Your Holiness, are you a happy man?"I cannot answer that question without making sure that we understand the word "happiness" in the same way. If you are talking about a continuous state of mind, a permanent interior disposition where there is no regret, no suffering, no feeling of dissatisfaction, that state is foreign to me. But I believe that the state of mind is simply not human. In human life, happiness is a victory: the overcoming of doubt, despair, temptation. If this is how you understand happiness, then yes, I am happy!"
I reading a book called "Between Heaven and Earth", which is a convestation with His Holiness Karekin I, my all time favorite Armenian pop. In there the journalist asks him who does he think is a Saint? He said, "The saints, to me. are the interprestation of Chirstian fath in the context of lived, human life," and then recalls these two quotes:"I cannot respect pure and saintly hands that have always been protected by gloves. I prefer hands that have remained pure in mud."
~ Daniel-Rops
"In our times. the path to sainthood passes necessarily through the world of action"
~Dag Hammarkold
Not that you you can or should become better than another person or even good engouh to fulfill certain wordly standards. This is giving too much power to the world "out there". In the wisdon of the East there is an axiom that says: there is nothing noble about begin superior to some other person. True nobility is being superior to you previous self"
"Life is simply a form of energy....to be guided and directed in a person's body by his or her intelligence."
Look for the Soul, you become Soul
Hunt for the bread, you become bread,
Whatever you look for, you are
Words are also seeds, and when dropped into the invisible spiritual substance, they grow and bring forth after their kind. "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles" (Mathew 7:16). Farmers and gardeners choose their seed with the greatest care. They reject every defective seed they find and in this way make sure of the coming crop. To have prosperity in you home you will have to exercise the same intelligent discrimination in the choice of your seed words.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
"What's true in sports is also true in our business and personal lives. There is only a fractional difference between winners in life and those who merely exist. The difference is attitude under pressure. It's the winner's edge. The Edge is not a gifted birth. The world is full of wasted talent. The Edge is not academic degrees. Education is important, but the world is full of educated misfits. The Edge is not luck. If it were, Las Vegas would be a ghost town. The Edge is not capital. Many of today's self-made, multi-millionaires started building their fortunes with under $5,000. The Edge is all attitude. Attitude, not aptitude, is the criterion for success."
If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It's very important to be aware of them every time they come up.
Deepak Chopra
Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can’t retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.
Bernard Mannes Baruch
Love will give you light;
You can conjure up in your mind a thousand imaginary things that will seem real to you. This shows that the mind creates by forming things according to its ideas. The world is awakening in a wonderful way to the truth about the creative power of the mind. Everywhere people are studying psychology or soul culture. The imagination builds things out of the one substance. If you will associate with in its creative work, the things you make will be just as real that God makes. Whatever you make in mind and really put faith in will become substantial. Then you must be constantly on your guard as to what you believe, in order that you may bring what is for your good into manifestation.
Even though Freud and Jung disagreed on many points, one thing that emerges from twentieth century psychoanalysis is the fact that dreams go beyond their individual dreamers and often show patterns that are common to all cultures. Indeed, dreams are only partially rooted in consciousness and tend to reveal deeper parts of the human psyche.
One of the eldest books on dreams - the Oneirocritica «The Interpretation of dreams” - was written by the Greek thinker Artemidorus in the second century AD. In it he distinguishes between dreams that forecast the future and “allegorical dreams” that need interpretation.
Unlike Freud that reduced dreams to repression of infantile sexual experiences, Jung stated that besides these personal dreams, there was an unconscious collective dream, the very backbone of imagination. He saw then in dreams the manifestation of a certain truth that went beyond the dreamer, as if planted by a higher consciousness that he calls “the soul”.
Borrowed from Paulo Coelho's Blog
The beautiful part about having problems is whom you become because of them. The ancient philosopher Horace said it best: "Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."
Why do we hate, why do we suffer
We are finishing off the Rat year and entering the Ox year (the year 4706 in the Chinese calendar ). It's fun for me to read the predictions from the last year and to see if they were any close to reality? Yes, the Chinese astrology did predict that the Rat year will usher in the "unpredictable and intangible."!! They also referred to 2008 as "The Roller Coaster Year". There was also a guy who actually predicted the fall of oil prices . It certainly was a roller coaster year!
