BELIEVE“Believe that you can run farther or faster. Believe that you’re young enough, old enough, strong enough, and so on to accomplish everything you want to do. Don’t let worn-out beliefs stop you from moving beyond yourself.” – John Bingham
All that we are requires faith. Not just in a religious sense, but also… self-confidence, trust, power, courage, perseverance, ambition. We must believe that we are doing the right thing. We must believe in our actions, in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our destiny.
The present phase of human thought and history … almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint.
“But ‘religious’ people who resist the scraping of the paint from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own, and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this is actually such a ‘first principle’ of the spiritual life that it should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems, after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy of science.”
You are what you believe in. I am what I believe in. We all are the by-products of our beliefs.This is extremely important. What you believe in is going to determine how your future will look like. Your thoughts will shape your world for you. There is no reality other than the one we interpret ourselves.
That is all.
Believe that you are good enough.
Believe that you can do better.
Believe that you can…
And you WILL.
The above was written by Cristian Mihai. I added the images.
And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God comes not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:20-21
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: Matthew 12:25 This also applies to every individual!
I walk across the beach, follow the ever-shifting outline of the water. The sun has begun to set; the sky is blossoming with fire. I watch the surf churn and froth as it rolls in and out. I find the waves to be contemplative. They comfort me, draw me into myself as the water is always inevitably drawn back to the sea. I step into the tide on a whim, and cool briny water surrounds my legs, sometimes splashing as high as my knees.
I stub my toe on a rock and a sharp staccato curse escapes my lips. It tears me away from my center, and for a moment I wonder at the fragile nature of my body. I look down, spot a chunk of granite half buried in the sand and pick it up. I hold it toward the light, examine the structure closely. I was there, I think, when it was formed, when the Earth itself was just a rock hurtling through the cosmos. I toss it back into the ocean and watch it land with a plop.
I try to remember the distant past, and sometimes I can almost glimpse the life beyond. But so much of who and what I am is inaccessible to me. I am an ocean, of which my humanity is only a remnant small enough to be caught in a glass jar. Like Jesus in the New Testament, I have a dual nature. I am both human and divine.
I have assumed many forms, have lived many lives spanning the gamut of time and space. Like light through a prism, I have been split apart, reduced to a broken spectrum of partial selves. I have inhabited countless worlds, existed as many species, loved and lost a thousand times for every star that’s ever burned in the sky.
I drift from one life to the next, a cosmic vagrant, the fullness of my being always just out of reach. I only ever know what I need to fulfill my current life’s purpose; I must regard everything else as a mystery.
I am an Immortal, but before the gas clouds of this universe had even condensed into stars I was exiled. The scope and nature of my crimes are lost to me, incomprehensible to my present form. I only know that I must atone. I strive in each life to make my brethren proud, because I know they’re watching and await my return. I know that someday I will redeem myself, that there will come a time when I will finally die my last death.
A wave rolls in, this one particularly strong, and I panic as I picture the sea preparing to swallow me whole.
I often imagine ways that I could die. It amazes me that after so many lives on so many different worlds, I could still fear something so banal. But my frail human psyche has bound me hand and foot to the dictatorship of instinct, and I must endure the biological imperative to survive like everyone else.
During the night I write. It’s the only way I can confront the shadows that haunt me in the small hours, the only way for me to give them form and expression. It’s my way of capturing small remnants of who I was. Yet words are imprecise, and there are so many thoughts that are inexpressible, transcendent, atoms of being that predate my humanity.
I gaze up. The sun is gone now, the sky transparent to the cosmos. I drink it in, eternal mysteries that are no longer mine to understand. I utter a silent prayer, a plea for mercy that I hope my kind will hear, and I accept by faith that they do.
If you were of the world, the world would love his own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
I have given them your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
I read in The Jerusalem Post this week, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas spiritual leader, called on followers to ask God to wipe out “evil ones who threaten Israel.” The Shas are a part of the Netanyahu Zionist coalition regime in Israel.
This is the second time in a row in which Yosef has spoken about the threat of Iran’s nuclear program during his post-Shabbat Torah lesson.
It follows a briefing he was given by National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror on the Iranian issue 10 days ago, which was seen as part of an effort from the Prime Minister’s Office to obtain the rabbi’s support for the government’s position on the matter.
Speaking on Saturday night, Yosef talked about the tradition on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, of eating various fruits and vegetables as positive portents for the year ahead.
“When we make the blessing on the dates that ‘our enemies and haters should be ended’ we should have in mind the Iranian regime, those evil people who threaten Israel,” the rabbi said.
“Do good, God, wipe them out, kill them,” he entreated, to which the assembled crowd answered “amen.”
If this is what Israelis are being indoctrinated with these Days, kiss Peace in the Middle East goodbye and welcome World War III/Armageddon. No Nation on Earth will be immune from the consequences.
It brought to mind this article which appeared in The Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2009. At the Time, I thought it was a significant article on the attitudes within the Israeli Zionist regime by government Ministers. I’m glad I copied and saved it since the original Jerusalem Post link no longer exists.
Those attitudes are even more entrenched among the Zionists in Israel than ever before. Just read the comments to any article inThe Jerusalem Post concerning Palestinians and Iran and you will see an Israeli-centred view of Arabs with whom they must live in Peace in terms, descriptions and characterizations that equal the worst terms the Nazis used to describe Jews in another place and Time. Has the lesson not only been forgotten, but never learned?
So when exactly did we go nuts? With depressing regularity, our leaders say the dumbest, most vile things. And we, the public, look up at this bloated, cacophonous monstrosity of a government and think, “Everything is OK.”
Take our public security minister, for example. This June, while reviewing antidrug operations in southern Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Aharonovitch praised an undercover cop for his grungy appearance, remarking that he looked an “Araboush.” Now for those who don’t speak bigot, Araboush is an anti-Arab epithet on par with, say, Jewboy or Hymie. In any sane Western democracy, an official caught using such language could kiss his career good-bye. But not so here.
When the media called out Aharonovitch for the slur, all he had to do was apologize, then assure us that the comment did not represent his worldview. And we moved on because no one who belongs to Yisrael Beiteinu could possibly be racist, right? I mean, this is the same party that sought to institute loyalty oaths, ban Israeli Arab political factions and prohibit commemoration of the nakba – the defeat and dispossession of the Arab community during the War of Independence.
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, has even suggested disenfranchising Israeli Arabs by handing over their towns to a future Palestine. Oh, and there was that stray comment about bombing the Aswan Dam in Egypt.
Again, in a normal Israel, Lieberman would be left to rant on a soapbox next to the meat-is-murder wackos and the Raelians. But what do we do with such a dangerous demagogue? Make him foreign minister, of course! For the past couple of months, Lieberman has been serving as our voice abroad. Well, sort of. Lieberman is, in fact, so toxic that Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres have to pick up much of the diplomatic slack.
WHAT’S STRANGE is the fact that few people here seem troubled by this. Maybe it’s because we expect so little of our politicians that nothing shocks us anymore. After all, we do have a housing minister who backs Jim Crow-style segregation.
Lecturing the Israel Bar Association earlier this month, Housing Minister Ariel Attias said that he sees it as his duty to keep Arabs out of Jewish communities in the North. Mixed towns are dangerous, he said: “Look at what happened in Acre.” Yes, let’s look at what happened in Acre. Last Yom Kippur eve, a pack of youths attacked an Arab motorist after he had driven into a mostly Jewish neighborhood. The assault then sparked an intercommunal riot that engulfed the city.
None of this, though, matters to Attias. He doesn’t care about healing wounds; he just wants the Arabs hemmed in and out of sight. And we treat Attias like he only speaks for himself, like what he does is happening on the moon
Of course, not every minister in the government is prejudiced; some are just idiots. A case in point is Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. He actually thinks that the future of Zion can be secured by changing Arabic place names on highway signs.
Then there is Yossi Peled. This minister-without-portfolio suggests that we boycott US defense contractors and sell arms to nations not on the White House’s BFF list to register our displeasure with Barack Obama’s Mideast policies.
Apparently, Peled wants Israel to risk $3 billion a year in foreign aid, lucrative defense projects with the US and superpower backing at the UN Security Council to keep on building in the settlements.
A sign of still deeper dysfunction, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently told the Americans that he’d remove illegal outposts if the US took a harder line on Iran. In other words, Bibi would enforce our own laws only if first paid a political bribe.
NOW, TO be fair, we’ve had crummy ministers before. The Bibi government is just the reductio ad absurdum of our political system – a fractured partyocracy that panders to ideological sectors, not real communities.
See, there’s no such thing as an Israeli citizen. There are just haredi voters, secular voters, Arab voters, etc., and we all vote as if no one else existed in the country. Likewise, the politicians act as if they were responsible to no one but their parties.
Accordingly, the system encourages behavior that borders on madness as even the center must pay homage to the radicals. Indeed, if Netanyahu were to fire Lieberman, Attias and Co., their parties would bring down his government.
The only way to end this farce is through regional representation. By dividing the country into voter districts, we can make each and every Knesset member beholden to the people. A first-past-the-poll system in each district would likewise temper extremist positions as assorted factions would need to band together to win.
Unfortunately, our current crop of “public servants” has no interest in fixing the status quo. So to make a change, we will need to rally from the bottom up. If we don’t, we may wake up one day to find a country not worth defending.
From TheJerusalem Post by Eric Schechter, July 2, 2009 The writer is a freelance military reporter based in Tel Aviv.
Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’
His past was Jewish, but today he sees Israel as one of the most racist societies in the western world. Historian Shlomo Sand explains why he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore
