Paris, France, Today: Early in the morning, at 12:01, over a friendly glass of Cabernet in a little cafe in Montparnasse, the Bloggard has signed an Agreement in Principle with the world-famous Folies Bergere.

Assuming that all proceeds as planned, in the upcoming summer season, the Bloggard will assume the leading role of Margo Lane in the Folies Bergere all-singing, all-dancing production of “Les Retours d’Ombre.”

The Bloggard reports that he is “tres jolie” about the upcoming production. No comment was forthcoming from the Folies at the Bergere.

More details to follow as they become available.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Each roommate knows that he does more than half the dishes.

That’s it. Just that simple. It’s a law of human nature, as dependable as gravity, and it’s caused by the way we see things.

For example …

Roommate A is very, very conscious of the dishes that he has washed, because he was there. If he was emotionally resisting the work, he was even more agonizingly there, and it seemed even longer.

On the other hand, Roommate A is hardly conscious at all of the time that Roommate B put in doing the dishes. Because while Roommate B was scouring the pots and pans, our pal Roommate A was thinking about a brunette or watching TV or worrying about the gubbamint.

It’s just a function of the consciousness of Roommate A. (Also see Law 23 of Human Consciousness.)

His dishes. Took forever. Some other dishes, done by somebody else, while he was wasn’t there, what do those dishes matter? Those are hardly any dishes at all!

Therefore his own dishes are vaster and more slow. It’s just human nature. Each roommate knows for certain that he does more than 50% of the dishes.

How is this useful?

Firstly, in any kind of negotiation, even though you know that you’ve done more than 50% of the blah-blah-blah, you’ve got to pretend to understand when the other person swears that they do more of the blah-blah-blah. For example, if you are married, your wife. As she will tell you, she does far more work around here than you do.

Grinny Bearit. Just the way life works. Another of God’s little jests. Let us all laugh together. Like this: Ha ha ha!

There. Knowing this valuable Rule-O-Thumb, go forth and prosper.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Doingness Goals can produce more Happiness than Beingness or Havingness Goals.

That’s it. In the physical universe, one must Be something, in order to Do something, with the result that one will Have something.

For example:

One chooses to be a surgeon, so one can do surgery, and then one will have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon.

One chooses to be a ditch-digger, so one can do the labor of digging ditches, and then one will have the muscles, money, and workday of a ditch-digger.

One chooses to be a car salesman, so one can do the selling of cars, and then one will have the wardrobe, commissions, and lifestyle of a car salesman.

Can you imagine somebody being a ditch-digger, so that he can do the selling of cars, so that he will then have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon?

Nope. Because it just doesn’t work that way.

And this knowledge leads us to something very, very useful …

In these examples, it’s clear that one could set a goal of any one of these things. For example, one could choose the goal of being a ditch-digger, or one could choose the goal of doing the digging of ditches. They’re not the same goal. In the first one you’re choosing who you are; in the second, you’re choosing something to do.

If you had a house and you wanted to dig some ditches around it, you could set the digging of some ditches as a doingness goal without your having to permanently become a ditch-digger. Or … you could choose the beingness goal of being a ditch-digger, and go through your whole life that way. It might be a little limiting, unless you really, really love the life of being a ditch-digger.

Similarly, you might choose the havingness goal of having a doctor’s office. Now you might be the surgeon, or you might be the landlord. Either way you could have a doctor’s office.

So you as a human get to choose your goals in life. And the goals you choose may be Beingness goals, or Doingness goals, or Havingness goals. But these three types of goals are not equal when it comes to providing you with a happy life.

When I went off to college, I first decided that I wanted to be an engineer. However, I’d not thought much ahead to what an engineer would do. And when I found myself studying engineering, I discovered at that moment that I didn’t enjoy doing what an engineer would do. The prospect of a lifetime doing those things was pretty boring to the wild guy I wanted to be at that time.

So the first thing we can do is to look past the Beingness goal to what we will be Doing, because that’s what’s going to fill up your life. Therefore, choosing Doingness goals may be generally wiser and more productive than choosing Beingness goals. Although Beingness is senior and probably more important than Doingness, the Doingness part determines whether you perform surgery or dig ditches or sell cars.

Now, if you listen to the television or if you read the advertisements online, you’ll notice that our world has the intent to ensnare you with Havingness goals. If you are to believe them, they claim you will be happy if you have this car to drive at illegal speeds down deserted roads, or you will be happy if you have that razor to make you handsome like the guy on television, or you will be happy if you have this bank to guard your financial affairs and make you wealthy when you are old and fat with white hair.

And you know that most of that is all baloney. This is our first clue about Havingness goals.

For you notice that they’re all Havingness goals. Are there any advertisements urging you to adopt a Doingness goal such as to save up $10,000, or to repair the storm drains of your house, or to practice dancing the tango? Not really. The closest they will come is to urge you to have a savings account at the bank, to have a power tool for the storm drain work, or to have lessons at Durango’s Dance Studio.

Always Havingness goals.

And let us ask the question: Do Havingness goals make you happy?

The answer is: Yes, they do, for about three minutes.

You may enjoy your new toaster for months, or even for years if you engage in the wise practice of gratitude. However, the flush of pleasure that comes when you first open the box and plug the toaster into the wall, and the flush of pleasure that comes with your first slice of toast will diminish rapidly. After a while, it’s just another slice of toast. A big ‘So What?’

But compare that to a Doingness goal.

Suppose that you really, really love dancing the tango, and you really, really enjoy teaching the tango to other people. You love the Doingness of dancing and teaching the Tango more than anything else in the world.

Now suppose you adopt the doingness goal of dancing and teaching the tango. And you start doing that.

How long will the pleasure last?

For the rest of your life.

You see, what happens in our world is that spirit or life (beingness) appears in the physical universe and does this and does that (doingness), thus bringing about the natural consequences or the inevitable effects (havingness) of such action.

Spirit –> Action –> Effect
Be –> Do –> Have

Life doesn’t really have to ponder much what it is being, just as you don’t have to ponder much what you are being when you focus on how you just love to dance and teach the tango. And you will have the natural consequences of the actions of a person dancing and teaching the tango.

The before and the after parts (being and having) are the premise and the natural consequence of the part in the middle (doing). The part in the middle is the part you most get to choose, and if you choose doing something that makes you happy, you can be happy your whole life long.

Now, within that, you can also make choices of whether you just get by, or whether you have riches untold while doing the thing you love. For example, you could squander your tango salary on red wine and drift from tango job to tango job, or you could own a national chain of Tango Studios and bring the joys of tango to the masses, or you could write startling and popular books on Tangercise and sell millions on television. So the havingness could vary tremendously. But in any of these cases, whether its the giddiness of red wine or the fame of Tangercise, you’d spend your life dancing and teaching the tango, and your entire life can be happy.

And the reason you can be happy for your entire life is that, when you choose Doingness goals, you are expressing what a spirit is designed to do in this physical universe.

You are fulfilling your destiny.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

You and I are not really all that conscious, so would we assume other folks to be conscious?

Because each of us goes through the day being continuously aware of something, we assume that we’re conscious beings. I mean from moment to moment, we’re aware of this, then aware of that, and then something else. First a thought about your work, then your butt itches, then you remember you need to stop at the grocery store, then you sneeze, and then you admire a passing girl.

You see? Continuously aware of something or other.

However, that’s not the whole story.

If we take a viewpoint outside our own busy brain, and consider one thing that’s outside ourselves, in the environment … for example, consider the color of paint on the front door of the house three doors down the street from where you live.

What color is it?

Many of us will not know. Because when we consider just one thing outside our own busy monkey-mind, it’s clear that we’re not very conscious of that one thing, not very conscious at all.

And the two things are related. Because we’re so internally busy being aware of this, of that, of this other, we’re really much too busy to be very conscious of the multiplicity of things and people and events and colors and sounds and temperatures and tones and stuff and stuff and stuff … all around us. The being busy — which makes us think we’re aware — is actually interfering with our ability to be conscious of things outside ourselves.

The book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind is perhaps the best book ever written that explains how human consciousness came to exist. In this book, author Julian Jaynes uses an analogy for consciousness. He says that our conscious is much as if we were a flashlight in a dark room. Wherever we look, we see light. But all around us — behind and to the sides and above and below — all around us there is a vast darkness, which we can never perceive, because that’s never where we are looking.

Accepting this situation is not to say there is anything wrong. We are finite creatures in an infinite universe. That’s the deal. We are feeble and so very limited, in the wide world around us. How could we possibly be conscious of all the vast and imponderable concatenation of single things through which we swim as in a rich broth of sound and sensation?

The answer: We cannot.

By our nature, by our limitation, we cannot be conscious, no matter how busy we are being aware of this, of that, of this other. Our freedom amid this vast barrier is that we can thoughtfully choose what kinds of things we’re going to be aware of. We can learn to operate a mind, to operate a set of emotions, to operate a body. Learn how to treat others, how to find what we want and what we think we need, how we will cherish others. This is our freedom. The freedom to choose … if we’re thoughtful about … being alive.

But now to the point: If you and I are not actually all that conscious, day in and day out, then why would we assume that other people are conscious?

And the answer is that they are not. For example, if you start a new business and you advertise in the paper and pass out leaflets up and down the street, then you will be amazed how staggeringly long it takes for your community of people to actually become aware of your existence. Each of those people has such low consciousness of any one thing — such as yourself — that they can remain amazingly unconscious of you and your thoughts and your needs and your existence. Oh, for years and years, it may be.

So we shouldn’t suffer about what other people are thinking about us. They’re generally not conscious of us at all. And there’s a lot of freedom in that.

Knowing this handy Rule-O-Thumb, go forth and prosper.

Mount Shasta, April 7, 2005: As of 3 pm, I am sixty-one years old. I know it was 3 pm when I was born, because my mama told me that ‘People Are Funny‘ was playing on the radio, and back in those days, it came on at 3 pm.

I have a few more creaks and aches, now and then, than was once the case. I’m not so willowy flexible as once upon a time. Yoga and motorcycles don’t suit me as well as once upon a time.

The girls no longer grin at me, just because my hair is curly. Of course, my hair is not curly any more. Being truthful, I must admit that the curly hair, once upon a time, was a permanent anyway. I wanted to see what would happen. I found out. It made them grin.

But this is just as well. I no longer have a great need for grinning girls, so that works out fine.

But when I look in the mirror, it’s still me. I suppose some day, when I look in the mirror, I won’t be there. But in the meantime … so far, so good.