The Swan

Winter has come for me, can't carry on.


The Chains to my life are strong but soon they'll be gone.


I'll spread my wings one more time.

Is it a dream?


All the ones I have loved calling out my name.


The sun warms my face.


All the days of my life, I see them passing me by.


In my heart I know I can let go.


In the end I will find some peace inside.


New wings are growing tonight.



As I am soaring I'm one with the wind.


I am longing to see you again, it's been so long.


We will be together again. 

Sharon den Adel

Doubts

As Nightfall crawls in shadowing the morning light. As your doubts begin to creep and fill you with fright. Do not fear the darkness, for the shadow only excits, when there is light...

Moving On

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.

Stop avoiding pain & discomfort

Pain is necessary for growth and self understanding. Pain is part of our internal checks and balances. Don’t give into pain: understand it, accept it, and move forward. Don’t let pain steal your spirit or belief in life and love. Sometimes you need to sit with it, and let it be, but beyond that never, ever, empower your pain. You have a right to feel your pain.

Stop avoiding pain and discomfort. People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s not always the case. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. 

People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.

If We Could See Inside Others Hearts

Cubism

       Following their 1907 meeting in Paris, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist style, a new vision for a new century that inspired paintings that were initially ridiculed by critics for consisting of “little cubes.” Often painting side-by-side in their Montmartre, Paris, studios, the artists developed a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that rejected the conventions of perspective and representation. Cubist works challenged viewers to understand a subject broken down into its geometrical components and often represented from several angles at once.

Cubists abstracted from real life to make their work, but most often maintained small identifiable clues to a realistic figure, whether a woman or a violin. The artists adopted a neutral palette of browns and blacks, intending the viewer to focus on the geometric composition rather than the color. Cubism marks a pioneering moment in the history of art—one that ended when many of its leading practitioners, Braque among them, enlisted to fight in World War I....




'' The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain "
                                                                                                     Georges Braque




MoMA

A Lesson to the Next Generation

When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.

Martin Luther King

  

What You Don't Do

Sometimes it is what you don't do which defines you. It is the negative space that shapes your life.

It is the things you don't say, the decisions you don't make, the actions you don't take.

These things can set you apart from those that do.

Time Travel Paradoxes

It's impossible to consider the subject of time travel without addressing the issue of paradoxes. These occur where time travel would result in what appear to be logical inconsistencies or impossibilities.

Many people believe that the paradox problem is itself enough to render time travel impossible. Regardless of the physics, the philosophy of time travel is a fascinating area for "thought experiment".

Various paradoxes have been raised, these usually involve an apparent breach of causality in one way or another. The most well-known version is the "grandfather paradox".

The Grandfather Paradox

This is a very simple idea with serious repurcussions for the concept of time travel. Let's say that I invent a time machine and travel into the past. I meet my own grandfather when he was a boy and kill him.
The result? One of my parents is never born, therefore I can never be born.

So I couldn't have gone back in time and killed him.

This is a logical contradiction - and a philosophical nightmare!

Resolutions

There have been numerous proposals for dealing with the apparent causal paradoxes of time travel.
The easiest is simply to say "so what?". The paradox only exists because of our "common sense" view of linear causality - possibly related to the arrow of time. If we step back and look at the system as a whole then we can see a multi-dimensional causality. Unfortunately most of our existing laws of physics assume linear causality in one direction or another, so this resolution is unpopular.

An alternative is to call on the "multiple universes" theory. By travelling into the "past" we are actualy travelling into an alternate or parallel universe. From the moment we arrive, the universes start diverging. Whether the universes "split" or whether they always existed in parallel in some higher "dimension" is a matter of taste.

One side-effect of this resolution is that we can never return to our original time - we are stuck in the parallel universe and can only move forwards into its future. If I shoot my grandfather then get back into my time machine and return to 2013 it will be a 2006 where I was never born. Once I have stepped on that butterfly then my original universe is forever inaccessible to me.

Another interesting idea is the "mobius strip" timeline, discussed here by Anthony Edwards. How the mobius strip generalises to multiple dimensions when multiple time travellers are involved is beyond my grasp - I get lost after the klein bottle!

An interesting technical approach to resolving the paradox is the Novikov self-consistency principle proposed by Dr. Igor Novikov. This essentially says that paradoxes won't happen - it's impossible to create a paradox however hard you try. In this view the universe is in some way "self-righting". If you attempt to shoot your grandfather then something will go wrong - you'll miss, the gun will jam, etc. Or, if you succeed, you'll later learn that your father was adopted; so he still gets born and still marries your mother. This reminds me of the anthropic principle: the universe is this way because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here.

Perhaps the simplest resolution of temporal paradoxes is to say that since they only occur when we travel into the past, then travel into the past is impossible but travel into the future remains a possibility.

Unfortunately this makes time travel rather pointless - it achieves little more than we could get through long-term suspended animation or near light speed travel.

Your Children are not Your Children

They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

© Kahlil Gibran, 1923, 1973.

The Multiverse Theory

Anyone who has not spent the last ten years on a desert island, has at least once heard of “the multiverse”, or parallel universes. As many of us have seen, parallel words, in theory, are worlds very similar to ours, with little (or in some cases, large) changes or differences. The multiverse theory speculates that there could exist an infinite number of these alternate realities.
What’s the point? In a parallel reality you have already killed the dinosaurs, and you are lying under the ground at a depth of eight feet (because that’s what happened there.) In the other you might be a powerful king. In another you might never have even been born since your parents never met. Now that’s a memorable image.

Presentism

Time is something that we perceive as a matter of course, if we view it at the moment, we usually divide it into past, present and future. Presentism argues that the past and the future are imagined concepts, while only the present is real.
In other words, today’s breakfast and every word of this post will cease to exist after you have read it, until you open it again. The future is just as imaginary, because time cannot exist before and after it happened, as claimed by St. Augustine.

Stop running from your problems

Face them head on. No, it won’t be easy. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.

The Story behind The Scream

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and influential painter and printmaker.

Munch's The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age—wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset.

Edvard Munch, has described himself in a book written in 1900 as nearly going insane, like his sister Laura who was committed to a mental institution during this time period as well. Personally he discussed being pushed to his limits, and going through a very dark moment in his life.

The scene of The Scream was based on a real, actual place located on the hill of Ekeberg, Norway, on a path with a safety railing. The faint city and landscape represent the view of Oslo and the Oslo Fjord. At the bottom of the Ekeberg hill was the madhouse where Edvard Munch’s sister was kept, and nearby was also a slaughterhouse. Some accounts describe that in those times you could actually hear the cries of animals being killed, as well as the cries of the mentally disturbed patients in the distance. In this setting, Edvard Munch was likely inspired by screams that he actually heard in this area, combined with his personal inner turmoil. Edvard Munch wrote in his diary that his inspiration for The Scream came from a memory of when he was walking at sunset with two friends, when he began to feel deeply tired. He stopped to rest, leaning against the railing.  He felt anxious and experienced a scream that seemed to pass through all of nature. The rest is left up to an endless range of interpretations, all expressed from this one, provocative image.


The Real (And Not at All Universal) Meaning Behind Edvard Munch's The Scream

Edvard, came from a grim and deeply religious family. His father, a military doctor, married a woman 20 years his junior, who hailed from a once well-to-do clan that had fallen on hard times. She bore five children, of which Edvard was the second, and she died early, leaving behind a tragic letter to her family saying, “We all, who God so carefully has bound together, may meet in Heaven never to part again.” Munch’s dad became morose and fanatical; he would read this letter aloud to his clan at the dinner table, regularly, and lecture his kids on the horrors of hell that awaited them if they strayed from the righteous path. This fatalistic atmosphere definitively colored Munch’s view of the world.

Which brings us back to “The Scream,” actually originally known as “The Scream of Nature.”

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Notice anything about this tale? “The Scream” is often taken as an image of personal isolation or alienation. But it is significant that the scene takes place in public, not in some lonely interior (of which there are many in Munch’s work). Whatever emotion is seizing the wailing central figure, it comes upon him not when he is isolated, but when he is “walking along the road with friends,” represented by the strolling couple glimpsed in the painting behind him, apparently oblivious to the drama taking place in the foreground.

The key to the image is that its terrifying epiphany is felt to be an expression issuing through the figure from the landscape or the cosmos itself (“I felt the great scream in nature”). This is what Munch’s then-radical Expressionist styling, in which everything — sky and sea and the wailing, deformed figure itself — conveys so perfectly, depicting a universe fully animate with turbulent emotional meaning.

Munch was trained to see the universe as being filled with divine meaning, as subject to a plan — but he also could no longer fully believe in this plan. And so the universe speaks but has no voice, shrieks but makes no sound, issues forth a sense of loss that transcends any human fellowship.



Regards,

Ismail R Raslan

Special thanks to Dr.Rakan Nazer

Challenges keep us alive

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the water close to Japan has not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring the fish. If the return trip took more time, the fish were not fresh.


To solve this problem, fish companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer.


However, the Japanese could taste the difference between the fresh and the frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of the frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, the fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, they were tired, dull, and lost their fresh-fish taste. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis! But today, they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan

How did they manage? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks but with a small shark. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. The challenge they face keeps them alive and fresh!


Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired and dull? Basically in our lives, sharks are new challenges to keep us active. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. “Your challenges keep you energized. Don’t create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.


Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go..!

Challenges and difficulties are the essence of success. They keep us alive and we need them to stay active and fit for life!

The past should stay in the past

Good and bad memories should stay right where they belong – in the past. Positive people do not spend their time, longing for the good old days, because they are too busy of working on their current and future day. They do not use negative experiences of the past for self-flagellation or regret, but for taking lessons and move to a better future.

Stephen Hawking's Advice to his children

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.

Stop caring about the boundaries others set up

No matter how much progress you make there will always be the people who insist that whatever you’re trying to do is impossible. Or they may incessantly suggest that the idea or dream as a whole is utterly ridiculous because nobody really cares. When you come across these people, don’t try to reason with them. Instead, forget that they exist. They will only waste your time and energy.

Try what you want to try. Go where you want to go. Follow your own intuition. Don’t accept false choices. Don’t let others put a cage around you. Definitely don’t listen to the watchdog.

Whenever somebody discredits you and tells you that you can’t do something, keep in mind that they are speaking from within the boundaries of their own limitations.

What part of ourselves we dislike ?

People filled with self-loathing typically imagine they dislike every part of themselves, but this is rarely, if ever, true. More commonly, if asked what specific parts of themselves they dislike, they're able to provide specific answers: their physical appearance, their inability to excel academically or at a job, or maybe their inability to accomplish their dreams. Yet when presented, for example, a scenario in which they come upon a child trapped under a car at the scene of an accident, that they recoil in horror and would want urgently to do something to help rarely causes them to credit themselves for the humanity such a reaction indicates.

Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The answer in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.

The true source of self-esteem

The problem is that we common mortals can hardly avoid deriving our self-esteem from the wrong source—even those of us whose self-esteem is healthy. We look to what in Nichiren Buddhism is termed the "smaller self," the parts of ourselves that seem better than those of others and to which we become overly attached. In other words, we ground our self-esteem in things about ourselves we perceive as unique: typically our looks, our skills, or our accomplishments.

But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.

I'm not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our positive qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on positive qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of others for us to value them. We must awaken to the essential goodness—to what in Nichiren Buddhism is termed our "larger self"—that lies within us all. If we want to fall in love with our lives—and by this I don't mean the "we" of our small-minded egos—we must work diligently to manifest our larger selves in our daily lives. We must generate the wisdom and compassion to care for others until we've turned ourselves, piece by piece, into the people we most want to be.

In other words, if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn't require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character .....

What makes a Hero ?

You are not who you used to be, and that’s OK

We've been hurt; we've gone through numerous ups and downs that have made us who we are today. Over the years, so many things have happened – things that have changed our perspective, taught us lessons, and forced our spirits to grow. As time passes, nobody stays the same, but some people will still tell you that you have changed. I usually respond to them by saying, “Of course I’ve changed. That’s what life is all about. But I’m still the same person, just a little stronger now than I ever was before.”

Breathe in the future, breathe out the past

No matter where you are or what you’re going through, always believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Never expect, assume, or demand.  Just do your best, control the elements you can control, and then let it be.  Because once you have done what you can, if it is meant to be, it will happen, or it will show you the next step that needs to be taken.