kilkon ikhwe ya ikhwet...

natural self

We would all agree that babies are their best selves. They are their natural selves. A baby knows exactly what he wants and doesn't want and lets it be known. As that baby matures, he learns what pleases and displeases those around him; he begins to change. He begins to develop a social self, a self that is more accepted by important others. He learns that some of his natural tendencies and characteristics are not only not appreciated, but also sometimes disdained. If you watch a baby develop into childhood, you can see the socialization process taking hold.

To a degree, that process is necessary to enable us to live amenably with one another. In an ideal world, children would be taught how to get along well in this world while, at the same time, having their natural selves honored and esteemed. In an ideal world, children would stay connected with their natural selves while developing social skills. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. Sometimes, more often than not, the socialization process goes awry and children lose part or all of the connection to their natural selves.

This loss of connection can happen in many ways ranging from as small as thoughtless comments by well meaning others to as large as child abuse. It also depends on the persons' level of sensitivity. Some people, about 20% of us, are born with the natural characteristic of high sensitivity. For a highly sensitive person, it may only take one careless remark to wound him so deeply that he loses the connection.

Many people who have lost the connection to their natural selves describe it as an empty feeling, as though there is a hole in the middle of their stomach. They may try to fill this hole with other things like substances such as alcohol, drugs or food or by romantic relationships or with material things. None of that fills the emptiness. That hole can only be filled by one thing -- reconnecting with the natural self.

Sharon L. Demarte

free hugs...

eh... w ba3dein ?

life is a tease

Every minute is another that blinds you. Life is a tease, naked crying ghost bees. Happiness is dead to me, under the withered tree. Life is a blank memory, to blind you away from your dreams. Nothing it seems, is going to be the center of your scene. Nothing it gleams, will give you the time of the clean. Followed by spirits of evil tangle, followed by bleak voices that angle and mangle.

Life is not worth it, to see half of it in happiness. To be built up, just to be knocked down.

Thrown down, with your face to the ground. Where is god, and all his faces and places? Why doesn’t he set them right in their paces? Noones meant to be happy, noones meant to be free. Noones able to grow and learn, or open their eyes to see. Life is a tease, every minute and hour.

Life is nothing more than a bent and withered flower. So I’ll go to sleep and say forget how you always devour.

Ben Harris - Natural Philosophy

1100+ killed... 3600+ injured... 700,000+ homeless...

l balad ra7... w shoo naf3 l 7akee

examining my identity

I sometimes find myself “examining my identity” as other people examine their conscience. As you many imagine, my object is not to discover within myself some “essential” allegiance in which I may recognize myself. Rather the opposite: I scour my memory to find as many ingredients of my identity as I can. I then assemble and arrange them. I don’t deny any of them.

Amin Maalouf - In the name of identity

the new moon

I don’t have much hate in my heart, but I hate them for killing me. I hate them for hurting me. I don’t like to hate, but I do them, because they’ll never let me be. I don’t have much fear anymore, because I know this is all temporary. I laugh at all they do to me, because obviously they can’t see, all their lies when they say that we are all free.

This would be true if they will just let me be. I don’t have much anger in my heart, although I should at them, for taking my goodness away. I hate what they try to obligate me to, each and everyday. They will regret it today. Telltale now, island swimmers frown, debutante honey magic, seeing all they rise and clown. Yet I still remain proud.

I don’t have much hate in my heart, but I hate this for what it does, and I hate this place, this country, for taking all my love. So sad, so true. Its what they do to me and you. We must find the new reasons, we must find the new moon. The new moon begs for her knowledge. She laughs and dances, and sweeps away. Now to watch all things unnatural break and forsake.

Ben Harris - Natural Philosophy

arguments

Socrates: "... People find it difficult to agree on exactly what is it they’re talking about, and this makes it hard for them to learn from one another and so bring their conversations to a mutually satisfactory conclusion. What happens instead, when two people are arguing about something, is that one person tells the other that he’s wrong or has expressed himself obscurely, and then they get angry and each thinks that his own point of view is being maliciously misinterpreted by the other person, and they start trying to win the argument rather than look into the issue they set out to discuss…”

Plato - Gorgias

reactive thoughts

Do you have any idea how your mind came up with the thoughts it now has? Do you not know that your world has manipulated your mind to think as you do? Wouldn’t it be better for you to manipulate your mind than for the world to?Would you not be better off to think the thoughts you want to think, than those of others? Are you not better armed with creative thoughts than with reactive thoughts?

Yet your mind is filled with reactive thought—thought that springs from the experience of others. Very few of your thoughts spring from self-produced data, much less self-produced preferences.

Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations with God

the sponsoring thought

So much of your present experience is based on your previous thought. Thought leads to experience, which leads to thought, which leads to experience. This can produce constant joy when the Sponsoring Thought is joyous. It can, and does, produce continual hell when the Sponsoring Thought is hellatious.

Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations with God

sleepwalkers

The world is in the condition that it’s in because the world is full of sleepwalkers.

Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations with God

tomorrow that never comes

… I began to imagine how many millions of people were, at that moment, feeling utterly useless and wretched –however rich, charming and delightful they might be– because they were alone that night, as they were yesterday, and as they might well be tomorrow. Students with no one to go out with, older people sitting in front of the TV as if it were their sole salvation, businessmen in their hotel rooms, wondering if what they were doing made any sense, women who spent the afternoon carefully applying their makeup and doing their hair in order to go to a bar only to pretend that they’re not looking for company…. People who look at themselves in the mirror and think themselves ugly, believing that being beautiful is what really matters, and spend their time reading magazines in which everyone is pretty, rich and famous. Husbands and wives who wish they could talk over supper as they used to, but there are always things demanding their attention, more important things, and the conversation can always wait for a tomorrow that never comes.

Paulo Coelho - The Zahir

slaves...

While I was fighting, I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents' wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person 'for the rest of their lives', to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying 'No' or 'It's over', to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn't even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their identical days and nights passed, days and nights in which adventure was just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say: 'I'm not interested. I'm not in the mood.’

Paulo Coelho - The Zahir

borders of insanity

This makes us feel alone. When we sit on the borderline. This place is the place most of us have seen. When we have become alone, and are strangers to our own world. That gives us the feeling of being apart. When none helps our wound, we become perched on the edge of the borderline. Between pure madness and custom comfort.

That’s why most don’t try to have it any other way. They become trapped in comfort, and become hopeless and give up. How many times have you found yourself sitting on the brink of madness? That shows the natural cuts that are made from living in a civilization.

But who are really civilized? Back to the statement, of animals and men. Most are beasts of rage, they want only to fulfill their quickest desires, and are not scared of the divine, no matter what the cause. We should respect omens that are designed for our unset future. Then we can live on the borders of insanity.

Ben Harris - Natural Philosophy

mindless idiots

Yes, to wear the attire of being tired. This is what slumps us down into the gap of miserable silence. To have our jobs, our lives that create a circle around our heads. It makes a prison, a form of capture. That encloses our souls and makes us mindless idiots.

Yet, we intrust our lives to this routine, and it seems to break our will. It shatters our child belief. This belief in magic hour, the belief in play and freedom. We loose that power of essence, that power of unyielding will. Then we accept the curtain that is pulled over our eyes. Then we let life blind us from the true nature of our being. This is what we need again.

Ben Harris - Natural Philosophy

intrepid spirit

Alone, aren’t we all? We fall into the cracks of society. Then we become something, even if it’s not what we really want to be. Most are so stuck in linear silence, and cut off from natural selection, it is sad to see them. Those who are alone and stuck in loneliness, can break from their silent prison by growing stronger from it.

To do this, they must find the lion of their being. They must watch for the surrounding causes of their absence from the normal. This is the great intrepid spirit. Fearless of all, and can do wonders to self esteem.

Ben Harris - Natural Philosophy

Ucello's clock

'Have you ever been to Florence?' asked Dr. Igor.

No.

You should go there, it's not far, for that is where you will find my second example. In the cathedral in Florence, there's a beautiful clock designed by Paolo Uccello in 1443. Now the curious thing about this clock is that, although it keeps time like all other clocks, its hands go in the opposite direction to that of normal clocks.

What’s that got to do with my illness?

I'm just coming to that. When he made this clock, Paolo Ucello was not trying to be original: the fact is that, at the time, there were clocks like his as well as others with hands that went in the direction we're familiar with now. For some unknown reason, perhaps because the Duke had a clock with hands that went in the direction we now think as the 'right' direction, that became the only direction, and Uccello's clock then seemed as an aberration, a madness.

Now lets turn to your illness: each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it. Have you ever met anyone in your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

No.

If someone were to ask, the response they got would probably be: "you're mad." If they persisted, people would try to come up with a reason, but they'd soon change the subject, because there isn’t a reason apart from the one I've just given you. So to go back to your question. What was it again?

Am I cured?

No. You're someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view, is a serious illness.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

QWERTY keyboard

… A lot of doctors before me have made similar studies and reached similar conclusions that normality is merely a matter of consensus, that is, a lot of people think something is right, so that thing becomes right.

… Some things are governed by common sense. Other things, however, become fixed because more and more people believe that's the way they should be.

I'll give you two examples. Have you ever wondered why the keys on the typewriter are arranged in that particular order?

No, I haven’t.

We call it the QWERTY keyboard. The first machine was invented by Christopher Scholes, in 1873, to improve calligraphy, but there was a problem: if a person typed very fast, the keys got stuck together and stopped the machine working. Then Scholes designed the QWERTY keyboard; a keyboard that would oblige typists to type more slowly.

I don’t believe it.

But it’s true. It so happened that Remington -who were sewing machine manufacturers at the time- used QWERTY keyboard for their first typewriters. That meant that more people were forced to learn that particular system, and more companies started to make those keyboards, until it became the only model available. To repeat: the keyboard on typewriters and computers was designed so that people would type more slowly, not more quickly, do you understand? If you changed the letters around, you wouldn’t find anyone to buy your product.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

the mad king

I'm going to tell you a story, said Zedka. A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.

The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, and which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors however had also drunk the poisoned water and they thought the king's decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them.

When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication.

In despair, the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: "Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then, we will be the same as them."

And that was what they did: the king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country?

The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbours. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.

Veronika laughed.

Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete (the asylum of Ljubljana, Slovenia)?

People who have all drunk from the same well.

Exactly, said Zedka. They think they're normal, because they all do the same thing. Well, I'm going to pretend that I have drunk from the same well as them.

I already did that, and that's precisely my problem.

There's a group of people here, men and women who could have left, who could be back home, but who don't want to leave. There are many reasons for this: Villete isn't as bad as people say, although it's far from being a five-star hotel. Here inside, everyone can say what they like, do what they want, without being criticised, after all, they're in a mental hospital.

After so many years, Veronika was now experiencing something she had never dreamed of: a mental hospital, madness, an insane asylum, where people were not ashamed to say they were mad, where no one stopped doing something they were enjoying just to be nice to others.

She began to doubt that Zedka was serious, or if it wasn't just a way by which mental patients could pretend that the world they lived in was better than that of others. But what did it matter? She was experiencing something interesting, different, totally unexpected: imagine a place where people pretend to be mad in order to do exactly what they want.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

bitterness...

Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that Bitterness begins its irrevocable work.

The will was the main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as Dr. Igor preferred to call it). The people attacked by this malaise began to lose all desire, and within a few years, they became unable to leave their world, where they had spent enormous reserves of energy constructing high walls in order to make reality what they wanted it to be.

In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth, they continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.

The great problem with poisoning by Bitterness was that the passions -- hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity -- also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.

That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say. The madman committed suicide, the hero offered himself up to martyrdom in the name of a cause, but both would die, and the embittered would spend many nights and days remarking on the absurdity and the glory of both. It was the only moment when the embittered person had the energy to clamber up his defensive walls and peer over at the world outside, but then his hands and feet would grow tired and he would return to daily life.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

insanity...

... Insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

god's apology...

... If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but results have proved disastrous; if God exists, He will be generous with those creatures who choose to leave this earth early, and he might even apologise for having made us spend time here.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

it's a tie!

You say they create their own reality, said Veronika, but what is reality?

It's what the majority deems it to be. It's not necessarily the best or the most logical, but it's the one that has become adapted to the desires of society as a whole. You see this thing i've got round my neck?

You mean your tie?

Exactly. Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an absolutely normal person would give: it's a tie!
A madman, however, would say that what I have round my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit of coloured cloth tied in a very complicated way, and which makes it harder to get air into your lungs and difficult to turn your neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan, or I could be strangled by this bit of cloth.
If a mad person were to ask me what this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. It's not even purely decorative, since nowadays it's become a symbol of slavery, power, aloofness. The only really useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something, though quite what you don't know.
But does that sense of relief justify the existence of ties? No. Nevertheless, if I were to ask a madman and a normal person what this is, the sane person would say: a tie.

It doesn't matter who's correct, what matters is who's right.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die