The Animals’ School – By George Reavis

A Story About Recognizing Your Strengths

Once upon a time, the animals decided that they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world, so they organized a school.

They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying.  To make it easier to administer, all of the animals took all of the subjects.

The duck was excellent at swimming.  In fact, he was better than his instructor.  However, he made only passing marks in flying and was very poor at running.  Since he was so slow in running, he had to drop his swimming class and do extra running.  This caused his webbed feet to become badly worn, meaning that he dropped to an average mark in swimming.  Fortunately, “average” was acceptable, therefore nobody worried about it – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because he had so much makeup work to do in swimming.

The Will To Fail

I was reading a Norman Vincent Peale book when I happened upon the phrase/concept "The Will To Fail".  The following was retrieved from http://18mind.com/mind/wake_up_and_live_the_will_to_fail on 7/20/13 ... the video of the 1961 Katie Lee song was retrieved the same date on youtube and in about two and a half minutes, with humor, portrays and explains what the concept may look like in action ...

The Will to Fail

December 28, 2008 by gus

FROM the disciples of Schopenhauer and Freud, of Nietzche and Adler, we have all become conversant with such phrases as the Will to Live and the Will to Power. These phrases, representing---sometimes to the verge of overstatement---drives of the organism towards fulfillment and growth, correspond to truths of experience with which each of us is familiar. We have seen children struggle to make themselves and their personalities felt; as young people we have contended for a chance to try our own emerging forces; after long illness we have felt the tide of returning strength in our veins. We know that any average man caught in unfortunate circumstances will put up with poverty, distress, humiliation with conditions which an onlooker will sometimes consider as much worse than death; and that only the presence of a will to continue living can account for the tenacity with which a man in such circumstances clings to the mere right to breathe and exist.

Furthermore, we first experience and then later turn to realize the process of growth in ourselves. The individual, emerges from childhood into adolescence, from adolescence into maturity; and at each of these crisis we find that the activities and interests of the old period are being replaced by those of the new, that Nature is preparing the organism for its new role in the world, is actually reconciling us to the new demands on us by showing us pleasures and rewards in the oncoming state which will replace those we must abandon.

Buckets

What's in your bucket?

What if each day of your life was captured in and represented by a bucket?

What would you find as you walked along a path lined with the buckets of your life? Full buckets or empty buckets? Would they contain contents you'd happily splash on others or sludge you'd rather others not know?

Would you find yourself often eager and excited to sit on the path and spill a bucket before you, lifting each item high, smiling, and holding it close to your heart?

Would you find yourself peering into buckets then looking about hoping no one else could see what you see in there?

Would you find empty buckets?

Would you find buckets overflowing?

Are your days represented by large buckets or small ones?

Are your buckets filled with people or things?

If someone else stumbled upon this path and only knew you by the contents of your buckets what picture would they draw of you?

What are the colors within the buckets? Are there colors at all, or shades? What's on the outside of the buckets, anything? What do the buckets of your life reflect?

It is true, they are your buckets and, in many ways, not there for the evaluation of others, but it is also true they are open for the consideration of all. It is also true that most paths will have some buckets filled and others spilled with both good and bad, sweet and sour, joy and sorrow, triumph and suffering.

There will be buckets empty, too.

What do you find in your buckets as you walk along the path of your life? Contents to share? Contents to hide? Contents you'd forgotten?

The buckets before you as you bend to rest today's bucket in its place on the path ... what of them?

With what do you hope to fill tomorrow's bucket so that one day when you walk this path again you'll find it and hold it with pleasure? What brings you lasting pleasure and how much of it do you find in these buckets?

The path itself, what does it look like? Neat and trimmed, littered and lonely, winding with hills, well lit or dim?

What's in your buckets and where do you keep them and with whom do you share them?

Is this a path that tells your true story, the story you imagined, the story you planned, a story at all?

What's in your buckets?

The Young Boy, The Rattlesnake, The Path, The Journey

Once upon a time there was a young boy, a young Native American Indian boy, and in his tribe the custom was to send the young men out into the wilderness at the age of fifteen to fend for themselves. So, the young man, he set off on his journey, and after thirty days all the men in the tribe would come and find him in the wilderness and bring him back and initiate him into the tribe … into full adulthood.

So, he began to wander in the wilderness and for the first few days there were no problems, there was plenty of food. There were no wild animals, and he found comfortable places to sleep … and everything, for the most part, was fine … but about the sixth or the seventh day food became scarce … and on the eighth day, the young man, he found no food at all and he went to bed hungry that night. On the ninth day he found no food, either, … and the tenth, and the eleventh, and the twelfth, … and on the thirteenth day, when he hadn’t eaten for several days he was starving … and he came to a mountain … and he looked up the mountain and he thought to himself, “Perhaps if I wander up that mountain, somewhere on the mountain, I will find some food”.

So, the boy began to wander up the mountain, and as he wandered up the mountain he discovered a path and he began to follow the path to the top of the mountain.

As he got to the top of the mountain he still had found no food. So, he became a little discouraged and right towards the summit of the mountain a rattlesnake came across the path in front of him. The boy saw the rattlesnake and the rattlesnake saw the boy. They stood head to head and stared at each other for a long moment and then the snake said to the boy,

Cookies

A Bag of Cookies
by Valerie Cox

A woman was waiting at an airport one night,
with several long hours before her flight.
She hunted for a book in the airport shops,
bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.

She was engrossed in her book but happened to see,
that the man sitting beside her, as bold as could be,
grabbed a cookie or two from the bag in between,
which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene.

So she munched the cookies and watched the clock,
as the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock.
She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by,
thinking, "If I wasn't so nice, I would blacken his eye."

With each cookie she took, he took one too;
when only one was left, she wondered what he would do.
With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh,
he took the last cookie and broke it in half.

He offered her half, as he ate the other;
she snatched it from him and thought... oooh, brother.
This guy has some nerve and he's also rude;
why didn't he even show any gratitude!

She had never known when she had been so galled,
and sighed with relief when her flight was called.
She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate,
refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate.

She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat;
then she sought her book, which was almost complete.
As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise;
there was her bag of cookies, in front of her eyes.

If mine are here, she moaned in despair,
the others were his, and he tried to share.
Too late to apologize, she realized with grief,
that she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.

(From Glen Leverentz's "Glen's Story Corner" on Relevant Radio - www.relevantradio.com).

Has the Doctor been accurate on Obama?

From February 2009

Dr. Samuel Vaknin on Barack Obama

An interesting point of view. Samuel Vaknin, Ph.D.: Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about narcissism. Dr. Vaknin states:

I must confess I was impressed by Sen. Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident - a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words.

Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi "religious" impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects. Barack Obama is a narcissist. Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love believes "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist."

Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens.

Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao,Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom.

When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse. "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations," says Vaknin.

"Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia, a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995".

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them.

Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents.

Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and do not deserve their attention.

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong.

Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations

The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography!

Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father. Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who has raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power.

A narcissist cares for no one but himself. This election is like no other in the history of America. The issues are insignificant compared to what is at stake.

What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of concience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world?

I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed.
Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others...They are simply self serving and selfish.

Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw.

Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous.

Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks have also decided to vote for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple. The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites.

The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support. I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960's. Obama will set the clock back decades...America is the bastion of freedom.

The peace of the world depends on the strength of America, and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House.

America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.