If you don't have a plan for pleasure, you will have pain

The whole key here is to create a huge list of ways to make yourself feel good so you don't need to turn to those other ways that are destructive. If you link pain to the destructive habits and more and more pleasure to these new empowering ones, you'll find that most of them are accessible most of the time. Make this list a reality; develop a plan for pleasure for each and every day. Don't just randomly hope that pleasure will somehow show up; set yourself up for ecstasy. Make room for it! What we're talking about, again, is conditioning your nervous sys- tem, your body, and your mental focus so that it searches constantly to see how everything in your life benefits you. Just remember that if you continue to have a limiting emotional pattern, it's because you are using your body in a habitual way, or are continuing to focus in a certain disempowering way. If it's your focus that needs to be shifted, there is one incredible tool that can change it instantly. You must know that...

QUESTIONS ARE THE ANSWER

" He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers."

CAMEROON PROVERB

They needed no reason. They came simply because he was of Jewish descent. The Nazis stormed into his home, arresting him and his entire family. Soon they were herded like cattle, packed into a train, and then sent to a death camp in Krakow. His most disturbing nightmares could never have prepared him for seeing his family shot before his very eyes. How could he live through the horror of seeing his child's clothing on another because his son was now dead as the result of a " shower"?

Somehow he continued. One day he looked at the nightmare around him and confronted an inescapable truth: if he stayed there even one more day, he would surely die. He made a decision that he must escape and that escape must happen immediately! He knew not how, he simply knew he must. For weeks he'd asked the other prisoners, " How can we escape this horrible place? " The answers he received seemed always to be the same: " Don't be a fool, " they said, " there is no escape! Asking such questions will only torture your soul.

Just work hard and pray you survive." But he couldn't accept this—he wouldn't accept it. He became obsessed with escape, and even when his answers didn't make any sense, he kept asking over and over again, " How can I do it? There must be a way. How can I get out of here

healthy, alive, today? "

It is said that if you ask, you shall receive. And for some reason, on this day he got his answer. Perhaps it was the intensity with which he asked his question, or maybe it was his sense of certainty that " now is the time." Or possibly it was just the impact of continually focusing on the answer to one burning question. For whatever reason, the giant power of the human mind and spirit awakened in this man. The answer came to him through an unlikely source: the sickening smell of decaying human flesh. There, only a few feet from his work, he saw a huge pile of bodies that had been shoveled into the back of a truck—men, women, and children who had been gassed. The gold fillings had been pulled from their teeth; everything that they owned—any jewelry—-even their clothing, had been taken. Instead of asking, " How could the Nazis be so despicable, so destructive? How could God make something so evil? Why has God done this to me?, " Stanislavsky Lech asked a different question. He asked, " How can I use this to escape? " And instantly he got his answer.

As the end of the day neared and the work party headed back into the barracks, Lech ducked behind the truck. In a heartbeat, he ripped off his clothes and dove naked into the pile of bodies while no one was looking.

He pretended that he was dead, remaining totally still even though later he was almost crushed as more and more bodies were heaped on top of him.

The fetid smell of rotting flesh, the rigid remains of the dead surrounded him everywhere. He waited and waited, hoping that no one would notice the one living body in that pile of death, hoping that sooner or later the truck would drive off.

Finally, he heard the sound of the engine starting. He felt the truck shudder. And in that moment, he felt a stirring of hope as he lay among the dead. Eventually, he felt the truck lurch to a stop, and then it dumped its ghastly cargo—dozens of the dead and one man pretending to be one of them—in a giant open grave outside the camp. Lech remained there for hours until nightfall. When he finally felt certain no one was there, he extracted himself from the mountain of cadavers, and he ran naked twenty-five miles to freedom.

What was the difference between Stanislavsky Lech and so many others who perished in the concentration camps? While, of course, there were many factors, one critical difference was that he asked a different question. He asked persistently, he asked with expectation of receiving an answer, and his brain came up with a solution that saved his life. The questions he asked himself that day in Krakow caused him to make split-second decisions that led to actions that significantly impacted his destiny. But before he could get the answer, make the decisions, and take those actions, he had to ask himself the right questions.

Throughout this book you've learned how our beliefs affect our decisions, our actions, the direction of our lives, and therefore our ultimate destiny. But all these influences are a product of thinking—of the way your brain has evaluated and created meaning throughout your entire life. So to get to the bottom of how we create our reality on a daily basis we need to answer the question, " Just how do we think? "