Excerpt

Since January 20th of 1981, the regulatory environment in every sector of the American federal government (from consumer and environmental protection to every aspect of our financial institutions like banking, insurance and Wall Street investment and trading regulations) has been systematically weakened, all in the interest of strengthening and consolidating corporate power over the everyday lives of Americans, and to test neo-conservative economic theories of letting the “free market” solve all of American society’s problems. As we’ve seen one wave of financial shock after another blow through the American economy since then, and specifically witnessed each shock affect the financial markets with increasing volatility and culminating in 2007-2010 as the worst recession since the Great Depression, examination of the underlying causes has made it clear that nearly thirty years of deregulation of the financial industry was a huge mistake. During the latter part of the same period, mostly in the first decade of the 21st century, Wall Street and the financial brokerage industry have succeeded in tapping an enormous financial resource to exploit for additional profit. That resource is us. With the advent of electronic trading and widespread availability of the internet, they began offering and heavily marketing to average citizens systems enabling them to venture into trading and investing arenas that were formerly the exclusive domain of the very wealthy. User-friendly online trading platforms for personal computers sporting real time data and charting, provided free to customers compliments of online brokerage firms, carried the lure and promise of making money from the comfort of one’s own home trading stocks and their derivatives opposite the Wall Street “big boys”.

What they didn’t tell us was, the abysmal odds of success of the average citizen day or swing trading the financial markets would be a consistent and lucrative profit center for those big boys, and a cause of financial pain and in many cases devastation for the vast majority of aspiring day and swing traders. Many estimate the odds of a small participant making and keeping profit trading to be less than 15%, and many more cite statistics showing those odds to be as low as 1%. Which begs the question: why would a rational person not only venture into this work knowing she has an 85-99% chance of ultimately failing at it, but stick with that brutal work for years before reaching the point of capitulation and quitting – finally acknowledging to herself that which she had suspected all along – the markets are heavily skewed in favor of the well-capitalized insiders? Within the pages of this book I will provide answers to this question, hopefully doing so in a manner that will overcome the myriad of books, online brokers, internet-based trading-assist services and scammers that promote trading and steer you decisively away from the strong temptation to answer the siren call of trading the financial markets, and therefore protect your cash and preserve your mental, psychological, emotional and consequently even your physical health and well-being.

Trading stocks and their derivatives like options and futures is extremely dangerous, plain and simple. Only the well-capitalized insider traders residing at the stocks, derivatives and commodities exchanges and large brokerage firms consistently profit from that work. And as we’ve repeatedly seen in the years since the dot.com-precipitated crash of 2000, even long term investing in the financial markets can be perilous and detrimental to the longer term financial security of the average “outsider retail” investor. It is a myth that long term investing in the stock market is the best route to financial security and independence in your retirement years, a myth that is continuously propagated by the financial planning and brokerage industries. The crashes of 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2008-2009 that caused devastating portfolio value setbacks for the average investor provide ample proof of this.

Casino Wall Street recounts my experience of trading the markets for seven years, and of losing a small fortune in the process before finally giving up. Aside from the dismal odds of success for the average “outsider” trader/investor, all that I discovered about Wall Street should convince the reader that the financial markets in general, and Wall Street in particular, are nothing more than giant slot machines, and like any casino they are the very worst places in which to trust your money. In fact, you’ll learn that the word “trust” has no meaning and doesn’t exist in the vocabulary within the Wall Street culture and it’s practices. This book ends with a discussion of alternative investments that are very profitable and far better and safer than anything you could hope for struggling to extract and keep profit from the Wall Street insiders.

In Chapter One I provide an overview of what the financial markets are, how they work, and it covers some important reasons why it is so difficult to extract net profit when actively trading them. Chapter Two discusses the enticement, and the dangers of trading the so-called “derivatives” – options and futures contracts. After my first year of trading realizing a modest profit, it was these much easier to trade but treacherous leveraged trading instruments that portended the “beginning of the end” of my ability to profit in the financial markets for the remainder of my ill-fated trading career. Hence the title of Chapter Three, where I digress and for that and the next three chapters discuss in detail the many reasons why it is practically impossible for well over 90% of aspiring traders to succeed in this brutal business. In Chapter Six I return to my own experience to illustrate and drive home the toxic psychology and mental torment that is routinely evoked by the exercise in futility that is trading.

In Chapter Seven I discuss those alternatives to the financial markets that are consistently moderately to very profitable and light years safer. Finally, this book concludes with an epilogue that acknowledges the worst kind of loss that is a consequence of feeding the Wall Street monster (it is not financial), and ends with a plan for an American future without Wall Street that all of us can and should carry out to successfully rid ourselves of the monster.

Read more about Casino Wall Street: A Trader’s Seven-Year Education in Delusion and Deception and Mario Cohen HERE.

Copyright 2010 Mario Cohen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

You Don’t Know, What You Don’t Know

Have you? Were you? Did you?

Grow up • in a dysfunctional family?

• Suffered a period of depression or hopelessness?

• Been betrayed by someone you trusted and loved?

• Experienced sexual abuse by a person in authority?

• Battled a fight against alcohol yourself or with a loved one?

• Questioned the existence of God?

• Asked why bad things were happening to you?

• Suffered more than you felt you could bear?

• Experienced the grief of family death?

• Lost all your financial life savings?

• Want to be happy?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then I am just like you.

That’s good news. Why?

Because you can transform all those perceived negatives into a diamond you love. I am living proof, and if I can do it, so can you!

Don’t believe the lie that it is impossible to be happy if you have a history of suffering any kind of tragedy. Don’t believe the lie that transformation is impossible. Don’t believe the lie that you can’t be happy with all these perceived imperfections in your life story.

Don’t believe the lies! Believe EVERYTHING you now define as bad in your life, CAN and WILL be transformed into something GOOD. They will become unexpected gifts for you to appreciate, and treasure, with continuous happy gratitude.

One of the most important historical events of our time was when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. How did he get there? In a rocket that was on course only 2.5% of the time! But he still made it to the moon, because the rocket and other pilots were open and willing, and accepted that they had to keep adjusting course along the way to arrive at their final destination. Th e goal and outcome of that goal was important enough for them to be humbly flexible and willing to adjust rocket settings. They didn’t wait until they were 40% off course to get back on the correct coordinates.

What got them there then?

They had the skill set, equipment, and tools to readjust their direction quickly, and so will you. That’s what you’ll learn here the skills to maintain and readjust your course to arrive at your well deserved destination of healthy happiness.

With a million self help, recovery, and motivational books on the shelves, why should you read this one?

What could possibly be different about The Sky is Green and the Grass is Blue? How will reading this particular book truly change “my” life?

I often asked myself these types of questions when I wandered through the shelves of books I’d grab to buy and devour when I first began this initial quest for these exact same answers in my own life. It is now my honor and privilege to pass on this knowledge to you. To transparently share this passion that I began years ago, has not left me disappointed right up to this very moment. In fact, the healing, hope, and happiness I feel inside has only grown bigger, brighter, and more powerful. And so have the results – or the rewards of freedom and peace within the entity called “me.” I learned how to make this happen and last with the tools I’m about to give you in the following pages.

Your happiness does not have to come from other people’s minds any longer! What others say or do has nothing to do with you. It actually has more to do with them, and how they think, act, believe, and perceive.

Genuinely enjoying your own company is possible, regardless of outside circumstances. Yes, authentic freedom is just around the corner of these pages.

Doesn’t that feel great?

I may not be academically approved like Dr. Phil, or a rich and famous Oprah, or possess that “listen to me” media power of Bill O’Reily, but most of us don’t. What I do bring to the table is the proof and evidence that anyone who seeks to live in peace, on purpose, and be happy regardless of outside circumstances, can change their life for the better.

These tools can offer you hope and genuine, lasting change. Change to be a happier and healthier person every day of your life, not just
when situations seem to be going your way. Believe that you too can be the best person you were created to be.

Perhaps this search for peace and happiness has only been the ghost of a possibility. A feeling in your gut, or an intangible dream,
something you could only grasp at but never really hold. You WILL change for the better, I promise, beginning with this very moment, with this very word you are now reading. In fact, it’s already begun…

Do you want to be genuinely happy? You can.

You will learn about tools in this book that you may never have known about. I certainly didn’t until someone told me. The goal of this book is to guide you to these resources that can give you the lasting happiness you seek. This is why The Sky is Green and the Grass is Blue is different from other books. This is a tried, tested, and proven ‘walk the talk’ guide by yours truly. I am here to tell you that achieving lasting happiness with these methods is an opportunity of transformation you will keep forever. Isn’t that what we all want in life?

To be so happy and peaceful on the inside that it doesn’t matter what the heck is going on around the outside. To be free to detach from the negative or often nasty comments people can hit you with unexpectedly. To be able to deal with the inevitable unexpected bombs that crash down in your life, no matter how hard you try to avoid them.

Would you like to repel these negatives in your life, like water that effortlessly rolls off the back of a duck? Unfairness of people, places and things in this world does not have to stop you from living your God-given dream.

This is what you will find in these pages. A stable, consistent set of tools and resources that you can depend on like the impenetrable consistency at the bottom of the ocean to get you where you want to be.

“How could this be a lasting change for me?”

Look at nature. Does the death of winter bring the birth of a new spring? Does the pruned-to-a-nub rose bush come back with more flourishing flowers the following year? Is it possible for a crawling caterpillar, once transformed in its cocoon to become a butterfly, regress back to its original state? No, these changes, which appear to be lasting death, are in fact transformations to a fresher, better life. This is what is going to happen to you.

How would you like to turn everything that you now define in yourself and your life as “upside down” and negative, and transform it into something positive and “right side up?” How great would it be to know your perceived setbacks are disguised gifts towards the horizon of your greatest comebacks?

It’s true!

We will use the tools shared in this book to make the very same pile of manure you hate, into rich fertilizer you love, and regularly utilize it to grow your garden of happiness. Discovering and transforming that “mess” of unhappiness you find so painful to accept, and realizing there is a way for you to change it all into a miracle of personal freedom and lasting happiness, is possible.

Here’s an example of trash before, and treasure after, transformational results you can expect to receive after using these new tools.

Before (you have) Transformed to… (you get) After

Anxiety Peace

Confusion Confidence

Fear Faith

Doubt Trust

Resentments Forgiveness

Selfishness Purpose

Anger Acceptance

Pride Humility

Depression Joy

Arrogance Openness

Bitterness Gratitude

Dishonesty Integrity

Lies Truth

Manipulation Detachment

Despair Hope

Hatred Love

The Sky is Green and the Grass is Blue was created for you. Why?

Because I want to give you everything I wish someone else had given me years earlier. How much more time could I have enjoyed? How much more energy could I have directed towards things of purpose and meaning? How much more peacefully could I have lived my life? What else might I have accomplished? What gifts did I never see in my life that could have enhanced my ability to appreciate my life? Yes, this transformation of turning your upside down world right side up will help you be truly happy. This is my purpose, my wish, my prayer, especially for you.

Where ever you go, there you are.

Why not take these positive transformations with you in everyday interactions with your friends, family, co-workers, and relatives. Trust that you’re able to transform anything from green sky to blue… And once you are transformed, everything around you is transformed along with you. Don’t waste another minute on needless suffering. Take courage, “be steadfast,” have hope! “The diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.” Confucius

You already own a diamond of happiness, and that would be – YOU!

Happiness is already in there, inside of you, screaming to shine, otherwise you wouldn’t be here right now. What you may not believe, what no one has shown you up until now, is how to chip away and remove all that ugly stuff that surrounds your personal diamond of happiness.

The upside down problem that’s causing you frustration, misery and keeping you stuck, only exists because no one showed you how to TRANSFORM the mess into a miracle. How to appreciate the very same black junk that’s been stubbornly covering up the beauty of the diamond is the very same material that made the diamond so precious in the first place! The pressure of all that unpleasant looking junk around the diamond is precisely what makes it so valuable, so beautiful, and so unique. The same is true for you.

Take comfort, join me on a journey to appreciate, remove, and replace all the black charcoal surrounding the diamond called you, so we can release your own personal dazzling sparkle and shine. Nothing in your life will go to waste.

Even in the midst of a pouring rain storm, you can make a beautiful bright rainbow. Sometimes, the greatest winners in life have lost
now and then, causing them to later rise higher, and become a true record breaking champion.

Exercise:

Write down each letter in your first name, and think of something you are grateful for about yourself right now, in this present moment; something about you, something you have, someone you have in your life. It could be any person, place, or thing.

Here is my example:

D Determination to keep a promise.

E Enthusiasm to write this book, and share these tools with you.

B Belief that anything bad can be transformed into something good.

Now, your turn;

_____________________________________________

____________________________________________

_____________________________________________

____________________________________________

____________________________________________

CONGRATULATIONS!

Your diamond is starting to sparkle with deluxe dazzle, super sensational, beyond beautiful, fine shine.

People don’t change because they see the light, people change because they feel the heat. Pain can motivate you to change for the better. If pain can lead to a good thing, anything can be transformed to bring you a happier good life.

The success of this plan, of course, requires something from you. Yes, indeed, you’ll need to bring one piece of “action” into your silent reading of this book on a regular basis. Without it, you can’t ever possibly get the happiness you seek, so listen carefully. You are required to bring an active acceptance of this simple statement. YOU DON’T KNOW, WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW.

You must firmly believe this fact, really believe this statement in the very depth and core of your heart. You will have to accept that out of all the knowledge in the world, this huge planet of data from the beginning of time until this present moment, from every human being that’s ever walked the earth, every book that was ever written, every course ever taught, every invention ever created, out of this whole enormous pool of information, you only know a very little itty bitty tiny sliver of it. You may possess merely a speck of this knowledge and truth, an eyedropper full in the mass of an ocean. That’s all you know. Th e simple truth is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Humbling, isn’t it?

Once you accept that you don’t know what you don’t know, you are open to receive.

The transformation process hinges on this, because it allows you to be open to receiving the gifts along this new journey. Every time you read a thought or a page that brings up your defense mechanism, sarcasm, or cynical inner voice, you need to be actively involved in the process by telling yourself to remove any preconceived notion in your head. Read onward, and repeat these words…”but I don’t know, what I don’t know.”

There’s enormous power in that statement, because the words allow fresh space for you to replace the void with the ability to learn, and listen. This is the only way you can possibly ever change. You must first change your thoughts before you can expect to change your behaviors.

Consider that you are not seeing things in your world as they truly are; you are seeing them as you are, through the filter of the interpretation of your personal life experiences in your own mind and emotions. My friend, you must at least consider that your thoughts have been color blind in the past, blocking you from noticing the vibrant colors of truth in the present moment. Th e sky may have looked green to you, but the true color has always been, and always will be, a beautiful shade of your favorite blue. Doesn’t the idea of having your “thinking vision” corrected feel exciting?

Imagine being your own best friend?

I mean, after all, you do spend more time with yourself than anyone else, don’t you? Why not ENJOY your own company? The very fact that you desire to be happy is a sure seal of the promise to receive it.

The only map that can lead you to that place called “happiness,” is a willingness to believe it and receive it. You want to go there, to get there, and to live there so desperately you can taste it. Remember George Bailey in the 1946 movie, It’s A Wonderful Life? He got what he asked for – relief from all his troubles, “I wish I had never been born.”

But the irony of his being able to see what life looked like without him in it was a total disaster! By the end of the movie, he realizes what he thought to be true was completely wrong, and he really did have a Wonderful Life.

Shaking in desperation, he finally begs out loud, through the heavy falling snow battering his broken heart, “Dear God, I want to live again, please Lord, let me live again.”

You are going to live again too, fully alive, in your best version possible. You are going to star in your own life’s movie with more zeal than you thought possible, imagined, or dreamed. And the academy award goes to YOU, living an authentic, happy, grateful, purposeful life with lasting love.

The following story breathes life into these thoughts. I call it The Donkey Story.

“One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally he decided the animal was old and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well, and was astonished at what he saw. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey did something amazing. He shook it off and took a step up. As the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he shook it off and took a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was struck with amazement as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off .” Author Unknown

Life is definitely going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of your troubles can be transformed from obstacles into stepping stones. You can get out of the deepest wells solely by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up. Who doesn’t have troubles?

Who doesn’t have a skeleton or two in their life history? Who hasn’t been hurt, betrayed, or treated unfairly? Who doesn’t have a problem they pray would go away? I promise you, everyone has had something they regret having happened to them, or has done something they regret having done to someone else. We all feel pain and sorrow, just like that donkey at the bottom of the pit.

Not everyone has the tools to understand how to take the dirt of disaster thrown on them, and transform it into the stepping stones that can bring us to complete freedom.

The key to the end of the donkey story is that when the donkey released himself from the pit, he ran off , totally free. Had he never entered the pit and overcome his trouble, he would still be tied up and owned by the farmer for the rest of his life. He would have remained a slave to the farmer and never known the difference. His horrible disaster brought him the complete freedom he could never have achieved without it. This is the key: if you have a mess in your life, you have a potential miracle as well.

It only benefits you to keep your mind open at all times. Your mind is like a parachute – it only works when it’s open. Keep your mind and heart open like the parachute, and I promise you’ll travel to your new beach home on Peace Island with miles of serenity sand. Wait until you see the spectacular new view from here!

You can’t unscramble those scrambled eggs. Why waste a good worry?

There is great power in the now. Give up the hope of a better past, and start focusing your time and energy on a better present moment, right now.

We may not be able to control the direction of the wind, but we can always adjust the direction of our sails. Don’t be afraid of change; be very afraid of staying the same.

Exercise:

Imagine you are now on your new home of Serenity Island. Walking on peace beach, you discover Aladdin’s Lamp. Curious, you open the cover to find a real life Genie inside. He powerfully emerges out of the lamp growing larger than life, and asks you if you want to be happy? Of course you answer, yes! He tells you to answer the following questions before your wish can come true.

1. What are you doing when hours pass by like moments?

This is your purpose.

____________________________________________

2. When do you feel most at peace and when do you feel most confused?

This is your task to transform.

____________________________________________

3. Are you willing to let go of your confusion, replace it with your purpose, and transform yourself to find everything you seek?

This is your happiness.

____________________________________________

He tells you, sometimes it is harder to let go than to hold on, and leaves you in a gentle breeze of hope.

Take courage! You’re worth the effort!

You are now going to find many treasures and KNOW what you DID NOT know, to be truly happy from the inside out. Existing in a safe place where no one can steal your joy.

Congratulations!

Get ready to celebrate transforming yourself into the unrepeatable, super fabulous diamond of a person, called – YOU.

Copyright 2010 Deb Scott. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

MC: If I gave you God’s phone number, what would you do with it?

JT: Well, I’d have to call. Partly it would be curiosity. But another part would be the idea of hooking up to some natural voice speaking in English for the God Energy. There is this thing about God Energy. We’re swimming in it. It’s swimming in us. I’d have to see if I could really talk with this.

MC: What do you think you would say?

JT: Hmm… [pause] …That would depend on when you asked me. If you asked me today “this may be too mundane” but I would want to ask God why so much of our lives, my life, are ruled by money. I do five different things for a living, and the ones that I do the very best are the ones I don’t get to do often enough and don’t get to make enough money doing. I’ve been asking this God Energy this question a lot of times. The last couple of days I’ve been painting the roof of a barn. I make my own hours and all that, but it’s not what I do. It’s not who I am. I want an answer to that question.

MC: If this God Energy gave you an answer, what do you think that answer might be?

You know…I guess the answer’s pretty obvious. It would be: “Hey, I didn’t design it that way. Other people did that, and I may be able to tell you how it’s going to turn out, but this is your trip. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to figure it out.”

I guess that’s always true. But it’s strange to me that there are so many great poets walking around on the Earth, and only some are making a living. There are so many that are struggling so hard. Yet the number-one-grossing business in this country is weaponry. There’s something there that’s really out of whack.

MC: Would you want to ask God about this?

JT: I wouldn’t ask God why it is that weapons are such a popular business. I know that that’s not God’s doing. I think I know the answer, it is that profit is more important to this culture than God.

A whole culture can be based on profit because people are unhappy. Somehow they think that attaining more will change that and make them happier. Maybe I would ask God what could I do about it. But I don’t know. [Deep sigh]

I could do what the Berrigans did and go into weapons plants and destroy those guns and get thrown into jail. I don’t know if that would answer anything. I really honor them for having done that, but I don’t know if that changes things.

I can try to find time and space to make more art. I do think that a person making a poem, speaking it out loud, even if it’s in their bedroom and nobody else is around, is a very healing thing. I think it’s a very mystical thing.

There is an energy to speaking our poetry, really Speaking with a capital S. I think we have to ask ourselves what is this stuff, this energy, and also really revel in the mystery of what that is.

MC: Is this what you call the God Energy, this stuff that you are talking about?

JT: I think it is. This spirit is in everything. It’s in you. It’s in the bricks. It’s in the trees. And it’s so much more that that. And yet, I really get tongue-tied at this point because it’s…[pause] …this Being, the Big Being is all around, and we’re in it.
When we get caught up in the daily struggle of paying bills, it’s real easy to lose track of that. To not recognize that you’re eating miracles all the time.

So I have a mixed feeling about someone’s saying, “Here’s God’s number, you can just call up.” On one hand I feel like I’m already right there in the middle of it. I should be able to get all the answers. They are internalized. They’re here.

And then again, there’s a part of me that says, “Yeah, I want to not only get the phone number, I want the address, fax number…email. I want to look into this face and see the face that’s behind the face.”

So many times in my life I’ve wanted to see that face in a really joyful way. I’m doing some great dance, and I really want to be grateful about it. Then there’re times when “I’ve been there a bit lately” I want to see this face because I just want to say, “Come on, you know, what is this? Give me a break and make it clear!”

MC: You’re talking about being in the throes of the trials and tribulations of our human existence…I really wonder if having such a number would make our trials any easier. I don’t know.

JT: Well, I think the big mistake that’s been made about God in so many church philosophies is that they think they understand God. They think they know what and who God is and what God looks like. And I think that’s a big mistake right there.
We’re not supposed to get this. It’s supposed to be a mystery. And the fact is that it’s the mystery that I really love. I really love the fact that we can spend all of our lifetimes trying to figure this out and put a name on it. And it can’t be done. At some point, when we see the real vision, there’s just no way it could be explained in human terms. No name would make it. No words could describe it.

It might actually be that if we dialed the phone number, the top of our heads would completely explode!

Copyright 2010 Mare Cromwell. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

CHAPTER FOUR: How the “Unconscious” Works – Understanding Our Etheric Bodies

Higher Selves Quote:

The Thought Form Body is an invisible body that contains realities that have been created through every thought generated by any individual at any point in time. Within this envelope [energy field] dwells many different “yous.” There is the “you,” for example, who lives in this altered reality as an actual energy identity who is poor, who has no money.

This altered reality has been created by you based on every thought you’ve projected dealing with a state of financial lack. This altered reality that is the “you” in a state of financial lack actually seeks to reinforce and empower itself, the altered reality that it has become. This then, quite outside of your conscious thought process, allows that altered reality to continue to grow and manifest its power and its authority over you in the physical form in the physical reality.

“Imagine what it would be like to hold on to every thought you have ever had from the first moment you were born. Imagine that each thought was actual energy that did not disappear but hung out in some energy field surrounding you. And imagine that this thought energy had some magnetic qualities so that every type of thought you’d had over the years drew all other similar thoughts to it, like magnets with the same polarity. Then imagine that all these thoughts, or energy identities, have created actual altered realities in the space around yourself. And as you grew up, these energy identities, and the altered realities they created, became larger and larger with each thought.”

To illustrate the different concepts throughout the book, I will offer many examples in order to make them easier to understand. To do that, it will be necessary in the early stages to oversimplify somewhat. However, as each chapter unfolds, revealing additional information, more complexity is woven into the picture. By the end of the book, you will see the whole of how our lives work, how each individual can take the reins of his/her life, and how to achieve true change. In looking back, however, you will notice how the picture had to be broken out into various pieces before it could then become whole. Let’s begin with an example of how thoughts create energy identities and how these, in turn, create altered realities.

Perhaps you’re someone who has focused on your weight throughout your life. Maybe as a small child you went through a chubby stage, and sometimes people around you would suggest that you refrain from a second helping. At first you paid it no mind, but then your consciousness took it in. You began to think that you were bigger than your cousins and friends the same age. You started thinking thoughts of needing to eat less candy and desserts. You found yourself rating how some friends or family members looked based on their weight. The issue built slowly for you as you went through being teased in school.

‘As an adult, you’ve struggled with your weight, trying diet after diet with limited success. And all this time, you’ve been harboring thoughts about being overweight. These similar thoughts are magnetically attracted to each other, building thought forms such as “I’m too fat,” “I eat too much,” “I’m a failure at losing weight,” and/or “I’m unlovable because I’m fat.” All these thought forms tirelessly develop an altered reality of your struggling with your weight.

Thought Form Body

Thoughts of every type have created thought forms in each of us. They come in all sizes, some tiny and some huge, with many in between, depending on the degree of thought put into them. As the Higher Selves stated in the above quote, the invisible envelope (energy field) around us, the place where these positive and negative energy identities call home, is the Thought Form Body. It isn’t actually a physical body but is instead held in an etheric energy field everyone carries with them. It contains all the thoughts of joy, fear, love, hate, hurt, illness, wealth, poverty, and ideas of the self, others, relationships, work, play, and on and on. All thoughts are held here, magnetically attracting similar thoughts from many sources, thereby building and strengthening all of our thought forms. They create all the altered realities that live with us in our Thought Form Body.

Suspending disbelief for a minute, let’s take this a few steps further by looking at how our mind works. Do we tend to think more positively or negatively as we go throughout our day? Most of you know the answer to this already.

For example, if we wake up feeling good, having had a good night’s sleep, we might think, “Oh, I feel great today! I have so much energy; I’m sure this will be a good day.” And then we go on our way and may never think of it again. Despite feeling really good, we actually tend to spend little time thinking about it. Feeling good helps us focus on the things we have to accomplish that day, resulting in thoughts geared toward those activities other than the state of feeling good.

But what happens if we sleep poorly and wake up with a backache, headache, or stiff neck? Don’t we often express a litany of complaints about it to friends or co-workers? And if a repairman or deliveryman comes by and politely asks, “How are you,” what do we say? If we feel good, we most likely just say, “Fine, and you?” But if our neck still hurts, we say, “Well, since you asked, I am having a bad day, starting with . . .”

The tendency to dwell on the negative outweighs our tendency to think positively, and every day we do so we strengthen those misery magnets. This means that when we look at the balance or the ratio of negative energy identities to positive ones, the scale weighs heavily on the negative side. This serves none of us well.

Drive to Manifestation

“Thought forms are soulless and mindless. They lack consciousness. However, they carry the power of magnetic attraction. This magnetic energy is working 24/7. In fact, it does not just attract our own thoughts but all similar thoughts from many sources, including other people. This is not a conscious act any more than an actual magnet consciously attracts. What is the result of all this attraction?”

“The result of magnetic attraction is that the energy identities (and the altered realities they create) continue to build in strength. At the point that they’re strong enough, they manifest into our physical reality. In fact, their sole purpose is to manifest. The manifestation process from all of our energy identities is what forms our outer expression or, in other words, our lives.”

For example, if it is cold and rainy outside, we may think throughout the day that we have to keep warm and dry so we don’t get sick. We see ads on TV about various cold remedies, which remind us to check what we have on hand just in case. We remember the time last year when we got the worst cold ever and had to miss work. Flu season is here and we plan to get a flu shot. We believe that all schools are breeding grounds for illnesses and have no patience for parents who send their children to school with a cold. We also believe that we are susceptible to every germ with which we come in contact. In this way, we are empowering our illness thought form (one that we already have) over and over again. And what do you know? Despite all our efforts to prevent it, we come down with a massive cold two weeks later and blame it on the time we spent helping out at our daughter’s pre-school.

In fact, getting sick was a result of the altered reality of illness gaining enough strength to manifest itself in our physical reality as a cold. It attracted the opportunity when you were asked to volunteer to read to your child’s pre-school class. This then triggered and empowered your beliefs (based on your thoughts) that you were now exposed to the germs that you were convinced would make you sick. And they did.

“Isn’t it just that colds are contagious? No. If that were the case, every teacher, parent, and student who came in contact with children would get sick. Each individual responds to each situation based on what thought forms he/she is creating for him/herself. That is why some children/teachers have perfect attendance and others are chronically sick or somewhere in between. Of course, this process is more complex than I have presented. But the basic principles are the same.”

Other examples are: If you have a large victim thought form, it will magnetically attract conditions that will make you a victim once more. If you have a failure pattern, the thought forms will bring in situations that will again result in failure. If you bring in mates that make you crazy with their infidelity, the thought forms may keep you in a cycle of betrayal. The process of manifestation will be explained more fully in Chapter Six, but our thought forms are the primary source for the patterns we have in our lives.

Habit Body

In addition to the Thought Form Body, we also carry a Habit Body. The Habit Body is another invisible envelope of energy (field) surrounding us that contains imprints of every thought and every action. Thoughts create energy identities and habit imprints simultaneously. And as the imprints of similar thoughts get deeper and deeper, they become our most ingrained habits. As we smoke/worry/procrastinate/and so on, the imprints/ruts are reinforced again. In other words, the depth of a habit imprint in the Habit Body is relative to how often we have thought the thought and/or acted the deeper the rut, the more automatic and intense the habit. There are no energy identities in the Habit Body, but the habit imprints empower the thoughts and vice versa.

“Have you ever noticed that you wake up five mornings out of seven at the exact same time? Or that you get a cup of coffee without thinking before you start any project? Or that you put on your left shoe before your right one every morning? These are simple, repetitive habits that are easy to see and are relatively harmless in the scheme of things. Of course, we all have deeper and more complicated ones, so it is very important that we pay attention to all our habits. These habit imprints work with Thought Forms to reinforce our patterns. These two working together are in part what makes it so difficult to change things about ourselves with which we are unhappy. The more ingrained a habit, the more we act on it and think about it. The thought form gains power and then manifests again, and then again.”

One of my habits for over ten years was to sleep only three or four hours a night. Once I’d wake up, I would never be able to go back to sleep, resulting in chronic exhaustion. Fortunately, by doing the exercises that the Higher Selves taught us, I was successful at changing this pattern, and those sleepless years are now a distant memory. Now I sleep at least five to six hours a night with few exceptions. I still wake up many nights, but the difference is I go back to sleep. Of course, five or six hours are not enough. Fortunately, I have continued to improve, sleeping seven plus hours a night at least three times every week. Habits can be changed, and you can do it too.

The Overall Picture

Remember that we live as humans in a Free Will Kingdom, that we choose how our lives unfold. If something happens that changes our thought patterns for a day or week, we will empower different energy identities and habit imprints and will, therefore, manifest differently than we did in prior weeks.

One example many can relate to is the unexpected death of a young friend or family member. The new vulnerability we now feel may make us realize that we have been complacent about life. As a result, we decide to focus more on preventing illness by eating healthy food and exercising. We also become more open to telling our family every day how much we love them and perhaps resolve to work harder to be a better person so that there are no regrets if we die young. Were we thinking this way before? No, but we are now. So our energy identities and habit imprints are changing as a reflection of the changes in our thought patterns.

What is more significant, however, is how often we are determined to change only to find our old habits return. How many of us with great intentions find ourselves back in the same place within days/weeks/months? How many times have we had to use the same New Year’s resolution because we didn’t accomplish it this year or the prior years? Why are there so many new diets on the market, multiple no-smoking aids, a myriad of solutions for depression, insomnia, etc? Why are there so many self-help books? Because for all our grand efforts and deep desire to change, we predictably find ourselves back in the same place, having made little lasting forward movement. This does not feel good. There are reasons why change is so hard, and this is why I wrote Choices. We need help to make the changes. There is much more to it than thinking positive thoughts. Let’s take a look at the Law of Attraction.

The Law of Attraction Clarified

Higher Selves Quote:

Thought forms are what carry the impact of what you will outwardly manifest. This is not a process that will be reached through affirmations or through consciously speaking words. For the process of thought forms is one that goes very, very deep. Thought forms are carried from lifetime to lifetime so that the buildup of these “altered realities” is very intense and very powerful.

What exactly is the Law of Attraction? It seems to be the basis of many metaphysical self-help books (including The Secret) and even has its place in some religious teachings. Simply stated, it posits that thoughts are energy and are magnetic in nature. They attract to you situations and people that match your predominant thoughts, whether conscious or unconscious. The bottom line, therefore, is like attracts like. The more positively you think, the more positive your life will be. Every individual is responsible for what they bring into their lives. Is there more to it than this? Yes.

If you have understood the information in Choices up to now, there is a good chance you see that the Thought Form Body information seems similar to the Law of Attraction. Both involve magnetic attraction that brings situations, conditions and people into our lives based on our thoughts. However, you may also be beginning to see that there needs to be more than positive thought to create real change in your life. Of course, there are people who have changed their thoughts from the negative to positive, who have brought more good into their lives than before. But what does it mean for those of us who didn’t find success by thinking positively, yet worked as hard or harder than the others who did? What about those who achieved results but didn’t recognize that what they got was either the exact right result (even if unexpected) or that it was only the first step in a process that would lead them to the final goal? What about the patterns that keep recurring in life despite the efforts to change them? Or the emotional upheavals that make us behave in ways we’re not proud of?

What has been missing in the prior teachings on the Law of Attraction is the fact that it has not been fully understood. The Higher Selves didn’t change the Law. They explain how it works. And there are two misconceptions that need to be cleared up. One, a positive thought does not negate or replace a negative thought. It only empowers the positive energy identities while the negative ones remain to magnetically attract negative situations, conditions and people into our lives. Because we harbor so much more of the negative, the positives we empower through our thoughts are still extremely weak compared to the powerful negatives. In Part II, Choices will describe a more efficient and powerful way to empower your positive thought forms, growing them to where they are increased 1000-fold.

The second misconception is that even if you never think a negative thought ever again, it doesn’t mean that the negative energy identities go away. Once created, the thought energy exists forever. Leaving those negative altered realities in place is what makes it so difficult for us to change. Whether negative or positive, the energy remains in place in our etheric bodies as thought forms and habit imprints. When these are positive, we can rejoice. When they are negative, we are concerned with what we do about them. What we must do is to neutralize the negative energies to render them harmless and incapable of magnetically attracting anything that could hurt us. Neutralizing the negatives and using that energy to empower our light is the key to change and is fully explained in Part II. Again, the Higher Selves didn’t change the Law of Attraction but added details about how it functions. Choices will show you how you can properly utilize it to your advantage.

The Shift From Victim to Taking Charge

Once we accept that we are living in a Free Will Kingdom, and that we are making both conscious and unconscious choices that create our experiences, we can find our way to take responsibility for what happens to us. So the shift goes from blaming someone, something or some event for our problem/s to looking at ourselves and asking, “Why did I bring this into my life?” “How can I change this reality?” Or “How can I prevent it from happening again?”

There is no judgment here. We are not all screw-ups who just can’t get it right. Instead, we acknowledge that we are all experiencing the human condition. Everyone has challenges to face, joys to experience, moments of wonder and moments of despair. What will be explained is the way to be actively involved in how your life unfolds. There is no magic pill to take and presto . . .you have changed. If it took years and lifetimes to develop our patterns, undoing these patterns won’t be instantaneous. However, with consistent effort, we can change our patterns, find what was hidden and untapped, and definitely improve our lives significantly.

In a year from now we will all be one year older. We can still be in the same place, coping with the same issues. Or we can use the simple Higher Self techniques and make this year and every year a witness to us becoming much more of what we want to be. We understand our conscious choices. And now we understand how our own thought forms and habit imprints, through the process of magnetic attraction, work with our conscious choices to create the outer expression we call our lives. Someone else isn’t creating our lives. It isn’t Mother Nature, your jerky boss, or a vindictive god picking on you. We are busy making and playing out our patterns consciously and unconsciously, then, taking what life gives us and handling it as best we can. Now is the time to be in charge, and we can be. We are not doomed. We are not stuck. We are not powerless.

Read more about CHOICES: Neutralizing Your Negative Thoughts and Emotional Blueprints and Janet Richmond HERE.

Copyright 2010 Janet Richmond. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt
Am I Walking Worthy?

Often times I wonder, am I walking worthy of my calling? Am I walking circumspectly and not as a fool? What about my prayer life? Is it effective? What can I do to improve it? Am I studying enough? These are all questions that many Christians should be asking of themselves? It is called self-evaluation. You take a critical, spiritual look at yourself and ask the Holy Spirit to show you where you are weak.

Other questions I ask myself are: Do the people I allow in my inner circle bring me down or do they lift me up? What about myself? Do I encourage others to seek God’s face and to study His Word to improve their walk? What about my light? Is it shining brightly or is it dimly lit?

Every day I strive to honor God and bring Him glory. When I shared these questions with my “first friend,” a fellow minister, he welcomed me into the Christian club or the minister’s club. (I get to pick which one.) He reassured me that God will let me know if I pull too far away from Him. His response was comforting.

I like the idea that I am asking myself all of these questions because that lets me know that I am not spiritually dead. In fact, I am growing and maturing in my Christian walk. I am running in this Christian race because of my deep rooted love for God. He made it possible for me to be alive and well in this day and age. I have lived through three decades which is more than what most people lived to see.

Now, back to my initial question about whether or not am I walking worthy of my calling.  Honestly, I believe that I am. Every day, I encounter situations that can make me or break me. I can set my eyes on God and come out as a victor or I can focus my energy on my situation and come out defeated. I would not want that added stress when all I have to do is give everything over to God? To walk circumspectly simply means that I walk in my Christian life looking for opportunities around me to glorify God.. It means that I look for a chance to share God with others. As an ambassador of God, I look for opportunities to assist/minister to those who are lost and struggling and need encouragement and I look for those who are saved and need to see Christ lived out.Martin Luther said it best, “The world does not consider labor a blessing, therefore it flees and hates it, but the pious who fear the Lord labor with a ready and cheerful heart, for they know God’s command and they acknowledge His calling.”

When God gives you life, He expects you to live it. Not as you see fit, but as He sees fit. His ways are not like man’s and His path is not crooked and wide, but straight and narrow. And your destination (whether it’s on the wide and crooked path or on the straight and narrow path), is truly left up to you.

Copyright 2010 Satara P. Ferguson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

In a recent book, The Friendship Crisis, Marla Paul evokes nostalgia for her mother’s weekly bridge club. She remembers getting out of bed to spy on them, recalls the laughter and “gossipy whispers floating upstairs like a promise…a glimpse of my future.”  That generation “sank roots into neighborhoods like an ancient oak…playing bridge…with the same women for decades.”  No friendship crisis then.
Bridge Table is about the history and pop culture of the kind of bridge played by Marla Paul’s mom—sociable bridge (as opposed to serious bridge). That airy title question—What’s Trump Anyway?—reflects the spirit and the essence of sociable bridge. In a serious game, the question would be appalling—someone might call the director. During a sociable bridge game? Not a big thing.
This is informal history, told in fifty-two “cards” and four “hands” (like bridge) of notes, quotes, anecdotes, menus, recipes, trivia, opinion. Bridge & Me is a sub-theme.
Sociable bridge can be defined as a melding of friendships that last for decades, food, and a stress-free bridge game symbolized by the bridge table around which food is shared and a classic card game played. Its millions of women players are a subterranean sisterhood—uncounted and uncountable.

Bridge Table, far as I know, is the first book to tell the story of sociable bridge. It hopscotches down the paper trail left by the ladies-only bridge club in women’s magazines and cookbooks of the 20s through the 60s, the New York Times, general magazines, and books on popular culture and bridge history.
As a cookbook, Bridge Table is in the “armchair”  category—more about old cookbooks and food history than cooking, more about menus than recipes—intended to nudge readers to seek out old cookbooks and recipes, throw a Retro bridge party, and/or revive the classic menus of ladies-only lunch.
You don’t have to play bridge to enjoy Bridge Table—but women of today ought to learn! Science is tellng us these days that for a dementia-free old age, it’s better to have played bridge badly than never to have played at all.
The 90s were the Retro decade and the nostalgia for her mom’s bridge club reflected in Marla Paul’s Friendship Crisis is part of that whole Retro trend. By the 90s, those same boomer students of the 60s who rejected their parents’ pop culture began   taking up, in Retro, icons of the 50s suburban lifestyle— martinis, steak houses, bridge.  Can a revival of ladies-only lunch and its gender menus be far behind?
In Robert Parker’s mystery, Back Story, a college student of the 60s recalls the prevailing attitude on campus back then. “My father was in the Rotary Club, for God’s sake. My mother played f—— bridge!”  Anything parents did (and they certainly played a lot of bridge in the 50s and 60s) “we couldn’t possibly do.”
That hostility era is all over now and today there is a spurt of 50-plus newcomers to bridge, both serious and sociable. The time is right for Bridge Table.

Historically, sociable bridge is the unwanted offspring of its serious bridge parents—the bridge establishment and the ACBL (American Contract Bridge League). Except for a few golden years in the 30s, there’s always been an unbridgeable chasm between the two kinds of bridge.  One bridge player back in the early days described sociable bridge as “kitchen bridge…the lowest form of bridge life.”
That we (sociables) outnumber them (serious players) by the millions is evidence that sociable bridge players have never been concerned about what their “betters”  thought of them. The ladies-only bridge club has been despised by the bridge establishment (for its casual, chatty bridge game), by the culinary establishment (for its Jell-O salads and creamy somethings on toast) and by moral critics who took the women to task for wasting time on bridge.
Today bridge is thought of as a game for older women, retirees, senior centers. Until the 70s, however, bridge was at the heart of America’s social life for women of all ages—a middle class tradition passed on from mother to daughter.  For college-bound daughters, learning to play bridge was like a rite of passage. If they didn’t learn to play bridge at home, they learned at college. Bridge was rampant in dorms and sororities.
Then came campus turmoil, feminism and Betty Friedan. For young women, taking up mom’s favorite bridge game at college was no longer politically correct. Their mothers, on the other hand, mostly went right on playing bridge with their bridge clubs—unto today. Some were members of three or four  women-only clubs.
Sociable bridge is a phenomenon of popular culture and women’s history. Serious bridge, because it has the American Contract Bridge League to see to it, will survive. The survival of sociable bridge, on the other hand (along with the ritual gender menus of ladies lunch) depends upon boomer daughters taking up their mom’s favorite game so that it doesn’t die off with my generation of ever-older bridge-playing women.
It took two women’s movements of the 19th century merged with a classic card game to create the ladies-only bridge club tradition. It deserves to survive another hundred years.

One is supposed to answer three questions in a book’s introduction—why this book, why now—which I’ve answered. Why me is the third, and why so late in life? What took so long?
I first thought to do a bridge cookbook back in 1960, and actually started to write one then, and again in 1987.  An anthology of popular culture writing, Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf, happened upon at Miami Public Library in 1987, completely sidetracked me into popular culture and the history of bridge. One thing leads to another when you like to hang out at libraries and browse the book stacks! Bridge Table was no longer just a cookbook project and I was hooked.
The problem is, hanging out at the library is fun, settling down to put all those notes you gather into a book is hard work. No one was out there waiting for my book manuscript and so it became my dabbling hobby for two decades.
I made several serious efforts over the years to organize my notes into an outline–usually when I came across some new bit of information that galvanized me for a few months. I did so in 1995, 1999, 2001—only to quit in frustration.
Then, around 2003, I came upon If You Can Talk You Can Write by Joel Saltzman. His 50-short-chapter format in five sections was a light bulb moment. For my bridge book, 52 short chapters in four sections (like a bridge deck) was the answer. I would, however, call them “cards”  and “hands.” Saltzman believes in adapting other writers’ solutions to your own work—so I did.  After that, I knew the book was do-able.
I have no excuse for the years after 2004 except  procrastination, thinking I’ll live forever. Then, in 2007 (by this time I’m 87!), someone suggested to me I’d probably never finish Bridge Table because I subconsciously felt I’d die if I finished it.
Well! That led me to thinking, what would happen to all my books and cookbooks and fifty-two files and boxes of 3 x 5’s I’d collected over the years if I died before publishing the book? Like Marley forcing Scrooge, to witness his own funeral I envisioned my daughter Maria having to deal with the “stuff”   from years of research—putting it all into black plastic bags and depositing in the condo dumpster.
That did it. I resolved to finish the book manuscript by the end of 2008, edit and refine in 2009, and have it in print by the end of that year—or toss it all into the dumpster myself on January 1, 2010.  Despite that generous two-year schedule, I just barely made my deadline.

Because Bridge Table is entirely based on the paper trail found in libraries, what’s missing are stories of real women—recollections of those who lived through the 50s and 60s and hears stories of their mother’s bridge club back to the 20s.
Depending upon response from readers and the energy of this author, perhaps with the magic of the internet, Bridge Table or What’s Trump Anyway?  can be the catalyst for  making the ladies-only bridge lunch part of gender food studies by scholars, and bridge club memories part of women’s history.
A way, finally, of being counted.
Maggy Simony, 2009

First Hand

No one in 1925 could have predicted that by the close of the decade, auction bridge would be well on its way to oblivion.
During the early years of the twentieth century, card playing was frowned upon for religious reasons in many parts of America. Even then, exception was often made for bridge. Bridge, like its forbear whist, had always enjoyed special status—different somehow from other card games. Many churches would make an exception for bridge, allowing fundraising bridge events on their premises.
Middletown is a groundbreaking study of mid-American popular culture, by Helen and Robert Lynd, published in 1929. The town studied was said to be Muncie, Indiana. Comparing newspaper accounts of card parties in 1890 and 1923, the authors found just one such party in a three-month period in 1890, thirty for the same three months in 1923. That figure of thirty, they said, “would probably be greatly increased if more of the informal clubs could have been found and included.”  From the start, and unto today, sociable bridge has been an uncountable activity because of absence of a paper trail..
This increase in playing cards was credited to post-World War I prosperity, the revolutionary 48-hour work week, and changing social mores. A mass of people for the first time had leisure time formerly enjoyed by only the better-off. Playing bridge had spread from fad status amongst New York’s upper class to middle class America. By 1924, according to the Lynds, the bias against card playing had virtually disappeared, except amongst “religious working class families.”

The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1927)
Fannie Farmer died in 1915; her name and cookbooks live on. This 1927 edition was edited by Cora Perkins, had the same preface as the 1923 edition, and included most of A New Book of Cookery (sequel to the original 1896 cookbook) published in 1912 by Fannie herself.
It is a very different book from the original 1896 edition, with four times as many salads. And yes, indeed, this later edition includes several of the silly salads that have been put forward by critics as dreadful examples of the domestic science influence on American cuisine.
Heliofolis Salad, for example, combines celery, apples and tomatoes with parboiled green pepper. Dixie Salad is a combination of endive, apples, tomatoes and hardboiled eggs. Rosalie Salad is an odd combination of celery root, canned peaches and pistachio nuts. A cup of celery and half a cup of peanuts: voila, another salad.
The banana salad in the original cookbook is still there, along with Banana Salad II, which is bananas cut in thirds crosswise, rolled in chopped peanuts and arranged on lettuce with sliced tangerine.
Los Angeles Fruit Salad combines marshmallows with canned pineapple, oranges, walnuts and Malaga grapes that have been seeded, peeled and cut in half.
Waldorf Salad, created by the chef of the Waldorf-Astoria is included, and it survives today, with variations, often at supermarket deli counters.
Moquin Salad is an example of a recipe intended, by the domestic science movement aficionados, to take the drudgery out of cooking by engaging the cook’s creativity. Oh, the work involved! Moquin Salad calls for three-quarters cup of grapes that have not only been peeled and seeded, but stuffed with strips of pimento. They are then combined with two and one-half cups of orange and tangerine sections freed from their seeds and white membrane. A quarter cup of finely chopped nuts are mashed into a “large cream cheese”  and moistened with enough French dressing to enable forming into grape-sized balls. The stuffed grapes, citrus segments and grape-sized cream cheese balls are then arranged attractively on lettuce.
Jell-O was invented soon after Fannie published her original cookbook. With its flavors and jewel-like colors, the potential for ladies lunch menus to include congealed salads, aspics and desserts of every flavor and hue was limitless. Decorative jellied salads, says Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad, were seen as especially appropriate for ladies, “reflecting the image of frailty attached to the women who made them.”  Often it’s hard to tell whether a recipe is for a salad or a dessert. Easy, said Jell-O: if it’s a dessert it gets a dab of whipped cream, if it’s a salad, a dab of mayonnaise.

Electric Refrigerator Recipes (1927)
General Electric created the first widely-used electric refrigerator, and with it published a cookbook, written by Alice Bradley. It is a lovely little book in a cover elegant enough to contain a book of poetry. Bradley compares owning an electric refrigerator to “almost having an Aladdin’s lamp and not knowing the right way to rub it”  and promises that with this book women can make all the drug store favorites. “Why go out to the soda fountain when you can have a chocolate or maple nut sundae at an instant’s notice by visiting your own refrigerator?”
There always had been frozen salads (like gelatin, freezing offered another total control device for messy veggies and fruit salads) but the freezing process had been complicated. Now anybody with a refrigerator could serve frozen salads, while at the same time show off a bit, impress guests, and proclaim that this hostess already had discarded her icebox. This hostess did not have to put a Need Ice card in the window for the ice man, or put up with his muddy feet when he delivered it.
The following two frozen salads are typical, but why freeze them, except to impress upon guests that one owned a refrigerator?
General Electric’s recipe for Frozen Lobster Salad called for combining a cup of lobster (or fish, shrimp, chicken) with half a cup of white sauce and half a cup of stock in which a tablespoon of gelatin had been soaked and dissolved, a bit of salt and nutmeg. Chill until the mixture is thickened. Fold in three-quarters cup of heavy cream that has been beaten until stiff and one-half cup of mayonnaise. Freeze in a refrigerator tray. Serve on a bed of lettuce.
Frozen Pineapple Salad is the kind of 1920s salad that earns the scorn of modern food critics, resembling a dessert more than a salad. Combine half a cup of cream cheese blended with quarter cup of salad dressing. Beat in half a pound of marshmallows cut fine, and a small can of crushed pineapple. Whip a half pint of cream until stiff, fold in. Freeze three hours. Serve with salad dressing and a cherry—pass hot toasted crackers.

Read more about Bridge Table or What’s Trump Anyway? and Maggy Simony HERE.

Copyright 2009 Maggy Simony. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

PREFACE
The book you are about to read is God revealed and will change your life forever. Inspiration Divine foretells a journey you and mankind will take together. Unlike other books that seek to enlighten you with a new perspective, Inspiration Divine seeks to guide you down the path of your own enlightenment so that you may unlock the keys to your full human potential. In short, this book will reveal your purpose and through this purpose, you will find enlightenment.
A lot of people talk about enlightenment as if it were a state of mind that only a privileged few are capable of attaining. Similarly other people play down enlightenment as if it were nothing more than a heightened state of awareness. Neither statement is true, nor would anyone who is truly enlightened describe enlightenment in these ways. For enlightenment is a connection to God that reveals not only a complete understanding of everything you desire to know, but also provides a path to understanding everything you don’t desire to know. That’s a whole lot of information to know and thus enlightenment isn’t as much about knowing as it is about knowing how to understand. And this ability to understand is available to each and every one of us including you.
Similarly, enlightenment doesn’t have anything to do with religion. This isn’t to say that the understanding one can attain through enlightenment will be in conflict with one’s religion, but so too, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be in conflict either. In spirit and intent, enlightenment is above religion as it embodies a direct and communal relationship with God directly rather than through what others have written about God (no matter how divinely inspired their message was or not).
Simply put, enlightenment is a connection to truth. No matter what we believe about the Universe, God or Humanity, the truth is the truth. Our opinions about what is true or what is not true is irrelevant and we have a better than average chance that our current set of beliefs aren’t entirely true. One thing is for certain: enlightenment will be a humbling experience.
When we embrace the grace of the divine and the truth as being beyond reproach, we open up our hearts and minds beyond our current mode of operating in the world. And this is great news, for both the faithful and the atheist desire the truth. They may have contradictory points of view on what they believe the truth to be, but they both truly seek the truth. And in enlightenment they will both find the truth (one of them is going to be greatly disappointed).
Even staunch atheists like Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, are calling for a new revelation of the truth:
Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. (Hitchens 2007)
What Hitchens is alluding to is the capability of enlightenment to be possible in every human being rather than a handful of prophets. And while it would be an odd world where God selectively picked who should be enlightened, our religious history certainly depicts Divine communication being highly selective. And with enlightenment not being a regularly occurring experience in our lives and the ancient texts demonstrating it only being blessed upon a select few, we’ve wrongly assumed that enlightenment isn’t possible for us. And so we don’t even consider it something worth pursuing.
Consider for a moment, if enlightenment was possible for you and the rest of mankind. What if we’ve been missing the messages from God that are all around us? What if our enlightenment was not only possible, but also part of our human evolution?  Consider the possibility that the keys to enlightenment are in our hands and we only need to learn how to insert the key and turn the lock.
Spiritual Evolution
The message documented in Inspiration Divine is not a self-help prescription nor does it contain mystical secrets that have eluded mankind. The lessons that you will learn by reading these pages are drawn from the messages that have been broadcast to mankind since the dawn of time. Only now are we awakening to these lessons and tuning in to listen like never before. These messages have existed since the beginning and are actually interwoven into our cultures, religions and fundamental assumptions. Beyond the wisdom conveyed by those that have previously discovered these lessons, you too will find that you have heard these messages deep within the essence of your soul. However, there is much more available to you.
Inherent in life are the keys to understanding everything. However, through the ages we have lost the ability to listen and thus we seek that which is actually already within our possession. From the very beginning, mankind has wrestled with elementary questions that we still desire to be answered:
Why am I here?
What is my purpose?
Who is God?
From there, our questions branch into many directions, but the underlying answers continue to elude mankind. Trying to make sense of it all seems to be impossible and thus most of Humanity leaves this task to those that study philosophy, psychology and theology. But even though we tell ourselves that the answers are beyond our grasp, we still desire to understand the Universe, God and Humanity.
The path to this understanding is inherently part of living and surprisingly simple. In fact, the path is so elemental that your Mind may reject it for not being complex enough. Our Minds are advanced thinking machines that crave complexity despite our attempt to simplify our lives. So too, we have established a partial understanding of life through our cultures, religions and personal experiences. In combination, our Minds tell us that the truth must be complex and in line with what we already believe to be true. And so we continue through life with the answers to these questions all around us, without an awareness of how close we are to the truth.
The world in which we live is advancing to an inflection point of enlightenment as is evident by the exponential change that is occurring around the world. Each and every day we create more information, knowledge and wisdom than we did the previous day. In Karl Fisch’s Did You Know presentation (Fisch 2007), he chronicled many of the amazing statistics that describe the exponential times we’re living in:
* The first commercial text message was sent in December 2002; the number of text messages sent today exceeds the population of the planet.
* There are more than 8 billion searches performed on Internet Search Engines every month (4.1 billion on Google alone).
* There are more than 540,000 words in the English language; about 5 times as many as during Shakespeare’s time.
* The amount of technical information being produced is doubling every two years and is estimated to soon double every day.
As we expand this collective knowledge, we gain insight, perspective and a bit more of the truth. Whereas previous generations could passively pursue the truth, our generation is called to an active participation in living the truth. In short, we are being called to understand.
Inspiration Divine foretells the evolution of mankind from a physical existence to a Spiritual existence. When most of us think of evolution, we envision Charles Darwin shocking the world with his evolutionary description of our lineage to our primate cousins. And while Darwin’s focus was largely biological, even he was aware of the future that awaits Humanity:
As man advances in civilization and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If indeed such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow creatures. (Darwin 1871)
As Darwin warned, the solidarity of mankind is a future state that we have yet to reach. The physical lives we live today fail to provide us with a path to solidarity or any glimpse that this path is in our near future. Clearly our physical evolution has brought us quite far, but the rest of the journey will require us moving to the next phase in our evolution: a Spiritual existence.
As you have gone through life, you have no doubt experienced amazing coincidences, ironic threads between two or more people in your life and chance encounters that could not be logically explained. We have all had “ah-ha” moments in which an idea leaps into our head or the answer to a seemingly unsolvable problem suddenly reveals itself to us. Moreover, even if these moments are rare, they provide us with a glimpse into the potential of a Spiritual existence. Inspiration Divine reveals how these connections operate in the Universe and how we can tap into God’s wisdom in order to achieve our hopes and dreams.
Understanding Inspiration Divine
Inspiration generally refers to an unconscious burst of creativity, but in the context of divine inspiration we’re invoking its original Roman relation to the term afflatus:
Cicero, in the oration for Archias, speaks of the poet as one who was breathed upon or into by some divine spirit, – poetam quasi divino spiritu inflari. Plato held the same view with regard to poetry. He believed that the poet was often so inspired that he said things that he did not himself fully understand.
“Himself From God he could not free;
He builded better than he know.”
Josephus, who was a cotemporary of Paul, in his first book against Apion, speaks of the twenty-two sacred books of the Jews as having been written by an inspiration which came from God, or according to a breathing upon them of God. (Evans 2004)
Similarly the term Divine, which has many meanings, refers to the concept that human beings are “God revealed” — living representations of God on Earth as they live in accordance with God’s intent. In combination, Inspiration Divine is about expanding our consciousness to tap into personal prophecy (the disclosing of information that is not known to the prophet by any ordinary means). (Davison 2005) Rabbinic scholar Maimonides, suggested that “prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man’s rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty.” (Sunwall 1996)
Thus the title Inspiration Divine describes Humanity’s path to enlightenment as conveyed by the Divine Being (God). Most readers will immediately become skeptical of any proclamation of Divine communication, as our society has given up on direct communication with God. In our modern understanding of life, we’ve come up with lots of reasons why God doesn’t talk to us anymore, but for some reason, most of these theories leave out the simple fact that we’re not listening.
We assume that because God can communicate with us via any method of His1 choosing, that He will appear to us in a form that we will understand. We picture ourselves as Charlton Heston climbing to the summit of Mount Sinai in pursuit of the burning bush and hearing the voice of God. With a deep, raspy voice God will call our name and command us to listen.
And if God called out to us in this way, why wouldn’t we listen? This isn’t to say that God wouldn’t call to us in this manner. However, this sensational version of Divine communication is more appropriate for a single conversation rather than one with all of Humanity. Possibly God reserves the attention grabbing, burning bush communication styles for one on one conversations.
Inspiration Divine documents God’s message of love, acceptance and understanding for all of mankind. The message that is being broadcast is intended for everyone, rather than a chosen few. We are all called to listen and Inspiration Divine contains lessons on how to listen, how to communicate with God and, most importantly, how to evolve into a Spiritual existence that embodies the beauty of sustained enlightenment.
Whereas other books extol the benefits of enlightenment, Inspiration Divine brings enlightenment into your daily life with practical and accessible methods for achieving harmony with the Universe, connecting with your Spirit and maintaining balance in your life. However, beyond what Inspiration Divine can do for you, the lessons contained in this book are for Humanity as a whole and your role in bringing about the Spiritual enlightenment of Humanity is embedded in the message itself. In short, you have an unshakable responsibility to personally bring forth the next phase in the evolution of mankind.
In attempting to understand Inspiration Divine, you have already begun to experience the logical battle that will take place within your Mind. As human beings, we interpret and understand the world around us through our sensations, emotions and thoughts. When things make sense we accept them and when they don’t make sense we tend to refute them. There is no other way for human beings, for everything must ultimately be interpreted, analyzed and accepted by our Minds. However, in putting the essence of understanding entirely within the domain of the Mind, we also ignore both the Body and the Spirit.
In modern metaphysical circles there is quite a bit of discussion about the Body, Spirit and Mind. Our society readily accepts these three ways of describing being human but we rarely stop to understand the deep, meaningful consciousness that is present in these simple distinctions. They are so elemental a part of being human that we tend to accept them without fully considering the insightful role they play in our lives. But as soon as we start to encounter concepts that don’t make sense, we instantly become aware of just how entirely caught up in our Minds we really are.
By ignoring the Spirit and the Body in figuring out what is true, we ignore God and make our way through life embracing most situations based entirely on logical thinking. The problem with this approach is that with a mental existence we risk missing out on any relationship with God that doesn’t fall into the logical patterns that our Minds demand. Surely the burning bush and booming voice from the Heavens didn’t make sense to Moses either, but in trusting his Spiritual side, he was able to accept, understand and believe in the voice of God.
In bringing you Inspiration Divine, I’m not asking you to accept these words as the voice of God. I believe Inspiration Divine to be a message from God, for all of Humanity, which is intended to teach mankind how to attain enlightenment, how to serve God and how to be in communication with God. To your Mind, these words will represent a paradigm shift that will cause you to rethink your current understanding of the Universe, God and Humanity.
What I would ask you to do is consider the message contained in Inspiration Divine with more than the logical analysis of your Mind. As you read each chapter, your Mind may refute concepts that are presented and I encourage you to not fight or judge your Mind for being so quick to separate truths from un-truths. Instead let your Mind’s thoughts be nothing more than thoughts and instead let your Spirit engage in the conversation. In collaboration, the Body, Spirit and Mind will guide you down the path of determining what is right for you. By engaging all three in the conversation, you will find more wisdom and insight than could ever be provided to you by another.
Your Path
It is no accident that you are reading this book at this time in your life. No matter if you are reading this in a library or someone gifted this book to you, the motion of the Universe is unmistakable and there is a reason you were brought to these words. No two people have the same role to play, despite us all sharing a common purpose in life. And with this comes your awakening to a purpose that can only be revealed by a connection to your own Spirit. The words contained in this book will not dictate your purpose, for that message can only come from your Spirit. However, this book will show you how to connect to your Spirit and keep that relationship strong for eternity. In this, your path to enlightenment will be revealed through your discovery of purpose.
The final note I will add to this introduction speaks to the energy contained in this book. Your bookshelf is full of books that you find amusing, insightful, and inspiring. I truly hope that you find this book to be worthy of your bookshelf but ask that you do not park it there. Instead, learn what you can from this book and gift it to another. Take the teachings of this book and then give this book to someone else. If you cannot think of whom to give it to then pick someone at random, but make sure that it gets into the hands of someone that can benefit from its message of love, harmony and universal possibilities.
If you are one of the people that was handed this book, count yourself as both deserving and the most valuable person in the world. You have provided someone else the opportunity to practice sharing, to try giving and to experience what it feels like to take a chance on someone else. By receiving this book, you know that there is beauty in the Universe and that you are part of the evolution of Humanity towards a new, Spiritual existence. For you, the path is similarly simple: learn the lessons contained herein and gift this book to another. One by one, the human race will move forward to truly understand a new relationship with the Universe, God, and Humanity.
As we investigate the countless models seeking to explain the Universe, God and Humanity we should be inherently skeptical of complexity. A simple and rich river runs through us despite our propensity to focus on the wider ocean. When we find an understanding of the ocean that also explains the river, we will have found the truth.   In short, any explanation of life that is complex may be interesting, but it certainly isn’t enlightening.
Without a grasp of the path to enlightenment, our Minds are helplessly drawn to complexity. Followers of that path will certainly obtain knowledge, but they will be no closer to a union with the Divine than before they began.
In walking the path we seek the truth. Be the truth beautiful or be it ugly, we seek the truth in its purest form. We care not for what is appealing to our senses nor what calms the masses, but instead desire to know what we are, why we’re here and what is our purpose.
Already God is near, the Truth is close,
Walkers of the Path
Inspiration Divine is a handbook for Humanity designed to bring about enlightenment one person at a time. You are but one person in this chain, but the chain reaction cannot continue without you. For this reason, the journey you are about to take is both a personal one and an enabling key to another’s journey. Upon reading these pages, you will understand the beauty, peace and love contained in the message. Sharing this message with others will not only bring about the Spiritual evolution of mankind, but will also propel you on this path. Record your name below before beginning this journey. In time, you will know who should appear next on this list. Your time is now and by inking your name below you begin your journey:
1. ______________________________
2. ______________________________
3. ______________________________
4. ______________________________
5. ______________________________
6. ______________________________
7. ______________________________
8. ______________________________
9. ______________________________
10. ______________________________
11. ______________________________

The ordinary life is that of the average human consciousness separated from its own true self and from the Divine and led by the common habits of the mind, life and body which are the laws of the Ignorance…
The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one’s true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine.
For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters.(Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga 1970)

Copyright 2009 Darwin Stephenson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

The root of your dissatisfactions is not to be found in problems themselves,  but rather in the way that you think about them.

Terms like “working on yourself” and “dealing with your issues” are irrelevant to positive psychology because effort is not necessary.

A person’s identification as a seeker can be a profound obstacle to their own realization.

Until you learn how to summon self-acceptance,  self-compassion,  and self-encouragement, insecurities will lurk within.

Enlightened living involves living more fully in the present.  Although you may have plans and preferences, attachments to outcomes lose their importance.

When you allow your authenticity and vulnerability to arise,  the phoniness of your personality transforms into the uniqueness of your individuality.

Attempts to override fear using positive affirmations can result in internal conflict.

There is nothing that will sabotage your happiness more quickly than perceiving life through a filter of victimization.

You have within you an infinite well of compassion that can dissipate resentments, help you to forgive yourself and others, and free you from feelings of separateness and loneliness.

Read more about UnTherapy: A Positive Psychology for Enlightened Living and Sunny Massad, Ph.D. HERE.

Copyright 2009 Sunny Massad, Ph.D.. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Chapter 26. The Secret Life of the East Village Other
New York, 1968-69

If the title of this chapter makes little sense to you, it should perhaps be explained that from about 1967 until 1971, the East Village Other was the name of an
“underground” newspaper that swept fear and terror into the hearts and minds of uptown New Yorkers and Americans everywhere, though most, but not all, of its contents would seem fairly sedate today.

One of the paradoxes dearest to science fiction writers depicts the earth-born hero returning to his planet after a flight of several years’ duration at a speed approaching that of light. Due to a quirk in the Einsteinian cosmos, his own personal time has moved far more slowly than that on earth, and so he returns to a planet where everything has changed almost unrecognizably, where everyone he knew before he left is either dead or dying. Yet this fantasy can become close to a reality in one’s own lifetime, as anyone who has returned to his country after a prolonged absence well knows.

When Ilene and I stumbled back into Greenwich Village after seven years in Europe, we might just as well have been space travelers shot out of a “time warp.” We had no choice but to submit to a period of reverse cultural shock in readjusting to American manners, customs, and tempo. During this time our previous experience as Americans turned out to be of dubious benefit, for so much had changed in our absence. We were fore-warned of these changes by our assiduous reading of the underground press, but we were still not prepared for the full impact.

The America we had left in 1961 had been stately by comparison, formalistic, still nestled in its Fifties mythology. To the extent that a culture was evident, it had been the orthodox culture, whose adherents spoke in hushed voices and gathered in small enclaves for self-protection. Contacts between these enclaves and the dominant American life-style were rare and unsought on either side. Anyone who dressed the least bit strangely would be stared at, perhaps even heckled in certain neighborhoods. I can recall being stared at myself for wearing one of the first Russian-style fur hats in New York during the deep recesses of the Fifties, and I remember Ilene getting cat-calls even in Greenwich Village as late as 1961 for the large earrings she was fond of wearing.

But the America we were returning to in 1968 was so different that we could only rub our eyes with joy and amazement. What we were seeing was of course only New York, but the changes even here were so compelling that we had to extend them in our minds to the nation as a whole. To our astonishment almost every other person we saw looked weirder than ourselves. This was not only true of the East and West Villages but extended to some extent uptown as well. When we had gone to Europe, the East Village was a small defensive community of nonconformists. When we came back, it seemed unaccountably to have taken over.

After a fitful night’s sleep in a fleabag hotel, we stumbled into the offices of the East Village Other in the hope of orienting ourselves to what had been happening during our time with Rip Van Winkle. To my surprise, our sense of dislocation went totally unnoticed, and I was immediately asked to start writing for the paper on the strength of the work I had been doing in London and Berlin. And to my further surprise I found this quite easy to do, although I was walking into what appeared to me almost a foreign land, my every step of the way seemed assured, as though I had been rehearsing this role over a long period.

And in a sense I had been. I started writing my articles, brought them into the paper, and saw them in print a few days later, just as I had been doing in London. It was as though I had walked from one world into a totally different one without missing a step. After only two months I was firmly established as a fixture at the East Village Other.

Because this newspaper emanated from New York, still widely hailed as the nation’s cultural capital, and because it had preceded all other underground papers in the country, with the exception of one or two conventionally laid out papers which were called underground in retrospect, it was widely regarded by many as the chief spokesman for “the movement.” [FOOTNOTE 1] Universities and libraries had started to subscribe (as had other newspapers and even foreign embassies) on the theory that we were the cutting edge of the youth culture and had to be understood.

We were only in the EVO offices a few moments when Allan Katzman told us that he was being regularly courted by uptown reporters and commentators and had even been asked to speak at various press lunches on the significance of what we believed we were doing. Allan regarded this as something of a joke besides being a waste of time, for no matter what he would tell them, they were simply not in a position to interpret it correctly and integrate it with their preconceptions. This was how wide and real the gap between the two cultures was in late l968. As this gap was spread out over all of the twelve cultural and political areas (described briefly in FOOTNOTE 2), it is not really surprising that it often seemed to be an unbridgeable chasm.

As soon as I started writing for EVO, I too found myself being wooed by certain uptown media types, who seemed to believe that I possessed a key to opening deep cultural secrets, if only I would share it with them. And this attempt at rapprochement among media people, at courtship even, was going on during the height of the tensions surrounding the counter-culture, when demonstrations, arrests, and physical violence were a fact of everyday life. I believe that what Allan and I saw working was one of the mechanisms by which a society protects itself from dissolution. Fortunately for all of us it was to prove quite effective.

The East Village Other aka EVO at the time I formally joined it had already been in existence for over two years and had reached what was in many ways the peak of its power. It had been founded by John Wilcock, Walter Bowart, Sherry Needham, and Allan Katzman as a single sheet broadside which slowly and painfully began to put out larger and more frequent editions. It had originally been published from offices on Avenue A but gladly accepted the offer of free office space from rock impresario Bill Graham, and in 1967 EVO moved into its Second Avenue offices over the Fillmore East. During its early existence it came out twice a month at best, but shortly before my return to America it went weekly and for a while at least seemed to have no problems coping with this schedule.

The fights and duels between the various founders were already legendary when I arrived in New York. John Wilcock and Walter Bowart had allegedly broken up over a dispute concerning whether or not the work of Andy Warhol should be featured in the paper. This was at a time when Warhol was truly an underground and controversial figure. Wilcock was in favor of promoting him, but Bowart was unable to accept Warhol because of his homosexuality.

This story alone made me wonder how much real freedom the underground press was capable of, but the upshot of this feud was that both Wilcock and Bowart decamped, leaving Katzman mainly in charge of the paper. Bowart took off for the Southwest, and I was to see him only once, a few weeks after I returned to New York, when he arrived at the EVO offices accompanied by a lawyer.

He was impressive, tall and bearded, and reminded me in many ways of Jim Haynes in London. Soon he and his lawyer disappeared into the front office to talk with Allan, Sherry, and some of the other “official” directors of the paper. There soon emanated from behind the door shouting of such intensity and duration that I and several other writers left the building and went elsewhere to work. When we returned, we learned that there had been a battle over the custody of the EVO stock (I will deal later with the ironies of an underground paper issuing stock), and the
impasse had been resolved with Bowart being bought out and fleeing back to Arizona.

Although John Wilcock was no longer around the paper he was a considerable figure in his own right. He had originally quit the Village Voice when they criticized an article in which he had mentioned pot smoking, another indication of how much times were to change. Not only did he play an important role in starting EVO, but he was also one of those figures who were to catalyze many other papers and underground activities, achieving little for himself in the long run other than personal satisfaction. He had also been involved in the early stages of the Los Angeles Free Press, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and had even visited London during the summer when plans were being laid for International Times aka IT. He had a job writing for the well-known series of books on how to live in various countries for five dollars a day, which aided him greatly in moving around the world, and he is rumored to have played a role in starting papers in India, Japan and Thailand as well.

I soon became aware that the atmosphere of the EVO offices was far more turbulent than that of London’s underground paper. Despite our various problems with the police, there had always been a certain English gentleness and unhurried quality at IT. Whatever other international benefits the underground might be conferring, it had clearly not yet succeeded in eradicating national differences.

The best picture I can give you of our offices is to ask you to recall all the violence, turmoil, and confusion of the Sixties and imagine what the Chief Crisis Center of that era would have looked like, if there had been one.

There was in fact such a Crisis Center, and the East Village Other was it for New York and a large part of the Northeast. News of riots, arrests, and dope deals regularly passed through, and so did the dope dealers themselves, people sky-high on their products, street people, Black Power leaders, astrologers, gay power pioneers, commune members, Hell’s Angels, FBI agents (always easy to spot), ordinary policemen, people placing sex ads, runaway kids, all these and more were passing through the EVO offices on any given day, sometimes it seemed during any given hour.

These people came in all shapes, sizes, colors, mental states, and even age groups, though the young predominated. Because we were located directly above the Fillmore, there was often also the deafening sound of live rock music going on as the paper was being edited and prepared for the printer. How we brought out any kind of paper under these conditions was close to a miracle.

In the midst of these multiple comings and goings sat for a remarkable number of hours each week Allan Katzman, the principal editor. Allan was, for me at least, the ideal editor every writer dreams of finding but rarely does. Once he had decided on the basic abilities and merit of a writer, he let him have his own lead, trace out his stories in his own way. While he might question a word or an idea here or there, he rarely made extensive corrections, at least with my work. Where some editors will cavil over every word with a writer or need to withdraw to secret hideaways and rewrite every sentence in every article they publish, Allan simply let things happen. Rather, he encouraged them to happen. Maybe it was because he was himself a poet and felt secure as a writer, but envy and constant quibbling were not part of his makeup.

Perhaps the single most important element of the tension at EVO was a tall, heavyset young man named Joel Fabricant, who increasingly took on the role and duties of “publisher.” At any time of day Joel was usually quite loudly occupied in various administrative tasks. Although Allan was responsible for editorial matters, Joel had come onto the scene after the split between Bowart and Wilcock to coordinate, if that was the word, our business affairs.

Although Joel was very much into pot, rock music, vegetarian foods and all the other underground causes, I always felt there was something decidedly unreconstructed and Fifties-like about him. To me he looked like the typical fast-buck businessman glazed over with a counter-cultural wash, which frequently wore thin.

Although the EVO offices were spacious enough, Joel made them feel quite cramped, for he was always everywhere at once, shouting and laughing loudly, punching the men with mock boxing blows or striking karate poses, pinching the women with gleeful abandon, barking orders to everyone about advertising, circulation, printing runs, graphics, layout, and even editorial policy. While we all had to make some sort of peace with Joel’s presence, I know that many of the writers found him objectionable in varying degrees and did their best to avoid him whenever possible. And I suspect that Joel was one of the reasons that eventually led Allan to resign as editor.

The best that could be said about Joel was that his bustling was harmless and even ineffectual in the long run, for he rarely read a copy of the paper. He was mainly concerned with having a new issue to ship to the distributors each week, and he showed an interest in its contents only if there had been some negative feedback from the distributors or the newsstands where it was sold. I have already mentioned that this happened with one article I wrote (an illustrated review of a book on erotic art), which was so outspokenly sexual for its time (possibly because I entitled it Fucking Through the Ages and included some of the wildest drawings) that several thousand copies of EVO were returned from California, and suits against the paper were launched in two small New Jersey towns. Joel tried chewing me out over this, saw that I wouldn’t take it, and finally concluded that this sort of problem was good for our circulation in the long run.

The absolute peak in EVO’s power and influence came during the spring and summer of 1969, and if a few halfway competent decisions had been taken around that time, the paper might conceivably still be around today. But EVO’s success was just beginning to be counter- productive, for until that time the paper had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on raunchy material and sex ads in a newsprint format. Over the winter, however, a new paper had been launched in the form of Screw Magazine, and its appearance signaled that we had indeed, ironically enough, been successful in our battle against censorship. Yet our victory was to prove most useful to another sort of paper. While the underground press had included sex as only one part of its broad formula, Screw moved in to specialize in this area.

At first our stand was to support Screw, and we accepted their ads in EVO. Soon they grew so powerful that they launched a second paper called Gay for the other side of the sex scene now emerging. As our “publisher,” Joel was beside himself both with the threat this posed and the opportunity it offered. Within only a month or two, he responded to this challenge by publishing out of the EVO office not only our own separate sex paper called Kiss and our own gay sheet called Gay Power, but even a foray into astrology called the Aquarian Agent. And Peter Leggieri, another of our editors, soon started a comic strip tabloid called Gothic Blimp Works. For a while all of these papers were being prepared on the same premises at once.

These developments drove some of our writers up the wall. Not only were they being asked to turn out a popular paper with a political thrust under trying circumstances and with very little pay, but now they were being pressured into writing for the new papers as well. Many of these writers had chosen to write for EVO out of idealism in the belief that they were paving the way for a new society. And here was Joel Fabricant, as many thought, just trying to make money, with little thought for the future of EVO or the paper’s policies.

Several pep rallies were called that winter and spring, and Joel would explain the bright future ostensibly awaiting all of us if we would just keep writing, for he believed he was building an empire that would change the whole future of journalism. To an extent he was correct in this belief, but it turned out not to be his empire or any one’s for that matter. But for the time being it looked as if Joel was unstoppable. No one could contradict him or even argue with him for that matter. And yet it was at one of his own pep sessions that his fate was sealed. He met his defeat at the hands of a single artist. And the decisive blow was dealt not by a sledge hammer but by a simple symbolic act.

The entire staff, some thirty of us, were gathered in the front office beneath its custom-made stained glass windows showing Katzman and Bowart as glowing saintly presences. Everyone waited expectantly as Joel, seated next to the door, began his latest sales pitch for the combined papers.

He went on and on until we all grow numb. One person got up and left, muttering some excuse, and we all envied him. Joel was still holding forth a few minutes later when the door opened again. The cartoonist R. Crumb reached into the room just far enough to smash a gigantic Ratner’s cream pie into Joel’s face. Crumb quickly retreated. There was a moment’s pause, a dread silence before anyone, even Joel,
reacted.

Then Joel shouted one word at the top of his lungs:

“FUCK!”

The rest was a stream of obscenities punctuated with Crumb’s name. Joel had risen like a bolt of lightening and raced back into the layout room, where he imagined the cartoonist had fled. Fortunately for Crumb and the future of American comics, he had chosen to run down the stairs instead and on up Second Avenue. After a bemused interlude, Joel came back, still quite literally in a lather from the pie, and tried to resume the mood of the meeting.

But it was no use. No one could take anything seriously after that. And it was from that moment that we ourselves stopped taking Joel seriously.

I had been present a few weeks earlier at a small gathering in Joel’s office, where I think we all may have had a foretaste of his demise. Allan Katzman, his twin brother Don, and several other writers and editors were crammed together around Joel’s desk while he spoke on the phone to a relative, who happened to be a broker on the New York Stock Exchange. This being America, the original founders of the paper had issued themselves stock in the East Village Other Corporation, and now Joel had gotten it into his head that EVO’s promise and renown had become so great that considerable capital could be raised by “going public”,  reissuing the stock and selling it on Wall Street.

He had managed to corral the imagination of several other EVO workers in this vision, and they all sat there awaiting the final outcome of his phone call on this matter. I was an exception, as I just happened to be in the office at the time. I expect I was the only one present who was skeptical of this plan, but I kept my opinion to myself.

Slowly but surely we watched Joel’s jaw drop, as he absorbed the information from the other end of the phone. After he got off, he quietly explained that we appeared to have some slight communication problem with Wall Street concerning our “image.” Why, many of the brokers down there actually thought we were opposed to capitalist society, he announced in a flat voice devoid of humor.

I do not think it had really occurred to him to ever doubt until that moment that everything could be sold as a commodity on the market, including revolution.

———————-
FOOTNOTE 1:
A considerable debate would later arise as to which was the “first” underground paper. I opt for EVO, because it was the first to use a story content AND a
graphics layout treatment which became identifiably underground. Neither of the two Los Angeles Papers founded somewhat earlier (the Free Press and Open City) did so, nor did the Berkeley Barb, which beat EVO by two months. And the editors of the quintessentially “psychedelic” paper, the San Francisco Oracle, freely admitted EVO’s influence on them. Those interested in this sort of detail may wish to look at Robert J. Glessing’s The Underground Press in America, Indiana University Press, 1970.

FOOTNOTE 2:
It’s easy enough to explain these differences, and during the Seventies I devised a test or game for measuring how “counter-cultural” or “orthodox-cultural” various people were at various times (or even might be today). The test covered twelve specific cultural and political areas dividing the two domains: it was this thorough-going contrast in ideas over so wide a field that created the tension between the two cultures and held the potential for a real social breakdown. The twelve areas of disagreement I identified (others may occur to the reader) were acceptance and use of drugs of varying degrees of soft- or hardness, attitudes to rock music, openness of sexual attitudes (heterosexual), attitudes towards gay sexuality, interest in mysticism, I Ching, etc, the Vietnam war and/or militarism in general, commitment to feminism, interest in ending or limiting capitalism, desire to restructure government or society as a whole, the status of minority rights, desirability of new break-throughs in art, education & technology, and ecology/environmental issues. These issues are addressed in greater detail in Chapter 53.

Copyright 2009 Alex Gross. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

I did start showing myself that next week. At first it was not too difficult, because I could play on my ramkie and sing while I was doing this. But when he took my ramkie away and made me turn this way and that way for hours on end, I became very fed up and angry. And I showed him how angry I was.

One day, many moons later, I was still standing there. The big exhibition hall was full. It was in Piccadilly, opposite the William Bullock’s museum, so people came there when they left the museum.

I stood for six hours a day and people came to stare at me, passing remarks all the time, which they thought I could not understand. Sometimes Hendrick would allow me to play my little guitar. I loved feeling the dried pumpkin skin against my hands, which were now going soft because I was not doing proper woman’s work. I loved to play on the three gut strings, holding it under my chin, smelling it, and singing. Those were the best times.

At other times he took the ramkie away from me, especially later in the day, when the men came to stare at me. Then I had to stand and turn when he ordered me to. He made me smoke a pipe and blow smoke over the crowd. He painted my face in a funny way. This I was not used to. We never painted our faces back home. I felt ridiculous. And Obi, the boy, laughed at me.

One afternoon a famous actor came to stand by the cage I was being shown in. His name was John Kemble. Obi told me his name the next day, because it was in the newspapers.

I was very cold and had my arms around me, although Hendrick had told me many times not to do this. When Hendrick saw me put my arms around me, he shouted at me in Dutch, and the famous man heard him, so I dropped my arms.

“What a disgusting sight,” I heard John Kemble say. He must have thought I could not understand him, for he mumbled to a woman standing next to him, “I feel so sorry, so deeply sorry for her”.

I was very tired. By this time I had been standing for more than five hours, and I needed to sleep. With great effort I pulled my  back straight and wriggled my body as I tried to shift more comfortably into the knee-length dress which pulled tightly around me, showing every bump, every fold of me.

I sighed. Every time I took a deep breath, my chest strained against the tight bodice and my breasts flattened against the see-through fabric.  My two nipples spread out flat, gaping at the crowd, like two blobs of black gum pressed out under the glass of a microscope. I felt shy and embarrassed.

“Forward,” I heard Hendrick shout from behind the curtain, where nobody could see him. He said this in a loud voice, so everyone could hear him.

“Like a wild beast being ordered around,” I heard John Kemble mutter again, but I could not see his face, for I had turned away from him, “more like a bear on a chain than a human being,” he said, for I was totally under Hendrick’s command and afraid of what he would do if I did not obey.

I knew that John Kemble was looking at me from behind, and I felt hot with shame.

“Draai!” Turn! Hendrick barked at me again, in his heavy Dutch.

This time I ignored him. I was too tired.

Hendrick came out from behind the curtain. I turned my head away from him, and looked slightly to the right. Straight into the eyes of John Kemble. I closed my eyes then, too embarrassed to look into those kind eyes, and hugged my arms again.

The exhibition hall was freezing. All the people were dressed in their outdoor clothing. Men were wearing greatcoats and waistcoats and cravats around their necks for warmth. Women wore chamois coats with satin linings, which reached down to their ankles.

“She’s falling asleep,” a woman screeched in a high-pitched voice. I pretended to keep my eyes closed, but I was peeping from underneath them, at the woman.

She was kneeling in front of the cage, peering up under my dress, her green eyes large and shocked. She had been staring up for at least five minutes. Pretending to tie her shoelaces, the woman sat on her haunches, her head bent sideways as she tried to get a better look from under the little cloth which covered my private parts under the dress.I opened  my eyes and they looked straight into John Kemble’s. I could see that he was very angry. I was angry too. I bit my lip and scowled down at the woman.

Then someone poked a parasol through the metal bars of the cage and stabbed me in my soft flesh from behind. “Is this natural?” the voice asked stupidly.

“Aargh!” I shouted. I could hold back my anger no longer. I shouted so suddenly that the green-eyed woman’s husband, who was peering through the metal bars of the cage with an eye-glass, jumped back. He tripped over their dog, which yelped and jumped out of his way.

At that moment I turned and hit down onto the parasol. The parasol fell with a loud clang into the cage.

“What a savage!” the woman shouted, stepping back and tripping over her wide skirts. But instead of falling into her husband’s arms as she had expected, she stumbled back. Her husband, instead of helping her, stepped further out of her way. I thought good for you!

The commotion forced Hendrick Cezars to come out from behind his curtain. He ran around the cage to the woman.

“My sincerest apologies, madam,” he murmured, offering her his hand, helping her up. Flustered, she pointed at me.

The parasol was lying inside the cage, on the little stage at my feet.

The crowd went silent. All eyes were fixed on the parasol. I stared at Hendrick, frozen in fear.

Hendrick took full advantage of the situation. With exaggerated care he opened the low gate of the cage and pulled himself up onto the stage. As he came close to me, I stepped back. I thought that he was going to strike me, for he came towards me with a black whip in his hand.

With the whip out in front of him, Hendrick stepped forward. He made as if he was facing the gravest danger. He bent down, one hand behind him with the whip held high. With the other hand he slowly reached for the parasol. He kept his eyes fixed on me, then stood up, holding the whip between us.

Not a sound came from the crowd.

I was mesmerized with fear. My eyes were glued to the whip. As Hendrick moved closer, I stepped back and felt the cold bars of the cage against  my back. I could go no further.

“Stay!” Hendrick barked out at me in English. His voice boomed across the hall. He paused dramatically, as if I were an angry wild animal.

He quickly jumped back and out of the cage, slamming the gate shut.

Once outside the cage, he slowed down his movements again, like a magician exaggerating each careful move. He knew all eyes were on him as he pulled a metal chain out of the pocket of his coat. He fixed the chain in place and padlocked the gate.

The crowd clapped as he turned around. He bowed three times, his silly dark red wig (which he was wearing only since he came to England), shifting forward.
My knees gave in and I sank to the floor. I cried without tears. My tears had dried up long ago.

“Stand up!” I heard him shout from behind the curtain where he had once more disappeared.

I jumped up and leaned against the side of the cage. I trembled. I felt lost and defeated.

“Poor creature. Poor, poor creature,” I heard John Kemble murmur to himself.
Hendrick saw John Kemble and he came back from out of his curtain. “Please feel free to touch her, sir,” he said. The man ignored him.

Then John Kemble caught  my eye. I could see the kindness in his face and I could not look away. I pulled myself away from the metal bars and turned my body squarely towards him. I looked straight at him this time. I patted my palms together, as we Khoi do when in front of someone we respect.

“Babba, Babba!” I said.

“What did she say?” John Kemble asked Hendrick. “Does she call me her papa?”

“No, sir. She says you are a very fine man.” He lied again.

“Upon my word,” said John Kemble dryly. He was looking at me from the side, with his head at an angle. He looked pleased. “Upon  my word, the lady does me infinite honor!” he said.

“Do touch her, sir, if you so wish,” Hendrick said again. “It is without additional fee,” he stressed.

John Kemble pulled back. “No, no!” he said. “Poor creature, no!”

I could see tears in his eyes as he turned away from me. “Now that was a sight which made me melancholy,” he said to his friend as they turned to walk away from the cage. “I dare say, now, they ill-use that poor creature! Good God. How very shocking!” I heard him say.

And yet (not too long after that) the court believed Hendrick when he said I wanted to stay in England, that I wanted to be put on display, that I did not want to go back to see  my family. All things which he and that doctor Alexander Dunlop made up between them, and forced me to say. All things which they wrote down and made me put my mark against. I was so scared of them that I agreed to repeat those lies to the men whom the court sent to speak with me personally. I said those things to them because I was afraid.

But the whole world believed Hendrick’s lies.

As the rest of the people followed John Kemble out of the hall that night, I fainted. The day had been too long.

I woke up as Hendrick dimmed the lights. He returned to my cage. He unlocked the gate, stepped into the cage and pulled me roughly to my feet. Slowly I came awake. I shivered, this time not from cold, but from fear and fever.  My body was hot and felt dry. I could feel yet another boil in my groin. The boils had started developing a few days before. A small one, throbbing ones, big ones.

I stood up, confused and unhappy. I leaned against the metal bars as Hendrick walked away, leaving the gate of the cage open.

I closed my eyes, trying to understand what had gone wrong.  My mind could not wrap itself around the change of events, try as I might. I could not figure it out.

It was not as if it had been my decision alone. It was a big decision. In our culture sending a woman away on a big ship to far away lands was a big decision.

Frowning, not understanding, I moved out of the cage. Slowly, with difficulty, I climbed down from my platform of persecution, shivering with thirst and fever.

This was how most of my days went.

Copyright 2009 Monica Clarke. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.