Spirituality .. The Lost Jewel

            Been a while since I got in touch with myself and as a result, I was unable to write anything meaningful or worth reading, but since it is the night of the last day of the year I glued myself to the laptop to write something. Writing for me is the freedom from everything and the way I keep my well-being, I use it as an indicator for my mental and spiritual stability and balance because when I am fine and balanced I can find the words and express my thoughts clearly inflow of words but when there is chaos in my heart or mind all words get scared and hide in the caves of my very complicated mind.

The last five months were not so easy, I had so much going on in a result, I was unable to clearly see what really happening and where all the chaos started, when there is any problem in life the solution always lays in the problem itself, we need to know the root cause to figure out a solution and to anticipate future problems and put solutions for them before they even occur; That was my strategy for so many years but when chaos occupy something for a long time then it is easy to get distracted and lose your sharp mind and focus and that was my case but I am grateful that this happened because it helped me to realize more interesting facts that I kind of let it slip from my mind recently.

During our journey in life we get occupied, busy and distracted by too many things, we have so many things to chase; career, relationships, finance, knowledge, ambition… etc and especially with modern life and all the knowledge we gain during our journey we just start to ignore the very basic things that keep us as individuals sane and balanced which is I might call it spiritualties, others may call it religions, energy whatever. Whatever you call it; this balance weight is something a lot of us ignore or dismiss during our hectic journey because we think we are smart for that and it a result of a big mess and chaos that usually we don’t even think twice it might be caused by what may some call stupid reasons.

If we will think about the whole spirituality realm, I think we would find simple answers to everything including why religions and all philosophies exist. Brain is an amazing mechanism, and incredible organ that works consistently without break, without having time out, but I do believe it can get overwhelming for our brain sometimes and this can mess us up, because it is not clear for us when to quit and give our brain a break, always mental health was unimportant issue because usually it doesn't lead to major defect in our body, it usually reflects in our psychological and mental health which is not something obvious for others in most cases; it is something we can hide and don’t give it a big attention, and a long with the bad reputation mental disorders had it made it even more complicated to touch this issues.

Anyways, the simple humans lived thousands of years ago, realized that our brain and soul need a break without making it accumulating all this exhaustion to a real issue, and because the life long way back was unpolluted and the mentality and thinking of people lived there were simple they came up with meditation, prayers, Yoga, Kabala …etc as a daily ritual that somehow with the time it started to be connected with higher reasons and purposes and voila .. we had a way, but with time people started to neglect that part because we grow more knowledgeable and smart for such legends and stories and between our fight and quarrels to undermine the importance of religions or philosophies and who is right and who is wrong we lost the important thing behind all of this, the balance weights for our existence, it doesn't matter if you pray, meditate, practice Yoga, whatever; the important thing that this practice is not stupid or without reason, and people a long time ago didn't come up with it for no reason, they had a simpler life than we have now still they saw the need to cut time out daily, weekly or even monthly to restore the balance in your mind and soul, you need to give their mind a break from thinking about urgent things to focus on clearing up some pending issues or just reorganize thoughts and re-energize, it might sound silly to some but only people who practice that know it really does work, having a ritual to rest our brain keep us, focused on what really matters, keep us happy because it directs us to what is important and most importantly it makes us emotionally and mentally balanced and stable.

Some might agree, some might not but I am a big believer in this and the last five months, actually to be totally honest, the last  two years of my life proved to me that what we think of is who we are, I always had my rituals, sometimes they were religious sometimes they were just what I created for myself but they always helped me to find my way and be who I am, during our fight to find our way we might reject valuable concepts that were covered by lies or illusions that we despise but let’s not reject them because they belonged to something we didn't like … we should just take the valuable concepts out of the dust clean them and put them where they deserve to be.

So let’s start a new year where we take time out, without getting scared that others might think we are weak, let’s stay at home alone without getting shy that people may think we are introverts, let’s pray, meditate, practice whatever keeps us balanced without worrying how others judge us, let’s love ourselves enough to stop, working, studying or even taking care of our loved ones once in a while and go back to our caves and put things in order to be able to continue further in harmony between our mind, soul, and body where the whole mechanism works together not against each other.

We are what we think, so let’s take care of our brains the engines of thoughts and our souls the cisterns of our emotions.

Happy New Year and let 2015 bring all happiness, success and contentment to everyone in this planet.

The Universality of Human Rights

               The universality of Human Rights is just a concept and claim rather than a reality, and the answer lies in the word “universality” itself. Although we might think of Human Rights as a universal concept that should be applied to, accepted, and agreed upon by all human beings in any place in the world, but the unfortunate truth that states’ politics, cultures, and religions still play major roles to impact people’s values and acceptance to certain concepts that are out of their traditional value systems.

Despite that Human Rights seek to promote equality for all humans without considering their race, religion, nationality or gender which theoretically can prove the universality of the rights, but we can say that the background of people affects their consent to Human Rights and their actual commitment to them. The declaration of Human Rights is relatively a new concept that challenges much older traditions, cultures and religions that already set their values upon people and it is hard to go against them especially in more traditional communities which are attached to their claims of their own sovereignty, culture or religion and find Human Rights threatening because they impose new values; some might call them western values, another might call them irreligious values and others might call them individualistic or capitalistic, according to where they come from and what background they have. 

In depth, Human Rights seek the protection of individual rights; not creating collective rights designed for specific groups, which means every human being is free to operate within or out of community, religion structure and give them the protection to practice their individual freedom which might be disturbing to the law and order of certain community, religion or political structure in certain places in our small world. 

In sum, although Human Rights are universal in their claim and nature, they are not in practice and reality, not because of the content of the rights themselves but in regard of the diversity the rights challenge, not only the religious and cultural diversity of the world but the political diversity as well, which make it hard to adopt a concept by different people from different backgrounds and value systems. 

The Life Where I Come From

       Where I come from everything is intense, we take everything to the extreme، we love extremely, we hate extremely as well … we express passionately, even when we shut up our silence full of meanings.

We use our hands, faces and all body language to convey what we want, we insist and stress on everything, we probably will remind you of something thousand times.

There in that warm soil; people will celebrate you when you go to them like it is a special occasion, we take luxury and fun to new horizons … we are relaxed and do not rush anything, we take it slow and enjoy every second when we can.

There you probably would not notice the difference between rich and poor because each of them spends till the last penny in their wallet and when you ask them how they manage they will smile and tell you that tomorrow has a God and he will take care of it!

All of this intensity is not a crazy choice or a weird desire but it comes from a deep understanding of life, with extreme life, people have to face every single day … they know that they have to live the day because tomorrow might never come, they value the seconds because they know it is the most important part of the time; actually, it is what makeup minutes and hours!

They express everything without holding back because they know they might have no other chance to express their love, hate, anger, joy and even boredom. They have faith and hope because they have no other choice and that is the only thing they afford to feel to be able to survive!

Life is celebrated when everything is going well because in the midst of the chaos they live in; they know that routine is something unique, something must be appreciated and valued ... It is crazy but we get excited when the electricity is back after hours of darkness, we take pictures of the full fuel meter in the car after hours waiting in queues to fill the car; which happens that we have a lot of if to export but have a crisis to provide it to the local market!

We are simple people, enjoy basic things in life because we are deprived of them, we learned that no matter how much money we have, or what the position we hold; all this cannot make us live normally so we know money is just a way not a purpose by itself, and accordingly we use it that way.

Many people outside that part of the world fail to understand our lifestyle because for them living in these conditions is unimaginable; so better to stop trying to understand us; you need to be there and to experience certain feelings to be able to understand us,

Simply, our life is just a rollercoaster we do not control, we have the choice either to enjoy it and go with it, or cry and scream the whole ride, and it is a long long ride you enjoy your whole life because of you are doomed to be born in the dark warm soil of Yemen.

For More Success, Happiness and Effectiveness

We are never happy with where we are or what we got, either we complain about everything or want more, not that there is something wrong with that but it would be more effective if we spot the errors in our concepts and try to fix them, to see if the problem within ourselves or within the world, society or even other people.

The first question we should ask ourselves when we get in this cycle of unsatisfaction is; what is lacking in our lives or what is needed to be changed and why? The key is not the answer itself but the level of honesty we deal with ourselves, it is an attempt to explain the pure perception we hold on life; is it coming from within us, like our own values and principles, or is it something we see as a trend in the world around us?

The second question is, what is more, important to us happiness or success, and the definition of both concepts .. What is happiness? What is a success? 

Let’s ask ourselves for a moment; where did we get our perception about these concepts, and how we developed our view about them? But let’s put in mind while answering these things that such concepts are wide and stretched depends on people, different people means different meanings and values.

Recently, I browsed through books by a writer called Daniel Coyle, explaining ways to be more successful, the books were very useful but it made me question a lot of things; what is a success and how we can measure our success and according to whom? More importantly, why we are so obsessed with the idea of being more and more successful? Why not, enjoying life be happy and do whatever makes us wake up with a smile? Why the hell we live to standards set by others from their own point of view!!!

I am not saying here we all just have to be lazy and unproductive .. my point is, we stopped living our lives and fulfill our destiny by living up to the society/world standards, we stopped being ourselves just to be puppets moved by other, we do things the way others expect us to do, not because we see things that way, we stopped being happy but running in cycle looking for happiness, though as everything started from us it should end by us, we shouldn't live according to any standards but our own, our purpose in life should be living happily and fulfilling our destiny ... it is that simple!

Let explain you how, instead of taking a job you hate or not enjoy just do something you love, something you are really passionate about and good at, I will not repeat here the same things always said  about the more you in love with your work the more successful you will be but I will say: the road will be hard, it might sound way easier to accept a safe job with regular income and bearing the headache of uncertainty but; when you step toward your choice the further you go toward the thing you love you will push yourself to new limits, you will learn way more, not only about the thing you love but about yourself as well, you may fail but you will learn how to handle failure and learn from it, you will be able to find new paths that will lead you to new opportunities, you will train yourself to be whoever you want. You will learn, relearn and unlearn many things and all of this will add to you as a person and will create the unique YOU.

During this journey you will have to stop dreaming and you will have to be the initiator of every move, you will train yourself to get where you want, you will learn discipline and commitment along the way, you will be a whole different person because you are living your life according to what you want, not as how it was planned for you, that will make you an interesting person full of energy, happiness, and satisfaction … The most important, you will wake up every morning with a smile in your face because you are doing what you want to do, you will enjoy every second spent in doing that thing because it is your choice, you wouldn't mind working overtime or the workload and pressure because it will be a pleasure for you to spend time doing things you really love and enjoy, and by this, you will be more successful, not because you fulfill some requirements or standards but because you gave your whole to this and that will make it work for you despite everything.

People think that the most successful people are successful because of their habits or behaviors, while if we examined almost all successful people we would find one common thing among them all; they all did something they love and they are good at, they were more productive not because they woke up at a certain time but because they enjoyed what they were doing, they were more dedicated and committed because that was their pleasure, they got better not because they went to top schools but because they wanted to know more and more about the thing they are enjoying and working with, which allowed them not only be more knowledgeable and experienced but more creative, they all failed but they learned from failure and learned to deal with failure, which made them the successful people we see today, we didn't see their suffering and struggle to get to the top, we only see the glory and want to get there but we don't know the real story of struggle to be happily successful.  

Do you want to be more effective, successful and happy? Be yourself, follow your dreams and stop listening to others or t the world, we have our own perceptions of everything, why we should ever follow other people point of view of what is right or wrong for us, what is a success or what is happiness … the only person who knows this is you, ONLY YOU. 

Questions

Humans; the most complicated mechanism we deal with, not only filled with contradictions and puzzles, but sometimes even we are unable to understand ourselves, still we require the others to understand us and act according to what we have in our minds, sometimes without even clarification or any way of communication and then when others act according to their own senses and impulses we claim that we been treated unfairly and people are insensitive to our needs and requirements! The fascinating part is not this but totally the opposite, when some of us try to communicate and end up by complicating things more, though it is totally painful and sad but I can’t help myself but laughing at the fact that we are so messed up to the limit that despite the technologies and languages …etc still unable to communicate properly.

Through the pursue of new philosophies and ideas we started to complicate our own lives terribly, during our search for utopia we created the world of confusion, and the ideas that were supposed to unit use become the fuel to our disputes, we started to call things differently, we started to drift from our simple nature, and “primitive” started to be associated with everything negative or unsophisticated. We claim that we are more intelligent than we used to be and the newer version of us are better but a close look at the world back then and now can sum up the whole argument; the human of these days is way less happy and satisfied with what he has, more violent and more evil …. While the primitive human was happy, satisfied and less violent and lived in harmony with its surroundings, so how our pursuit for perfection turned to the worst nightmare ever, how the most idealistic concepts turned to be evil and incoherent with reality? Does our desire for idealism created unbalanced world, accordingly unstable humans’ psychology that got lost between idealism and reality? Most importantly, how this confusion messed up our mindset?

Love ... The Lost Feelings

Again away from politics, problems and the ugliness of this world. Let’s talk about love, the most overrated, abused, and in the same time ignored feelings. What is love and how it became the feeling we acknowledge as love today and why it became so painfully unsuccessful, weird and empty!

Actually the term love may refer to different types of feelings; vary from affection and compassion to preference and enjoyment to attraction and emotions but let’s see what sciences (biology, neurology and psychology) say about love:

A new psychological study led by Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a relationship; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship. Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store.

From the neurological and biological point of view, Larry Young, professor of Neuroscience at Emory University, attempts to define love in chemical terms. Young contends that love is a result of chemical reactions within the brain. Asserting that human emotion and behaviors have evolved from those found in the animal kingdom, Young argues that maternal love among a woman and her child is not that different from that of a monkey or chimpanzee. In which case, he rationalizes that maternal love can be understood as a result of the mammalian hormone oxytocin being released into the brain. Approaching love from a biological perspective, cultural anthropologist Helen Fisher, PhD. asserts that hormones, often differing form one’s own, are key, as individuals are often attracted to those whose chemical makeup differ from their own. Dopamine, a neurochemical made in the brain that is involved in many brain activities, including movement and emotion, is “a brain chemical important for controlling emotion response and the ability to feel pleasure and pain.”  In examining the biological aspect of love Fisher identifies love as it occurs in and involves three different brain circuits in addition to the chemical mix that Young mentioned.

If we looked deeply to those scientific bases or definitions of love we can notice that all scientists in different fields just focused on one or two types of love (kinship love and romantic love) ignoring not only different other types but I would go further and say more important types of love. One might think that with scientific and technological development we grow closer to understand the human nature but a quick research in not so complicated issues like, dreams, desires and behaviors may reveal for us that the more advance we go the more complications we add to our lives, and might discover that ancient civilizations might answered some of our questions in a very simple way, but since we think we are smarter now than we used to be in let’s say 2000 years ago we decided to ignore that and build up new theories based on our complicated “development”. 

If we look to what the Greeks' ideology of love we would  find they were more accurate in their views to love; Greeks for example define different types of love with different types of terminology, while in English Love is used to describe different set of feeling we find the Greeks had different terms to describe different types of love which differentiate between physical attraction, ideal love, love of the soul and the love of the body, they go further than that by defining to love someone and to be in love with someone; we find Plato refined his own definition by saying; "although Eros (is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing) is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself. Eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth by Eros. Some translations list it as love of the body." Another type of love is Philia (dispassionate virtuous love), was a concept addressed and developed by Aristotle, It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality, and familiarity. Philia is motivated by practical reasons; one or both of the parties benefit from the relationship. It can also mean love of the mind. Another types of love are Storge (is natural affection) , like that felt by parents for children, and Xenia ( hospitality and gratitude), was an extremely important practice in Ancient Greece, It was an almost ritualized friendship formed between a host and his guest, who could previously have been strangers. The host fed and provided quarters for the guest, who was expected to repay only with gratitude.

From these examples we can find that the modern view for love though it made it more complicated but ignored important parts of the emotions and feelings that can be categorized as love; it simply ignored the simplicity of love and put a huge burden on us to feel loved or to give love to others. In today’s life it became so hard to say I love to a friend, a lover, parent, child or even a person you just enjoy their company, because we limited our love feeling with two types of love (kinship and romantic love) so if you say I love you for example to a not so close friend from the opposite sex it become so weird because immediately they will think either you are in love with them or you are naïve and stupid because that’s usually the only love feeling we acknowledge in our daily life and human interactions, this created a huge emotional burden and built up a tremendous emotional barriers between us as humans, it made us more emotionally and psychologically isolated which complicated the whole system of partnership and romantic relationships because of this emotional isolation we started to put so much requirements on the romantic love or kinship love; we required our lovers, parents, siblings .. etc. to fulfill more than they can do because we deprived ourselves from other types of love which we expect two types of love should make it up to us and compensate the lack of feelings that we deprived ourselves by the misconception the modern life created which eventually led to the failure of most of the relationships we experience today; not only romantically but in all aspects of human interactions. We put so much pressure on the other and we doomed to failure because we wanted to compensate one feeling by totally different set of feelings; we can’t ask our lover to love us the same way our parents did, we can’t ask our child to love us the same way we love them, and we can’t ask  our spouses to love us the same way a lover will do, every stage of our life will bring new type of love, every person we will meet will make us feel different type of love, all we have to do is to open our hearts, eliminate expectations and lower our requirements to be able to feel these types of love from different people. Only then we will not put so much pressure on the closest people to us because we acknowledge that they are not responsible to compensate what we deprived ourselves by being emotionally isolated, that is exactly love unconditionally because we accepted life and people as it is and as they are, we didn’t put them in a test to succeed, eventually we are not a prize we are just another humans no matter how good, amazing and incredible we are, there are A LOT of other people like us out there.

Let’s live, love and enjoy simply without feeling so much pressure to do so, allow others to share their feelings with us even if they are not that close, share their lives and experiences that will enrich our lives in very incredible way, we would feel more connected, more alive and most importantly more loved not only by couple of people but by the whole universe, where peace will shadow our destiny and we might finally be about to live in harmony.

On Happiness and other silly stuff

Again the most asked question is been asked again, I have been asked this zillion times.

The person: what are you so happy about?

Me: excuse me!

The person: Just you are smiling and you look so happy, I am curious to know the reason.

Me: Okaaaaay! What makes you think I am happy, maybe I am not, I am just smiling

The person: no you look happy

Me: it is called gratitude.

The person: continue …..

Me: your bus will come soon or mine and this is broad concept … but let’s say I am happy because I am alive this morning, have health and all I need to survive… so why I won’t be happy!

The person: that’s it, you have this wide smile in this freezing cold weather because you are alive!

Me: YES! You tell me why you are so gloomy and sad?

The person: because I live in the real world and face problems like everybody else.

Me: like everybody else! So I might have problems too why I am smiling and you are not? I will tell you why… because I chose to, I have a problem right I ask myself can I solve it; if my answer is yes then why I should worry (here I noticed they wanna say something but I kept going) if my answer is no (their eyes brightened as if they are saying YES explain it smart pants) then I just ignore it because I have nothing to do about it so what’s the point of killing myself over something I can’t change.

Here I noticed that they were disappointed with my answer.

Me: Look it is the matter of choice, you can be happy and direct your energy and your unconscious mind to solve the problem which will be solved eventually or preoccupy your mind and emotions with sadness and get it distracted from solving the real problem. It is easier said than done but when we practice to get control over your feelings and mind life gets easier and all the keys of happiness will be in your hand, there is no magic or secret spell for happiness …. There is only hard way that will accompany us through our whole life and we all will fall down and cry, it is your choice to get up and dry your tears and continue your road or you can stop where you fell and stay there crying your whole life. Trust me in both cases you will suffer but if you chose the harder road of happiness you will be more satisfied because you know that happiness is a road not a destination and you been up and down but you never gave up, you will be happy because you had the choice, because you owned your life … you didn’t blame anyone on what happened to you, you feel that you are invincible because you controlled the one thing that most of people can’t control; Your mind (conscious and unconscious) because mind is a dangerous master but a beautiful servant.

We chose long time ago to blame the world, the people and the whole universe about what happens to us, we called it luck, we called it fate and we called it reality, we didn’t doubt the system for one second and questioned why what happens, happens only to certain people .. Why some people are so happy and lucky their whole life and others are miserable and suffering for their whole life! We never questioned why some people are hanging between the two worlds. Did we ask ourselves why good things tend to happen when we are happy and bad things happens when we are down? We never ask the questions that worth to be asked because we fear the answer, we fear to be accountable for our Fate, Luck and Reality; we preoccupy our minds with foolish things to distract it from what really matters …. Our happiness, success and fulfillment …. It is way easier to say all of this out of your hand and you have no control over it because then you won’t be accountable for what crosses your bath because then you will only be a puppet in the hand of invisible power that decided your whole life, because by this you will be the victim not the aggressor. By doing this you give away the only superpower you have as human being, you give away the treasure that God gave us, which is hidden nowhere but inside of us and only few people are able to see it.

I will leave you with one question, why don’t you try to take the road of happiness? What you will lose? At least you know you have tried, and there is nothing you will lose; in both cases you will be the same miserable you are today but with the happiness road you only take the chance of being happy and find your luck and meet your fate!

The person: …………………………………………………..!

Me: Have faith, not in any thing supernatural, just have faith in yourself and say “Abracadabra” and you will create what you say.

The End ;)

Originality

And she asked about originality.

I answered her: my dear being original doesn’t mean the detestation of the world or looking down to people it is something profound and deep … it is the rejection of the world in its current structure and the consistent attempts to change it through our action and our being, it is the unending battle to defeat our negativity by the strength of our positivity presence … originality doesn’t allow you to judge other people or despite people because of their behaviors, it is more about showing none acceptance for such ignorance and arrogance and accordingly raise above it. Originality, is the ability to be you, only you as clear and honest as you could be; take the water as example: it is original because it never changes its form according to what its environment, water is always water in a glass of gold or glass of mud … it saves our lives in any way we drink it because water is just water always simple yet very important for the existence of all creatures and always will be. So we should just be ourselves and serve our purpose of existence without attempts to make our presence in this planet more glorious or important than it really is, we should be ourselves with all transparency we can … originality speaks up its mind, expresses its feeling and enjoys its moment, most important originality works with life not against it because it knows that those who go against life will always lose; only then we will be important enough because we served and fulfilled our duty in this life.