What do you call this beauty?

I took this picture in Gallatin on Maple street. I wish I knew the name of this flower.

Vision and View

O how the internet opens you to see the hopes and struggles of people in distant lands. I have been recently reading of some friends who appear to be in captivity in the land of Egypt. I am not speaking of the land of Egypt of the biblical past, but the land of Egypt of the present day now.

I am particularly enamoured by the story of one young woman. She perhaps is a medical student. Let's call her Naheed, for the sake of protecting her anyonymity. Naheed is a very intelligent and sensitive young woman. She loves her religion Islam, yet she finds it outmoded. It is her hope to reform her religion. Each day Naheed expends enormous amount of energy, pointing out what appears to be erroneous about her religion and invites people into discussion on the internet. Yet she is so sensitive that she cannot handle the brickbats that come her way. Naheed naively hopes that she will be served with bouquets just because she has such great reform ideas.

After reading about the activities about Naheed, I feel like proclaiming to a dead civilization "Let, my People go." I will however restraint my feelings. I will not become someone else's Messiah. People don't need a Moses or a Messiah. If people need to come out of their captivity all they need is themselves. Through my fictious Naheed I maybe able to speak to many such women. Your Liberator is within you. Don't rebuild on an old foundation. Go to the mountain top yourself. Take a view of the enormous eternity of God's opportunities. Then come down the mountain, and translate the view you had seen into a vision for the people.

May be Naheed has already been to the mountain top. She may have already seen the view. She may now be, by her activities, translating the view into a vision. I don't know. I am here to see. I come here to connect.

Dreams

Dreams for me are those vibrant, mysterious nocturnal vacations I indulge in each night. I do not so much indulge in them; they are bestowed upon me, several times each night. I may not remember every dream. Every one of us has several nightly sojourns into this mysterious experience. Dream researchers tell us in an average life span a human being dreams for about six years. Can you imagine six years of vacationing in diverse exotic experiences? The dictionary definition: Dream: (noun) a sequence of images that appear involuntarily to the mind of someone who is sleeping, of a mixture of real and imaginary characters, places and events. They come involuntarily to my mind. I wonder who bestows this vacation on me each night. My Creator, I would unhesitatingly say, but why, I also wonder. Dreams are replete with mystery. It is the mystery of this biological phenomenon that might have woven itself in the cultural history of religion. We desire to know how and why of all things mysterious.

Our fascination with dreams are about as ancient as our ability to dream. Do the blind dream? If they are born blind do their dreams have visual images? Do babies dream? The dreams of the blind are a mixture of the experience of their world from touch, smell and sound etc. Babies spend 72 percent (compared to 15% in adults) of their sleeping time in the REM stage of sleep. This is the stage where dreams occur. From our studies with adults we know 10 to 20 percent of the REM time incubates dreams. So we can conclude babies dream. We also know that as the baby grows REM stage sleep length decreases. This is because the stimulus needed to “exercise” the emotional growth of the baby comes from the external environment. To me a dream may be a refreshing vacation each night bestowed upon me by my Creator to revive and refresh me emotionally. To a physician a dream may be a biological mechanism of communicating with the conscious and subconscious states of the human body. To the religious a dream may prophetic or revelatory significance. Dream researchers tell us that the content and purpose of dreams are poorly understood. This is why or in spite of which there exists a sizable industry of dream interpretation.

Inerrant Word of God?

Belief creates an extremely powerful pychosomatic response in human beings. Whether the belief is good or bad it creates a chemical response within us. That is the way we are created.

Faith in an "inerrant" word of God is the most dangerous belief human beings can espouse. Mind you I am not suggesting that the religious scriptures of the world have no value. I am however suggesting that the ideas of "inerrancy" and "God dictated" can do the society more harm than good. It is because of the psychosomatic response such ideas create in human beings. Ideas (good or bad) are the most potent tools in the creative genius of God.

Far more important than the written scriptures one has to question the need for belief. Why do people believe? What purpose does it serve in our lives? Do we believe because we want to be "saved?" If so, saved from what? "hellfire" of course. Where did hellfire come into your repertoire? It came from a "book." You chose to put hellfire into your mind as a belief. Now all of a sudden you find yourself enslaved. God did not do it; you did it to yourself. You did it because you do not know how to read the religious scriptures of the world. You should take it with a pinch of salt.

"All the knowledge of the world," said a Sufi man, "is contained in a dot; it is the ignorant who wrote volumes of interpretations about the dot."

Can you imagine what I might say about the "Interpretations" and commentaries of scriptures?

I might some day.

Be of good cheer; the world is what you make it.

We yearn to connect

The human soul yearns to connect. I imagine we yearn to connect to God. This yearning continually plays like a silent tape within our being. We are driven crazy like the musk deer. We know there is something beckoning us. The perfume of the musk. We search, gaze, seek and wander not knowing that the musk is attached to us. Such is the yearning of the soul.

In this wilderness of yearning how does one get a quenching draft of that connection? There are countless ways of doing this. I know a few. Before I share these with you, let me draw to your attention that there is a common element to each of these practices. Indeed we all like to know the how and why about things mysterious. The story about quenching one's yearning is also such.

I once heard a minister comment, "There is a void in your soul, only God can fill." That statement is not only true, but apparently identical to what I am saying in this blog. Yet you will discover there is a sharp distinction between the ministers words and my commentary below. The void the minister was peddling had only one solution. The unspoken solution was a membership in his church and adherance to his theology. The God who can fill my void, I have come to learn, is not a God of confined spaces and theologies. The God who can fill my void is Omnipresent in every molecule and in every breath. The begining of the filling of this void is the awareness of the void.

Like the musk deer our yearning to connect manifests in many forms. People attempt to fill the void through relationships, food, alcohol, drugs, religious explorations etc. Some of these attempts offer temporary fulfillment of the yearning. Then the yearning reappears. The reason such yearning reappears is that we often fail to reckon the source of the yearning. It is the awareness of the source of our yearning that brings about fulfillment.

At the core of our being is the spirit that is our driving froce. This force seeks our recognition. For lack of a better word I call it the lamp of God. This lamp beckons us all the time. It is the light of this lamp that is trying to reach us all the time, but is clouded by our unmindfulness. This is how the yearning, restlessness and the incompleteness is born. As such we desire to connect.

Among the many ways of connecting can be something as simple as walking in a park. It could be even a simpler thing like observing one's breath; or it could be a practice of prayers. Even mundane things like watching a plant germinate, holding an infant's hand, visiting an art gallery, listening to beautiful music, reading fine literature etc. Anything could take you where you need to be. Even a romantic dinner with your beloved could take you there, if you do not miss the crucial common element.

The crucial common element is you have to be connected to the core of your being. This connection comes only from practicing awareness. Use silence to become aware of yourself. Practice it each day. May you discover your bliss. Once continual awareness is instilled in you, the yearning will not return. You will engage in things that evlevated your awareness not out of yearning anymore. It will be out of blissful joy.

Blessings.

This just may be the vision of a new way of democracy

I was aghast when I heard a political pundit say that the Democrats have an advantage of money. He was commenting on the neck and neck race to the White House. This is February 20, 2008 and most people are yet unsure who John McCain's contender would be in the race. He said Barrack Obama is well financed to keep up his steam. Hillary he said would run out of money that makes the mare go. He also said that John McCain may be running out of money to be serious contender to McCain.

If Obama and McCain go to the final rounds, the issue of money will surface again. This I believe will make a stimulating national conversation about the role of money in politics. John McCain is known for his efforts to make campaign reforms. Obama on the other hand over ambitiously declared very early in his campaign that he would be willing to have an agreement with his opponent to mutually run campaigns financed by the people.

Until Obama came on the scene, I never felt inspired to participate in politics, much less make a political contribution. I have been the "less than 40K" person for most of my adult life. I was convinced that politicians were caught up in the vicious cycle of money and power, and our democracy was now at best an aristocracy in disguise. I never thought I mattered in the scheme of things political. I never before voted in the Primary elections.

I am now hearing that the $25.00 contributions I sent several times during this campaign season, put Obama in such a fincacially sound position. This is amazingly empowering.

I am thinking, how can this be? What might have prompted the commentator to say that Obama was in a stronger financial situation than McCain? The Republicans are the party of the rich and the powerful. Surely they, together with the Lobbyists can monetarily empower the Republicans in much stronger ways than my meagre $25.00.

Then it dawned on me. These so called "rich" are the very ones who clamour for tax breaks. These are the very ones who use all sorts of legal tricks and manouvers to siphon money out of the Treasury to fund their toys, expensive cars, huge homes, lavish vacations etc. The poor guy on the other hand thinks, "what does $25 matter?" He says to himself, "I do not have adequate retirement or health insurance, but I have food on my table and a shelter. $25 is not going to significantly alter my retirement plan, let me promote a cause I believe in."

This just may be the renewal of a government of the people; for the people and by the people.