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[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

What is the motto of OBC in comprehensive and precise terms for us to connect with it and work for it in a universal and all-encompassing way? Is it also something like promoting literacy?

 
Hi, Surabhi Rani,
 
Thank you for your question!
 
The closest thing we have to a motto is this: Our (OnlineBookClub.org's) goal is to be the best place on the entire internet for people who like to read books.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

How did you manage to sleep between jobs and taking care of the children when they are young? I have two toddlers (2 years old and 8 months old).

 
Hi, jeminah28,
 
Thank you for your question!
 
I slept while they slept.
 
Thus, depending on their age, for children 12 and under, that also gives you an extra 2–10 hours per day that they are sleeping when you can do chores, work, or relax. That's because children 12 and under sleep 2–10 hours more than adults per night.
 
Sleeping was and is the easy thing, for me at least. 
 
There are 168 hours in a week. If you sleep 8 hours per night (56 per week), that leaves 112 hours of well-rested waking time to do what you want to do with your life.
 
In theory, at 36 hours per job, you could work three separate full-time jobs in that time (112 well-rested waking hours per week) and still have a little to spare.
 
Taking care of two young kids is definitely at least one full-time job in itself. 
 
But that doesn't mean it's practical or even possible to work 112 hours per week on physically or mentally demanding tasks such as parenting children, paid professional work, and various household or personal chores or projects. You'd get enough sleep (8 hours per night), but would you get enough waking rest and awake downtime?
 
As a matter of hours per week, I doubt it is sleep you are struggling to fit into your schedule.
 
More often than not, it's awake downtime that people fail to account for, which ironically can have severely negative effects on productivity, very analogous to sleep deprivation. I get more work done if I sleep 8 hours and then work 16 versus if I sleep 4 and then work 20. 20 sounds like a higher number than 16, but it's not if you're sleep-deprived. 20 hours of sleep-deprived work is less than 16 hours of well-rested work. The same issue would occur if I did not firmly and stubbornly make time to meditate daily or sit on my porch drinking tea, staring at the stars or watching bees buzzing around, or sit at home alone quietly with nobody at all around. Like sleep itself, my short periods of downtime are extremely important to me and are a crucial and necessary ingredient in having any significant productivity at all. I'd choose happiness over productivity anyway, but unhappiness causes unproductivity. Likewise, not making a priority of both sleep and awake downtime causes unproductivity. You will get less done, not more, if you sacrifice sleep and waking rest to do more active work.
 
If you juggle too much, you end up dropping all the balls.
 
This is why there is an entire chapter in my book titled, "Do Less, Better."
 
The main and unavoidable reason I got all the many things done when my kids were young was all the other things I didn't do and that I stubbornly and lazily refused to do, even when other people (or my own lying mind) guilt-tripped me or such. The reason I can say a powerful and honest yes to the things I do is because of all the many many many many many many more other things to which I say a firm no. Each Yes I say also entails me necessarily saying infinite countless No's to all the infinite other things I could be doing with that same time, money, or energy.
 
Be a no-sayer. Then you will find that you have a lot more time and energy on your hands.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

You are an incredible time manager.  You always have time for your children, you answer questions and tweets and you write books.  I guess some of it is your young age and photographic memory.  I could do so much more when I was young but at age 70, I realize I cannot do everything I want to do.  How much sleep do you require?

 
Hi, mrlefty0706,
 
Thank you for your question!
 
I sleep a full 8 hours each night on average. If I don't get a full night's sleep, I am much less productive the following day.
 
For example, 20 hours of work on 4 hours of sleep is less than 16 hours of work on 8 hours of sleep. It might seem like 20 hours is more than 16 hours of work, but it's really not if the 20 is being done in a sleep-deprived state while the 16 is being done in a well-rested state. 
 
I don't actually have a great memory, but instead, I use to-do lists, calendars, and habit schedules to keep track of my priorities and ensure I get everything done.
 
In a sense, I go out of my way to avoid wasting any energy or mental space trying to remember anything, so that I can be more clear-minded, focused, and productive in regard to whatever task I am doing. Then my to-do list, calendar, or habit schedule tells me what to put my full clear-minded attention to next.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.


Hi, Samantha Green Tolson,

Thank you for your questions!

I agree with most of the points in your book; in fact, we see many things the same way. So, I was wondering about your views on mental health conditions. 
 
Do you think that Autism, ADHD, Bipolar, clinical depression, and other such neurodivergent conditions are a matter of choice? 

 
Generally, no, I don't think those conditions are a matter of choice.
 
Similarly, I don't think things like heterosexuality/homosexuality are a choice.
 
Here's another analogous example: Due to evolutionary factors, many humans feel hungry even when they have already eaten 4,000+ calories in a given day. Many humans live in such a state that if they ate every time they felt hungry and kept eating until they weren't hungry, they would die in less than a year from overeating. I know because I am one of these people.
 
Presumably, due to random genetic diversity, some other humans, including one of my very good friends, have the exact opposite problem: If they only ate when they felt hungry, they would quickly starve to death. Many of them set goals to gain weight and struggle with it in the same way I can be said to struggle with feeling incessant hunger no matter how much I eat, or those who die from morbid obesity can be said to struggle with the same hunger and bodily urges I do*, despite making a different choice in the face of such hunger.
 
Between those two categories, there is also a type of person who is just genetically prone to feeling hungry such that if they ate whenever they felt hungry and only when they felt hungry, they would eat just about the exact perfect amount to stay in a roughly so-called "healthy" BMI range (and/or just stay near their goal weight, whatever that is, if they have one).
 
I don't think people choose to be one of those three categories any more than they choose to have blue eyes or be tall or short. If I were given the choice, I'd probably choose category three, but I find myself in category one. This is like saying that if I were given the choice to become 1 foot taller, I would take that opportunity.
 
The thing about such 'conditions', though, is that they merely abstract descriptions of how often we are to feel a certain bodily feeling, at least in given future situations, in statistical comparison to other humans. 
 
Psychobabble** like "anxiety disorder", "phobia", "attention disorder", "high metabolism", "food addiction", "imposter syndrome", "Illness Appropriation Disorder", etc. can help tell us how prone/predisposed to a certain feeling someone is, relative to other humans, particularly in terms of their genetics, hormones, upbringing, or ingrained habits. 
 
As my book teaches, everyone's feelings are fickle, and we generally don't control what bodily feelings we happen to be feeling at any given moment. They come like clouds and storms in the sky and float away to be replaced by yet other different ones.
 
So there's a lot of psychobabble that ultimately still boils down to this simple idea from the book: "Generally speaking, you cannot control your body’s feelings or even your mind’s thoughts. But your body and thoughts do not control your choices; you do." (Page 103)
 
So there are three different things at play here:
 
1. So-called 'Conditions' and other psychobabble (e.g. xyz-phobic, anxious, food addicted, pedophilia, alcoholism predisposition, etc.) that refer abstractly to how often or predisposed a certain human is to feeling certain feelings (e.g. fear, sadness, grief, apathy, hunger, the urge to have sex with children, etc.).
 
2. The feelings (a.k.a. urges) themselves (e.g. fear, sadness, hunger, the urge to have sex with children, etc.).
 
3. Actual choice (i.e. the choice to eat food or not, the choice to be brave or not, the choice to have sex or otherwise act on one's sexual urges or not, etc.).


It's often confusing and conflating to ask whether a certain situation or state of affairs is 1, 2, or 3 from above because all three are at play in any given situation. However, one who is practicing the teachings of my book will focus on the difference between the three and then focus most of all on #3 itself.
 
I might notice that I am experiencing a certain feeling (#2), and I might notice that the human in the mirror (i.e. Eckhart) has a statistical tendency to feel that feeling more than most humans on average (#1), but my focus will be on neither of those two things and instead my focus will be firmly on figuring out what the choices available to me in my present are (#3) and then focusing on deciding which of those options I will choose to select in my present with free-spiritedness (a.k.a. self-discipline).
 
Beware of any word, label, or viral thought pattern that falsely or confusingly conflates #1, #2, and/or #3 with each other. I suggest you do your absolute best to break your concepts and words down so that the distinction between #1, #2, and #3 is always very clear in each and every sentence you speak to both others aloud and to yourself in your own head.
 
Perhaps the epitome of a dangerous word that falsely and confusingly conflates those three things is the word "try". This is why both my book and I very strongly recommend that one give up the word "try" entirely. In fact, my book even goes so far as to say, "Trying is lying".


 

Or do you think they are conditions that cannot be controlled; ergo stop fighting them, and accept them as they are?

Surely, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question.
 
In an actual medical field, it's relatively easy to tell; you just check the literal diagnosable symptoms in the manual. If they are chosen behaviors (e.g. drinking, eating, having sex, smoking cigarettes, gambling), then it's a choice. If they are feelings/urges, such as hunger, sexual attraction, or the urge to drink alcohol, then it is generally not a choice but a feeling or a propensity to experience a certain feeling.
 
Homosexuality and female hysteria were both historically diagnosable "conditions" or even "disorders", one of which was treated by a vibrator. Our allegedly scientific manuals and psychological taxonomies today aren't much better. At least they didn't use a hysterectomy to treat hysteria, I say. 
 
Nonetheless, each condition/situation is different.
 
Some are like real-life literal prisons that a person cannot get out of. It's possible, for instance, that any given literal pedophile could not stop themselves from being sexually attracted to children, no matter what they do from this point forward in the rest of their human life. Other conditions are like a room with an unlocked door. A human who takes some simple practical steps can get themselves out of that condition/situation/room.
 
Since my book treats your so-called past and future selves as others, then, in that sense, it's generally always true that you—the real you—don't ever choose the condition/situation/room that you find yourself in. A younger version of the human you see in the mirror puts you there. In other words, your past self (i.e. an 'other') put you there. Thus, in the lingo of my book, your situation/room is determined by another, and your choices determine what another person's room/situation/condition will be. It's a karmic cycle in which each person's choices affect another more than themselves. Nonetheless, practically speaking, it's very often extremely easy for a human to choose to get up and start walking towards the door, turn the handle, open the door, and walk out of whatever room they happen to find themselves in. 99% of the time, when a human says, "I must XYZ" or "I can't ABC", they are lying. This idea is explored more in my two topics: (1) The Six Dangerous Misery-Inducing Words: "Must", "Have to", "Need to", "Should", "Ought", "Try" and (2) My Three Principles for Happiness and Success ["Success is a choice."]
 
Still, as my book says, "An imaginary roadblock can be as effective as a real one." (Page 120)
 
If someone thinks they are in prison when they are in a room with an unlocked door, then they likely won't bother getting up and walking towards the door.
 
The illusion of futility is debilitating to many.
 
All humans are on the addiction spectrum, and many find comfort in pretending they are out of control when they aren't (i.e. pretending they cannot do something when they can do it, or pretending they must do something when they could simply choose to not do it).

If you think that they are a matter of choosing, what advice or program do you recommend to assist with choosing to overcome them?

I recommend they read my book at least twice, do their absolute best to implement all 11 of the suggestions at the end, and also make sure they either (1) already agree fully with every single sentence in the book or (2) post each and every sentence with which they disagree in order one at a time in this topic, making sure to wait to post the next one until the first one has been settled.
 

If they are something that cannot be controlled, what advice or program do you recommend to assist someone in working to achieve their goals despite the condition?

It's the same advice I give all humans.
 
There's a reason my book has the subtitle, "The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All".
 
If you generalize 'the condition' sufficiently, it's just 'the human condition'.
 
For some humans, it's choosing to not eat despite feeling extreme hunger.
 
For some humans, it's choosing to be brave in the face of fear—perhaps even a fear so extreme it can be rightly called a phobia or an anxiety. 
 
For some humans, it's choosing to not obey a certain sexual urge.
 
For every human, it's something.
 
It's in that sense that all humans are on the addiction spectrum.
 
All these different conditions and situations boil down to a common situation/condition, which is addiction itself, which is part of the human condition and, in a sense, is itself the common human struggle that unites us all. All the feelings are a type of temptation/urge. All humans have these feelings/temptations/urges. Many humans are just like slavish puppets bossed around by feelings/urges/temptations. Other humans have discovered the spiritual freedom of which my book speaks and have become the master rather than the slave.
 
What varies is simply, as my book says, the "props in the common human struggle against temptation and misery". Or, in other words, what varies is just the props in the common human struggle for spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) and for the invincible graceful true happiness (a.k.a. inner peace) that such freedom entails.
 
My book was inspired by a simple question: "What is the opposite of temptation?"
 
In contemplating that question, I wrote my book about spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) and the wonderful invincible inner peace (a.k.a. true happiness) it provides, with a grace and gracefulness that is so amazing and empowering that it at least seems supernatural.
 
Fundamentally, all humans have the same struggle. It's sometimes called the spiritual struggle or just spirituality itself. And all humans have the choice in each and every moment to choose to be an Übermensch (a superhuman) or not. That choice is always a choice, and it is always 100% yours and only yours.



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

"When we rebel against fleshy material nature in this way, our success is absolutely guaranteed and infinitely easy, for we rebel without fighting; we succeed without trying. When it comes to the contentment of inner peace and spiritual liberation (a.k.a. self-discipline), you are omnipotent. You need not even snap your fingers. In the words of Voltaire, you are free the instant you want to be."

- In It Together, page 105
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* That is, unless they are free-spirited and happy as they walk themselves to an early grave via morbid obesity, which surely some are. If they are free-spirited and happy, then I say more power to them, as in that case they don't struggle with hunger. In that case, they aren't fighting hunger and losing, but rather just happily playing with the joy of hungrily eating using happy free-spirited choice.



** Please don't get me wrong or read between the lines; I believe psychobabble is very useful in the taxonomy of humans and communicating which props represent one human's props in their version of the common struggle, so I don't use the term psychobabble with any tone or derision or such.




In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[mrlefty0706]

You are an incredible time manager. You always have time for your children, you answer questions and tweets and you write books. I guess some of it is your young age and photographic memory. I could do so much more when I was young but at age 70, I realize I cannot do everything I want to do. How much sleep do you require?

Hi, mrlefty0706,

Thank you for your question!

I sleep a full 8 hours each night on average. If I don't get a full night's sleep, I am much less productive the following day.

For example, 20 hours of work on 4 hours of sleep is less than 16 hours of work on 8 hours of sleep. It might seem like 20 hours is more than 16 hours of work, but it's really not if the 20 is being done in a sleep-deprived state while the 16 is being done from a well-rested state.

I don't actually have a great of a memory, but instead I use to-do lists, calendars, and habits to keep track of my priorities and ensure I get everything done.

In a sense, I go out of my way to avoid wasting any energy or mental space trying to remember anything, so that I can be more clear-minded, focused, and productive in regard to whatever task I am doing. Then my to-do list, calendar, or habit-schedule tells me what to put my full clear-minded attention to next.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

You are an amazing man.

Mrlefty0706
Larry

[NENYE1999]

Thank you sir. What is the best inspiring book that you have ever read and it made a significant impact in your life?

[Surabhi Rani]

Thank you for your answer about the motto of OnlineBookClub.org. I envision myself as a spiritual seeker, learning the art of expression on your website!

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

Thank you sir. What is the best inspiring book that you have ever read and it made a significant impact in your life?

Hi, NENYE1999,

Thank you for your question!
 
I think it's a tie between these two books:
 
And Then I Met Margaret by Rob White
 
Burn Zones: Playing Life's Bad Hands by Jorge P. Newbery
 

I strongly recommend you read them both! 
 
However, I also have a Recommended Reading List for All Mentees that includes about 15 amazing books.
 
Anyone who reads all 15 of those books is sure to be a huge success.  



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Faes]

How did you get to meet all the right connections that helped you in life. Was it by chance or did you put in the extra work to meet them?

[Thera reads]

I want to have a wider view on philosophy. After watching the Truman Show, I'm beginning to wonder if anything is real. What do you think?

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

How did you get to meet all the right connections that helped you in life. Was it by chance or did you put in the extra work to meet them?

 
Hi, Faes,
 
Thank you for your question!
 
Philosophically, if I'm being strict and literal, I would object to the use of the word 'right' in that sense. The best way to explain that is by example. In my philosophy, I am never dealt the wrong cards. I am never playing poker and believingly saying to myself, "These are the wrong cards. I was hoping for the Ace of Hearts and got the Two of Spades!"
 
Thus, whoever I meet is the right person to be meeting at the moment I am meeting them simply by the fact that I am meeting them.
 
In my philosophy, I only ever meet the right people, and only the right things ever happen.
 
Nothing is wrong. Nothing real, that is. There is no evil. There is no 'should have' or 'ought have'. Nothing happens that shouldn't have happened.
 
In other words, I fully and unconditionally accept the proverbial cards I am dealt, meaning that which I don't control, meaning that which isn't a matter of my choice in my present, which tends to often include literally the people I meet or am not able to meet.
 
However, if you take away the word 'right', then the question becomes this: "How did you get to meet all the connections that helped you in life. Was it by chance or did you put in the extra work to meet them?"
 
For some people I met, it was mostly by chance; for some, it was mostly by intent and work; for all, it was generally a mixture of both. More of one doesn't necessarily mean less of the other.
 
For example, for about a year, my full-time job was going door-to-door raising money for political campaigns. I did this full-time, 5-7 days a week. I would knock on 100 doors a night. I could talk to 50 people at their door in a night, doing my best to get them to give me (a stranger at their door) some money. 
 
Were the people I was meeting a matter of luck, or was it work?
 
Whether I got money from any one door was almost entirely luck, but how much I made for the night was not luck at all. Randomness at one level leads to emergent certainties at another high level. That's even how thermodynamics and the laws of entropy work. In other words, randomness and luck only seem to exist when we don't look at the big picture. 
 
The exact person who happened to be behind any door felt random to me. But it averages out quickly. If I knock on 100 doors in a night, a certain percentage are people who would never give me money and who I had little value in meeting. In fact, about half of the people would slam the door right in my face. But another percentage were high-quality contacts. It's just a law of averages. If I wanted X people to give money, I just needed to knock on X*Y doors. Even though most of the people said 'no' (i.e. were the "wrong people" for me in a sense), I could guarantee that I got enough people to say 'yes' simply by knocking on more doors. Even if only 10% on average would say yes, then to get 10 yeses, I would simply need to knock on 100 doors. So whether or not I got 10 yeses was not luck at all, even though whether I got one yes from one specific door did seem like a random chance.
 
In contrast, I could just have sat at home doing nothing and would have met nobody and made no money.
 
If you don't put in the work, you'll effectively meet nobody.
 
If you put in enough work and meet enough people, you'll meet the kind of people you want to meet. 100%. No luck is needed. 
 
The seeming luck gets washed away if you don't let rejection hold you back and just keep knocking on enough doors.
 
Even though I left that job 15 years ago, figuratively, I've been doing it ever since. Nowadays, it's more of a digital knocking, but I'm constantly sending out emails or reaching out to people on social media. I feel I'm doing it even in doing this right now, with this public Q&A that I advertise frequently on social media and such, offering new people to come and ask me questions to build even more new connections.
 
Some days, I will personally read and manually reply to literally over 1,000 emails.
 
It takes a lot of work to do these kinds of things because that's how you overcome and negate any luck involved. Back at that door-knocking, I'd spend hours going door after door after door. I did it on rainy days. I did it in the snow.
 
If you don't work exceptionally hard at something with exceptional dedication and exceptional consistency, luck creeps back in more and more. On the other end of the spectrum, a lazy person buys a lottery ticket and then says luck determines success and wealth. If one leaves it to luck, then luck will decide, but then that's still what one has chosen to do. I don't buy lottery tickets. I'd rather put in a million dollars of effort to give myself a one in one chance: 100%.
 
If only one in a million people is the kind of contact you need for what you want to do, then contact one million people. Start knocking on doors, literally or figuratively.
 
All people are right people in one sense of the word, the spiritual sense. In a different more business-minded sense of the words, which is the sense I think you mean, let me say it like this:
 
Meet enough people, and you'll meet the right people.



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.

I want to have a wider view on philosophy. After watching the Truman Show, I'm beginning to wonder if anything is real. What do you think?

Hi, Thera reads,
 
Great question!
 
I love The Truman Show. I'm also a fan of some of these other movies that have a similar way of exploring the concept of reality itself:
 
- The Matrix
 
- Vanilla Sky
 
- Fight Club
 
- Jacob's Ladder
 
- Free Guy
 

However, we don't have to rely on fiction or the age-old question about whether you might be dreaming right now as you read this. Modern science has shown that waking life is at best almost entirely just as much a hallucination as a conventional dream. Your brain is like a PlayStation or Xbox creating this VR world, the same way it does when you are having a sleeping dream, but at best, your brain is really just in a dark quiet skull with no light or sound. Here is a post I wrote about that subject that I think you might like:
 
Commentary on self-transcendence, ego death, and dying before you die; with a finger snap more brutal than Thanos
 

There are definitely a lot of things that we typically treat as real due to misleading intuitions and/or for practical purposes that definitely aren't real.
 
But we can start to get a grasp of what definitely is real by playing with the idea of this life and this world being an actual dream. Let's assume you are dreaming right now. Or make it not pretend by literally reminding yourself to literally ask yourself this question next time you are sleeping at night having an actual literal conventional dream. You can talk about it with the other characters in the dream world. Maybe literally have a debate with yourself in your dream tonight.
 
There's an undeniable reality to your consciousness itself, meaning you yourself, meaning your true self, the real you. From that, there are other equally undeniable realities. What you feel is one. A hallucination or dream or even the story in a fictional book doesn't need to be real for the way it makes you feel to be real. Your experience of it is real. A nightmare is really scary, regardless of its reality. Fiction has a way of becoming real when it is experienced (and/or created) by consciousness.
 
In my book, In It Together, I write that even a dream is real if it is consciously dreamt.
 
What you see may be a hallucination, but the fact that you see it is not.
 
Your true intentions and the choices you make are real, no matter what.
 
Just because you are playing virtual poker instead of with real cards, your choice to play those cards—real or not—the way you do is real. Your choice to unconditionally accept the cards you are dealt versus hate and resent what you cannot control is real. The cards you are dealt don't need to be real for your choice of how to play them to be real. The cards you are dealt don't need to be real for this to be real: your choice to lovingly accept them versus choosing to engage in miserable impotent resentment or hatred of them.
 
The hate you choose to have in your heart, if any, is real.
 
Or, if instead, you choose to practice love and acceptance, that is real. The love is real. The choice is real.
 
That is, in part, what I mean in the book when I write, "Not even a god can come between you and your choices."
 
Your choices and intentions are real, even if what allegedly actually happens as a result of those intentions and choices cannot be known or is not even real.
 
If I choose to hatefully point a gun at an innocent little baby and fire, not realizing I am dreaming, and then wake up before the bullet strikes, my choice to murder that baby was still real. That hateful or otherwise murderous intent was still real, even if the baby and the gun were not. In a sense, I am still really a hateful murderer, even if I wake up after committing the murder to find that I was dreaming without realizing it.
 
That's why I don't commit murder and why I don't engage in miserable resentment or hate, neither in my dreams at night nor in this waking life, which we often falsely treat as so much realer than our dreams, even though it clearly is not.
 
For some things, the ends don't and can't justify the means because the means are undeniably real and the alleged ends are not.
 
It's not just the choice or intent to commit hateful miserable murder. The same goes for things like the choice to be honest and brave versus being a coward and a lying thieving cheater. These choices are undeniably real, even if one is dreaming while one makes them or while unknowingly living The Matrix or The Truman Show.
 
The hate or love you have is real. Your choice to do your best to put that love—or hate—into practice is undeniably real.
 
That is in large part why I say that to have hate in your heart is to be in hell. Someone like that will be miserably hateful while dreaming and miserably hateful while awake. They will be miserably hateful in the north and miserably hateful in the south. The miserable hate they have is real, and so no dreamy forms or possibly fictional worlds can cover it up or give them an escape. It's all just a different mask on the same real thing.
 
In contrast, to have unconditional love in your heart for everyone and everything is to be in heaven. The masks and covers change, but the reality beneath does not.
 
I am in heaven before I fall asleep at night; I am in heaven while in my sleeping dreams; and then still, I am in heaven when I awake in the morning to this waking life we falsely think of as so much realer than our dream worlds at night. 
 
For better or worse, we can't escape our own hearts, by which I really mean our own spirits and choices. What's in there is real, and it stays with us through all these dreamy dancing forms in these quickly changing worlds, like an unconcealable scar on the face of an actor playing different roles in different movies. It's a glimpse of the real sneaking into the fiction. It's a peek at the naked constant underneath the ever-changing clothes.
 
What my book calls the real you is real.
 
In a way, the clothes never are.



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Hi Scott,

As Zhuangzi's example of the fish trap ..

My question is how can we go beyond the boundaries of language and words and understand life more deeply without understanding it? "

Hi, Rahul Singh 29,

I'm sorry; I don't understand your question.

I suspect you may have made one or more accidental typos in it. Namely, as written, it appears to contain a contradiction: "understand life more deeply without understanding it"


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

[Sanju Lali]

Hi Scott, I hope I will get answer to my problem given below. Currently my boss is not paying for my work consistently and there is uncertainty if the boss will pay me for my future work. What should I do if If unable to find a alternative job?

[koffi Malay]

Why does the manual verification to enter leel 6 take so long. It is frustrating for readers. Can the process be sped up?