People, citizens, did not go out and pick up trash! Governments hired people to do this or used prison labor, so John Q. Such citizen initiative was unheard of in those days. First, we demonstrated personal responsibility by cleaning trash along state highways. Clean Up America’s mission was two-fold in nature. It expanded to over a dozen in a few years. Clean Up America (CUA) was our first answer. The lessons we taught, the heart of the School, were then as they remain today for adults. Many of us were parents or taught those who were raising children. In 1976, students and faculty of the School of Metaphysics were invested in educating the soul from birth. Less than a year into my study I learned something that helped me to understand. Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? I wondered why I hadn’t been taught how to find these answers earlier in life. ![]() Here I could learn the answers to the really important questions in my life and everyone else’s. Having been roused from the sleep of victimhood, I quickly realized this was the school I had been looking for all my life. Within a month of this life-changing, consciousness-raising realization I began studying mental law at the School of Metaphysics. One day I asked the right question, “What causes my pain?” The usual suspects flashed before my mental eye, some, like my parents, were miles away having no direct impact on my life others, like the ex-fiance, weren’t even in my life anymore. Where was my reward for being good? The distance between my thoughts and my physical reality was oppressive. Sooner or later you have to wonder, is this all there is? Like most middle class people I grew up believing that if I had a skill in life, a career, a niche, which are all products of schooling, then I could expect to find happiness and security the rest of my life. Since then I have found a lot of other people follow this same pattern. I didn’t want to face a hopeless life, so I ran from it. So I fell into escaping through will busters for a while alcohol, drugs, excessive sleep. Religion was not an option because I had so many prejudices about it. Therapy was a bit too expensive and I knew the basics there anyway. I’d visited mental institutions as a college student and knew I didn’t belong there. I was so depressed – with no goal, the breakup of an engagement, yet not wanting to return to my parents’ home – I began thinking of how to get out, how to end it all. So six months after graduating I found myself wondering what I was going to do with my life. What I learned came from the experiences I had in school and college more than the book learning. I settled on journalism, partly because I would be able to learn the rest of my life and partly because my scholarship to the University of Missouri helped financially. I educated myself and found not enough financial security in psychology and too much medical study and upfront expense in psychiatry. Our school didn’t have psych courses, so I talked with teachers. By high school my interest in helping people was steering me toward psychology. At one point or another I wanted to be just about everything, a lawyer, an interviewer, an actress, a pilot, a playwright, an architect, an interpreter at the United Nations. It introduced me to many wonderful people, living and dead, who would serve as role models, ideals. I was led to believe that school would provide me with what I needed to find them. To the degree we can respond to opportunity, can we expect to produce happiness, peace, and security? I wanted to know the answers. The inquisitive among us wonders what about the opportunities missed or passed by, the roads not taken. If who we are, what we are made of, determines our success in life, each of us must be in control of our destiny. Who each of these people became depended upon who they were as individuals. Think of da Vinci, Einstein, Curie, Churchill, Plato, Confucius, Lincoln, Lao Tsu. ![]() The cause had to be more than when and where you were born and to whom, because many times this just didn’t seem to matter. Is it fate or luck that determines success? Is it predestination or windfall that determines a well-lived life? One person makes a global success out of meager beginnings while another squanders a fortune in reputation as well as money. Even as a young child, I saw the paradoxes. When I was young I read books and saw television shows based upon the lives of famous people. From the newly released How to Raise an Indigo Child
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