You feel something is missing. You search for it through experience; yet the more you try to fulfill yourself through people, places, and things, the more of you turns up missing.

You are like a Las Vegas loser trying to recoup his losses, only to lose more of the little he had left. Like the gambler in hope of gain, you have been seduced and have lost a piece of yourself to the seducer.

In trying to get your own back, you give yourself to the system that corrupted you in the first place, losing more and more of yourself in the

process.

There are actually two parts to this riddle. The first one is your true identity, which you have lost through being separated from your true ground of being.

Another identity has taken up residence in its place. An inner relationship has been lost and replaced with an outer connection to some other

presence or circumstance.

It is that false nature in you that seeks to complete itself through external experiences. Pride, in its search for security of all kinds, is what attracts us to all the wrong types of people; it is the reason we teach others to be wrong, to serve this same sick egocentric need.

There is an unspoken, universal conspiracy to keep men from finding their way back from whence they have fallen.

"Common sense leads us back to the source of wisdom and to profound changes..."

We are all encouraged to identify with the seducers and corrupters who have become our leaders. Common sense is the other

life beckoning us home.

Common sense leads us back to the source of wisdom and to profound changes in character, mind, and body.

You will begin your journey with low-level, basic, commonsense applications, assailed by much doubt and discomfort, but eventually you will arrive at greater faith and deeper levels of understanding.

You must learn such things as managing your money properly, for instance, by resisting even the slightest temptation to splurge on selfish indulgences.

You must learn to be a good loser, and to discover what it means to win an argument in the right way, to acquire success without

letting it go to your head.

It is not so much what you achieve in the worldly sense that matters, but the proper exercise of character through proper decisions.

Then, after all is said and done, what we will be left with ultimately is the prize of character, a right relationship with our Creator.