Dreams of joy

 "I slept and dreamed that life is joy
I woke up and saw that life was service
I acted and behold, service was joy"

The above quote from Rabindranath Tagore is really speaking to my soul
I have deep inside that very strong belief that indeed service equals joy.
Service brings peace of mind and
peace of mind is such a huge component of joy!

Just think of the last time you rendered selfless service.
Does it bring peace of mind, does it bring joy?

So what to do in our life?
Let us create more joy for others and ourselves.
and understand fully what Rabindranath meant in the above quote
If we live a life of service, we live a life of joy.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/rabindrana134933.html

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/rabindrana134933.html

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/rabindrana134933.html

Authority

Hitler gathered so much authority
that he managed to corrupt the minds of the masses
in favor of evil and violence within a short time.

Would it be possible that soon we get someone
gathering so much authority, perhaps more than Hitler
to move the minds of the masses in the other direction:
towards a true and all encompassing kindness revolution?

I can see clearly that this is possible.
We need authority for the good.
Not liars and power-sick politicians,
but true advocates of compassion and kindness

Looks sometimes a bit that people like Mother Teresa
Ghandi and the Dalai Lama are among the persons
preparing the path for such an authority to come.

Somehow, our elected leaders of today, in many countries,
are willing to give up all their own moral values,
practice all kinds of evil, just to obtain massive wealth.

Outwardly they seem to be doing well.
But inwardly they must be wrecks.
The moments they are true to themselves
they must hate themselves so much.

Oh, my dear good friends,
we need an authoritative figure
Authority for love, care, kindness, empathy.
If Hitler can corrupt the mind almost all Germans in less than ten years,
Surely a new authority, standing for the GOOD,
might be able to influence the mind of almost all people on earth for the better.

Let us all within our small communities, become authorities for the GOOD.
 

True power

Somehow we were given the true power to choose
the values and principles we want to live our lives by.

But what do we do?


The values and principles, I want to live by are love and peace.
The power is mine to choose these principles at any time!
And yet so often I give away that power to others,
to govern my actions and emotions with their principles.

I want to share the following story:

It is about a loving and generous young man who loves to help people.
He had agreed to meet his friend at 3 PM.
The friend did not turn up and was not contactable at the time.
That was mean of that friend.

The young man became upset, gave away his peace of mind.
He was grumpy for the rest of the day.
Everyone he met, was told in a loud way about how bad that friend was.

The young man could have stuck with his principle of love and generosity
and have imagined a situation where that friend was stuck somewhere
in traffic with a telephone that had a flat battery, or he could have chosen
to just pity the guy for his lousy behaviors and lack of manners.

Instead he gave away the power to control his own principles to that friend.
That friend had been mean. He had allowed his own principles and values
to be determined by his friends values and principles.


We have the power to choose.
We do not have to let others or circumstances determine
our values and principles by which we live.
It is our choice. Our TRUE POWER. 

If we choose love and kindness, the meanness of others cannot change this.
If the actions of others determine how we behave (kind or mean),
we give that enormous wonderful power to them, to the circumstances.
Let us starting today with fully exerting this enormous personal power!
Maybe easier said than done, but worth to try, isn't it?

Sense-ational

Just sharing a poem, I wrote about 3 years ago

Sense-Ational

The smell of the sea was more special
More precious than that of a rose in spring
The wind on my skin was so sweet and soft
It was fantastic, a real caressing
The sounds of the waves, real music
Mozart, Bach, never heard such a thing
The view of the sea the colours so nice
Blue green, white waves, amazingly amazing

I tried to smell, feel, hear and see
All at the same time, simultaneously
But this was really much easier said than done
When I looked and listened, the smell was gone
Focusing on smell and the breeze from the skies
gave me the sudden strong urge to close my eyes
I tried again and again to absorb the senses of the sea
And what was first two, became soon a wonderful three.

After some time I finally could sense all four
It felt like being one with the sea in my core
I felt and smelled and heard and saw
It really had me standing there in awe
I licked my lips and guess what
I could taste some of the sea’s salt…

Aufie Zophy

(Aufie Zophy is my author name/nom de plume)

Changing the world

When the terrible news of a genocide comes we tend to get despondent.
We want to do something about it; sometimes we sign a petition,
but generally we feel quite powerless.

When we see the children in Africa dying from hunger
We want to do something about it; sometimes we donate a sum to a charity involved
but generally we feel powerless.

When I was very young, I had this dream, this ideal to change the world for the better. I saw it quite big. This is not a simple thing to do however. As I grew a bit less young :), I almost gave up on this wonderful ideal, this amazing dream. But in moments of reflection I became aware that I do not have to give up that adorable dream and fantastic ideal:

We may be not able to save the world from atrocities, but we CAN change the world! We may not be able to help our brothers and sisters suffering now in places that are far away from us, but we can get ourselves inspired.

If we manage to make a small positive change in our family or prevent a minor negative event in our village or at our workplace,we are in the process of changing the world. If we manage to enjoy the pleasure of living a life filled with altruism and try to inspire some others about this very true feeling and desired way of life, we are changing the world. Each and everyone can make many small changes in this world and I am sure if enough us do so, we look at a future that is bright for most people, 100% foolproof against idiotic despotism

If wondering how to start, there is a good site on the web about random acts of kindness: https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/ 

Paradox

I have always been intrigued by the paradox:
It is in giving that you receive.

For a long time, I thought it did not make too much sense.
If you give away your money, you have less in your account.
Giving with the aim to receive sounded more like corruption.

Now I think I understand that the paradox is not about money.
It is not about material things. It is more like this, I feel:
It is in giving love that you receive peace of mind

And somehow receiving peace of mind is a tremendously bigger gift
to receive than any amount of love we could ever give.

The paradox could also be understood as follows:
Inside our heart we have a large amount of love.
If we take some of it to give it away,
automatic it is replenished with much bigger amounts
than the amount that was given away.
So again it is in giving that we receive.

I remember an event in my own life, i have described already before:
As I work in Malaysia, whenever I visited my family in Belgium
I somehow expected a special welcome, from my closest family.
If it did not work out as expected, I was frustrated and sometimes,
the whole visit turned out to be not so pleasant.
Then I read in the prayer of Francis of Assisi:
"Please, God, Let me seek to
love rather than to be loved"
My next visit, I applied this wisdom and tried to give love no matter what.
I received a great peace of mind
My own heart become more filled with love
and as cream on the cake, my closest relatives love for me was fantastic
It was the best visit ever

So, before frowning again (as I used to do in the past) upon hearing or reading
this amazing paradox: it is in giving that we receive,
try to apply it to giving love.
Amazing, truly astonishing, fascinating, awesome

No gym, don't worry

If we feel like we need a body work out,
we tend to go to the gym and burn some calories doing exercises
or we go for a log walk and to burn more calories we jog a bit.

This morning, I was wondering, why do we waste so much efforts
why do we waste so much money
There are so many useful things we could do while still getting the work out our bodies need so badly. Why not we go and clean the beach instead of going to the gym or why not instead of running in the park or along the beach, we bring a person in a wheelchair and burn the extra calories while walking, pushing a wheelchair and having a nice chat with the person in the chair?

Let us each organize at least once in a year a crazy event like a wheelchair walk
If you are a member of a gym, why not ask your friends from the gym to replace
one session in the gym with cleaning a stretch of beach of 1 km long
or go and cut the grass in a whole kampung to make it look really nice?

There are so many useful things we can do
that provide exercise to the body in a very balanced manner,
much more balanced than the apparatus from the gym :)

Happiness

Happiness is a word with at least two very different meanings.

When i get food, it makes me happy (blij in Dutch, gembira in Malay)
When I drive my new car it makes me happy (blij, gembira)

But when I call my auntie who is 84 years old and very lonely
something much more profound is happening:
It touches my inner self, my inner being, my soul
I am happy (gelukkig in Dutch, bahagia in Malay)

In English blij is maybe closer to gaiety
and gelukkig to having peace of mind
But in both Malay and Dutch these two
are not used interchangeably by the same word

I think most humans should strive to get peace of mind - type - of - happiness
Perhaps if the English language as such would have a sharper distinction between the two types of happiness, it may be likely that less people would trick themselves in doing all to get the temporal type of happiness f material wealth, power and ego gratification. <?>

Please read also on the two meanings of love

or visit my poetry page: http://www.poemhunter.com/aufie-zophy/

Words

One of the biggest confusions in this world arises from
the poverty of the English Language for certain words:

1. Love
The meanings of love are so diverse and yet so similar.
If the different meanings of love would have different words,
our world would perhaps be a lot less confused.

The meaning of love as in being in love is an infatuation.
It is a powerful and wonderful feeling that falls on us from the sky
and that most often falls out of us again within a reasonably short time.
It comes almost invariably with the illusion of being eternal

The meaning of love as in "love thy neighbour as thyself"
or in the sense the Dalai Lama talks about loving our fellow humans,
is something completely different. This type of love, has 2 sub-meanings
still:
Love as a do-word (verb): we love when we do something loving for people
Love as a noun: the feeling associated with doing loving things.

If we remember some of the most famous songs, like "love hurts"
or some of the heartbroken "love"- poems, it is invariably about the 'in love'-love.

Doing simple loving things for our neighbours or even for strangers (almost) never hurts
Love in its meaning without the 'in' is so very different.

If we would have different words for in love and love and have a better understanding of the differences between the two, I think we would see a lot more happy couples in this world.

We always fancy -like in fairy tales- for the in love to last and live happily ever after.
If we fall out of love which almost always happens we feel there is something wrong and we feel we are with the wrong partner. But nothing is less true. IF we possess some wisdom we will replace the in love (the infatuation) with love (the verb) and create as such love (the feeling). In this way the infatuation may come back on and off for the same partner and we will enjoy the feeling that is endlessly more valuable still than the infatuation. We will be able to build a stable relationship which is essential for the well being of our children and in fact also ourselves. There are plenty examples of people (the most famous examples among the pop or movie stars)  who fly from infatuation to breakup to new infatuation to break up and new infatuation and break up and repeat the whole sequence many, many times. They tend to end up as wrecks and not rarely such a life ends in suicide or overdose of something illicit.

2. my next soul sprinkle will deal with another important word

Deep

There is a story of settlers of a big land,
passing over big plains areas of fertile soil
but they did not find water.
They dug wells and the wells dried up too soon
and they moved on and on.

Later other people came to the same areas.
They dug deeper wells and found abundant streams of water
and now the land is giving so much produce

The author of the text (SW Bremer) compared the deep streams of abundance
with the deep sources, talents and callings, that reside deep within our inner self.
We may just live on the surface and experience drought after drought,
but then, when we dig deeper in our mind, heart and soul,
we may find our very own special talents and start a life
where work becomes a hobby.
Please, let us keep on searching
searching for our calling
searching for the truth
Sometimes we may have to search deep.

What a wonderful world

I was just listening again to the song of Louis Armstrong, what a wonderful world.
Each time I hear the song it seems to have a kind of special effect on me.
His almost magical voice gets time after time the fullest of my attention
and each word in the song seems to move my heart in an extraordinary way.

I think we need more songs like this.
We need more people like Louis Armstrong,
singing excitedly about the beauty of the world,
about flowers and friendship and children.

Right now, I feel the world is still reeling
by a surprising American vote for hatred
for division and isolation and bigotry,
but somewhere inside I keep hoping.

Actually inside of me,
there is something so much stronger than hope.
It is more of a positive certainty that soon,
much sooner than many of us can expect,
the world will take a turn for the better.

Perhaps the American election was meant to be like this.
We tend to learn very valuable lessons from our mistakes.
I hope, no, I know, that somehow the force that has pushed evolution
to the extremely high level of human function we experience to day,
will continue to steer the world to new heights,
no longer alone in the sense of new technical progress
but much more now in the sense of wisdom progress.

The world is caring.
Extremely caring, when compared to 200 years ago.
And our generation Y and Z is rejecting greed at a much higher level
than ever before.

Please my friends, keep believing with me.
If you have a hard time, especially after Brexit and Trump,
take a minute or two and listen to the most amazing song ever produced:
What A WONDERFUL WORLD

I wish you so much love
So much caring
So much sharing
and a day full of peace of mind and happiness.

Awe suddenly quadrupled

I do not know too much about life,
but I know that it keeps amazing me.

Today my good friend Prof Zabidi
shared with me the most astonishing coincidences
happening for his adopted daughter who is severely disabled.

Coincidence comes from the word, coincide.
If two lines coincide, that means that they perfectly match.
Perfectly matching lines have nothing to do
with haphazardness or chance events.

Surely some coincidences are just chance events
but I think almost every human being has witnessed
not one but multiple coinciding events that
touch on the borders of the impossible.

The new-age thinkers believe that through
directed thoughts and positive feelings
people can increase the likelihood
of supreme level coincidences in their life.

I am not a believer in magic
but somehow if we keep our mind busy with positive thoughts
we will give more attention to the positive things and
notice the opportunities more readily and accurately too.

The way we think affects our attention
Our attention affects our perception and from there also our actions.
So, even if not agreeing with most of new-age thoughts,
it does make sense to think more positive thoughts
in order to create more positive events in our life.

Another huge puzzle and amazing thing in our life
is the capability of humans to control to a certain extent our emotions.
By changing our thoughts, we can change our emotions.

And then how our problems tend to shape quite often our life.
Life never seems to stop to be truly amazing!
Thinking about life does bring a feeling of awe.

This evening I was experiencing such a state of amazement and awe,
while thinking about life and all the above, when I suddenly looked outside
and saw a most adorable sunset from my hotel room over the skyline of Kuala Lumpur.
My awe and respect for the world, which was at almost maximal levels, I thought,
suddenly quadrupled !

The "wild well-doer"

(title borrowed from a cartoon)
This small essay is on the combination of service and humility.


If we manage to give some real good selfless service,
quite often we feel we should keep it to ourselves,
if not, we think, it will be no longer selfless;
If we share our good deeds with others, we may feel we lost humility.
That leads to people to be very discrete about their own good deeds
while most people tend to be quite loud about other people's bad deeds.


The above causes a disproportionate ratio of bad talk, bad news over good talk, good news.
Sharing our good and nice achievements does not mean a lack of humility.
One can immediately see whether it is done to share and inspire
or to elevate the wild well-doer

If we try to give good service however, there is always a threat of loss of humility.
It lies not so much in sharing our achievements to inspire, but it lies in our judgement.
After a while we become sure that what we do is right, because it feels so right.
That is still OK. But that feeling of being right makes us too often judge others as wrong.
And that is not OK.

We are all humans with our innate limitations and weaknesses.
Whenever I tend to become too judgemental, there seems to happen something
that really brings me back with my feet on the ground.
It is good to encourage, to inspire, but harsh criticism is rarely of benefit.

So, in conclusion, yes, always keep focused on remaining humble
not so much in terms of avoiding to inspire others
but more in terms of avoiding to criticize others.
But remember:

ABOVE ALL, Enjoy to be a wild well-doer

Colors of Love

Let us reach deep in our heart,
and then the painting will start
in the colors of love, kindness and peace;
not one single soul, entering our place
will miss out the warmth and bliss
upon the sight of colors like this

You may choose to believe it or not:
in no place, the painting will stop.
Our whole house will be colored the same;
our street, village, and soon our whole state
Hues of love and kindness ‘ll glow everywhere
And no, the painting will not stop there

It 'll go on 'til the whole land is covered in love
Kindness in front, from behind, below and above
All my brothers and sisters 'll use their brush
painting colors so adorable, vibrant and lush.
Until all children in our whole world wide
Will enjoy love's bliss and kindness' light

Let us all take up our biggest brush today
And start painting the world, right away.

  ---------------
Note:
I have a sister blog with inspirational quotes
If you have time, please pay this little sis a short visit:
http://quotesfromhans.blogspot.my/
I have also a brother blog with small prayers for the big world
If you have time, please pay this little bro a short visit:
http://smallprayersforabigworld.blogspot.my/ 
my poetry:
http://www.poemhunter.com/aufie-zophy/

A small thought

A small thought my dear students and friends,
may make you pass or fail.

If you do not believe deep inside
that you are ready to pass the exam,
How can you convince your examiner
that you are?

So, today start believing in yourself
gather enough self confidence to stirr
something deep inside.
Believe you will pass.

Too many times we are so afraid of grand disappointments
that we choose not to believe from the start.
But that lack of belief, that lack of self confidence
will soon became a self fulfilling prophecy.
That lack of belief will cause so much agony, so much pain,
perhaps ten times more than the pain of the disappointment in
case you'd not pass after having believed you would.

So let us think clear, not choose certain pain even before we sit for the exams
Let us think clear and choose a healthy level of self-confidence.
Passing is never a certainty
but no one needs to go through the agony of facing an exam
while convincing themselves they will not pass.

Most of the things we need to bring out from our brain, during an exam,is sitting somewhere in our memory. Whether or not we manage to bring out the true answer from the depths of our memory
will depend on our mental state. We need exactly the right amount of adrenaline:
- If we are too self confident we may have a lack of adrenaline
- If we are not confident enough we will produce far too much

So at least a few weeks before any exam,
start practicing a healthy level of self confidence
This positive self talk is so important.

Self confidence alone is not enough; we have to be prepared for the exam
but without self confidence, even if we prepare are chances to achieve success will be most likely not very great.

Aim for distinction, If you miss, you 'll still pass

Think: "I will pass"
Do not think: "I will fail"
'cause on little thought can make a huge difference