The Benefits of Acting Well Acting Well will help you understand your consciousness - a subject that baffles most scientists - through metaphors, not scientific experiments and proofs - and thereby extend your analytical powers and free you from the tyrannies of doctors, politicians, healers, teachers, writers, and scientists who enjoy playing God. Acting Well will be your personal trainer, your physical therapist, your psychoanalyst, your private nutritionist, and your taskmaster who pushes you to ever-higher levels of endurance. You'll develop skills you didn't know you had, and polish and prepare them for combat against your stronger demons until daily victory establishes the hero you can be - in the eyes of the world. Acting Well will lead you on a journey through the community, every day for the rest of your life, to sense human realities you never tasted. Those sensual realities are the poetry that translates and unites you with the people and the sounds and inner visions of your neighbors' works; even to those poor people who beg or are too old or young or idiosyncratic to become brothers and sisters who interest you. Acting Well will command you to evangelize. Like all good evangelists, you'll want to share your new discoveries with friends, lovers, and children; but you can share them only with those who recognize and declare, as do recovering alcoholics, their humanity and need to serve, receive, and lend support. Although Acting Well may tempt you to become an evangelist, it requires no declaration of faith - only keener observations than you're used to, and more cutting analyses than you thought necessary. Yet, the religious fervor Acting Well inspires will persist lifelong. It will be a fervor that is worthy of you because it's based not on heavenly faith but on stone reality. Thus Acting Well will convert your prayers of supplication into laboratory notes in which you participate in wide-ranging, non-randomized experiments, use the Internet both for outreach and for in-reach, and compose your own Book of Hours. Acting Well will stop your building chapels in the air, that float unbridled with the spirits; but will tether your thinking to the concrete sounds of city and nature - off the clouded cliffs of heaven to the humbler, stream-washed pebbles of reality that stop your throat from humming mindless ditties, putting an end to the Nobel, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and all gold-watch acceptance speeches - that mainly charm the bathroom mirror. If you follow directions in detail, you'll lose weight - if that's what you need to do. It will come off automatically in a reasonably short time and you won't even think about it. You'll notice, one day, you need new belt holes, or you'd better see the alterations person at the cleaners. You'll probably eat more than you're used to in order to get all the nutrients you need so that you won't have to swallow food supplements every day. You'll enjoy purchasing, preparing, and eating food more than you ever have; and you won't feel guilty about that subject ever again! You'll never have to experience hunger, and whatever cravings you used to have will disappear. You'll never have to suffer again from food-related acid indigestion. Your body will become the only food expert you'll depend on. You'll learn to recognize what its unique and subtle requests, complaints, and messages are telling you; and you'll choose the foods it wants you to have, in the proper quantities. It will reward you with simple, satisfying pleasures. You'll feel stronger and physically better off than you ever felt before - except, if you were an athlete in school or in the armed forces during basic training, you'll remember and compare what it felt like in those halcyon days. If you're suffering from "middle-age syndrome," with symptoms like rising blood pressure and falling libido, then Acting Well will offer you the most elegant restoratives. They won't come in pill form, however. In fact, your doctor may suggest that you throw your pills away. Your physical endurance will shock you. If you like fast dancing you'll marvel how long you can stay on the floor without getting winded or tired. If you run, you'll be amazed how much farther you have to go before you hit the "wall." Moreover, if you bike you'll beat everyone except professionals up the steepest hills. Your energy will never flag. No inconvenient breaks and naps will leach valuable time from your schedule. However, old you are you'll feel beautiful. Your skin will radiate a glow so that people will tell you that you're looking better than ever. Maybe for the first time in your life you'll like what you see in the mirror (although you may not like your face in snapshots because simple cameras don't capture the radiance). Whatever the objective truth is, you'll walk amongst people feeling proud of how you look. You'll start dressing better and wearing finer clothes in more stylish fashion, getting even more compliments on your appearance. If you engage in weekend sports you'll stop feeling "cool" by pretending you're a professional competitor for whom it's necessary to wear expensive costumes and purchase extravagant equipment. You'll be relaxed, and you'll sleep without problems. Your body will let you know the exact number of hours it wants you to rest - sometimes six, sometimes eight. You'll rise every morning eager to meet the day. You'll wonder what made you stop worrying. Your problems and prospects won't change that much; but if they start to get you down you'll spring back after a night's sleep, eager to meet new challenges and solve the old ones. If something stresses you too much you'll know what to do; but you'll practice relaxation remedies only when you have to - not twice a day, and rarely even once. Getting rid of headaches will be simpler, too. To summon up the full powers of your consciousness, you'll need nothing more than the sound of a taxi-horn or the rumble of an air-conditioner. The simple snap of a light socket will do it, as will the straining of a truck transmission, the rustle of a bending tree, the cooing of a lost bird, the delicious scratching of an itch, the strain of the neck, or the constant fear concealed behind the draperies of your solar plexus. Acting Well, like visiting the Wizard of Oz, will tear away the curtain to reveal the mechanics of your psyche. Thus Acting Well can disillusion you, but can also make you wiser for the backward trip to Kansas. Acting Well will teach you to love America because it was the first country to guarantee the freedom to pursue happiness. Thus Acting Well will provide your own personal Declaration of Independence from the protective custody of your lethargic brain and anyone that would enslave it.