Better

The world is good
and it gets better

If all of us
we start with ourselves
to make our own self
a bit better today

Today will be the best day
in the world ever. 

I have sister blog with small prayers for the big world
If you have time, please pay this little sister a short visit:
http://smallprayersforabigworld.blogspot.my/ 

Youth

The youths of today...
So many times we hear complaints about the youth of today.
And yet...

Today I came back from KL by plane.
My son and his friend came to pick me up from the airport.
We stopped at the local mall for a quick meal and to buy something.
The friend of my son told that their ex teacher was working now in the mall.
They were keen to go and see the teacher.
The way they greeted the teacher and showed so much respect to him was heartwarming.

But then, the best still had to come.
When we went to the parking lot,
my son noticed people sitting in a car not far from where we parked.
He remembered that that car, when we arrived had its lights on.
He discussed with his friend and asked my permission to go and help them, since he had starter cables at the back of his car. He went to ask the driver whether he had a battery problem. Indeed they had. He went to park his car in front of the other and yes, with the cables connected the engine started easily. All the time I had been just sitting in the car of my son. The man with the battery problem wanted to give some money to my son and his friend and both of them did not take the money, saying they did it with "ikhlas", meaning they did it just to help.

I felt so good about this whole thing.
Thanks God for this wonderful present.

Expression

Thoreau wrote: do not die with the music in you.
Indeed we have all so much music in us
Our talents, our ideals, our aspirations
Do NOT let your ideals die with you.
Live them, make them happen,
Express them
Keep your ideals alive
Sing them, make them work.
Do not believe anyone saying idealists are naive

Quarks

Here is a little poem, I wrote a few years ago.
Enjoy.

Y..... Quarks Inside

The morning sunlight
In all its glory
The morning sunlight
In all its glam

Every molecule in my heart
Is jumping up and down
The quarks inside collide
Emanating a mini beam of light

I hope that this little beam of light
Coming from my heart in a way
Can just like the morning sun
Brighten the lives of those I meet today

The power of crooks

I doubt there are any statistics about beggars
Let us assume that half of them are just crooks
or make it even worse, 3/4 of them may be crooks

The main question is:
Are we willing give so much power to the crooks
that they are allowed to deprive the 1/4 of beggars, truly in need, of our charity?
that they are allowed to deprive perhaps 90% of good hearted people of the pleasure of giving?

Are the crooks really deserving so much power?

For my self I have decided long time ago,
not to give to crooks any such power;
to give to all, crooks and truly needy alike.
I wish all of them well.

Does that mean people take unfair advantage of me?
Perhaps, some will, but if we look deeper, the so called crooked guys
must have major problems too.

If it would be a consolation to anyone,
the bad crooks tend to choke on their ill gotten gains
and lose more than they received in their very next transaction
if not money-wise, certainly peace of mind-wise!

That is just how nature works.
I like the essay of Emerson on Compensation.
A true classic, written in not so easy English.
But each time I read it, I discover new gems in Emerson's writings.

Suddenly...

at one moment in our life
all of us 'll suddenly realize
that happiness does not depend
on material gains and wealth

We become instantly aware
that for happiness to be there,
we need love and smile and care
for each and everyone anywhere

There is truly only one way
Let us start here and now, today :)

Imagine...

Imagine
That enough people
Would believe
That the world is good
That the world is loving
That the world is wonderful
What a good
What a loving
What a wonderful
World it would be...

If at one moment...

If at one moment
we would doubt the friendliness of our universe,
we would doubt the love of our God,...

Let us look up at the sky.
The beauty of the clouds or just the fantastic blueness
the lovely sight, the amazing sensation of vision
with our close to perfect eyes.


If at one moment
we would doubt the friendliness of our universe,
we would doubt the love of our God,...

Let us make it silent for a while
Listen to the tune of the wind,
the song of a bird, the humming of a bee
The lovely sounds, the amazing sensation of hearing
with our close to perfect ears


If at one moment,
we would doubt the friendliness of our universe,
we would doubt the love of our God for us,...

Let us walk in the grass, walk in the sand
Let us smell a flower, smell the sea
Let us taste, smell, feel,
Let us hear, see, touch

Let us walk, look, talk,
love, be kind, love
care, share, care

Let us do all these things
All doubt will soon be gone. 

White as snow

Starting with a Tanka (poem of 5 lines with syllable distribution of 5-7-5-7-7)

a beautiful smile
on a disabled boy's face
teeth as white as snow
full of warmth, melting my heart
with unconditional love 

Yesterday, I visited this lovely family in Pasir Putih, Kelantan
Recently their 30-year-old severely disabled son had died during an infection.

They still had 2 more severely disabled sons and one disabled grandson.
The way the family takes care of the children and the happiness in the home
are truly a source of warm-hearted inspiration.

The very nice smiles on the faces of my disabled friends, lying on the floor
were so beautiful. The younger one started to cover his face with the mat he was lying on and tried to play a form of hide and seek with me. He had visibly a good time and laughed out loud.

They were so severely affected by this hereditary disease. but they still had the ability to love
still had the ability to smile and laugh.

If you have the chance, do visit a disabled person, enjoy the smile on their face
and who knows, they may inspire you to a bigger expression of your own love...

Two amazing side effects

As Doctors, we are always worried about side effects.
However, sometimes side effects are simply amazing.



An amazing side effect of praise (previous soul sprinkle)
is that if we systematically try to give heart-felt praise
to another human on a daily basis,
we have to look for something nice, something good.

This will shift our focus, (perhaps from fault-finding,)
to finding positive things in others.
We WILL find more good things
and automatically this will lift up our level of happiness

Side effect 1: we will find more good things 

On top of that we will see all these smiles
on the faces of the persons we praise.
Making other's smile, makes us feel better too.
Another 'lifter' of our happiness

Side effect 2: we will see so many smiles

Aren't these amazing side effect of praising others in a heart-felt way?

Praise

Please do not miss the red text at the bottom.
If you are in a hurry, jump straight to that part


There is one thing for which all humans crave
It is not money, it is not sleep, it is praise

And yet we do it so rarely
We receive it so rarely

And if finally we receive some praise
we tend to be lousy at receiving it.

When we are babies it seems so natural
We receive praise for almost everything,
from a cute smile to holding a cookie in our hand.
We are keen on praising babies,
because the baby will not think: what does this one want from me!
because it feels like the right thing to do
because the act of praising a baby feels so good.

When we like something about an adult,
praise is no longer a natural thing to give.
"what will he or she think?"
And we forego willingly the joy of giving praise;
we deprive the fellow adult of receiving praise.

We do not need flattery.
Sincere heartfelt praise we do need.
But to be able to give it,
we have to learn how to receive it first.
Let us praise sincerely ourselves first.
If someone gives us a compliment,
we do not need to break down the reason for the compliment;
we can just gracefully accept it
admit that we like it too, or a sincere thanks for the compliment;
If we get a compliment for a skill, we can explain a bit on how we acquired it.
We need praise, and gracefully accepting praise
will boost our own capacity to give praise to others.
We can praise ourselves during our night time reflection
All these things will help us to give sincere praise to others.

Let us try today and in the coming week
to give at least one sincere praise to another adult per day.
A different adult every day...
By the end of the week, it is likely that we have made a positive difference 
for 7 people; extremely likely at least 6 and almost certainly at least 5 

The revolution, just around the corner

I have come to believe very much
that a kindness revolution is just around the corner.
I have come to believe very much
that soon we will see something disruptive
Disruptive to our greed
Disruptive to our ego
Disruptive to our society as we know it.

Helping your friend to get an A will become
so much more important than you yourself getting an A
We will care for mankind.
our identity will no longer depend on how much money we have
no longer depend on what our profession is, on what our religion is,
We will become unconditionally kind, unconditionally loving
Across races, across nations, across borders,
Borders will become a burden and we may do away with them at all.

Wisdom will be everywhere,
All of us will seek truth
And kindness, love and peace will be abundantly present
We will finally start to see our true nature.
Our true purpose of life.

It may look like just a dream,
but every day, I ask our Creator
to use me as a servant to help make the above dream happen.
Let us all join hands.
It may seem surreal,
It is OK,
if just you let the idea play in your mind for awhile
even for a short while, we have made
a major step forward to the realization of the dream

Long, long traditions

Many of our beliefs are based on long, long traditions,
transmitted through generations and generations of well meaning people.
Even if it was true that all links in the long, long chain would have been
well meaning people, even the most well meaning ones
are influenced by so many biases and human factors of
(perhaps subconscious) self interest.

That being said, it is a bit scary,
(considering, how many of the most powerful people today
use and abuse religion for their own gains,)
to assume that all links in the long chain
of our own dogmas and traditions have been truly well meaning people.
How many "trusted" links were "politicians"?

Then many people go on using these traditions to judge others,
adopt them as a blind belief because they hear them from the so called scholars
who have spent a few years studying (or sometimes even not) about all these traditions.

While traditions often carry quite a bit of value,
it is our duty as humans to filter these so called truths.
We were gifted with the most sublime gift in nature:
the gift of being able to think and analyse what is true and what is likely to be true,
what is likely to be not true and what is pure nonsense.

Whatever knowledge from whoever, we need a filter before we let it in
and make it our own truth.

A (t)rusted tool

All of us have experienced considering buying something,
we thought was relatively unique or rare,
just to see more of these unique or rare things
in the next week, than we have ever seen in our life.
It could be a green scooter, a special dress or whatever.

This is because when we think about that rare or unique thing at that time,
our mind starts to pay attention to it.
Whatever comes in our field of sight, we do see, but if we do not pay attention,
we do not notice it and are not aware of its presence.
Do you agree?

That is how our mind works: what we think about most, gets most of our attention.
The wonderful thing is: we can choose what we think about!
Some people choose to think about the ugly traits of our politicians all the time.
And that is what they will notice all the time in the world around them: ugly traits
They may wish the bad guys, bad luck and bad luck is what their mind will get focused on.

A poet's mind is inundated by the imagination and thoughts of something superbly beautiful.
And that is why poets tend to find and see beauty where others only see greyness.
Some people choose to think about ugliness, and they see lots of it
Some people choose to think about beauty and they see lots of it.

Are those thinking about beauty, cheating themselves, escaping from reality?
Or are those thinking mainly thoughts of ugliness, distorting a beautiful world?
Perhaps reality is somewhere in the middle, containing both nice and ugly things
and you may say, I focus on the middle road, that is what you will notice
and your life will most like turn out to be somewhat mediocre.

Life contains sooo much peace. There is also sooo much war
There is sooo much superb harmony, sooo much extreme discord.
There is so much in the mediocrity, so much mild disharmony,
What we think most about will be what we notice most.

Today for one, I want to think about beauty, peace, love, kindness, abundance
I want to think thoughts of opportunity, freedom, truth, wisdom, brotherhood
fairness, integrity, equality,...      How about you?
Imagination is one of the greatest gifts humans received from Nature,
It is a tool that allows us to think thoughts of future things that not yet have happened.

Imagination allows us to choose thoughts about things that we do not experience right now.
Let us use this wonderful tool
Do not ever get it to be rusted !
If it got rusted in the past, get the strongest rust remover today
and remove all rust from your imagination. Trust it!

Trying

Sometimes we try to be good and to do good.
We may succeed to do some good things
We try hard,

But then one moment of stress and
many of the good things we did
are overwhelmed by one burst of anger

How much I want to live a life full of kindness
How hard do we try? Kindness, love, bliss
But on and off we become slave to our own shortcomings...

We are human.
Just trying without improving is not enough
We need to reflect, to think, to plan

We need to pray for guidance
We want to be kind, we want bliss.
Slowly we move forward.

Slowly we can eliminate more and more negativity
and build up a heart full of unconditional love
Unconditional love and nothing else.

A lofty aim.
Let us work hard
towards it.

The dynamic of harmonizing good

It was M.B Beckwith, who has said:
"Peace is not something passive but something active.
It is not just the absence of war or conflict
It is actually the dynamic of harmonizing, actualizing good."


I felt that this is such a wonderful thought,
that I wanted to share it here.

I hope you enjoy as much as I did,
the depth of that statement.

Peace is the active presence of something that is created.

Theater in Bachok

This morning I went to a theater show in Bachok
I got comfortably seated on the first and only row
with a glass of freshly squeezed watermelon
naturally sweetened to perfection.

The first actress to come on stage
was a butterfly, performing brilliantly
the most elegant dance just in the air
Her wings were brown and white 
and then she landed with her feather light feet
on a green leaf of a flowerless tree.

The second actor came on immediately
a white butterfly doing a rock and roll
The birds came on stage before it was their turn
but who cares about turns in this theater.
A choir of invisible doves
made their lovely sounds in the background
for an aria of a proud yellow bird.

When my drink was finished,
I was allowed to go on stage
and have a private chat with many actors
They spoke a strange language
but perhaps they understood my heartfelt praise.

Faith in Europe

Recently I was attending a talk on ethics in the medical profession
While I sat there, I was asked about the situation in Europe.
Have most Europeans become non-believers, have they lost their faith?

I was taken aback a bit by the question. As if I am an expert on faith in Europe!
I live in Malaysia and have been here for the past 22 years.
I grew in Belgium and go back occasionally.

Anyhow here is my answer, which may be right or wrong:
I think that indeed a majority of people has moved away from the classical forms of religion as they have been practiced for centuries. A minority is still strictly religious in that sense. Another minority has become strictly "religious in claiming that no God exist" and became blind followers of that "religion". A majority in the middle is sitting on the fence. While the term 'sitting on the fence' may sound negative, I think it is not. People seem to have moved away from the "abnormalities" that have happened in the organised religion  and have adopted a position of the agnostic. Agnostic means: there may be God, but I am not sure about it.

I think that being in such a position is putting you in the very right place for growth. Once we become absolutely certain of our faith (on either side, the fanatic religious people or the atheists), we adopt an attitude that prohibits any growth. If we are convinced our faith is perfect, let us be aware that an equal number of people have a faith extremely different from ours and they are as convinced as we are that their faith is perfect. In every faith, there are people like this. They become blind to all wisdom, they stop growing.

So, I think, sitting on the fence is not too bad. Leaning heavily to one or the other side is OK, as long as we remain on the fence and we can see all sides of the world. I was attending once an interfaith talk and when the question was asked why God had allowed so many religions to evolve, each "expert" answered something along the line that God had given the challenge to the humans to find the one true faith (and of course each of them thought it was their own faith that was the true one). I could not have disagreed more with these statements but I did not get the opportunity to voice out my opposition.

My take on this is that our God has allowed so many religions, so that we may keep on growing. Our human mind, though the most evolved among all creatures on earth, is no where near the level that we can grasp all truths about the world and the spiritual dimensions associated with it. Let us remain seekers. Let us open the windows of our soul, not to be inundated  by swarms of nonsense, but with a nice filter (perhaps a wonderful mosquito netting) in front of windows, so we can let sip in the fresh air of true wisdom from all sides and grow spiritually to a level higher than any blind fanaticism could ever achieve.