Harmony

If our rituals, if our religion is a source of any disharmony between us and other people, let us be aware that we are on the wrong track. Rituals and religion have been abused a lot in our human history. While religion is meant to show us the path to our Creator, so many scholars and religious leaders have abused it to gain and maintain a position of power over others. In order to remain relevant they ask people NOT to think for themselves. The scholars assume an attitude that gives the impression that they are the only ones who can interpret all sacred scriptures and tell us what to do. 

If any religious talk or sermon is making you feel anger, hatred or superiority towards or over any other human, you may have been the subject of a manipulative effort from a religious leader. True religious leaders will guide their followers towards harmony. Harmony with our family, harmony with our neighbors, harmony with our friends, harmony with our colleagues and yes, harmony with whom we call our enemies. Nobody is as strong as the one who can create harmony with his enemies. Prophets of every religion have not only conveyed the message but lived it in numerous stories of sublime levels of love and forgiveness. 

Creating harmony with our enemies is not meaning we allow ourselves to become victims. It is not easy. Let us start with the easiest one. Create harmony within our family. This is perhaps the least difficult one, but how many of us truly succeed in this on a daily basis? Let us make it silent in our heart today for a short while and think about ten ways to increase harmony in our family. If ten is too much, at least 3. We have to discover the beauty of harmony ourselves in order to fully understand that living in a way that our Creator wants us to live, is a way of harmony. If we achieve harmony most of the time for our family, let us expand bit by bit, to neighbors, to work environment, and in the end, we will find it logical that harmony with our 'enemies' is just as desirable. 

Harmony, first with our family, then let us go on and on....

Tuning in

Radios have been gradually replaced by the internet and our I-gadgets. I still think most of us have radios, at least in our car. I love the radio. Just tuning in into my favorite station, and listen to the songs, that are not chosen by me but by my favorite DJs. Many of the songs that I know and like, but on and off the unexpected melodies; a pure delight.

This small reflection is not really about radios. This afternoon I had a small discussion with my really good friend from Scotland.We like to discuss many topics from the light and superficial to the heavy and deep.We touched the topic of the existence of God. Even though there is no proof, no tangible proof that God exist, equally so, is there no tangible proof that love exists!

Only when we experience love, we know for certain that love exists. We cannot see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or taste it, but we can feel it with our heart, we can feel it with our soul. We can experience also God, the love of our God, that is. All we have to do is to make it quiet, and tune in. If we just open our radio and do not try to tune in, to find the right frequency, the right wavelength, we only hear noise, nonsensical noise, noise that makes no sense. If we try to connect to God with utmost skepticism and disbelief, we will experience only noise and try to enforce our fixed narrow beliefs about spirituality. If we manage to explore the frequencies and wavelengths of gratefulness and forgiving, of silence, of prayerful reflection, we will tune in and suddenly it starts to make sense...

Love is surrounding us, peace is surrounding us. 

Let us find the right frequency and tune in . Even if you cannot make yourself to believe that God truly exists, the universe and the air around us is filled with love, peace, kindness and wisdom. Let us explore the right wavelengths, open our hearts and our mind and feel it.

Before I wrote this small piece, I remembered that I wrote about tuning in before. I just clicked on the search tool in the left upper corner of this page and typed tune in. I enjoyed my old reflections about this, especially the one about equinox and I hope you enjoy them too.

I wish you lots of love, peace and wisdom and happy tuning in :)

The story of Mr. robot!

Imagine you create a robot. 
It is so important that the battery gets charged on and off.
So you program Mr. robot to feel low if the battery is low
and to experience some pleasure when the battery is charged.

The purpose of Mr. robot is that he helps people 
and that he is always friendly and good. 
So you program the robot to feel very good when he does that.
He feels great satisfaction and a superb peace and happiness
if he helps, is friendly and good.

Then you start up the robot and you have big expectations.
The robot is starting his 'life' and to your big frustration,
he is spending almost all of his time 'running' after the small pleasures
you had installed when he did the things necessary for maintenance.
He completely ignores his main purpose and 
remains most of the time ignorant of the huge benefits for him
you had installed when he would be helping people. 

Stupid Robot!

Weren't we humans created in a similar way?
Our small short lasting ego-pleasures to help us sustain ourselves and our species!

Our great satisfaction, peace of mind and true happiness depending on our altruism!

But perhaps everyone on Wall Street and so many of us with them, remain focused on, and believe that happiness is to be found in, the transient ego-pleasures that were meant to help us merely survive. It is high time that we become fully aware and act continuously on the firm knowledge that a much bigger  happiness and peace of mind is lying in a life of purpose, a life of altruism, goodness and kindness.

Happiness, fulfillment, peace, love and kindness are waiting for us.
Let us choose a life of purpose and finally see the small pleasures for what they truly are!   


Small quote:
When we chase happiness (through chasing pleasures) it tends to flee and fly away
When we choose a life of purpose, happiness tends to come and sit on our shoulder

Within!

Tonight I was peeping silently in my heart.
You know what I found?
I found peace sitting there
I found an awful lot of kindness planted there
I find so much love, ready to be given away.

Then I was confronting my mind: 
Hey, mind, if there is so much peace, kindness and love in my heart,
why do you not make full use of it and let me enjoy it all, every day?

I got to understand that it was not my mind that was to blame. 
Mind was just obeying my own choices I made day by day.
It was thinking the thoughts I was wanting it to think.

But I wanted to choose peace, kindness and love all the time.
I was praying for it and searching for it!
Why did I choose the thoughts that brought so often the opposite?

Reason chipped in with a thought:
Perhaps, you are looking for peace, love and kindness in the wrong place
You seem to keep looking for it and expect it from the outside all the time 
Now you have seen where it really sits, it is perhaps time to start looking from within.


I hope you enjoyed the small conversation above with my inner self.
Aren't we all wanting peace and love and kindness very much?
Let us look for these happiness bringers from within.
In a spirit of gratefulness and forgiving, we look within
and we will find all these things not only to be ours,
but to be so abundantly ours that we want to give them away
that we want to share them with everyone we meet.
And these people, we share it with, will share so much back.
Give it a thought, search within and live love,
live peace, live a life filled with kindness!

Knowledge and action

Being and doing good, starts with knowledge.
But knowledge alone is not enough.
We need strength, motivation, inspiration as well.

1. Knowledge
The worst thing for many of our friends is ignorance. 
Many of us are blinded by the completely wrong belief
that more material wealth will bring us more happiness. 
True knowledge of our own happiness consist in knowing
that when we care, when we are randomly kind, 
when we give selfless service, selfless bits of our time
selfless bits of our possessions; only then we get closer
to true happiness, peace of mind, harmony,... 

Gaining a new possession, surely makes us happy.
But it is a happiness, more like elation, enjoyment, delight.
It lasts for awhile and then we get used to the new possession,
and we want more. Get a new car! We are elated. 
But how long does the elation last? Not long after, 
we want something bigger, something faster, something better

Performing some selfless service, helping a poor soul,
giving some time to a person in need, a simple smile,
a friendly word, a pat on the back, a small inspiration.
These things give us happiness too, 
but it is a very different kind of happiness. 
Here we talk about bliss, contentment, joy.
It tends to stick, to stay. When years later, we think about it,
it still gives that warm feeling of being good, doing good. 

If we manage to know and convince ourselves about the above,
we have gained a piece of superb knowledge.
We give up our ignorance and gain from it tremendously.

2. Action 
However this knowledge alone may be not enough 
to make us do good all the time.
Too often we know what we should do,
but our big ego nudges us to different things. 
That is why sometimes, we share this extremely valuable knowledge,
but then so often we are caught not practicing what we 'preach'.
That is quite normal and does not mean the knowledge is not valuable.

To act on our knowledge we need reminders, motivation, inspiration
we need to read, to listen to talks, to see videos, to talk to each other,
to keep our motivation, our level of inspiration high. 
We can build up our goodness, our reverence, our altruism by practice
Just like regular training can build up our muscles and physical strenght
we can build up our capacity to do good through practice.
The more we practice, altruism, goodness, reverence, the stronger 
we become mentally, spiritually and 
the easier it becomes to put our ego a bit aside. 

The sad thing is that is a kind of taboo to talk about our charity.
People easily label us as doing charity just to boast about it later.
This is a pitiful thing, because it deprives so many people from inspiration.
If we do not have to be shy to talk about our good deeds,
if we would easily share the things that truly give us peace of mind,
we can go on and inspire so many other people.
The world is truly getting better. We can speed up the process
1. by sharing our knowledge (even if we do not manage to live up to it all of the time)
2. by sharing our inspiring stories of helpfulness, of random kindness and altruism

Let us all participate in this process. 
The time of the idea of universal love and kindness has come
It is unstoppable now. 
Let us all be active participants!








 

Scholar

While reading the American scholar, a speech and essay by RW Emerson, I felt like some of my own thoughts/feelings were expressed there. He wrote that the scholar has three main sources to learn from:

1. Nature
The scholar sees nature in a superbly holistic way. He uses all senses and connects to the wisdom of the ultimate Source of nature while spending some quiet time there. To connect, to enjoy the sight, the sounds, the wind, the smells; it is so inspiring and so much wisdom and thoughts do come to us in silent reflection in nature

2. Books
He started by going back to the wise man of old age. They could see, and discovered giant truths through direct contact with nature and the ultimate Source of wisdom. We got so enchanted by their wisdom, and we value what they spoke and wrote so much, that often we forget to connect ourselves with the highest Source of wisdom. Scholars become then not thinkers but parrots of other people's thought. Surely books are useful for our dark moments who definitely appear in our life, but in times of flow, we should write the poetry and wisdom for the next generations.

3. Action
Scholars often feel they have to isolate themselves from society, cave in, become like hermits. Not good! Most of the things we do learn through action and pure hard experience of life's reality. Reflection on our actions and our own experience it what generates wisdom rather than just isolating ourselves in a cave

Whenever I read Emerson, I feel a sort of connection with what he wrote more than a century ago.  Of course, whenever we read we read with a critical mind and not everything Emerson wrote is equally valuable, but there are many gems of wisdom in his essays and his poetry.