Judgment

The story of judgment is not a happy one.
We tend to pick up our judgments from so many potential places.
From a preacher, from politicians, the news, from a pseudo-scientific website,
and the list goes on and on.
The problem is that once we made a harsh judgment, it tends to stick.
It tends to paralyze our flexibility, our thinking out of the box,
our empathy, our capacity for respect and understanding

Once a believer accepts the preacher's judgment that those who are not following this or that ritual, are doomed to hell, it becomes very difficult to even consider a standpoint of someone thinking differently and even give it a try to generate some respect for it or trying to understand it. 
Once an atheist judges the believers as stupid, addicted to illusions, it becomes very difficult to even consider the other person's belief might be of value or even give it a try to generate some respect for it or trying to understand it. 
Once a conservative starts the name calling of liberals and creates harsh judgment on them (indulging politicians rants) it becomes almost impossible to to consider the other's viewpoint as having some value or even trying to generate some respect or understanding.
The same for liberals versus conservatives, or any other polarizing concepts in this world. 

It is so extremely important not to allow persons of authority to spoil our minds, not to allow anyone to put the toxic venom of hatred in our thoughts. These things are often done by persons in power or authority in mean attempts to cling to their power. We have to guard the doors of our mind with utmost vigilance. Please my friends do not allow harsh judgments to enter your mind. If they are there already, do try to trace their origin. Once we recognize the origin, it becomes often possible to make them milder and to generate some respect.

I often dream of a world filled with harmony.
Please dream with me
We can make it happen.

The world, one nation

If you follow the news about the USA and see the time spent on extremely trivial and stupid issues as the quarrel between Trump and the NFL players for not standing up during the national anthem, one cannot but reflect that nationalism/patriotism is slowly assuming religious extremist proportions in the USA!

Humanity is the race, the only one race.
The world is our nation, the only one nation.
If we need a flag at all, we need a world flag.
If we need an anthem at all, it would be a world anthem!
Let us design these things together.

Let us give up ignorance. Ignorance of our true nature through politics of division is fed to us since childhood to keep the powerful powerful. Our true nature gives us tremendous peace of mind and true happiness, only if we manage to sincerely love each other. Politicians all over the world do not want a loving world. They have been increasing ignorance by needless fear mongering leading to unnecessary wars. Then they want us to be proud of these wars (blind patriotism/nationalism) so when it pleases them, they can have another one.

Let us start to refuse this indoctrination of fear, this wilful maintaining of ignorance, of stupidity by greedy leaders and politicians. Let us become a bit wiser and work towards a world filled with love. The evolution of humans towards a higher level of wisdom is unstoppable. Soon a critical number of people, who refuse to even pay a dime of attention to this ridiculousness, who refuse to be taught, or even influenced by the stupid and the greedy; a critical number of people who are wise enough to rule the world as a nation of love will be achieved. And the space that stupidity is now still getting in media and all over the world, will shrink so rapidly, that an avalanche of kindness will make anyone, clinging to racism, nationalism, extremism of any kind, ashamed of themselves. since almost all will see the stupidity these things carry.

Please my friends, let us make a small competition on designing the nicest world flag/anthem. Put your designs in the comment section or better still if any of you, reading this can make a blog or website with a more formal competition to design a WORLD FLAG or world anthem, that would be great.

Trees

Here I want to share with you my recent experience sitting outside.

I was sitting outside in my garden and suddenly managed to appreciate how beautiful one of the trees was. It was a tree, I had walked by countless times but had never really noticed its particular beauty. And now I just sat there, not far from that particular tree, truly admiring the beauty of the texture of its bark. I could see the roots disappear in the depth of the soil and above form the crown with all the shades of green it displayed. I loved it, I had like a few moments of joy.

A little bit more reflection made me look at other trees too and surely they had so much beauty too. I had so many trees in and outside my garden, in my village! And all had their own special beauty. Let us all make some time today to pick a tree, take a closer look at it, discover its amazing beauty and just sit not far from it and have a few truly enjoyable moments.

Some people hug trees, talk to trees. This is not very much in my character to do. But I will surely try to make a bit more time to just watch some trees and perhaps in the weekend I will try to plant some new ones for the next generation :)

Five to one

Every day I make the intention to spend my time after dinner doing some useful things like reading a book or at least one or two chapters of a book; like looking at a TED talk that can help me understand something or help me forward in life.

But so many of the evenings after my dinner, I start either on google news, looking at all the negativity of the day; either on Youtube, watching how some would-be comedians make fun of the politicians or celebrities or some failed talent show auditions; either spending time on Facebook or Twitter or even on Google finance, looking for a much too long a time how some of the very few stocks, I own, are doing and never seem to make me rich.

Today however I managed to pick a TED talk and I think I was lucky enough to encounter a good one. It was Mel Robbins talking for about 20 minutes. I think the 20 minutes is what makes TED talks so interesting. The speakers are forced to bring their message in a concise and interesting way. Mel Robbins did so. She managed to convince the audience and me that the odds of being born are very small. Come to think about it if just one of your millions of ancestors had died in a war or from a disease before the next of your extremely long row of ancestors was conceived, you would have not been here. The odds of being born as me or you as you, are smaller than 1 in 400 trillion. So the fact of being born makes us already something very special.

And sure enough, each of us has so many special ideas, we know what we should do. But to make our ideas happen is the really difficult part. We have to FORCE ourselves to do things that we feel not so comfortable with. We plan to do things that we really want to do inside of us, like getting up early the next day or losing some weight but when the time comes of doing, we find some excuses to remain in bed or start our exercise or diet tomorrow or the day after. She advocated if we plan to do something, if the time comes to get out of our comfort zone, just to count from 5 backwards to 1 and start doing it on the count of 1. How many times I intended to talk to the passenger next to me on the plane or train but always find just enough excuses not to start a conversation. The few times I did, were almost always so rewarding, but so many other times, I just found some cheap excuses not to have to come out of my comfort zone to start talking to a stranger.

Forcing ourselves within 5 seconds to actually do the kind of difficult things that can help us what we really want in life, may make a big difference.

Let us try and it. Tomorrow after dinner, I will avoid the news, twitter or any other distraction. I will read a chapter in one of the books I wanted to read for a long time but have just been on my shelf, I will look at another TED talk and I will do some exercise before going to bed. Wow, I hope I succeed. What do you plan? Let us really try the count from 5 to 1 to get us to come out of our comfort zone and do things that matter to our life to our growth.

Seeds for the mind?

I am not a Trump supporter. 

I feel he has a lack of understanding of basic principles of life like honesty, humility, loving-kindness and respect. These are just a few of the many strong principles that, as laws of nature, tend to determine whether or not we lead a peaceful and happy life. Even though he may experience short lived pleasures, seeing his name on many buildings; true happiness and peace of mind are most likely not his share. 

Now this is not a posting meant to criticize anyone. But negative people like him, even if we do not support any of their thoughts or convictions, tend still to influence us in a huge way. While by now perhaps a majority of the American people and almost certainly a huge majority of non-Americans have seen enough to have developed a certain dislike for the man, we tend to be inundated by his ideas and his ways. 

He likes to tweet and has more than a million followers on twitter. But how about the billions of people who do not even want to think about following him and reading all his rantings, his self-praise and his illusions of grandiosity. We are almost pressed with our noses in this rotten material. We look at the news and what we see, even on the media that do think like us? "Today another tweet storm of Trump". And something inside of us, wants to see the negativity about the person we do not like.

But in this way give so much power to these negative persons, and unwittingly, we allow so much of negativity, so much of anger and hatred, so much of nonsense to enter our mind. 

Robin Sharma has written the bestseller, the monk who sold his ferrari, and in this book he compared the mind of humans to a garden. The more seeds of nonsense and anger we plant the more of the same will grow in this fertile garden. The more seeds of love and kindness and honesty and values we plant, the more of these things will govern our thinking process and thus our lives. 

I think this metaphor of the mind as a garden is a real good one. It is high time, I think that we try to stop reading all the headlines about the persons we cannot align ourselves with. This does not mean we close our mind. But once we know enough about negative persons, we do not want to give them the power to pollute our thoughts, our mind our inner world with all their negativity. 

Let us spend each day a bit less time on "the news" and a bit more time on the positive literature of olden times and of today. Investing an hour a day in positive thinking, in prayerful reflection, in nature, is so much more contributing to our personal growth than spending a lot of time following all the negative news of the world. 

Even if up to now, I have fallen in the trap of eagerly reading all negative reporting about people like Trump, I have decided for myself from now to stop feeding my mind, what persons like that think and write and reserve for my mind the food educational events, positive thinkers, charitable wisdom, and also fun events like listening to some great music.
 

A small calculation

Dear friends, I wrote this small attempt at poetry a few years back.
When I read it, I liked the message inside. So true: even if only a fraction of us
get really enthusiastic about kindness we can cause a revolution that
soon will envelop the whole world.

Hey, hey people of every nation,

please read this small but real calculation.

 

If you do two random kind acts every day

That would be more than 700 in a year, OKay? 

Now nobody, really nobody is immune to kind acts

but lets take, only ten percent would have any effects

Hey, hey women and men of every nation

please read this small but real calculation

That would mean every year 70 would be inspired 

by 1 person, living kindness, without getting tired

That means that just 1/70 or less than 1.5 percent

needs to believe, to touch the whole world by year end

Hey, hey people of every nation

please read this small but real calculation

Let's hurry to be part of this 1.5% choosing to be kind

Please people listen to your soul, your heart and mind

Join quickly the revolution of kindness and bliss

You will never regret, reading and acting on this

Hey, hey readers of every nation

please read this small but real calculation 

Aufie Zophy

I have written more on this topic (please click) HERE

Science

Our scientists spend so much time and money staring into the cosmos and come up so often with amazing ‘discoveries’. I am putting discoveries between inverted commas because the reliability of their interpretations is at least a bit and most likely very doubtful.

If even within our own atmosphere our eyes are so often deluded by phenomena like rainbows, like a horizon where skies are meeting the sea, like the road looking wet at a distance on a hot day. We see northern lights, we have literally thousands of optical illusions that can make us perceive things as moving when they are not, look out of size and shape and unrealistically bright. Within our own solar system we were until very recently not sure about Pluto: was it a planet or not?

Surely what we see in the skies, is amazing and with telescopes we can see an enormous amount of lights and things. But how many of these so called discoveries require far going interpretations. Claims of billions of earth like planets prop up like weeds in a garden and we are not even sure how many planets there are around our very own sun.

And so much money is spent on ‘discovering’ all these things while within our own world we have not found the cure of cancer or Alzheimer’s, we have not even discovered how to be happy, we have not done away with the huge hunger and poverty in our world, we have not even found simple ways to live together in peace and harmony.

I think humanity will be served if we start to spend our money to take properly care of ourselves and all our fellow humans in a great and compassionate way. Let us get finally some of our priorities right!

Scientists want us to believe in the big bang but many become irritated with people believing in God

Scientists want us to believe particles are at different places at the same time but many become irritated with people believing in God

Scientists ...  the list may become inexhaustibly long. 

Being a doctor myself, I surely appreciate science a lot. There are amazing discoveries, we do understand; there are those we don't understand; and those about which we make theories that sometimes do not make sense; all of these only strengthen my belief in the existence of a creative Power, we call God, rather then weaken it. 

Changing the world!

It is almost time to close my eyes, but before going to sleep, I want to make it a bit quiet within. I remember the song about love: 🎸Let us love, love, love! Everybody, love, even when it is hard to love,🎹 our loving will change the world. Our sharing will change the world.

Seems like some inner ramblings of my soul,
but it was something from you-tube,
I heard it perhaps more than a year ago,
but my memory had stored it in a safe place
for this giant truth to come back to me tonight:

Love, love, love
even if it is hard to love,
our loving will change the world

Share, share, share
even if it is hard to share,
our sharing will change the world

Let us all make it quiet for awhile
and let our soul sing these wonderful verses.
We will change the world !

Unicorns

In You-tube there are many videos of conversations between atheists and believers.

It is astonishing how the believers, no matter how strong their belief is, are so often on the losing end of the discussion. Believing myself, in the reality of the existence of God as a phenomenal creative Power guiding the universe and our world away from chaos, I thought for a while why believers are often so poor in defending their belief.

Atheists claim to be men and women of logic, who are not accepting things that make no sense. And yet they have been forced by recent scientific developments, to believe that particles can change in waves and depending on whether they are observed or not will behave as particles or as waves, that particles can be at several places simultaneously and that they can move through any kind of obstacles without a problem (like a ball going through a window without breaking a window). These are things just resulting from studies regarding the material world. (quantum physics).

If all these things can happen to an electron in a piece of metal, is it any longer logical to claim that living beings are just following some simple laws they have discovered in nature. Consciousness; life and cells; the power of free will and mind; these are all functioning in a huge and much more complex way than the extremely small electrons, quarks and bosons that are still very incompletely understood. How many electrons can we  expect in a cell? How many cells in a body? How many interactions between all small and big building blocks of one human? Even if they BELIEVE that billions of galaxies and trillions of planets exist and think these things are the results of chance happenings, this makes much less sense that to believe in a constructive and creative Force.

Organized religion has indeed been abused throughout the ages for personal gains and power of those in control, resulting in lots of absurdities in terms of superstition and practices. The success of the atheists in videos lies in their attacks on these absurdities. However they are not successful in denying the existence of much more than our senses can perceive, they or not successful in denying the existence of a God.

In the comments of one of the videos, I wrote about the perception of love. Most people have felt love, without being able see or hear love. We can see and hear expressions of love but never love itself. Love is something we feel inside and because of that we know love is real; love does exist.
It is not hard to imagine that someone who never felt love would doubt whether love truly exists.

Now without saying that love is God or God is Love (even though the two have a lot to do with each other), there are millions of people who do perceive the presence of God, no matter what name we give to God. By making it truly silent inside and performing a prayerful reflection, we do experience a peace, a love, a wisdom and beauty that just flows in our soul. In order to experience this we have to have an open mind, and be able to make it quiet and then the spiritual dimension of humanity starts to make sense. We have to tune in, like we tune into a radio-station. Only if we are tuned in to the right frequency it makes sense, if not it is only noise. If someone never found the right frequency on his old radio that made only noise and noise, it would be easy to believe for such a person that radios are useless and those believing in radio-stations make no sense.

One response came from a hardened atheist, I suppose: he said that he had dreamed about a unicorn and therefore if my logic was true, he could claim a unicorn was existing. I replied that if his unicorn did not bring with it a huge peace of mind, love, beauty and wisdom, that his unicorn imagery is just a bad dream. Spiritual experiences do bring these qualities along and are valuable to those of us who have kept our belief in God, our faith in this 'spiritual' creative Power, even though we may have thrown overboard the absurdities of superstition and excessive rituals that were indoctrinated by many of the people in power of organized religion.

I pity, to a certain extent, the people with a closed mind. They may dream of unicorns.They lock themselves out of extremely valuable experiences, that do increase peace of mind, love, beauty and wisdom. And yes studies have shown that spiritual persons tend to live healthier and longer...