Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very very much.
Hi, how are you?
Wonderful to see you.
Are you ready?
It is finally time.
Time for me to put together all of those pieces, to assemble the concept out of all the concepts
I have laid out for you, and to bring this very big part of the last ten years of my
life to its fruition.
In fact, at the time that this sentence was written, it is nine days until the ten year
anniversary of the day that God asked me to take my journey, and the huge leap of faith
that I made.
I am so glad that we're here, and I'm sorry that it took me this long to figure out what
I've figured out and to lead you to what I was led to.
But we're here.
As great as that is, we're pretty much at the end of the book now, and I want to start
fixing our eyes outward from where we are right now, to where we go from here, because
that's the one that's going to matter the most.
We've been through a lot during this book, you and I, and it's going to be time soon
to go out into the world with what you know and make some difficult choices.
It's what you do with this information that holds the greatest weight.
This is a lot like when mistakes are made.
There's nothing we can do to stop the ones that were made, they're gone and over with,
but what you do from there is always a choice.
And I'd like for you to consider the following as one among the great many questions that
I hope you have going forward.
What part of you is it that you want to motivate you?
I'll tell you, you're going to get a very telling answer by way of how you reach that
answer internally.
I hope you choose to carry this book's information with you, to carry it on to others.
Chapter 10.
Strings and Keys
There was a study done in the 1960s in which they had IV drips attached to the jugulars
of rats that, when the rat would press down on a lever, would inject a drug into the animal.
They performed multiple studies with multiple drugs like heroin, morphine, cocaine, and
amphetamine.
In each of these studies, the rats would hit the lever with increasing frequency, constantly
abusing it, sometimes administering lethally high doses to themselves.
Well, the media had a field day with the results.
Here was scientific proof that these drugs were addicted.
Well approximately 40 years later, a group of scientists decided that that data might
show something a bit different than what we pulled from it initially.
You see, people are normally not kept in featureless metal cages in isolation from others.
The only times that the rats had contact with anyone, rat or man, was when the handlers
would clean the cages every few days, including the sheet metal walls that kept them from
being able to socialize with the rats stacked on every side of their cage.
The rats had nothing to do with their time.
They had no purpose, no one to be with, had a needle sticking in their jugular, and a
happy lever.
They didn't get any exercise or sunlight.
Their lives were devoid of options for happiness.
Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander did a different variant of the study.
He and his team built the rats a large wooden enclosure that was 200 times the size of the
cages used in the original experiments.
Gone were the barren sheet metal floors and walls, replaced by a wooden perimeter and
wood chips.
They did away with the needles too, favoring the two-water bottle system, one laced with
morphine, one not.
For the laced bottle, they would frequently sweeten the morphine water to negate any of
the unsavory taste to the drug water.
The enclosure had ladders, tubes, platforms, as well as bedding, but most importantly,
the rats had each other.
Each study group was 16 to 24 rats that had plenty of room to play, socialize, and mate.
They quickly discovered that the rats who had only lived in Rat Park preferred the regular
water significantly more than the morphine water.
They would go for the occasional nip, but that was it.
And the scientists also recreated the conditions of the first experiment, and housed two groups
in the isolation cages, but with water bottles and no IV drips.
In one group, the rats lived for the first portion of their time in the cramped metal
cages with access to both bottles, and heavily abused the laced water, and then were moved
to Rat Park for the second portion.
These rats immediately began to show a strong preference towards the regular water once
they were moved.
The other group that lived in the metal cages for the first half of the experiment only
had the morphine water bottle during their time there.
Once the second part of that study began, and they were introduced to Rat Park, they
immediately avoided the morphine bottle, sweet or unsweet, altogether.
And they would occasionally show minor signs of withdrawal, slight twitching, but by and
large, none of the dramatic withdrawal seizures or symptoms that accompany morphine addiction.
They were rats that suddenly had a community, something to do, and other rats to be with.
They no longer hated their lives.
They actually avoided the drug that was the one source of dopamine release in their brains
while they were in those cramped cages.
And people can be much of the same.
When we're unhappy with our lives, a lot of us turn to escapism in the form of video
games, obsessive eating, drugs, alcohol, which technically is a drug, but television, random
hookups, etc.
But once our lives are full of love, trust, joy, and happiness, we only occasionally go
nip at the bottle.
When we're living the way we're designed to, we see a pretty drastic reduction of the
use of the breaking laugh.
Why?
Because we have the genuine laugh in our lives, and nothing quite substitutes for that.
Sure, we may go back for the occasional nip, but we just don't need the escapism behaviors
to ease the pain as much because we're just not in as much pain.
And when you don't need the breaking laugh, you tend to lose your taste for it.
When one undertakes the task of loving all, if they already have a belief in a God, they
find it much easier to talk to him and can hear him quite a bit more loudly and clearly.
But the thing that becomes easiest is loving God.
Finally, it becomes effortless, like falling.
I believe this is because you're loving him here through other people and as mentioned
before, between the two greatest commandments, it's the same thing as loving him there.
And when you find yourself loving God this way, it becomes so much easier to trust him,
to put your faith in him leading you to the paths that'll bring happiness and out of
danger for you and others.
So why don't we do this?
Well, we're afraid of where that'll land us.
You are essentially doing away with the predictive guidelines that have been cultivated by yourself
and everyone else and you are staring directly into the void that is what lies directly ahead.
You are acknowledging that anything could happen at any moment.
Of course, one minute from now, your instincts to predict the likelihood of what will be
waiting up ahead are going to pester you and attempt to take over and I can't offer you
any way that I know of to stop them.
But I can tell you how I stopped hearing them, how their voices became less important and
imposing, how I reduced their clamor to a soft din.
I was always too busy marveling at the clever ways that God had navigated me thus far, or
simply stop those voices from trying by saying, yeah I know, right?
You would think that that would happen.
Luckily, God's got quite a bit more authority than my prediction, so...
So far in the book, I've been stringing a concept to a previously explained concept
occasionally.
But I think we've reached the point where we need to go ahead and put the rest of the
strings up.
Now that all the main concepts are on the table.
So here we go.
What is one of the biggest things that women cite as what they're looking for in a relationship?
They want someone who can make them laugh.
And now you have a much better idea of why that is.
Laughter is the sound of love un-aimed, but it can also be misappropriated in order to
avoid feeling bad about not caring as much about your fellow man as it seems we were
probably designed to do.
The thing that typically gets in the way of that caring is our desire for my own path
and the unpredictability of our fellow man, which leads to distrust.
We can't see the future, so the fear of the unknown becomes a governing force in our lives,
and we try to make our lives predictable.
And we don't just try to predict it either.
We attempt to carve our path towards that which we choose for ourselves, and the less
we care about others, the more straight, probable, and predictable you can make that path.
That way of living requires that we sacrifice the three main keys to real substantial happiness.
Universal love, trust-slash-faith, and generosity.
The breaking laugh can be used as a salve while we do this.
We are continuing down a gradually declining path in our humor towards violation, and it's
leading us further and further from compassion and trust for those we haven't yet bedded.
And those people count, every single one of them is just as important and real as you
are.
And of course they're as important as we are.
We're all made of the same stuff, and that stuff is probably God, and we all have something
within us that is unlike anything else and something that resembles God more than it
resembles the physical world.
God has very clearly stated across the board that we're to care about each other, to love
each other, and to love God, and that these two ideas are the same.
That which you have done to the least of you, you have done unto me.
The only way to do what's been asked of us is to open ourselves to everyone else, to
trust and to love.
But the biggest obstacle is the fear of the unknown.
So big and governing is that fear in most people's lives that even though I've walked
you through a very logical argument on why it's easily the best way to live when you
trust God to drop your defenses with others to love and increase love and happiness in
others.
Even then, that imaginary world of prediction still rears its head and asks you, you aren't
seriously considering doing this, are you?
Hey, hey, hey, let's see, I need you to say no right now or I will start screaming.
The core of real solid, high quality, true sustenance caliber happiness is reached by
giving of yourself to others and loving others and yet that fear demands that we don't do
it openly.
But the people that take the leap clear over fear's head and into faith, they find that
love and they find that happiness.
It's like that split second when you're climbing stairs in the dark and your foot passes through
a step that you thought was there.
That next step will be there, just probably not where you expected.
And once you start, it's such a simple thing living without fear.
Just be kind and love them and help where you can.
Don't fear the consequences of your vulnerabilities when you help, just hope.
And if you still feel that fear, it's okay, but don't let it stop you anymore.
For those of you who are still waiting for proof to make the leap, the proof you need
appears to be on the other side of the leap, I'm sorry.
It's somewhat similar to courage in that it doesn't appear in earnest at the start
of when you needed it, but rather once you've pulled yourself up and headed into whatever
you needed it for in the first place.
The morning I set off on my journey, January 21, 2011, I stopped at the door of my dorm
room.
I had everything I was taking in a small stachel and I had left my wallet on the bed.
I had paused at the door, teetering at the edge of the scariest tipping point I had ever
stood upon.
By far the biggest cause of my pause was that the only other explanation for everything
that had happened was that I had gone insane with delusions of self-importance, and my
fear pushed all of its chips into the center of the poker table on that one.
So I asked, God, I just need some help knowing that this isn't all in my head.
Please, anything.
I had no idea what I was standing there in wait of.
I finally nodded, gripped the door knob and smiled to myself.
So it's to be faith then.
I said trying to keep the choke out of my voice as I made my final decision and took
my first step into the true unknown.
I stepped out to a bright world blanketed in snow, reflecting light everywhere, and
as I turned to pull the door shut behind me, a bright color stood out above all the white.
A neon green post-it note then slapped my dorm room door and written on it in ecstatic
handwriting was, Smile, Life is Wonderful.
I suppose I'd do well to mention that no one had ever left a note on my dorm room door
save for the RAs leaving event announcements in the two and a half years I lived on campus.
We had cell phones, you send a text.
As I stepped away from the door, I saw that every single door on my floor had a note,
brightly colored and brandishing messages of hope.
I read them as I walked down the hallway and I still remember the first three.
Great job!
I'm proud of you!
And I believe in you.
So far as I understand, this was not an organized event by the RAs, but simply a single student
that felt compelled to share some statements of positivity for no other reason than among
those notes that were put out on the doors, a few of those doors probably had tenets that
needed to hear what was on the note.
I'd also like to add here that very shortly after, any suspicions of all these concepts
being the result of my having gone off the farm mentally were officially disproved, for
me, I mean, and laid to rest.
And all it took was talking to the people I met on my journey about the concepts.
To watch them realize the same things that I had wiped that fear out quick.
Truth resonates and people's reaction to hearing a truth that they weren't prepared for is
pretty easy to spot.
It's also a great catalyst for loving them.
Gives you a peek behind the curtain as their defenses slip a bit.
We are all connected on levels that we have no way of detecting other than to spot the
patterns that emerge by way of those connections' existences.
Everything points to us being good to each other, helping each other, and that it is
that behavior that God enjoys most and has been very clear that we are to do.
As Maya Angelou said, if you find it within your heart to care for someone else, you will
have succeeded.
So do for them without fear of reprisal, be kind, act from love.
I have never hurt God so clearly or felt him as close to me as I did when I opened up my
heart to my fellow man.
Love without aim, and let that smile boil over into a laugh.
Loving God becomes a lot less like swimming upstream like this and a lot more effortless
like falling.
Loving others is the only way to truly feel complete.
Loving them here is in a very real sense loving them there.
And besides, God knows what paths lead where, and the paths where your defenses are down
have special attention paid to them to make sure you have what you need and that there
is always ground beneath your feet.
And I believe that this was designed that way for the same reason that we are not allowed
to know with scientific clarity if there is a God or an afterlife.
Because love and faith, these are the two things that are the point of this life.
And it's not really faith if you have absolute proof.
And so God's hands are hidden throughout these paths, pushing and nudging through the
skin of our world and leaving just enough evidence to sustain those that have already
made the choice to believe.
They can be argued as coincidence, but have faith that if you try to do the right thing
by way of others and treat them as if they were just as important to you, then you have
to know that those hands will protect you and they'll help you along towards real,
substantial happiness.
After all, happiness is only real when shared.
Nobody gets to happiness alone.
There's a few more things about laughter that I thought I'd wait until now to share with
you.
A cultural anthropologist, the study of human behavior over the course of man's history
believed that laughter was the very first form of social-vocal communication that we
developed with each other.
These scientists believed that it was primarily used to communicate that everything was okay
after a tense or scary encounter, or to convey that they could be trusted.
It was a sound that was used to bring people closer.
The breaking laugh doesn't have to be used to lessen our compassion.
We also try to use it for good and to display our compassion.
When a friend is down, sometimes a cleverly worded joke at the expense of the teller or
the friend of whatever their misfortune was is all the excuse they need to laugh and for
the laughter to help make the hurting stop.
And human beings are good that way.
No matter how much our empathy gets shoved aside, our compassion still makes us want
the hurting to stop for the ones we love.
And there's a lot of them out there that are hurting.
Your love and your trust can go a much longer way to helping the injured than you could
ever predict.
And that's almost it for me.
Thank you for coming to the reading.
Now at some point you may have stopped and said, hey, he said that this was the big wrap-up
episode, but he also said that the book's got 11 chapters.
Okay, well, Chapter 11.
Final Words
Now, take these concepts and plug them in.
Tent the glass that you see the world through with what I've shared on these pages.
See what sticks for yourself.
Ask questions to yourself about moments in your past where you've seen some of this stuff.
And see if you don't already have the answers just waiting there for you to ask.
This book is a tool to start the conversation.
A conversation that I hope you continue to have with yourself and others for the rest
of your life.
Much like the Bible is a tool to start people with a relationship with God, it isn't the
beginning, middle, and end of God.
This book isn't nearly all that there is to these concepts.
It's just one facet.
Just an introduction to them.
Look at the threads from your own unique standpoint, like I did, and after you make the leap, the
answers you actually need will be there to welcome you.
And on the note of the Bible, I want you to know that I don't hate religions.
You wonderful, wonderful person who read this book and made it this far.
I know that some of these concepts were very hard to hear, and I truly am just so proud
of you.
Religions introduced me to God, that gave me a name to call God, and some insight into
some of how God has interacted with mankind in the past, and showed me some of the beauty
and community.
But the long-standing histories of mankind's time with these religions has left a certain
rigid feel towards God, particularly to the public perception held by those that are not
part of a religion or are non-practicing.
But it is either this or its wrong rigidity and competition that doesn't give an active
mind much of a choice to believe in any of the gods.
So deeply have these perceptions of God been locked into place, that a fair shake of people
out there that believe that there is something label themselves as atheists, subconsciously
just trying to distance themselves from well-known versions that they don't necessarily believe
in, not totally.
Most of the atheists that I've spoken with or befriended believe that there is something,
or at very least believe that it's possible, if not probable.
There seems to be this almost subconscious message that hangs right under these religions
that states it's all of this, or you don't believe.
Contrary to apparently very popular belief, you are allowed to believe only some of it,
and gather wisdom from any of it.
You are allowed to find God out in the world, in the math of the universe, in the eyes of
anyone you love, in the genuine laugh, or any feeling that you are capable of feeling.
Find Him wherever you find Him, but find Him.
If you are looking, He will be there when the time is right, because not every time
is right this moment.
The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying, cleave the wood, I am there.
Lift the stone, and thou shalt find me there.
Yes, learning backwards about what God was like in the past is good, but living and learning
forward about God is best.
To quote Donald Miller from Blue Light Jazz, believing in God is as much like falling in
love as it is making a decision.
Love is both something that happens to you, and something you decide on.
I believe you have a decision out of you that I didn't warn was coming up.
How will you treat them?
Can you live in a path that you were designed for?
Which in essence boils down to, do you actually believe?
Now that you have all the pieces, and know how most of them fit together, I recommend
reading the book again.
I'm told that it's much better the second time.
And for seconders, which is what I call people making their way through the second time,
I've left little notes in there that you may have noticed the first time through.
You'll see each concept slot nicely into place in a large intertwining series, and then go
talk about these things to people.
The book is here as a tool.
When I finished writing it, I found that I had become one more rung on the ladder.
So get a hold of it, and create the next rung.
About the Author
W.S.
Walker was raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and was generally considered to be, quote,
a bit weird, but a nice enough fellow, end quote.
I truly thank you for giving my words a chance.
They are my words, but these are not my concepts.
Much like an explorer shouldn't be credited with how beautiful a portion of land or sea
is, but only that they were the ones that came across it, these are not my concepts.
I merely found them, and I know that you, the reader, will find them as well if you
but look where I am pointing.
And that's the book.
Choose to believe.
Choose to be good to them.
To be good for them.
And you're gonna be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.
And you can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at will help mail at gmail.com.
Come by and talk about this stuff.
Ask questions or hear what others think at r slash the laughing matters on Reddit.
And you can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at Facebook.com slash I could
help.
And of course, the laughing matters.com.
This is not the end, by the way, the show will keep going.
There's plenty more for me to tell you guys about that I found and plenty more that I
have to teach.
So please keep coming back.
It's actually going to be a lot looser from here.
It's going to be more entertaining, hopefully.
And I think we're going to have some fun.
I believe in you.
When it comes to this stuff, I believe that you have it in you to process this.
Be strong and be good.
They were rats that suddenly had a community, something to do and other rats to do it with.
That's bad.
I'm going to change that up.
değer and travel.