This famous opening line from Ayn Rand’s best selling novel Atlas Shrugged comes to mind every time a new tragedy explodes on the scene and people ask “Why?” I am now convinced that before they ask the question, they have already decided that the answer is either nonexistent or at…
It is a year of unprecedented extremes in the climate of presidential politics. It is a year of terrorist attacks around the world, most inflicted by Muslims upon other Muslims. It is a year that has left humanity groping for answers to the perennial question: “Why?” Satisfying answers, however, are…
Listen to this page being read: Very few people would look at our world and see no problems whatsoever: Nothing to complain about; no wish unfulfilled; nothing to fear. Never is this more obvious than when catastrophic events occur, whether natural or human in origin. Almost inevitably when these events…
This is a brief excerpt from an interview I did with Mary Adams on Co-Creator Radio. This segment deals with how I came to write When Gulls Fly Low, and why. It ends with my answer to her questions about forgiveness. Many people have seen the book as a class in forgiveness, even…
This is what happens when people of goodwill seek real solutions, not just revenge and retribution. Click the photo to read the whole Washington Post story about how Black Lives Matter canceled a protest to accept an invitation from the police of Wichita to a cookout instead.
In my post here, “The Parallax View of Thrill Seekers,” I cast light on the prejudice of scientists to intepret experimental and observational data to infer causal relationships where none are indicated. Today I read one of the few highly-visible examples of both that propensity, and its polar opposite. In…
As a freshman in college I took my first psychology course in which I was introduced to many new and interesting concepts. Among these was something called “consensual validation.” I don’t recall the precise definition given to this term, but it was something like: “granting validity to a belief or…
I have been blessed throughout my life with the presence of extraordinary people. Alvin Bach was one of my favorites. Al was a diminutive man, barely 5 feet tall and a bit elf like. He was soft spoken with a sense of humor as crisp as the first bite of…
Yesterday Mary Adams-Eck, co-owner of the Co-Creator Network, interviewed me on her weekly Internet radio show. We covered a wide range of topics, from forgiveness as I dealt with it in my novel When Gulls Fly Low, to fear and the craziness it engenders, as well as how to deal…
There is an athletic team you may not have heard of. They are not affiliated with any city, league or country. They are what you might call freelance. They call themselves Team Hoyt, composed of father and son Dick and Rick Hoyt. You may want to watch a video about…
Have you ever felt like you were just wandering through life without a compass? Many people secretly feel that way. They also feel like there must be some purpose to their lives, but they have not yet been able to determine what it is. At least not in a…
Once upon a time in the mid-1970s, toward the end of the Watergate fiasco, comedian Rich Little did an impression of President Richard Nixon. In it he said, “Richard Nixon is the kind of man who, if you were drowning 20 feet off shore, would throw you eleven feet of…
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those were the famous words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first inaugural address, and while he showed much greater insight than most people, before or since, he didn’t have it all figured out. Not by a long shot.…
Written by Ned B. Johnson As told by Hank Freyman Hank Freyman is a long-time lover of jazz and has been active in a jazz/vocal ensemble in New York City for some time. The group enjoys performing at hospitals and nursing homes whenever they can. One such outing recently took…
When I was in my early 20s, I developed a bad case of resentment about forgiveness. My reasoning was straightforward and fairly simple. I saw the act of forgiveness as being equivalent to saying: “Even though you are a bad person who does bad things, I, being a superior and…
Many readers of my novel When Gulls Fly Low have remarked that they found it to be a wonderful lesson in forgiveness. One even said it was the best book on forgiving she’d ever read. At first, this mystified me, because I’d never thought of it as anything like that.…
Would you spend a weekend with this man? Nearly half a million people once said “Yes!” Why would so many people put themselves through untold discomfort in the middle of August, just to hang out with him and a few hundred thousand of his (not really) closest friends? Well, some good music…
Many years ago, comedian Bill Cosby did a series of commercials for the Peace Corps. In one of them he began by saying something like: “Remember when your mother used to say, ‘Don’t forget your rain coat,’ or, ‘Don’t go out without your galoshes.’ You probably thought she was nagging you, but…
Over 300 million years ago, the land mass now known as the Middle East was covered by swamps and shallow seas and populated by countless forms of life. Now, the residue of those creatures and plants have transformed into oil deposits beneath the sands of the region. When that oil…
What follows is an excerpt I recently found in my personal journal. I wrote it Friday, November 25th, 2005, the day after Thanksgiving. It offers the reader a chance to peek inside my mind as I consider some new ideas that I found extremely compelling at the time, and far…
I read this quotation from Abraham Lincoln on Twitter just now: “Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.” It reminded me of a situation I was once in, and for the first time I can recall, I did just what Abe would…
When a college freshman, I had never taken a course in public speaking or debate. I decided it was time to correct that missing element of my education. So I enrolled in Speech 101 (or whatever it was called). I don’t know exactly what I expected, but whatever it was,…
Albert Einstein is alleged to have said, “Great spirits have always encountered violent oppostion from mediocre minds.” Over forty years before I read that, I expressed a similar observation at a deeply personal level in this poem: In dead of night I skulk about my secret to pursue. This lonly…
Listen to this page being read: The following is excerpted from Chapter 4 of Millennial Challenges: Personal Challenges. Before we get into the challenges involved in living fearlessly, let’s get a few things straight about the nature of fear. There will be some surprises here for most people, but not…
I would like to say something about the only emotions being love and fear. In a sense that is true, but it can be simplified even further to the point where there is only one: love. Here’s what I mean. Fear is the emotion we experience when we have the…
All That Is creates the Universe because of its desire to know itself completely. It expresses itself, then experiences those expressions as itself. We are part of that process. We are All That Is expressing itself as us, and our unique experiences are All That Is experiencing itself from our…
I have considered many times over the last two or three decades various descriptions of what I wanted to represent in the lives of those with whom I interact. My focus has been on finding the best way to express the effect I have, or the role I play, in…
I’m overjoyed to announce that I will be interviewed by Mary Adams-Eck on Monday May 25, 2009 at 8:00 AM PDT (-07:00 from Greenwich, 10:00 CDT, 11:00 EDT) on Co-Creator Radio. After a long discussion about the topic we wanted to focus on, we decided that the best approach was…
The Milgram Experiment In 1961 a 28-year-old psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, with the ink still wet on his doctoral degree, began his career at Yale University. One of his first acts was to contrive an experiment that shook the world. His name was Stanley Milgram and the experiment…
Freedom is a word that is bandied about capriciously by nearly everyone in these United States, yet is one of the most abused words in our language. In the minds of the founding fathers, it was thought of as an absolute thing: either one is free or one is not.…
As a clinical psychology instructor at the U.S. Army’s Medical Field Service School, in San Antonio, my job was largely involved with teaching a wide variety of forms of psychological testing. The famous Rorschach inkblot test was among them. It is a specific example of a category of test called…
Full and effective communication is the most important single factor in any human interaction. This is especially true in a loving relationship. It is easy to overlook the fact that the information that is being communicated, even non-verbally, does not tell the whole story. Nor is it necessarily the most…
I recently watched a TV program about hazing in college fraternities. In it they quoted disturbing statistics such as every year for decades at least one student has died as a direct result of hazing. They went on to look at what colleges, parents, police, and even the leadership of…
When I look at all the classes and courses I was offered in school–and there were thousands–never did I see anything called “Being Honest with Yourself 101,” or anything like it. In fact, I’ve never even heard of such a thing. Yet what I have learned is that any inability…
I am the Earth. And while that is your name for me, not my name for myself, it will do for now. I write to you out of love for myself and for all of which I am composed which, of course, includes you. I will refer to myself here as “I”…
So you want to be immune to Swine Flu? Read on, but are you in for a surprise. In the last few days the consciousness of swine flu has virtually exploded. Everywhere people gather to exchange information, whether on TV, radio, newspapers, or the Internet, it is a main topic…
Although the term technology has become closely bound to science, even the word science itself has its roots in a time long before the scientific method was formalized. Basically, it means the search for knowledge. Technology is the application of that knowledge, presumably to one’s advantage. So technology can be…
Most people believe that their lives are largely a matter of cause and effect with a substantial dose of random chance (or luck, if you prefer). Some see destiny as being involved. They are wrong. Life is an experssion of choices and the creativity with which all consciousness is richly…
(excepted from The Seth Material) Now, and this will seem like a contradiction in terms—there is nonbeing. It is a state, not of nothingness, but a state in which probabilities and possibilities are known and anticipated but blocked from expression. Dimly, through what you would call history, hardly remembered, there was…
Excerpted from “Magic Mail” by Ned B. Johnson October 1993 The capacity for tool making was long considered the signal characteristic that made human beings human. It was, that is, until Dr. Jane Goodall and others began documenting the behavior of chimpanzees. They soon discovered that at least this branch…
In 1975 Jane Roberts published the second volume of the series that came to be known collectively as “The Seth Books.” It was entitled The Nature of Personal Reality, and it was the closest thing to a combined owner’s manual/Chilton book for human beings I have ever seen. It’s basic pitch was…
In 1961 the East German government started work on the Berlin Wall. Not long afterward The Chad Mitchell Trio recorded their first album. Remember The Chad Mitchell Trio? The Mitchell Trio? Maybe this will help. When namesake-tenor Chad Mitchell left the group, his replacement was another blond tenor, Henry John…
In an article in New Scientist magazine, neurobiologist David McCobb, of Cornell University, says he has found evidence linking a preference for extreme sports to a pair of proteins in the adrenal gland. Adrenaline is secreted by the adrenal gland through tiny channels made up of two types of protein…
There is a subtle but critical difference between intellectual and personal acceptance. It took me a lot of years to reach the place where I felt I had to go one way or the other, the conventional reality view or Seth’s. When that time came, my choice was to consciously,…
I received an e-mail this morning from the producers of one of my favorite films, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” It was a letter from one of the movie’s three prime movers, Bill Arnst. In it he responded to a scathing and cynical review of his film in a…
At the end of this video, the question is asked, rhetorically, what does this exponential rate of change mean. Below is a brief overview of some of my answers. In the early 1980s I created and implemented a public opinion poll in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. It’s purpose was…
In 1981 I had a neighbor who, while she was friendly enough, always seemed to keep a certain distance. When asked about that, she said she had a rule never to get too close to her neighbors. One evening I met her coming home, and I saw that something was…
In the early 1980s I had a lot of friends who were into various alternative health care modalities. None of them was exactly setting the world on fire, nor did they seem to have much of a clue as to how to market their practices. There was a lot of…
Here are some resources that are helpful in understanding the basis upon which the World Sanity Project is founded, along with annotations as to why they are included on this list. I started this list with just a few entries already in mind. But as I went through the inventory…
Introduction Before going further, it is important that the word ‘sanity’ be defined as it will be used here. There are shades and nuances in the popular vernacular that could be confusing if used to interpret what you are about to read. A definition of sanity as used here This…
“The War in Iraq” is nonsense. It does not exist. It is entirely fiction. What does exist and is real is a multitude of wars in Iraq, as many of them as there are humans who hold the thought of such a war. Each and all of them are entirely unique, individual,…
“Perspective: use it or lose it.” Richard Bach, “Illusions” It is always a matter of perspective. Perception, if you like. But what it really comes down to is that anything that can be called a failure, can just as easily be called a success if you stand in the right…
How many times has that question been asked, in various forms, since the Indian Ocean’s belated Christmas present arrived in South Asia? And children aren’t the only ones asking. Most people, even those who are thousands of miles away, are trying to come to grips with the magnitude and impact…
When I switched my college major from engineering to clinical psychology, I was fortunate to have a new next-door neighbor, Al, who was a graduate student in clinical psychology. He was in the final months of an eleven-year saga to his PhD. One day I asked him what the difference…
In game theory there is a type of game called the “zero-sum game.” Simply put, it is the winner-take-all kind of game. The name derives from the fact that in zero-sum games, what the winner wins is exactly equal to what the loser loses. If you add them together, the…
