John is in his third marriage. He is trying to get by. He has a responsible job, a good income, a home, grown children. Suddenly without any intention he has an affair. Now everything is at stake. His marrige is threatened, his stability gone, he is torn with indecision. He can’t understand why he did this to himself. He was doing okay. His life was not great, but it was passable. We re-diagnosed his symptom as being the affair and before that his mediocrity. He tried, but just couldn’t settle for compromise, for decency, for okayness. He didn’t consider what he really wanted, because "it was not attainable." The affair represented what he was denying. Without even realizing it, he risked everything and went for the "brass ring." But what was this brass ring? Was it another woman? He had reached for that brass ring many times, including three marriages and other affairs. Every brass ring had turned sour. But that did not prevent him from reaching again for more than compromise, for what he thought was "unattainable." What is this "more" ? Does it imply that something is lacking in his wife or even in his marriage? Not necessarily, unless he was expecting his wife and his marriage to make up for something else.

You may try to live in Kafka’s hut, but the castle that you are towers above the story of your huthood. You can’t be mediocre. You may attempt to settle for less, to compromise, to build a safe security zone, to defend ourselves against risk and hurt, but it cannot be done. You are not mediocre, never have been, never will be. You are a human god, an infinite being, pretending to have been hurt, damaged, belittled, victimized, and therefore as needing protection. You spend half of your energy trying to protect and defend yourself, but you can’t do it. Why? The danger is in your thinking. The enemy is within. The enemy is an inner fear which has become aggressive. This fear aggresses toward you, and you try to defend against it. There is a mole in your psyche. A betrayer. And you are angry that you have to "give up" freedom, love, power, and pleasure in order to be safe. But what is worse, you cannot do it. As hard as you may try to prevent it, something is always pushing you over the edge, upsetting your apple cart, putting you at risk. We buy every kind of insurance conceivable, and we still aren’t "covered" well enough. Our comfort zone will never protect us from the risks of our infinite potentiality. You cannot grow and feel absolutely safe at the same time. We build a protective fortress and then we develop a symptom that is out of control and that puts us at risk. We cannot be mediocre. If we try to be banal, we develop a symptom. We have to become the nicest, meanest, scaredest, saddest, sickest, craziest, strongest, weakest, smartest, stupidest, cheatingest, lyingest, friendliest, unfriendliest, gamblingest, drunkest, laziest, hardest working, most pious, naughtiest, etc. Everyone goes to some extreme to prove he or she is not mediocre. You can’t be mediocre, you can’t settle for less. You will be sick or angry about your self-imposed mediocrity. Whether you live in apparent poverty or luxury, you are a human god and you cannot settle for less than a godlike state of mind. You can live anywhere under any circumstances with dignity and respect, and you will transform your environment.

All of our excuses are justifications we give ourselves for not being the gods that we are. Pride and shame about our symptomatic behavior goeth before a fall because these are compensatory actions, based upon the belief that we are not up to snuff. Attention-getting devices and popularity-strivings always backfire until we reach genuine self-realization. We work so hard to be accepted or we pretend that we don’t care. A goddess has nothing to prove, defend or deny, nor does she compare, compete and oppose.

If you judge anyone as less than a god or goddess, you can forgive your judgment, whether the other meets your standards or not. A mistaken god is still a god; an angry god is still a god; a pathetic god is still a god. And if you don’t recognize it, you too will experience feeling mistaken, angry and pathetic. First and foremost this person before you and this person in your memory is a human god, a human goddess. To the degree that you can see that, you too are a human god, no more and no less. In fact, the more you see your own godhood, the more you see others’ godhood. Wherever you see sin, it is yours; wherever you see crime, it is yours; wherever you see fault, it is yours; wherever you see beauty, it is yours; wherever you see love, it is yours; wherever you see godhood, it is yours. There is nothing you can see except your own consciousness and the story therein. If you see laziness or weakness or meanness, it is yours. You see only your own judgments. If you forgive your judgments, you are free of them. If you cling to them, they cling to you. Judging is mediocrity.

If you judge, you will punish or reward. If you punish or reward, you will be judged. If you are judged, you will be punished or rewarded. If you are punished or rewarded, you will judge again. What a mediocre cycle! Imagine what a difference you could make in the world if you broke even one of those cycles a day. And what about 100 or 1000! Freedom and peace follow the disappearance of the judge-and-punish-or-rewardcycle. Is it my business to judge-and-punish-or-reward? Am I equipped to be a punisher or rewarder of myself or others? Is it my business to judge myself or anyone else? Everyone seems to make judging their business, but can we assume that we know enough to punish or reward anyone? Judging, rewarding and punishing is god’s business and he knows enough to do neither.

Self-ignorance and its judging bring the mediocre symptoms we call punishment; self-awareness and its non-judging bring relief from the mediocre symptoms that we call rewards. Some people have supposedly learned self-discipline from the judge-and-punish-or-reward system and some have supposedly not learned such self-discipline, and most have inconsistently learned it, but all learning has to be un-done if we are to be self-realized. Discipline and non-discipline occur within a false story, and bring with them the self-fulfilling prophecy of rewards and punishments. All of our stories and the self-discipline and non-self-discipline, rewards and punishments therein, are mediocre.

The addictive power of television must arise from its attempt to be non-mediocre. Any extreme of human experience can be portrayed in what seems like the relative safety of the media. We may be trying to get by with the supposed safety of mediocrity in our daily life, but we can come home and watch the wildest shows. Yet I offer you the suggestion that for the most part television and the media do not break the bonds of mediocrity. We can taste the possibility of breaking the bonds of mediocrity through the good guys or the bad guys on the television or movie screen or in a novel, but such characterizations often still remain within the mediocre story of good and evil, reward and punishment, and we are still not satisfied with our mediocrity, and we will never be. You are not some mediocre stimulus-response machine, although you may think, feel and act like one too much of the time.

Symptoms are consequences of your story. No story, no symptoms, no consequences. Just peace.