Spanish Proverb - Of Bulls And Bull Rings
September 30, 2007
“It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bull ring.”
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A Dialogue Between The Man of Riches and The Woman of Wealth
September 30, 2007
The Man of Riches asked the Woman of Wealth, “I am going to ask you a question, do you have the wisdom to answer?”
The Woman of Wealth said, “Please go ahead and ask.”
The Man of Riches said, “I already have.”
To which the Woman of Wealth replied, “Then I have already answered.”
The Man of Riches continued, “What did you answer, when did you answer?”
To which the Woman of Wealth replied, “What did you question, when did you question?”
“I haven’t yet questioned anything.” said the Man of Riches.
“Then I haven’t yet answered anything.” said the Woman of Wealth.
“Such is life.” commented Manoj Sharma
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com and http://www.manojsharma.com
Seize The Opportunity Here And Now by Manoj Sharma
September 30, 2007
In the mind of an “ignorant” child there are infinite possibilities, but in the mind of an “knowledgeable” adult there are few.
Correspondingly, those who live their lives as being a possibility of something or another are only giving further power to their ego. Their ego, which is only too happy to convince them as to their own grandeur, legacy and “contribution”.
Following the path of possibility will only serve to move you further towards the systematic failure to appreciate the underlying principle of the universe, made up of multi-verses, existing as an opportunity waiting to be seized.
An opportunity, here and now, for consciousnesses to emerge, re-merge and sub-merge with consciousness itself and ultimately realize its true nature.
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com and http://www.manojsharma.com
The Power Of Volition
September 30, 2007
The Power Of Volition by Paramahansa Yogananda
“Volition is the dynamo that feeds all our powers. It initiates and keeps in continuous operation all our physical, mental and spiritual actions. Without the spring of volition, we cannot walk, talk, think, work or feel. In order not to exercise volition, or will power, one would have to lie down and enter a state of suspended animation. Even the slightest movement of the muscles (as in winking the eyelids) or any act of thinking is initiated by the use of volition.
A wish implies a helpless desire of the mind. A desire is a stronger wish; it is often followed by fitful efforts to manifest itself into action. An intention, or a determination, is a definite, strong desire expressed very forcefully once or twice through action for the accomplishment of a certain purpose. Such a determination, however strong, is often discouraged after one or perhaps several unsuccessful efforts.
But a volition consists of a series of continuous, undiscouraged, unceasing determinations and acts revolving around a desire, until it becomes dynamic enough to produce the much-craved result. “Will and act until victory” is the slogan of all volitive activity.
No matter how impossible of accomplishment his goal may seem, the man of volition never stops repeating conscious acts of determination to achieve it. As long as he lives.”
Special thanks to Prasanth Kumar for assisting to identify the author of the piece.
10 Things I Believe In by JooHock
September 29, 2007
1. About God?
God is not some Super duper omni-potent Being, somewhere out there in some realm of the Universe, watching us, who needs to be kowtowed to. And such that if we don’t kowtow to this God, we will be punished. My thoughts and thus my mind is totally inadequate to fully comprehend this Integrity, this “Being” humans generally refer to as God.
However, I can only say my feeling, and belief is that we are all manifestations of God.
2. About Human Beings and Life?
As human beings, we feel and seem to experience ourselves in the flesh, we are not things. Under very powerful super nano-micron-microscope (if there is one) we are all but empty space. Therefore the physical beings that we are, are like holograms formed to give physical manifestation of a consciousness, the Integrity, the Life that animates this “hologram” being.
3. About Universe and humanity’s place in it?
Universe is teeming with life with myriad physical forms, extra-terrestrials, which we have never yet encountered. Humanity and the creatures that lives here on Earth is but one teeny weeny part of Universe. It is a testing ground for whether humans, given consciousness, awareness, including ego, can discover and evolve itself to higher level of consciousness. Or whether human despite his consciousness, his ego can violate the laws of Universe and destroy itself, perhaps including Earth. I believe that human can make it through, as there are manifestations like Buckminster Fuller who comes along to demonstrate and transcend our ego-selves.
4. On Self.
Believing in myself is important, and to do so is believing in this Integrity God-Spirit which manifest this life and animates this physical being given the name JooHock, as well as all of humanity, past present and future.
5. On Being Different
I’m here to be different in order to make a difference for my fellow man. (that’s why I’m UNIQUE).And to do so, I have to Dare to be myself, which is quite a challenge in an environment that tries to make me conform to it norms.
6. On Being Free
I believe in Freedom for all, (Freedom is Wealth) and in order to be Free, all Man and I need to be aware of the “programs”, the conditioning put in us by society to control and “imprison” us. We’re a walking bundle of “programs”, and we need to be able to be free from them. Not easy.
7. On Buckminster Fuller
If ever there was anything in my life that I can say that I really believed in, it would be this.
Prior to my “encounter” with Bucky, I was a very skeptical person. Never could I say that I could trust anyone, nor believe in anything. Since I learnt about him and from him I’ll admit that I believe in Bucky, what he shared, his experiences. He made sense to me. He had no personal agenda, nothing to “sell” me. He was Integrity personified. And that’s also why I am committed to share his philosophy, his works, etc., through my Bucky sessions, with my Bucky Group and also my Bucky Workshops.
8. On Reality
I create my own reality, which is subjective.
9. On Paradoxes
The Great Consciousness, that designed this Universe, designed it perfectly, with paradoxes to give humanity constant challenges. When he solves a problem successfully, he is given more challenging problems to solve Otherwise humans will be bored, and he will be complaining of his boredom.
10. On What I’m here for?
I’m here to make my Music, Sing my Songs and Dance my Dance, through my Bucky workshops. And if they touched lives, great. If they benefits by them, fine. They did it themselves. I’m just doing my thing. Ha Ha.
What are the 10 Things You Believe In?
To create your own list of 10 Things please go to http://www.listphile.com/10_Things_I_Believe_In
Are You In The Know by Manoj Sharma
September 28, 2007
Born you were, as everyone else is, almost completely ignorant. Ignorant about yourself, ignorant about your world and certainly about yourself in it. Sure, you had some basic survival mechanisms in place such as crying for food, not putting yourself in danger and resonating to the friendliness of a smile. Outside of the above and their likes, you were even born ignorant of mother and father and definitely ignorant of language, mathematics, science, society, ethics, arts and the other fundamentals that signify a “civilized” human being. You had precious little knowledge of anything (And in the bigger scheme of things, are you willing to be truthful enough to recognize that you still don’t?) - and therefore were born largely ignorant. As knowledge crept into your presence, correspondingly ignorance started to eliminate itself and ideally this process of gaining wisdom should continue until the day you die.
Presently you are who you are and face the seemingly unique challenges you do and while this is going on, how often have you stopped to ponder why it is so?
You are, at the very least, the result of the culmination of your entire life up to this point. Consider that initially, the infinite consciousness of your spirit together with the subtle presence of your mind, animated the tangible instrument you call your body. Your body, through its five senses, and only with the support of an attentive focused mind, brought initial morsels of knowledge into your sphere of awareness.
Your body was, is, but will not forever be, in a physical world defined by action and effort. Your potential to carry out actions both voluntary and involuntary along with your ability to sense were built in. Albeit they started off as erratic and needed some honing. Given space and time you learned how to coordinate and control them, you also discovered that you could even deliberately plan them. You sensed and functioned in your existing environments and functioned and made sense of new environments. You had a remarkable ability to adapt and inquisitively sought the curiosity of the new, even though, and as, you enjoyed the comfort of the familiar.
You called on past assimilated experiences to accommodate new experiences even when they did not fit. Due to a lack of the light of knowledge the confusion started, grew, persisted and still lurks in the shadows as you dismiss it to be the way life is. So you continue to endeavour to embrace the highs of life and resist its lows.
Somewhere along the way, very early on, you learned to distinguish yourself from your world, and others from you and thus gave rise to your ego - your sense of yourself as a distinct and separate entity from others and your world; the one and only thing in your universe that you refer to when you say, “I”. You soon also learned by repetition and relation that others seem to give a name to this “I”, and you too started to relate to that name and responded to it as “me” when it was called. You became yourself, your own person, the “myself” - distinct, unique, special and because of that separate from the completeness, elegance and perfection of the universe.
And it was non-coincidentally then, at that very happy point of differentiation of your “me”, “myself” and “I” that the eventual sadness of unfulfillment simultaneously started. Your compulsion to eliminate the partial fillment of life and be fully filled - fulfillment began. And even as you may be unaware that all gains or losses of your fears, desires, pains and pleasures, in tandem with your vast array of limiting and empowering strategies and generally situational orientations, at best will only temporarily satisfy you, the struggle continues.
Known or unknown to you, your search for fulfillment will never be satisfied through your pursuit of security, pleasure and even the localized ethics that you have been lead to believe, have adopted and will defend as the “normal” and “best” way of life.
Your ultimate outer pursuit of freedom is only an echo of your inner goal of liberation which requires an unfamiliar, different and new means of knowledge that we can call a knowing. A knowing you are unlikely to discover on your own by accident, as this knowing requires you to have been seeking it, before you stumble upon it, are drawn towards it and devote yourself to another seeker who has found it and is living it.
This is a knowing which cannot be gained through conventional action and effort and can only be illuminated through guidance and insight. A knowing, which is not so much an achievement of the not-yet-achieved, but an achievement of the already achieved, keeping in mind that all forms of knowledge are not created but acquired from a pre-existing infinite pool.
This evolutionary path to liberation is not a process of becoming or even being, but simply a question of knowing.
Contemplate this deeply. And if you need to invest hours re-reading it, please do so, it will be well worth your while.
For Keshan in appreciation of your friendship over the years.
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com and http://www.manojsharma.com
Another Perspective On Money by Barnaby Googe
September 28, 2007
“Give money me, take friendship who so list,
For friends are gone come once adversity,
When money yet remaineth safe in chest,
That quickly can thee bring from misery.
Fair faces show friends when riches do abound;
Come time of proof, farewell, they must away;
Believe me well, they are not to be found
If God but send thee once a lowering day.
Gold never starts aside, but in distress,
Finds ways enough to ease thine heaviness.”
– Barnaby Googe (1540-1594)
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com and http://www.manojsharma.com
The 4 Divisions Of Knowledge by Socrates, from Plato’s The Republic
September 28, 2007
In this segment from Plato’s The Republic, Socrates explains the 4 divisons of knowledge as he recognizes them. If you read it carefully you will clearly appreciate that most people (possibly yourself included) live vastly in the world of faith and shadows and only occassionally dwell in the world of pure and active intelligence. From personal historical experience, simply understanding this in itself seems be a great starting point to move more actively into the world of intelligence, a world in which ideas are the closest we seem to be able to get to truth.
“Imagine further worlds… one of the visible, the other of the intelligible; you may assist your fancy by figuring the distinction under the image of a line divided into two unequal parts, and may again subdivide each part into two lesser segments representative of the stages of knowledge in either sphere.
The lower portion of the lower or visible sphere will consist of shadows and reflections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world of nature or of art.
The sphere of the intelligible will also have two divisions, one of mathematics, in which there is no ascent but all is descent; no inquiring into premises, but only drawing of inferences.
In this division the mind works with figures and numbers, the images of which are taken not from the shadows, but from the objects, although the truth of them is seen only with the mind’s eye; and they are used as hypotheses without being analysed.
Whereas in the other division reason uses the hypotheses as stages or steps in the ascent to the idea of good, to which she fastens them, and then again descends, walking firmly in the region of ideas, and of ideas only, in her ascent as well as descent, and finally resting in them.
‘I partly understand,’ he replied’ you mean that the ideas of science are superior to the hypothetical, metaphorical conceptions of geometry and the other arts or sciences, whichever is to be the name of them; and the latter conceptions you refuse to make subjects of pure intellect, because they have no first principle, although when resting on a first principle, they pass into the highersphere.’
You understand me very well, I said. And now to those four divisions of knowledge you may assign four corresponding faculties–pure intelligence to the highest sphere; active intelligence to the second; to the third, faith; to the fourth, the perception of shadows - and the clearness of the several faculties will be in the same ratio as the truth of the objects to which they are related…”
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com/ and http://www.manojsharma.com/
Are You Enlightened, Fit To Rule And What Training Will Draw You Upwards
September 28, 2007
Read through the following allegory of the cave by Plato from The Republic and decide for yourself.
“And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or unenlightenment of our nature: Imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen overwhich marionette players show their puppets.
Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent.
‘A strange parable,’ he said, ‘and strange captives.’
They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; to these they give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows.
Suppose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images; will they believe them to be real? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without blinking?
And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light?
Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will conclude: This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see.
How will they rejoice inpassing from darkness to light? How worthless to them will seem the honours and glories of the den!
But now imagine further, that they descend into their old habitations; in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death, if they can catch him.
Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right–parent of the lord of light in this world, and of truth and understanding in the other.
He who attains to the beatific vision is always going upwards; he is unwilling to descend into political assemblies and courts of law; for his eyes are apt to blink at the images or shadows of images which they behold in them–he cannot enter into the ideas of those who have never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to the substance.
But blindness is of two kinds, and may be caused either by passing out of darkness into light or out of light into darkness, and a man of sense will distinguish between them, and will not laugh equally at both of them, but the blindness which arises from fulness of light he will deem blessed, and pity the other; or if he laugh at the puzzled soul looking at the sun, he will have more reason to laugh than the inhabitants of the den at those who descend from above.
There is a further lesson taught by this parable of ours.
Some persons fancy that instruction is like giving eyes to the blind, but we say that the faculty of sight was always there, and that the soul only requires to be turned round towards the light.
And this is conversion; other virtues are almost like bodily habits, and may be acquired in the same manner, but intelligence has a diviner life, and is indestructible, turning either to good or evil according to the direction given.
Did you never observe how the mind of a clever rogue peers out of his eyes, and the more clearly he sees, the more evil he does? Now if you take such an one, and cut away from him those leaden weights of pleasure and desire which bind his soul to earth, his intelligence will be turned round, and he will behold the truth as clearly as he now discerns his meaner ends.
And have we not decided that our rulers must neither be so uneducated as to have no fixed rule of life, nor so over-educated as to be unwilling to leave their paradise for the business of the world?
We must choose out therefore the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light and knowledge of the good; but we must not allow them to remain in the region of light; they must be forced down again among the captives in the den to partake of their labours and honours.
‘Will they not think this a hardship?’
You should remember that our purpose in framing the State was not that our citizens should do what they like, but that they should serve the State for the common good of all. May we not fairly say to our philosopher, Friend, we do you no wrong; for in other States philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you have been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and therefore we must insist on your descending into the den.
You must, each of you, take your turn, and become able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you will see far better than those who quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is a waking reality.
It may be that the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be the least inclined to rule, but necessity is laid upon him, and he must no longer live in the heaven of ideas.
And this will be the salvation of the State. For those who rule must not be those who are desirous to rule; and, if you can offer to our citizens a better life than that of rulers generally is, there will be a chance that the rich, not only in this world’s goods, but in virtue and wisdom, may bear rule.
And the only life which is better than the life of political ambition is that of philosophy, which is also the best preparation for the government of a State.
Then now comes the question,–How shall we create our rulers; what way is there from darkness to light?
The change is effected by philosophy; it is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the conversion of a soul from night to day, from becoming to being.
And what training will draw the soul upwards?” - by Plato from The Republic
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to http://www.differworld.com/ and http://www.manojsharma.com/
The Law Of Love by Mahatma Gandhi
September 27, 2007
“The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not…. a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work great wonders…. The men who discovered for us the law of love were greater scientists than any of our modern scientists… The more I work with this law, the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
For Andy Tay, upon his return, after the start of his great journey of self-discovery.
As usual, please feel free to send me your thoughts and comments to Info@DifferWorld.com And if you’d like to explore how you, your teams and your organization can benefit from the above and other DifferWorld initiatives please feel free to drop me a note by clicking here, or call me at DIFFERWORLD at SKYPE now! For more, please go to www.DifferWorld.com and www.ManojSharma.com