GOOD PARTNERS

For a good relationship, some or more of the following points may be considered:

1.     Can you both be alone without looking for a partnership as a relief or escape?

2.     Is there a more or less similar absence or presence of personal growth?

3.     Are there more or less similar levels of intelligence?

4.     Can you, instead of quarreling about symptoms, discuss underlying forces, such as childhood damages, sex differences and cultural differences?

5.     Can you together survive stress situations, such as travel hardships?

6.     Is there physical attraction or, more precisely, good sex?

7.     Can you have silence together without having your energy drowned?

8.     Can you have a good laugh together?

9.     Can you both tolerate any differences between you?

10.   Can you give up expectations that the other will change in the future?

11.   Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is there real love at both sides?

WALKS TO HAPPINESS

In order to find peace, clarity or happiness, some of us focus on spiritual entities such as the universe, souls, angels, spirits or former lives. A second route is to focus on digesting earlier experienced trauma in this earthly life. Another way is to try and maximize comfort and pleasure in the present. Yet another route is to work hard, take responsibilities and go for status or influence.

All routes have their merits but can also function as ways to escape from the other routes and keep us unhappy. To the extent that hidden fear guides our choice, we preserve that fear by letting it decide on our choice of routes, and the route thus chosen will not lead us to sustained peace, clarity or happiness.

The art is to know the benefits and costs of all routes, chose consciously between routes and remain ready to switch routes whenever that seems beneficial. The second art is to move on with love and care for ourselves, while we develop the skills of nuanced map reading and walking.

INTERCULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY

We humans have to learn how we are seen by others who live in places until recently unknown, or who have moved over the planet and are now neighbors. And this necessity to look out of our windows will only increase.

Whether they like it or not, peaceful, well-intending westerners are held co-responsible for mass killings by western armies. Peaceful, well-intending Muslims are held co-responsible for terrorist attacks by Jihadists and cruel punishment systems in Muslim countries. The peaceful majorities can hide and say they cannot reduce the violence, but that will be increasingly rejected by the other side.

It’s high time that we all wake up and understand how we are seen by others in this globalizing world. We will increasingly be reproached, justified or not, about wrongs committed by people who are seen as associated with us. Instead of complaining about such reproaches, we better start learning how to help reduce those wrongs for which we can be hold responsible by outsiders.

HEART FOR MUSLIM BOYS

Do you want to redress violence by Jihadists? Listen to them. Listen to them, use your heart and take their feelings and arguments seriously. These young men see the West as blind and deaf for their feelings, feelings of being ignored or despised by the West.

And they hold the West responsible, directly or indirectly, for the thousands of innocent Muslims killed in Gaza, Bosnia and Iraq. Reversely, they see themselves as being at war with the West and as being allowed to conduct violent attacks as well.

Find that young Jihadists are misled by inciting Imams? Investigate why potential Jihadists are sensitive to the inciting speeches of those Imams.

Find that hate Imams are liars? Find that young Muslim men are not ignored or despised? Find you are not co-responsible for the mass killings in Gaza, Bosnia and Iraq? Expect more attacks.

Sadly enough, only now that their violent outcries come closer to us, we are more ready to give them the attention or understanding they have been needing all along.

PITFALLS OF RELIGIOUS ADDITIONS

A religion may be seen as having three layers, with the third layer divided into three parts again.

First, there are many people having personal spiritual experiences, that are perhaps in essence just experiences of emptiness or a void, a void that in itself can be experienced as harboring a lot of rich potential. These people can be doubted or criticized by people who don’t have such spiritual experiences, but in others they do exist.

Second, there are the sharings, often in ceremonies, with others who also have such spiritual  experiences.

So far so good. Then the sharing community creates a number of additions and the problems start.

One type of addition comes when the members of the community cannot resist the temptation to fill in the void with projections, fantasies, images, representations, words or even stories of human-like figures, call such figures god or gods, and image them to live on Mount Olympus or in ‘heaven’.

Questions arise, for instance, about the perceived inconsistency of an old father figure in ‘heaven’ who is supposed to be both a good god and the creator of Auschwitz. Also here belongs the endless debate between Darwinists and Creationists who both ignore the spiritual experiences that many people have without any additions.

Another addition comes when a sharing community creates an organization to arrange meetings and other mundane activities on behalf of the community. Their misconduct can be used as a means to criticize the particular religion.

Yet another addition arises when the religious community design certain rules of behavior for its members and both the community and the organization sanction the compliance to these rules by referring to the human-type projections called gods, or derive authority from such imagined figures to justify what others call misbehavior.

All such additions seem to have with the transformation from tribal to agrarian societies when humans added agriculture to what nature just had been offering them.



Mount Olympus