A Poem by Mother Theresa: Do It Anyway

Do It Anyway

People are often unreasonable,
illogical and self-centered;
forgive them anyway.

If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
be kind anyway.

If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight;
build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
be happy anyway.

The good you do today,
people will forget tomorrow;
do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
it never was between you and them anyway.

-- Mother Theresa --

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Wayne Dyer: Manifesting Your Spiritual Destiny

"Your destiny," writes Dr. Wayne Dyer, "is to become a co-creator with God and to treasure the sanctity of all that comes into this world of form that we call home, but which is only a transitory stopping place."

"Your creative ability," he observes, "originates in the unseen mind. It begins in the unseen world of waves and energy. So, too, do the planets, the stars, the flowers the animals, the rocks, you, your possessions, your creations - all of it, no exceptions. Examine everything and anything," Dyer notes, "and you find that at the core there is no form, only an unseen quality that brings it from the world of the unseen to the world of the observable."

"Look around at the world of form, he urges. "Then look within and realize that it began in the unseen dimension that we are not even close to comprehending."

[Dyer, "Manifest Your Destiny, pp. 10-11]

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Best-selling author and acclaimed motivational speaker, Dr. Wayne Dyer is the author of over thirty books, most of which cannot really be classified as "self-help" but rather belong to a genre that could be called "soul-help," a category he has largely helped to define by his own writing and his passionate and tireless advocacy for the writings of others. (See, for example, the works of David R. Hawkins, M.D.)

The attached two-part video interview captures Dyer at his best, and gives the viewer a good sense of this truly remarkable communicator.

"My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ-like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha-like."

[Source: Wikipedia.]

Dr. Richard Moss: From Doctor to Healer

In the West, the medical profession seems to always have been a fertile breeding ground for spiritual teachers. From pioneering psychiatrist, Richard M. Bucke (author of "Cosmic Consciousness") to modern-day teachers Deepak Chopra and David R. Hawkins (author of "Power vs. Force") a career in the healing arts seems to be inspired by, or inspires, an awakening to higher consciousness and spirituality.

In the attached video Dr. Richard Moss, another M.D. turned spiritual teacher, describes his spiritual awakening and the methodology (outlined in his book, "The Mandala of Being") which he uses in counseling others how to be alive and spiritually awake in the present moment.

Inspiration from a Trio of Hungarian Exiles

In a hidden and inspiring gem of a lecture on TED.com (itself, one of the most inspiring sites on the Internet), Ben Dunlap, president of Wofford College, a small Methodist institution in South Carolina, relates how a trio of Hungarian-American luminaries (including renowned composer Béla Bartók) helped shape his worldview.

Primarily this must-see lecture tells the story of textile magnate, Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor who rebuilt his fortune in America after the Second World War, and who humbly but determinedly integrated South Carolina's textile mills in the 1950s. Yet Dunlap extends the spiritual lesson that he was taught by Teszler ("that humans beings are fundamentally good") to include the lessons he learned from Bartók and Francis Robicsek, a polymath Hungarian-American heart surgeon and art collector who cracked the secret of the Mayan's hieroglyphic code.

There is "an irrepressible and insatiable appetite to know," Dunlap observes, reflecting on the wisdom he received from this trio of Hungarian exiles who took up residence in the American South.  "Live each day as if it were your last," he exhorts his audience, quoting Mahatma Gandhi. "Learn as though you will live forever." 

Resolving Life's Equation

"Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted. "

--  Srikumar Rao --

Fill in the blank: "If ____________, then I would be happy."

I have heard it said that we humans are great logicians, and the mental equation that we are usually preoccupied with is "if x, then y,"

The problem with our great logic, however, is that we spend almost no time looking at the 'x' factor, and concentrate all our imagination on 'y.' "If I had great wealth, then I'd be happy." "If I lost 20 pounds, then I would be attractive." "If I had a great relationship, then I wouldn't want anything else." "If I lose this job, then I'll be homeless." Etc., etc., etc.

All this mental algebra is just thought-food for the inner mental narrative of our ego sense. So much of our time is spent on how great, or how awful, 'y' would be if 'x' occurs, and little or no time is spent on the reality, probability or possibility of 'x' occurring, a point stressed in a lecture on achieving "happiness" by Professor Srikumar Rao, (attached below).

Is it true that we would experience unending happiness if we just had lots of money in our pocket, weighed twenty pounds less and were in a new relationship? Most people's experience, but not their inner narrative, says that this is just not so.

Prof. Srikumar Rao

"It's the model itself that is flawed," says Professor Rao, "not what you put on the 'if' side of the equation."

"The problem," Rao notes, "is that your life right now, with all the problems that you have - or more precisely, all the problems that you think you have - is equally perfect, but you do not accept it. In fact, you are spending all your time striving with might and main to make it different. You are not accepting it. And, when you are not accepting it you are buying into the 'if/then' model - 'if this happens then I will be happy' - and it is the model itself that is flawed."

What is needed, Professor Rao observes, is to "invest in the process, and not in the outcome." Rao, like so many others, preaches the benefit of focusing our attention on what it is that we are doing in the here and now, rather on what may - or, likely, may not - be the outcome.

"As we grow up," he observes, "we lose the ability to invest in the process. We start investing in the outcome. By definition the outcome is outside of our control, (and) if that is where we spend all of our emotional energy, we will get drained as we do so."

In encouraging his audience to focus on the process rather than the outcome - to focus their energy on doing 'x' rather than in obsessing over 'y' - Rao quotes the following introduction that the great John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, would give to each of his teams at the start of their season:

"When it's over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If you did the best that you were capable of, the score doesn't matter. But, I suspect that if you did the best you were capable of you will find the score to your liking."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rumi: On Religion, Evoloution and Science

Rumi (1207-1273)

Perhaps the most popular and most influential poet in the West for the past several decades, is the thirteenth-century Persian Sufi from what is now Afghanistan, Jallaludin Rumi.

Rumi and his teachings on Sufism, the fruit of a markedly advanced Persian and Islamic culture at a time when Europe was still mired in its Dark Ages, is remarkable by any standard - poetically, artistically, scientifically, philosophically and metaphysically.

While elements of fundamentalist and evangelistic Christianity in the West, particularly in the United States, cling blindly to an exclusivity and blind faith that denies the legitimacy of all other religions and the findings of modern science, 750-or-so odd years ago, Rumi swept aside such false controversies in language that, even in translation, is both striking and startling.

Taken from "The Way of the Sufi," by the great Sufi teacher and scholar, Idries Shah, the following excerpts from Rumi's vast works, both poetry and prose, show how far ahead of his times, and perhaps ours, the great Sufi poet was.

Rumi on Religion:

I AM THE LIFE OF MY BELOVED

What can I do Muslims? I do not know myself.
I am no Christian, no Jew, no Magian, no Mussulman.
Not of the East, not of the West. Not of the land, not of the sea.
Not of the Mine of Nature, not of the circling heavens,
Not of earth, not of water, not of air, not of fire;
Not of the throne, not of the ground, of existence, of being;
Not of India, China, Bulgaria, Saqseen;
Not of the kingdom of the Iraqs, or of Khorasan;
Not of this world or the next: of heaven or hell;
Not of Adam, Eve, the garden of Paradise or Eden;
My place placeless, my trace traceless.
Neither body nor soul: all is the life of my Beloved . . .

HE WAS IN NO OTHER PLACE

Cross and Christians, end to end, I examined. He was not on the Cross. I went to the Hindu temple, to the ancient pagoda. In none of them was there any sign. To the uplands of Herat I went, and to Kandahar I looked. He was not on the heights or in the lowlands. Resolutely, I went to the summit of the [fabulous] mountain of Kaf. There only was the dwelling of the [legendary] Anqa bird. I went to the Kaaba of Mecca. He was not there. I asked about him from Avicenna, the philosopher. He was beyond the range of Avicenna . . . I looked into my own heart. In that place, his place, I saw him. He was in no other place.

Rumi on Evolution:

HOW FAR YOU HAVE COME

Originally you were clay. From being mineral, you became vegetable. From vegetable, you became animal, and from animal, man. During these periods man did not know where he was going, but he was being take on a long journey, nonetheless. And you have to go through a hundred different worlds yet.

WHAT SHALL I BE

I have again and again grown like grass;
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearnace through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels:
After that soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine. I shall be that.

Rumi On Science:

INTELLIGENCE AND REAL PERCEPTION

Intelligence is the shadow of objective Truth.
How can the shadow vie with sunshine?

THE SCIENCE

The Science of Truth disappears in the Sufi's knowledge.
When will mankind understand this saying?

[Idries Shah, "The Way of the Sufi," pp. 102-108.]

. . . .and, finally, from "The Essential Rumi," by Coleman Barks:

THE MILK OF MILLENIA

. . . For hundreds of thousands of years
I have been dust grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched time-and-space cross,
this waiting room.

I walk into a huge pasture.
I nurse the milk of millenia.
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.

Thomas Merton on 'The First Lesson About Man'

This surreal poem, "First Lesson About Man" (from "The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton") is an all-too accurate view of the world from which the late, great Catholic contemplative, Trappist monk and prolific writer, Thomas Merton, sought refuge in the late 1940's. Sadly, it seems no less applicable to our state now, some 40-odd years after Merton's death, than it did on publication.

To paraphrase the words of the great 12th-century Sufi poet, Rumi: "We may need more grace than I thought."

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“First Lesson About Man” by Thomas Merton

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.
He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.

Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.
Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.
Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:
“Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news.”

The Tavern of the Soul

In Sufism, the most mystic branch of Islam (and perhaps a wisdom school that predates Islam's greatest Prophet), 'wine', 'alcohol' and 'the tavern' are symbolic of the highest spiritual and/or religious experiences. Perhaps, not unrelatedly, the renowned Swiss psychologist noted that the Latin for the "highest religious experience," spiritus, was the same as the Latin word for alcohol.

Paradoxically, the English word "alcohol" is derived from the Arabic name for the "kohl" tree, the bark of which was ground up and then distilled to produce collyrium, a fine metallic powder that was used as an eye shadow and made the wearer's eyes glisten. Islam, of course, prohibits the consumption of alcohol (as does Buddhism, which says we should refrain from intoxicants that dull the perceptive qualities of the mind). And turning "water into wine" was, of course, the first "miracle" that Jesus performed.

Jalalludin Rumi (1207-1273)

One of the first of Jalludin Rumi's mystic poems that Coleman Barks includes in his anthology of "The Essential Rumi" is the great Sufi poet's ode to the power of "wine" to transport the imbiber to this 'tavern of the soul.' In his poem, "The Many Wines," Rumi, the 14th century Afghani poet and Sufi teacher who has become one of the West's most popular poets in the past several decades, describes the transcendental power of "spirit" or "wine" in the following way:

"God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
drinking it, we leave the two worlds.
God has put into the form of hashish a power
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep so
that it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much that
just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies
are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about "what's needed."

Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it;s been untied,
and is just ambling about."

". . . a power to deliver the taster from self-consciousness." Is that not the power that every wisdom tradition points to in 'the tavern of the soul' which exists within us all? Perhaps the most essential message from Rumi is that the human thirst for truth and meaning - for what "glistens" - can only be quenched in the 'tavern of the soul' and not in lesser taverns or in ordinary wines and spirits.

We must recall that it was the alchemists who determined that "all that glistens is not gold." And, that the greatest of alchemists were the Sufis, who were concerned only with the "alchemy of the soul."