jneo LiFe: March 2010

Why Presumption Hurts our Loved Ones the Most

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      My father was dying. It was a fact that I refused to acknowledge for months. Cancer steadily ate up his lungs for years. Thanks to cigarettes: it made us suffer for years and made us orphans eventually. Hours before I received a call that indeed my father would come home in a coffin, I prayed for the impossible: that I would be given the chance to hug and tell him how grateful I was for all he has done for all of us; to tell him, I love him. It was never granted.

     Of all my siblings, with the exception of my brother Jojo, I guess I was the one who stayed by my father's side the longest. I was his apprentice for years. It was from him that I learned that helping other people makes us better persons. But, in all those years I never uttered a word of gratitude or of love. 'I love you, dad' was corny. Everything was presumed, understood, tacit, if not taken for granted. Once I told my best friend in college, Jerome, that one of my greatest regrets was that I was not able to hug my father when he was yet alive. He said: 'You're right. But you can still hug him through other people. Go and tell them your stories so that both children and parents could hug each other and say, 'I love you...' before it's too late.' Vita brevis: life is short. It was a costly lesson to learn that 'presumption hurts our loved ones the most.

     Today, I see to it that I hug my children everyday. No, I don't wait for any special occasion to do it. I hug them and tell them how much I love them anytime of the day. They do the same as well. Love should not only be seen in doing, it should also be said, spoken, uttered. Spoken words of love connect directly to our brain through our auditory nerves. Hugs embrace the whole being. A hug is the kiss of the heart.

     So, what are we waiting for? Let's all be huggers. Let's give them for free without reservation. Sprinkle it with crisp whisper of tender care. It's an instant karma, as John Lennon puts it. You get the benefits right away. As an unknown author once said:

" Hugging has no unpleasant side effects and is all natural. There are no batteries to replace, it's inflation-proof and non-fattening with no monthly payments. It's non-taxable, non-polluting, and is, of course, fully refundable."

Be a healer. Be a hugger.
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He Could Have Been Tony Stark's Father: The Merchant of Death!

I've heard this story twice already but it still amazed me every time. Ahhhh, so I promised to find and verify its source and retell it. And please, help me figure out the real value of this story ;)

The Milwaukee Journal Nov. 15, 1972

Thus, the story behind the famous NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

You can read the full story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

clip source: The Milwaukee Journal Nov. 15, 1972

Iron Man Never Forgets

My most unforgettable memory with my doctor was not those times when he injected me several times at the buttock with my pants down in the presence of other kids. No, it was those times when I sat at the corner looking at a poster hanging on the wall. It was a poem by Dorothy Law Nolte . Until now I could still remember the colors, texture, the embossed texts, the picture, the Iron Man I was holding, the smell of the clinic and whole ambiance. This is a poem that even Iron Man should have in his lab...

Children Learn What They Live

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.

If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.

If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.

If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.

If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.

If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.

If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.

If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.

If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.

If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.

If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.

If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.

If children live with fairness, they learn justice.

If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.

If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.

If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

This poem has gone several evolutions and was translated in more than 35 languages. I am thinking, if only parents could live by this, what a beautiful world we have for everyone...

Excerpted from the book CHILDREN LEARN WHAT THEY LIVE

©1998 by Dorothy Law Nolte and Rachel Harris

The poem "Children Learn What They Live"

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Anecdote from Hell

A solid explosion literally rocked us. Black mushroom like

smoke went into the air. A grenade just went off. It was like in the movie, I thought. But when a man, approximately 70 meters away from us, came out from the gate walking with his two legs trembling, and his fists clenching I knew then that it was real and fatal. He raised his both hands to the chest and then fell face down. That was traumatic. The scene and the sound would flash in my mind every time I saw a camouflage uniform or a military tank.

That certain event in my life did so much on me. Life is indeed fragile and could be sudden. It pushed me to re-evaluate the existence of Heaven and Hell too. I was thinking then, if there is a way to prove the existence of life after life. Well, my childhood education has taught me so well that there is indeed, but as I grew up I realized that life is more

complicated than I thought. In college, I came across a book by Raymond A. Moody "Life After Life." 'Moody investigates more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced "clinical death" and were subsequently revived.' It speaks of 'Being of Light' at the end of the tunnel. What's so cool about it is that all of those people who were interviewed had almost the same experiences. And to think that these people came from different cultures, religions and nations, that's amazing.

One common experience is like this: a person is pronounced clinically dead. And then this person sees his deathbed and his relatives crying. He/she is then zapped into this dark tunnel and at the end of this tunnel there is a 'Being of light' who tells him/her to go back. But most of these people do not want to comeback anymore because they felt so much peace and happiness. At the end they wake up from death which doctors and experts could not explain. More of these interviews were conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross who came to the Philippines in the process of her research.

But in spite of these scientific evidences of the existence of life after life, there are still a lot of people who don't give a damn about it. Well, when my students asked and argued me about this I made it sure that I told them this story:

"Anecdote from Hell"

When Satan realized that Facebook membership has surged to more than 120 million users,
he immediately called for a conference of a century.
In his opening remarks he said he wanted to come up with an updated strategy on how to bring more people to Hell.
He wanted to seize this opportunity.
In the third day of the conference, he gathered the best suggestions on how to bring his plan into completion.
He called on his archdevils who made the following reports:
Succuba: Our team has been ahead of this already. We have so far taught people to produce and monetize pornography. This a sure way to bring more people to hell, bwahahahahah!
"Well done", Satan complimented. "Next please..."
Diablo: "Well, our team is faster than that. We have trained humans to kill other human beings in the name of God, Allah or Muhammad!"
"Right, that's faster, indeed!" Satan said.
Next was known as the Hollow Demon, old and cunning.
"You're wasting your time!" he retorted, "our approach never went out of style. Simply convince people that there is no Hell, you'll see they'll act as if there is no Hell!

* * *

What do you think? Does Hell really exist?

picture credits:

grenade http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1048745

heaven http://wikipedia.org

virus devil http://www.morguefile.com/

The Woman at the River - Second part

(first part here)
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Have you met people whose gloomy auras are contagious? They are habitually depressed

and perpetually complaining about anything. I called them casts of "Back to the Future." The famous poem Desiderata advised us to avoid this kind of people; "...they are vexatious to the spirit." When you are with them, you become angry and depressed too. They zapped your energy.

The phrases "be happy", "forget the past", or "don't get depressed" are cliche. They are too general. In order to battle our second monk, we need to understand how 'regrets', 'depression', and "emotional pain" work. Don't worry, I'll try to make this short, simple and applicable right away.

First, we need to remember that our mind is like a huge hard drive where every bit of information is recorded. When I say 'every bit of information' I mean everything that happened to us since our conception in the womb of our parents. We may 'forget' how they look like or what really happened, but our emotional memory does not forget the feeling of being rejected. What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. ~Cynthia Ozick

Second; those feelings of rejections are triggered, re-played when a seeming event happens. Can you remember a time when you met a person for the first time, but you seem angry or displeased right away? You have this feeling of 'I don't like him', or 'he is not my type', or 'I don't trust this person'. It's the feeling that's in play here. The reason is that we had bad experiences in the past involving some people whose aura had similarities with that person you just met. You may have forgotten the face of that person who brought you pain and fear, or the event surrounding it, but your emotional memory remembers that pain and the gloom in it. Our emotional memory will bring it to the processor and output in our emotions and eventually in our actions. And so, those old feelings would make us feel angry and un-trusting. This is one of the reasons why women would suddenly change mood without any reason.

Can we do something about it? Fortunately, yes, and that will bring us to the third point. Emotional memory is good, but oftentimes it prevents us from seeing what's in front of us. So what should we do? Amy Bjork in her book "Staying OK", spoke about 'truth serum' or 'reality serum'. According to this book, we need to be connected to the present in order to silence our crying child inside and our nagging second monk. That's why when we pacify a child we should not just say to the child, 'all right, dear, stop crying already...' instead we direct his attention to toys or invite him to observe something around or talk to him something that he's been interested to. We may say, 'wow, I like your shoes, who bought it?" That kind of question should force him to think and engage in the reality, hence, stop playing the emotional recording from playing.

In our case as adults, if our child with-in start to cry or our nagging second monk attempt to engage us, we need to do something to reconnect us with reality. Inject a truth serum right away. A reality serum should bring us out of it. So what are reality serums? Here some concrete effective reality serums:

1. Ask for the time: "What time is it?", "what day is today?"
2. Look around you and start reading some posters or identify colors and designs.
3. Get out of your room and go somewhere else, buy yourself a cone of ice cream.
4. Talk to a positive friend, avoid unhappy people.
5. Read inspirational quotes, watch inspiring clips.
6. Take your mp3 player and listen to your favorite audio book.
7. Take a bath, groom well, feel beautiful or handsome.
8. And lastly, the most powerful advice is 'pray'. He is the God of memory, of healing. He is the God of time.

Now, you have good reasons to create good and beautiful memories with your loved ones ;)

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picture credit:

morguefile.com

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The Woman at The River

One story that really challenged our imagination when we were in the seminary was the story of the two monks. After, we heard the story, many of us wanted to encounter such a situation and would choose what the first monk did. Everybody loved the first monk. Why? Here how the story goes:

"Once there were two monks who were on a mission. When they were near the broken bridge, they saw a really beautiful woman in silky dress. Although the two monks did not look at her, they could tell how inviting the woman's existence: she smelled so good. The hot summer breeze was filled with her natural scent.

Obviously, the woman was waiting for a lift to get across the river. But the two monks were determined not even to communicate with her. Their code was clear about that. Avoid occasions of sin; avoid women. And so, the two monks headed to the water without a word. The tide was almost to the neck. When they were already half way, the woman shouted. "Don't you have hearts? You did not even look at me. Am a devil? All I am asking is a lift. I need to attend to the wedding of the King. I need to get across the water without getting wet. Please..."

The second monk answered the woman back, "Lady, please, understand us. We are not allowed to even look at you..." But even while he was saying this, he noticed that the first monk made his way back towards the woman. Without a word he signaled the woman to climb on his shoulders. With the woman on his shoulders, his head between her thighs, he started walking across the river. Seeing the mirage-like scene, the second monk almost fell on the river bank. "Holy cow!"

Two days after that monk-river-woman incident, the second monk still kept on lecturing the first monk. He wanted to extract remorse and inflict punishment on him. On the third day, for the first time, the first monk said: "Brother, I dropped that woman three days ago on the other side of the river, but you are still carrying her..."

Whoa! Felt familiar? Emotional baggage is heavy. Some of us don't want to let go of them for a lot of reasons. But the truth is, we never become truly happy if we have them. I met several people who have these baggage, some they carried them for 40 years. They complained everyday. Their favorite words and phrases are: "if only..," "if not because of you..," "had I...". These words are unhappy twits. Listen to yourself. What is your baggage? How persistent is the second monk in you?

Next: concrete ways to silence your second monk.

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When You Kill Someone in Your Dream

                                                                Updated: June 2011

     Why do we dream of killing other people: what do they mean and why do we need to remember them ?

     Dreams are a gift of reconciliation. It helps us heal our spirit and understand our present situation. Dreams help us reconcile our broken spirits and relationships. Let me explain that. Back in college or even in HS, we learned this:

As you see, only ten percent (or maybe less)
john b. bejo

of who we really are got into surface.
The good, the bad, the ugly and the not so ugly memories are stored; while others are forcefully

forced down there because they’re unpleasant.

     Now, our whole being could not stand being divided or dissected. It struggles to make us whole again. It struggles to be reconciled with itself. We may deny a sexual desire for a certain person, for instance. But since our 'education', or our custom brand it as something 'improper', we push them down to the subconscious and we either tell ourselves, it's dirty or improper, and therefore, you should not want it. BUT, our spirit knows, you badly desire it. What happened is an internal complication which results in several neuroses.

     Now, our internal doctor will attempt to fix it. So, it will look for a way to reconcile our fragmented self. That's where our dream comes in and does what it was designed for. It will show us the reality, but it will attempt to prevent us from waking up. See? Our dream was designed to keep us sleeping while showing us things we don't want to accept.

     Let's say, you dreamed of killing someone. That someone has no face, or the identity of that person shifts from your friend to your enemy or a person you don't really care. Why is this so? Your dream wants you to accept the fact that you are angry, but it attempts to hide real identity of that person lest your feeling of anger would surge up and eventually wake you up. So, you understand now why you're choking to death a friend or insignificant person in your dream. It's your job, when you wake up to trace who would be that person that you intend to kill ( which could be yourself too ). Your dream wants you to accept that feeling. No, I am not saying that you need to really kill that person in real life. On the contrary, what our dream tells us is that it's okey to get angry and you don't need to deny that. It wants you to own that anger and do something positive about it.

     Just as dream is a gift from God, so is anger. Jesus got angry. Gandhi got angry, so did the saints and our parents. God placed it there to protect us from injustice. To get angry at the injustice is not a sin, it is even a duty. So, next time you would feel angry, accept the fact that you're angry, and then choose a Christian response to it.

First photo: web collection|Second photo: edited and posted by john b. bejo