When I used to watch television, my mind was just accepting what it saw, and was constantly being pushed to the flight or fight response mechanism from all the changing camera angles and blood/violence I saw on the screen. Now that I have books to read, and the whole experience is going on insde my head, and not through my external senses, it is entirely my creation. I think what all the characters look like and I create the scene by filling in the gaps and it is a wonderful experience. There is nothing to react to, all I need to do is create.

People always compare books to movies. First, the book comes out and it is a national bestseller, so they decide to make it into a movie to make more money. And everyone is always so happy they made it into a movie. Then it rules at the box office, and most of the people that go see the movie never read the book, at least not up until that point. Maybe after seeing the movie, they decide to read the book, but most people say they do not have time. I find that if I read a book after seeing the movie, I am forced to put the characters from the movie, the actors who played the characters, into the novel and it takes away from my imaginative power. I would rather imagine the characters the way I see them, making it a richer experience. If I ever read The Shawshank Redemption, every time the narrator describes a scene, I do not want to be thinking of Morgan Freeman’s voice. That would just place celebrities in a book I am reading to form my own impression about the book.

Even when I do read a book after I see the movie, I still find the book was always better. The book always contained more information, different scenes from the movie, and all of that good stuff, so it is not entirely the same. But the affect it has on my dreams is amazing. If I read the book, I start to have much more vivid dreams. They are so amazing, it is incomprehensible. Better than before. It is a mix of people from my life, and the storylines from some of the books all brought together, and sometimes there are things I never experienced, nor had I ever read these experiences, which is really interesting. I find that no one, or hardly anyone, ever wants to discuss dreams and how they relate to real life. I am one who loves to explore the dimension of dreams and its discontinuity. Its lack of persistence from night to night, from dream to dream. In a given night, I can create as many as six vivid scenes, six amazing dreams that put me in six different states of mind. And they all start off like this is my life, this is what I do, this is what is really happening.

Lucid dreams come few and far between, but I did have one about a week ago. That is something I need to get better at. I believe the key to unlocking that realization is when something happens in the dream that would never happen in real life, or would seldom happen and you would never expect it. Like the time I became lucid recently, I found over eighty dollars on the ground, and I thought to myself, “Hold on a minute, this never really happens, and if it does, I must be dreaming.” So that is how I became lucid. Although I really did not do much in that lucid dream except celebrate that I was lucid, it is something that was an indicator of progress, and the more I read, the closer I feel I am to having richer and possibly more lucid dreams.

The whole fact is that I have taken initiative to strengthen my mind and getting rid of the television was the first step. Now that I allocate the time I used to watch to either reading or writing, imagining instead of passively accepting images in front of me, I am unlocking the creative side of me that was dormant for so many years. Luckily, the first place the creativity struck was in my dream world, the place where I can have the most fun, at least in comparison to everyone else who is sleeping. I intend to read from now on every night. Another thing I added to my routine is going to bed earlier. Instead of staying up watching some sitcom I have already seen ten times anyway, I decide to read for maybe 45 minutes to an hour and then go off into dream land. It is less stimulating and relaxes me into sleep, like a warm bath.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my dream vividity and also come back for some more tips on how to have better dreams in the near future. I look at it this way: If you are asleep, would you rather dream vivid dreams, or essentially do nothing while you sleep? The choice is up to you.

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I remember a day where I was suffering with the after-effects of radiation on my brain: swelling, pressure, constant pain, with no real end in sight. The doctors had me on steroids, painkillers, and a host of other treatments and I was beginning to lose hope. I felt miserable and I did not know what was going to happen. Then I decided to take control of my life. I bought a book, a simple book, called Creating Power by Kareem Hajee, but it wasn’t just the book that changed my life, it was the attitude I had going into it and the feelings I had about getting to a point where I felt like myself again. It was knowing that everything is a product of the mind and that through conditioning of the mind, you can succeed in any aspect of your life that you want to.

It was all about figuring out what it is you want. In my situation back then, my first and foremost goal was to get healthy, so I focused primarily on that, with daily affirmations, visualizations, expanding on possibilities, and making sure I knew that anything, and everything was possible, and still is possible. One of my favorite examples from the book was he told a story of a man who was getting ready for work and accidentally dropped a jar of mayonnaise on the floor, shattering it everywhere. Some other family member comes in and makes a sarcastic comment about how you dropped the jar and now have to clean it up, therefore making you late for work. The obvious way to react to the situation in a reactive mode, meaning a defensive mode, sort of, is to yell at the family member and become enraged at the jar of mayonnaise, and clean it up grudgingly, and proceed to go to work in a huff, carrying that negative energy with you, and making your whole day miserable.

The alternative way to react to the mayonnaise situation was to say to yourself, “I’m cleaning up the mayonnaise and having a great day.” It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it works. You could spend your whole life in a negative state based on your external circumstances, and it won’t do you much good, but perhaps decoupling the feelings from the external actions and situations can somehow free us from emotional instability. If you can maintain an internal positive state at all times, you are less likely to be ruffled when things don’t go your way. It’s all about keeping things in perspective anyway. Let me explain:

If you are having a good day, a really good day, it may put you in a state of complete joy. You may be bursting with pride or whatever, but in that good day, it helps to realize that in order for this day to be a really good day, you have to look back at some other days and see that they were anything but good. Some of them were downright awful. But it makes the good days that much sweeter, knowing that they are not forever, that cherishing each positive moment is a sacred practice. But getting overly attached to these good days can be kind of unhealthy if you know where I am going with this. When things start to not go your way once again, if you are overly attached to the good days, a bad day could send you into a deep depression. But if you can look past the bad day, observe it, and say to yourself, “This may be a bad day, and it is a part of life, but there are more good days coming, as well as more bad days, as is the nature of life,” you may get a better bearing on understanding life is more about attitude than it is about situations.

I think it’s great whenever I talk to elderly people and I ask them if they are having a good day and they say, “Every day I wake up is a good day.” It shows an overall appreciation for life, no matter how good or bad it may be. If you can appreciate life itself, every part of it, be thankful for the good and the bad, then you are on your way towards enlightenment or whatever you want to call it.

I can honestly say I am thankful for everything, even my unexpected brain cancer. It was another form of “personal growth.” I know that it was a terrible experience, but it changed me for the better in so many ways and allowed me to no longer be afraid of who I really am and to share myself with the world, without any kind of fear or regret. I sometimes forget this and have to constantly remind myself of who I am and what I have overcome and that once I get the inside right, the outside will take care of itself. It is an overall approach to life, to have a positive attitude, to be thankful for everything you receive, and to prosper indefinitely with the fruits of existence.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I overcame the pain, the swelling, and if it ever comes back, if any sort of suffering comes back to me, I will accept it, and change my attitude towards it, be grateful for the health I have, thereby sending me more of the health I need. Good day.

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“I’m just having trouble overcoming this fear of society. Sure, it’s nice to live in solitude and I’ve made a lot of progress in many areas, but it’s becoming integrated in a society that is so preoccupied with material wealth and superficiality that stifles me from doing so. I’m not of material gain. I care more about the inside of a person than the outside. But society conditions us to look on the outside and take possessions over knowledge. That’s one reason I got away. There is no more value in truth. The value is in creating a life that others would envy, whether or not the life is true. It’s all about ego. Ego and the gratification of that ego. But when you live alone for as long as I have, the go pretty much disappears. You no longer are your birth name. You just become an entity. You don’t really have a specific ego because you are no longer trying to impress people. There is no drive to do so, especially by telling falsehoods. You learn to get by from being an honest and loving person, even if the only person you love is yourself. It’s not that I fear society, I fear the fact that if I were to become part of it once again, I’d be considered the weird one, the one who doesn’t conform to conventional normalities. People will wonder if I’m completely insane or if I’m some sort of serial killer. The things I do will be suspicious in a world bombarded with fear. Even if I were doing activities that resembled Jesus, people would pass me off as a crazy man because no one acts like that anymore.

And it’s a shame no one does. We’ve isolated ourselves anyway. Most people get up, go to work, and then go back home in their safe little house. So it’s not like I’m doing anything that radical. Most people spend the majority of their time in isolation or with very few people. Maybe I’m not that different. Maybe I need to lead a revolution about slowing down and relaxing and thinking, for Christ’s sake! The whole world is almost devoid of thinking. People have so many things to occupy their time that thinking has become of a low priority. Very few individuals think on a regular basis. This is why most of them can’t have nice things. And by nice things, I mean a sense of inner peace, a feeling of connectedness with nature, and an overall good feeling about where their lives are headed. But it’s not really their fault. It’s society’s fault. The media has conditioned them to believe that in order to be happy, you must buy things that will ultimately not make you happy. It’s because the things you’re after aren’t material, but internal. The internal part of yourself can never go away. The materials will come and go. There is not permanence in material wealth, but there is permanence in spiritual and intrinsic wealth. This is why most Zen Buddhist monks own hardly anything. They don’t feel bound by the impulse to always get more things because they have such a good inner self-image and peace that they don’t need external substance to ground them.

I think that’s what we all crave, though, isn’t it? To be able to be content with the things that nature gave us, the food we were intended to eat, and the peace we were intended to have. I feel that if we could all do this, then there would be no more wars, no more famine, no more greed, lust, and the other deadly sins and catastrophes. There would be no more need for entertainment because we would get that from experiencing our daily lives. There would be no need for processed foods as we would be grateful to eat the foods nature intended for us. These are the things that I wonder about. Could we actually go to a place like this, where everyone lives in complete harmony? A place where people help each other out of compassion and not for a reciprocal gain? That we all give, but by giving we also receive, but without actually receiving anything physical? A place where judgments are left at the door and never picked up again. That’s the kind of place I would like to live in. Maybe if I imagine it clearly enough, it will come true. I can see it so vividly in my mind’s eye. There are only peace, harmony, and unconditional love for one another because we all know we’re all pretty much the same. And we embrace that fact by working together to better the world and erase the terrible state that it’s in now. But we don’t organize anything. Whenever an organization forms, there becomes a need for greed and fear-based conformity. Take Christianity for example. They prey on the fact that they believe if you don’t follow a specific book written over 2000 years ago, you will go to a place that’s so bad it’s beyond your imagination.

The real motive is to decouple the fear mentality from the doing good to others mentality. I want people to help each other because they inherently want to, not because they feel that they have to or something bad will happen. I want people to live to their full potential while also making the world a better place. I want them to become a vibrational match for peace, love, and forgiveness. I want to us rely solely on each other and place trust in one another. I don’t want people out for their own selfish causes. I want people to only exist to help each other and do what inspires them. No more need for people do do jobs they hate just to make money. There will be no need because money will eventually become obsolete as everyone’s basic needs will be met and the rest will take care of itself through people living their passions. It will be a form of mutual connectivity that will most likely never divert back to the way the world is now.

The problem with the world is that we were born into it. We weren’t born before it was created, so we’re not really wholly responsible for the way it is. But we’ve become so accustomed to it that we just take it for what it is. We don’t really know where to begin to start correcting it, so we place those thoughts in the back of our minds in a filing cabinet with a lock on it. And when we go to retrieve the information, we realize we don’t have the key for the lock on the filing cabinet, so we decide to accept the world as it is and not make significant steps to change it. And then the cycle perpetuates to the point of utter materialism and gluttony as a society, which leads to the depletion of our natural resources, which leads to the extinction of mankind. And we will never see it coming. Even if we do see it coming, we’ll be too late to stop the disaster that will ensue. ”

There, I hoped you enjoyed the little snipet from my book.  I’m really enjoying writing it, as it is simply a “continued journal,” as the man in the book was completely given up using dates and times to run his life.  It’s kind of like reading someone’s organized thoughts continuously.  It’s a very itneresting book to write, that means it will be fun to read for whoever ends up publishing it.

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• The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter
• Step to Stand-Up Comedy by Greg Dean
• How to Be Funny by Jon Macks

The book I found most enlightening on comedy was definitely Judy Carter’s Comedy Bible because it really had a no-nonsense approach to comedy.  It had pretty good exercises and had some quizzes to determine if you were funny.  It was filled with personal stories, commentary from hundreds of pros, and jokes from more than fifty different comedians.  It also featured how to do a one-person show, write a sitcom, and many other comedy-related things.  Business advice is also very prominent.  I really enjoyed this book.  Of all the books I’ve read, I would recommend this one above everything.

The other two books are very informative and cover the theory of laughter and what makes people laugh.  It talks about different things that cause tension and all that stuff that’s very theoretical in nature.  I would recommend Greg Dean’s book if you’re more of a beginner as it covers basic joke structure and beginning stuff that you really should know already, but he makes a lot of valid points.

How to Be Funny is just a book for being funny in everyday life.  It gave me a ton of great ideas of what creates laughter and basic things like that.  These things have made me a hit at parties and social gatherings, mostly because I think a lot more consciously and on my toes.  It also helps that I have  a sharp wit.  If you don’t have a sharp wit, I’m sure this book will at least sharpen it to a certain extent.  I sure hope you enjoy these three books because I sure did.

Keep in mind that I havnen’t read every comedy book, but I do know when I read bad books and when the books I read are very informative.  Take my word for it, you’ll enjoy these books if you are interested in comedy to some degree.

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