HANTA YO

I would identify the first 'self help' story I ever read as being "The wonderful story of Henry Sugar" by Roald Dahl. It's theme aligned with all the religious teaching of my sect. Through supreme concentration those things just beyond natural sensory perception would be revealed.
I smuggled a candle and sought to concentrate on the center of the flame....nothing.
Robin Sharma and David Irvine each direct their disciples to take time to go within and align themselves with their authentic soul. Escape.
Hugh Pinnock, area NW area President warned the missionaries of the Canada-Vancouver Mission that any book they read or music they listened to, was an escape from the work they were called to do, and this distracted there-from and therefore would not be blessed. (Nor condoned)
Irvine's Father said to him, "If you define success by the world's standards (achievement, conformity, recognition,wealth, compliance, materialism, and pleasure), then success for you will be easy. But I don't wish success for you by these terms, I wish for you to have a meaningful life"
My synthesis of all this and countless pages of further substantiation, just as the mind requires sleep to subconsciously file the learnings of the day; A moment of solitude will loose the shackles, pour off the dross, winnow the wheat, and eventually define your purpose for the day.

Then the Clock Stopped, Never to Run Again

The concept of time travel arouses our curiousity of physics, our perceptions of the universal fabric, and the plausibility of the concept.
Although entertaining, when we consider the paradox of meeting our past or future self, what would be the resulting chaos, really?
Marty McFly? Bill and Ted? Midgets in the closet?(Time Bandits)
I have three postulations regarding the accomplishment of time travel in my lifetime.
1) I would have visited myself long before now.
2) I probably can't afford it when it is discovered.
3) Eventually I become very content with the way my life turns out and don't feel the need to visit my past self.
On God Shuffled His Feet, one lyric says, "All the things that have come to pass, and all the things that shall be, I see here, before me"
One true prophetic glimpse would blow your mind.

Dream Life

I suppose that we all have, in our minds, an idea of what the ideal world would be like.
For some, it would be more sharing of goods, communal. For others it may be a higher Earth consciousness. John Lennon posed a few ideas for us to imagine.
Some groups have tried, but in the end always fall short of their utopia. Mormons, Hutterites, Communists, Emmisaries of Divine Light, Nazi's.
I'm just shooting this out there... but did any of them stop to imagine that someone else may imagine their ideal differently?
The bothersome issue that results, in religion and in politics, is the cognitive dissonance, of the believers. The wheel was not invented in the workshop my friends, it was invented in conversation.