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Best Times - VIP Audio

Hi it’s AJ, welcome VIP member to this month’s topic, this month’s lesson. Now this one is inspired by a quote, which you may recognize. I think it was Tolstoy. I haven’t actually read the book, but it begins like this: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” And that’s the idea I want to explore with you right now regarding our current modern age that we’re living in right now. It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.

This is an idea that I’ve heard a few people talk about and I’ve really begun to appreciate and see. Because in many ways, you look at any aspect of modern life today in any country, on one hand it seems like things are worse than ever before. I mean absolutely frickin’ terrible and, yet, on the other hand if you look at some other things, if you shift your focus, things seem to be better than they’ve ever been before, just amazing.

So, in many ways, it’s kind of hard to process this, to understand this, especially emotionally, and it’s really easy to get caught in one or the other. Unfortunately, I’d say it’s probably easier to get focused on the worst parts. Let’s face it. Our media, the news, all these things tend to focus on those things and so it can become super overwhelming and, yet, at the same time all those terrible things are happening and they are happening, there’s all these amazing, wonderful, incredible things better than ever before also happening in the world.

So let’s just talk about a few examples, a few of the really major things in modern life, in modern societies today and let’s look at both the worst and the best so that we know hey, yes, things are terrible, but we can also find some amazing things. The first one will be media, in terms of media, news, television, radio, print media or even online. So on one hand the media is worse than ever before. I mean there’s more lies, more propaganda than ever before and it’s more sophisticated than ever before.

I mean here in the United States, mainstream media, meaning normal television, normal television news, major newspapers, they’re total lies at this point. They’re all owned by super-huge, massive corporations and so they serve the interest of large super-huge corporations and the U.S. government. They’re both connected quite closely.

So on one hand if you look at this situation, it seems just really terrible and horrible. It’s very much like the world that George Orwell described in his book 1984 where the lies are so deep and, yet, everybody believes them, seemingly everybody. Not everybody, but it seems a lot of people just kind of believe all the lies and how even the language has been corrupted.

For example, one of his famous examples he called doublespeak. Doublespeak is where the media propaganda makes one word mean its opposite. So, for example, now we have wars for peace. That phrase, ‘war for peace’, right? People will just kind of accept that. Oh, war for peace. This is something you’ll hear on the news and, yet, when you think of it okay, war is not peace. War is the opposite of peace. War is murdering and killing and bombing people and, yet, people will just get confused by this sort of propaganda-type of language and we see this constantly.

You know the war on terror, the war on drugs. The war on terror is not a war on terror.

Terror is just an emotion. What is it? It’s a war against certain countries and certain people. They’re killing them. They’re murdering them and most of them are no threat at all. The war on drugs what is that? They’re not shooting drugs, they’re shooting people.

They’re capturing people. They’re putting people in jail. They’re destroying lives all over the planet.

So this is just like oh, my God, it’s terrible. I get really overwhelmed by all this stuff myself, all this propaganda. It’s just pure lies, the lies about all the wars to support all the wars, all these other things about science, about health, about nutrition. I mean any topic in the United States and I think probably everywhere in the world, if you listen to the main news sources you’re going to get distortions or complete lies and you’re also not going to hear a lot of other stuff that’s true. They’re just going to leave it out. They won’t cover it. They won’t tell you about it.

So that seems overwhelming, it’s the worst of times. It’s worse than ever before oh, my God, but on the other hand it’s also the best of times because, especially through the Internet, we have this amazing connection to all kinds of alternative media, independent media. I mean anywhere from little small individuals writing their own little blogs or Facebook pages, all the way up to bigger organizations that really are dedicated to truth and they really are against war and against lies. It’s amazing. There’s this incredible integrity.

So if you search a little bit and it doesn’t take a lot of effort, online you can find incredible news sources. You can hear all those things that the big corporate media is not telling you, that the governments aren’t telling you. You can get an incredible amount of really great information about politics, about economics, about health, about anything. It’s quite amazing.

I mean HYPERLINK “http://www.InfoWars.com” InfoWars.com I read that for a lot of political information. I don’t agree always with their opinions; however, I get so much more valuable real information with some integrity than I would if I watch CNN, which are just mostly corporate lies or distortions. There’s one called HYPERLINK “http:// www.NaturalNews.com” NaturalNews.com, another great source for independent alternative media. I mean there are hundreds and thousands of them out there in all different countries of the world and all you have to do is just make a little effort to research them and you can get so much deep, real information. So it’s also the best of times if you focus on that.

What about health and food that I mentioned? Is it the worst of times or the best of times? It’s both. It’s the worst of times. There’s more chemicals used than ever before.

We’re now getting all these genetically-modified organisms. Companies like Monsanto are trying to destroy organic food and takeover the whole food supply. They’re putting horrible poisons on our food. They’re driving out small family farms horrible, horrible stuff.

Likewise, the medical industry, like cancer industry, for example, it’s an industry that makes tons of money. In America they actually will arrest somebody who tries to help someone with cancer in a natural way. If they open a clinic and they tell people oh, you can possibly cure your cancer with nutrition and other natural health-building methods, the U.S. government with huge, big machine guns will come in and arrest that person and throw them in jail.

Yet, at the same time hospitals can zap people, hit people with horrible radiation and give them these toxic chemicals that kill most of the patients. Their success rate with treating cancer is extremely low. Those people are not put in jail. Why? Because it’s huge, big business. Seems like the worst of times with our food and our health. On the other hand, again, through the Internet, through books, through a whole range of things there is more information and more access to amazing, super health than we have ever had at any other point in history.

I mean at this point because of the transportation systems, because of online, because of all the new discoveries out there, you now have access to the most powerful plants, nutrition, supplements, herbs and foods in every single part of the world. You can order amazing healing super powerful herbs from the Amazon, from Asia, from North America, from Europe. It’s amazing. It’s super powerful.

You can gain incredible information about nutrition, fitness, health. There are all kinds of incredible athletic improvements that have been made through research and new cutting-edge training methods and new cutting-edge nutrition. I mean it’s now possible to be stronger and healthier at an older and older and older age than ever before. So, in that sense, it’s the best of times.

The same is true with the international community. In war, of course, we know that there is just horrible wars and all this horrible propaganda about wars and this whole propaganda about the war on terrorism and terrorism and all this other B.S., you know bullshit. So it seems like oh, it’s horrible. It’s terrible. Oh my God, they’re creating a police state all over the world. Oh my God, all this war and all these people are supporting wars, yet, at the same time we’ve never had more of an opportunity to build international communities.

I mean look at our Effortless English Club and our VIP Program. I mean it’s just amazing. You know people from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds, different ages, different genders, etc. connecting, befriending each other, supporting each other, learning from each other. Some of our VIP members have actually visited each other. I have visited VIP members in Asia and in Europe. It’s pretty cool. It’s really amazing.

I mean if you think back 50 years ago even, it wasn’t so easy to do this. We didn’t have the Internet. How would you connect with so many people from so many countries and learn from them, right? It was very, very hard. Likewise, international travel now is cheaper and easier than at any time ever before in history. Now I know that everybody can’t afford an international plane ticket, but a lot more people can afford it now than in the past.

I mean in the past people had to pay to take a ship and it would take months, possibly, to cross the Pacific Ocean if you wanted to go from America to Japan, for example. It was a long difficult journey. I guess not 50 years ago, they had planes then, but 100, 200, 300 years ago. That’s fairly recent history and, yet, it was very hard to do then.

Even 50, maybe 100 years ago, even when the first planes were coming, it was an expensive thing. It was kind of a luxury thing. The average person didn’t just take a plane from San Francisco to Europe whenever they wanted to. Yet, now we have that available to us much more.

We’ve got all these little budget airlines. They have terrible service, but they’re cheap.

So there’s this incredible opportunity for people to travel, actually go to another country and experience it and learn from it. It’s much different than just reading a book about another culture. So, in that sense, we’ve got more of a global community, more of a connected international community of regular, normal people, not politicians, not soldiers, than ever before. That’s amazing and that is just the best of times.

And so in sum, to end this, what I would like us all to think about and this is true for me too, because I also have this same issue in my own life, is that on one hand we cannot ignore the worst parts. We can’t pretend they’re not there because they’re there. We see them. We read about them. We know they’re there. So forget living in denial. We have to accept that yes, it is the worst of times in many ways.

However, I think our job in the VIP Program, certainly my job, your job, all of us, to be happy, to be healthy, to really contribute to the world; we can’t let ourselves become focused on the worst parts. Many of those things we can’t control, so it is really in our interest and in the interest of the whole world that we focus more and more and more on the best parts.

On all these great, wonderful things I’ve discussed and many other areas of life, these wonderful, great, amazing things, the more we focus on that and make those things part of our lives, the better we become, the stronger we become, then we encourage other people to do the same thing. In this way we can start making things a lot better so that more and more people are focusing on and living the best parts and less and less are focused on and living the worst parts. There’s a big task for us, all right?

So your task this month and my task as well is to just accept all these terrible things and then try to let go of them as much as possible and really this month try to be focused on all the best parts, the great things. So if you start getting upset about the news and the media say okay, I’m going to focus on the great part, all these incredible independent media.

So just decide, I’m going to focus on the best parts and, I promise, I will try to do this, this month and I hope you will as well. So whenever we have this sort of overwhelmed feeling with anything that’s bad that’s happening out there in the world, let’s sort of take a deep breath, try to let go of it and then shift our focus and say okay, but what’s also great. It’s a good question, right? What’s also great? Let’s just keep asking ourselves that every day all month and then we can discuss this on our VIP social site as well.

Let’s discuss what’s great. Okay, see you next time.

Bye-bye.