Supposedly Buddha recommended avoiding extremism, suggesting we should instead pursue the middle path. But where exactly are the edges of the middle path? Does the middle path mean the average path, close to what everyone else is doing? No, I don’t think the middle path is something you can measure with an external yardstick. This is [...]

The essence of successful income generation is value creation.  If you want to earn income, you must provide something that matters enough to someone else that they’ll pay you for it.  The act of providing value may be direct, such as selling a useful product or service, or it may be indirect, such as providing a free [...]

There many strategies you can use to select and plan a career path, but perhaps the two most basic patterns are bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up career planning Bottom-up career planning means figuring out how you can best take advantage of the career building blocks you already possess.  It’s a low-level, objective method of planning. Perhaps the [...]

Erin recently decided to start offering consulting services on her web site.  You can visit her consulting page for details and topics, or read her recent blog post about it. Technically she’s been doing consulting for a while.  Some people would book a reading with her and then use their reading time to ask her [...]

The reason I haven’t posted the New York City trip review yet is that I’ve been sick the past several days.  Erin and I co-wrote the review last week (about 6000 words), but I still need to add the photos.  I’ll have it online by the end of the week. This was a strange illness.  I had a mild cold near [...]

A forum member recently shared the Carl Sagan quote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Sagan is credited with popularizing that slight rephrasing of an older quote by Marcello Truzzi:  “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” These quotes assume an objective universe, which is a rather biased way of looking at reality — and not particularly accurate.  [...]

Our shared physical reality is the most common state of reality we experience, but it certainly isn’t the only one.  Our nighttime dreams are another state, as are astral experiences, near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences. I regard these different levels of reality as being at different frequencies or energy levels.  It’s like tuning into different TV channels.  Physical [...]

John Assaraf is an international best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. You may have seen him as one of the experts in the popular movie The Secret (as well as in The Secret book), talking about how he manifested his dream house. What’s most amazing is that he lived in that house for quite a while before discovering it was the exact same house he originally posted on his [...]

Readers often ask me, “Steve, how do you know if the whole subjective reality belief system you describe is accurate?  Do you really believe in this stuff?  It just seems so… you know… out there.” Behind such questions is usually an assumption that reality is in fact objective and that accuracy is an objective standard.  But [...]

I want to make a distinction between subjective reality and solipsism, since many readers still confuse the two.  I think the best way to explain the difference is by way of a simple analogy:  lucid dreaming. Imagine you’re having a lucid dream.  This means you’re lying in bed having a dream, and while still within [...]