More than fifty years ago, pioneer researcher Abraham Maslow recognized the importance of ‘studying’ the healthy people, those who were self realized.

Are you fascinated with mental pathology, serial killers, gossip, roadside accidents—name your grisly scene? It’s clear that most in our culture are swept away to support such aspects of social behavior.

If you want to excel above the mundane, to evolve beyond social conditioning, choose your model carefully and with restraint.

Here’s a challenge from An Artist Empowered:

You must make it through an entire day, while conversing with others, without using these three common tick words: just, hope, and wish, or uttering a single cliche. I call them tick words because they are merely marking time, nothing more. If you’re unaware of abusing cliches, then your are (let’s use an apt one here) adding insult to injury.

The point of this exercise is this: prove the insidious power of social conditioning to yourself; from this insight, original work can begin.

Leave a comment, and let me know how you made out.

While we live in a culture steeped in greed and conspicuous consumption, it is becoming increasingly clear to larger numbers of people that there is a better world view.

The soul thrives in the bosom of generosity and gratitude, which has nothing to do with how much money you have in the bank. Generosity is liberating, and gratitude is in all humility.

Be grateful for all your teachers—a former girlfriend, a mentor, a man on the street who taught you something with his awareness. Be generous with your talent, and your praise, and good thoughts for the success of others—which the Buddha had taught more than 2,000 years ago.

From An Artist Empowered:

Although seemingly overlooked for years, there is a current renaissance of interest in the eccentric man who understood electricity. In the mid-1880’s, Nikola Tesla, a lanky twenty-eight-year-old Serbian immigrant and eccentric genius, nervously laid out his plans for alternating electric current (AC) to his hero, Thomas Edison.

However, Edison was already heavily committed to direct electric current (DC), a delivery system that was both cumbersome and inefficient. Edison gave the eager and penniless Tesla a job, but not why you might reason. He hired Tesla to keep him from further developing AC, which was clearly the superior technology.

After a brief time, Tesla quit working for Edison over two primary reasons: the AC issue and Edison’s failure to pay him a $50,000 premium for a select number of innovations he had developed for DC power.

The cure for cancer will be a milestone in human ingenuity and quality of life.

We need to look in the right place. The people immune to cancer must have an inherited gene. Those genetics can then be inserted (prevention) into each baby, plus in those suffering (healing) from the disease—which would begin to dissipate as the gene replicated itself (creating a new and more hardy immune system) as part of the patient’s body.

Let this discovery happen very soon!