth about each person.  It is a truth often overlooked and denied.  This is especially true when we reject taking full responsibility for our selfish choices and the negative circumstances we created with them.  Our intentions determine whether the nature of our choices and actions will be loving or selfish, positive or negative, right or wrong, honest or deceptive, nurturing or hurtful, responsible or irresponsible. 

The nature of our intentions affects the quality of our moment-to-moment life experience.  Selfish intentions produce negative behavior that results in painful and destructive experience.  Right intentions produce positive behavior that results in nurturing and loving experience.  However, it should be pointed out that having right intentions and making right choices in a selfish environment could be dangerous given the fact that extremely selfish people tend to negatively react to right and loving behavior.

Acting rightly in a selfish society requires that we pay “prices.”  To change and live rightly, we must be willing to pay whatever price comes with making a right choice.  Right choices, in selfish environments, are not encouraged and sometimes come with painful consequences.

When we enact intentions, we set our life course and they create our probable future.  The stronger we invest in an intention, the more committed we will be in aiming for, and fulfilling, its objective.  Without a right intention, there can be no right action.  Without a right intention and consistent right action, we become self-centered, controlling, arrogant, dishonest, reactive, and hurtful to others, as well as ourselves.

The more we choose to deny and reject the responsibility we have for our intentions, choices, and circumstances, the more we will act subconsciously.  We will enact our most irresponsible and destructive intentions and choices with little or no conscious awareness of what we are doing or why we are doing it. 

In addition, the nature of our intentions and choices, largely, determines the condition of our physical body.  Many people subconsciously harbor self-destructive intentions.  They eat poorly, smoke cigarettes, abuse substances, refuse to exercise; generally they willfully refuse to take care of themselves.  Others selfishly control and play psychic-energetic games with their minds using psychic energies to block certain memories from conscious awareness.  When they do this over a long period, it can lead to brain tissue deterioration.  Excessive subconscious control makes one mentally opinionated, judgmental, and dogmatic.  Excessively controlling people lack curiosity and tend to see only their own subjective ideas.  All of these positions cause pain to self and others.

When we choose to be selfish, we become complicated.  As a way of selfishly controlling, we act and react from two different levels of awareness, intention, choice, thought, feeling, action, and reaction, that is, conscious and subconscious.  We are able to do this simultaneously, often, in opposite and contradictory ways.  On top (consciously) we can be acting one-way, while underneath (subconsciously) be acting a very different way.  Since the subconscious rules over the conscious, how we are choosing to be subconsciously will be how we are in truth. 

When we energize a particular subconscious negative intention, we set into motion other key associated subconscious psychological elements.  These are stored memories related to the particular intention and past experiences.  The choice may energize a negative agreement, a specific behavior pattern-idea that activates a behavior pattern or an entire network of behavior patterns, a certain belief system, or a negative attitude.  In addition, energizing a behavior pattern usually triggers associated emotions or feelings such as guilt, anger, fear, jealousy, or some other selfish and negative sensation. 

Our subconscious intentions, ultimately, override our conscious intentions.  This conscious-subconscious dynamic plays out constantly in daily life.  In spite of extraordinary conscious efforts at striving to be “successful” at a conscious objective, a person may find that he or she keeps failing or that stated goals are always “just out of reach.”

The good news is we can always choose to change.  We can always decide not to enact selfish intentions.  That possibility is our hope and salvation.

No set of selfish parents view their children equally.  In addition, no selfish child views his or her parents equally.  A major reason for this is the affects of hidden psychological factors called “basic negative agreements.”  They are selfish deals.  The most influential and destructive negative agreements are subconscious and parent-related.  We make them very early in life, actually, while we are fetuses.  They bind children to their parents in unloving ways usually for a lifetime. 

Selfish babies, inside the womb, display either a “basically angry” or “basically fearful” personality.  For selfish reasons, all of us enter into a basic negative agreement with one particular parent.  It might be a mother or father, but it is always the parent who is of the same basically angry or basically fearful personality as we are. 

The similar disposition creates an energetic attraction.  The parent a child is in basic negative agreement with becomes the child’s “favored-parent.”  The child will energetically support, align with, be most loyal to, and agree to be, as that parent wants the child to be.  Note: if a baby had truly loving parents, they would not permit or encourage negative agreements.

The basic child-to-parent negative agreement leads to a child agreeing to subconsciously take-on or “download” his or her favored-parent’s major selfish behavioral pattern-ideas.  When a child subconsciously enacts those behavior pattern-ideas, he or she will act and react “like” that parent.  The behavioral similarity between children and their parents is “psychological and selfish,” not natural or genetic.

Such agreements always substantially affect personality and behavior in negative, destructive, and unloving ways.  Every selfish person, to one extent or another, is honoring and enacting parent-related negative agreements.  Unless a person chooses to stop honoring his or her parent-related negative agreements, that person will live, act, and react in robot-like ways until the end of life.

Our abilities to be aware and choose freely make us essentially equals to each other.  We cannot control other people unless they “consent” to being controlled.  Consent is always tentative as shown by the frequency of resignations, divorces, and revolutions.  It is also not possible for us to control the natural environment of our planet.  These facts of life drive us to look inward for ways to control.

Apparently, the only things we can reliably and consistently control are the “ideas” we choose to think, hold, and enact in our minds.  We all know this, and that is why ideas have become the primary “instruments of our selfish control.”  We use ideas to program ourselves to act and react in automatic, repetitive, robot-like (unloving), and selfishly controlled ways.  Our ideas are part of complex subconscious software systems of selfish behavior patterns and pattern networks.  Subconscious behavior pattern-ideas are also “feeling structures” that we use to create and sustain selfishly controlled negative feelings.

“Memory” is an important part of the human mind.  Memory is stored data in the form of psychological energy.  All of a person’s intentions, negative agreements, selfish behavior patterns, and pattern-ideas are stored as memory.  Images, impressions, responses, judgments, beliefs, and intentions that relate to actual past experiences are also stored as memory.  These types of memories were subconsciously recorded and stored in a “natural” way—automatically, involuntarily, and starting from the moment of conception. 

Our “self-edited” versions of actual experiences are also stored as memory.  These self-created fabrications are our personal lies, distortions, and illusions.  When a truth about a past experience is distressing, disturbing, or unflattering, we can, and often do, make up “personal truths” that we subconsciously store and recall when the fabrication is more convenient than the actual truth.

We selfishly control and subconsciously use (abuse) negative agreements, selfish behavior patterns, and pattern-ideas to produce a wide range of negative thoughts, attitudes, images, imaginings, feelings, actions, and reactions.  We use the ideas we choose to hold in our minds to create various negative feelings.  Under every negative feeling is a negative idea.  By choosing not to enact a negative idea, and by choosing to act rightly, we can reduce our experience of emotional pain. 

Memory is stored throughout the cells of physical body and brain.  It is impressed on a “sheath” that interpenetrates our physical body.  This sheath is our “psychic-energetic body.”  What has been previously impressed and recorded as memory does not appear to be erasable or changeable by acts of intention or choice.  All recorded memory data is permanently impressed but remains “dormant” until a conscious or subconscious choice is made to energize it.  The only way to avoid experiencing a stored psychological element is to refuse to energize it, or refuse to enact it once we do energize it. 

Our physical brains and nervous systems are vital parts of our physical body and humanity.  They are intimately associated with what we think, feel, and do.  Our brains and nervous systems could be compared to “computer hardware.”  They are “processors” that we use to process the activity of our will, intentions, memories, attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions. 

The human mind is not a “feature” of the physical brain.  A person is not his or her physical brain.  A human has a brain.  The brain is an organ that performs vital functions, just as the heart, liver, and kidneys perform vital functions. 

Your brain makes you do it!  This has become a popular irresponsible statement, usually heard in regards to a dysfunction.  It is being echoed by legions of people in the medical establishment, pharmaceutical industry, government agencies, and the many sympathetic groups that have joined together to form a formidable political force.  This powerful force functions mainly in the areas of child, teen, and adult dysfunctions.  Each special interest group has an economic and self-serving stake in believing and promoting lies about human behavior and the cause of dysfunctions. 

The idea that the physical brain causes behavior leaves dysfunctional people (any person) with no accountability or personal responsibility for what they freely intend, choose, think, feel, and do.  That idea also cleverly lets abusive parents off the hook for their abused children’s selfish reactions.  Even more, it leads to the dubious and counterproductive practice of administering strong psychiatric drugs for behavioral dysfunctions that have no biological or chemical cause. 

Psychiatric drugs act to dull the memory and feeling centers of disturbed people’s brains.  The drugs calm them down but do so by cutting them off from conscious recall of important negative memories and related negative feelings.  Psychiatric drugs dull and block the very memories and feelings that are vital pieces to the puzzle of why a disturbed person is behaving in dysfunctional ways.  Psychiatric drugs, and those who make and administer them, help to cover-up the true cause of a disturbed person’s symptoms and behavior.  The drugs actually inhibit healing.  

Actions and reactions are reflections of the quality of a person’s intentions and choices.  A person uses his or her will, mind, physical brain, and nervous system to express conscious and subconscious intentions and to act-out in the physical world choices, desires, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions.  A person also uses these physical and psychological mechanisms for internal subjective purposes and activities. 

We use our mind, physical brain, and nervous system to think, analyze, remember, learn, and problem-solve.  Depending on the nature of our intentions, these activities will be positive or negative.  The minds that were employed in the design and production of “cluster bombs” or “depleted uranium weapons” would fall into the latter group.

When in a selfish mode, the basic intention behind our behavior is to selfishly control by using and enacting selfish ideas.  A more fundamental and universally selfish intention is the intention to “destroy.”  This intention colors everything about our selfish way of life.  Every selfish person shares it, to varying degrees.  Essentially, selfishness is about “destroying good.”  In the extreme, selfishness is “evilness.”  When we willfully and defiantly enact controlled selfish intentions and ideas, the resulting experience is negative, painful, and destructive.  That fact should be obvious to anyone who observes conditions in the world. 

A friend once asked if I believed in “absolutes.”  This author thought for a moment and replied that I tended not to indulge in them because absolutes usually are ideas about which we usually refuse to be wrong, or rationally and objectively explore, or let go.  Then, I realized that I did know of two absolutes that I believed were always true. 

 

1.  Selfish choices result in negativity and pain.
 

2.  Truly right choices create positive inner experience that is nurturing and healing for the person and for everyone touched by the right choice.

Choices to be selfish, invariably, lead us to become deceptive.  The more selfish and controlling we choose to be, the dishonest and deceptive we will be.

To get to the truth about our selfishness and control one must go deep.  The average selfish person makes most of his or her most selfish, controlling, and destructive choices subconsciously.  We do this by psychologically ‘splitting’ ourselves in an attempt to hide self-serving and self-seeking negative intentions and personal negative truths from others, and, most importantly, from our conscious selves. 

We are constantly enacting subconscious intentions.  The conscious thoughts, feelings, and urges that we experience do not just randomly float in and out of conscious awareness.  It may seem that way, but the truth is we are subconsciously choosing every thought we think before we energize or think it.  In addition, we subconsciously energize and use thoughts and selfish behavior pattern-ideas to create and sustain controlled negative feeling states. 

We deliberately and subconsciously energize and activate every subconscious memory that we consciously recall.  No psychological experience occurs within us that we are not fully responsible for creating, orchestrating, enacting, and experiencing.  This fact makes us fully responsible for every thought we think, every feeling we experience, every action we take, and every reaction we have.

It cannot be stressed enough that the subconscious dimension of every selfish person is more basic, more negative, truer, and it is used to rule over the conscious.  If a person does not want to change in positive ways on the level of his or her subconscious, that negative intention will keep negating conscious efforts to change a person’s destructive ways.

Truth is vital to a healthy and secure life experience.  Truth is vital to our experience of rightness, love, and reality.  Our ability to perceive truth is natural and innate.  We are truth-seeing beings from the time we were inside the womb. 

Every person possesses natural nonphysical perceptual abilities that are intuitive counterparts to our physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.  All of our perceptual abilities could be (should be) used with each other in uncontrolled ways.  They can help us decide whether what we are thinking, believing, sensing, feeling, and doing is actually loving, true, right, and lovingly responsible—provided, we are not selfishly controlling our perceptual experience.

All of our experiences hinge the intentions we freely form and the choices we freely make.  These freedoms appear to be absolute in the sense that no one can take a person’s free will away from him or her.  Without the person’s prior consent, no external pressure or force can make a person choose other than he or she might otherwise choose.  When we are in grossly reactive and self-destructive modes, even severe and degrading levels of pain are “prices” that many are willing to pay to stay in control of their choices. 

On the other hand, choices to stand up for what is true and right have cost many people their lives.  However, they were willing to pay a different price and experienced a different kind of pain that brave individuals have always been willing to pay.

Our visible, conscious choices and actions are not the only choices and actions that affect us or impact on those around us.  The unseen psychic energies of our thoughts and feelings are real; others not only perceive our thoughts and feelings, they also feel and react to them.  Modern medical imaging equipment can take pictures of psychological energies and brain activity but cannot interpret or understand them.  Perhaps, that might be possible in the future.

Subconscious and conscious psychological energies can, and do, affect our physical bodies and they can alter our chemical, electrical, and structural states.  This is especially true of harsh and persistent negative thoughts and emotions such as the energy of intense anger, fear, or hatred. 

All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, subconsciously, selfishly, and irresponsibly use psychic energies to control and block neurological-energetic pathways in our physical brains.  By doing so, we control what we are and are not able to consciously recall.  We do this memory blocking mostly to keep consciously distant from undesirable, threatening, or unflattering memories of past choices and experiences.  Consistent memory blocking can and does affect brain tissue and may lead to a disorder such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Psychological researchers have documented that what we are thinking can affect how we feel and behave.  Our thinking also affects how our bodies respond to certain stimuli.  The opposite is also true.  Physical illness, physical exhilaration, physical exercise, and conditions such as insomnia can affect how we think, feel, and behave. 

When researchers and clinicians describe what they claim are “causes” that influence negative behavior, they consistently (deliberately) leave out the most important elements of behavior.  They never consider or speak about the role that a person’s intentions and choices play in behavior.  This omission happens much too often to be an oversight.  Obviously, medical professionals do not want to get to, or report about, the bottom-line causes of behavior.  Were they to do that it would mean talking about the ways people are choosing to be that are selfish, wrong, reactive, and destructive.  That would negatively affect their doctors’ ability to efficiently do business.  Most people are not willing to pay money to hear about negative aspects about themselves, and, unfortunately, most refuse to change in positive ways.

Personal choices can have far-reaching effects that we are usually not aware at the time.  However, we can choose to be aware of the truth about ourselves and our key choices, relationships, and situations in a present moment.  Most importantly, we can be aware of what is right and loving in each new moment and interaction—provided that that is our intention and choice.  Our abilities to be aware of what is right and act rightly are innate.  They are not dependent on learning or maturity.  Therefore, the excuse, I was never taught how to love or act rightly, is never valid.  Intentions and choices to be selfish and controlling can severely affect objectivity and inhibit our capacity to discover and choose for right, loving, and lovingly responsible actions.

Our ability to be aware provides us many options from which we can choose.  However, the physical laws of nature that affect our planet limit our free choice.  For example, we cannot simply choose to jump across the Grand Canyon.  Nonetheless, we can, and are always, choosing for or against what we know is loving, true, right, and lovingly responsible.  Moreover, if we have been making consecutive wrong choices for an extended period, we can always choose to make our very next choice, a choice for rightness, truth, and love. 

Nonetheless, even right choices have their limits.  After years of destructive behavior, a person may not be able to simply choose to make everything okay again, as if he or she had a magic wand.  There are negative consequences (negative effects) attached to our wrong choices (causes).  Sometimes, the effects of wrong choices are negative realities that cannot be altered or reversed.  A gross example would be the choice to push the button that explodes a nuclear bomb in the center of a densely populated city.

Political prisoners or prisoners of war, who have refused to comply in the face of horrific tortures, demonstrate that choice can reign supreme over tremendously painful external pressures.  The same is true of people who live in degrading, humiliating poverty, and discrimination, or endure physical and sexual abuses, and still choose to maintain their dignity, honor, and compassion.  These courageous people show their willingness to refuse to give in to selfish and destructive urges or external pressures to react or strike-back. 

Depending on a person’s intention and commitment, choices can even effectively override basic biological urges such as sex and hunger.  The fact that men and women are able to turn themselves into “cold, sexless robots,” or “insatiable sex maniacs,” indicates the extent of the power of choice. 

In similar ways, numerous individuals have made one firm, committed choice to turn away from supposedly addictive substances such as heroin, cocaine, alcohol, or tobacco.  By choice, they ended long-term destructive behaviors and never went back.  These, usually unreported, success stories show that sincere and committed conscious choices can dominate over well-reinforced, subconsciously orchestrated selfish drives and compulsions.  The key words regarding the effectiveness of our positive choices are “sincere” and “committed.”

With choices, we do a myriad of things.  Learning is a choice.  Not learning is a choice (just ask any schoolteacher).  Indulging in illusions is a choice.  Dealing in reality is a choice.  Acting irresponsibly in selfishly destructive ways is a choice, so is acting responsibly in lovingly ways.  Abusing drugs or alcohol are choices.  Respecting personal health and wellbeing are other types of choices.  Being nice or hurting others are totally different choices.  Expressing truthfully is a choice, so is lying.  The medical professionals who theorize about human behavior and dysfunction seem to have forgotten these important facts about our humanity.

The world is filled with options and the ways to go through it seem endless, but this is not actually true.  In any given moment, we are required to choose between one of two basic approaches to life.  They are distinctly different, and it is not possible to opt for both ways in the same moment.  The two basic ways are either “loving” or “selfish.”  How we choose will have positive or negative effects that sometimes are substantial and far-reaching.  Depending on whether we are making loving or selfish choices, we become nurturing or hurtful, nice or not nice, honest or deceptive, responsible or irresponsible, or good or bad. 

The essential “I,” who each person is, is the decider.  The decider is not some biological part of us, not our physical brains, not our brain chemicals, or genes.  Nothing and no one outside, any other person, or environmental circumstance can make us do something we are not willing to do.  Even a supernatural entity such as God does not seem to interfere with how we choose to be.

As a species, we humans appear to have been choosing to be selfish from the beginning of our existence on this planet.  In our individual lifetimes, we start making selfish choices while we are inside our mothers’ wombs.  Those choices are not obvious to most people.  My co-researcher has reported in detail about the choices she clairvoyantly observed fetuses making in relation to their parents’ choices.  For those of us who have long since distanced consciously from our natural clairvoyance, human choices first become obvious with infants and toddlers, especially, when they are indulging in extreme degrees of selfishness and selfish reaction. 

Most people believe the selfish lie that they are “powerless” to be other than the way they are.  They claim they are unable to change in significant, lasting, positive, and loving ways.  Many people point to the fact that they have tried to change on numerous occasions a negative about themselves, but usually failed or relapsed back into negative ways.  Most maintain that they are at the effect of some force that is outside of their control.  This apparent difficulty to make changes seems particularly true when we attempt to change unloving, negative, or destructive aspects of ourselves.  We conveniently find the willingness to make changes when we perceive that doing so will result in some selfishly desired benefit.

Deception and self-deception are big parts of our selfish lives.  The deception often is self-contained.  Gross examples are those who believe they are more than “one person.”  They experience themselves as having more than one will and struggle with conflicting “parts” of their personalities that often have clashing intentions.  There is a “good part” and a “bad part.”  The opposing parts allegedly pull them one way or another, and they feel as if they are pawns and innocent victims in their own lives. 

These types of inner battles are selfish shams.  They are self-orchestrated put-ons, similar to what happens at a child’s puppet show when good and bad puppets fight for dominance.  Those who experience this kind of inner conflict are participants in a subconsciously orchestrated “personal puppet show. “  They are consciously caught up in the illusion that their irresponsible, self-deceptive mind dramas are real.  However, as with a child’s puppet show, from a place of concealment, the puppeteer (the essential “I”) is subconsciously and covertly deciding every move the “puppets” are making.  The person is subconsciously determining every willing and willful, good and bad, honest and dishonest, choice and action, and determining the outcome of every personal inner conflict. 

By pretending to be at the affect of illusionary willing and willful parts, such people are attempting to avoid the full responsibility for their choices and resulting effects.  In spite of our efforts, it is never possible to avoid personal responsibility for our choices and circumstances.  When we refuse to accept our personal responsibilities, we open a door to an onslaught of personal mental, emotional, and behavioral problems.  When we reject personal responsibility to an extreme, we are certain to display symptoms of a severe mental illness or behavioral dysfunction. 
 

It is obvious that we vary to the extent we are choosing to be selfish, willful, controlling, hurtful, dishonest, or irresponsible.  That should indicate to any objective observer that our choices are most definitely involved in both our positive and negative behavior.  When someone stands up for what is obviously right, fair, just, true, and good, he or she stands against selfishness, control, and petty self-interest.  Judging from the state of most relationships, families, communities, nations, and our natural environment, most of us are refusing to stand up for what we know is right.  Most of the time, we turn away and indulge in petty personal selfish desires, urges, patterns, and reactions.  Most deny important truths about how they really are.  This denial contributes to added pain and a sense of hopelessness.  []