As this was Saturnalia before it was Christmas, I’m off out for a Pagan night.
I am chocked up to the earballs with doing duties.
I haven’t managed to get Wake of the Raven loaded onto Amazon’s Kindle reader yet, nor Zorn either, but naff it; I’m off out.
To avoid confusion – I think I may have unintentionaly misled a few people – I’m not the author of the discourse below, which I lifted, pics and all, from Prem Rawat’s website. As he has made it his mission in life to talk publicly about peace and personal growth, I’ve no hesitation in thinking that he won’t mind at all.
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I’d like to talk about the importance of passion in our life. Often when you ask a person what their passion is, they answer something like, “Oh, I just love gardening—that’s my passion.” They like it; they enjoy it. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t. But that’s their hobby.
What can you have a real passion for in your life? What can truly ignite the fire in you to admire, to love? Something so special, so real. You cannot be passionate about something that is just in your imagination. It cannot be, “Oh, I love dragons.” Well, I like dragons, too. They’re powerful, they can fly, and they breathe fire. But I can’t touch one or go talk to one.
To be passionate about something, I need it to be really real—not a figment of my imagination. If you need to sit down on something, you check to make sure it will support your weight. You can’t sit on air; you’ll fall down.
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When I was very young, I used to love to listen to stories. If a story took all night to tell, it was fine with me. Every night, it had to be a new story. And when they would say, “And then they lived happily ever after,” I would say, “No, no, no—keep going. I want to know what this happily-ever-after is,” because that was a big assumption. The stories just freeze everything. It’s done, finished; reality is locked up. What happened?
So if we’re going to talk about passion, maybe we can begin with clearing up a few assumptions. People think, “If I have this, this, and this, all my problems will be taken care of.” But that’s not what happens in real life.
Most people have a nice long list of what they don’t want in their lives and their list of what they do want is zilch. That’s not how things work. Do you know what drives you? Do you know what inspires you? Do you know this thing that doesn’t like pain? Do you know this thing that wants you to feel peace?
With all our reasoning, we haven’t understood our nature. We haven’t understood that there is such a thing that, if our consciousness were plugged into it, would bring not just joy, but supreme joy. Joy unparalleled.
That’s what we should be passionate about. If we were, the floodgates would open. All our reasoning would not be needed. Just to understand the ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is so simple that you have to be utterly simple to be able to understand it.
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How simple? You have to have the heart of a child. What does a child have that you don’t? You’re sophisticated. You have a lot of ideas, a lot of concepts; you have seen the world. You’re a little bit seasoned. So what is it that a child has? The child has simplicity. So if you want to experience that passion, you will have to have a heart of a child.
People ask, “What do I do to become simple?” It’s not about doing; it’s about undoing. We get bogged down by the very things that we have placed in our bag as we go along in life. The burdens we have placed upon our own shoulders—we did it ourselves—are the very things that bog us down.
The key is not to measure how many miles you have come, but to enjoy every single step you take. And don’t walk so fast that it tests your endurance because, in reality, there are no benches on the side of the road. You do not get to sit down and rest because there is this thing called time attached to existence. And that is why passion becomes important. Because without passion, this life is like food without any taste. You can eat it, you can chew it, but you won’t enjoy it.
A human being is an incredibly fine, sensitive experiencing instrument. Play it with the passion it deserves and you will hear sounds that you have been yearning to hear all your life. Fortunately or unfortunately, till you play it, that yearning will never go away. And if you do play it, that yearning will simply increase. For me, when something is like that—without it, the yearning never goes away and with it, the yearning increases—this is the most accurate description of true passion.
Prem Rawat
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http://www.voiceofmaharaji.info/
It takes a long time to achieve wisdom.
Just how long, I ain’t yet finished measuring.
Nearly two weeks since I last posted anything, but I’ve been so busy with this and that, that I’ve had to let all sorts of things slide.
I had a thought a few minutes ago, that came after brooding on all sorts of stuff, and I decide to post it.
It’s not original or new, but perhaps it’s a good thought as Christmas approaches, and it’s not directed at any person or anything that’s happened recently, but it comes from thinking about a disaster in my past that shoots pain through me all too often.
And here it is.
It’s a bad idea to pull yourself up by dragging other people down.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through reading The Kite Runner, by Khalad Hosseini. Opening in Afghanistan in the mid-seventies, it tells the story of a young Afghani man’s struggle to win his father’s approval, against a background of his country’s turbulent politics, where control passes through the hands of various kings into those of Russia, and finally into the hands of the religiously fanatical Taliban.
Yet the appeal of the story lies not the changes of government, nor in the depiction of a different, Islamic culture, but in the human story of the hero, Amir, as he is caught in his own, personal turmoil. Love, fear and ambition war together, and the price of his success is betrayal and guilt. Were he to have acted out his life in any other time, place or culture, it would have made little difference. The happiness and pain of his life are personal, and the background of violent change from feudalism to communism to theocracy remains just that – a background.
And this sets me to thinking – and not for the first time – that we are all much the same. Skin colour can change, the language in which we express our belief in God, or the lack of it. Though these change, the essentials of our lives do not.
And it seems to me that the real politics, the real struggle in life, is between two spirits. One is optimistic and cheerful, that recognises love and says to strive for a better world. And one is dark and full of fear, and says to lash out and hurt, and destroy the world in hatred and despair. And these are universal, and greater than all differences in culture or religion.
And I find that these two spirits live in me also, and battle with each other.
I think that some people decide to call themselves writers, but when faced with actually writing are seized by a kind of panic. Worse, they might have decided they are poets, and then they are in double trouble.
Wanting to tell how Jack walked down the road, they perhaps writhe and strain internally, and finally, drenched in sweat and despair, blast out….
“Jack walked - the road walked Jack, century rotting strides spattering the black sky with the puss of vengeful stars each howling of meaningless birth and death, mind seething memory of whore bitch betrayal corroding every sense. Relentless, grinding, pitiless. where the sunny fields? No! Forgotten, flowers cropped to stubble devoured by the bleating goats of greedy nihilists. Beneath his feet the iron hard earth, the twitching of feverish limbs….” etc.
Not a good idea. Try “Jack walked down the road.” Then tell us what he did. You’ll last through to chapter two that way, and can go back and elaborate later.
The internet is a place where you can find information on anything.
And certainty on nothing.
A few years ago I was in a hotel in Atlanta. A group of people were in the city for a business convention, and in the evening they met together in the bar, standing with drinks in a little knot. Mainly they were men in their twenties or thirties, regular guys, marketing types, but at the centre of the bunch was an attractive girl, blonde, perhaps a little over twenty. She was popular, and flirtatious, and a few of the guys flirted back.
Was she bored by all the business affairs dominating their talk, or did she want to grasp the centre of attention more firmly? I don’t know, but whatever the case, she suddenly spoke up in a clear voice: “I once had a sexual affair with another girl,” she announced brightly.
There was an immediate dead silence, that lasted a few seconds, and then conversation resumed as though she’d never spoken. No one took the bait, no one asked the interesting questions of who, and how, and when and where, and the dry discussion of sales techniques continued as though never interrupted, and the brief startling incident was swallowed into history, gone.
But I doubt that it was forgotten. Not by me at any rate, for it set going in my mind a question, or rather a whole flock of questions, that circled this blunt statement like inquisitive vultures. For though we know quite well such things happen, and so have no cause to wonder, it is not everyday we see such bold declarations thrown down like a challenging gauntlet amid a group of serious enough business types.
How exactly does such a taboo’ed fling occur? I wondered. She was pretty, reasonably clever and popular, obviously liked men, and didn’t seem to have any unusual personality traits that would label her – to some people – as “strange,” or “not our type of person,” or any of these little classifications used to safely fence off some people, and corral them in the state of loners.
This made me think she probably had a bunch of female friends who were much the same. I pictured them, and thought of the many times Saturday night would have rolled round for them, and phone calls would decided the when and where for the evening. They’d have gone through the whole ritual of shower, makeup, deciding what to wear, tossing aside rejected items onto the bed, and finally deciding: yes! this is the thing for tonight, to outdo Jill and impress Brian. And when with her female friends she’d had those little conferences that men aren’t privy to, those earnest whispered meetings in powder rooms, those chats over coffee, where confidential secrets are exchange…. Would not she too have spoken that safe, accepted language, dealing with such feminine essentials as what he’d done that made Rachel so angry, or why Sarah wasn’t safe to allow near a boyfriend?
Moving in this accepted world of accepted scandal, by what means had she and some girl advanced on each other? If all her friends were man-oriented, as it seemed she was, what words, what faint suggestion had first been exchanged that strengthened to a purpose, that inflamed to a coupling? Or was I too naïve, forgetting that appearances are no more than that, and she and half her friends always were loons, ready for any fun and games. Or was it something that happened in an un-planned instant: a few drinks, a suggestive joke, and the pair fell on each other with no further ceremony?
Was I interested in this in the way that men regard such affairs, finding it sexually fascinating? No, not particularly, no more than usual. It was the question of the Dialogue, the words by which people communicate, and strangers become friends, then intimates. Cause and effect, where triumph or disaster may grow from a tiny seed. Faint ideas that grow into obsessions. Authors love these.
I never saw the girl again, I never asked the questions, I never learned the answers.
But this little happening – a trivial thing, that could lead to laughter, or to murder – this stuck in my mind, and some years later tangled itself with a few other such true stories of people’s unpredictable doings. The resulting mix boiled, and grew, and developed guessed at details, till one day I wrote it down.
And I called the novel Wake of the Raven.
I’m encouraged by the increased sales of my first novel, Wake of the Raven, with James Patterson’s novel, The Quickie on amazon.com
But….
I’m too busy to blog much about it. I’m trying to get my act together to get my second, Zorn, out for Christmas.
Byeee
Later – But this is too brief a post, so let me put in a short excerpt.
From chapter 34, “I Did That,” Wake of the Raven.
Now that the sign was finished, he wondered if he’d asked too much of her? No, not really. He’d done all the digging, although she’d snatched up the mattock and had a hack now and again, and she’d dragged all the sod away. One hell of a load of soil though, he thought, all those square yards, it must amount to tons. If I’d had a platoon of infantry here with me to do it, then there’d have been no end of grumbles. But do it yourself, and who is there to grumble too?
“Lieutenant Ellis, your command is considerably shrunken,” he murmured, and sat on the sand. Tania looked back as she climbed the little rise that preceded the scrubland; she waved and disappeared around the bend of the treeline. “My troops,” he murmured. A long time since he’d had men under him, where they had to obey, yes sir no sir, and then him off and saluting to someone over himself. That had been all right during the war; in war there was no other way but orders and authority. No use in peacetime though; then it was all bull. He’d had a few employees since of course, but that was different. And one wife of course.
Let’s not forget the one wife, no indeed. Not that he’d expected obedience. Decency yes, and some kind of sense of reason, but not obedience. In the end he’d had none of the three. Still, what could you expect; she’d been spooning with a major before they met, and she thought her family were God knows what important. “Pampered bitch,” he muttered.
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What is the nature of light? We all know that when light comes, darkness cannot stay. It goes away. Light is the only thing that can make darkness go away. But that’s not the only quality of light. There’s another quality. Whatever it falls upon, it illuminates. And this process happens by reflection. Each object—each person, the walls, the ceiling, the carpet—has the quality that it can reflect light. When it does, light falls on your eye, and you can see that object.
What does this mean to us as human beings? It means that when light falls on us, what we absorb and especially what we reflect gives us a color. This is the color we will be seen as.
If you absorb everything and reflect hate, if it’s all dark, no problem. But if the light falls on you and you are reflecting hate, it will become visible. If you are reflecting peace, that will become visible. A family knows when the father is angry just by one look, “Oops. Father is angry. Disappear.”
So, the question is, what do you reflect? What do you want to reflect? Do you reflect the color, “I know everything”? I’m not making a judgment. I’m not here to say that’s a pretty color or an ugly color. I am not an interior decorator.
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Somebody once asked me, “How would you describe what you do?” I said, “I am the one who carries the mirror, puts it in front of people, and says, ‘Look at yourself. Do you like what you see? Great. If you don’t like what you see, maybe you can fix it.’ This is all I can do—carry the mirror.”
Some people don’t want to look in the mirror. A lot of people feel threatened by the subject of peace because they don’t want somebody to redefine their world by telling them what peace is, what joy is. I am here to point out some simple facts: This is your life. You exist. You’re here temporarily, and this earth is temporary. One day—not tomorrow—it is not going to be here.
Recently, I was on a veranda overlooking the city. It was still early. All you could see were lights in people’s houses. It looked so tranquil, but there are incredible dramas going on. There are people who are happy or unhappy, people who are fighting or just want to sleep. Amongst those lights, new hopes are being formed and dreams are being shattered. A drama behind a veil that seems so tranquil. An incredible drama.
So, you have this ability to reflect. What do you want to reflect? Do you want to reflect peace because you feel peace, contentment because you feel content? Would you like to have a slight tinge of gratitude? Do you want to feel joy? A joy that is real, that comes from within you, that does not seek triggers from the outside? These hues are not imagination. They have to be real. If they’re not real, their reflection will not happen.
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A lot of people say, “Oh, I have felt peace before.” This is like saying, “I don’t need to eat today; I ate last week!” Some people think you feel peace once in your life, and that’s it. No. You need to feel peace every day of your life—that’s the kind of peace you need.
People go near a quiet lake and say, “Oh, it’s so peaceful.” Quietness is not an attribute of peace. They have a definition of peace and go around looking for it. But if you’re looking for peace by description, you will never find it. Why? How do you search for something you already have? The word “searching” assumes you’ve lost it. But you never lost it. It’s within you.
You have an amazing possibility, and that is to reflect the color of the infinite that is within you. Forget green, blue, and yellow. If you are going to reflect a color, reflect the infinite. This color has shades of peace and hues of contentment. Not questions, but answers. Not ideas, but realities. When you begin to be filled with the color of what is within you, you shine.
As long as you’re alive, the light is shining. You need to shine, too. It can happen.
http://www.voiceofmaharaji.info/
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