As the old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Recently I was in a store that was offering a free pack of razor blades if you bought two tubes of shaving cream. Well, of course, the blades weren’t really free - their cost was passed on to the customers indirectly in the price of other things they bought at the store.

Mastering your Internal Map of Reality This may all seem incredibly complex, and in a sense, it is. (In fact, we’ve just scratched the surface of your Internal Map of Reality, looking at just a few aspects of it.) You are fluent in your native language, however, and even the simplest language is complex. Mastering your Internal Map of Reality is like anything else - you start where you are, you practice, and you make progress.

Metaprograms are content-free (unlike beliefs or values, each of which has content) in the sense that they can be applied to any content. Let’s look at a couple of the more important metaprograms.

The Direction Filter determines whether, when you look at a given situation, you move toward what you want, or away from what you don’t want. If someone asks you why having a good job is important to you (assuming that it is), you might say that having a good job creates a good living and allows you to exercise your creativity.

Your Internal Map of Reality is really just a way of taking what comes in through your senses and turning it into what you feel, how you behave, and the people and situations you attract or become attracted to. There are several steps in this process. In the simplest sense, you begin by deciding what to pay attention to. Then, you decide how to pay attention to it, in other words, how to represent to yourself internally whatever you are paying attention to (i.e., how to think about it).

The entire universe is a projection of consciousness. We experience the universe as a projection through us because each of us is a center of consciousness. Therefore we are all centers of the universe. There really is no here or there because everything is at one point where consciousness is. We all do not exist in different places but are all present at one point. The reality of here and there is all created and experienced within the singularity of consciousness itself. Where you are is the center of the universe.

Chances are, at one time or another, you and everyone you know have asked the age old question, “Why me?” when something bad or unfortunate has happened to you or someone close to you. I know that I have certainly succumbed to this most familiar query.

Here’s the problem with letting this question get the best of you: you automatically lose!

For many, a new year ushers in opportunities for fresh starts. For those hampered by last year�s (or the last decade�s) household clutter, decreasing the mess also can reduce stress, according to organizational expert Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, a health psychologist at the University of New Hampshire.

�There is a connection between mess and stress. Life is substantially more stressful when chaos reigns. You end up taking longer to do the same amount of work,� Kendall-Tackett says. �When your home is well ordered, people and things get to where they need to be, tasks get done, and family life is cherished. Organization allows you to have a life.�

Few things affect our lives more than our faculty of attention, If we can�t focus our attention�due to either agitation or dullness�we can�t do anything well. We can�t study, listen, converse with others, work, play, or even sleep well when our attention is impaired. And for many of us, our attention is impaired much of the time.