Dear Friends,

As I write this there are just a few days before the U.S. elec­tion of a new pres­i­dent, cab­i­net, and sen­ate. Much will change, as it always does. The law of rhythm states all things have a begin­ning, a period of growth, a peak­ing and an even­tual end; but when some­thing ends, some­thing begins that has been born of that end­ing. So it is, so it has always been, and so it will always be. Cycles. When some­thing dies, some­thing else is born.

I have faith in the fact that we see the world we wish to see. Atti­tudes; that is what makes each indi­vid­ual real­ity unique. Con­sider your atti­tude towards your fam­ily, your friends, the city you live in, the coun­try of your birth, the coun­try you live in, your reli­gion, your beliefs, in short, the things that make you who and what you are.

In addi­tion to atti­tudes there is the ‘ego’ con­cept that dri­ves one’s atti­tude. Ego is your opin­ion of your­self, but in addi­tion to self ego there is also fam­ily ego, friend ego, coun­try ego, reli­gion ego, com­mu­nity and city ego as well; remem­ber the ego is an opin­ion. You do have an opin­ion of all the above. There is also an emo­tional or love ego. What is your opin­ion of love?

We are con­stantly being beset by catch­phrases like ‘love one another’, ‘love your­self,’ love, love, love, but no one seems to explain just what that, best of all the four let­ter words, really means. The Greeks, from whom much of our lan­guage has evolved, felt it such a com­pli­cated word that they expressed it in many forms. Agape, for spir­i­tual love, Phi­los, broth­erly love, Eros, roman­tic love, Storge, love of fam­ily, and on and on. But those words just trade one abstrac­tion for another with­out truly defin­ing the word.  A gen­eral def­i­n­i­tion is nec­es­sary so that all forms of love can be under­stood and uti­lized as a resource in one’s life. Here is a sim­ple, all encom­pass­ing def­i­n­i­tion of the word.

Love, is a pos­i­tive viewpoint.

That’s it. Uti­lize that def­i­n­i­tion and the word can not only be under­stood it becomes a tool to dig you out of what­ever quag­mires you may encounter in life. Allow me to tell you a short story that will bet­ter explain the con­cept of a pos­i­tive view­point. But do under­stand that love, like all things has a hier­ar­chy, a scale of degrees. On the one hun­dred degree side of the scale there can be no neg­a­tives what­ever. You would see only the pos­i­tives; as the view­point changes, the line of degrees diminishes.

As exam­ple: Sally and Mar­vin were new­ly­weds, they were, of course, in love. Their view­point would be one hun­dred per­cent, they could see only pos­i­tives in one another. Sally was brush­ing her teeth one morn­ing, wear­ing her old, raggedy bathrobe, and was drool­ing a bit as she brushed. Mar­vin glanced in and thought, ‘Gee, she even looks good when she’s drool­ing; and that bathrobe, its prac­ti­cally in pieces but she wears it like a Queen. And she has the cutest walk, she kind of hops every now and then.’

He can see only the pos­i­tives in his spouse. But as would hap­pen, time goes by and the pos­i­tive view­point slips down the scale a bit; now he’s down to 90 degrees on our arbi­trary scale and a few neg­a­tives are creep­ing in to mar his atti­tude. He says to Sally, ‘Honey, would you mind clos­ing the bath­room door when you brush your teeth, you drool you know, it doesn’t look good. And I wish you would get your­self a new robe, that one makes you look like you’re homeless.’

More time goes by; the pos­i­tive view­point slips down another few degrees, he still loves her; but… Mar­vin comes home one day and says, ‘Sally, I’ve enrolled you in a charm school; you have the sil­li­est walk.’

But what’s changed? Sally hasn’t, the only thing that has changed is his viewpoint.

Love is a pos­i­tive view­point, the higher the degree the less you see the negatives.

I hope this has been of help to you. I will, from time to time con­tribute a few thoughts here. When I do have some­thing I feel will be of spe­cial inter­est I’ll title the piece, ‘Burt’s Lit­tle Corner.’

Inci­den­tally, some of you may know that one of my loves is paint­ing, which I’ve only recently dis­cov­ered a bit of tal­ent for. The photo here was taken a few weeks ago as I was putting a few fin­ish­ing touches to my ver­sion of Vincent’s bed­room. Enjoy.

Burt Gold­man

Cor­rect me if I’m wrong here, but there’s no law against med­i­tat­ing in pub­lic places, right?

Why, then, do author­i­ties seem deter­mined to stop my new friend Max Simon and his friends from doing their thing?

You may have heard of Max. He’s the 26 year old founder of the self­cen­tered Tour (getselfcentered.com), a new school med­i­ta­tion move­ment that’s on a mis­sion to inspire a mil­lion peo­ple to learn med­i­ta­tion by 2010.

The med­i­ta­tion ses­sion you can see in the video is called a Pub­lic Dis­play of Med­i­ta­tion (PDM). Max has been hold­ing them across the coun­try in all sorts of unbe­liev­able venues, from Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard to shop­ping malls, and the buzz has caught on like wildfire.

I recently met Max at my 81st birth­day party, and I think he’s an astound­ing young man.

This is exactly what we need to get the younger gen­er­a­tion inter­ested in med­i­ta­tion. Max is suc­cess­fully brand­ing his form of med­i­ta­tion into a refresh­ing, mod­ern pack­age that is fast catch­ing on among young peo­ple through­out the world.

The son of best sell­ing author David Simon M.D., he’s been med­i­tat­ing since the age of 4. And by the time he was 22, he was the youngest med­i­ta­tion and yoga teacher at the Chopra Center.

After barely a year of oper­a­tions, he’s already gained the praises of Mr. Deepak Chopra him­self, Apl of the Black Eyed Peas and Ms. Deb­bie Ford.

I’m sure it’s only a mat­ter of time before he reaches his one mil­lion mark!

You can visit his web­site here: www.getselfcentered.com

So, if you had the chance to med­i­tate any­where in the world, where would it be? Please leave your com­ments in the box below.

All this talk about the $700 bil­lion bailout plan and the eco­nomic cri­sis is going to reach its peak very, very soon.

Yes, I’m talk­ing about the Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion on the 4th of Novem­ber. And while I’m sure you’ve already for­mu­lated your own opin­ions and rea­sons for what action you’re going to take on that day, believe me on this — you absolutely must see what one very promi­nent man has to say about it all:

Neale Don­ald Walsch is a mod­ern day spir­i­tual mes­sen­ger and author of the best-selling Con­ver­sa­tions with God series of books, an incred­i­ble com­pi­la­tion that has changed the lives and per­spec­tives of mil­lions across the world.

Now you know me — I’m not going to take sides or get into any overly polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions, but his mes­sage makes more sense to me than most of the other opin­ions I’ve been hear­ing lately.

Just visit the link below to down­load a free, exclu­sive inter­view with Neale, where he reveals his choice for Pres­i­dency, the beliefs that have caused Amer­i­cans to make the wrong choice, and much more:

Neale Don­ald Walsch Interview

How do you feel about this? What will you have in mind when cast­ing your vote?

I’m doing my best to help us all get through this, and that’s why I need to hear your con­cerns. So please leave your com­ments in the box below.

Here’s to our future,

Burt

P.S. And as you remem­ber, I cre­ated my pro­file on face­book. I’d love to have you as my friends…please add me!

Ever since I saw just how many peo­ple have been affected by the $700 bil­lion bailout and the global eco­nomic cri­sis, I knew it was part of my mis­sion and respon­si­bil­ity to reach out and help.

I hope that the “Pros­per­ity Pro­gram” solu­tion I put together will really help you sail through these tough times.

How­ever, I became con­cerned last night when I received an email from one par­tic­u­lar per­son who expressed an inter­nal con­flict about using the “Pros­per­ity Pro­gram”. While on the one hand he told me he is des­per­ate to give him­self and his fam­ily a bet­ter life, but on the other hand he feels this is “mate­ri­al­is­tic and selfish”.

He then went on to say, “There is so much pain and suf­fer­ing going on in the world and far more peo­ple in other third world coun­tries worse off than us. Shouldn’t our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness be focused on help­ing oth­ers, rather than sim­ply help­ing ourselves?”

Well, please allow me to tell you about my dear friend Cyn­thia Kersey. You may remem­ber me talk­ing about her before, she was one of the peo­ple that joined me for my birth­day cel­e­bra­tions (for those of you who are my friend on Face­book, you can see pic­tures from my Birth­day din­ner there).

Cyn­thia has a heart of gold, bless her kind soul. She, like me, is on a mis­sion to help the world the best way she can. Cur­rently, she is focus­ing her efforts in Africa.

Now, the key point I want to stress here is “the best way she can”.

A few years ago, Cyn­thia had an impor­tant choice to make. She needed to decide whether to go to Africa and help by giv­ing her phys­i­cal time and energy to build a local school, or to focus her efforts on her dream of becom­ing a suc­cess­ful author and entrepreneur.

What would the best choice be? Many would think it is far less self­ish to do the former.

How­ever, Cyn­thia real­ized some­thing very impor­tant. She real­ized that by going to Africa to phys­i­cally help in the effort of build­ing a school, she would actu­ally be doing the world more injus­tice by not using all the resources avail­able to her wisely. This would not be true to her mis­sion of help­ing the world in the best way she can.

Real­iz­ing that she was in an incred­i­ble posi­tion to build wealth and raise aware­ness, Cyn­thia knew she could make a big­ger impact on the world by donat­ing more than just her phys­i­cal time and energy. Start­ing her career as a sec­re­tary, she rose to become a sales exec­u­tive at Sprint Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. She then left Cor­po­rate Amer­ica in 1996 to pur­sue her dream of writ­ing and encour­ag­ing peo­ple to live “unstop­pable” lives.

Today she is earn­ing her wealth by spread­ing her pow­er­ful mes­sage around the world to help empower indi­vid­u­als so they can build and main­tain a suc­cess­ful busi­ness and to cre­ate a rich and mean­ing­ful life. Even numer­ous For­tune 500 Com­pa­nies, includ­ing Xerox, John­son & John­son and Aetna, have ben­e­fited from her mes­sage and strategies.

With all this in hand, Cyn­thia is “unstop­pable” in her mis­sion. She now has the power, influ­ence and wealth to build 40 schools in Africa, and is aim­ing to send 4,000 African chil­dren to their first day of school (ever) by spring 2009 and has pro­vided life-saving ser­vices that will enable these chil­dren to remain in school. This is far more than what she could have achieved by lend­ing her phys­i­cal labor to help build one African school a few years ago.

All in all, I guess what I’m try­ing to say is that there is a dif­fer­ence between “gold-digger” and “heart of gold”.

It all boils down to inten­tions. My inten­tion in mak­ing the “Pros­per­ity Pro­gram” is not to cre­ate some get-rich-quick scheme that does lit­tle to ben­e­fit the world.

My inten­tion is to help as many peo­ple as I can KNOW HOW TO TAP INTO THEIR RESOURCES to attract pros­per­ity so that they can reach out and help even more people.

There is no pain in pros­per­ity… there is only purpose.

Towards a mean­ing­ful and rich life,

Burt Gold­man
~The Amer­i­can Monk

P.S. And as you remem­ber, I cre­ated my pro­file on face­book. I’d love to have you as my friends…please add me!

It seems to me that the $700 bil­lion bailout plan is some sort of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card… but the ques­tion I beg to ask is…

Free for who?

Watch this video and tell me how you feel.

What are your top con­cerns? How are you already affected? I’d like to know, because NOW is the most impor­tant time for us to unite our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness and focus on the same goal if we, Amer­i­cans and fel­low cit­i­zens across the world, are to make it through.

But before I can help you do that, I need to know where you stand right now. So please leave your thoughts and feel­ings below.

Don’t worry, I will not leave your side in these times. I’ll be in touch again soon.

Sin­cerely,
Burt

My per­fect Birth­day ended with an ener­getic and excit­ing din­ner orga­nized by Vishen Lakhi­ani and Mike Rein­ing, co-founders of MindValleyMedia.com. I had a plea­sure to meet some of their col­leagues from the per­sonal growth indus­try:
* Paul Hoff­man of SuccessSongs.com
* Gary Gold­stein, who pro­duced the movie Pretty Woman
* Cyn­thia Kersey, the author of “Unstop­pable“
* Bill Lae, the film­maker behind “The Instru­ment“
* Max Simon, the 26 year old med­i­ta­tion pro­moter behind GetSelfCentered.com and publishers

Take a look at this video Vishen took amidst the celebration.

And here are some snaps of the event:

Apart from learn­ing how to blog, I have also cre­ated my VERY OWN Face­book account! I’d love to hear from all of you, so click below to add me as a friend!

Thanks again, you will be hear­ing from me soon.
Burt Goldman

Hello every­one,

I would like to start off by thank­ing you once again for all of the heart­warm­ing birth­day wishes that I received within the last few days.

It’s hum­bling to know that I have touched so many of your lives.

I’d love to share with you some of the moments of the best Birth­day of my life.
Below are some pic­tures I man­aged to snap the morn­ing of my Birth­day while enjoy­ing a relax­ing stroll down the Cal­i­for­nia coastline.

I espe­cially love tak­ing pic­tures of birds. There is some­thing so calm­ing and relax­ing about watch­ing such ele­gant crea­tures soar above you.

For those of you who don’t know, pho­tog­ra­phy is a pas­sion of mine and I hope to be able to share many of my pic­tures with you in the future — now that Alexan­dra has shown me how to blog

After the stroll I enjoyed a delight­ful break­fast and spent a relax­ing day at home with my family.

Have a won­der­ful day!
Burt Goldman