1. You can check your own health by biting your fingernail clippings. The softer they are (when dry) the worse your health. The lighter areas at the base, under the cuticles if you have any, show the progression of your decay. The more and bigger these areas are the more desperately your flesh is leaching your skeleton for what it is missing. Your flesh becomes desperate if you don't give it enough of what it needs, and if you give it enough but then put in the opposite, like flushing it out or counteracting it. See Yin and Yang in your healthfood store.

2. Buy a cheap dental mirror. Check each other's teeth before going to a dentist. Take macro pictures using the mirror, and bring them to the dentist office. Capitalism is spreading. The cheaper tricks are:

To hollow out and fill each of your molars as quickly as possible, just because it's quick and easy to do.

To con you into trying to get the bristles of your brush between the gums and the teeth, creating a need for cosmetic dentistry when your gums recede.

Always demand a copy of any x-ray that is made, dental or other, and make sure you have it safely stashed before you let anyone do anything to you based upon it. Can you think of a more important picture of you than one that an important decision is based upon?

3. If you have to own a car, make sure there is a self-diagnostic center available to you for that model. One of the more common problems with driving a petrol driven car is monoxide, which is like nicotine in that you don't have to smell the smoke to get the toxin. The toxin is a gold medal sprinter.

Most monoxide related accidents are not called anything but driver error, since the drivers themselves don't know what monoxide is like. Having a smoker in the car increases the monoxide problem from a slightly faulty exhaust many times. You should specify, when seeking a self-diagnostic center, that you want the latest in CO detection. Cheap CO detectors for your garage won't tell you what you need to know.

4. Earplugs are a solution many people fail to think about. Ear plugs and ear phones are friendly solutions to living close together. With the big sound attenuators used at airfields and in construction you can use small earphones to listen to soft music from your mp3 player at low volumes. You might find that silence is often better than music, that quiet is what you were really looking for.

5. Even schizophrenia (which effects over one per hundred, so that many of us know someone) is significantly less painful using ear plugs, hence less medication is required. The noise in the brain competes with external noise. The schizophrenic may also find it useful to study up on Nitrous Oxide and Poppers as another way to reduce more hazardous medication, since these are available and legal in many countries. There is a lot of info plus where to buy. Dogpile, which I have a link to, may be your best search tool. (I personally would not class amyl nitrate as harmless, but I'm not going to elaborate. You'll have to do your own research, and the web is bristling with info on it.)

6. Bicycles and most footwear are incompatible with bulletin boards that encourage the use of thumb tacks. If you don't have the clout or cooperation to get these things changed to metal, you need to learn and to teach your children where every one of them is, so you can avoid them. It is illegal to get a refund for shoes that are leaking the first time you use them, if it is not a defect.

I have merely learned where they are in my favourite haunts, and I get a flat tire about once every 400 hours of biking at about 7 hours per week averaging the year out. But I do use very good tires as well. Not Kevlar, but good.

7. Dance and gymnastics corrective surgery blossoms out with capitalism. Suspect it. Everyone wants a miracle. I have one for you: take my class!

8. Photography: a digital camera should have 2 levels in it, portrait and landscape. Having to rotate a single degree screws up your res. Until then, watch your levelling, or better, bring a small level. Gravity and relationship to it is a message you rarely disregard to good effect. I think it's more frustration with digital cameras than art that makes people exaggerate the effect, as if they meant it that way all along.

2 polaroid filters held perpendicular to each other will be opaque, but place one on your flash or lightsource and the other on your lens and all you lose is the glare. You can take pictures of glossy pictures or items with your camera's little flash. Source, Ansel Adams. A small piece of polaroid filter film will go a long way, if you have friends who want to try it. It's hard to buy two square inches.

With a model turntable, even a rotating stool, you can, with care about placement (u can dangle a weight from the ceiling to show center of spin), make a sort of 3D picture, which is great for these new frames you plug a memory stick or USB into. The background often needs to be plain so there is no comparison between object or model and background.

1. He was born the usual marvellous child. He told his mother they lived with the boogey man. Other kids and their moms didn't have to live with the boogey man! The father wouldn't stand for a child who knew how to criticise him. He sodomized the boy, out of sheer hate for his marvellous normalcy, as his father had done to him. When the boy later confronted him with the crime he told the boy it had been his mother's father who had done it; that he would cut off his arm before.., etc. He also told the boy that during his infancy he had only cried when his mother held him; that it had been hard to keep her from touching him and making him cry. Home-made misogyny. Some months later the father resumed having sex with the boy, each time given him enough alcohol that he would laugh while being sodomized, and saying that it was good for him, that it would eventually heal the injury from the rape. He established other reward patterns besides the alcohol, so the boy would look forward to the sessions. As he grew the boy learned to exert extortion pressure, and did fairly well at it despite the alcoholism. The father learned to predict his demands and fulfil them before any threat was applied. Love meant to give before he was forced to, which kept him broke. The boy started a little band, but the drinking and a volatile temperment kept it from developing more than local recognition. All this came to light when he was found molesting a much smaller boy who thought he was a rock-star.

2. Her obese, self-prescribing, mother walked around like a General inspecting the worst of the troops, grumbling and growling, glaring at everyone. Everyone made way for her imperious disposition, parting like a sea before an ocean liner, putting it down as 'a mere psychological disorder', not wanting to interfere in her therapy. The girl was very impressed by this apparent command of respect from absolutely everyone. The behaviour of the mother was simple to explain: she had told the girl that she was a queen, and ruled over all the people. "The buck stops here!" Everywhere they went mother had to stay in character so the girl wouldn't think there was anyone she could tell about her unpleasant experiences as mother's sex-slave.

3. A boy had a father who actually was an officer in the police. He had the idea that all the police stood by each other no matter what they had done. He was regaled with stories of the crimes each cop had committed and they were all keeping quiet about. Getting paid for sex with his father was just a perk; he really had nothing to do about it. This same cop also had a list of people whose children he had sex with as a bribe to keep them out of jail. None of this would ever have been discovered if the cop in question hadn't been hurt in an auto accident and taken to a hospital where a doctor, trying to determine who to notify, noticed his little phone book had some very peculiar entries.

4. Another obese woman who self-prescribed (and had a key-machine so she could burgle the local grannies she had visited perfunctorily, grannies who had the tablets legitimately) sent her two retarded children out to invite other children to stay the night, tempting them with promises of all kinds of sweets. Gradually about a dozen children began to suffer varying degrees of retardation, according to how often they overnighted with the lurid family. She was respectable enough in dress, housekeeping and manner that not many thought her anything but unfortunate to have two retarded kids, but her sex-life was composed of drugging children into unconsciousness and having sex with them.

5. A girl had sex with her obese alcoholic father, mostly oral at first, so early she couldn't say when it began. He used her like some male version of the vibrator. Once she could speak he used rewards and threats, the most effective threat being that if everyone knew about her "whoring" she would become an outcast just like he would. She wasn't all that inclined to tell anyone in any case, since she was actually accustomed to and inured to the abuse, although she really did believe that the abuse would only get worse if she were put in some institution. (Her experience was that everyone had sex with kids.) He also promised her that having learned sex meant she could get rich, since rich men wanted sex with her as well. In the circles he travelled she learned that this was so, except that none of them were very rich. She developed an expensive taste in drugs and had a lot of customers, and a lot of diseases. People who want sex with children seem often to know each other and each other's predilection, perhaps because they do a lot of drinking together, drink being a sort of lubricant that makes people say more than they would otherwise.

6. A very ugly and somewhat slow woman, on some pharmaceutical program which she supplemented with cheap wine, had a very ugly baby boy. About a year later she went out and kidnapped a lovely little girl the same age. She had named her boy Erik, apparently planning to make this switch. She adjusted the birth-certificate she had to say Erika. No one got her to say how she disposed of the boy. The girl was poisoned in her crib with solvents and became retarded to the point where she didn't have to go to school. The woman collected a pension for the child, and was only found out to be a pedophile when she started picking up other children of an unlikely age and masturbating herself with them. She seemed under the impression that this was what the neighbors sent their children outside for.

If we appreciate the relationship between feelings (genuine glandular events) and perception, as per earlier instalments, we realise that ego is not a love for oneself as popular theory has it, but a belief in the lies others have told us. Ego is about how many and what kind of lies we have accumulated (lies accumulate as belief and trust), and how early, or how close to utterly devoid of suspicion we were at the time.

Therefore Catholics have frightening egos, as do Tibetan Buddhists, Radical Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and others who fit the pattern where parents have allowed very early and severe brainwashing. George Bush has asked that schools reinstate the policy of turning out US patriots, who have begun every day by putting their hands over their hearts and pledging allegiance to the flag of the only people fit to rule the world. For patriot, read "hooligan". GW was very disappointed at the turnout for the 'let's exterminate the Muslims' campaign. A blow like 9/11 should have generated a lot more racial hatred (especially when he had inflated the figure to 9 or 10 thousand dead) in the Republican estimate.

In other words, if one is raised a Catholic Christian, for example, and one discovers how very human and corrupt Catholic priests and popes are in general, then the greater majority of one's ego has vanished. Ego is drive, and so traditional psychology says that this is a bad idea; but it becomes an excellent adjustment if it leads to inspiration, which is a natural driving force. Inspiration opposes the products of the ego force, products everyone knows how to produce, and so it is not going to become popular overnight.

One of the most special cases of egotism is when incest leads to prostitution and extortion, and from there to great power and wealth. Is incest right, actual sex with ones children and grandchildren? Any normal person understands that incest is terrorism, but these "successful" victims are far from victims in their own minds, and manage to actually pass on to their children that incest is a gift from God. Incest fundamentalist, a term for our times. This confusion is just as "natural" as Catholicism. And we can add it to any of the others: Catholic Incest Fundamentalist, for example, producing a very "natural" leader concealing strictly demonic ambitions from "the extremely inferior masses".

How does this switching of roles work? Why isn't your ego you? Let's say I'm a priest. I teach you that those who don't accept what I say, and follow the rituals I provide, which I say is what Jesus said to do, and what God told Moses to do, are going to hell. "Lucky you, who doesn't have to go to hell, because you are listening to me and following my rituals, which is listening to Jesus and God." You, at this time, are too young to question this. Church is holier than home. Without it mother and father would be going to hell. So doubt is not an option; you become Catholic. This is like inflating a tire. Your ego gets so inflated it will pop. And the only pressure this is about is deceit. Let out the deceit, which is so hard to do because you were so young at the time, and you become more humble, more prepared to see things as mere diversity, and as your own responsibility rather than as divided into good people and evil people, well-meaning and ill-meaning ideals.

To let the pressure out you have to discover what belief is as other, which an uninstructed child can not do, which is why we are having this class. When conceit washes over innocence, accepted by this innocence as more innocence, it becomes belief, the innocent form of conceit. When conceit washes over innocence as other it remains conceit.

As other (as discovery), the belief becomes conceit, which is the other's faith in his skill as a liar, a long history of not being questioned because he chooses to address only preconditioned audiences. What is Dalai Lama's problem today? He is being kept apart from the preconditioned people. He is like a surfer with only a wading pool left to work with. He would do and say anything to get back on the sea. He would swear, sign, confess, humble himself (he says that in his dreams he is only a Buddhist monk, not the Dalai Lama, which is a very well conceived fabrication: 'I'm not a surfer; I'd just like to wade in the deeper water'. He has been laboring with the problem of conning the Chinese into letting him have his audience back, like Mick Jagger trying to get himself knighted despite all the bizarre things he has published and recorded), or recruit the devil himself. One of the most malevolent men on the planet, so that belief in him and his rituals is generating one of the most dangerous mass egos on the planet.

The priest, in the eyes of the child, is holy as he says he is, and as the parents and neighbours say he is. This is a mask, a disguise, but the child sees it as the whole truth, as a man who is nothing else but holy, like the reverse of being scared of a monster Halloween costume. The conceit, then, is private, secret, invisible to the child. It washes over the child, but only as himself, because he has not made other of it. As himself, his best version of conceit is belief. This is the same as when a pedophile lusts after him, while pretending to be a nice guy. The child's best version of lusting is having to pee in his pants, so he squirms and tries to tie a knot in his legs.

We may think that to help a child confront the rude realities, like that of the pedophile's lust for children, not as a fact but as perception of the lust itself, is too crude, but it is only as crude as a buffalo calf understanding that the lion kill for food, which no buffalo has to learn to do. There is no dwelling on the discovery when the discovery is of this kind. It is only a discovery of the mistakes people are prone to making, the traps they are prone to triggering. A child who is pushing pedophiles out of his environment at a single glance is a healthier child. It is the lust that lingers; the discovery of the lust is complete and over instantly. An unexposed pedophile lusts all day and all night. He is safely ensconced in the lusting niche. An exposed pedophile has other things on his mind.