Deserve

Today I am bringing you an extremely short post that is basically a quote from Seth Godin, a marketer of all things. Oh me, oh my, Alon is now quoting marketers for his blog, he must really be busy/uninspired/confused because really what can a marketer, especially a commercial marketer like Seth, teach us about spirituality?

Maybe I am all of the above, I don't know, but I do know that his questions and ensuing comments got me thinking so I want to share them with you:

Do you deserve the luck you've been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you've got?

Not at all. “Deserve” is such a loaded word. Most of us don’t deserve the great opportunities we have, or the lucky breaks that got us here.

The question shouldn’t be, “do you deserve it.” I think it should be, “what are you going to do with it now that you've got it?"

If you are reading this then it means that you can see, that you can read, that you have a computer, that you have electricity, that you have an internet access, etc., etc. and 'just' those criteria alone probably already place us in the lucky 1% of the human population of this planet.

What did we do to deserve that? And what ARE we going to do with it from here on in?

Judging a book by its' cover

Today I walked to work (in Paris you can do that) and on the way I saw a women walk out of a social shelter dressed quite strangely. As I got closer I could see that she was wearing a black garbage bag on her head, had another garbage bag over her clothes and her shoes were taped on with wide bands of packing tape.

I felt a wave of sadness which then turned to pity. "What a poor woman. How awful that must be..."

As I overtook her, I first thought I heard her talking to herself. Normal, I thought, she must be a bit "off". And once I got past her, or should say once I hurried past her (you never know right?), I realized she was singing. She was singing an incredibly beautiful song with an incredibly beautiful voice!

And she sounded incredibly happy.

Prophetability

This is a very very short post to share that my wonderful friends K and Y had a baby girl this morning at around 5am.

Funnily enough, I predicted about 6 months ago (thus the title of the blog) that she would be born on my birthday, and despite K's resistance - she has had contractions for the last week and never hoped for it to take that long - all worked out as (I) planned : )

It turns out though that I was not alone. K's mother had also hoped for a birth on the 22nd since her mother was born on the 22nd and it seems that she was a very special person.

Which leads to me to the only spiritual thought of this blog post, something that some spiritual thinkers have mentioned, that when you are born on the same day as someone in your family or share the same name as a relative, maybe somehow the destinies get intertwined...

I don't know the answer to that one, but I do know that I am extremely happy for K and Y and hope our destinies remain intertwined!

On Dianetics and Tangerines

I was just given a book on Dianetics, or rather I should say THE book on Dianetics by the famous or infamous L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame. I have never really known what to think about the man, the philosophy, the religion that has sprung from it, the press that the Church of Scientology has received, the many reading rooms I have seen around the world... but at least I will be able to read it and react to the underlying "theory" as written by the original author.

It is easier to be skeptical in life than it is to be open to new ideas, especially if they question what we "know", or if they are a long stretch from the ideas we already hold and which we use to construct our own realities. While many people mention 'faith' as a necessary first step towards spirituality, or religiosity, I think faith might be a cop out for many in the sense that it means that you believe in something that you haven't taken the time to figure out. While being open to new ideas is part of what someone like Krishnamurti could have termed 'walking your own path to understanding'. In my mind, this is a more laudable approach than taking a prepackaged religion, no matter how well it has been packaged. Maybe it is no coincidence that faith is often referred to as 'blind' (not just love, an interesting ellipse to my last post).

I don't know what I will find, but I do know that many people have found profound wisdom in Scientology, and as such it is worth looking into. Others have expressed serious doubts and concerns, and this too is worth looking into and understanding. Is it just fear of 'different' ideas or legitimate concerns with the underlying principles? As I read on about Dianetics I also hope to look into some of the more seriously-expressed critiques so as to understand both sides better.
If I do manage to figure anything out worth sharing I will post it here.

On a different subject altogether, I have started reading Peace is Every Step, a book by Thich Nhat Hahn (Amazon link here). Simple messages, powerful ideas. One small anecdote, he tells the story of how children were taught to truly examine a tangerine, the look, feel, weight, the squirt of the peel when it was peeled, to imagine the seed, the tree, the sun, water and earth that went into it... all before taking a first bite. They were given a giant lesson in appreciation. Think about it before your next bite of anything... and it seems that Thich does and is a more content person for it.

Which makes me think that a future post should discuss the difference between Happiness (what we have been taught to want but is probably not sustainable) and Contentment (which is not often discussed, and probably arises from the saintly-feeling of gratitude, and is probably truly sustainable)...

PS I am on vacation so the posts are a bit more spaced out. I hope to be more regular starting in March.

[Thoughts on Golden Rule] The Rabbi on the flight

For the first time in a long time I sat next to an Orthodox Jew on a flight to Israel. He was busy working on a text in Hebrew and I was reading first a spiritual book in English and then a text in French (of a friend who is in the process of publishing a book) that just happened to be about something religious.

He asked me "what I did" as he noticed that I was reading about religious things, or something to that effect. I explained, or tried to explain in brief, what I do and that the spiritual stuff is something I don't "do" but is something I am interested in...

We started a long and, to me, very interesting discussion on religious issues that apparently he was working on and thinking about. It was a long discussion and I will not even try to relate all of it here, but at one point I suggested that all religions, and especially all mysticism's of the various religions, as well as most spiritual studies, all boiled down to the Golden Rule, Love thy neighbor as thyself.

He smiled to himself and told me a story, which is often told, about a non-Jew who wanted to convert to Judaism. He went to see several Rabbis and asked them to tell him in one sentence what Judaism is about. Most of them scoffed and angrily sent him away. And then he met Hillel who told him (something like) the Torah teaches us 'Love thy neighbor as thyself', and all the rest is commentary, but what commentary.

We talked a bit more about this and other things and then he handed me a paper he was reading and working on which was all about Leviticus 19:18 in which the Golden Rule is mentioned. In Hebrew the golden rule can be transliterated as "and you loved the other as thyself" (phonetically veahavta re-echa camocha, with the ch pronounce like the Spanish jota).

The article was very interesting and long, so once again, I must try and condense for brevity's sake, so here are key ideas I recall: the other, any other, is another small piece of God's glory, the other is our brother since we are all God's children, to love another is to show our love for God, having a significant other brings us closer to knowing the love of God, consider your love for God as you do any other love - with thoughts and actions... Of course, there was much more but it wasn't always directly related to the subject and it digressed occasionally into discussions of whether we should or could compare human love to love for God, was it right, recommended or, on the contrary, necessary, etc.

A text of biblical commentary that was quite interesting. It was interesting to see commentary (Gmara) on the Torah, and to see that it was not that esoteric. I haven't read much of it in general, but I was under the impression it was more difficult to understand.

I asked him about the book of Job, since it is one of the books that fascinates me the most (Job was not Jewish, he challenges God, he challenges the devil, and it is the last book in the Old Testament in which we hear from God, so he also manages to shut him up for eternity...). The Rabbi smiled and said, he could explain it to me but he would have to explain so much of the Tanach (the five books of the Torah, the Prophets and the 'ctuvim' which I don't know how to translate (the Written histories)) that it would take a long time... So he didn't even try.

We discusses a lot and it was interesting to discuss things with the Rabbi. It turns out that my Great Uncle, who was Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem at one point, ordained the Rabbi sitting next to me. This Rabbi was extremely kind and gracious, soft spoken, intelligently, had smart, active and kind eyes and was definitely a positive example of the wisdom some people may attain from years of religious studies.

I asked him about politics and he admitted that he was not interested in things like politics but was worried, like I was, about the loss of values in Israeli society, but for different reasons and from a different perspective. He could not understand why Israelis want Israel to be the Jewish state while turning their backs on the wealth of wisdom in Judaism. Why secular Israelis have so much hate for the Orthodox.

We talked of love, and he told me that the love most people understand as love is not really love but lust. Something that I hope to share with you one day in this blog is a text by Eva Pierrakos on Love, called Love, Eros and Sexuality, which says just that. He reminded me that in the marriage vows in Judaism, the husband makes three promises to his bride - to ensure her living (money), her nourishment (food) and her sexual satisfaction ("ona"). Nowhere does it say that his libido must be satisfied, only hers. If a man does not take care of all three, he is not satisfying his wedding vows...

It was wonderful and strange to speak about love, sex, passion, lust, manhood, true love, etc. with a Rabbi, but we were speaking the same language and it was an intriguing exchange.

I asked him for his e-mail address and he apologetically explained that they don't do e-mail ("too many temptations") but instead he gave me his cell phone number.

It was a special conversation and a true meeting of the other...

[Some authors] A very very brief post

Some authors are extremely spiritual even though they don't 'sell' themselves as such. One such author is Paul Gallico (read more about him and his books here - there are also descriptions of each book and the website author's favorites - made me want to buy all of them!).

If you can find his books, read them.

My two favorites: Love of Seven Dolls (hard to find though) and Snow Goose (tiny and easier to find among his collected works).

More Thursday...

[Krishnamurti] What you seek...

Of all the spiritual writers out there, and there are many, the most demanding is probably Jiddu Krishnamurti. Why demanding? Well, even though he is a spiritual guide in most senses, he is unrelenting in what he demands from each of us, and what he demands from us feels nearly inhuman in the breadth, depth and sincerity of the personal work needed.

While Nisargadatta reminds us that depth cannot be found by digging shallow holes everywhere and encourages us to pick a spot, any spot, and dig deeply; Krishnamurti asks us to dig deep holes and even when we find oil, water, paydirt or whatever it was we were looking for to keep digging for he warns us (or admonishes us depending on how you want to see it) that "what you seek you will find, and it will not be truth."

This last phrase must be some form of Hindi philosophy (or just plain spiritual wisdom) as it appears often and I remember that Nisargadatta also mentions something similar when talking about death, telling us that to each will be given an afterlife as we expect to find, i.e. as we imagine it, and not as it really is...

Getting back to Krishnamurti, what a life story! A brief outline (you can get more here) goes something like this: Jiddu and his brother were identified in what was then Madras, India, in 1909 or thereabouts by members of the Theosophical Society who were looking (like in The Matrix) for a Chosen One, which they called the "World Teacher". They found two. They were tutored and given a very spiritual education first in India and later in the UK and Europe. His brother later died of tuberculosis. Jiddu was groomed to fill the role of World Teacher and during a famous meeting in 1929, when he was around 35, he disbanded the order set up to follow him. The speech he gave at the time, to disband his followers, as quoted from Wikipedia, is a pretty good glimpse at his philosophy:

"You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of the truth,' said the devil. 'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend. 'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to help him organize it.'

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path."

"This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies."

To me, this philosophy reminds me of the scene between the messiah-like figure from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor (I mentioned in a previous blog post). In it, the Grand Inquisitor rails against the Messiah who is preaching freedom and tells him how much the Church, i.e. organized religion, has been working to undo the damage the Messiah did putting those ideas in the minds of men, ideas they are not equipped to handle and, thus, do not want.

Krishnamurti seems to be saying something similar to Dostoyevsky's messiah-figure. I understand it as organized religion, any organized religion, is about someone else's truth, so it cannot be anyone's, any one's, truth. We each need to find our own truth, and that is a "pathless land" in the sense that it has to be our own path, we cannot take any shortcuts by walking a path already taken by another.

A propos paths, an interesting and somewhat frightening side note on the original Theosophical Society (Wikipedia link here) which I only learned by reading a bit of background information to write this post. The first of their three official objectives was "to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour." Their rather positive philosophical intentions, together with their worldviews, were later used and abused to justify racism of the worst kind. Another example of the path to hell being paved with good intentions?

Back to Krishnamurti (again, there I go getting sidetracked...). He has written many books and in addition there are many books about him. There are also many DVD's of him speaking that are available, for those who are interested. His speaking style is very stern, very serious, he says often that he is not here to entertain us. Or rather, something that is very original for a public speaker, he does not address his public in the plural, he says you, never all of you, he says we are here 'both of us' the speaker and you, as if it is an intimate two-person conversation even when speaking to a large audience, and he deems it a conversation - it is neither lecture nor entertainment nor an attempto to teach or affect ideation or beliefs. The severity of his attitude, no smiles, doesn't make you uncomfortable but calls for perfect seriousness of intent and of listening. It impresses and it is impressive.

I find this same tone in his writings.It is not that he is unforgiving (see a previous post on this subject :)) but rather uncompromising in what he suggests we demand of ourselves - to look at everything simply but deeply with our brains, our hearts and our entire being...

Of his different books, I could suggest This Light in Oneself or his Commentaries on Living Series, of which I believe there are three books (subtitled First, Second and Third Series), but there are many others. Many of them have very different names, maybe you can choose one that speaks to you.

As a teacher, I also feel 'called to task' quite often by Krishnamurti's writings as he often is most demanding of educators and parents, the teachers of children. Speaking of the importance of educators to be properly educated (a term he would never use by the way), that if the educator does not have 'self-knowledge', which is 'the beginning of wisdom' he himself will be both the victim and the source of much ignorance, strife and sorrow. He speaks of teaching quite beautifully.

One of the worst things about reading Krishnamurti is that he really does tell you everything that you need to know to figure things out. And then he tells you that, and that you can stop reading now; but I keep reading, keep looking for more insights elsewhere...

"See the false as the false, then the truth is. You don't have to look for it.
What you seek you will find, and it will not be truth."

Another note to myself.

[A short one] Nisargadatta on love

Just a bit busy so I will make a short post today, but short does not mean lack of intensity. This could be a prelude to a theme I would like to develop at another time on one version of the golden rule - Love others as you would yourself - that to me has many layers in it I would like to try and share one day. Another day. Today I will present a couple of short quotes from Nisargadatta which I believe are contemplation-worthy. Before I do, I just have to explain for those who are not familiar with his philosophy, that when he speaks of dreaming he refers to what we call living and when he talks of awaking he refers to seeing life and living as it really is...

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all.


When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all, you love each.

Have a wonderful weekend.

[Thoughts on work] Note to myself

I have always been struggling with what to do "when I grow up" in terms of earning a living. I think I would like to earn a living from writing. I know I can earn a living from teaching. And every now and then I am tempted to stop dabbling and take a serious dive into business - because I am probably pretty good at it but mostly because I think I could earn a lot of (or a lot more) money... Usually, a short time after the latter axis of thinking, I end up shaking myself by the shoulders (not easy to do) and sternly telling the guy in the mirror 'what are you thinking?!' It's a cycle...

A friend of mine gave me a wonderful little book (yes, a recurrent theme) called Simple Truths by Kent Nerburn (Amazon link to book here). The subtitle is 'clear and gentle guidance on the big issues in life', and it is quite apt to what you will find inside. Once again, my skeptical side came out and I judged the book by its cover, expecting to find watered-down, easy, American-style spirituality. I underestimated my friends discerning taste and wisdom (please accept my apology! (and read yesterday's post : ))) and Kent Nerburn's wisdom (sorry Kent).

I picked it up today, flipped through it and landed on a chapter called "On Work" and since I have been thinking about this quite a bit of late (I'm in the cycle), I reread the chapter with interest. Here is some of the original text:

Choose your work carefully.
No matter how much you might believe that your work is nothing more than what you do to make money, your work makes you who you are, because it is where you put your time.
We are what we do, and the more we do it, the more we become it. By giving a job your time, you are giving it your consciousness. Eventually it will fill your life with the reality that it presents.

And

You should think of work as vocation, which comes from the Latin word for calling, which comes from the word for voice. In those meanings it touches on what work should really be-- something that calls to you, that gives voice to who you are and what you want to say in the world.
If you find a vocation, embrace it. You have found a way to contribute to the world with love.


I like how Kent thinks and writes. Soft spoken wisdom and thought-provoking. The whole book is a little gem.

In regards to work, maybe because I work alone in front of a computer often, I have been thinking that maybe work is not about work at all but all about relationships.
As I hear from people around me how great and enriching (rare) or awful and frustrating (common) it is to work in a big, medium, little company, I wonder if all work is, really, just an excuse to force us to work on relationship issues. Not with people we love per se, or choose to work with or spend time with, but the infamous "other" that is thrust upon us.

Maybe the point of work is that it is the soul's way of putting us in situations in which we must depend upon and get along with people who we do not share a natural affinity for, in which we are not comfortable, in which we need to realize that a lot of the "what" of work is less important than the "how" of working with people. Maybe it is the devious little soul's way of teaching us the important lessons that we cannot learn with our friends, family and loved ones... Just a thought.

Apologies

Today the post will be quite short and more of a thought piece and a call for your comments and ideas.

I had an interesting exchange with a friend today on the subject of apologies. I was reminded of the Course in Miracles' take on forgiveness and I want to share that here.

For anyone who has not read the Course (as it is often called) you should know that it not very intuitive and trying to read it makes the Bible (Old Testament) feel like easy reading. It is one of those books that needs to be reread a few times to understand it (or rather each time you read it you will probably understand it differently). I will give you an example, in regards to how it speaks about forgiveness (page 638 from the blue edition):

Unjustified forgiveness is attack. And this is all the world can ever give. It pardons "sinners" sometimes, but remains aware that they have sinned. [...] This is the false forgiveness which the world employs to keep the sense of sin alive.[...]Thus is the fear of God the sure result of seeing pardon as unmerited. No one who sees himself as guilty can avoid the fear of God.

You see what I mean?

By the way, this passage reminds me (and my crazy associative mind) of the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov (which you can find online without a problem) in which the Grand Inquisitor rebukes a Christ-like Messiah figure that comes to Earth and tells the Messiah (here I am paraphrasing very liberally) we are not going to let you ruin the work we have done to repair the wrongs you have done to humanity putting ideas about freedom and forgiveness into their weak minds...

Anyway, back to the Course's take on forgiveness. My (probably superficial) understanding of it goes something like this: accepting an apology is a terrible thing to do! it means you are putting yourself in a position of superiority vis-a-vis the person who is asking for your forgiveness, and if you accept the apology, i.e. accept to forgive, well then you are accepting to place yourself in a position of (moral) superiority. Exaggerating slightly it would be like the apologizer saying, 'Oh superior one, please show your superior grace and accept your lowly subject's apology'. Now from what I understood from the Course, and it makes sense to me is that the only way to truly accept an apology, is to realize and share that realization with the person asking to apologize that there is nothing to forgive. This way both are again in a position of equality.

The lead up to this chapter is quite long, and to understand it properly you probably need to read and understand everything that precedes it (not sure I did). The basic idea, once again if I have understood it as intended is that 1/ only things that are done out of love are real and lasting which means that 2/ nothing that is done otherwise really exists and 3/ even if you believe that bad things happen to you in actuality they happened and you were there, they were not done to you.

For example, if you get sick, it wasn't done to you, it is just happening to you. Why you? Well, why not you? As the saying goes, shit happens, and sometimes it happens to you. You can decide to take it personally or understand that it happens and is part of life. Same event, but a different attitude. The same thing when you are hurt in one form or another by another. You can feel terribly insulted (i.e. need to forgive) or have compassion and wonder what happened to the other person to make them want to do what they did. Same event, two different reactions. One requires an apology, the other is an expression of compassion.

I wish I could say that I have integrated this into my life, but please forgive me if I don't always show that wisdom ; )

In any case, the answer my friend gave me was quite interesting and wise too. I won't quote it because 1/I haven't asked for permission and 2/I don't want friends to have the feeling that their private e-mails could show up on my public blog but suffice it to say the idea was that apologies are, more than anything, about accepting our mistakes in order to learn from them and move on. That a true apology is difficult, humbling and a very generous act.

My only comment to that would be that maybe wisdom is recognizing instances in which we may have hurt someone and to apologize sincerely for it - not because we are looking for forgiveness but out of compassion for making someone feel uncomfortable. On the flip side, when apologized too, it is about helping ourselves and the other to realize that there is really nothing to forgive. It would seem that the two are not incompatible.

A final word, I read the Course in Miracles while my father was dying of cancer and I was literally reading the book to try and work a miracle. That is NOT what the book is about. It is more about the miracle of daily life, of seeing life as it is, not as it is not, and seeing the miraculous everywhere. But I tried...

[Continued] Thoughts on Conversations with God

(continued from yesterday)

If I had to choose one major actionable insight from Conversations with God, before rereading it afresh, I would have to say it is “What would love do now?” as a guiding question to answer most decisions we are faced with.

To better understand this question, I probably need to explain that it is premised on another key idea from the book, namely that everything we do is motivated either by love or fear. (Note, this is very similar to what the Course in Miracles has to say, the main difference being that in the Course in Miracles it is written that only love is real; meaning that only acts of love are lasting and thus real. The inference then is that we have a choice at all times - do anything we do out of love or from a place without love…).

Another five word powerhouse (like 'the content of their character')... “What would love do now?”

While I do not remember to use it often enough as a prologue to action, nor has it become a reflex, when I have applied it, it has been quite powerful.

One of the rare times I do think of it is when I have a potentially disagreeable e-mail to write to write to someone who has ticked me off. Instead of writing what I would have spontaneously written (a more or less poetic and subtle version of ‘screw you’) I try to reframe my attitude and say, ok, what would love do now? I try to find a feeling of love, caring and compassion for the person in question and then I write my e-mail. Sometimes it works well for me and sometimes it doesn’t (usually when my ego says ‘go ahead, give ‘em a kick in the balls, you know you want to…’ or something to that effect). But I try, and when it works, it feels really, really, good and it works wonders.

If you do apply it, let me know how it works for you.

Another incredible insight, from the beginning of the first book has to do with Joy, Truth and Love. According to Walsch, according to God, These three are interchangeable, and one always leads to the other. It matters not in which order they are placed. The Highest Thought is always the thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love.

Just the first book covers so many topics that no blog entry could ever do them or the book justice. Values, morals, creativity, sexuality, finding your own way, free will, religion, finding your own way, being happy, desire, gratitude, what God is not, what religion is not, what prayer is not, what you are not, and on it goes. The subtitle of the books is ‘An uncommon dialogue” and it really is.

Trying to skip through the book to find nuggets to report back to you I realized I so marked up the book that there is hardly a page without underlining, stars, exclamation points, comments, notes to self… and I realized I want to reread it from start to finish again from a clean slate. And I will.

While there is so much I would like to share and comment on this book, I know it is impossible. So let me just wrap up this post by sharing the following series of quotes which followed Walsch’s expression of feelings of inadequacy in terms of providing for his children. God is quoted as saying, “Your job is to render them independent […] for you are no blessing to them as long as they are dependent on you in order to survive.[…] Let your love propel your beloved into the world—and into the full experience of who they are. In this will you have truly loved.”

Then begins the following series of statements:

In the same sense, God’s greatest moment is the moment you realize you need no God.
A true Master is not the one with the most students, but one who creates the most Masters.
A true leader is not the one with the most followers, but one who creates the most leaders.
A true teacher in not the one with the most knowledge, but one who causes the most other to have knowledge.
And a true God is not One with the most servants, but One who serves the most, thereby making Gods of all others.

Food for thought, isn't it?

[Joy, Truth and Love] Thoughts on Conversations with God

One series of books that I was truly surprised to enjoy reading, and continues to be a source of wonderful insights for me, is Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. I have a feeling that is has gone too far in the commercial realm, with a movie adaptation (which I have not seen), workbooks and too many sequels. But I did read the first three ‘Conversations’ and especially appreciated the first two.

The basic premise of the books is another example of scriba deus (a scribe of God, like Dante was purported to have seen himself as a scriba Dei, a scribe of gods...), i.e. Neale wrote questions to God on a notepad and felt that God began to answer him. His books are the result of the 'dictation' he took down over the years (same story by the way for the origin of the Course in Miracles).

If you are not open to spiritual issues (yet), it could seem like a lot to digest, but it is one of those books that you can read slowly, bit by bit, 15 minutes a day, while reading other books. Chewing on it in small bits will probably help to really ‘get’ the different ideas, of which there are many. Also, I would suggest getting beyond the skepticism in regards to the form in order to test the content based on your own internal bullshit detector. Do the ideas make sense? Would you be a better person and would your life be better if you applied them? Regardless of what you might think of the how, it is hard to be skeptical about the what of these books…

An interesting insight about communication appears early in book 1. This is not even from the realm of the spiritual but an insight on human understanding. Here I am quoting Walsch who is quoting God:

When we try to speak to each other—Me to you, you to Me, we are immediately constricted by the unbelievable limitation of words. For this reason, I do not communicate by words alone. In fact, rarely do I do so. My most common form of communication is through feeling. Feeling is the language of the soul.

If you want to know what’s true about something, look to how you’re feeling about it. Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover—and often even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth. […]

I also communicate with thought. Thought and feelings are not the same, although they can occur at the same time. In communicating with thought, I often use images and pictures. For this reason, thoughts are more effective than mere words as tools of communication.

In addition to feelings and thoughts, I also use the vehicle of experience as a grand communicator.

And finally, when feelings and thoughts and experience all fail, I use words. Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood.

And why is that? It is because of what words are. Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience. So I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings. And so too, thoughts.

Now the supreme irony here is that you have all placed so much importance on the Word of God, and so little on the experience. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.

Another irony is me writing a blog in which I quote a phrase like "when feelings and thoughts and experience all fail, I use words." Then again, that is probably why I need to write about these topics...

(to be continued - I will finish this post tomorrow)

[Thoughts on]The Five Languages of Love

A recurrent theme in my life is the way some books really have an eerie, I would say mystical, way of showing up and demanding to be read. One of the more recent and strange of these occurrences happened to me in regards to The Five Love Languages for Singles by Gary Chapman (which apparently has been updated to a 2009 version). I call it eerie because 1/I have no idea how it got into my bookshelf since I do not recall buying it or receiving it as a gift and 2/because of the way I stumbled upon it.

To make a short story longer, I was working on a paper recently for my doctorate and as usual this inspired me to do things I don't usually do. So I had Larry King of CNN on in the background and someone on the show mentions the book in question. About an hour later, as part of my usual procrastination routine that kicks in when faced with a paper, I decided that I really should rearrange that top shelf in my bookcase and dust off those poor books I rarely visit. I have reserved the top shelf for textbooks because I so rarely use them and I don't have the heart to throw/give them away (since they cost a fortune and maybe one imaginary day I will need them and regret their absence...). Anyway, I climb onto a chair, climb up to the shelf in question, which I must admit really did need dusting, and start to organize the books. As I take one of the fatter books out to dust I discover a book behind the books. Well, you have probably guessed by now, it was the Five Languages of Love. How it climbed onto the top of my bookshelf, into the reference book section, how it managed to sneak behind the biggest book on the shelf, and why it decided to bite my hand on that day I do not know. Synchronicity? I don't know, but, call me crazy, I decided to take this as a sign from the Universe that I was supposed to read this book...

So I read the book I did and I must say that I was not overwhelmed by the writing. It is not extremely well-written, or rather it is written simply with a rather not-too-subtle Christian prudishness. This is natural since Dr. Chapman is not just a marriage counselorbut also a pastor at a Baptist church. However, some books say nearly all they need to say in the title, and this one gets pretty close.

The basic tenet of this book, which is a follow up on a similar book for couples that sold 4 million copies, is that there are (you will never guess) Five Languages of Love which are:

• Words of affirmation
• Gifts
• Acts of service
• Quality time
• Physical touch
  

The author points out something that is obvious once it is said/read/heard but which needs to be verbalized: we all speak one primary love language. It appears that there is no lingua franca in love.

And to complicate things further, beyond the primary language which changes, each of us has our own mix of a primary love language and dialects that vary in order of importance.

The author's insight is thus that good communication, loving communication - not just in couples but also with family and friends - means being aware of both your own primary love language/s and those of others.

After having thought about the author's list for a bit, searching for a common denominator, I reworked the list with my own terms. Here goes:

• verbal giving
• material giving
• acts of giving
• time giving
• physical giving
  

Of course giving and receiving are different forms of generosity (and in no way opposites in my mind), and in this book the author was clearly referring to both - what we would like to receive to feel loved and what we usually give to express our love.

The wonderful insight here is that once this is known and understood, it makes expressing love in the other person's terms that much easier. Plus, it is a clear reminder that love requires expression, to a stronger or a lesser degree, on all five fronts.

It also explains a lot of frustration among couples. Imagine someone who is a quality time person with someone who is a gift giver. The first does not appreciate fully any gifts that are given without time spent together, and the second will not fully appreciate time spent together without a token of affection in the form of a gift. Anyway, it is not too difficult to imagine all the crazy combinations of couples who do not have the same primary love language and the feelings of frustration and lack of fulfillment this can engender.

The tragic side of it though is that we can easily feel unloved vis a vis a person who thinks that they are screaming out their love and expressing it daily. Imagine all the people...

The book itself is rather simple, with some cute stories and basic exercises along the traditions of the modern self-help book, but the core tenets alone and the awareneess that it creates to self and to others makes it worth the price and the time and climbing up to your highest dusty bookshelf to find it and read it...

[Thoughts on] MLK's I Have a Dream speech

A friend of mine wrote me as a response to this blog that she is interested in reading about Martin Luther King and reading more of his writings. I have only read his historic I Have A Dream speech (which you can read in its entirety by clicking on the link) which he delivered in Washington in August of 1963.

Because she asked me about it, and also thanks to Obama's references to the man and his words in his inaugural speech, I started to think about the original speech again and what I thought about it the last time I read it (the first time I read it was in elementary school, I believe, but I didn't remember much about it).

There are many incredible passages, inspiring, wise and poetic phrases throughout the speech, but to me there is one phrase that just sticks in my mind and still awes me. Dr. King says this phrase after the fourth of his "I have a dream" statements and it goes:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If you are a parent, especially the parent of a minority, it is clear that you don't want your children judged by the color of their skin, or their religion, or their sexual orientation, or I don't know what. We could also make the question even more personal and ask what we might want to be judged by? Would it be our actions, intentions, charitable acts, contributions, by how the lives of others would be in your absence (like in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life), by the love we have given or received, by how many friends we have, I don't know actually, probably I would prefer not to be judged.

'by the content of their character'! How brilliant is that?! I am not even sure what it means but at the same time I soooo know what it means and it is incredibly clear. Everything that makes us who we are and how we act - in general and in regards to others; five words to rule them all: the content of our characters.

An admirable man, an admirable legacy...

PS. If you do know of a good book by or on Dr. Martin Luther King please let me know - maybe you could even comment directly to this post and thus share it directly with my intellectually curious friend.

the book that got me going

An openness to spirituality came to me by small steps. Or rather the wall of skepticism I had built concerning spiritual matters and all things spiritual fell brick by brick until one day it just toppled over. And the best part of it now is that I even know the book that gave me the push. I could have even told you the date, since I always jot down in books the date in which I read them, but I have lent the book out to someone and it has not yet come back...

The story of how the book found me, and books often seem to have that ability, is as good as the book. A dear friend of mine in Israel fell into a deep depression just after getting married. My attempts to talk to him from Paris were thwarted as he did not want to talk to anyone and his fresh wife was transformed into the role of gatekeeper. I had really only met his wife on a couple of occasions and had no idea how she would be able to cope. I had no news for some time until at one point she wrote me an e-mail to tell me that he was doing better and that a friend of hers was coming to Paris to live for a while and that she was sending me a present from her with her friend. To this day I have no rational explanation as to why she decided to send me a present and why she would send me that book. I later learned that she is someone who is into spirituality, but really I hardly knew her and she knew even less about me. But send it she did and the arrow hit the bulls eye - the right book at the right time.

Anyway, the book in question is Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss MD. The author was head of the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and had a rational-scientific-empirical approach to life (kind of like mine at one point) until he started working with hypnosis with his patients. The author shares his own story of being a skeptic, of being overly rational, of having had to wait several years before having the courage to come out and tell his story for fear of being ridiculed in his profession and about his 'spiritual coming out'. While our stories weren't perfectly parallel, I felt like I was reading someone who was telling a spiritual tale despite his rational self, and that struck a chord from the beginning.

So about the book. The book is mostly the story of his experiences with one patient, Catherine, who he attempts to treat for many phobias, fears and personal problems through regression hypnosis. The idea is to take the person back in time through hypnosis to earlier traumas that they may have suppressed from their conscience. Although he found traumas, many of her phobias persisted and he kept regressing until one day she was talking to him differently and describing a different time and place. It took him a while but he understood that she was in a past life. The book goes over the different past lives and how each was linked to a health problem of phobia. In one life, Catherine was a soldier and was killed by a sword through her throat. After the hypnotic session in which she told the story her chronic sore throat cleared up.

The stories themselves are interesting but to me the most interesting was the occasional regression that went to a kind of waiting station between lives in which Catherine, under hypnosis, tells the Doctor/author that there is someone there who wants to talk to him. There begins a series of dialogues between the Doctor/author and those that identify themselves as Masters (thus the title of the book). The Masters at first distill spiritual wisdom that is intended to help the Doctor help his patient and then becomes more general spiritual wisdom. Apparently each Master spoke differently, which was manifested by Catherine (always in a hypnotic trance) speaking or acting slightly differently (channeling, although the author doesn't use that term). It was first the situation, then the author's background and finally the words of the Masters that somehow broke down my resistance and I found myself asking myself "what if?" What if this was not ridiculous, what if it was real? I then turned the question around, made it more personal, and reread the words of the Masters. My thinking was then something like 'if I did believe this was true, and lived by these words/precepts, would my life be worse or better?'

For those who know me, you know that I write all over my books and underline the best parts. Normally I would have shared a few quotes, probably from the Masters, but it looks like I will have to buy the book again, unless the person I lent it to is reading this blog and would like to give it back : )

As for the answer to my 'question to self', well if you are reading this, you know the answer. And Brian Weiss, his book and my friend's wife who sent it to me started my own spiritual ball rolling, a ball that hopefully will roll for a long time and gather no moss...