Grace Under Pressure - World Class Leadership Course

“There are no bad regiments in the French Army -- although some regiments fail because they are commanded by bad colonels.”

Napoleon Bonaparte -- Maxims Of War

Wild Ducks

Some years ago I heard what was soon to become the death rattle of a great industrial civilization. I heard it in the angry voices of two factory owners who were at their wits end. In Sydney, Australia, one furious executive shouted that the only way to restore employee commitment would be to line his striking workers against a wall and shoot every third one.

His American counterpart in Minneapolis wasn’t so bloody minded but he was no less frustrated by his failure to win the commitment of his workers. He yearned for a major economic depression to return them to their senses so they would never again challenge his decisions. His business would suffer and his earnings decline, he admitted, but he felt it would be worth it emotionally to get the labor issue settled once and for all. He may have had his wish granted, since his company is now working at half capacity and is struggling to survive as his sons now compete with products coming from China, Japan, India, Brazil and even from an awakened and ambitious Vietnam. For we are no longer competing with ourselves -- with firms who are making the same fundamental mistakes inherent in a lockstep approach, but with hungry achievers who are coming on line abundant resources and deeply committed people.

I took neither man seriously, since they were both half out of their minds with frustration and were obviously venting their fears and frustrations -- but as they blustered, it became painfully obvious that neither executive understood the challenge nor had the wisdom and the grace to cope with the events occurring across Western Civilization. Neither owner had a sound vision for ending the crippling adversary relationships that make many American, Australasian and British businesses more and more vulnerable. Too few men and women in leadership positions have captured a vision of what a committed community of achievers can accomplish. A great many companies remain trapped in an antiquated philosophy of leadership that depends on interpersonal power and rigid control and when that fails, they become vulnerable because of increasing world competition.

We, in the Western World, still suffer greatly from the massive leadership failure documented in Harvard Business Review some years past. Of course it is ironic that more recent Harvard researchers criticized the tightly scripted industrial engineering approach to management that their predecessors in the Harvard Business School invented a generation or so ago. The fill in the blanks -- connect the dots, Harvard engineering and re-engineering approach used managers and workers as if they were emotionless robots. Workers were paid the absolute survival minimum and worked relentlessly until they malfunctioned. The so called rational approach that ignored emotions and ethics and excluded morality from a nihilistic philosophy of business, consumed people who were then replaced as if tools of production that failed.

It seemed cost effective to use up workers and to replace those who faltered with machines that never argue or want more money. Actually, dealing successfully with ego-centric humans is a challenging business that bad managers and executives strive desperately to avoid at all costs.

The Harvard approach trained plug-in executives who could shift effortlessly from one product or service to another as the best possible approach to fast stock market profits -- whether manufacturing hair driers, paint or canning peaches. The Harvard approach was always about winning on Wall Street with swift stock market killings and never about producing great products or valuable services and letting a company’s excellence persuade investors to stay committed over the long term. Many executives lose their jobs because the company suffered a bad year on Wall Street but few if any have ruined their careers by producing second or third rate products. This nihilistic philosophy of service to society worked reasonably well for dysfunctional organizations that produced shoddy goods and services. The managers could follow the lock step procedures laid down by ideological professors who never met a payroll or walked a production floor and the cash cow would give milk and cream forever. Unfortunately, the old girl grew weary and gave up the ghost when a host of international players appeared on stage and elbowed their day into the chow line. Until now, General Motors automobiles and vans suffer as many failures after three years on the road as Toyotas and Hondas have during their seventh year of service. More and more companies have become wholesalers who produce nothing of their own but pass foreign goods off to the public with their own brand names pasted on. Chrysler has managed to survive by teaming up with Mercedes while General Motors is considering a consortium with European and Asian firms in order to remain viable in the world market. Or possibly Ford and G M may combine forces in order to survive by cutting design and production costs significantly. Everything is still about the all crucial quarterly report in order to placate institutional shareholders. Very little is about manufacturing excellence although no one wants to make shoddy goods. It is just that when push comes to shove financially, the accountants on the top floor go for the stock market fast buck every time.

The computerized re-engineering approach became an item of faith, was the standard ideology revered by many who lacked the vision that sophisticated leaders apply to create effective communities of achievers. It seemed good enough to break every task down to its mind-numbing elementals, to pay the peons just enough to keep them from starving and to follow the industrial engineering lock steps to mediocrity on the world’s stage when our competitors are offering increasing excellence through their products and services.

There certainly has been no great desire to follow the wild ducks who ride the cold north wind of commerce to great heights with their organizations. These swift birds of passage upset domesticated barnyard fowl terribly with their fierce passions. Lee Iacocca carried his youthful fascination with speed to fruition when he saved an even then struggling Ford Motor Company with the original Mustang sports car. He mass produced a twenty-nine hundred dollar low tech donkey that could blow off forty thousand dollar Porsche thoroughbreds on any race track in America. He build them in several variants -- from six cylinder butterflies for elderly ladies who wanted a town coupe -- to fire-breathing dragons for white knuckle racing. I know, I bought one of the four speed, over-carburated, disc braked beasts that was sprung like a British ox cart for my wife Roberta on her thirtieth birthday. We made swift passages along the back roads through the Rocky Mountains and around the Great Lakes for years in bellowing glory. Thank you Lee Iacocca for many glorious memories imprinted on our psyches while in four wheel drifts near the limit of adhesion!

Then, there was Mary Kay with her cosmetics empire who developed an entirely new way of transforming fifty cents worth of simple ingredients into glamorous lipsticks and rouges and she did it with flair and great fun -- with girls-only house parties and gifts of flamingo pink Cadillac's for her committed achievers. Mary Kay was a sophisticated leader who really understood the social and sensual interests of women who party together, recapture a bit of romance at home and buy more of her cosmetics line than they had planned!

Dutch Kindleberger transcended the law of gravity by first designing and building the world class B - 25 bombers that James Doolittle’s boys flew to Tokyo and the evergreen P - 51 fighter from scratch on clean sheets of engineering paper. You could see the fighter parked on a tarmac at dawn and know that it was the best of the breed. That was for practice -- Dutch then went on to jets such as the F - 86 and the F - 100 and to create earth shaking rocket engines that could power towering space ships to escape velocity at his Rocket dyne Division of North American Aviation. He literally made the mountains quake! Dutch loved aircraft and he loved men and women who were thrilled by his Mad Max vision of powering Americans to the moon. Dutch would salivate at nights over his drawing board. I know -- I did quality assurance on his X - 15 and the air breathing Navajo scram jet for two summers when I was teaching science at Cincinnati’s Sayler Park School. For years I treasured a small medallion which included aluminum taken from the Eagle that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. Walking upright through the massive ram jet engines of the Navajo was never just a summer job for this former science instructor who sent ten times as many kids into science and technical careers as his predecessor.

And don’t forget Willy Davidson who quipped that a fellow who has only one motorcycle couldn’t consider himself much of a biker. Willy knew what his customers wanted and served them so well with his rumbling 1915 technology Hogs, that Harley Davidson is now worth more on the stock market than General Motors. I doubt that the Harvard gurus ever pondered why the Dupont executives who destroyed the Indian Motorcycle Company, failed so miserably with their plug-in management approach. The executives made bad financial decisions and a series of bad motorcycles that few riders would buy. Willy and his posse didn’t survive with clever Wall Street scams after Indian collapsed -- they did it the old fashioned way -- they earned it after Willy and other motorcycle enthusiasts snatched Harley Davidson back from the Brunswick executives who were following the Dupont crew to disaster by building bad machines. You might say that both companies were saddled with bad colonels, but Willy and his guys rescued his namesake.

Those were committed people, who multiplied their passions through their people and not one of the wild ducks, who rode the cold north wind ahead of their flocks, would have been worth a hill of beans at making clothespins or peddling sugar water to teenagers. All of them were passionate achievers who had the dual leadership ability to manage resources and relationship well.

Unfortunately, our deepening American leadership failure has included a greedy loss of vision of what creative men and women of passion and a commitment to greatness can achieve when they become committed leaders.

It is well past time to put that failure behind us, to harness the human element understood by successful leaders, by embracing and capitalizing on the universal desire of men and women to find meaning for themselves and to make their lives count in purposeful activities with their resources and through their relationships. Fortunately, I am finding signs that more perceptive Western managers are beginning to understand how commitment and excellence can be jump-started in our organizations. I surely do see it emerging from the women entrepreneurs now taking significant roles in our society. Most men have traditionally followed the Harvard paint-by-the-numbers approach, using a universal system for earning money but not especially caring whether they are working with garbage, grain, coal or with the American banking system’s money -- so long as the monthly report is good. On the other hand, most women going into business for themselves, choose areas of service where they feel a sense of meaning and purpose that lifts them beyond a satisfactory bank account in return for their accomplishments. When they reach home and family at the end of the work week, many more women than men want to feel they have contributed to society in some significant manner in addition to creating their own wealth.

For years I taught courses about the need to harness commitment and creativity, to manage resources and relationships -- to the budding executives in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona at Tucson. I acknowledged the need for greater government cooperation, for improved technology, for lower interest rates, and for freedom from the tyranny of the monthly report. I then insisted that a new philosophy of leadership is needed to better utilize the reservoir of often untapped human ability that exists in every organization. In my courses, I told each group of two dozen or so fast-track executives from Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, Australia, England, Brazil and the United States, that we must turn our organizations into surrogate communities in which people invest the very stuff of their lives at tasks or in relationships that are meaningful to them personally. I concluded by saying that in no other way could an executive or manager further a career effectively.

There is a point to this, and I cannot help but recall it every time I hear managers and executives talking about the lack of commitment offered them by their employees:

Because men and women almost always continue holding the attitudes and completing the activities that reward them personally, while avoiding the attitudes and ending the activities that devalue or deprive them of benefits, every management team receives the level of performance from the employees that the leadership group consistently reinforces in some tangible or intangible manner.

Unfortunately, in our American and European nations, frequently the level of commitment is neither what the leadership wanted nor expected.

There are no bad regiments: There are only bad colonels!

This course is about becoming a more successful leader by harnessing what we now know about effectiveness and efficiency. The research is in -- any group that becomes what I call a community of achievers can maintain its level of productivity with a significant reduction in labor costs, in floor space, and with in inventory. Any manager who cannot build a career on that improvement probably has no business cluttering the territory!

SELF-FOCUS SAMPLE
Tell what you think the author means when he writes that every management team receives the level of commitment that the leaders consistently reward.

In the physical or resource aspects of leadership.

In the psychological or relational aspects of leadership

Does your group receive the degree of commitment expected from the use of a sound quid pro quo?

If you answer yes, why does your reward system succeed?

If your answer is no, why does your reward system fail?

Facing Up to 2008 and Limits of American power

In the dark Indochina night of the American soul, we wasted almost sixty thousand soldiers and a quarter million wounded, while morally weakening virtually every American institution. Multitudes of citizens have never again accepted our administrative, legislative and judicial aspects of governance with the same degree of trust that we had in them before Vietnam. This is still reflected in the twenty-two percent approval rate of the late do nothing Republican Congress. And why should we -- when our leaders not only sacrificed our own men but murdered more than a million simple peasant farmers and fishermen. They killed them in a brutal scheme to return the people of Vietnam as serfs in chains forged by brutal French colonial thieves. Worse, we supported the rapacious return of the Europeans to Indochina while Ho Chi Min and his staff were begging first Truman and then Eisenhower to help them create a humane approach to life for their people. They modeled their revolution after our own and in desperation after their pleas fell on deaf Washington ears, turned to the Communists to help them savage the French Army at Dien Bien Fu. Hard ball power players such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were incensed and eager to retaliate, because the ragged little peasants dared challenge their personal power to move the people of Asia around like pawns on the international board. As J R R Tolkien said so brilliantly -- Unfettered power players compromise so much in their determination to rule or ruin, that they lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil -- between right and wrong. A wicked shroud of expediency envelopes their souls as the needs and rights of others are twisted to their meet own neurotic or even psychopathic yearnings.

It has now become painfully obvious that our present cabal of hubristic proto-fascist ideologues have learned nothing about the limits of American power. We have been led for more than a decade by power brokers who are far more willing to rip and tear everything good for our middle class rather than to create anything positive. Now, anyone with even a modicum of spirituality mourns the three thousand slain and twenty-five thousand maimed men and women of the Cheney/Bush War that has the potential to explode out of control and double or triple the current costs and casualties. Three thousand dead and still counting as Cheney/Bush call for even more men and women to draw their chestnuts from the Iraqi fire. All of which should receive some concentrated attention from Republican clones of Bush who survived the 2006 massacre when the 2008 campaign brings another day of reckoning.

During the Vietnam War, Tricky Dick Nixon won the presidency after the voters drove Johnson from office, by pretending to have a secret plan to extricate America from Vietnam. He even patted his breast pocket as he campaigned -- as if he carried his plan close to his heart. Of course, Nixon’s exit strategy was to win a grand military victory over the non-white raggedy-assed little peasants, despite rebellion on the college campuses and streets of America and eventually in corporate board rooms and within the Congress itself. After Johnson left just before the ax fell, Nixon’s futile pursuit of a military victory gave America another twenty-five thousand mostly poor ghetto and farm boys slain, and another hundred thousand crippled. Only then was Nixon dragged, kicking and screaming to negotiate with the peasants armed with little more than great big A K - 47s, a handful of rice each day, plenty of ammunition and infinite courage -- as they shivered with malaria in the monsoon. They gave first French Foreign Legionaries and then U. S. Marines all the war they could tolerate, closing so near to the perimeter wire that neither American artillery nor air craft could strike them without slaying their own ground troops. His wicked choices led to Nixon’s downfall -- the entire Watergate affair was simply the cause celebre through which angry citizens drove the dark hearted, paranoid president out of office. And despite the continuing disaster Nixon stayed the course to the bitter end. It fell on Gerald Ford, to bite the bullet and withdraw all American forces from Vietnam. And, when Ford sacrificed his own reelection chances to pardon Nixon, possibly keeping him from prison, he refused to thank his benefactor.

As a line of ancient French wisdom reports -- The more things change the more they remain the same. George Bush has taken a page from Nixon’s failed play book with his very own secret plan for winning his war despite growing outrage at home. Bush’s exit strategy is to win his victory by doubling down the number of our boys and girls at risk, dooming as many American kids as it takes to secure military bases from which to dominate the oil rich region, which is why Cheney/Bush took us to war in the first place. He also wants to leave a decent legacy to his presidency and especially, to sooth his severely wounded ego. Virtually every man and woman in the civilized world now sees that this wannabe emperor wears no clothes, that he is a fraud as a leader. Many understand that his failures as a dyslexic student, a womanizing husband, a troubled father with drastic mood swings and a three strike business failure until his father gave him a share in a Texas baseball team -- have left great throbbing wounds in his psyche. He consistently reveals the symptoms of psychological overcompensation with his bombastic West Texas aggression, his devaluing everyone he meets with demeaning nicknames, his inability to read and concentrate, his violent rejection of any form of criticism and reliance on ideological fantasies rather than on facts, are some of the symptoms that plague a dried out alcoholic. To paraphrase the brilliant Otto Rank -- The road to vast power and wealth indeed passes close by the madhouse.

Bush irrationally expects successful results from compulsively repeating his self-defeating mistakes. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Baath Party and the El Quaida leaders despised and distrusted one another, there was not a single Iraqi among the 9/11 attackers and the myth of creating a democratic Middle East was a fall back position hurriedly invented by White House spin doctors to deceive a restive American citizenry who had begun to question the logic behind the Cheney/Bush War. Bush now finds himself deep in a hole of his own making but he cannot stop obsessively digging it ever deeper.

Such a rigid inability to learn from one’s mistakes is as probably as good a short description of neuroticism and psychopathy as can be found.

Cheney/Bush ignore the bruising defeat the American voters handed the Republican Party during the 2006 election, reject virtually everything the Baker Commission identified as important and dispute the advice from the compliant generals they themselves appointed. Bush is compulsively determined to win a self-redeeming military victory where none is possible without a decade or two of bloody guerrilla warfare. An Iraqi civil war is simmering as American occupiers cause deep resentment and distrust. Obviously, a defeat of this magnitude shall shred even more his wounded ego although he no longer has any good options. Bush faces a choice of evils, clinging to the slender hope that somehow, Iraqi politicians who hate one another with a tribal virulence few Americans have ever seen can persuade their police and military forces to forget centuries of brutal warfare to cooperate according to democratic rules they do not understand.

To win a military victory and keep the lid on tight, Cheney/Bush would need to double or triple the war budget and the number of Americans sacrificed in Iraq and install a regime as cruel as any imposed by the Germans and Japanese during World War II. The war mongers would need to invent and rearm another Saddam! Johnson and Nixon installed surrogate rulers in Vietnam and the expedient decisions made in Washington hastened the Vietnamese victory and crippled the American Army for a generation. Unjust wars and the moral compromises made by politicians and generals to win them at any cost, make a mockery of the motto of our professional officer corps -- Duty, Honor and Country. Even honest and patriotic soldiers can be so worn down and frustrated that they acquiesce to the lesser of several evils. After having served America as one of them, I do not blame the troops in any way as they serve our nation wisely and well in a situation made by the proto-fascists of the Republican right wing. It is a tragedy that so many American soldiers naively danced to the tune of narcissistic politicians, plutocrats and preachers for so long -- who are spending their lives like pocket change in a mad quest to meet their own wicked ideological and financial goals.

The reactionary politicians and their fundamental preacher allies of the Republican Party may remain so stubborn that they must stay the course with an apparently neurotic and barely coherent president and his brain trust. They can filibuster every attempt to negotiate an end to the Cheney/Bush War, burn the Army and the National Guard to professional and emotional cinders with endless tours of duty and keep Cheney’s Halliburton gang busy building military bases in Iraq from which to launch an even more disastrous war against Iran. They can continue to play fast and lose with the Kurds’ against Turkey and the Shiite slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Iraq until Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt explode in resentment. Then the oil fields may well go up in flames and gasoline shall sell for five dollars a gallon across America -- crippling our airline and trucking industries and sending inflation skyrocketing.

Every wicked endeavor is filled with unforeseen consequences that are subjectively overlooked by compulsive narcissistic leaders who claw their way to power in political, commercial and religious organizations. The Cheney/Bush spin doctors may continue to egoistically assume they can manipulate middle class voters into loving or at least financing and fighting their war with their sons and daughters, while their own kids are safe at Yale, Harvard and Stanford. But we out here on the tundra are primed to complete the job well begun during the 2006 election. If the reactionaries and fundamentalists continue playing the cards Cheney/Bush deal from the bottom of the deck, they will enter the 2008 presidential election season with still more of our kids coming home in coffins, the national debt soaring out of sight and inflation stalking every retirement plan. That should galvanize their already surly constituents immensely as they vote to elect a president and even more members of Congress who will finally stop sleepwalking behind the pied pipers of Washington led by Cheney/Bush and address our legitimate concerns.

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* Benefit: learn the personal tools to revitalize and fulfill your
relationship.

* Consistent joyful sexuality in your relationship.


* Benefit: achieve sexual intimacy without guilt or game playing to increase your joy.

* Predict your Personality Pattern to influence and your partners.

* Benefit: learn specific communication techniques to better influence your partner.

* Learn to manage your conflicts through the Three Stage Conflict Avoidance and Control ASRAC PROCESS.

* Benefit: learning this alone could save your marriage or relationship.

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* Benefit: negotiate about money, sex, discipline and everything else without conflict.

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Men and women are mirror image souls who need one another for fulfillment - for intimacy caresses through the long nights of winter, for the yin and yang of masculine and feminine strengths, for perpetuating ourselves immortally through our children.

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Warmly,
Jard and Roberta DeVille

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The Slacker Uprising

Come watch the trailer for the new Michael Moore movie entitled "Slacker Uprising". You will be able to download the entire movie for free on September 23rd if you sign up!

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God's Passion

As anthropologist and priest Tielhard de Chardin expressed so brilliantly, life in the universe is no accident -- no one time collision of random factors that led eventually to humankind's appearance on this lovely planet circling an insignificant yellow star, out on the edge of a very common galaxy, with nothing to set it off from several hundred million island universes. We can hardly imagine how life established a foothold here, amidst the billions of crashing meteor strikes, millions of rumbling volcanoes and eons of acid rain in a poisonous atmosphere. We do know that free radicals and electricity are colliding continually throughout the Cosmos, creating basic building blocks of protein, under enormous pressure to burst through every seam on every viable world, into existence in every possible environment. Of course, as children of the stars we simply cannot boast that God created the cosmos for us alone, when one planet around an insignificant yellow sun would have been quite enough for our needs.

Everything exists because God's deepest passion has always been life, life in every nook and cranny of our world. From the mountain peaks to the depths of the seas, life of every shape and style emerges constantly. Life seems to ooze out of the very pores of Mother Earth. The six or eight billion year old record of fossils in the rocks is staggering in volume and complexity. When Jard was in graduate school and teaching science in the Cincinnati school system, he’d occasionally take the kids fossil hunting with picks and hammers along the creeks that carved passages through the chalk bed of the vast, primordial Mississippian Sea. The white deposits are hundreds of feet thick with the skeletal remains of creatures that look like everything from twigs to trilobites and a great many one to two inch long beaks of prehistoric squids. One year, a nearby farmer plowed up a giant squid’s beak over four feet long. Even the biology professors at the University of Cincinnati, where we were studying at the time, had trouble estimating how long its arms must have been. Perhaps, one of them finally ventured a guess, tentacles of sixty or more feet! God indeed is the Seminal Spirit and Cosmic Creator of all matter and all that has followed according to the basic principle of Continuous Creation.

Here now is our crucial point about cosmic origins, about stars and humans for men and women who want to make their lives count for something meaningful rather than merely secular and temporal.

When God’s processes of Continuous Creation produced our species through cosmic alchemy, we retained the metaphysical -- the spiritual nature of God and the Cosmos from which we came. No other species became so self-aware, with spiritual yearnings that go far beyond our physical and psychological needs. We are the only philosophical species. Like no other creatures -- we are sentient, we know that we know. We think constantly about thinking and consistent find spiritual sources of meaning and belonging or we go spiritually bankrupt.

We ponder being alive, wondering who we are, why we exist and where we are going. After making a bad choice and receiving punishment, no dog lays awake all night agonizing over what an evil thing he has done. To think about good and evil is a human concept. So is success and failure. It is our conscience, a vital part of the spiritual unconscious of which Frankl wrote, that actively seeks more than bread and circuses, more than power, possessions, prestige and pleasure. We live within the physical and through the psychological. but we dare not neglect our philosophical/spiritual needs or we wither and blow away as rootless tumbleweeds vanish in a barren desert.

Until we connect consciously to God by developing a purposeful and permanent spiritual relationship, we remain fragile individuals trying to navigate our little boats on a desperately complex voyage that stretches from eternity to eternity with very little security while traversing the void. And it is from this challenge in an age of incessant change that the many life-style frustrations of our era come to bedevil us!

Fortunately, God, the Continuous Creator and Lord of the Cosmos in whom we live and move and have our being, is the all-powerful, all wise and all-pervasive spirit who knows, understands and loves all persons. In other words;

God cares about you and all of your loved ones, although multitudes freeze God out of their lives until they are unhappy, frustrated and in desperate spiritual straits. Then, with their souls wounded, they turn to any number of self-defeating ways in a futile search to make psychology successful. Karen Horney in her brilliant book, the Neurotic Personality Of Our Time wrote --

“A great many neurotic men and women will do anything to be loved except to become loveable.”

God’s obvious passion is life; life beyond comprehension developing continually in every nook and cranny of Earth. Off the coast of southeastern New Guinea, two great tropical ocean currents collide and swirl and intermingle water so warm it is almost like a broth. This vast soup bowl is filled with incredible living creatures, thousands of which have yet to be discovered and classified by scientists. Some of them change from plants to animals and back again during their life cycles. Spiders have been found hunting prey atop Mt. Everest and incredible yard long eel-like creatures make their living feeding on bacteria spewed from the throats of volcanic vents in the eternal night and crushing pressure under two or three miles of Pacific Ocean water. And of course, the faster we create antibiotic medications to slay dangerous bacteria, they faster their strongest survivors adapt to the poison and render it useless as a medication. Nothing in life remains static, although we humans do indeed despise change in almost any form, unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then we still have difficulties when adapting to anything new.

There is little doubt, to us anyway, that life forms continuously develop beyond our limited vision to populate the entire Cosmos, according to scientific principles of which God is the divine author. Astronomers have now identified more planets beyond our solar system than within it. And we do understand that God the universe throbs with God's passion for life; life under intense pressure to burst through at every seam in every viable environment, on every borning world. This is no little fly-by-night operation we are invited to join but the very purpose of existence! God’s passion is why there is something here, within our grasp and sight rather than nothing existing at all. If we foolishly reject psychospiritual wisdom and practices or just ignore God through ignorance, we are missing the main element of a successful and spiritual lifestyle. For the health of our souls, we must meet the cosmic needs that we all have inherited through the Lord of Life.

Despite the quarrels of some fearful persons within formal religion and academic research, there never has been any real conflict between spiritual wisdom and scientific knowledge. There is nothing that should cause spiritually minded persons to cower in the stagnant backwaters of research, education, the arts, commerce and government. Of course, science considers the how of cosmic creation while religion deals with the why of our extraordinary cosmos.

Mini-Quiz
Have you ever felt yourself connected with God in a personal manner?

How do you see God’s passion for life being manifested today?


Author's Bio

Jard & Roberta DeVille; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote 'LOVERS FOR LIFE' and other courses/books together. She's been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and Internet Business Tools.

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God' Will and Sarah Palin a Fundamentalist

Much of the scrutiny has focused on Palin’s church, the Wassila Assembly of God. This past week a video emerged of Palin telling students there that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a task from God. Her comments have raised concerns she could see some government actions as inevitable or pre-ordained as part of a theocratic belief in “end times.”

Palin said the construction of a new oil pipeline in Alaska is God’s will.

Watch the Video *Sarah Palin's Crazy Ideas*

FAITH’S REWARDS

Although it is difficult for secular skeptics to believe that joy and satisfaction is found through a spiritual life-style, we can prosper in many ways through our faith. This can now be seen through a large body of research. Psychiatrist Raymond Moody, some years ago, researched and wrote the amazing book called Life After Life. In it he described scores of experiences through which persons from all walks of life died clinically and then were called back through heroic medical procedures. Multitudes of persons, perhaps as many as several million, including Roberta who bled to death during the birth of our third child and was revived miraculously, went through the now famous tunnel to the light on the other side of life and then returned to complete earthly missions. The life after life experience has become too common to deny, although some scientists legitimately debate its cause. However, most researchers see it as a real event. From time to time we catch glimpses that existence isn’t all over for us with the death of the brain and body -- some aspect of our soul seems divine and linked forever with the God who brought us into existence. We suspect the human race has been experiencing this for a long time, which would account for the elaborate Egyptian celebration of life after life during the ages of the pharaohs.

We can also verify the power of prayer in our lives as believers after relating to God. Professor of Cardiology Randolph Byrd of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco studied some 400 patients at San Francisco General Hospital over a period of several years. They were in the Cardiology Unit with massive heart attacks or severe chest pains that required serious treatment. Dr. Byrd conducted traditional double blind research in which neither the health care professionals nor the patients knew which half of the sufferers were being prayed for - in addition to the best care the hospital could offer them. Their names were sent to church groups around the Bay area for regular prayers. The two hundred control patients received the precise same medical treatment but without consistent prayer. The results were spectacular, far beyond statistics, almost beyond belief!

According to Larry Dossey, M D, who has written Meaning And Medicine and Healing Words (The Power Of Prayer), the group being prayed for reacted precisely as if the patients were being given a miraculous new medication. The 200 being prayed for, although taken at random in a double blind, had far fewer deaths, required less surgery and were soon put on a much milder medication schedule. They healed more quickly than the control 200. Dr. Dossey reports that had any new drug been so effective, it would have been hailed world wide as a modern medical miracle. Dossey cites some one hundred thirty research studies which show that prayer heals and how it is connected with the temporal area of the brain's right hemisphere! We can call this telepathy or communicating with God or whatever, but the truth is; When we pray for you with love, compassion and concern, knowing we are connected with God, something good ,prayhappens to you! Also -- the other way around when you pray for us.

From the day Jard learned that his innocent nephew on Death Row in an Arizona prison was getting an appeal hearing, he prayed that justice would be served, that the judge would see the truth and release David. What happened at the hearing? Within forty-five minutes the judge threw the conviction out as being without any merit and sent David home with his mother and father. When we connect with God -- we also connect with each other and it can be a fulfilling connection! It was a tremendous victory over evil men and systems through prayer.

SELF-FOCUS
Do you know anyone who returned from the other side?

When have you seen sincere and loving prayers work miracles?