Befriending Yourself

A life worth living is a life that needs constant re-examinations. Pause every once in a while to see where life is taking you. Are you in the driver’s seat or are you just tagging along with the flow of life? Are you being gentle and fair to yourself or are you sabotaging your own success without being aware of it? Are you your own best friend or are you your own worst enemy?

How do you befriend yourself?

1. Serve your own physical needs

Our first needs as physical human beings are our physical needs. That means taking in good nutritious food, clean water and air, exercise regularly and have enough sleep and recreations.

2. Be authentic with your feelings

Next, frequently examine your feelings, especially the negative ones, such as fear, anger, irritations, anxieties and worries. Identify the thoughts that lead to these feelings. Examine them and you’ll see that most of our fears are born from our own imaginations. They are self created, not real and due to a certain belief or assumption that we are falsely holding on to.

Learn to be honest and recognize your feelings, acknowledge them and embrace them. Take responsibility for your own feelings and not blame them on others or outside circumstances. You’ll find that you do have a choice to choose what you want to feel. When you are not
aware of your feelings and how they come about, then you forfeit that choice. Your feelings just come on autopilot.

3. Learn and improve your living skills

We are here to learn, so learn! There is nothing wrong in making mistakes. Everyone does. The important thing is to learn from our mistakes. It is said that a fool continues to make the same mistakes, the common man learns from his mistakes, and the wise learn from the mistakes of others. Choose which category you want to be in.

To improve our life, there are certain living skills worth learning. Learn to communicate well with others. Be a good listener. Learn to empathize with others. Social skills are essentials not just for success but also for a sense of happiness, belonging and self worth.

4. Be at peace with God

Finally, do not focus your life entirely on material possessions and accumulation. As you near the end of your life, you will start to ponder on your own mortality and spirituality. You will reflect on what you have done for others and what you have contributed to the people around you.

So, do not leave your relationship with God, or whatever you understand God to be, in neglect until the end. Start to cultivate a friendship with God or your spirituality now. Be a blessing to others. Be such a man and live such a life that if every man is such as you, and every life a life like yours, this world would be a paradise.

The God Particle: Where Science meets Spirituality

The most ambitious science project has just been launched – to find out how a particle obtains its mass. In other words, how is something created out of “nothing”? The interface between “nothing” and “something” has been the subject of scientists as well as science fiction writers. It has also been the subject of speculators as well as new age thinkers.

Is there a “God particle“?

Scientists are hoping to find some clues, if not answers, from their latest work with the completion of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. They have just successfully taken it for a test run yesterday and the scientists are exhilarating that everything is going as planned. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to re-create the moment of “big bang”, albeit in a much smaller scale.

This is where the implicate order and the explicate order of David Bohm will square off. Will we finally find “God”? Will the findings lead to a drastic change in the way we see our world? Will our belief systems change? Will we know what is reality?

Or will we just find more questions?

To find out more about this amazing project, go to Large Hadron Collider homepage.

More on the God Particle here.

Oh, my God. Here we go again…

I’m amused reading the stories about Senator Ernie Chambers’ (D-Omaha) action in suing God for terrorising citizens around the world and the apparently mysterious response from God.

It would all be funny if not for the fact that our misunderstanding and misinterpretation of God and reality is a major cause of sufferings in this world.

With science now advancing the idea of an intelligent design to creation, it would seem that the debate as to whether God exist or not should have been put to rest, but that is not the case. If anything, it seems to have stoke the fire even more.

On October 3, there will be an interesting debate between Richard Dawkins, the best selling author of “The God Delusion”, and John Lennox, a popular Christian apologist, at Birmingham, Alabama. I believe the debate will not clarify the issue. If anything, it is likely to further fan the debate.

In my own mind, there is really no issue at all. The problem is only in the definition. That is why the sages of old have always warned us of the danger of words and labels. They can be a real big source of miscommunication.

God is a word that is so overused that no two persons actually have the same definition. Many see God as a real being, much like us with all our likes and dislikes. What happened here is that we “humanize” God, making God in our own image instead of the other way round.

I think this definition of God is a great disservice to God.

On the other hand, others see God as an omnipresent and omniscient being without form. Now this definition of God is what science is able to understand because science has found that there is an underlying intelligence to creation. Still, this understanding does not go deep enough for us to have a perfect understanding of God.

The God that science has just begun to discover is impersonal, yet there is definite intelligence in its creation. It is beyond time and space, and is therefore infinite and ever-present. That means that the essence of God is within us, and that makes us its co-creators.

Ultimately, God is beyond definition because it is much more than what our mind can conceive it to be.