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

HEALING HANDS

Some hands can heal. This seems to be a miracle but is actually a physical process that takes place through bio-magnetic fields. Scientific research shows that bio-magnetic energy emanated by the practitioner resonates with particular molecules in the receiver and initiate a cascade of events that can stimulate the repair of cells and tissue.

Such healing effects are studied in differentiated ways. For instance, research presents evidence of certain frequencies emitted from practitioner’s hands that ‘jump-start’ healing processes in receivers.

Although scientific research strongly suggests that healing may be initiated, less certain is that everybody can sense the resonance and use it to ‘tune in’ to imbalanced areas by providing proper electromagnetic fingerprints. Able body-workers sense more and can develop brain rhythms that lead to stronger and more coherent magnetic fields which facilitate detection and repair in the receiver.

Biophysicist James Oschman has brought together evidence from a range of disciplines to provide an acceptable explanation for the energetic exchanges that take place in body-mind therapies. He addresses a growing interest in the role of natural energies in maintaining health and wellbeing. http://energymedicineuniversity.org/faculty/oschman.html

While solid knowledge is growing, much is still hypothetical and waits for scientific studies that can reject or confirm implicit beliefs and explicit statements.

~ Courtesy: Elise Pattyn

SCIENCE AND ASTROLOGY

It is scientific to say that without knowledge of scientific proof we cannot have an opinion, including about astrology. But a scientist would appreciate curious colleagues who take astrology as an object of study, just like chemists study molecules, economists study capitalism or physicists study gravity.

There is an endless number of hypotheses to be derived from the astrology books, tested and statistically analyzed. But even if a hundred hypotheses are rejected we can still not say that astrology has no validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be confirmed. On the other hand, even if a hundred hypotheses are confirmed we can still not say that astrology has validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be rejected.

The curious scientist may not only appreciate the testing of statistical relations between stellar constellations and human behaviors, but also value the physical research that increasingly confirms energy relations of different frequencies that occur at many levels, from the molecule to the universe, and may produce cause-and-effect relationships between the behaviors of stars and humans.

And the curious scientist, aware of what physicists have realized for long already, knows that cause-and-effect cannot explain everything that happens but that synchronicity sometimes replaces causal relations. For instance, in 1964 the scientist J.S. Bell, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, has found that the supposedly separate parts of the universe are in fact connected in an intimate and immediate way. It provides repeatedly tested proof that cause-and-effect thinking cannot explain everything.

The shocking news is that science has shown its own limitations. And even after half a century this conclusion is far from being understood in its consequences. The word synchronicity is the proper term to be applied here. The same word synchronicity may apply to what astrologers study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

PARADISE OR WISDOM

As fetuses and infants we live with subconscious illusions of total comfort, perfection, grandiosity, timelessness, limitlessness, centrality, almightiness and total control. We usually overcome such paradisiacal illusions only to a certain extent and ban, under pressures of the social and physical environment, other parts of those illusions to the back of our minds. Developmental psychology has been demonstrating those features since the 1970s.

Now, when conditions allow, those subconsciously remaining parts of infant illusions can grasp their chances, come back to the fore and infuse our feeling, thinking and acting. Growing wealth, social power, spiritual enlightenment, technology or car driving, for instance, can remobilize our undigested paradisiacal illusions, until real life unmasks our reappeared fantasies.

For quite some prominent people, overcoming the subconscious paradisiacal illusions of early childhood is just too hard. Instead of helping them to deal with reality on the ground, their fame or power inflated their illusions and made them derail, even to a fatal extent.

Exposed rapists such as IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn and American TV hero Bill Cosby, or the  fatally addicted singer Amy Winehouse are recent examples.

Others, on the other hand, are fortunately in a position where they can honestly and courageously confront themselves with early paradisiacal illusions that are still lurking in them. They may even develop real wisdom.