Yet another word worth extracting from your vocabulary is “just” in the sense of meaning “and nothing more.”

Just has its place in the realm of meaning moral excellence or justice.

The just I’m ferreting out makes sentences flat by stripping away liveliness with a self-effacing facade. “I’m just calling.” “I’m just trying to find out.” “I’m just wondering if this or that.” “I was just too upset.”

Why is this observation important? If you want to say “just” on purpose, that’s okay. If, however, you are a “just” abuser and unaware of your habit, then clearing it up will make you a more direct and powerful communicator.

After some practice, you will see that this exercise in self-control is a just cause.

You may recall the line: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

One of the most difficult and most liberating of challenges is giving up judgments about this and that.

I don’t mean to give up your sense of morality or what is ethically good—treat your neighbor as you would have him treat you.

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Listen.

Listen to someone talking. There is more going on that meets the ear. When you hear the words being spoken, it seems there are pauses between the words. These “pauses” or gaps allow us to identify each audible word in the same way that we read text: there are spaces between words in a sentence.

Despite what we think we hear, there are no specific pauses between words in everyday speech. The words we hear are an interconnected stream of words and phrases being hosed into our ears.  So, how do we make sense of one another’s speech? The marvelous processing power of the brain interprets this stream into a coherent form that we can understand, and it seems to us that there are pauses between words.

Prove this phenomenon to your self. If you listen to computer-generated speech, you can hear the mechanical pauses as the machine attempts to segregate one word from another. And that’s why computer-speech sounds artificial.

Once upon a time, I was in a meeting with the president of a new startup film company.  We agreed to meet in his Santa Monica apartment where he had set up shop before finding a permanent office.

The president, a smooth and likeable talker, told me that years back Rod Serling had leased this very same apartment while he was working on the Twilight Zone series. Now, I don’t believe in ghosts, although I do know ghosts of our making can haunt us.

I thought: Would Rod give me a sign that he was somewhere in this plane of existence?

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If there is any doubt that your eyes can fool you, try the following experiment. Take a ruler with you and look in the bathroom mirror. It seems that the face looking back is about life-size. Now, measure the image in the mirror and you will be surprised. We see what we want to see. It’s for this reason that lawyers love having eyewitnesses to a crime. What you saw can be picked apart until you are no longer certain of what took place.

And if our perceptions of things are in question, there is a larger issue here. No one ever saw anything outside his head. Think about it and you will see the truth in it. Perception takes place solely in the mind’s eye. What appears to be in front of you is taking place within you.

Buddha knew this and saw the maya, or illusion of the world—and in that moment, he was released to experience things as they are.

So, here’s looking at you, kid—with deference to Bogey.