Belief

Have you ever thought of buying a particular car?
You start seeing the model everywhere.
The cars had been always there, but you start noticing them.

If you choose to believe something, you will start a similar selective seeing. What will you pick up? Evidence; you will find pieces of evidence for your belief. Everywhere!
Your belief will become stronger, and soon it will be experienced as a knowing.

You may choose to believe the world is good, to believe you can do something or that there are a lot of opportunities. You WILL find your evidence, and your belief will get stronger.
You may choose to believe that the world is bad, to believe something is impossible or that there is a lack of opportunity. You WILL find your evidence for what you believe and your belief will get stronger.

It is good to listen to all sides of the story, even to listen to the people who have opposite visions of ours. We do not have to adopt their view, but just hearing something different, may allow us to notice different things in the world.

I think that an open mind is the most important thing for us to keep somehow a balance in what we believe, and to keep our visions, concepts, and paradigms as close to reality as possible. Keeping an open mind to everything, but still, scanning all information that tries to enter our mind and deciding what is definitely worth letting in, what is definitely deserving to be blocked out and what is worthy of some serious reflection before we let it in or block it out. A majority of things may be worthy of some reflection!

Gifts that cost no money

This is building a bit further on a message I posted a few days ago or perhaps more like summarizing it (in only 17 lines, below 😀).

Peace is one of these fantastic gifts: peace of the early night or the morning: all we have to do is think about it, let it in and be fully aware of it and enjoy it. We may have to clear our busy mind a bit of all the clutter that worried or angered us earlier in the day, but peace is a great gift, easy to experience

Beauty is number two. It may require a bit more action than peace: we have to actively look for it or listen for it. Still, with a minor effort, we will enjoy it and our life becomes a bit more beautiful. Just take the time to look up at the skies, the trees, the flowers.

Love is another gift. It sits in our heart but to fully enjoy it, we have to give it truly away. The gift of love keeps flowing: the more we give away, the more flows back in. Giving love, even if no love comes back to us, is pure joy. But it is almost impossible to give away love without receiving any back. To turn a smile on someone's face...

And the fourth one is creativity. For this, we have to listen to our heart and our deepest passion let it boil over and express in a nice and original way. Perhaps a bit more difficult than enjoying peace, beauty or love, but it is surely worth it, to make some extra efforts. RW Emerson wrote: a man is only half himself and the other half is his expression (Link). I agree quite a bit with that. We truly need to express ourselves and if we manage to inspire even only one other person, it is a true source of joy.

A small rhyming poem on the topic: 

Isn’t it always fun and pleasant

To receive a wonderful present

Wrapped in paper and ribbons of gold

A gift of value and beauty untold

Unexpected or on a special event

Received from a brother or friend

Surely happy feelings will be there.

But what if the gift is floating in air?

Everyday we get such gifts for free

Think just about all the beauty we see

The peace we find at dawn in our room

The song of a bird, a marvellous tune

There is so much in nature to be adored

Which gets all too often simply ignored

So is also the love that sits in our heart

And the creativity, our sense for art.

The love sits in our heart; be always aware:

It is replenished no matter how much we share

Sharing love, the greatest gift we get from God

But all too often we appreciate it not.

Creativity another gift from above

As valuable for our character as love.

Using our talents as well as we can

for helping any other woman or man

Most of the gifts of nature are always there

We just need to open our heart and let it in

Love and creativity in abundance to share

So let’s all be aware and live a life from within

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You may enjoy also:
Beautiful skies: https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans
Beautiful flowers: https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans
Beautiful poems: https://aufiezophypoems.blogspot.com/

Beautiful inspirational quotes:  https://quotesfromhans.blogspot.com/
Essays about good things: https://abcofvirtues.blogspot.com/

A fantastic short story: https://afishwithawish.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-fish-with-wish-whole-story.html

Creativity

The best pieces of art express the way the artist sees the world.

Paintings that show the reality as everyone sees it, may provoke a 'wow, what superb skills in painting the reality as it is', but paintings that really enthrall are the paintings that speak the feelings of the painter, that uniquely depict the world as seen by the artist. Similarly for poetry: while poems with perfect meter and rhyme may tickle the mind and heart, it is the poem that expresses the story of the deeper feelings, of the unique perspective of the poet that penetrates deep into our chest and moves our soul.

True art involves passion. A melody may sound pleasant and nice, but when the passion of the singer resounds in the voice, it is then that the song becomes a masterpiece, touching our deepest core.

Artists have passion and are passionate about expressing this passionately :)

Awareness of pleasure, happiness beyond...

The pleasure of food

Pleasure lies in consuming food when we are hungry. Wonderful!

Some of us get so enthralled by this pleasure, that we keep eating.

We accumulate fat, get overweight, obese and make ourselves feel not comfortable. We may even get sick and die early. The pleasure that lies in food is not unique to humans:

the fly in the sky, the fish in the sea, the birds in the trees, the chicken, the cow; all of them find pleasure in eating.

Other pleasures that help sustain life
There are other pleasures that are related to sustaining life too. They are wonderful too.

It is good to enjoy them at appropriate times, but if we make them a purpose by itself or get too excited about such pleasures, we may overindulge, which invariably makes us feel not comfortable and they may make us sick and even cause us to die prematurely.

Awareness

We are human. And as humans, we were gifted with pleasures and sources of happiness beyond those that are needed to sustain life. The key to experiencing the pleasures and happiness beyond those we share with the animal kingdom lies in AWARENESS.

Beauty

One such pleasure is beauty. We need to be aware of the beauty that is all around us, in order to experience fully its pleasure

My garden has thousands of flowers. Tens of them, I planted but hundreds, literally hundreds have grown spontaneously, in the wild. The very small flowers, half-hidden in the grass, the flowers on the clover, on the weeds, on the trees, on the shrubs, each of them displaying their own little bit of exquisite beauty.

And yet there are days, when I dash from my door to my gate, without paying any attention, without any awareness that there is so much beauty along my way for all of us to see.

Every morning, a chorus birds sings beautiful songs, but all too often we are too much in a rush, too busy with our small tasks, to stop and listen, to really become AWARE of it and enjoy the pleasure that lies in listening to these beautiful sounds.

Just this morning, I made a small walk on the beach and the sky was so amazing. Sun rays radiated over very dark background clouds and made the sea below them, white. It looked like a painting where they display an apparition of God.

Surely the beauty of nature, the beauty for our eyes, the beauty for our ears are a source of pleasure and happiness. Somehow, we have to make time for it, look for it, look at it, listen for it, listen to it, in order to consciously enjoy the true beauty. We need to be aware! We can consciously make time for beauty and increase our level of happiness instantly by enjoying the beauty all around us.

Beauty is only one of the pleasures beyond animal experience. Another one is…

Peace.

If we consciously experience the peace that we have, the peace at night, just before we go to sleep or the fabulous peace in the morning, just after waking up,… During these minutes or even hours just before or after sleep, do we consciously enjoy the peace that is within them? Right now even, it is quiet in my room and the rain and winds of the monsoon season are the only sounds I hear. I try to relax my body, to quiet my mind and to focus on the silence, on the rain. I close my eyes and experience peace, which is a joy to our soul, a pleasure to our body and bliss for our hearts.

Sometimes we pray for peace and expect it to come from someplace far away, to descend on us from heaven or from the skies. But peace is most of the time all around us. All we need to do is make it a bit silent within become aware and consciously experience and enjoy the peace.

Love

And then there is love, a truly big one, perhaps the most misunderstood source of happiness.  When I pray for love, I get sometimes the same feeling as when praying for peace. We expect it to come from outside, from somewhere far away, but if we truly look inside of our own heart, there are tons of love sitting right there. 

There are two kinds of love: the love we get (like friendship) and the love we give (like friendliness). We crave for true friendship, we crave to get love and appreciation, but it is not in our hands, not under our control. That is indeed depending on others, whether or not we get love and friendship.

But the other love, the love we can give, the friendliness, is really within our control. When we were born our heart was filled with love and we started to smile at our parents and give away our loving feelings. And what did we get back? Currents, torrential currents of mother’s love and father’s love. Actually, all the love and friendliness that was planted in our hearts at birth, is still in our hearts. It sits there and the more we give it away, the faster it gets replenished. It is as if there is a source, a well, filling our heart with love, as soon as we give a bit away. There is so much friendliness in our hearts. We give it away and poof, it is replenished by new and fresh friendliness. 

If we become AWARE of this huge reserve, this giant heap of love that sits in our heart and soul, and we start to give it away consciously, it is such a big source of peace of mind and happiness. Maybe the biggest source of happiness and joy that we can ever experience. Somehow we were programmed by our Creator or by the universe to enjoy this very special human source of true happiness. It gives us the greatest possible level of satisfaction and feeling good whenever we truly give away the love that sits in our heart, whenever we manage to genuinely help some of those around us, whenever we manage to make a positive difference and create a smile on the face of a human being. Love is here, it is here now and it is always easy to find, as long as we look for it where it sits: inside. 

While beauty and peace are joys we can experience passively, since they are like real presents, like birthday gifts, given to us by the universe or God, love is special in a way that it was planted in our heart and only if we give it away, we will experience the great human joy connected to it. And the love we tend to pray for most, the one we get, the friendship will flow like a natural consequence to us in great quantities. And even if it doesn’t, the joy of sharing the love in our hearts with others is always worth it by itself. I have personally experienced multiple times the great paradox: “it is in giving that we receive”. The most striking one when I visited my family at home in Europe, while I was working in Asia. (click here to see more about that story :) )

Creativity, growth, devotion, self-expression

I think love Is like a bridge between beauty and peace that we can enjoy passively on one bank of the river, and the other joys that needs our action, on the other bank. They include creativity, the joy of creating beauty and actively maintaining or even creating peaceful situations for our loved ones. They include also growth, personal growth, emotional growth, spiritual growth that we tend to obtain through sincere (prayerful) reflection about the challenges in our lives and ultimately the wisdom that comes from them and then of course the sharing of the wisdom in again creatively expressing ourselves. Self-expression and living a life of purpose are among the greatest sources of joy and happiness.

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If you are in need of something more than an inspiring quote but do not have time to read books or long pieces, the solution may be here: I have written a few short essays on good things. Please click here if you want to read them

If you feel OK with quotes alone, I have also a place where I keep some original inspirational quotes
https://quotesfromhans.blogspot.com/

Are your eyes hungry for some nice pictures of skies or/and flowers, I can recommend:
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans 
or/and
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans

Goodish

I just saw a TED talk about how our attachment to being a good person can interfere with our potential to become better.

The premise was that all of us (or almost all) are convincing ourselves continuously that we are good persons. We truly want to be good, want to be seen as good, want to be heard as good. The problem is that we have an all or nothing perception of being a good person. Either you are good or you are not.

If someone points out a mistake that would make us a bit less good, we tend to go in a bout of 'red-zone defense' mentioning to ourselves all our donations, our help we have offered and so on. So rather than analyzing and learning from our mistakes when pointed out, we go in full defense mode and try to find a thousand excuses.

The speaker suggested we all perceive ourselves as goodish, being aware that good is a quality like strength. From each, you can have only a bit, a bit more, a moderate amount, a whole lot and everything in between. None of us have absolute strength or absolute goodness.

By being aware of that, we can keep an aim in front of our eyes to build on that goodish-ness. We make mistakes and it may cost a lot emotionally or psychologically to other persons or to ourselves, but this awareness will prevent us from finding excuses and accept that we are not perfect and then we can reflect better and learn from our mistakes.

So let's be goodish. Know we are far from perfect but with every accepted mistake that we reflect on, we can become more and more goodish and who knows, maybe one day truly good :)


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If you are in need of something more than an inspiring quote but do not have time to read books or long pieces, the solution may be here: I have written a few short essays on good things. Please click here if you want to read them

If you feel OK with quotes alone, I have also a place where I keep some original inspirational quotes
https://quotesfromhans.blogspot.com/

Are your eyes hungry for some nice pictures of skies or/and flowers, I can recommend:
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans 
or/and
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans

Rule number 6

Here I share a story I just heard, from Benjamin Zander, a great teacher:

<<Two Prime ministers were sitting in a room discussing affairs of state.  
Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk.  The resident prime minister admonishes him: “
Peter,” he says, “kindly remember Rule Number 6,” 
whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws.
 
The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again twenty minutes later by a hysterical woman gesticulating wildly, her hair flying.  Again the intruder is greeted with the words: “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.”  
Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws with a bow and an apology.

When the scene is repeated for a third time, the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague:   
“My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this.  Would you be willing to share with me the secret of this Rule Number 6?” 
“Very simple,” replies the resident prime minister.  “Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.’”
“Ah,” says his visitor, “that is a fine rule.”
After a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?” …
“There aren’t any.”>>

I like the story soo much and wanted to share it with as many people as possible.
Isn't this a superb story. Thanks, Mr. Zander! 

Morning magic

Just waking up is already like real magic, but then, while still in bed, saying a small prayer in our mind, that just transitioned from peaceful sleep to peaceful wakefulness, is quite miraculous too. 
    
For breakfast, I had bread, coffee, orange juice and each was tasting divine. 

I spent some time on the beach, yeah, cleaning it, because the sea had returned quite a bit of plastic bottles that had been inadvertently deposited in its water. The clean beach was giving me a good dose of satisfaction and it was as if the sea was smiling. The clouds had hidden the sun for most of the morning, but once I finished the cleaning it came out and shone in the most fantastic way on the waves and the deep sea.

When I think at night about the day that is about to end, most of the time, I think most about the mornings. I am not sure why, but surely the morning hours do have something special.

I wish for you that the next morning will be truly wonderful. :)

Seeing with love

This morning was beautiful:
the casuarina trees and coconut trees were displaying a fresh greenness that contrasted with the blue skies behind them and in the blue skies, some scanty white clouds were creating amazing patterns looking like artistic grids.
Seeing this made me thankful,
thankful for the skies
thankful for my eyes.

Perhaps our eyes are the most wonderful gift we received from the universe.
Let us be truly grateful for eyes and see through them with a super loving heart.

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If your eyes hunger for some beauty now, I have put pictures of flowers on a moving website:
https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans 
and also pictures of beautiful skies, I have seen on a different website:
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans

Reflection

This morning I really lost my temper for the wrong reason.
Sometimes we have a faulty perception of a situation and get really upset about it.
When we get to know the truth, we can see how we came to the wrong perception,
but in the meantime, we may have been displaying foolishly our anger.

All we can do is apologize after such an event, but we need also to reflect on how to prevent things like this from happening again. Maybe reflection is one of the most important in human life :)

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If your mind hungers for some reflection on good things,
I have written some essays on good things, A bit more than a quote
but still very short: https://abcofvirtues.blogspot.com/ 

If your soul longs for something a bit more poetic
something a bit inspirational but still short, you mail like:
https://aufiezophypoems.blogspot.com/