How Would You Like a Bite of This Fruit?

By Rodney Votion

This book is about the explanations we each seek to be provided with that will help us grow and become mature human beings. These are thoughts that lead to profound questioning of why things are the way they are. Peace of mind is the development we all seek to achieve, no matter where we exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449745103

Rodney Votion

Mr. Votion has worked the last ten years with out-of-control children, teens, and adults. He has worked for Bexar County Juvenile Probation, Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services, Father Flanagan’s Girls’ and Boys’ Town, Foyo Rehabilitations Services, and the Nix Specialty Center. These are mentally and physically demanding occupations.

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Copyright © 2012 by Rodney Votion.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The art work comes from the original designs done by the author.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-4511-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-4509-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-4510-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012905788

WestBow Press rev. date: 5/10/2016

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Leave Me Alone

I Am Standing Right Here

Right and Wrong

Argument I

Argument II

Permission

Drinking

Drugs

Gangs I

Pregnancy I

Pregnancy II

Police

Fights

Delinquency

Friends

Listening

Schooling

Making Fun

Nickname

Perfect

Chapter 2 Be Careful

Family

Life

To Be

Sexuality I

Sexuality II

Sexuality III

Sexuality IV

Sexuality V

Sexuality VI

Sexuality VII

Sexuality VIII

Sexuality IX

Sexuality X

Sexuality XI

Sexuality XII

Sexuality XIII

Sexuality XIV

Sexuality XV

Sexuality XVI

Sexuality XVII

Sexuality XVIII

Chapter 3 Help Me

The Report

Anger I

Anger II

Anger III

Anger IV

Anger V

Anger VI

Anger VII

Anger VIII

Anger IX

Anger X

Anger XI

Anger XII

Anger XIII

Anger XIV

Anger XV

Anger XVI

Anger XVII

Anger XVIII

The Fallen I

Chapter 4 Hurting Others

The Enemy I

Abuse I

Abuse II

Disobedience I

Disobedience II

The Lie I

The Lie II

Punishment I

Punishment II

Punishment III

Punishment IV

Punishment V

Punishment VI

Punishment VII

Punishment VIII

Punishment IX

Punishment X

Punishment XI

The Fallen II

Chapter 5 Don’t Do This

The Learning

Maturity

Desire I

Desire II

Desire III

Desire IV

Desire V

Kindness

The Fight

Guns I

Guns II

Guns III

Don’t I

Don’t II

Don’t III

Chapter 6 Care About Me

Running Away

Relationships I

Relationships II

Relationships III

Relationship IV

Relationship V

Relationships VI

Relationships VII

Chapter 7 Change

By The Cries

The Enemy II

Truth I

Man

Peace

To Humble Yourself

To Be Free

Responsibility

Does God Exist I

Sin

Being Principled

Prayer I

Prayer II

Peace of Mind I

Peace of Mind II

Peace of Mind III

Peace of Mind IV

Peace of Mind V

To Be One

To Be Great

Fear I

Fear II

Fear III

Honor

Religious Scripture

When You Cheat

Chapter 8 Last Words

What Do You Want?

Self-Confidence

Intimidation I

Intimidation II

Intimidation III

Intimidation IV

Different Mind Sets

My House, My Rules

How to Study

Fear IV

Fear V

The Answers to Life

Does God Exist II

Life

Afraid

Normal

Judgment

I Don’t Care: This Is Not a Trick

Dignity

Love and Hate

Sexuality, Another Look I

Caring About Others

Evil

Truth II

Prayer III

Dominance

Learning How to Defend Yourself

What about Money?

In the End

The Way

Attachments

Why Must Evil Always Exist?

Sexuality, Another Look II

The Absence of Life

Evil Is Nearby

Loyalty

Happiness

Sexuality, Another Look III

Trust

Gangs II

The Seven Wars

Balance

Salvation II

Salvation III

Salvation IV

Salvation V

Last Thoughts

Background History about the Author

Introduction

I went back to school to balance my life by adding psychology after all the mechanical and electrical fields with which I have been involved. I had been writing journals for some time, which helped me to stay attached to some sense of critical thinking. These journals were thoughts I wanted my children to have, since I spent some time away from them working in another state. So the information I was putting down was about being able to explain to them what life means. Also, a friend of mine who had been working with me was in a terrible accident after which I found myself looking after him and helping with the issues he faced. My friend’s injury is why I was curious about studying the field of psychology. In the past ten years since then, I have worked with out-of-control children, teens, and adults. I am searching for the kind of thoughts that will bring anyone to a place that feels right about what we are trying to understand about life.

A professor asked the class, Should therapists or counselors give any advice to the people they are trying to help? The answer is no. The understanding is that you help people best by letting them be the ones to come up with the most appropriate thought that will conclude in a positive outcome for who they are. The therapist or counselor is only there to help bring out this information and guide them to that right kind of thinking.

This book has to do with my response to that question my professor had asked. My answer is that appropriate advice does work, especially if it is given in the most meaningful way. Everyone wants to be stimulated by someone else’s personal ideas, even for just a moment.

In life, we are each here alone in our own one mind. I would like you to continue reading and considering how these next thoughts may affect you for the rest of your life.

We are constantly blaming others for the negative things that occur in our lives. How important these things are becomes clear when something happens hurts us very much. The importance we give it is to recognize how much pain it gives us when it does not go right. Thus, it is good to understand how we know things are important to us.

Who we are has to do with the way we think. Our ideas of mistakes in our lives lead us to believe there is something wrong with our thinking. The true meaning of whatever goes wrong is again about recognizing these things that we call important. Self-preservation or preparing for what may go wrong is what thinking is about. We all have to be shown by someone who can bring us up to speed on those things they can help us with. He or she has to go through the motions of how it works or gets accomplished. Being able to read is not the same as having someone show you and tell you what to prepare for. Thinking teaches us constantly about failure in how much we are not able to prepare for. It is important to understand the feeling of failure in order for us to have compassion for others. Thus, our own failures teach us how to deal with each other. These situations show us how to help others, in how we learn to forgive and forget, in a way that explains the human interaction of how to survive being who we are to each other. Respect is what life should teach us. Respect is our ability to get along with anyone or in any situation. Respect is first our ability to get along with ourselves. All through life, we are trying to find all the answers that can do that for us.

All people are born into life having to determine their own usefulness. Usefulness also can be twisted into something that makes us all feel worthless. Often, money is what does this. We tend to want to make money more important than people, or make anything that is expensive more important than people. If you hang around foolish people who dress themselves to look like expensive things, you begin to think things are more important than people. If you hang around people who are responsible in that they show you how things can get better, you will believe people are more important than things. To care about people has to do with awareness. How you think is your awareness. Life is thinking. We should all want to continue to stimulate our awareness of ourselves in life. This is called love. To be in love with who you are, you must be aware of how you say things, choose things, and stand up for things.

Beauty and handsomeness are the things that cover the outside, what we call, having a body. The body is the structure in which you operate. This is an object that can be wanted as things are wanted. Love is about how somebody makes you feel inside your own mind about yourself, your people, and the world you live in. Beauty can’t love you back. Beauty is an object that can be found reproduced in things. You are your own person who can’t be found in another person. Prettiness or handsomeness is part of our collection of what looks nice, or what goes with this and not with that. Awareness is a person. Awareness is the only thing that can love you back. Awareness loves the awareness of the other person.

Awareness is what you know, what you think, and what you believe. To be in love with someone is specific to who that person is. If love is about how beautiful this person looks, it does not matter who this person is. It can be anyone. Our minds are hard-wired to value youthfulness because of our desire to be desired. We have to understand this is part of what we have in this thing called excitement. Excitement is about something being new. We each want to be something new to others. We want to embody excitement, and we want people and things to be always new and exciting to us. This is what being young means to us. To young people, being an adult is what is exciting to them. Being an adult to young people is about being able to do exciting and stimulating things that only adults are allowed to do.

Understanding pain is what makes an adult person an adult or a mature person mature. Pain is why adults don’t obsess and why they stop or limit what will be a danger or improper way of conducting their lives. The pain we cause ourselves or the pain we cause others is the same pain that tells us how to think about when or where to say no or stop. It is the pain of trying to understand what it means to be a person to each other. Also, how we help ourselves is by realizing how other people are affected when we do not say No or Stop.

I want to take this moment now to end with what we do as human beings. We are constantly asking ourselves, What is right and what is wrong? If you follow any person throughout his or her daily routine, you will see this person always seeking comfort. You will find him or her going to the bathroom, toward clothes, toward food, and then toward school or work for the education or finances to get ahead. When you follow this person out into the world, you will see him or her worried about his or her protection and safety. All of this leads us to what is right and wrong with our lives. Having a place to live, having the things that help us to survive, having something to transport us here and there, and having somebody to talk to about it is what is useful or not useful. What makes right or wrong is what others, as a group, think about what is useful or not useful. The group is what leads us to the question of what is a wasted life or what is a useful life. Life itself is whenever your mind finally becomes aware of what you call your comfort.

Our beliefs are about trying to understand the greatest comfort we really need, which is being loved. I hope this kind of book can comfort you in a way that your thinking will always bring you the kind of peace of mind that gives you pause to nod in agreement with others about what things should mean to all of us, which is this:

Love is purity.

Purity is peace and wisdom of the mind.

Your spirit teaches you peace and wisdom.

To teach is to share togetherness.

Togetherness is not selfishness.

Togetherness teaches us to be with others.

The body is only one.

The body’s senses seek comfort.

Comfort for one is selfishness.

Selfishness teaches want and desire.

Want and desire teach violence.

Judgment upon selfishness is sin.

Sin is to be without God.

To be without God is to be without love.

Remember this, though: the evil that is nearby is anyone who thinks, acts, or says things that make life to be foolish. So open your mind, listen to what others are saying, and watch what others are really thinking. You should find many of these moments to be very overwhelmingly foolish. Especially when you are the one who is always witnessing them, but you are also the one who is there with them.

Sin or to not understand is about you being a child waiting to be taught. Forgiveness or to understand is about you learning the wisdom to reason. Judgment is love. Judgment is God’s to decide. God’s judgment is to make clear what is good and what is evil. We all hoped to be judged as good because it shows us that love exist in the hearts of real men and women.

Your sexuality is about being with someone who is a person first. This is about this person meaning family to you. If sexuality just means sex to you, you have no business being with anyone. Many young people don’t realize how hard they can be on themselves until it is too late. They keep going back to the guilt or the shame of what they felt with someone else instead. Similar things have happened to all of us at one time or another, but we somehow made sense of it. Sex is something most everybody likes, but we don’t know enough about being safe with others to be as mature as we should be about it. Yet it does not make us bad people, just very misguided people.

This book is to be used by teens and young adults in being able to determine what is right and what is wrong. I interact with a lot of young people who believe they are educated enough in a way that they see themselves to be smarter than most people―and I find out later that they are locked up, or in some rehabilitation facility, or that they just died recently. Deception is to be made to believe in something that is not right or true.

CHAPTER 1

LEAVE ME ALONE

Ch1.jpg

I Am Standing Right Here

A circus appears on the outskirts of the woods in an old abandoned site. An old black train is sitting there waiting to leave. As you come up over the hill, you say to yourself, Everything is Adam and Eve. This is about how far back or how deep one has to think about what things really mean. You don’t have it inside you to understand anything now.

Slowly, you make it to a very old-looking circus tent with a person who is half-man and half-woman wearing a large black hat and horse-riding clothes. This speaker welcomes you in, and with a big painted smile says, How difficult thought is, especially for one so alone. You say to yourself, This weird person could not have known what I was just thinking.

The spotlights are on, and the speaker comes in to introduce itself. It goes on to speak about how magical this night is, and how it needs a volunteer from the audience. You smile and come over, but are frightened by the tail that now moves from behind the speaker’s back. The speaker now says, How exciting that you have decided to become part of this special evening’s deliberation in what life may offer us all. How interesting that you should make a point about how a decision means nothing. Out of nowhere, a tree appears with a single fruit upon it. The speaker then says, A decision is life! It then picks that one piece of fruit from the tree. It turns, and then says, The mind just has to obey the reason. The speaker grabs you up and begins to dance with you in its arms. Into your ear, it says, All life is or will ever be is thought. In the next instance, you are on the train tracks watching the speaker standing on the back of the train leaving. You can feel those eyes just staring and staring. Then, you see the speaker step forward with a hand reaching out to offer you that fruit from that tree with desire, and with his other hand and finger motioning, No, no, no. In your mind, you could hear the words coming, You will always be searching, and you will always be standing right here waiting for that thought to make sense of everything.

Right and Wrong

Cooperation is about comparisons and differences. Comparisons and differences are about right and wrong. Right and wrong are about agreements and disagreements. Agreements and disagreements are about peace of mind and confusion. Altogether, these are called judgments. Judgments are right or wrong at different intensities. Right is about cooperation. Wrong is about trying to consider possibilities, until right may be possible. A possible right is a right that lasts a very long time.

Why do we need to make comparisons and find differences in life? We need to know where we are in our minds, but most of us think about how we feel and not about how to think. Feeling is important, because it teaches us how to care. It did feel good to me or it did not feel good to me are very low intensities or short ways of dealing with life. These lead us to a way of life where right lasts only for a very short time or not at all.

How we should be about right and wrong is in how we think. How we think is about an order of thought that keeps us out of confusion. Comparisons and differences give us the ideas that reason. Reason is the decision we make based on the information we have that makes certain or sure the answer fits the question being asked or considered at the time, or for a particular time, or for that content. The attention we give comes to the quality and value we give it. Quality has to do with how its meaning changes us. Value is how low or high the intensity of change comes to us. The definitions we give things are what keep order or confusion in our minds. The comparisons and differences of definitions are why we understand anything. It is why we are able to think to cooperate continuously, as long as this particular right we are considering or using can last until another right can be considered or used.

Argument I

How we avoid the argument is by not having attitude, by not using cuss words, and by not using slang. These kinds of speech challenge the other person to be wrong or not to be right enough. Instead, we should ask ourselves first, Who is the adult here?

What does it mean to be an adult?

Being the adult has nothing to do with understanding anyone else’s reasons about how to live.

Being the adult where you are has to do with what you have to work with in order to make things work for where and how your family lives now.

The adult needs to try to sustain a trust with his or her other family members about what it means to cooperate and support an everyday kind of living.

The adult does not need to prove to the youth that this is the best way to do it, but the youth needs to feel that this is what works best for this adult. This is why the argument will always be about what level of appreciation is going to be accepted in trying to understand what this adult is going through or has been through in order to get where this adult is coming from.

To be an adult is painful, because there are many things this adult never understood or took very long to finally get. This is why most youth will never understand where their adult is coming from. The adult’s attitude displays a horribleness that shows the child that he or she has no authority. Having no authority is about not having the ability to be respected enough to be told why this adult does not have it together. This is why most adults tell the youth what to do and don’t instruct the youth in what life means. However, a responsible adult will always try to be with his or her youth in a supporting way. This youth will appreciate that this adult is an adult.

Attitude is about the tearing down or building up of each other’s possibilities of supporting anything that the other wants in creating any idea of help. Attitude is about how you take things. Bad attitude is an attitude that takes on an attack measure that does not allow the other to seem right enough. Bad attitude can be in projected signs of noncooperation, or you better cooperate or else. Good attitude is to take things because you want to work them out. So visiting the youth on his or her level of cooperation mainly is to sustain an agreement with the youth that tells the youth, We can help each other, and We can get along.

There are times when the youth will not cooperate with the adult. The youth will make up his or her mind about the dissatisfaction of this family arrangement. Here the adult will give up on the child at some point, because the child has become a danger to the child’s self, the family, or had gotten in trouble with the law. This is considered to be a failure of this family, but not a total loss of what society and the organizations put in place to deal with this can come to mean to these children.

There will always be children who need some greater attention. They are children who must have the same support to develop and be productive in living a life with all the same possibilities as anyone else. It just will not be with their immediate family or not all together with their immediate family.

The argument will always be about non-cooperation. Family and society should always be about cooperation. The child will become an adult, and society’s hope of an adult is that he or she shows and believes in cooperation.

Argument II

Adults should say, I need you and me to be here today, because I need to see how we are doing together.

If the adult and the youth are never really together, why would either of them expect to have anything in the future that will resemble some type of family cohesiveness or togetherness?

Togetherness is not to be separated. It is what drives our reasons not to be alone or not to allow anything to divide us. The adult has to continuously be encouraging interactions that will develop and promote positive self-esteem about where his or her people come from, why celebrations are important, and what he or she hopes to accomplish or in what ways he or she hopes to succeed in the future.

How we govern ourselves has to do with exercising our right to avoid words that hurt how we feel about each other. Every day should be about finding time to be together, about what we are doing in life. We must try to understand how we are doing this, as a family.

An adult instructing you has to do with teaching you about life in everything an adult says to you, which should show you that a higher authority is guiding us. This authority is called the adult’s experiences in life. It governs every action we do in life. These experiences are what taught this adult to have respect for responsibility.

Our lives are all about respecting to learn the thought that governs responsibility, which is survival. Adults should be trying their best to bring up their youth through their life’s instruction.

The ability to learn is to know how to process information from instruction, which leads to a higher step in surviving. Survival will always be teaching responsibility.

Permission

Maturity is always to respect what home means.

Home is about permission first. We lose respect for home, when we don’t worry about losing our parents’ trust in