Intimacy

Everybody wants intimacy.  We long for intimacy because we don’t want to be alone.  We’d like to have at least someone whom we can trust, to whom we can open all our wounds because the wounds cannot heal unless they are open.   At the same time, we’d also like the other person to be intimate with us.  We’d like him to become vulnerable, drop his defenses, masks, and open his wound to us. 

We all have needs:  to be needed, to be loved, and to be accepted.   But we don’t want to accept that.  We are not what we appear to be.  We live like pretentious hypocrites.   This is why we fear intimacy.  Everybody is afraid of intimacy.  We want to be intimate with the other person but we are not dropping our defenses.  We don’t want to come in utter nudity and sincerity with the other person. 

So unless we drop our repressions, inhibitions, and other taboos, we will never be intimate with someone.  But before we can even attempt intimacy with someone, we will have to attempt intimacy with ourselves.  We must accept ourselves in our totality, in spite of what were taught.  If we cannot accept ourselves totally, how can someone else accept us?  Our acceptance and openness with ourselves will help others to accept themselves and to open to us.  We will find out that not only we are full of weaknesses but others too are full of weaknesses.  We will find that beauty is not of being strong, but of being fragile. 

Are you ready to be an open book, available for all to read?  

Self-Conscious

Reflecting life, I can say that I am fairly a self-conscious person.  I take seriously in what others say about me.  I follow people’s advice.  I try to be respectful.  I try to please them.  I constantly have my eyes open for collectibles to decorate my ego house.  I seek others to certify my beliefs, intelligence, and beauty.  I depend on others to tell me who I am.  And because I don’t have a strong foundation, it is difficult for me to hear the opinions of others, particularly those that are not in agreement with my beliefs in fear that they may shake my foundation and my beautifully decorated house would fall down.  My ego is always at guard for fear of annihilation.  Here is an interesting paradox:  Whenever I am self-conscious, I become unconscious.  Because I don’t have a real center, I cling to other for my center. I am always concern with what others would say about me.  I am constantly searching outside for understanding, support, validation, or approval from others.  I am also searching for eprops .

It will be very enlightening to understand this letter written by Paddy to his beloved Maureen:

My Darling Maureen,

     I would climb the highest mountain for your sake, and swim the wildest sea.  I would endure any hardships to spend a moment by your side. 

Your ever-loving,

Paddy

P.S.  I’ll be over to see you on Friday night if it is not raining.

When you say to someone “I love you,” have you ever thought what you mean? 

Atheist and Theist

When we think about it, there is no difference between an atheist and a theist.Both are traveling in the same boat.Both are closed minded.Both have beliefs.Both have accepted something on faith without any inquiry.

An atheist believes is his disbelief that there is no God.A theist believes is his belief that there is God. Disbelief is as ignorant as belief.Communism does not believe in God.Religions believe in God.Neither bothers to inquire whether God really does not exist nor does exist.An atheist has accepted that there is no God, in the same way as the theist has accepted that there is a God.The communist believes in Das Kapital, and the Christian believes in the Bible.Both have the same mind of beliefs only different content.

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The X-Men is one of my favorite movies.

You Are Cyclops

Dedicated and responsible, you will always remain loyal to your cause. You are a commanding leader – after all, you can kill someone just by looking at them. Power: force beams from your eyes

Individuality versus Personality

I often hear others speaking about improving their personality.  Do you think you should improve your personality? 

Personally, I think we should spend our time and energy in discovering our individuality instead.  Individuality is something that is given to us at birth.  It is our nature, our essential being.  It is original and authentic.  It is rooted in us.  Personality is a plastic.  It is a phony.  It has no root.  It is a mask that people have put over us. 

Personality may repress individuality.  But individuality will call us again and again. It will not be in peace.  We can pretend not to hear it for a time, but know that nature has ways of asserting itself. There will be conflict.  This conflict will divide, create a split, schiz, and eventually we will breakdown.  Then, we will find that we spend all our time and energy engaging in the warfare within ourselves from money to relationship to sex.  We can never find inner peace when there is a split. 

We don’t need to add more layers of personality.  It’s time to let it go.  We can save a lot of headaches, lies, and deceits in our relationships if we just find the courage to take the mask off.  Love and respect yourself.  Be proud of who you are, whatever you are.  Just ”be”.

Comparison

Each one of us is unique.  You are you and I am me. A Buddha is a Buddha, and Christ is a Christ.  No comparison is possible.  Comparison creates the way of the ego.  It creates superiority and inferiority.  It creates great desires to compete and to defeat others.  The desire to defeat others creates jealousy, envy, hatred, enmity, aggression, and violence.  This is a living in hell. 

So, drop the stupid ideas of superiority and inferiority.  We should be aware when our mind quietly made comments like “I am right and they are wrong.  I have the truth and they don’t.  I am better than they are.”  The truth is you are neither inferior nor superior.  You are simply you.  There exists no one like you, even your twins, no one whom you can be compared.  God made you and destroyed the mold. 

As parents, we should try to be aware when we say things that create comparison in our children.  Although it is done through unawareness, it is still poisonous.  Once this happened, children will never think about themselves.  They will always think in comparison with someone else.  The poison of comparison create symptoms of miserable and discontentment and will carry them into adulthood.  Then, it will be difficult to find a happy person on this earth. 

We have all been conditioned from a young age to believe that our religion is the true religion.   A Christian believes her religion is the only true religion in the world, all other religions are false.  Not only that she believes this to be true, she may also believe that her denomination is the only true denomination that represents Christianity, all other denominations are false.  This same belief applies with the Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim.

I have been thinking about organized religions and the beliefs they are teaching.  There are advantages and disadvantages in having organized religion.  Organized religions provide great tools in helping me finding the true religion.  Organized religions act as rafts to help me get over to the other side of the river.  At some point, I just have to find the courage to let the rafts go because the journey takes longer time with me hauling them around.  I like the concept of traveling light. 

A bonsai tree grows older but not taller because its roots have been pruned.  Like the bonsai tree, sometimes I feel that religions have stunt our growth by pruning our roots.  These include our doubts and our own nature.  Having doubts allow us to grow taller, to experience, to inquire.  When our own nature is being condemned or pruned, how can we flow, grow, and learn to take our own course in life?  Without these roots, we know nothing about our own depths.  We will remain superficial human being, with no profundity, and no authenticity.  We need to nurture all the roots we have to anchor the storms of life.

Selfishness

I would like to know what motivate you to help others. What is your goal?  What are you going to gain out of it? Why do you feel good about helping others?  Do you help them for their own sake or do you help them for your own sake?  Do you help them because you want to help yourself by earning the right to enter the kingdom of God?  Do you help them because you were taught that helping others is a good trait and so you do it for recognitions?  Or do you help them because you feel guilty by seeing them suffer and so for your own interest, you help them to make you feel better?  While providing service to others, do you feel torn?  In other words, have you thought about the possibility of crippling and humiliating them by helping them?   I’d also like to know what motivate you to seek for spirituality, God, Christ, Buddha and so on?  Is it because you want to ultimately attain joy by liberating yourself from pain and suffering for selfish interest? Do you have the courage to admit that most of the things you do is for your own selfish needs?  I’d like to hear your honest answers. 

All religions in the world teach the practice of unselfishness by helping, serving, or saving others.  Why is there any need for service?  I don’t know.  Maybe you can help me understand.  But unless we come to a point where our “selves” dissolve into the universal, we cannot be truly unselfish.  We can pretend, but we will only be hypocrites.  Selfishness is part of our nature.   We have to accept it.  It is because of selfishness that we have survived.  Otherwise humanity would have disappeared long ago. Is the orchid selfish when it blooms? Is the sun selfish when it shines?  The orchid and the sun have something to share without making extra efforts.  Our first and foremost responsibility is to bloom so that we would have something to share.   

Honoring the Child

Before Ron and I dropped Chelsea off the school last wednesday, I expressed my gratitude to her in the car.  I said, “Thank you for chosen us as your parents.”  She had this puzzle look on her face and responded back, “God made me for you.”  I said,” True, God made you and you had a choice in picking your parents and you chose us as your parents.”  She just smiles.  I love that precious face. 

I think it is important that parents give love and respect to the child because the child is a guest from the unknown.  She is a child of God.  God only lends her to us and God can take her back anytime God wants.  So we have to be respectful of God’s child who is our guest.  As parents, one way we can show the child love and respect is to give her the freedom, life, and uniqueness she deserves to grow.   We can do this by allowing her to be herself what ever that means, accepting her as her natural self wherever it leads.   

Another way we can help her is to remain open to the unknown future.  We can help her be a seeker, and not a knower or a believer because beliefs stop all search and inquiry.  Seeking, searching, inquiring will be her religion.  We can help by sharing our experience with her, but not force her to be like us or reproduce carbon copies of ourselves because she is an original, a unique being.

I’ve reached an impasse here on Xanga. 

Any Suggestion?