Acupuncture: It works.  My brother one day woke up with a pinched nerve in his neck and couldn't move his head without great pain.  We went to visit my great-grandaunt who was a well-respected Chinese Doctor.  She stuck an acupuncture needle into my brother and he instantly became well.  My brother is a skeptic like I am, so it must have worked.  It couldn't have been a placebo effect.

Chiropractors:  I recently went to a party where they hired a masseuse.  We got half-hour massages.  The masseuse had been working on people since 8pm.  I got my massage after midnight.  She said that I had a miss-alignment in my neck and asked whether I wanted it readjusted.  I said, "Yes."  She cracked my neck one way then the next.  She asked whether I had any other problems.  I said, "I had problems sleeping and had lower back pain."  She said that a neck problem sometimes exhibits itself as lower back pain.  Months ago I had tried snowboarding (three separate weekends) and fell a lot (every time).  At one point I hurt my back and it took months for the pain to go away.  Well, that night I slept very well and the lower back pain was gone.  I was surprised.  It really worked and the pain hasn't come back.  This gal is good.  On her business card she lists about six or so massage techniques.  So, go to an experienced professional.

Luck: You have to make your own luck.  You can't just sit there and hope you'll win the lottery.  Chances are you won't.  You have to work hard and prepare yourself for opportunities that will occur.  When you take advantage of an opportunity, that is luck.

Wealth: You can only make a lot of money if you have a lot of money.  Money begets money.   Let's make believe that two individuals invest in the same stock.  Both aren't any different except for how much money they already have.  One has $100 dollars to invest in stock XYZ.  The other has $100,000 to invest in stock XYZ.  XYZ stock price doubles in a month.  The guy with $100 dollars only made $100.  The guy with $100,000 made $100,000.  The poor guy is still not that much better off, but the rich guy made more than a year's salary.  Who is smarter? Who is luckier? You see there is no difference between the two men except for how much money they originally had.  It is a question of scale.  A question of what the cost of living is.  So, how do you get to the point where you can invest $100,000? You work hard and you save your money.

Afterlife: There is no afterlife.  When you're gone, you're gone.  I grew up in a non-religious family.  So, the question of where you go when you die was a puzzle I wanted to solve.  As a teenager, I researched all the religions of the world, reading up on all of them.  There seemed to be a common thread which pointed to an afterlife, so I thought there might be something to this.   Also when you dream, you think there is something going on when you're unconscious.  Then I had my wisdom teeth taken out.  They put me completely out.  There was no memory, nothing, a complete void.  I woke up and it was half a day later.  This is what happens when you die.  No brain activity, nothing.  Period.  There was a really good special done by "Nova" that explored afterlife experiences and was able to explain the "tunnel of light" and feeling of well-being as physiological effects.  But then there are Chinese folk-wisdoms about people dying.  A greataunt of mine who wasn't very lucid started to remember people and events very vividly.  According to Chinese folk-wisdom, this was a warning sign that she was going to pass-on.  She died one week later.  This matches the "life-flashing-before-me" scenerio.  Spiritual or physiological effect?

Gods: There are mental states that could be reached which make people transcend the ordinary.   Call it possession, call it divination, call it speaking with the ancestors, call it being in the zone.  These states happen when I write and feel the Muse, when I play racquet ball and know before I hit the shot that it's going to roll out, when I play blackjack and can predict the cards, when everything clicks.  These things happen.  Maybe it's divine intervention, maybe it's being attuned to the universe, maybe it's luck, maybe it's just a bunch of bull.

Time: Time is subjective.  When we're totally wrapped into something, time passes by without our notice.  When we're bored, every second seems to stretch out to infinity.  One day, when I was a student and worked for the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley, I was painting gas pipes in a newly constructed lab.  Two guys from the machine shop were connecting gas pipes in the same room.  I thought, "I hope they know what they're doing." After they left the room, there was a large explosion.  My ears became muffled from the increased pressure.  The lights went out.  In front of me was a door connecting my room with another lab.  Flames shot out from under that door -- in slow-motion.  My first thoughts were, "I'm dead." My second thoughts were, "Put the paint brush down, climb down the ladder, and get out of there." I did that.  I must have done that in less than a second, but I seemed to have all the time in the world.  The next day, I went back and found my paint brush and the open can of paint -- exactly where I left it.   This is what had happened.  In the lab next door, a grad student's salt bath had blown up.  He was heating up some other chemical in the salt bath, but the stirrer left hotspots in the salt bath.  At a specific temperature, the salt bath became unstable and became an explosive.  The student was lucky enough to be bent over getting something from the cabinet under the lab bench.  The explosion shattered the granite lab table, flung the fume hood doors across the fifty foot room and embedded them in the wall, shattered the glass windows which looked into receiving, and bowled out the walls in an adjoining stairwell.  The student got scalped by the shattered lab table and he was lit on fire.  He walked out of the lab and found an emergency shower.  He pulled the shower cord and nothing happened.  It wasn't hooked up yet.  A professor came by saw the student on fire, and put the fire out with his lab coat.

Writing: It takes ten years to make a living as a writer.  I looked at the biographies of Mark Twain, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and others and they all took about ten years of seriously writing and trying to get published before they became popular enough to make a living as a writer.  Most writers don't make enough money to buy groceries.  That's why a number of them have moved to Oregon and other states with either no sales tax or income tax.