Pardon me, I just have to put down these random thoughts about my faith…

(It’s so hot now in my room. Shall I buy a new fan? Does it make any difference?)

Anyway, here’s a quote: “Yesterday’s moral outrage has a way of becoming today’s necessary evil and tomorrow’s common good.”

It does make sense. It’s getting harder and harder not to sin these days, because the surrounding just force us to sin. And I don’t even like to use the word ’sin’ today, because it sounds so horrible, like I’ve committed some mistakes that cannot be undone, which is not true theoretically (and theologically, through ablution you can fix it), so I’d rather use the word ‘mistake’. And by the way, I have never accepted the notion of ‘original sin’. It just doesn’t make sense.

My priest said one day that the Catholics in the USA are ‘cafetarian Catholics’ because they choose what they want to believe in, and discard others that are not so appealing to them. I guess I’m like them. But how can the church continue to force-feed us some teachings that do not make sense anymore? And how do we know that those are really what God wants?

One day, my mom and I share this thought: what if the entire Bible is just a book of analogy, and perhaps a historical script and a book of moral guidance? Given Jesus’ fondness of analogies, I think this is a reasonable thought. And what if this whole faith thing is not about searching a physical deity? Maybe it’s about reaching a state of peace of mind (because that’s what modern priests have told us today, that heaven is no longer a place, but a mental state) In a way, I love that idea. And especially after I read the book “Eat, Pray and Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert (who seek both worldly pleasure and divine transcendence -something I want, too), the idea of seeking a peaceful mental state and to find the divine deity that rests within us sounds very nice. And I’ve always known that in time of depression, I can’t never rely on others. Okay, so I talk to others, I listen to their solution, but in the end, it’s the overcoming of my OWN mental barrier that help me go through difficult time. It’s about listening to my inner self, and perhaps that’s the divine deity Gilbert has been talking about. I hope so.

But my mom and I were too scared to continue to deal with that notion. It’s just too foreign, and too profound. It changes our entire perception of our religion. And I don’t like how that idea doesn’t offer any explanation about the afterlife (so okay, who can possibly explain that?) I don’t want to accept the idea that after I die, it’s nothing, just a peace of mind, just a long, eternal slumber. Honestly, I’d rather have an Eden with angels floating around playing harps and an endless supply of wine (which is boring in my priest’s opinion). But if that idea is what my religion has been hiding and refusing to reveal it (because it’s too groundbreaking-earthshaking), then by all means, tell us, give us some hints, so that we may finally believe in the power of religions and not wrestling with them continuously, comparing it to science, blaming it for the sorrow of the world, cursing those who spread religions forcefully and insensitively (including many evangelists, in my opinion). And finally, let us have that little peace of mind.

The Power of Daydreaming

My mom gave me this book called “The New Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz last year (more I like I forced her to give me, she bought another new one after I claimed hers), but a fiction lover like me takes forever to read the non-fiction. So today, I finally reach page 106 (out of 430 pages) and I think the book is interesting!

It’s a self-motivational book, by the way. Apparently, just by imagining yourself to be successful, it’s more likely that you will achieve your goal. It’s like mental exercise, you keep playing over and over again what you want yourself to be like and your subsconcious mind will program your “success mechanism” to work towards that goal, almost effortlessly. WOW!

But isn’t that like daydreaming? (my darling friend guineapig thinks so too! ) And if I thought about it, it’s true that almost everything that I can envision myself in, I usually achieve it. Although I need to envision the real me, not someone completely different (I tried that and it failed).

I hope I can finish the book. My mom has undergone major change after she read the book, so I guess it does work somehow. And my hobby of daydreaming does yield some results hehehe.

Planning your goals is rarely effective!

I live in a land whereby planning your goals (short term and long term) is something that people do regularly, naturally and perhaps with little thoughts because it’s just understood that you plan your goals before you start doing anything. This is of course something that is highly encouraged by all those self-help books which ardently believe that goals make your dreams come true…and which thinks that results are all that count.

Long before all those motivational talks on goal planning blablabla, I believe that each of us has some goals in our minds. But those motivators convince us that by considering seriously realistic goals and putting them down on a piece of paper that we pin up on our bedroom wall, we can be more focused and channelled all our energy into that goal. Goal-oriented. Purpose-driven.  Assigning such terms to something that we do naturally simply makes me sick. The more promoted those terms (“perfect step to success”), the more corny they sound. YUCK!

Let me fish out an interesting paragraph from an extremely interesting book entitled “Inside The Jihad” by Omar Nasiri (pseudonym):

“Every boy has a dream…to be something fantastic…As a boy grows up and becomes a man, he gradually lets the dream go…But if his dream is destroyed at a very oung age, the boy will either be destroyed totally along with it, or he will become strong. He will become strong because he no longer has anything to lose…A boy without a dream is dangerous.”

Now that sounds pretty reasonable. Those of us who are so preoccupied with goals may actually limit ourselves. We plan realistic goals because we fear the disappointment that comes along when we are unable to accomplish it. And how many of us are actually aware of our potential? If we ever knew our potential, we would not be calling it ‘potential’ because we would have made the most out of it.  Of course there’s that adage of reaching for the stars so when you fall, you fall on the cloud, or something like that. But again, it’s an oversimplification-of-a-complex-reality.

On the other hand, when you let go of your goal and just do the best you can do, that’s when you will come to realise your potential. When you don’t have any goal in mind, you have “nothing to lose”,  and you are not afraid of the outcome. Well, I’ve tried this out and it worked for me.

Then again, Paulo Coelho suggests in his popular book “The Alchemist” that with a final goal in mind, you are bound to achieve not only your dream but also countless experienve. That works if you don’t care about what you might get in the end, because what you hoped for might not be achieved. Instead, you get to experience lotsa other delights which are supposedly what makes you stronger, just like Santiago who managed to realise that his journey was much more valuable than the chest full of gold he discovered (that is, his initial goal).

So one thing remains true to these days, that result is never the most important aspect of anything.