There is no doubt that many a man owes his good fortune in life solely to the circumstance that he has a pleasant way of smiling, and so wins the heart in his favor.  However, the heart would do better to be careful, and to remember what Hamlet put down in his tablets - that one may smile and smile and be a villain.

• fate
• fortune
• circumstance
• awareness
• life
• doubt
• hamlet

All human beings consider themselves sinners. It's just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal human hangup there is. In fact, it's almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don't confirm it. To say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis— which was written by early Semitic opponents of the Illuminati— is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what creates all sin— plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong— and, mind you, in advance— without knowing what its consequences are going to be— depending upon the mental disposition of the actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake knew they were doing good, even though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist.

'If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad,' said George, 'aren't you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?'

'What's so bad about being Hamlet-like?' said Hagbard. 'Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you're not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive.'

'So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?'

Hagbard laughed. 'Not necessarily. He might have decisively killed his uncle at the earliest opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, 'Hey, am I really obligated to avenge my father's death?' and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths, and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act.

• good and evil
• hamlet
• humanity
• knowledge
• morality
• obligation
• sin
• death
• time
• conscience
• evil
• anxiety
• guilt
• creativity
• emotions
• consequences
• depression
• classification
• belief
• other
• transactional analysis
• scripts

In both the theater and in real life, the cues have to be memorized and spoken just right so that the other people will respond in a way that justifies and advances the action.  If the hero changes his lines and his ego state, the other people respond differently.  This throws the whole script off, and that is the aim of therapeutic script analysis.  If Hamlet begins to use lines from Abie's Irish Rose, Ophelia has to change her lines, too, in order to make sense of it, and the whole performance will proceed differently.  The two of them might then take off together instead of skulking around the castle - a bad play, but probably a better life.

• ego
• transactional analysis
• life
• will
• change
• aim
• hamlet
• analysis
• other