Stop trying to give what you haven´t got
2014/01/23 Leave a comment
The dead cannot resurrect
2012/12/13 6 Comments
We call ourselves modern, yet our outlook on life is terribly outdated and obtuse.
The only conviction I hold is that our beliefs and viewpoints must be under
constant questioning, and regularly and sanely contested – when it is required.
It is all about having a minimum of intelligence and common-sense.
We are aptly obliged to adapt to the current living conditions – that´s quite evident for
every lucid person.
I’ve always been a proponent of change. Now the question is:
If the Zeitgeist is diseased, indeed, if man and the whole present society is utterly insane, seemingly and irrevocably disturbed, WHAT DO YOU DO?…
If everybody is mad and considers right to be mad, uncritically merging into prevalent Stupidity and general Disease, bluntly and narrow-mindedly disregarding common sense and conspicuous evidence as to the real state of affairs, does it mean that I have to adapt too to this manifest folly, embracing and taking it for real?
If everybody is a cowardly moron and considers right to be a moron, do I have to be one in order to fit in and be accepted?…
What do you do when millions of people, states and nations are head over heels heading to perdition, stubbornly refusing to see, dismissing obvious fact…?
I will illustrate my point with an uncommon story:
Once, travelling by train in Romania, I met a shepherd. A down to earth but very astute man. He told me that he once was in the mountains with his sheep and dogs. Two colleagues of his were there too with their flock. Out of the blue a roaring helicopter noise came from the other side of the mountain. It created such a panic among the sheep, so they started running berserk all over that mountain plateau.
ONE OF THEM WAS HEADING TOWARDS THE DANGEROUS CLIFFS, AND EVENTUALLY THREW ITSELF IN THE PRECIPICE.
Instantly, all the other sheep were hysterically following the poor animal towards the abyss!
The three men and their dogs were desperately trying to prevent the flock from what seemed an unstoppable disaster. They managed in the end to save just a one-third of the sheep. Imagine that:
TRYING TO SAVE THEMSELVES, MOST OF THOSE STUPID ANIMALS WENT BLINDLY INTO SUDDEN DEATH.
The analogy is undoubtedly quite clear here, isn´t it…? It is exactly what happens in the human realm:
Millions of people are hysterically heading towards a dire fate, and yet they don´t see it…
I may be a misfit but not a liar: Without intervention from God´s grace or higher powers,
Man is on the verge of total ruin. Psychologically speaking, humanity is dilapidated.
Healing doesn´t happen overnight. It takes generations. Nature doesn´t take sudden leaps.
I SEE IT ALL QUITE LUCIDLY and I am not “pessimistic” when I say this:
Average man is sick beyond salvation. No matter how much drugs you inflate in someone about to die, you come to the point where you comprehend that the best thing is to let him die. We may try, but we cannot resurrect the dead.
Maybe it is so, that humanity secretly wants to perish, otherwise more people would wake up, sincerely and decidedly change the course and deliberately choose another way. Besides inane redundancy and good-sounding but empty phrases, I can´t see any real signs pointing to that.
THE THING IS THAT EVEN THE SO-CALLED AWAKENED ARE ASLEEP.
What can I say as a final word for now…?
May God stand alongside with the vivid ones!
None and both
2012/11/06 2 Comments
It´s a hard one:
On one hand there is no such thing as “positive” and “negative”. And on the other hand both exist.
Like Love – it is both indiscriminately all-embracing but sharply discriminative as well.
We only have our common-sense and intuition to rely on when to be one thing or “the other”…
The conman and the napkin
2012/11/05 20 Comments
You find yourself in a precarious situation sometimes…- vitally important things happen to you that others fail to notice – or if they notice, they bluntly disregard those inconspicuous details as mere “fantasy”…
“Don´t take things so seriously, you ascribe too much importance to matters of no consequence”, they say.
But these matters of “no consequence” make a life in purpose or a life spent in despondent mediocrity. These very details are sometimes the difference between being dead or alive. Literally and metaphorically.
Those key details are simply overlooked or dismissed, being considered “a waste of time”.
So there you are all by yourself, sensing the gravity of your awkward and disconcerting situation, with no one around you can turn to…
You are on your own. YOU AND YOUR DESTINY.
So, I once knew this guy. He was smart and cheerful, a rather talkative person. Tall, imposing stature, elegant. Very charming. He had a penetrating, lively convincing voice. Seemingly so…- THERE WAS SOMETHING IN HIS LAUGH WHICH WAS FORCED, something spurious, disturbing, for the common ear, a hardly detectable dissonance of sorts.
“Maybe I make this up, it´s all in my head”, I thought.
He was working in a radio station, he had a rather interesting program with philosophical questions. Long story short: He wanted me to join him in this radio show, which I did. I collaborated with him for few months. Anyway, this broadcast showed to be a success. We even did a few very appreciated lectures together. We were to carry on and engage in different other projects.
Once we were in his car going somewhere. “Do you have a napkin?”, I asked him. “Of course, here…” he said THROWING ME A PACK OF NAPKINS.
Here is the point of my story: he threw this napkin to me in such a way that I was dumbfounded: in that simple gesture I could read so much recklessness, arrogance, contempt and terrifying callousness.
It was impossible to misinterpret – in a fraction of a second I got the clear message:
Behind his mannered, well-polished mask, this guy was a treacherous, totally unreliable sham. A conman.
Let´s be honest, how many people would attach any importance to someone throwing a package of napkins?…
Luckily I was shrewd enough to take these inconspicuous warning signals seriously. Right after this incident, I began to look at him with totally dispassionate eyes, and realized that I had seen through him. His humanitarian projects, his interest to promote wisdom, to assist and help people was nothing but hollow phrases. He would trample on corpses in order to fulfill his agenda.
The weird thing is that he was not an entirely bad man. But who knows – his destiny
in his present life is to be an impostor.
So I stopped the collaboration with him. Thanks God I have been gifted with this highly unlikely intuition:
One year after, this man started a construction company and soon after he bankrupted many of his associates. Finding himself with no cash, he managed to persuade a gullible young man I know – one of his broadcast listeners – to lend him 45.000 Euros with 50% interest.
Even to this day, the poor youngster hasn´t retrieved a cent back…
The moral:
LEARN TO “WASTE” YOUR TIME WITH MATTERS OF “NO CONSEQUENCE” – as there is the difference between the loser and the winner!
A comment I made
2012/09/29 Leave a comment
The more we know, the bigger the morons we become.
As long as “knowing” doesn´t take into account Being, as long as the process of learning
doesn´t help us find out Who we are, we are naught but pathetic parrots.
School should teach basic human common sense. It would be better if we were taught how to cook a soup, iron a shirt or chat up a nice girl…
All the rest comes naturally when we are in touch with basic reality…
No one on his deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
2012/09/20 Leave a comment
Here is a great article by Dr. Rodger Duncan:
No one on his deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
Don’t get me wrong. Work is a wonderful thing. It can be very fulfilling and can provide meaningful service to others. But personal relationships are the most important things in our lives. It’s through relationships with others that we learn about ourselves, about how to make choices, how to self correct, how to grow and develop, how to contribute to the human community, how to turn dreams into reality.
And listening is the most important behavior in those relationships. Really listening. This requires using your eyes and your heart as well as your ears. Effective people listen to learn and understand rather than to rebut and overpower. They exercise influence rather than authority. They’re willing to be influenced rather than assuming that the views of others should always be subservient to theirs.
A comic once said that authentic communication is 50% sincerity, and then you just fake the rest. That line may get a chuckle, but it’s a dangerous practice. Genuine listening is much, much more than eye contact and an occasional “uh-huh.” Genuine listening involves connecting heart to heart and working to understand the other person’s viewpoint even if you don’t agree with it.
Listening with true empathy is the best kind of listening. Most people don’t want sympathy. They want empathy, which is all about understanding.
I love the story of the little girl who was late coming home. Her mother was worried. When the little girl finally arrived, she explained that she had stopped to be with a friend whose doll was broken. “Oh, did you help her fix her dolly?” her mother asked. “No,” replied the little girl, “I helped her cry.”
Listening with empathy is not some touchy-feely, warm-and-fuzzy behavior. It’s the key to effective human relationships. The best teachers listen with empathy because they know you can’t teach effectively without knowing where the learners are. The best doctors listen with empathy because they know that prescribing without properly diagnosing is simply bad medicine.
The best business people listen with empathy because they know that filling customer needs is the path to success. The best parents listen with empathy because they know that raising children requires on-the-job training and that important clues to family health can come from the mouths of babes.
Happy and effective people tend to be good conversationalists. And the best conversationalists are usually people who ask good questions. They don’t interrogate, they simply ask meaningful questions that other people are willing to answer. People who are really good at engaging the heads, hearts, and hopes of others tend to ask questions that evoke that engagement. And when they ask their good questions, they actually listen to the answers.
We are most effective when we talk so other people will listen and when we listen so other people will talk. It’s a common sense thing. Unfortunately, common sense is not all that common.
Great comment from Jane about “likes”
2012/07/04 29 Comments
Not only does the like button lack originality, but overuse of the “like” button also threatens our engagement with information online and in real life. When we compose a comment, we are compelled to actually think about why we feel a need to respond to an image or message. Liking a post “allows us to bypass this thought process.” It is all the sentiment without the thought, the online equivalent of the conversational “that’s nice” that we sometimes halfheartedly throw out when we are not really listening.
I find the “like button” a dumbing down of society. Perhaps we will be responding in grunts, groans, and growls, or hyena howls soon. Complex thinking requires us to think. Thinking requires us to perhaps state, ” I do not understand what you are talking about.” Pushing the “like” button is another form of societal conditioning by corporations to force us to behave in a certain way. Baaah go the sheep. We say we are not prejudice, but prejudice IS part of our conditioning, and now we are discussing the prejudice of pushing the like button.
We are losing our sensitivity and ability to form complex thoughts and ideas, write them down, discuss, and perhaps come out of a discussion reframing a perspective. NO! I do not like the “like” button. It is the dumbing down of the masses. I tried it out for awhile, but I am glad you brought this point up, Julien. I consider it the lazy way out. Most of the time, I do not think people are even reading what others write…they S C A N and press the like button…onward to more consumption…F A S T E R.
There is a flow to life. We will never be able to keep up with the exponential rate of data doubling every week on the internet. My song of existence requires me to be real – not a clone. I hope others will join in this “discussion.” We are here not to prove who or what is right or wrong. We are here to inquire.
No, the like button does not offer me the ability to “chew, swallow, and digest.” What is the point of collecting “likes?” Like “what?” What was “liked?”
We are being forced into thinking that we “like” the like button. Krishnamurti stated “The ultimate violence is war – the killing of ideas…”
We are caught in the web of society. Pushing the like button keeps us in our little cave, not stating what we feel or do not feel, afraid to be NOT LIKED! The like button is destructive. Conforming is imitation. Again, a quote from Krishnamurti: The quality of seriousness is to pursue to the very end a thought, an idea, a feeling; to go to the very end of it whatever may happen to you. Seriousness consists of seeing things clearly, in finding out, not accepting.”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/25/button-more-facebook-likes/
Julien Matei
Mirrors of Encounters 