Begin, if you will, to imagine yourself the day you were born. Continue in your imagination along the following path. Imagine that every baby, when born is handed a plain box. On the lid is simply the word LIFE! Imagine now, that on your birthday, you open your box. As you remove the lid and set it aside, you view the contents. You find therein, a large puzzle. There are three major differences between it and normal puzzles.

First, you notice none of the pieces have straight or flat edges. Second, there is no picture on the lid to guide you. Third, the face of each piece has different words on them. These words are descriptive of various places, times, people, ideals and attitudes… fears, hates, love, envy etc. The only similarity to a store-bought puzzle is that it is interlocking.

Now, when you first received your puzzle of life, like everyone else, you begin putting it together. Putting it together corresponds to living each moment, each instant, each NOW! For in truth, life is an eternal NOW! No other time! No past; No future; only now! You put the pieces together as you live each moment of existence.

Like all people, you put your puzzle together the only way you could. You picked up piece after piece, trying to fit one with another. When you were very young, you found this practically impossible to do. You had a physical drawback of being small as well as being mentally and emotionally immature. These lay as stumbling blocks in your road to success. Nonetheless, pieces of the puzzle you did get together.

Obviously, this is an enormous task to learn and experience all the possibilities that life can entail. These include any and all aspects ranging from hate and jealousy to compassion and love. As each moment was lived, you selected pieces from probably every possible area, finding only a very few that you were able to fit together. But what happened to you when the pieces did not fit, as you experienced those so-called failures? Undoubtedly, many times you were corrected! Your mistakes were brought to your attention and correction given; however, for the first time in your life, you did experience what is termed failure. As time went on and the ages of two, three and four were passed, you finally became five... the age you probably started school. Here, you met a large variety of people in teachers and friends. School forced you into a new way of life, one of competition. You still went about building your puzzle; however, in this new aspect of life, you discovered the corrections readily offered for your failures were probably a little ruder. You found your friends saying such things as, “You goofed” or “You are wrong,” or “You're stupid,” or “You dummy!” You began to recall the numerous times you were slapped, spanked, or ridiculed. You began to feel 'down' about yourself! You probably even began to feel very much like a failure. Naturally, this ridicule did not set well with you.

Fear became a part of your existence - - fear of failure, (another part of your puzzle). You learned to hesitate before picking up a piece, using what is called 'judgment'. Yet, at still a tender age, you continued to misjudge many of the pieces, finding many that did not fit.

Now let yourself grow older. Let the years pass by, all the while viewing those things which constitute your puzzle. Watch it grow! See yourself becoming increasingly more physically apt with much more mental understanding. You have begun using your eyes and the faculties of your mind to eliminate many pieces that would have otherwise been tried. Your analysis has shown you that they were not what you needed at this point in time. Yet, you have also now begun telling yourself how wrong you are; how bad you are; how dumb you are. You do this practically every time you fail to choose the correct piece. You have started to ridicule yourself. Do you not yet realize that life is merely a puzzle? Regardless of how wise you become in your selection, the time will always come when the one chosen just doesn't fit. Maybe the person had a little quirk you didn’t recognize when you first met them. Maybe the place wasn't quite as warm as you wanted; the job not as satisfying as you thought it would be; the attitude you picked up wasn't exactly the one you really needed. Perhaps a little bit more love or generosity was in order. No matter how many years a person lives, certain things will surely occur. We become suppressed, oppressed, and demoralized if we pull a shell over ourselves because of fear, worry, or ridicule from ourselves or others. If this shell keeps us from picking up the pieces, then we annihilate any chance of succeeding. We no longer live. We just merely exist for whatever time the body continues to function. We must learn to stop pre-judging our own fates. We do this many times during our lives. We sit back and look at our puzzle at its present stage of development. We view the situation-at-hand and very often begin to pre-judge that the future holds a similar fate. Possibly, you have done this, only to find that the 'pre-judgment' was in error. So long as we pre-judge, we invite that shell to surround us. We must learn to live for NOW!

Misjudgments will be made. The correct pieces will not always be drawn on the first attempt. It will be for those who maintain their stamina, faith and hope in the completion of their puzzle that will experience the joys of knowing what life truly IS! Life is not made up of fictitious things but of real things put together in their proper perspective. These are the words written on the pieces and the reason why the puzzle is designed as it is. You found no picture on the box as a guide, for there would have then been no sense in your living at all. Because of the few wonderful people who had the stamina, through all adversity to complete their puzzle; to find that, in the end, their puzzle interlocked with those of every person they ever encountered. We find the reason the pieces were void of straight edges. The individual puzzles of all people must interlock at some place along the line. This is LIFE! One helping another, locking all lives together into only one LIFE — The True Life — The REAL LIFE!