Up/Down Handle: The way you are controls whether you are pulling up or down. The secret is to always pull up. Never pull down, not when in grief, not when in anger, not for revenge, not to demonstrate. Sometimes the up handle may seem to hurt at first, but it is always worth it. Vale la pena.

“I am human and nothing human is alien to me.” This was said by Terence, one of the old Roman playwrights. It just means that we all have the seeds of all human emotions and actions in us. What we actually do in this world is the result of our heredity, our environment and our free will. Under different circumstances, any of us might not have been as nice.

To understand the nature of delusion is very powerful. To know that one’s own mind can put up an illusion that can fool the mind that made it is liberating. I once believed the I Ching had been written all those hundreds of years ago just to fool me in the here and now. The next thought I had was that I must be very paranoid to believe such a foolish thing. It was good to realize that I was paranoid. It was much better than thinking that the universe was somehow against me personally.