Acid Test
About this ebook
Choose to Discover this eBook to Learn—
- How To Discover Insight by practicing the discernment of sayings.
- How To Exercise and Improve Your Mind for greater openness, flexibility, and creativity.
- How To Increase Your Mental Capability by increasing your capacity for understanding, perception, and wisdom.
Pithy sayings can be either instantly helpful or meaningless. Often the best results from sayings or aphorisms come after they have grown slowly in the garden of your mind. Ideas you may reject at first can come to have more meaning in time. Aphorisms that make no sense today can suddenly reveal themselves to you years later. Some sayings can follow and teach you for a lifetime. For example, "Drink from your own well," has taught many over and over. Making yourself contemplate a saying that you do not understand can reveal much about your thinking styles. Is it the saying or your lack of openness that is cold? Feeling your way to the inside meat of a saying is the best approach.
You will find the sayings herein amusing, helpful, interesting, and thought provoking. Some of the sayings are like Zen koans; if you sit with them, they reveal the other side free of words. Some of the sayings are open to multiple interpretations and meanings. The same insight shared different ways helps you not to miss deeper felt experiences for simple surface meanings. It often happens that a slight change in wording allows someone to drop their mind long enough to hear something fresh. One person's, "that's obvious," is another person's "ah-ha" moment. Let the sayings pass that don't open to you now. Focus on the sayings that bring stillness. Listen beyond the words. Feel, rather than think, the sayings through. Sense, rather than think, the music behind the words. Manage to touch the energy behind the words and your heart will be touched.
- The first chapter consists of sayings related to both right and wrong thinking patterns. You are helped to discover how thinking can easily lead to misperception. You are encouraged not to make thinking the screen between you and life. Thought can be either a wall or a door depending on how you use it.
- Chapter Two contains sayings that help to make real the difference between being a container versus being the contents of a container. You are helped to rediscover your child nature as a container, in favor of your adult nature as contents. Understanding the nature of self makes it easier to choose to live in authentic moments.
- The third chapter gathers sayings that help point to what is and what is not genuine self. You are helped to discover and live in self instead of in ego.
- Chapter Four is mainly concerned with how and why you are responsible for your feelings. You are helped to become more mature by owning and accepting responsibility for your feelings. Owning your feelings is necessary for awareness and honesty. Being responsible for your feeling is necessary for leading an empowered life.
- The fifth chapter collects sayings that did not easily fit into one of the first four chapters. Most of those sayings continue ideas presented in the previous chapters. You will discover as much meaning as your ego defenses will allow.
- Chapter Six consists of longer posters that could and should not be reduced to sayings.
- The seventh chapter consists of poems related to the ideas of the book.
- Chapter Eight is the final chapter which includes end matter such as a recommended reading list.
- Chapters 1-5 contain 365 sayings making them suitable for daily reflection or a calendar.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Be it as a person's counselor or as a founding member of facilities for the homeless, Kevin Everett FitzMaurice, M.S., NCC, CCMHC, LPC, seeks to make others' lives better by helping others improve how they function. As a volunteer, he supports community services to improve others' living conditions. As a counselor, he "counsels" in the traditional sense: advising, directing, and nudging--or pushing--others into facing and resolving their issues.
Mr. FitzMaurice has a variety of formal and advanced training in counseling, which includes Addictions Counseling, Family Therapy, advanced Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), Transactional Analysis (TA), and over 1300 hours of diverse training for continuing education units (CEUs). To make the best use of that extensive training, he takes an integrative approach, grounding himself in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and using the other theories to build upon that one core theory, rather than focusing on multiple theories and mastering none of them.
After more than twenty years in counseling, Mr. FitzMaurice has worked four years in the substance abuse field, directed two community mental health programs, and spent fourteen years counseling in private practice. In that time, he has refined many principles for and methods of counseling. He now puts those principles and methods into book form to share them with a wider audience, so more people can benefit than he can reach in person. Currently, he has more than twenty books written, most of which are available worldwide as e-books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, Kobo, and Apple.
The philosophical odyssey of Mr. FitzMaurice began in the late '60s. It has remained a mostly self-taught pursuit, with little formal training or education in philosophy. The odyssey started with Western philosophy and a study of pragmatism and atheism. For example, he read every work of Nietzsche that had been translated into English at that time. From there, he moved to the study of Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a misguided experimentation with psychedelics to achieve states of superconsciousness. He continued into Eastern philosophy, pursuing Taoism and J. Krishnamurti. Next came a study of Christianity that started with seven readings of the Old Testament and nine readings of the New Testament from cover to cover, followed by a formal study of Western psychology. The ongoing influences for FitzMaurice's thinking continue to be Christianity, General Semantics, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and an Eastern combination of J. Krishnamurti, Taoism, and Zen.
Academic Credentials: Master of Science (M.S.) in guidance and counseling, with a specialization in agency counseling, from the University of Nebraska. Associate of applied science in human services - chemical dependency counseling (with honors), from Metropolitan Community College.
National Certifications: National Certified Counselor (NCC); Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor (CCMHC); Family Certification in REBT; Primary Certification in REBT; and Advanced Certification in REBT.
State Licensure: Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Oregon; Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in Iowa; Licensed Independent Mental Health Practitioner (LIMHP) in Nebraska.
Community Service: One of the original founders of the Francis House, Siena House, and Stephen Center homeless facilities still in operation in Nebraska. Supporter of the following charities: OxFam America, Amnesty International USA, Habitat for Humanity, and Green Peace.
