Borrowed Theme: A Bundle of Thoughts That Were Never Ours

by Michael Evans

Overview

Watch any drug commercial, and watch as the actors and actresses distract your attention toward the end of the commercial as a voice elegantly lists the horrifying side effects. This can sum up the borrowed theme--a hidden world of lies with carefully placed distractions to divide your attention. In this book, we focus not on the pretty faces you're supposed to look at. We focus on that tiny text at the bottom of the screen. We lift the hood on the car and check the engine while the salesman is trying desperately to get you fixated on the shiny paint. When you are able to spot a lie, a distraction, or an embellishment of the truth, you are on your way to freethinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524658984
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	01/09/2017
Pages:	110
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.26(d)

Read an Excerpt

Borrowed Theme

A Bundle of Thoughts That Were Never Ours

---

By Michael Evans

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2017 Michael Evans
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5898-4

---

CHAPTER 1

Accretion. The Killer Who is Never Found Guilty

Ring. ... Ring. ...

(Mike) "Hello:

(Sue) "Hey Mike its Sue. I have bad news. I have breast cancer. I am scheduled for surgery on Tuesday, then I start 14 months of Chemotherapy. "

(Mike) "I'm sorry to hear that. Before you go ahead with radiation treatment, maybe you should look into alternate treatments and stop getting mammograms. Start getting thermograms, because they are 100% safe and more accurate than mammograms. Did you know that mammograms cause 75 new cases of cancer for every 15 they identify?"

(Sue) "My doctor said I got cancer because I'm unlucky."

(Mike) Have you ever checked your home for dangerous EMF's, do you eat cured meats, do you manage stress? The accretion of toxins, coupled with poor diet, low activity and stress could be the cause – not bad luck!"

(Sue) "I don't have time for that. My doctor is going to save me and you don't know about cancer because you don't have it."

(Official) definition. Accretion: the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter

My definition for this book. Accretion: the process by which silent killers stick the proverbial knife into you, just enough to do some damage, but never enough for anyone to be able to pin-point who struck the lethal blow.

Chances are, you've never heard of the term, accretion. It's not really a sexy word. It's more of a term used in science. However, you need to understand the concept of accretion when it comes to food, physical activity, internet usage, toxins and life experiences.

Your friend Joe just died of a heart attack. Let's assume you haven't seen Joe in a year. The last time you saw him, he weighed 165lbs. When you see him in at his funeral, you see that he is obviously more than 200lbs and he's got a double chin with that basketball under the shirt look. Legitimate medical issues aside, we can assume that Joe was making poor choices with his food and the result is quite obvious. Assuming that Joe ate 3 meals per day, that's 1095 meals since you last saw him alive. Joe chose fatty, sodium rich, sugary meals and soda more often than he chose fruits, vegetables and water. By accretion (the gradual build up over time) Joe was slowly killing himself. Joe's heart attack can never be pin-pointed to one particular meal made in poor choice. His food choices over a period of time led to his heart attack.

Now let's assume that we haven't seen Jen in a year. She isn't dead, but she is depressed, angry, defensive and suffers from insomnia. The last time you saw Jen was a year ago. Back then, Jen was fun to be around and you enjoyed conversations with her. But now she doesn't participate in your conversations, even when the conversations are face-to-face and it's just the two of you speaking. When you are with Jen, she is constantly refreshing her social media page and clicking "like" on someone's photo. She writes, "LOL" in a comment section when she isn't laughing. She writes, "LMAO" when her face hasn't changed from the frown she's had on all day. Jen isn't laughing her ass off. She's pretending to listen to your conversation, adding noise here and there and repeating the last few words of your sentences in a mumbling voice to make it seem like she is engaged in your conversation. What the hell has Jen been doing to make her act like this? Unfortunately, it's what most teenagers and adults are doing with their spare time; staring at their phones and missing out on life. Social media itself is not the problem, but an imbalance of time on social media leads to a lack of patience or fulfillment, depression and a fake laugh here and there by way of writing, "LOL." When was the last time you wrote "LMAO" or "ROTFL" and you were really rolling on the floor laughing? Never. Jen has been hooked into the thought activity of her Facebook friends while they spew their feelings on politics, religion, terrorism, sports teams and other hot topics. A study by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers found the average cell phone user checks their phone 150 times per day. That's 54,750 times a year with an average of 30 seconds spent looking at the phone per session. That equates to a full 19 days of your life every year. If you were to only count your 20's, 30's and 40's, then you will have spent more than a full year and half (24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no breaks) of that completely without memory or regard for what was right in front of you. You spent that time looking down at your phone, clicking "like" and commenting when life was happening right in front of you. What did you miss? Who did you miss? What loves will never be realized? What dreams will never be fulfilled in the name of that damn phone? Anthony Robbins said, "People major in minor things." People are so damn addicted to their phones and the bullshit associated with them. This is the culture we live in. Adults are driving their cars around town looking to collect Pokémon, checking their phones 150 times a day, watching television shows and we wonder why millions of people are addicted to drugs to help with depression. People are hooked into the thought activity of all of this mindless junk – building up in our minds by way of accretion.

Accretion is an important concept to understand and recognize in your life. When you make choices, remember, what you are mentally is a result of the sum total of your choices you've made as far as what you feed your mind. What you are physically is a result of the sum total of the choices of what you feed your body. Your physicalfitness is a result of the sum total of choices you've made as far as physical activity and exercise. As a coach, I remind my players that the circumstances of the game do not define them as athletes, but it sure does reveal them. It reveals who has been putting in the work and who has been playing video games after school. I remember going on a cruise a few years ago, and seeing myself getting changed in front of the mirror and thinking, "Nice job, asshole!" I was angry with the way I looked in a bathing suit and only had myself to blame. It was obvious that my food choices and physical activity choices led me to look pregnant. The process by which I can identify those choices is accretion and I suggest you take a hard look at what you need to improve and see what has been building up in your mind and your body over the last year.

In the Borrowed Theme of life, you'll notice that the story you're living out is only a bundle of thoughts. By way of accretion, the buildup of your thoughts, you've created a story and you're starring in that story. Everything you've done up until this point, has led you to where you are. Wayne Dyer was correct when he said that you are a sum total of the choices you've made. When you arrive on that cruise ship and take your winter coat off and slip into that bathing suit, the image you perceive has everything to do with the choices you've made. When its game day and your entire team is performing at the highest levels and you're missing passes and out of breath, then your circumstances are revealing the choices you've made. When you arrive for a job interview and the interviewer asks you about your greatest accomplishments – and you have to sit there and try to find one, then your choices are being revealed. It's time to show up! When my lacrosse team enters a tournament, these kids show up! The inevitable victories they achieve were won, not only in the game, but in the preparation. The game is the easy part. The work was put in time and time again in their backyards, in their kitchens and in their minds. Winners show up! They have all the confidence in the world that they are performing to their greatest potential and that exudes confidence. The accretion of hard work, excellent food choices and mindful activities, puts them in an optimal situation to succeed. The same can be said for you. What are you eating? What are you doing for physical activity? How are you feeding your mind? By way of accretion, all of these choices are creating the person you are and if you're choosing unwisely more than you are choosing wisely, then you are not showing up; you are preparing to fail and preparing for illness. My children fill out an accretion chart every morning. During their homeschool lessons, they fill it out. It has four boxes:

1. Food

2. Mindfulness

3. Physical Activity

4. Dreams

Before my kids say goodbye to their former selves, they look at what choices their former selves made yesterday. We analyze the choices and this creates a mindful view of their progress in life. Your food choices, mind activity, physical activity and pursuit of your dreams exist, whether or not you choose to analyze your choices. Breaking the choices down helps to keep you mindful during the process of pursuing your dreams. Make sure when you enter the ring, that you show up!

CHAPTER 2

Humanity's Disease

"No society wants you to be wise. It is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise they cannot be exploited, if they are intelligent they cannot be subjugated. They cannot be forced into a mechanical life"

-Osho

Think about life as 27,000 days. Now think about how many of those 27,000 days were spent on things you didn't want. It's like people enter a store, see things they don't want and put them in their shopping cart anyway. Then they drag those possessions they never wanted to begin with around in a bag like Santa Claus over their back, weighing them down. They present this undesirable bag of shit to everyone they meet. Everyone they encounter. Everyone who cuts them off of traffic. I have a friend who I met when she applied for a job. The first thing she said to the manager as she approached was, "Hello, I am looking for a job and I am a convicted felon." Just think about the feeling she must be experiencing inside when she has to carry that around with her. What are you carrying around in your bag that you didn't want and how much of your life have you spent on collecting it? It is time to empty that bag, or at least examine each and every item in that bag that you carry around with you. Is it serving you in a positive way or is it just weighing you down? There is one person who relies on that bag and that is the ghost of your yesterday. If you want to start lightning the load on your back you need to kill the 'you' of yesterday, the 'old you' of even an hour ago. This old you represents the limited knowledge you had in the past, the abilities you had yesterday, the wins and losses in life that no longer matter. The ghost who carries that bag of shit wherever you go. It's not your fault that you're carrying this load and it is your responsibility as a maturing adult to rip that bag open and investigate every single thing in that bag. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz explains why it's not your fault when he said, "We live in this society, we grew up in this society and we learned to be like everyone else, playing non-sense all the time."

Bell Curve

When I hear the phrase 'Bell Curve' I automatically think of the iPhone. Millions of people know how to use iPhones but only a hand full have the ability to actually build one, and yet everyone and their mother is an iPhone expert these days. Unfortunately, the most qualified people very rarely make the rules, hence the bell curve. Somehow smoking a joint in Colorado is completely acceptable by the State of Colorado and yet the Federal Government can still arrest you for the same joint. So, smoking the same joint can have two completely opposite outcomes. Truly think about that statement and how citizens are left to interpret that scenario.

The problem is gullible people outweigh smart people by leaps and bounds in this world and the results are all around us. Traffic is nothing more than human failure but we never look at it that way. Simple truth is if roads were built more efficiently then traffic would be damn near obsolete. Even while no traffic engineering exists today in other parts of the world, to remain underdeveloped in the most routine of ways constipates economical efficacy and minimizes potential for national advance. I feel the same way about politics. Why is it that presidential candidates during a debate never get to engage in any meaningful conversation before being reprimanded by the moderator for going over the allotted time? You think that's by mistake? The process is always rushed and the results are never satisfying. Why couldn't we have unlimited time to address important topics or better yet, why can't we find qualified candidates to run for office? I mean, we are talking about the most important position on earth and we can't find someone that inspires us all? The response I most commonly hear is, "That's just the way it is" and my response to that statement is, "Are you sure it's just not the way it was designed to be?" We as a society can't find five-hundred-thirty-five honest people out of three-hundred-million citizens to represent us in congress? How is that a difficult task? All we need is a group of honest intellects who want to sincerely help society and in return, I think nobody would have a problem rewarding that loyalty with a comfortable lifestyle. Why is that not good enough? The simple and most honest answer is greed and pure stupidity. That's how you get soulless scumbags to gain momentum in politics.

The bell curve can also be seen in another example that comes to mind; schools and how they operate inefficiently. Every town has a school. Schools need buses, mechanics, bus drivers, music teachers, principals etc. Not to mention the time sacrificed by parents for over a decade to get that student in front of that teacher. Now go one town over and start the process all over. That means we are all having a different experience based mainly on staffing capabilities and demographics. I know of a child who wasn't singing loud enough in music class because he is naturally shy, so he was told to stand up and sing a solo while being reprimanded until he was crying uncontrollably in front of everyone. How dare an adult embarrass a child like that? When the parent called the school, they tried to justify his actions by saying, "That's just his teaching style." That situation could have been avoided if the child was in the presence of a smarter person, one who made rational decisions and understood the long-term effects of his actions on others and one that could be fired for simply being disrespectful to kids. Since when did we substitute using logic and interpersonal awareness for bad habits and an ignorant sense of authority in situations like this? I would bet that teacher went through similar experiences when he was younger. It takes insanity to breed insanity. I would love to see schools become a hybrid of Oprah's Life Lesson Classes teaching style mixed with weekly community outings. What if the buses picked them up to actually go places with other students, to learn about real life and not to go sit in a class to remember distorted battle dates geared toward making USA and white people look like the responsible saviors of the world? You may be thinking; kids occasionally go on outings. I would argue, that should be the only time students get on a bus and when you have nowhere for them to go, let them learn from home instead of sitting in a classroom doing nothing to make up for a make-up day due to bad weather. Kids sitting in a class so schools don't lose funding is a broken system. I think homeschooling is the way of the future and schools should be utilized more for social outings and teachers utilized more as teachers' aids, aiding the most qualified instructors from around the country. I would rather my son log on to his computer and have an uplifting experience with a talented music professor from home, or at a friend's house, rather than pass him off to the douchebag who feels that it's okay to belittle a child, due to his tenure. Kids these days have karate lessons, hip hop classes, sports outings, etc. They don't need eight hours of school every day. We didn't need eight hours of school either, but hey, 'that's just the way it was.'

CHAPTER 3

Religion – an Idea that Spoke its Last Intelligible Word Thousands of Years Ago

"Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret and for their own happiness, we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor in the Brother Karamazov, 1880.

Ring. ... Ring....

(Mike) "Hello"

(Principal) "Hi Mike. It's the Principal. I am calling because I received your letter of intent to remove your children from our school. I'd like to know if there is anything we can do to rectify your concerns."

(Mike) "As a matter of fact, yes. I have only two questions for you. First, is the earth six thousand years old?"

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Borrowed Theme by Michael Evans. Copyright © 2017 Michael Evans. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword, ix,
Prologue, xi,
Introduction, xv,
Chapter 1 Accretion. The Killer Who is Never Found Guilty, 1,
Chapter 2 Humanity's Disease, 9,
Chapter 3 Religion – an Idea that Spoke its Last Intelligible Word Thousands of Years Ago, 15,
Chapter 4 Morality – Where does it come from and what's really moral?, 39,
Chapter 5 A World Where Things Don't Make Sense, 51,
Chapter 6 The Shirley Trap – Recognize it, because your life depends on it, 61,
Chapter 7 Bon Voyage to the People on the Dock, 71,
Afterword 77,