Positive psychology is a recent branch of psychology that studies the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Positive psychologists seek to find and nurture genius and talent, and to make normal life more fulfilling, not to cure mental illness. Martin Seligman is considered to be the father of positive psychology.

Several humanistic psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Erich Fromm, developed successful theories and practices that involved human happiness. Recently the theories of human flourishing developed by these humanistic psychologists have found empirical support from studies by humanistic and positive psychologists, especially in the area of self determination theory.

Some researchers in this field posit that positive psychology can be delineated into three overlapping areas of research:

1. Research into the Pleasant Life or the life of enjoyment examines how people optimally experience, forecast, and savor the positive feelings and emotions that are part of normal and healthy living, such as relationships, hobbies, interests, entertainment, etc.

2. The study of the Good Life or the life of engagement investigates the beneficial affects of immersion, absorption, and flow that individuals feel when optimally engaged with their primary activities. These states are experienced when there is a positive match between a person’s strength and the task they are doing, such as when they feel confident that they can accomplish the tasks they face.

3. Inquiry into the Meaningful Life or life of affiliation questions how individuals derive a positive sense of well being, belonging, meaning, and purpose from being part of and contributing back to something larger and more permanent than themselves, such as nature, social groups, organizations, movements, traditions and belief systems.

Barbara Fredrickson hypothesizes that positive emotions undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions. When people experience stress, they show increased heart rate, higher blood sugar, immune suppression, and other adaptations optimized for immediate action. If individuals do not regulate these changes once the stress is past, they can lead to illness, coronary heart disease, and heightened mortality. Both lab research and survey research indicate that positive emotions help people who were previously under stress relax back to their physiological baseline.

After several years of researching disgust, University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt and others studied its opposite, and the term elevation was coined. Elevation is a moral emotion and is pleasant. It involves a desire to act morally and do good. As an emotion it has a basis in biology, and can sometimes be characterized by a feeling of expansion in the chest or a tingling feeling on the skin.

The broaden and build theory of positive emotion suggests that positive emotions such as happiness, interest and anticipation, broaden one’s awareness and encourage novel, varied, and exploratory thoughts and actions. Over time, this broadened behavioral repertoire builds skills and resources. For example, curiosity about a landscape becomes valuable navigational knowledge, pleasant interactions with a stranger become a supportive friendship, and aimless physical play becomes exercise and physical excellence.

This is in contrast to negative emotions, which prompt narrow survival oriented behaviors. For example, the negative emotion of anxiety leads to the specific fight or flight response for immediate survival.

Practical applications of positive psychology include helping individuals and organizations correctly identify their strengths and use them to increase and sustain their respective levels of well being. Therapists, counselors, coaches, and various other psychological professionals can use the new methods and techniques to build and broaden the lives of individuals who are not necessarily suffering from mental illness or disorder. 

Neodruidism is a form of modern spirituality or religion that promotes harmony and worship of nature, along with respect for all beings and the environment. It is considered to be a Neopagan faith by some adherents, along with such religions as Wicca and Neopaganism. By other modern druids it is considered to be a philosophical movement that includes religious tolerance, allowing its followers to be adherents of other religions, or even atheism.

The dominant belief in Druidism is the idea that the earth and nature is sacred and is worthy of worship in itself. For this reason some modern Druids are pantheistic, seeing the natural world as being divine itself. It is unknown if pantheism and direct nature worship were a part of ancient Celtic polytheism. There is no clear historical or archaeological evidence one way or the other.

Some modern druids practice meditation and visualization as a method of self transformation, particularly engaging the imagery of the four elements of the classical philosophers and the medieval alchemists. Earth, air, fire, and water are considered symbolic of aspects of nature and are sometimes linked symbolically to the four cardinal directions, the four seasons, and the four stages of human life: birth, maturation, old age, and death. Elemental symbolism is fluid and varies from group to group. Some modern druids believe that the ancient Celts did not adopt the Greek system of four elements and prefer to use only a symbolic division of the cosmos into three realms: Sea (the lower realm), Land (the middle realm), and Sky (the upper realm).

The Neopagan branch of Druidism in the United States can be traced to one particular root in the Reformed Druids of North America, which was founded by protesting college students. The history of this organization is interesting and one of the best documented histories of any druidic organization.

The founding of the first congregation of the Reformed Druids of North America in 1963 proved influential in giving birth to other Neopagan organizations. Carleton College’s requirement that each student participate regularly in religious services caused a minor rebellion of several students who started calling themselves druids. This religion was designed mainly to annoy and challenge the college administration and its attempt to enforce particular religious sects. 

This tiny movement came to be called The Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA), a pun on the genetic molecule. Despite its jocular culture, Celtic mythology, spiritual eclecticism, more general countercultural agitation, and easygoing self irony were also important themes by the time the religious requirement was rescinded in 1964. The loss of the specific protest motivation did not weaken the RDNA, which still exists today.

It was later developed into actual religious practices. These retained much of the humor with which the Carleton druids were founded but became increasingly seen as a legitimate spiritual pursuit by its founders, one which permitted the students of a largely Episcopalian college to explore their own consciences.

The Ancient Order of Druids in America, established in 1912, considers Druidry as a path of nature spirituality and inner transformation founded on personal experience rather than dogmatic belief. It is a church in the original sense of the word, a community of people following a spiritual path together. It welcomes men and women of all national origins, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and affiliations with other Druidic and spiritual traditions. Ecological awareness and commitment to an earth-honoring lifestyle, celebration of the cycles of nature through seasonal ritual, and personal development through meditation and other spiritual exercises form the core of its work. Involvement in the arts, healing practices, and traditional esoteric studies are among its applications and expressions.

John Michael Greer currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, a position he has held since 2002. He is an author, historian of ideas, Hermeticist and Druid who resides in Ashland, Oregon.

His first book, Paths of Wisdom, a study of the Golden Dawn system of Qabalah, was published in 1996, and has been followed by many other books on magical and esoteric traditions and their histories, including an encyclopedic work on secret societies, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Hidden History. Forthcoming titles will cover an exploration of UFO phenomenologies and histories, and esoteric Western Physical Culture. He has practiced gardening, Tai Chi and related internal arts for decades.

Greer has shown an interest in oil and other resource depletion, which he believes will bring about fundamental, global changes in societies for centuries to come.

The term sensorium refers to the sum of an organism’s perception, the seat of sensation where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives. In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world by senses, perceptual systems and minds.

In the 20th century the concept behind the sensorium became a key part of the cultural theories of Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter and Walter J. Ong. McLuhan, like his mentor Harold Innis, believed that media were biased according to time and space. He paid particular attention to what he called the sensorium, or the effects of media on our senses, positing that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. For example, the alphabet stresses the sense of sight, which in turn causes us to think in linear, objective terms. The medium of the alphabet thus has the effect of reshaping the way in which we, collectively and individually, perceive and understand our environment.

Focusing on variations in the sensorium across social contexts, these theorists collectively suggest that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific ratios of sense that members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit. More recent work has demonstrated that individuals may include in their unique sensoria perceptual proclivities that exceed their cultural norms, even when, as in the history of smell in the West, the sense in question is suppressed or mostly ignored.

This interplay of various ways of conceiving the world could be compared to the experience of synesthesia, where stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another, seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals between notes they hear, or artists who can smell colours. Many individuals who have one or more senses restricted or lost develop a sensorium with a ratio of sense which favours those they possess more fully. Frequently the blind or deaf speak of a compensating effect, whereby their touch or smell become more acute, changing the ways they perceive and reason about the world. Especially telling examples are found in the cases of ‘wild children,’ whose early childhoods were spent in abusive, neglected or non-human environments, both intensifying and minimizing perceptual abilities.

Although some consider these modalities abnormal, it is more likely that these examples demonstrate the contextual and socially learned nature of sensation. A ‘normal’ sensorium and a ‘synesthetic’ one differ based on the division, connection, and interplay of the body’s manifold sensory apparatus. A synesthete has simply developed a different set of relationships, including cognitive or interpretive skills which deliver unique abilities and understanding of the world. The sensorium is a creation of the physical, biological, social and cultural environments of the individual organism and its relationships while being in the world.

These sorts of insights were the impetus for the development of the burgeoning field of sensory anthropology, which seeks to understand other cultures from within their own unique sensoria. Anthropologists have focused on a critique of the hegemony of vision and textuality in the social sciences. They argue persuasively for an understanding and analysis that is embodied, one sensitive to the unique context of sensation of those one wishes to understand. They believe that a thorough awareness and adoption of other sensoria is a key requirement if ethnography is to approach true understanding.

A related area of study is sensory ecology. This field aims at understanding the unique sensory and interpretive systems all organisms develop, based on the specific ecological environments they live in, experience and adapt to. A key researcher in this field has been psychologist James J. Gibson, who has written numerous seminal volumes considering the senses in terms of holistic, self-contained perceptual systems. These exhibit their own mindful, interpretive behaviour, rather than acting simply as conduits delivering information for cognitive processing, as in more representational philosophies of perception or theories of psychology. Perceptual systems detect affordances in objects in the world, directing attention towards information about an object in terms of the possible uses it affords an organism.

The individual sensory systems of the body are only parts of these broader perceptual ecologies, which include the physical apparatus of sensation, the environment being sensed, as well as both learned and innate systems for directing attention and interpreting the results. These systems represent and enact the information required to perceive, identify or reason about the world, and are distributed across the very design and structures of the body, in relation to the physical environment, as well as in the concepts and interpretations of the mind. This information varies according to species, physical environment, and the context of information in the social and cultural systems of perception, which also change over time and space, and as an individual learns through living. Any single perceptual modality may include or overlap multiple sensory structures, as well as other modes of perception, and the sum of their relations and the ratio of mixture and importance comprise a sensorium. The perception, understanding, and reasoning of an organism is dependent on the particular experience of the world delivered by changing ratios of sense.

A complex is a group of mental factors that are unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject or connected by a recognizable theme which influences the individual’s attitude and behavior. Their existence is widely agreed upon in the area of depth psychology at least, being instrumental in the systems of both Freud and Jung. They are generally a way of mapping the psyche, and are crucial theoretical items of common reference to be found in therapy.

The term complex was adopted by Carl Jung when he was still a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Jung described a complex as a node in the unconscious. It may be imagined as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly, through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for.

Jung found evidence for complexes very early in his career, in the word association tests conducted at the psychiatric clinic of Zurich University, where Jung worked from 1900-1908. In the word association tests, a researcher read a list of words to each subject, who was asked to say, as quickly as possible, the first thing that came to mind in response to each word. Researchers timed subjects’ responses, and noted any unusual reactions such as hesitations, slips of the tongue, signs of emotion. Jung was interested in patterns he detected in subjects’ responses, hinting at unconscious feelings and beliefs.

In Jung’s theory, complexes may be conscious, partly conscious, or unconscious. They may be related to traumatic experiences, or not. There are many kinds of complex, but at the core of any complex is a universal pattern of experience, or archetype. Some of the key complexes Jung wrote about were the anima (a node of unconscious beliefs and feelings in a man’s psyche relating to the opposite gender), the animus (the corresponding complex in a woman’s psyche), and the shadow (Jung’s term embracing any aspect of psyche which has been excluded from conscious awareness).

Many Jungian complexes appear in complementary pairs. The puer, or eternal youth, often appears in relationship to the senex, or archetypal old man. A puer complex might manifest as an individual’s unconscious dread of growing up or of losing one’s romantic ideals or freedom. A senex complex, by contrast, might be seen in a person who, without seeming to understand why, is driven to act out an old man role in creative or destructive ways. Only when a complex results in destructive behavior would it be seen as pathological. Otherwise, a Jungian view of psyche accepts the presence of diverse complexes in ordinary health.

One of the key differences between Jungian and Freudian theory is that Jung’s thought posits several different kinds of complex, and emphasizes duality or plurality rather than unity as a basic condition of the human psyche. Freud held that the Oedipus complex was universal, reflecting developmental challenges that face every child, and was the central complex in most or all psychopathology.

Once Jung broke from Freud and the two men went their own ways, forming their own disciplines behind them, there was a brief movement in some of Freud’s circle to remove all of Jung’s work and terminology from their school of psychoanalysis. Freud himself however refused, and so the name complex stayed.

Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, thinking mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. Meditation often involves turning attention to a single point of reference. It is recognized as a component of almost all religions, and has been practiced for over 5000 years. It is also practiced outside religious traditions. Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual and psychophysical practices which may emphasize different goals, from achievement of a higher state of consciousness, to greater focus, creativity or self awareness, or simply a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind.

Evidence of the origins of meditation extends back to a time before recorded history. Archaeologists tell us the practice may have existed among the first Indian civilizations. From its ancient beginnings and over thousands of years, meditation has developed into a structured practice used today by millions of people worldwide of differing nationalities and religious beliefs.

Meditation has been defined as self regulation of attention, in the service of self inquiry, in the here and now. The various techniques of meditation can be classified according to their focus. Some focus on the field or background perception and experience, also called mindfulness. Others focus on a preselected specific object, and are called concentrative meditation. There are also techniques that shift between the field and the object.

In mindfulness meditation, the meditator sits comfortably and silently, centering attention by focusing awareness on an object or process such as the breath, a sound like a mantra, koan or riddle-like question, a visualization or an exercise. The meditator is usually encouraged to maintain an open focus.

Some shift freely from one perception to the next to clear the mind of all that bothers them, so that no thoughts can distract from reality or personal being. No thought, image or sensation is considered an intrusion. The meditator, with a no effort attitude, is asked to remain in the here and now. Using the focus as an anchor brings the subject constantly back to the present, avoiding cognitive analysis or fantasy regarding the contents of awareness, and increasing tolerance and relaxation of secondary thought processes.

Concentration meditation is used in many religions and spiritual practices. Whereas in mindfulness meditation there is an open focus, in concentration meditation the meditator holds attention on a particular object such as a repetitive prayer while minimizing distractions, bringing the mind back to concentrate on the chosen object. In some traditions, such as Vipassana, mindfulness and concentration are combined.

Meditation can be practiced while walking or doing simple repetitive tasks. Walking meditation helps to break down habitual automatic mental categories, thus regaining the primary nature of perceptions and events, focusing attention on the process while disregarding its purpose or final outcome. In a form of meditation using visualization, such as Chinese Qi Gong, the practitioner concentrates on flows of energy in the body, starting in the abdomen and then circulating through the body, until dispersed. Some meditative traditions, such as yoga or tantra, are common to several religions or occur outside religious contexts.

Krishnamurti used the word meditation to mean something entirely different from the practice of any system or method to control the mind. He said that in order to escape our conflicts, we have invented many forms of meditation. These have been based on desire, will, and the urge for achievement, and imply conflict and a struggle to arrive. This conscious, deliberate striving is always within the limits of a conditioned mind, and in this there is no freedom. All effort to meditate is the denial of meditation. Meditation is the ending of thought. It is only then that there is a different dimension which is beyond time.

For Krishnamurti, meditation was choiceless awareness in the present. He said that when we learn about ourselves, watch ourselves, watch the way we walk, how we eat, what we say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy, and are aware of all that in ourselves, without any choice, that is the meditation.

The following is excerpted from A User’s Guide To The Brain, by John J. Ratey, M.D.

I met a psychotherapist from the West Coast named Rolf at a conference in Aspen, Colorado. It was autumn, cool and overcast, yet Rolf was wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses. I just thought, Oh, it’s the California thing. But Rolf, age sixty-eight, had discovered only two years earlier that he had a visual-processing problem. He had begun to work with dyslexics when he retired from active practice, and in studying all he could, he learned about a technique called the Irlen method for helping a small subset of dyslexics.

Certain dyslexics have difficulty reading because as they move their eyes from left to right across a line of type, the letters seem to shimmer… they move. The affected individual can’t keep track of the words, and so has to struggle mightily to read. The Irlen idea was that if such a person looked at written material or any fine details through a certain type of filtering lens, the shimmering would stop.

Rolf had been tormented all his life with the idea that he was not as smart as he thought he was. It had taken him much longer than other students to study. He was smart enough to get by, and got his medical degree by forcing himself to listen well and ask lots of questions. Indeed, his first love was neurology, but that required much more detailed reading than psychology, which relied more on talking and listening, so he ended up becoming a psychiatrist. He had always loved literature, but just never read it because it was too much of an ordeal.

Upon discovering that different-colored Irlen lenses helped certain dyslexics, Rolf drove to his neighborhood pharmacy, picked up a magazine, and began trying on different-colored sunglasses. He tried blue, then brown. Nothing happened. But then he put on a $5 pair of yellowtinted lenses, and began to read the magazine. The words stood still! He read it more easily than anything he had ever tried to read before in his life. He was elated.

Rolf was already wearing glasses for common farsightedness. He hurried to his ophthalmologist to explain his discovery, and together they ordered a pair of Irlen lenses. Today Rolf is a voracious reader.

It’s important to note that Irlen lenses help only a small fraction of people who suffer from dyslexia, which can be caused by many different perceptual or brain processing problems. The shimmering of letters is not a problem that can be diagnosed with routine eye exams. Rolf happens to be in the small group of dyslexics who can be helped by Irlen lenses, was aware enough to apply what he was learning about dyslexia to himself, and was clever enough to find some ready evidence for a possible cure at his local pharmacy.

Rolf needlessly spent much of his adult life with a poor image of himself. Despite his outwardly successful career, he had been in analysis for years trying to understand why he thought of himself as inadequate and lazy, why he had to study so hard to achieve what others did routinely, why he didn’t read the journals as his fellow psychiatrists did or keep track of the news in the papers. His struggle had nothing to do with an intellectual deficit or a motivational problem. It was pure perception.

Just for a moment, look up and examine the scene around you. Be it a sterile office, cozy bedroom or den, allow yourself to sit back and really see the world that surrounds you. In the amount of time that you averted your gaze from this page, your eyes meticulously dissected the image cast upon your retina into approximately 126 million pieces, sent signals for every one of these tiny elements to a transfer station in the thalamus, which then fired neuronal networks to and within the visual cortex, then sent the information to the frontal cortex, and somehow you put the pieces back together into a seamless pattern perceived by you as a sterile office, cozy bedroom, or den.

To add to this complexity, recent physiological findings suggest that all this processing takes place along several independent, parallel pathways. One system processes information about shape, one about color, and one about movement, location, and spatial organization. If you look up and see a clock, the image of its face and the action of its sweeping second hand are being processed independently, despite how unified the image appears. It may seem bizarre to think of vision as functionally subdivided. But how otherwise could a person who has perfect focus and tracking of moving objects be color blind? Some so called blind people who cannot see colors or objects can still see movement.

As humans, our highly convoluted cortex enables us to combine visual messages with other sensory messages and past experiences to give unique meaning to particular visual situations. The sight of a fresh bouquet of red roses will probably have a different effect on me than on the florist who works with roses every day. Most other species do not have cortical convolutions, so the greater part of their visual processing occurs as pure sight. Humans have evolved to process most visual information in the visual cortex.

Since the introduction of the Irlen lenses, a more promising approach has been developed with the See Right Dyslexia Glasses. These glasses, which require no evaluation and are backed by a money-back guarantee, are an affordable risk free option to correct the problems associated with visual dyslexia. For more information, visit the web site at http://www.dyslexiaglasses.com

Concentration is a focusing of the mind. It consists of focusing upon a certain subject or object, and being held there for a time. It seems very easy, but a little practice will show how difficult it is to firmly fix the attention and hold it there. It will have a tendency to waver, and move to some other object or subject, and much practice is needed in order to hold it at the desired point.

But practice will accomplish wonders, as one may see by observing people who have acquired this faculty, and who use it in their everyday life. Many persons have acquired the faculty of concentrating their attention but have allowed it to become almost involuntary and they become a slave to it, forgetting themselves and everything else. This is the ignorant way of concentrating, and those addicted to it become slaves to their habits instead of masters of their minds.

They become day-dreamers and absent-minded people instead of conscious and mindful. The secret is in the mastery of the mind. Many enlightened beings can concentrate at will and completely bury themselves in the subject before them, then extract from it every item of interest. They do not allow abstraction to come into the picture. They are very wide awake individuals, close observers, clear thinkers and correct reasoners. They are masters of their minds, not slaves to their moods.

The ignorant concentrators bury themselves in the object or subject and allow it to absorb themselves, while the trained thinker asserts the self and then directs the mind to concentrate upon the subject or object, keeping it under control and in view all the time.

Concentrate the attention upon some familiar object; a pencil, for instance. Hold the mind there and consider the pencil to the exclusion of any other object. Consider its size, color, shape and type of wood. Consider its uses and purposes, its materials, the process of its manufacture, etc. In short think as many things about the pencil as possible allowing the mind to pursue any associated paths, such as a consideration of the graphite of which the lead is made, the forest from which the wood used came from, the history of pencils and other implements used for writing.

Then practice focusing the attention upon some abstract subject. Think about the subject in all its phases and branches one by one until everything is known about it. It is surprising to find how much more there is know about any one thing or subject than previously believed. In hidden corners of the mind there are found useful and interesting information about the subject. This exercise will not only help to develop intellectual powers but will strengthen memory and give more confidence.

We are all largely influenced by the thoughts of others. Vibrations of thoughts linger in the atmosphere long after a thought has passed. The atmosphere is charged with the vibrations of thoughts from many years past, and still affect those whose minds are ready to receive them. And we attract to us thought vibrations corresponding in nature with those which we are in the habit of entertaining. The law of attraction is in full operation and we may see instances of it at all time.

By maintaining and entertaining thoughts along certain lines we allow these thought vibrations to influence us. If we cultivate a habit of thinking along the lines of cheerfulness, brightness and optimism, we attract to ourselves similar thought vibrations of others and we find that before long we will find all sorts of cheerful thoughts pouring into our minds from all directions. Likewise, if we harbor thoughts of gloom, despair and pessimism, we lay ourselves open to the influx of similar thoughts which have emanated from the minds of others.

Not only are we affected in this way by the thoughts of others, but what is known as suggestion also plays an important part in this aspect of subconscious influence. We find that the mind has a tendency to reproduce the emotions, moods and feelings of other persons, as evidenced by their attitude, appearance, facial expression, or words. If we associate with persons of a gloomy temperament, we run the risk of assimilating their mental trouble by the law of suggestion, unless we understand this law and counteract it.

In the same way we find that cheerfulness is contagious, and if we keep in the company of cheerful people we are very apt to take on their mental quality. The same rule applies to frequenting the company of unsuccessful or successful people, as the case may be. If we allow ourselves to take up the suggestions constantly emanating from them, we will find that our minds will begin to reproduce the characteristics, dispositions and traits of the other persons, and before long we will be living on the same mental plane.

These things are true only when we allow ourselves to take on the impressions, but unless one understands the law of suggestion and understands its principles and operations, one is more or less apt to be affected by it. We all remember the effect of certain positive persons with whom we come in contact. One individual has a faculty of inspiring with vigor and energy those in whose company we happen to be. Someone else will cause a feeling of uneasiness in those around him by reason of a prevailing attitude of distrust, suspicion, and low cunning.

Some carry an atmosphere of health around them, while others seem to be surrounded with a sickly aura of disease, even when their physical condition does not seem to indicate the lack of health. Mental states have a subtle way of impressing themselves upon us, and the student who will take the trouble to closely observe those with whom he comes in contact will receive a liberal education along these lines.

There is of course a great difference in the degree of suggestibility among different persons. There are those who are almost immune, while at the other end of the line are to be found others who are so constantly and strongly impressed by the suggestions of others, conscious or unconscious, that they may be said to scarcely have any independent thought or will of their own. But nearly all persons are suggestible to a greater or lesser degree.

It must not be supposed that all suggestions are bad, harmful, or undesirable. Many suggestions are very good for us, and coming at the right time have aided us. Nevertheless, it is of utmost importance to always let our own minds evaluate these suggestions before allowing them to manifest in our subconscious mind. We must let the final decision be our own and not the will of another.