Day 190: The Power of Truth
03 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Kindness, Truthfulness, Uncategorized Tags: einstien, truth, virtues for wellbeing
THE WORLD AS I SEE IT — BY ALBERT EINSTIEN –
(Einstien speaks about Truth)
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”
“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
Day 180: The Gift of Self-Awareness
18 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment
in Compassion, Forgiveness, Love, Peacefulness, Truthfulness Tags: self awareness, self-actualization, self-improvement, Spirituality, virtues for well-being
Self-Awareness
This truly is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. Why they don’t teach us that in Kindergarten I really don’t know! My goodness, why did I have to strive for 32 years to find out who it was that was in my heart all along — Myself!
Today, I was thinking that it might be useful if I design these Virtues entries in a way of meditation, so that when you come on the site, or when you receive this blog in your inbox it can be a meditation for the day.
Meditation helps us to discover or uncover our True Selves that is buried, for so many of us it’s buried, beneath the coverings of who we think we should be or who we have been told to be. Discovering our True Self is difficult because, and this is just my opinion, but it is difficult because our True Self is our Highest Self or our Most Virtuous Self, our Soul, so to speak. Our True Self desires only Peace and lives in Peace.
So, if we had a lot of experiences that were not Peaceful in our lives then our thoughts and feelings became reflections of those events and reflected the opposite of Peace — this could be manifested as fear, loneliness, addiction, self-damaging behaviours, aggression, criminal activity, depression, anxiety, etc. The key to finding our True Self is to accept these feelings, accept the history that brought them there, and then let them go. Forgiveness, Compassion and Acceptance are needed. Without these there can be no inner peace.
What does all this have to do with Self-Awareness? A lot! Because “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.” (Quoted from the Baha’i Writings)
TRUTHFULNESS! Such a challenging concept in a culture that values deceit. We live in a culture of hiding, covering up, making excuses, passing off responsibility, seeing what we can get away with without “getting caught”! We do. And so to begin to be Truthful with oneself is to begin to go against the grain. The benefit of doing something that not many others are doing is that you know of a certainty that it will bring you to your True Self. The challenge is that it will not be easy and you will confront confrontation along the way.
The Reward? If you can become truthful with yourself then you will gain true self-awareness. Debbie Ford says that “Self-Awareness is the Key to Freedom.” So — to step out from whatever “prison” you are in…to embrace the freedom to “BE” that is rightfully yours…the very, very, very first step is to become truthful to yourself.
I would recommend that in your actions towards becoming more truthful that you also carry with you compassion or love too because without it you may just find yourself so upset with yourself that you get yourself stuck in cycles of negative thinking (believe me, I’ve been there.) Compassion and Forgiveness are on the same team as Truthfulness and together these three virtues will begin you on the path towards Freedom — which is Inner Freedom — which is the Freedom to LIVE fully awake to yourself and your life — which is to live the life that you were meant to have — which is a life of Peace and Fulfillment. Nothing less.
