Andy (Timothy Robbins) walks into Shawshank prison, an environment most of us would see as a hopeless place to survive, much less have a life of any quality.  He enters the mess hall and the yard, surveys his new neighbors, and joins the most sane group with the most balanced leader (Morgan Freeman).  He works in the library, teaches inmates to read, and every single night he scoops one teaspoon of sand out of the tunnel he’s digging for his escape.         

     Andy chooses to be in charge of himself rather than allow his surroundings determine what goes on inside him and how he conducts himself and he has a goal.        

     What are you perceiving if you’re the one walking into Shawshank?     

     You do not simply SEE the environment.  Your perception is an act of creation.  You will perceive in accord with the “AS IF” world you’ve made up.  You will PERCEIVE in accord to the WORLD YOU ARE RESPONDING TO, not the world as it IS.         

     How to talk someone else into thinking you’re fat:  A newly wed couple is enjoying a meal when the husband looks into his wife’s eyes and tells her how perfect she is.  The wife twirls a string of spaghetti, a shadow crossing her expression.  She says, “I know you think so, but I don’t.  Ever since I was twelve, I’ve always felt like my hips were huge.  I felt like a fat giant in junior high.  I can’t stand to think what’s going to happen as I get older.”  The husband says something sweet, but when the wife gets up to retrieve something across the kitchen, where do his eyes go?  How often and how many more times, in the years to come, will his eyes drift to the source of his wife’s junior high school misery?    

     It depends on how insistent is she that she SHOULD change the size of her derriere, and how insistent she is that IT IS AWFUL, TERRIBLE, AND UNBEARABLE to be a woman with a large (if it even is) posterior.   

     But now we’ve moved from PERCEIVING to INTERPRETING.  Oh, baby now our EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM can really take off!