Jofabelle Mae L. Jalalon – Assessments

As A Man Thinketh
Assessment by Jofabelle Mae L. Jalalon (Philippines)

1. What is the main idea that the author is trying to convey in the book?

It is stressed by James Allen all throughout the book that “As a Man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” A man, his character, his circumstances, his health, his achievements, his life are by products of the kind of thoughts he allows himself to have. When I find myself feeling sad or tired or scared often it is because I allowed myself to think of being exactly that. Those thoughts produce visual images and as I dwell on those thoughts they gain momentum in my life they become my reality. Living in anticipation that something good or bad is going to happen in our life creates forces of either good or bad which takes control of what will actually happen. It is imperative therefore, to watch out what thoughts we allow our selves to think. What we focus on and think about shapes what happens in our life. How we see and think of our self forms what we are.

2. What were the seven ideas which were personally most important to you and why? List these seven ideas followed by an explanation after each one as to why it was important to you. Use personal examples from your own life.

i. As a being of power intelligence and love, and the lord of his own, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself that transforming regenerative agency by which he may make himself what he wills.

My second eldest brother died in 2003. Its finality hit me so hard I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that my brother who lived such a full life died in a swimming accident. He left behind 4 children, the eldest merely 12 years of age while the youngest barely in his second year. My brother was a devoted father to his children, a loving and supportive husband to his wife. He had the character of a winner in life. He was a self-made man. He was a living-legend to me and he was my hero. As a family we did everything within our power to keep him alive, however, after much medical battles, he died. It was devastating. I asked, why my brother? Why like that? Why so soon? I chose not to attend his funeral neither did I make an attempt to look at his lifeless body when I found he died. I wanted to only keep memories of him when he was alive to keep him alive in my mind and in my soul. His death happen at a time when fresh out of the university I was getting all poised up for making my own marks in the world. His death having broken my heart put clouds of sadness and gloom on my days for months and months. I lost the motivation to go job hunting, to go out and have fun I stayed mostly at home in particular in my room so uninspired. Flicking through the family collection of audio compact discs one day, I came upon his favourite song entitled, “Never Surrender.” I played the song several times and cried while listening to it with memories of him flashing in front of me. I was flooded by images of him and his triumphs, his laughing eyes, his determination when going for a goal, his leadership, his special ways of keeping the family together. This served as a wake up call to me. His favourite motto was, “If others can do it so can I”. This buzzing in my head, I asked myself, “What can you do best, Jofabelle?” I answered, teaching is what I do best. I trained myself very hard for it. Setting out to be the best mentor that I can be, I gathered my school credentials, worked on my computer, and started writing my resume.

ii. The soul attracts that which it secretly harbours, that which it loves, and also that which it fears.

During the end of the last term of my studies in my second year in the university, I run for President of the Supreme Student Government. During that election, I went up against a male candidate who was well liked for his religious affiliations and pursuits. I did my best to mount a strong campaign telling myself I stand a chance at winning the election considering that I had a consistent student leadership history. In the back of my mind, however, I entertained thoughts of negativity I kept worrying about the fact that the University Student Government had a very strong history of being partial to male candidates for the presidency. Since the Student Council was changed into Student Government, no woman president had ever been elected into office. I worried as well, that I might have allowed people’s encouragement getting the better of me by deciding to run for president to soon, I should have waited a year more. Though, I did my best to connect with my fellow students, with my backsliding and self-defeating thoughts, I lost the election. My fear turned into a reality. It was a tough blow on my heart. Dealing with this defeat, I contemplated a lot. With a humbled heart, I kept a low profile from student leadership activities. I was however, pulled back into it again by being unanimously elected Speaker of the House of Legislators. I took a decision to reinvent myself, rise again, and try harder, serve my fellow students better. The next year, I ran for president again. I utilized the issue of my being a female candidate, which cost me the previous election, as one of my strengths. Looking back I could see myself mounting a campaign with every cell in my body telling me, I would win because I heard the call to serve as President of the Student Government. And I did. To date, I still receive emails, and messages, and gifts from fellow students thanking me for my leadership and how I touched their lives in special ways. To me reading the book and making a connection to that stage in my life, I realized that in my student leadership journey, with my thoughts, I attracted both the things that I feared and loved.

iii. Circumstances grow out of thought every man knows who has for any length of time practiced self-control and self-purification, for he will have noticed that the alteration in his circumstances has been in exact ratio with his altered mental condition.

Sometimes lying in bed feeling low and down and crushed because of problems either relational or professional, I have noticed that the moment I give myself a mental kick to get up, go out, go for a walk, listen to others and their stories, listen to uplifting music, dance and shake your worries away, do something worthwhile and be active, the heaviness I felt in my heart would gradually disappear. Allowing my mind to have happy thoughts makes me a fun person to be with. Keeping a positive disposition and a cheerful demeanour makes the world around me respond to me in a positive and cheerful way as well.

iv. Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought.

My body doesn’t take kindly to over the counter medicines, in particular, those prescribed by doctors. To treat cough, cold, fever, headaches, stomach aches, body injuries, I strongly prefer herbs in combination with healthy and revitalizing food. I go heavy on fruits, vegetables, spices, and water. The food choices concentrated on strengthening my immune system and revitalizing the part of my body that had been affected. Growing up I battled many allergies that were said to be common in the family’s medical history. Refusing to be frail I claimed my good health through a combination of exercise, I love to go swimming and running, I go for healthy food choices, I love green leafy vegetables and fruits and milk and beef. Knowing that how we deal with life stresses influences our health, I keep a cheerful disposition, I keep thinking that I am healthy…I tell myself that I am what I eat.

v. Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force. He who knows this is ready to become something higher and stronger than a bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations. He who does this has become the conscious intelligent wielder of his mental powers.

One summer, I went swimming with my elder sisters and some cousins. After having my play time in the water, I decided to draw pictures on the earth along the river bank. Suddenly I heard screams in the background. Looking up I saw one cousin struggling against the strong current of the water her head coming in and out gasping for breath. Then she got hold of my sister Jewel who was near her. She then tried to keep herself above water pushing my sister under and deeper into the water. My other sister Ivy, seeing this intervened and tried to save my sister Jewel by untangling them. Another cousin tried to help out but the water current was too strong in the ensuing chaos and they panicked and they all ended up pushing each other down each of them now gasping for breath swimming and fighting for their lives against the strong current of the water. I jumped into the river and swam under water with a strong resolve to save my sisters telling myself no sister of mine will drown not on my watch. Harnessing the strongest swimmer in me, holding my breath for as long as I could, I grabbed hold of their feet one by one, kicking them hard every time they would try to grab me and hold me down. Everything went by so fast that by the time I was able to pull and drag the last one of them into safety I was exhausted. I swallowed my own share of river water in the process thus, I puked a bit. All those weekends spent in the river trying to test my limit as to how long I could hold my breath and keep on swimming under water to get from one side of the river to the other, all those tests on how fast I could swim against a strong current, my own water play which I loved so much somehow paid off for the unpleasant turn of events in that summer adventure. This was one of the early encounters I had with the powers of thought brought on by a very strong feeling of protectiveness for siblings. I was twelve years old at that time and I realized that thoughts will cause us to spring into action resulting to life triumphs both surprising and defining.

vi. He who would accomplish little need sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. He who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.

Contemplating on the lives of people I look up to, I see many sacrifices they had to make in order to accomplish great things in their lives. When my family went through a financial set back when I was ten years old, to help out in our situation, I decided to work in a sawmill clearing saw dust, piling and tying lumbers together, and doing many other odd jobs a 10 year old can do in a sawmill. I loved the receiving my wages at the end of each week’s worth of work and then being able to go to the market to buy rice and fish for the family. I loved seeing the misty smile on my mother’s face whenever I would come home giving her the fruits of my toil. I loved most of all the freedom of being able to pay for my school fees, buy some clothes, and buy food from my wages. While other kids were playing games along the streets in our village, I sacrificed my playtime for the work in the saw mill. In a way I grew up earlier than my peers. I learned the value of time money determination and hard work at an early age. I learned also that one can do something about hunger by earning the money to buy food through work as opposed to just sitting around waiting for our parents to make things get better financially in the house. I learned of the essence of sacrifice and achievement in relation to being a good provider.

vii. Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs your heart, the beauty that forms your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

My grandfather loved to say food for thoughts aloud to his grand children. I was in grade school when I first started paying attention to them, though I did not know then what many of them fully meant. Looking into my own life journey, in particular when I was working on developing my skill in painting I read somewhere that it is crucial that we activate wirings in our brain for creative skills while we are young. We do this by repeated and constant practice. The younger we start the better it is for us. I divided my play time after school and house chores assigned to me by my parents among mastering painting, playing the keyboard and the guitar, and reading. What was left of my playtime, I spent on swimming and running. I started valuing my time this way at a young age. What brought this on was my deep longing to connect with myself and the dreams I had and the world I loved. Such a deep and strong stirring I felt within me from a young age.

3. How will these ideas or lessons help you in a practical way, both in your daily personal life and in helping you to create a better world? If so, how?

The seven ideas I picked out helped me in my soul searching, my journey towards emotional healing, claiming back my inner peace, and understanding myself by enabling me to assess aspects of my life in turn making me see myself, my character, my life circumstances, people around me and the world I love with a more positive filter. Humbled and being clarified with critical aspects of me puts me in a better position and frame of thought to mentor people.

4. Quotes: Are there any statements which the author made that particularly got your attention? If so, please quote them and comment as to why they were important to you.

i. The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do.
ii. The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream.

I used to be left handed. My teacher in first grade however, forced me to write with my right hand, singled me out of the class, and moved my desk close to her table to make it easier for her to smack my hand with a stick every time I would try to write with my left hand. This was an unpleasant introduction to the world of teaching and learning for me. I developed a negative attitude towards formal schooling. I was already in the second grade and I still could not write my name legibly. I could not read properly either. At some point I contemplated on running away from home believing it was the best thing to do having let my family down and having put them to shame by my inability to make it in school with flying colours. My elder siblings were all “A” students. They were high achievers. Many times I would stare at their medals and their trophies at home. Climbing on the roof of my parents home one night, worried about my difficulties in making sense of what a school is all about, looking at the stars, one thought came to my mind, “since my siblings were good at their studies, I stand a chance at being like them too.” I then connected this too my ability to draw portraits, I realized that I was good at it because I would constantly and repeatedly paint and draw. Picking up a book one day, I read one page after the other. Reaching the last one, I went back to the first page again believing somehow that doing so will enable me to unlock and grasp the meaning of the words and how they connected with each other. Eventually I discovered a world of possibilities, ideas, places, stories, and people through books, with reading becoming a favourite means to educate myself. I also made a habit of writing with my right hand from cover to cover as long as I could to improve the legibility of my hand writing. I was able to make myself an “A” student. All these started with a belief that I can do it followed by a dream to reap medals and trophies of my own as well.

5. Is there anything in the book that you do not understand or are unclear about, or are there ideas which you disagree with and, if so, why?

Suffering is always the effect of wrong thought in some direction. It is an indication that the individual is out of harmony with himself, with the law of his being. The sole and supreme use of suffering is to purify, to burn out all that is useless and impure. Suffering ceases for him who is pure.

Not really disagree, more like puzzled instead. Having observed that many people who seem pure to me still end up suffering, I do wonder about suffering brought to people who do their best to be a force of something positive in the world around them.

6. Did the book contain exercises for the reader to complete? If so, did you complete all of the exercises and did you find them helpful?

Thought exercises on having beautiful thoughts, thoughts of courage, self reliance and decision making, energetic thoughts, gentle and forgiving thoughts, loving and unselfish thoughts were the exercise I focused on. The last two weeks, I put myself on a journey of forgiveness for those who have hurt me including myself. Something happened in my life recently that zapped me much of my energy to the point of mental and emotional exhaustion. The above stated thought exercises helped me a lot in dealing with it, with moving on, keeping my inner peace, my walk towards inner healing, and going on a survival mode. The entire book actually is a blessing, a source of comfort and guidance.

7. Was there anything you read in the book that you would like to comment on that was not covered in the previous questions? If so, please comment.

A man becomes calm in the measure that he understands himself as a thought-evolved being. For such knowledge necessitates the understanding of others as the result of thought, and as he develops a right understanding, and sees ever more clearly the internal relations of things by the action of cause and effect, he ceases to fuss, fume, worry, and grieve. He remains poised, steadfast, and serene.

I wrote a ten pages account on a relational struggle I had. Partly to pour out onto paper what I felt, another to provide myself a thorough account of it all something I can read many times to figure out why things transpired the way they did, why I felt certain emotions at certain points, why I responded this way and that, and where I erred and why. Mostly to figure out what lessons I must learn from it and what was God trying to tell me in all of it. I approached trusted mentors for feedback and advice. With many things said and done and after all the inner journey I put myself through I claimed back my inner peace…freeing myself of personal agenda, and letting the grace of God connect with me and flow through my thoughts I was able to get my acts together, make a strong decision, harness the power of my understanding of myself in order to see life and people around me in a different light. Grasping the full meaning and implications of the causes and effects surrounding this particular relational pains and struggles gave me strength to move on and be steadfast in living out my revised relational blue print.

Please rate the following questions on a scale from 1 to 10. Ten is good and one is poor.

A. How interesting was it to read? 10
B. How helpful were the contents? 10
C. How easy was it to understand? 10
D. Would you recommend it to others? 10
E. What is the overall rating you would give it? 10

 

 

Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Assessment by Jofabelle Mae L. Jalalon (Philippines)

1. What is the main idea that the author is trying to convey in the book?

The perfect invisible principle of all life is that there’s a reason and a higher purpose to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. And that we must never stop learning and practicing and striving to understand more that each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. We’re free to go where we wish and to be what we want. We can be free to be who we love most to be, our true self, in the essence of here and now, freedom is the very nature of our being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form and nothing can stand in our way unless we allow it. Our whole body, from head to toe is nothing more than our thought itself about it, shaped in a form we choose to see it. When we break the chains of our thought, we break the chains of our body, too…when we smash the self defeating barriers we put around our self we set free the unlimited powers and strength within us. Once we have perfected this invisible principle of all life in our self we must juxtapose it to Love and its higher meaning…Love as our capacity to see the real being inside a fellow creature, Love as our nature to see and to reach out to the good in everyone, and Love as our calling to helping people see and bring to their fullest potentials the greatness in themselves.

And while we are at the heart of living and breathing the perfect invisible principle of all life, we need to keep on finding our self, a little more each day in all our experiences discoveries and life impulses, in our failures and triumphs, in our sadness and happiness, that real, unlimited Seagull present in each of us. My Jofabelle Seagull nature is my own built in instructor-mentor towards my true, meaningful, and higher north. Understanding the unique nature of myself and what it is that I am most passionate about, what it is that makes me feel complete, and what it is that makes me feel alive beyond the here and now humdrum monotony of eating in order to work…working in order to live…living in order to die, I bring to life that boundless and freeing essence and meaning of my existence to a higher and a higher perfection.

2. What were the seven ideas which were personally most important to you and why? List these seven ideas followed by an explanation after each one as to why it was important to you. Use personal examples from your own life.

i. We run the risk of being made an outcast from our flock for speaking our truth in the face of the Flock.

I come from the flock of teachers trained and honed by mentors who were interested in ideas big and small. Philippine Normal University is a teacher training institution in the Philippines that you go to if you want to go the farthest, and achieve the most as a teacher. As part of personal security decision, I studied in the said university to get a degree in teaching among others, to cultivate my self-confidence and acquire a sense of my own destiny. It was while studying there and getting actively involved and immersed in student leadership that I discovered in myself a strong passion for reaching out, motivating people, and touching lives. While others completed their studying clock poring over books that were meant to teach them to be very good teachers, I put another clock laden with leadership goals for me to actualize up on my wall. It was while working on that second clock that my love for a charismatic leadership and long term vision took shape. After I got my teacher’s license, I taught English to high school students for a while. Deep within me however, a strong longing to teach outside a classroom setting and through an unconventional level of consciousness was asking me to search out the horizon. One summer I was invited to join a team to write a script and shoot a documentary video for an environmental conservation campaign. This proved to be a turning point in my life as a teacher-mentor. I discovered a less constricting canvas that felt more freeing and more natural for me to put my own mark and grow more as a teacher-mentor. With determination to do better and to acquire the proper tools to make my own mentoring-teaching footprint all encompassing than I ever could as a teacher in a formal classroom, I approached volunteer development work in the Philippines as purposefully as a pruning ground that offered dimensions of knowledge and experience that I could never acquire had I chosen the more travelled track…teach within the confines of a classroom in a formal school environment and then on the side get a masters degree then maybe even get a Ph.D. My decision to travel and immerse myself in various cultures and sensibilities as opposed to just reading about it and listening to lectures about it puzzled many people around me, my own mentors, friends, and family.

ii. We choose our next world through what we learn in our current one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.
Making a clean break with each chapter of my life, I do my best to learn from encounters with different worlds. Sometimes I succeed in fully grasping the life lessons from those encounters at other times I fail in it. Looking back, I realize that in those encounters wherein I learned nothing, I ended up not only marginalizing myself I also placed myself in a vicious repetitive cycle of making self defeating mistakes. A negative approach to life mastery and learning that needs to be rethought…in view of my greatest passion which is to be a greater impact life teacher-mentor in an arena that crosses boundaries of politics, culture, race, skin colour, religion, language, social standing, and ideology.

iii. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is being perfect. And perfect is being there with no limits…

Heaven at one time for me was the north that I kept on seeking, at other times the life calling that I answered to, and now I am beginning to see that heaven is very much close to, in essence, the name I gave myself many years ago as a writer which is bornfree. Over the years I have been trying to perfect in me the ability as a life mentor-teacher to help bring about positive changes in the lives of people who reach out to me for advice. Early on in my journey touching lives, I grasped the immense possibilities and effect that someone of my nature could have both in imbuing in people a sense of hope and commitment to reach out to be the best that they can be by providing an experience and life travels-based framework for making that hope and commitment an asset for motivating and mentoring people. I grew up in an environment where a strong sense of the limits gender, religious beliefs, cultural systems, and institutional structures impose on what can be spoken and expressed and ultimately on what can be felt, thought, and achieved. That sense of caution for me limits dialogue, possibilities, meanings, motions, and actions towards perfection.

iv. Those who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. It is not in my nature to walk into a situation and be attracted to and warm up to people right away. I need time to observe, feel, hear, and smell them first. I need a little momentum…some kind of challenge. This nature translates into my approach to acquiring a certain skill. I hover around it at first with much weighing and inner dialogues whether it is a skill that I really want to master. When I do decide and commit myself to one thing, I do a lot of recreating and recasting how this can lead to that and I get absorbed in it. I strive for perfection on it believing that everything I do is a footprint of my soul.

v. For Most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

Many of my major inner dialogues and discussions have taken place in consideration of what I love most to do, which often does not bring much financially, and what I must do in order to bring in my own share of bread and butter on the family dinner table. Not that my family demands it of me. Centred on something that radiates like the sun, love of family is a wellspring of my other strongest of life motivations. I love bringing food to the family dinner table as much as I love to pursue my passion for teaching-mentoring to perfection. To ensure that my loved ones have food to eat matters to me as much as being able to fly to my perfection. Often these two strongest passions in me place me on diasporas when working on my trajectory to perfection.

vi. Don’t be harsh on them, Fletcher Seagull. In casting you out, the other gulls have only hurt themselves, and one day they will know this, and one day they will see what you see. Forgive them, and help them to understand. ..loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn.

I love to thread together various arguments and conflicting views of people around me, weighing their relative strengths, without judgment or dismissal of even the seemingly non-essential point of view. I remember one former instructor making a comment about my transition in humanitarian development work taking this as an offshoot of my inner confusion and lack of rootedness because I have chosen not to anchor myself to a formal school setting teaching in a four-walled classroom as traditionally what professional teachers do. She called me a lost flock. Absorbing and synthesizing this commentary on my life journey and the way I see my life defining decision to be a teacher-mentor without borders in an approach that defies tradition, I let out a chuckle. In response, I wrote on an invisible chalkboard with a smile…one day even my most strident critic will want to sit beside me on a bonfire with a cup of tea I have learned to make as taught by a native from Laos served with a rice cake cooked in the fire the way Cambodians have taught me to do it in a bamboo shoot and together we will laugh at tales I will share of how the American people love to put a swear word in their sentences, how the British people feel compelled to make their utterances with bloody this and bloody that…how the English language have taken on a variety of shape and how it is continuing to evolve from the pubs, the car boot sales, the red brick houses, and the castles in England to the skyscrapers, burger joints, cafes, and casinos in United States, to the high speed trains and airports in Central Europe, to the Tuktuks and floating markets in Thailand, to the agencies for visa runs in Laos, to the flash lighted classrooms with no walls under the night sky in villages in Cambodia where children and parents alike, some of them missing a hand here others a leg there caused by a blast from a landmine, gather for a teaching-mentoring class in English…how they only can have it at night because at daytime they need to work in a community-based eco-tourism livelihood project that benefits the entire community. I will tell of the sound, the smell, the taste, and the feel of those people and places in concert with my heartbeat and what it feels like for me to walk with and along the footsteps of my life heroes and legends. After exchanging notes, I see us shaking hands, and hugging each other for the beauty of our respective life stories our very own chosen path to perfection, hers a formal teaching in the classroom completed with paper trails while mine an approach to teaching that is undocumented and is without borders.

vii. Till you can fly the past and the future then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all…you will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love.

The road to finding my sense of confidence, identity, and balance over the years has proven itself to be a bit bumpy. Many times I felt like giving up on myself. Sometimes I felt upset with myself for not being like everybody else out there satisfied with their lot and having fun on their ordinariness. After reading this book I put on my trainers and went out for a walk with myself around the lake in Redditch. While activating my happy hormones I tried to get at the bottom of my perceived inner restlessness and dissatisfaction at the prospect of being confined to teaching in a classroom. I asked myself why it felt like a prison to me in the past. I pressed myself for answers why I felt like I did not belong there in the classroom full of students whose lives were there ripe for the picking for someone like me who loves touching lives, for someone like me who knows that teaching-mentoring is something that brings the best in me to life. Seeing a stork perched close to the lake, I got reminded of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Placing my dreams alongside his helped me come to clear and full terms with my deep seated need to spread my wings and fly. Before Jonathan Seagull, I had begun entertaining doubts on the blueprint I have drawn out for my passion to teach without borders. Taking a deep breath I played the video of my past and my future virtually in front of me. I tell myself, “not so bad Jofabelle, not so bad at all.”

3. How will these ideas or lessons help you in a practical way, both in your daily personal life and in helping you to create a better world? If so, how?

The seven ideas I listed and I interacted with above brought me to a discourse with myself and the realization that with the wealth of my life experiences providing me enough material to write my book, paint my master piece, compose and sing my songs all of these gifts in the palm of my hand for me to use as tools in touching lives on a broader arena, the distance, the future, the unknown is no longer threatening and there is that conviction in my heart that I will fill them with the meaning of kindness and of love as I have lived with it and understood through all my flights to perfection.

4. Quotes: Are there any statements which the author made that particularly got your attention? If so, please quote them and comment as to why they were important to you.

If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn’t die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It’s your choice now. You can stay here and learn on this level – which is quite a bit higher than the one you left, by the way – or you can go back and keep working with the Flock.

This makes me ask myself whether it is high time that I go back and join hands with the teachers in the formal classroom with four walls under the auspices of a stuctured institution.

5. Is there anything in the book that you do not understand or are unclear about, or are there ideas which you disagree with and, if so, why?

One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin…
How do we know that the school is finished? How do we know that the time has come for another to begin? In the past I have seen myself growing deeply attached to one world that I just wanted to stay in there forever. There were also times when I couldn’t wait to be out of one world even though I just barely got there. With growing concern, I have recently realized that, to a great extent, my emotional interactions with a particular world influence my will to stay longer or go sooner.

6. Did the book contain exercises for the reader to complete? If so, did you complete all of the exercises and did you find them helpful?

Putting aside my guitar my piano and my paintbrushes for this month, the exercise of focus and concentration on one thing at a time is helpful as I applied this to reading and answering the assessment questions for this book. The exercise of understanding and knowing what you’re doing. The exercise of control and the work we need over mastering something is helpful in my resolution to master in me the capacity to be heard without showing off. Most of all I love the exercises of kindness and of love when mentoring people.

7. Was there anything you read in the book that you would like to comment on that was not covered in the previous questions? If so, please comment.

If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?

I see cheerful impersonal friendliness in people as a mask for loneliness and secretiveness in the human character. Thus, without losing that critical sense of individuality, I build close vulnerable relationship with friends, family, and a life partner. I try my best to cultivate in me the ability to determine where my responsibility ends and where others begin. I often struggle with this one though in particular with friends and family. When I feel in every cell in my body that my reason for being in a situation, life circumstance, or people’s life is done I move on to the next chapter of my life while keeping and treasuring relationships and friendships I have built along the way. I make a point to keep in touch. I bridge space and time with the special ones.

Please rate the following questions on a scale from 1 to 10. Ten is good and one is poor.

A. How interesting was it to read? 10
B. How helpful were the contents? 10
C. How easy was it to understand? 10
D. Would you recommend it to others? 10
E. What is the overall rating you would give it? 10