I M Perfect lady

Tag: questions

  • Bring into the New Year.

    As I sit here on New Years Day, I am not filled with wishful expectations, nor am I hoping for a better year…and then sitting back to see what happens.  

    I have learned that Life is a game where you get what you give….and the more you put into it, the more you get back.  I know that karma works.  I know that the Universe doesn't just randomly give out bumps in the road for no reason, that each hurdle comes with a gift of freedom, IF I face it squarely and be completely honest with myself.

    So, there is no point in wishing. However,  I remember Oprah saying she wanted to have a year of Love and Peace….and all she got that year were challenges for her to find peace and love in the worst of situations.  A challege if you will, in loving the unlovable.

    With that in mind, be careful what you wish for.

    For your wishes are God's command.  

    I don't really have wishes, but it does feel like I have just begun to live…or perhaps grasp what living is about.

    In Elie Wiesel's book "Open Heart" he writes,

    "Yes, I have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not yet begun."  

    "Too Late?"

    "Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat."

    "At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair.  For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there a chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing.  Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…?"

    "I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?"

    "What shall I say to God?  That I was also counting on His help?  Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?"

    Later on he writes,

    "A credo that defines my path: "I belong to the generation that has often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by mankind. And yet, I believe we must not give up on either."

    "Was it yesterday – or long ago- that we learned how human beings have been able to attain perfection in cruelty?  That for the killers, the torturers, it is normal, thus human, to act inhumanely?  Should one therefore turn away from humanity?"

    "The answer, of course, is up to each of us.  We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.  Or not."

    "I know – I speak from experience – that even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion.  That it is possible to feel free inside a prision. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor.  That one instant before dying, man is still immortal."

    " There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.  I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed and preverted by the enemies of mankind.  And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console."  

    "As a Jew, I believe in the coming of the Messiah. But of course this does not mean that the world will become Jewish; just that it will become more welcoming, more human.  I belong, after all, to a generation that has learned that whatever the question, indifference and resignation are not the answer."

    "Illness may diminish me, but it will not destroy me. The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is. The brain will be buried, but the memory will survive it."

    "Such is the miracle: The tale about despair becomes the tale against despair."  

    He also writes in chapter 15,

    "Such are the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing the ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul."

    "I am eighty-two years old.  As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges."

    "Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire's outcry in his Mon coeur mis a nu  (My Heart Laid Bare): There exists in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan."  Have I distinquished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?"

    "My life unfolds before me like a film: landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva recieved from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths."

    "Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret of forbidden knowledge?"

    "To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald.  A slight volume; Night.  First in Yiddish, "and the world remained silent," in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension.  Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the results would probably still have been unsatisfactory.  I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth:  I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better.  In my writings about the Event, did I commita sin by saying too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from moring till night, under a silent sky."'

    "I have written some fifty works – most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims' memory.  I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often publish works – articles, novels on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner.  My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies.  To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere."  Elie Wiezel

    He continues to ask great questions of himself at 82 years of age….and his reflection will be ours someday.

    I wonder if we ask his questions of ourselves today, will we at 82 still be living with questions…and perhaps the questions are how we move into a deeper life…to fully live, aware.

    I do understand how knowing the evil of mankind, he yet believes in mankind.

    How the silence of God doesn't have him no longer believing there is a God.

    And, when or can you write enough about the subject of victims?

    He and I are not on the same scale on the specturm, but even at my lower end, it matters.

    Have I too, distinquished the path to evil?  

    I still am a faithful believer in mankind…that is the energy I bring into the New Year.


  • Fit into their Framework

     "The Seat of the Soul," by Gary Zukav

    "When a question is asked that cannot be answered within the common frame of reference, it can be classified as nonsensical, or it can be dismissed as a question that is not appropriate, or the person asking the question can expand his or her consciousness to encompass a frame of reference from which the question can be answered.  The first two options are the easy way out of a confrontation with a question that appears to be nonsensical or inappropriate, but the seeker, the true scientist, will allow himself or herself to expand into a frame of reference from which the answers that he or she is seeking can be understood."

    "We, as a species, have been asking the questions, "Is there a God?", "Is there a Divine Intelligence?", and "Is there a purpose to life?", for as long as we have been able to articulate questions.  The time has now come for us to expand into a frame of reference that allows these questions to be answered."

    "The larger the frame of reference of the multisensory human allows an understanding of the experientially meaningful distinction between the personality and the soul.  Your personality is that part of you that was born into, lives within, and will die within time.  To be a human and to have a personality are the same thing.  Your personality, like your body, is the vehicle of your evolution."

    "The decisions that you make and the actions that you take upon the Earth are the means by which you evolve.  At each moment you choose the intention that will shape your experiences and those things upon which you will focus your attention.  These choices affect your evolutionary process.  This is so for each person.  If you choose unconsciously, you evolve unconsciously.  If you choose consciously, you evolve consciously."

    "The fearful and violent emotions that have come to characterize the human existence can be experienced only by the personality.  Only the personality can feel anger, fear, hatred, vengeance, sorrow, shame, regret, indifference, frustration, cynicism and loneliness.  Only the personality can judge, manipulate and exploit.  Only the personality can pursue external power.  The personality can also be loving, compassionate, and wise in its relations with others, but love, compassion and wisdom do not come from the personality. They are the experience of the soul."

    "Your soul is that part of you that is immortal.  Every person has a soul, but a personality that is limited in its perception to the five senses is not aware of its soul, and, therefore, cannot recognize the influences of its soul."

    "As a personality becomes multisensory, its intuitions – it hunches and subtle feelings – become important to it.  It senses things about things about itself, other people, and the situations in which it finds itself that it cannot justify on the basis of the information that its five senses can provide."

    "It comes to recognize intentions, and to respond to them rather than to the actions and words that it encounters.  It can recognize, for example, a warm heart beneath a harsh and angry manner, and a cold heart beneath polished and pleasing words."  Gary Zukav

    In reading about the two different actual types of human beings -those who live secluded in a frame of reference of the five senses, and others with a much broader frame of reference makes all the difference in the world in how you live your life.

    My first 46 years I lived pretty much in a five sense body, and in the framework of the FALC.  All questions asked were brought to this network and answered there or dismissed.  Mostly, in my experience anything that would mar the shiny surface of the FALC, were labeled inappropriate.

    Stepping out of that tiny framework, a whole big world opened up.  It was like leaving a boxed in life…to live free.

    Now, when questions arose, there was nothing stopping me from exploring deeper or being fearless of the answers 'wrecking' or damaging the belief within the small frame.

    Living within in a small frame of reference, allows very limited responses.  And tossing out questions and ideas is much easier than pondering why they can't be answered within your framework.

    The 'simple faith' is to remain in a very small framework.

    The saying to believe like a child doesn't ring true. For children are born frame-less and we build a framework for them to live inside.  I believe that children are naturally curious and inquisitive and are fearless as they seek answers, not caring what side of the framework threatens to collapse based upon what it finds.

    A secondary framework is the family, like a box in a box…where there too are questions we don't ask or label 'inappropriate' in order to keep the framework from collapsing.

    Seeing your life as being framed by family and religion, will allow you to see the setting upon which you stand.  

    I didn't know how blocked in I was, until it all collapsed around me.

    As the framework lay on the ground, I was left standing…the part of me that wasn't tied into the framework, my soul.

    The soul me didn't fear any questions or the truthful answer.  It was a part of me that had been covered up and repressed for years….and blocked out by the framework.

    I know that those who can't explore deeply the questions or follow a gut feeling to its end, have way too much of themselves invested in the framework.

    Their point of reference lies within its walls.

    The answers to the questions depend more upon where you are asking them from, than where the answers are coming from.  In fact, some are not even allowed to ask the questions…or ponder their existence.

    Most strict religions work diligently to put their children in the churches framework, and to keep the child separated from their natural curiosity, frankness and Truth, to separate the child from their Soul.

    A free soul does not fit into their framework.

    IMG_2950

    Photograph by Hannah Jukuri

  • My mind’s point of view.

    Byron Katie says, “There are no mistakes” and I have to agree. We do that which we do with the knowledge and awareness we have at the time, when we know better or believe differently we do better.

    It isn’t a mistake it is a level of understanding.

    I even looked up the word Mistake and here is the definition,

    An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. 2. A misconception or misunderstanding.

    Some how we were taught that mistakes were bad, yet in reality it is a case of deficient knowledge and defective jugement.

    We can only act at the level of understanding, it is impossible to be above your level of knowing, it simply can’t happen.

    Byron Katie’s passion is to question stressful thoughts, to go after the thoughts that make us suffer.

    Mostly I think we suffer believing we are supposed to be where we are not, doing things we didn’t know how to do.

    We are where we are.

    We know what we know.

    And we can’t know what we don’t know.

    And once we know we can’t not know.

    It seems that life is all about being here and agreeing with what you know now, accepting yourself in this moment fully.

    Looking backwards you can see with your new found wisdom the places you missed the mark, but due to your level of understanding in that moment, it makes perfect sense, so no mistake, just the lack of knowing.

    On that dreadful day when I woke up to the fact that all I knew was not all there was to know, I found that I knew much less than there was to know.

    My greatest strength was being able to let go of all I knew to begin to learn about the things I didn’t.

    I simply sat down in the fact that I lived a life at the tip of the iceberg and it was to my own benefit to get to know me. Imagine living as me but knowing me.
    An incredible frightful place to find yourself living as someone you don’t know.

    My first step was to admit to myself I didn’t know me, know where I came from who the people I called family were, I began looking at my life as a stranger would.

    I began from the stance of I know nothing.

    And by doing so was able to be open to everything.

    I had lost confidence in all I knew and had no pre-sets or standards to adhere to, I was standing naked in an open space willing to see reality without my minds concepts.

    Mindless I stood.

    The landscape I then discovered didn’t match my old mind at all.

    We then danced this dance between reality and my old mind, like a game of old maid, trying to see what matched and what did not.

    In the end my mind lost only but 100% of the time.

    As Byron Katie says, reality is God and God is reality.

    I guess we could say the only mistake is believing an unchallenged mind.

    For I challenged my mind against reality, nothing was too sacred for the test, no family member, no title, no past cute deeds, all I dragged into the game of matching mind to reality.

    My mind was so far off the mark, that I began to understand that I fell into reality with a broken mind.

    Or you could say I went out of my mind on that day when I discovered a pedophile instead of a dad.

    And I did.

    My mind had a story that didn’t match reality, a story that I held sacred was an illusion, it couldn’t walk in reality.

    All my love, my life and my way was poured into an illusion that wasn’t even true.

    At 46 I awoke in the middle of a nightmare, in a play where I was the star but it was based upon lies, lies that I called truth. My fantasy world crumbled and a nightmare slid in place.

    Harsh reality boldly took over where my pretend mind stood.

    Yet this reality was actually kind to me, it affirmed my path, it resonated with my body, and it set me free from the mental mind.

    If your mind is not clear and you can’t see reality, you are then living in a foreign land, once removed from reality.

    You can live there for a lifetime and not touch reality.

    I know this seems insane and it is, to be in reality and not know it.

    I lived for 46 years in a mind that was blind to what is.

    Doing things that no one in their right mind would do.
    Saying and believing things that only an insane person would do.

    Yet there are no mistakes in my past.

    My past life was lived from my mind’s point of view.

  • Listen…

    The 20 most important questions we should be asking ourselves is the theme of Martha Beck’s column in The O Magazine for February.

    There are many great questions, but I love this one.

    “Is this what I want to be doing?” This very moment is, always, the only moment in which you can make changes. Knowing which changes are best for you comes, always, from assessing what you feel. Ask yourself many times every day if you like what you are doing. If the answer is no, start noticing what you’d prefer. Thus begins the revolution.” Martha

    Most often I hear what people don’t want to be doing while they are doing it.

    We call it complaining or whining.

    Yet what we fail to Hear is the actual words.

    Maybe it isn’t so much in asking the question, but listening to your voice or complaints, whether they are spoken out loud or silent behind, as begrudgingly does that which you don’t want to do.

    And I love her first question.

    What questions should I be asking myself? At first I thought asking yourself what you should be asking yourself was redundant. It isn’t. Without this question, you wouldn’t ask any others, so it gets top billing. It creates an alert, thoughtful mind state, ideal for ferreting out the information you most need in every situation. Ask it frequently. Martha

    Both of these questions can be life changing if you ask the questions with integrity and listen to your body and how you feel and then be courageous enough to actually follow through.

    Ask a bunch of questions today and listen…

  • Resolve who I am.

    It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.

    How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?

    What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.

    They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.

    Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.

    As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.

    The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.

    The act of answering, solving…

    Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.

    Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.

    It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.

    My resolution is to resolve who I am.