Life in itself is an empty canvas,
it becomes whatsoever you paint on it.
You can paint misery, you can paint bliss.
This freedom is your glory.
- Osho
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Utopian by Nature
It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without people who dream, who have a vision of what they would like to see. I can’t think of anyone who would say, “We’ve arrived at a perfect existence, so let’s retain it.” There are always things that are distressing and that we think could be bettered, so we imagine improvements. That impulse has not died out, and if it ever does, I don’t think we’ll have human beings on earth any longer. We’ll have some other form of life, which I can’t imagine. - Fritzie P. Manuel
By Jessica Roemischer
Human beings, by nature, are Utopian. We dream and we hope, and since the dawn of civilization, we have conjured notions of an ideal and perfect existence. From the bucolic realms of the Garden of Eden to Plato’s republic of philosopher-kings, from the island paradise of Thomas More’s Utopia to the libertarian collectives of nineteenth-century America to the counterculture communes of the 1960s, the ways in which utopia has been envisioned have changed dramatically over time. But whatever forms they have taken, Utopian ideals have helped drive forward an unfolding process of reinvention, a process whereby humankind has sought, through vision and experimentation, a new and better life. Indeed, Utopian visions, and the social experiments they inspired, are a product of our most freely creative faculty, the human imagination. They are an expression of the universal impulse to create the new - to reshape culture and even consciousness itself.
From an Enlighten Next editorial
Image source unknown but greatly appreciated
Image source unknown but greatly appreciated
Saturday, January 28, 2012
It's All in Your Mind
There was once in China an expert archer. One day he went to a very high mountain with his bow on his back. While strolling on the mountain, he became thirsty and wanted to drink water. Fortunately, he found a small spring under a bush. He bent the bush and scooped the water with his hands. He drunk out of his hands until his thirst was quenched. It was only when he finished drinking that he thought he saw a snake crawling in the water. He immediately felt sick and wanted to spit out the water he had drunk, but the water would not come out. He became seriously nervous about the water in his stomach, feeling something wriggling in it. He was more than certain that he swallowed the snake. When he got back home he fell seriously ill. Numerous doctors gave him medical treatment, but in vain. Finally, he became nothing but skin and bones, resigning himself to die.
One day a traveler stopped at his home. Seeing the condition of the patient, he asked the reason. The patient told him that he saw a snake crawling in the water of the spring and that he had most certainly swallowed the beast.
The traveler said that he could cure the illness if the patient would do as he told him to do, taking him to the same spring where he had drunk the water.
He told the patient, who was still bearing the same bow on his back, to take exactly the same pose as he had the first time he was there. The patient reluctantly bent over the water and was just going to scoop it up with his hands when he screamed out, that a snake was crawling in the water again. The man told him to be quiet and to observe the snake more closely. The archer got control of himself and found that what he saw was not a snake, but a reflection of the bow he was carrying on his back.
When the sick archer realized that the snake he thought he had swallowed before was only a reflection of his bow, he felt very relieved and soon regained his health...
We must recognize that our mind is the creator of our world and our fate. Our senses play tricks on our minds and yet, we live in fear of things that are not even there. Just as the dust of fear accumulated on the archer's mind and he become healthy again when he was able to wipe the dust away, we must scrutinize our beliefs that obscure the reality of our existence. Only then we will be able live fulfilled lives.
Image by Chris Tamdjidi
Image source here
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