Smart Pencils

by Ron Lauderbach

I keep hundreds of pencils I picked up off the ground during my teaching career in a PF Flyer shoebox, under my bed. They wait for a colorful slip-on eraser I attach when I bring one back to life.   My found pencils are not rookies from a yellow Ticonderoga box, but seasoned veterans, bearing bite-marks and other scars—proof of lives lived. Many are surprised by my electric   sharpener, a device that did not exist when they were dropped. Some have art class paint on them and others grease from auto-shop. I have one that says Oscar loves written on its roundness, but the name of Oscar’s lover   has been sharpened away. I like to write with my found pencils. I believe they impart wisdom from their past lives. A lot of pencils advertise businesses and institutions, many of which are   gone forever. I have one pencil with a student’s name I remember on it, in my car, in case I ever see him around town. I have some ink pens too, but dry—unable to reveal secrets.

__________

From Snapshots, Kelsay Books, 2022, RON LAUDERBACH.

“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

A field of conscious presence or You cannot lose something that you are

“Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself. Eckhart Tolle

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world. Gabor Maté

 “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.

We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking — or, more deeply, positive being — empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours.

 “Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past...Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction  

Protect a Deep Work Block Every Day

Before you open email, before you check messages, before you respond to anything: protect a block of time — ideally 90 minutes to two hours — for your most cognitively demanding work. Schedule it as you would an important meeting, at the same time each day. Research on circadian rhythms and prefrontal cortex function suggests that for most people, the first two to four hours after waking represent peak executive capacity. This is the window to protect most aggressively. Everything else — email, meetings, administrative tasks — should be pushed to the afternoon wherever possible.

Your Attention Isn't Broken

It's being harvested. Here's the neuroscience of what's actually happening — and the architecture that fixes it.

Dr. Judy Ho

May 20, 2026

 

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing. ―Dōgen

Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

― Dōgen

No matter how bad a state of mind you may get into, if you keep strong and hold out, eventually the floating clouds must vanish and the withering wind must cease. ―Dōgen

Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others' faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others' faults, then naturally seniors and venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others' faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.

― Zen Master Dōgen 

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? ― Dogen

To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections. ―Dōgen

 

“That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. 

But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger. 

I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.”

― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma page 231

The drug dealers are back and they are attracting a parade of addicted misfits. Mother's Day was a demented circus, a steady stream of drug addled humans teetering in the parking lot, terrifying everyone. The neighbors have been complaining to me over the fence, There's a woman living in the car! She was nodding off at 5AM! Yesterday when we came out with the dogs at 4:45AM, my husband was looking up at the Mars and Saturn. The dealer hidden in his car thought we were looking at him and he jumped out to identify himself. It's creepy and unsettling. We are all rattled. Every day we don't know what we're going to see when we pull into the shared parking lot. The daily zombie apocalypse. As long as the landlords get their rent money, they do not care.

It's not a waste if you are learning

Stephanie Foo's Memoir: What My Bones Know

I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. 

And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me. It's not as if I hadn't suspected this. There was that whole childhood abandonment thing, after all. But in my head, there were reasons and excuses for this. And now, for the first time, I saw the truth—the real reason they could not love me, had never loved me. I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them to selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn't been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior It had everything to do with them.

There are people who love me. I will be cared for And I have my capable self. Everything is going to be fine. 

My parents didn't love me, and it's okay.

― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma page 111.

“You don’t know what people are going through,” he said. “You don’t know what private battles they’re waging, either inside their own body or at home or out in the world. And so at the very least, you can simply be kind.”

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/19/metro/former-student-kidney-donation/

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it. Dennis Potter

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young. Dennis Potter

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in. ― Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter: “The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it, and boy can you celebrate it.”

Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it. Alan Watts

George Bilgere Poem

A Nice Place to Live

This summer, as the missiles went back and forth
between the one sobbing angry country and the other,
I went from the shallow end to the deep end,
my evening laps at the public pool,

wondering if there was something wrong with me
for not hating anyone that much.

Not the guy in the Hummer
who cut me off at the exit yesterday,
then gave me the finger.

Not my father, even in my worst moments.
Not even my ex-wife.
I’m a hater from the bush leagues, a small-time hater,

although I have, it’s true, gotten myself
through some long patches of self-pity
more or less on hatred alone.

Then I forget. Lose interest.
It’s called being white
and well-off in America,
where it’s all just handed to you
by a nice brown server with no English,
or a white person with bad teeth
and no dental plan.

And the gravy train is just so smooth
that when the big ideas—the ones
you would have died for, or even killed for,
the ones that take root and flower
only in the harshest desert climes,

wither inside you and die and turn to little figs
at the edge of your plate,
and you don’t even like figs—

then it’s time for a stroll down to Murphy’s
and a couple of beers with Roger
under the evening news.

And tonight it’s a weeping bearded man
holding the tailfin of a rocket
that killed his son,

a rocket made by all of us
sitting here at the bar tonight,
waiting to turn it to the Indians game.

Nice people, basically.
We don’t even bother to hate him.

https://www.georgebilgere.com/a-nice-place-to-live

 Monkey Mind

by Steve Orlen

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life. For example, I looked at that girl over there In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep. Walking home, I asked her both questions And instead of answering she told her mother Who told the teacher who told my father. After all these years, I can almost feel his hand Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision, Then coming down so hard it took my breath away, And up again in that small arc To smack his open palm against my butt. I’m a slow learner And still sometimes I’m sitting here wondering what my father Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five, Plunged down into his easy chair half the night Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows At every minute of every hour that he’s going to die Because he told my mother and my mother told me. I didn’t cry or cry out or say I’m sorry. I lay across his lap and wondered what He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

__________

From The Elephant’s Child: New and Selected Poems, 1978–2005, Ausable Press, 2006, by STEVE ORLEN.

Gabriel Barsawme: True freedom is the quiet, radical act of slowing down —

We do not need to fix our brokenness. We need to hear it. 

https://gabrielbarsawme.substack.com/p/the-freedom-to-fall-apart 

Gabriel Barsawme is a Licensed Social Worker, researcher, and ordained minister working at the intersection of psychology, theology, and philosophy.  

Loved this book

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir Book by Alan Cumming Not My Father's Son is a memoir by actor Alan Cumming that explores his difficult childhood in Scotland, marked by an abusive father, and his journey to uncover family secrets, prompted by a genealogy show. The book intertwines his past with his present, revealing shocking truths about his father and his maternal grandfather, leading to a profound re-evaluation of his identity and family history. It's known for its honest, witty, and moving account of overcoming trauma and finding peace. 

Once in a while it’s good to challenge yourself in a way that’s really daunting.  – Alan Cumming 

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.  – Alan Cumming  

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they’re so universal.  – Alan Cumming

I think you can be as big as you like as long as you mean it. I really do.  – Alan Cumming  

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don’t have an agenda. It’s more endearing and less piercing to your aura.  – Alan Cumming

It’s about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?

  – Alan Cumming

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.  – Alan Cumming   

My mum always told me I was precious, while my dad always told me I was worthless. I think that’s a good grounding for a balanced life.  – Alan Cumming 

"The devil you know" is an English proverb that implies it is often safer and more predictable to stick with a familiar, difficult situation or person rather than risk an unknown alternative that could be worse.

 When it comes to neighbors moving out and new ones moving in. I can only hope for the best.

I would often take my students to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. I would ask them to bring a notebook and to surreptitiously document, word for word, all the conversations they overheard. When we came back to the classroom we read these aloud. What we heard was fascinating.

Annie DeWitt

Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments. It was only after my husband and I built our house in Lake County, Illinois, near Libertyville, that my consciousness changed. On the first morning in our new home I woke up to the mooing of cows. Cows under my window, 35 miles northwest of Chicago! But there they were, rubbing against the fence that separated our one-acre lot from our neighbor’s 200-acre estate, and they were Holsteins, the only cows I knew from vacations in the flat North German countryside of my childhood. That was my initiation, and after 40 years in this house I know what time of day it is by the way the light slants. I am intimately familiar with the names and habits of the wildflowers and the birds that live in our hawthorns and aspens. We all live together, in the world and in my poems. Lisel Mueller

My family went through terrible times. In Europe no one has had a private life not affected by history. I’m constantly aware of how privileged we (Americans) are. Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller

 Monet Refuses the Operation 

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen Cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

“Monet Refuses the Operation” by LISEL MUELLER.

Cow Cuddling

Article

Forget touching grass. Cow cuddling is the new best way to get grounded.

Everything was quiet. It was just me and Barley. There was nothing left to do other than take in the calming company of this peaceful bovine.  

The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.

― Ram Dass, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

Our journey is about being more deeply involved in Life and yet less attached to it.
― Ram Dass

Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.

― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.

― Ram Dass

The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there--so there the mountain stays.
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn't that you're not being told. The secret is that you're not able to hear.

― Ram Dass

Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts... if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.

― Ram Dass

We're being trained through our incarnations--trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.     
― Ram Dass

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

― Ram Dass

It's very different because the Indians live as if they are their souls and Americans live as if they are their egos.

― Ram Dass

Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.

― Ram Dass

When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
― Ram Dass

 The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.”
― Ram Dass

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act.

― Ram Dass

Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.

― Ram Dass

Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.

― Ram Dass

Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.

― Ram Dass

Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.

― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.

― Ram Dass

There's much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.
― Ram Dass

In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?

― Ram Dass

Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

 Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
― Ram Dass

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

 ― Ram Dass 

Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!

― Ram Dass

We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.
― Ram Dass, How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.

― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

 ― Ram Dass 

 The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.

― Ram Dass

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

― Ram Dass

I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.
― Ram Dass 

 Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.
― Ram Dass

 Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.
― Ram Dass

The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.
― Ram Dass

The next message you need is always right where you are.

 ― Ram Dass

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

 ― Ram Dass 

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

― Ram Dass

We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.

― Ram Dass

I can do nothing for you but work on myself...you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!

― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

― Ram Dass

The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.
― Ram Dass

I practice turning people into trees.

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.
― Ram Dass

Heather Hopp-Bruce: I loved a dead fly: Beauty comes in more forms than you may imagine.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/12/opinion/bottle-fly-housefly-colors/ 

Dr. Gabor Maté Interview by Tim Ferris

https://tim.blog/2022/09/09/dr-gabor-mate-myth-of-normal-transcript/ 

In the new book, are there any chapters or concepts, anything at all that you really hope people do not miss? I know that’s perhaps a strange way to phrase it, but I’ll leave it there as a starting point.

Dr. Gabor Maté: No, that’s good. Thank you. Well, it’s almost like I felt I could just print the title, the title page, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and just have people write their own books. Just have a bunch of empty pages. So I think the message is reinforced through the whole book. What we think is normal in our society from the point of view of human needs and human evolution is absolutely abnormal. And therefore, when we think of abnormalities in terms of illnesses and dysfunctions and diseases and so on, these are normal responses to abnormal circumstances. And the biggest loss you and I have already talked about. This is a society that from the very beginning, from in utero onwards, put stresses on human beings, that they lose contact with themselves.

And the essence of trauma is loss of contact with yourself, loss of connection to yourself. And that’s reinforced through parenting practices, the parenting advice people get. You and I already talked about that. It is reinforced in the school system where it’s all about competition and evaluation rather than relaxation and learning. We are judged all the time by our externals, like how we look, what we achieve, how smart we are, how fast we are. We’re not accepted for who we are with our flaws and our vulnerabilities. Society caters to those false needs so that for God’s sakes, people are botoxing themselves because they’ve learned that how they are is just not acceptable.

People are on Facebook presenting a false image of themselves because they believe that how they are and who they are is not good enough. We’re sold all these products and are manipulated into all these activities that are all attempts to fulfill some deep hunger in ourselves that is missing because we’ve lost our true selves. We are manipulated into buying products and eating foods that are actually toxically, addictively unhealthy. And this happens with the full awareness, even — not only the awareness, the employment of modern science as to how to get people hooked on cell phones or junk foods. Our politics reflects very traumatized people reaching the top, enacting policies that then create more trauma for large numbers of people. In other words, this is a society that for all its wealth, scientific ingenuity, incredible progress in science and medicine, has fundamentally got disconnected from the essence of what it means to be human beings.

And we suffer. There’s an article in The New Yorker about the alarming rise in childhood suicide, the mysterious rise in child — there’s nothing mysterious about it. Kids are stressed because of the conditions of this culture, all the lonely people, as the Beatles sang, all the lonely people. The number of people lonely has doubled in the last 30 years. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness. Loneliness kills. It’s as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of causing illness or potentiating illness and death. There’s so many ways in which this culture is abnormal, and it’s causing people to be not well.

And so that message, that’s the essential one that I hope people won’t miss. But I doubt that they will, if they read the book. And the big message is, Tim, is we don’t have to be that way. It’s not our true nature. We’ve been sold a bill of goods about what human nature is. Human nature is not like that. And precisely the reason there’s so much dysfunction is because we’ve got disconnected from our true nature. We don’t have to be. We can find our way back. We can embrace it. And we’ll be lot healthier, both as a group and as individuals.