23
“Justice can proceed with wisdom.
Revenge cannot.”
- Ken Carey (The Third Millennium, p.118).
“At mainstream school. Children
sniffed out his vulnerability and hounded him down. What would he say to those
bullies now? ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover. Live and let live. Autistic
people have the same rights as anyone else. To deny them those rights is the
ultimate sin. I don’t believe in revenge.’ We have to learn to forgive. Anyway,
I know I’ve done well enough to set them a maths problem,’ he says, breaking
into a huge grin. ‘I can hold my own now.’” - From an interview by Genevieve
Fox with Marc Fleisher regarding living with Asperger Syndrome, Evening Standard. His first book is
called Survival Strategies for People
with Autism Spectrum (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, U.K., 2005).
“Marc Fleisher's new self-help guide
for autistic teenagers and adults will help readers improve their quality of
life and overcome many everyday challenges, be it through the acquisition of
independent living skills, developing a more varied and fulfilling social life,
or mastering a course in higher education and broadening one's opportunities
for the future. Marc Fleisher speaks from firsthand experience about the coping
strategies he himself has had to learn - often the hard way.”
(www.f84.blogspot.com/2008/04/survival-strategies-for-people-on.html).
SUMO (Shut Up, Move On). The
straight talking guide to creating and enjoying a brilliant life
by Paul McGee
(Capstone Publishing Limited, West Sussex, U.K., 2006).
p.22. Even if you are a genuine
victim, ultimately you need to learn how to become a survivor.
p.26. But what if I do believe I have been unfairly treated or discriminated
against? Are you suggesting I simply ‘get over it’ and stop making a fuss?
Absolutely and categorically not. The key is not to remain helpless. You may
have been a ‘victim’ but you must see yourself as a survivor. You must assert
yourself when necessary and do all you can to challenge inappropriate actions
by an individual or organisation.
The
message from this chapter is that some people, consciously or unconsciously,
habitually wear the Victim T-shirt. In doing so, they abdicate responsibility
for their lives. Removing the T-shirt is an indication that no matter what life
has given us so far or will give us in the future, we take control of our
response. If you want your life to get better, you’ll never be able to achieve
it until you remove your T-shirt. Change does not happen when circumstances
improve; change happens when you
decide to improve your circumstances.
p.31-32. William James, one of the
pioneers of modern psychology, said ‘You change your life by changing your
attitude.’ Quite simply, when you think
differently, you feel differently,
behave differently and ultimately achieve different results...You get a
different result and outcome because you changed how you thought about the
situation.
p.33. The most important message you
receive as you grow up is the one that influences how you see yourself.
Messages that affirm you for who you are, as opposed to for what you do, will
help you develop a healthy sense of personal identity. Equally, a bombardment
of messages that remind you of your inadequacies and failings will help sow the
seeds of low self-esteem.
p.67. You are not a robot who can
turn your emotions on and off at the flick of a switch. In order to move on,
you need at times to acknowledge the emotions you are feeling.
p.157. Hope is not a strategy.
Like the sperm that is successful in
the long run: it is going somewhere while others attack it. They live for power
in a temporal world, now, and are going nowhere. So it all balances in the end.
You leave them behind - like the hare and the tortoise - and cross the
finishing line of self-awareness and completed identity. They appear powerful
in the short-term but you win the game in the end by achieving your goals.
The Revelation of Ramala
(Neville Spearman,
Jersey, 1978), p.124-125.
...over many lives, Man has been
deceived by falsehoods he has built up within himself, within his soul, a
protection against the speech of his fellow-men. Throughout his evolution
unevolved Man has communicated through the means of speech. During higher
phases of consciousness, when the Earth was more evolved, speech was not used,
but for most of the time Man has communicated through speech and, as such, much
of the wickedness and evil of Man has come through his mouth. So Man has an
inbuilt resistance to speech but he cannot resist, his soul cannot deny, Truth
when he sees it. If he sees Truth with his eyes his soul sees it, and there can
be no denial. One deed is worth a thousand words.
If
you really intend to walk the path, pay particular attention to your deeds.
Every time you are going to do something get into the habit of thinking most
carefully about it first, especially when it affects your fellow-men, so that
your actions, when you perform them, are the result of careful judgement and
not quick personality decisions. Man remembers you more by your actions than by
your words.
So
many of the basic principles of life in your World today are wrong that you
will find yourselves in conflict with them in almost every aspect of life. You
will eat differently. You will drink differently. You will live differently.
You will behave differently. You will think differently. You will feel
differently. In all these ways you will become different from your fellow-men.
It is therefore very easy to create conflict and to antagonise people. What you
must ensure, however, is that people do not antagonise you. Your actions, if
they are correct, will produce different responses in people according to their
soul evolution. If a man recognises the Truth in you sometimes it will annoy
his personality, and he will dislike you for it. That you will have to accept.
It is the reason why you are here. Eventually, as he continually sees the
example before him, that man will change.
What
you yourselves must guard against is that you do not become antagonistic
towards your less-evolved fellow-men. If you see a man kill, if you see a man
steal, if you see a man tell falsehoods, even if you see a man trying to
destroy the Truth which you have established, you must not feel antagonistic
towards him and create evil thoughts because of what he is doing. This is a
most difficult lesson to learn. Remember that you are the evolved ones, and the
first duty of evolved souls is that they are here to be of service to their
less evolved brothers and that, with the power of their evolved thought, they
can easily create a greater force for evil.
So
be tolerant of your less evolved brothers who do not think and feel like you.
It is, for many of them, merely that they are the products of the Age, of the
falsehoods that have been taught and passed down from generation to generation.
Remember the difficulties that you yourselves have experienced in changing your
ways of life and in expanding your own consciousness. You, perhaps, may have
had a more favourable environment and received greater help than your less
evolved brothers, and therefore you are in a position to help them.
“Start the day with a great attitude. Fix it before you get out of bed and remind yourself of it throughout the day. Attitude is EVERYTHING.” - Gary Bate (from ‘7 Principles of higher conscious living,’ 2012, www.whatstress.com).
“The most beautiful people we have
known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known
loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an
appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with
compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not
just happen.” - Elisabeth Kubler Ross (Transitions).
In
the Disney film, Bambi (1942), the
rabbit named Thumper, as Wikipedia notes, “took it upon himself to teach the
fawn various tricks, notably that of speech. He succeeded in teaching Bambi a
few words, notably ‘bird’ and ‘flower’ which Bambi accidentally used to name a
young skunk. Thumper tried to correct Bambi but the skunk said, ‘That's
alright. He can call me Flower if he wants to. I don't mind.’ The three animals
go on to become friends and this encounter provides another moral lesson in the
virtues of tolerance and an easy disposition.”
Remember, Be Here, Now by Baba Ram Dass (a.k.a. Dr. Richard Alpert; Hanuman Foundation, Santa Fe, NM., U.K., 1971).
“Suffering is great. It’s like
straightening-by-fire. It’s purifying. It’s good. This trip requires total
suffering but it’s got to be suffering that’s no suffering. You’ve got to be
the whole suffering trip but: You can’t be the guy who is suffering.”
“Am I he who is being pained? NO!
That’s the thing. Once you know that then pleasure and pain, loss and gain,
fame and shame, are all the same. They’re all just happening.”
“You’re standing on a bridge
watching yourself go by.”
“You are it
It’s really just another cop-out to be searching
for the guru. He’s your fingernail. Just bite your fingernail and you’re eating
him alive. When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru. Speaking to you.
It’s right here...always.
Here and now
I keep doing this because I don’t think people
thoroughly grok the fact that here is where it all is. After you finish the
whole thing and you’ve vibrated your spine for years and done your pranayam and
meditated for years and years and sat in a cave and ants have eaten your arms
and legs, here you are...you’re right here again...and what your mind is you
were here all the time and it’s such a cosmic joke it’s so funny your
struggling to get HERE.”
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