The Voice of Genius is Soft

Although I can work very hard and defer pleasure for long periods of time, I make a point of enjoying myself and relaxing whenever I can, even if it is just to put my feet up on a desk to read. It is as important to be nice to myself as well as to other people. There are always tasks to be done, so I schedule each vacation well in advance and be sure to take it. I failed to take any vacations from childhood until 1964. From then on, I made an important point of getting away every year. But I usually return a day early to read the mail, tie up loose ends and prepare carefully for the return to work. I always prefer to be slightly early for work, meetings and even social events. It feels good, it’s courteous, and gives me an illusion of leisure.

I always try to be nice to people, not only because it makes a better world, but it lets me feel good about myself. I am not trying to avoid guilt, because I seldom ever feel it. But it helps my self-esteem to be cheerful, forgiving and have good spirits. Even doing good things no one else ever sees or knows about helps me feel good about myself.

 [Those people who are full of bitter complaints most of the time must be optimists at the deepest level. They must always be expecting something very good to happen. Otherwise, why are they complaining? In reverse, I am obviously a deeply committed pessimist because I am always (like Professor Higgins in “My Fair Lady”) so cheerful, good-spirited and almost never complain. I must be pleasantly surprised that things do work out when I was obviously expecting the worst. I need to clarify that this is a very serious position of mine that I have commented on for most of my life.

I have been lucky enough to think, create, hope, and able to communicate my collection of thoughts as presented in this book. The most important of my ideas, in the order of my awareness of them, have been: The Principle of Truth; the Hypnosis Theory of Schizophrenia; the proposal of the i-universe; altruism as a major drive for behavior; autistic symptoms resulting from the infant’s escape from “bonding dissonance;” completion as a major motive for behavior; emotional “body-building;” “natural responsibility;” “natural authority;” intuition as a major source of truth; the King Postulate regarding the fabric of time and space in the universe; morality’s origins from within us; the Philosophy of Possibility; and A Unified Theory Of Human Behavior Explaining All Psychiatric Symptoms.

I bequeath to you now all fourteen of those ideas as my heritage to humanity and my gratitude for the self-realization that permitted me to engage in this work. Just as I began this book with my gradual descent into anesthesia, so I am ending it with another such descent. The liver nodule that was supposedly benign eight months ago has proved to be malignant. Biopsy showed a hepatic cell carcinoma, which is about the size of a baseball now, yet encapsulated. If I have no metastases from the lung and