Weekend of the Aftermath, Newtown Conn.

It defies logic to deny that what happened in Connecticut yesterday or Aurora recently, etc., was perpetrated by other than someone owning guns. I know the statistics, thousands lose their lives in car accidents, in household accidents, or swimming. Right, so we can’t outlaw cars, goes the argument, or kitchen knives or ladders or pools. Anything can be used as a weapon, but “anything“ is not a weapon, it has many various purposes, and can only incidentally serve as an instrument of death. Only guns, however, are designed and manufactured with the one single intent and function of killing, the question of murder aside. And guns are and will remain our most very lucrative business.

As long as we hold dear our American “2nd-Amendment-Rights“ mentality and its sorely misguided interpretation which argues that “guns don’t kill, people do“ (wrong: people with guns kill), we will continue to see and to suffer more of this. Those who honor and uphold the gun lobby’s enormous clout over govt. and human dignity may also include many “pro-lifers“ who would see in the recognition of a woman’s right to decide for herself over abortion, a license to kill, to murder. And then simultaneously insist that everyone and anyone can just stockpile an arsenal of assault weapons because “the 2nd Amendment says so“… One is convinced that this part of our population actually identify “being American“ with having the “right to own and bear arms,“ just like that. Which is like countless Muslims I’ve met who identify being Muslim with avoiding pork – why it’s that simple.

These friends of the NRA and the firearms industry in general may shed crocodile tears over yesterday’s murder of children, or no tears at all. Sarah Palin never apologized for placing crosshairs over Rep. Gifford’s face shortly before the latter was shot in the head. No remorse can be expected from such elements of our society, these upstanding Americans, nor responsibility.

My Christmas at any rate will be a sober one, mighty sober, reflective and in anguish. I’ll be physically here in Belin, but my heart will be spending the holidays in a certain township in Connecticut.

So Rana and I sat up all evening and late into the night (Berlin time, the service started at 8pm EST) glued to CNN. We recognize that for those broadcasting it's all the business of infotainment, in all its cynical glory - but we had to watch because we are afixed, we are in anguish.

So we watched the memorial with all the nice eccumenical eulogies and then the local town hall rep., the gov. and the Prez. We were enormously and deeply affected by the rabbi who was the first of those invited to get up there. and coming a (relatively) close second was the Muslim imam. there were no thirds. The rabbi put out what was and is most needed. no one (unfortunately) could give what this rabbi gave - his words were sparse and to the point and from the heart with broken voice...and then he sang. Not the Kaddish exactly but a deeply deeply gripping Hebrew hymn tailored for this occasion, and with such a richness of grief and of authentic mourning and sadness and reality. I was already standing at the moment and remained there as he beckoned the hall to all stand, and I wept throughout his wonderful, terrible, blessed singing. THAT was a mourning, which must have brought the breaved infinitely more sense of being understood than all the shit which preceded and followed. thank Jehovah, that the Jewish expression still has it in it to deliver when it comes to something like this.

The Muslim came in 2nd in my book, less for what he said or quoted, although parts were good - I mean that from the standpoint of real spiritual gut-power - but he scored with me on authentic emotion and it was clear to see how broken and stricken he was.

Unfortunately - and here I had to comfort my dear protestant Rana - everyone else, from Catholic to Methodist to Lutheran to Pentecostal to even Baha'i to whatever else, offered with more or less practiced emotions, the awful awful usual victuals of bla-bla-bla, dry, "reassuringly" full of platitudes, colorless, prepared, predigested, and dead. dead words, no music (or nothing which could remotely compare with what Rabbi Shaul from the local synagogue put out). We bemoan that the Christian clergy just doesn't have it any more, or ever so rarely. her priest and pastor from her childhood, he had had it in him in full, he would have brought the house down with the ardent simplicity and co-grieving which was sorely lacking in that parish yesterday.

Well, that was our take.

And I KNOW exactly what I would have said or done on that pulpit had I been there, and in what measure. I know exactly because as I said to Rana, what they don't grasp at all (except the rabbi in this case) is that with people in a bereavement of this magnitude especially, and so immediately after as well - you HAVE to go down into the pain, the SHIT, you HAVE to get your fingernails dirty, your knees have to be covered with the earth of humility, you have to do this first and reach their hearts BEFORE you speak of elevating, ennobling, eternal verities.

You have to get across to them that their lost ones are here and now and in reality AS in eternity, to get their focus on that love which binds us defnitely and palpably and tangibly and powerfully. You can't embrace or empower anyone with platitudes about any kind of churchy "afterlife," you have not earned the right to do that - unless and until you can feel the snot in your own nose and the choked breath in your own heart, and say what really is, that the loss and the grief and the sadness and the horror and the pain and the sheer torture of living every moment from here on with this knife in one's heart IS REAL. And to BE with that, and to be with that with them. THEN and only then, can one go from there to elevate and bring the thing home.

http://news.yahoo.com/tearful-plea-victims-dad-deadly-rampage-233719408.html

UPDATE, 19 Apr. 2019 and 07 Dec. 2019:

Wolfgang Halbig - Sandy Hook Trial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfIp4MwizQ 

Psy Ops Goes Mainstream (fixed audio) - (All the world’s a stage, and they want you to believe their story is real. I give you some examples of faked reports that led us to war and then I introduce very unlucky people who were at multiple tragic events. I move on to one example of why they tell stories and then show you a theory as to how they are able to do it. MORE...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMVvjzTMjMI

 

Fourteen: Malala Yousufzai

Fourteen and with the heart of a lion,

fourteen, a girl with the tenacity of an army of women.

God by any name loves her over the viciousness of piety,

God will prefer her defiance of Muslim hypocrisy

and ignorant compliance - shrilly posing as a "model of advancement,"

looking only backwards - whereas she alone is her nation's enhancement.

In her schoolgirl form speaks the voice of our time,

she is the river itself over which the passing flotsam

of her coming or going, or of the Taliban's coming or going,

is carried out of sight to the ocean of unfolding.

We are in her bond, resounding on every breath

is a voice triumphant, victorious over the living death

of one more day with twisted norms in a twisted culture,

a clarion call to us: "Don't be the flotsam, be the river!"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/newsmakers/books-pens-most-powerful-weapons-heroism-malala-yousafzai-165035081.html?vp=1

I have been asked to pen something on Sufism in light of developments in Mali

Sufism dates back to the first Human Beings, it is neither a religion nor a philosophy, while giving them their life and depth and dimension, as it expresses from the source of both.

Whereas for a believer God is a reality, a Sufi apprehends God as THE reality, and arrives at this through direct experience of God and nothing less. She has donned the mantle of many faiths through the ages, lending each its peculiar form and the scent of love, harmony and beauty. And whereas Sufism is immeasurably older than Islam, which to the uninitiated appears to claim it for itself, the fact is that Sufis alone have given Islam all that is of value in it. Sufism is free and the Sufi belongs to no religion, it is the essence of all faiths.

Sufis may traditionally be Muslims, but Muslims are no Sufis, rather they have persecuted Sufis for centuries into the present, and we will be seeing more of this.

The Sufi can coexist in real mutual appreciation with anyone, embracing all forms and requiring none, but the Sufi cannot coexist with bigotry, racism, all manner of hypocrisy, faking, mass manipulation, supremacism, slothful indifference. Having said that, I have to point out that the Sufi can coexist with every kind of ignorance, as she does this all the time.

The most profound expression in English of Sufism in our time, is in the following invocation, whose value is - as with all things given by Sufism - only in the practice and realization of it:

“Toward the one, the perfection of love, harmony and beauty, the only Being, united with all the illuminated souls who form the embodiment of the master, the spirit of guidance.“

Now the spirit of guidance which demonstrates Sufism as the Source and not the effect of any religion, not the “mystical side-show“ of any faith, as bookish academics so often portray it – this spirit of guidance is most beautifully expressed in the part of this Sufi prayer addressing it:

“. . . Thy light is in all forms, Thy love in all Beings: in a loving mother, a kind father, an innocent child, a helpful friend, an inspiring teacher. Allow us to recognize Thee in all of Thy holy names and forms: as Rama, as Krishna, as Shiva, as Buddha. Let us know Thee as Abraham, as Solomon, as Zarathustra, as Moses, as Jesus, as Muhammad – and in many other names and forms, known and unknown to the world. . . .“

It should be clear by what is happening in Mali, in Pakistan, and certainly elsewhere, that Sufism - which proposes an ever forward movement of conscious Human development, both embracing tradition and yet traditionally, even notoriously breaking with it, both disappearing into any surrounding culture it finds itself sharing a corner of the planet with and maintaining an unwavering position in deference to the truth, to the light, indifferent to and independent of dogmas, institutions and ideologies of every brand or intensity.

What shall be the difference between Islam and Sufism, then, when they both have a penetrating power? Where Islam penetrates with dogma, sectarian warfare, supremacist tendencies – the Sufi penetrates with light, and her interests lie in effacement in God over religion.

Jew on the Block, or Showing the Flag

(Berlin, early Sept. 2012)

Multi-Kulti or officially dictated “multi-culturalism“ is the decades old project here in Doitch-Land, especially Berlin, which had had better prospects until it became so ideological (idiot-logical) that it proved to be a failure and continues proving itself to be a worn-out, outdated parody of itself – all the moreso when PC politicians parade their suspiciously banal agenda to sell the native citizenry on a scam-“tolerance“ which both defies democracy and good sense, and denies hard realities. It may seem to be a complicated subject to tackle, but there are certain factors which keep noticeably turning up – and turning one's stomach.

The elements of society here, as in other European countries and the UK, which are dead set against integrating, against the German, the European, the Western model of social-democracy and consitutional laws - most significantly Germany's own Basic Law (lesson learned after Hitler) making the dignity of every human being inalienable, against mixing with the real natives here and in fact demonizing them - these elements come out of the Arab and Turkish immigrant population – I say come out of, not represent all of them – and not from any Christian Arabs or Turks, no, but Muslim, exclusively Muslim.

Not the Africans as such, who had settled and remained, not the Asians who had settled and remained, not any other Europeans who immigrated and stayed. Jews are here in great number but you won't recognize them anywhere except at the corner of a synagogue where a congregation is inconspicuously flourishing or in bagel cafés safely near such corners. Jews are still unsure of where they stand in Germany, which makes me wonder why they stand here at all. I do not share this facade and have just clocked 24 years here. If something doesn't fit bring out the Holocaust, that'll work – an Israeli Minister so much as explained this tactic in an interview I watched, I didn't get her name.

So Muslims play both cards: the superiority of Islam/Qur'an/and Shari'a law over everybody else, and of course the victim card – and whose victim are they? Why the Germans' of course, and naturally those God-forsaken Jews'.

And the Muslims get their mosques built without a peep from the city, county or state, and they wear prayer caps, beards, robes, hijabs, even burqas openly on the streets. Entire districts have lost every recognizable Berlin-ness and have taken on the character of Berlistanbul or Berlankara. Everyone has to accept it because German politics has said so. Anyone who disagrees, much less criticizes this, is branded radical-right and neo-nazi and fascist – which simply isn't true, but the stigma works. The media peddles it and mouths what the naive (or worse) politic of the day dictates. And I stress the word dictate.

The Muslim world and the imams who are known to preach in mosques here want to gradually infiltrate with sheer numbers (which is working) and eventually impose Shari'a. I am not kidding nor making this up nor lapping up populist crap in pointing this out. This is all merely background for what I'm addressing here and I'll come to that very shortly.

Back in the States, at the end of the '70s, beginning of the '80s, I wore a full beard and a Sikh turban, going about my business, working two jobs in a boom town in northern New Mexico, and modeling my prayers after the Muslim custom. As Khomeini had just assumed power in Iran and commanded the news, I was occasionally accosted on the street as some “goddamn Muslim“ - which didn't bother me in the least, but I have never shied from wearing something which marked me as someone's public enemy. And I am no stranger to Islam or to Qur'an, nor its founder. Shari'a however, or identification with sects or branches of sects, has always been nothing but poison in my view.

As Reform-bred Colorado Jew, I have never worn a yarmulke (Kippa in Doitch) in public, and wear mine now only when I perform Friday evening Shabbos-Kiddush in my own kitchen here in largely Turkish Berlin-Wedding. Nor will you usually ever find me in a synogogue, although after 20 years here I did finally consent to becoming a dues-paying member of the Jewish Congregation of Berlin. A story in itself, and irrelevant here.

Now statistically speaking, apparently 90% of attacks on Jews over a studied period have been from right-extremists, that is, German Caucasians who generally like bomber jackets, jump boots, and very short hair or none on their knuckle-heads, and who identify strongly with Hitler's “Reich“ and its paraphernalia. However – they are not all over the place, and outside of their enclaves, which make things admittedly ugly enough, they are not actually particularly visible. Muslims however are, and these do not like Jews. I don't have a problem with that in itself, I do have a problem with their comparing themselves and thier lot with that of the Jews in the 1930s here – while also disdaining the Jews themselves – and while playing the victim card for their own purposes likewise using “victim“ as an epithet of contempt for, well, any or all non-Muslims.

Now an interesting thing just occurred this past week, and more interesting is how the prominent worthies of this fair city and the public and the media responded. A young rabbi was walking his 7-year-old daughter home one weekday afternoon, wearing a baseball cap to actually conceal his yarmulke (Kippa), in a still very decent neighborhood which exudes a gentrified Berlinerish atmosphere – or had back when I knew it – and he was accosted by four Arab youths. They came on to him, they asked him if he's Jewish, he answered in the affirmative. Therewith they roundly insulted him, shoved him and one broke his jaw, which got him hospitalized and some stitches. And for good measure, they verbally threatened to kill his daughter while he lay there. Nice kids.

So I learned through this, reading the local media blitz on it, of the curious fact that the reason why I think I almost never see Jews here is that they all conceal their yarmulkes (Kippas) under a baseball cap. Not out of fear of Germans, to be honest about it, but out of fear of Arabs, or of Turks, in any case radical-thinking, hyped-up Salafist-impressed “Muslims!“

Now the rabbi in question was actively one for dialogue between faiths. I would hope he has learned that you cannot have dialogue with punks and Salafist-influenced religio-fascists. He still did his daughter the disfavor (as I see it but he obviously doesn't) of already giving interviews saying he would “forgive them if they showed remorse.“ He is in Lala-land, and I will be writing him soon. The four by the way are still at large as of my writing this, and nice-notes placed on trees at the square where he and his daughter were attacked, repeating this desire for the four to come forth, had been torn down in short shrift. They may never be caught, but they certainly will not know remorse, as they obviously cannot feel another's pain. This die-hard-naive rabbi towed exactly the classic PC-government political line when he said in interview (and I am not making this up) that “we don't know if these Arab youths were Muslim, they may never have been in a mosque, they could have been Christian.“ So now we want to get real stupid here and paint some make-believe “Christians,“...hello?? Earth to rabbi, Earth to rabbi, we're having difficulties...! Excuse my ignorance, but no one has ever seen a Christian Arab here beating up Jews or anyone else for that matter. So what is the real agenda here?!

As I said, I've never wore a yarmulke (Kippa) in public, here or in the States, but this had nothing to do with fears, it had to do with not being a yarmulke-wearer, period. Evidently all these German Jews, citizens under a democratic state, and visitors from Ami-Land or Israel are careful not even to wear a six-pointed star around what once were alternative-scenes but now heavily Muslim, much less wear a Jewish head covering. NO ONE IS PREVENTED FROM WEARING A MUSLIM HEAD COVERING, EVEN A BURQA, ON THE STREETS OF BERLIN! BUT JEWS WEAR BASEBALL CAPS TO HIDE THEIR SIMPLE YARMULKES (KIPPAS)!

I don't care what Jews do or what they wear, and I don't care what Muslims wear or practice for themselves. I DO very much care that they have a take-over agenda (this is not a figment of my imagination, friends!) and that as long as the political and academic and literary class continue to sweet-mouth them and to drastically pervert what the alternative movement really once meant against racism and xenophobia, and as long as Jews and the official Jewish community continue to creep and grovel before this tyrannical mentality of exclusively Muslim character – then I will act according to what is in my power.

Now the public response to that attack last week was immediate: about a thousand turned out on the Saturday immediately following the incident, to demonstrate for (the usual platitudes of) tolerance and neighborliness and appreciation of diversity. One hardly dares mention openly that it is precisely and exclusively the Muslims who think, speak and act against diversity, against tolerance, against openness and mixing of cultures, except when it applies to them and their interests. When one does mention this, as did one or two Jewish spokespersons, the Muslim Central calls the Jewish Central on “unfairness“ and demands recognition for “doing lots“...

And the political class bends to every Muslim pressure, and the literary class and the academics and the media bend and tow the line dictated by a government under Merkel who has very nefarious aspirations ahead for Germany, and the worn-out parodied canards of sell-out “Greens“ and the “Left“ in general – the real antisemitism has always been as much from the Left as the Right, and while oozing oily words over our Jewish friends, it is the Muslim friends whom they really fear and whom they rise to every occasion to defend against the most intelligent criticism or confrontation.

These prominent persons present at that demo put on yarmulkes (Kippas) – how noble of them – to demonstrate before the cameras, the news, the world, their solidarity, by golly! The idiot mayor and other pious public figures, notably non-Jews of course, wore these with all seriousness. The Muslim Central was of course there condemning violence and such – but not one put on a yarmulke (Kippa) – THAT would have been asking too much. Good for them all that I was not there. I had shift, but wouldn't have gone anyway, except to disrupt and raise hell, probably getting myself kicked out – by both.

I want to kick some ass and rattle some cages in the Jewish Community, and I want to confront this very rabbi with some REAL questions: like, WHAT KIND OF IDEALIST (LIKE HIMSELF) SAYS TO THE WORLD “THEY BROKE MY JAW BUT NOT MY WILL TO FURTHER DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE FAITHS“ (AS HE DID) – AND STILL COVERS HIS YARMULKE (KIPPA) WITH A BASEBALL CAP!! This hypocrisy is unacceptable. Israelis visiting Berlin who speak English for fear of being overheard speaking Hebrew! If you are a yarmulke (Kippa) wearer then WEAR IT – or don't, I don't care. But I do care that you hide it under a baseball cap while grooming both your cowardly piety and your pious cowardice.

Our Freedom Riders in the 1960s rode into the South with a burning ideal and knew that baseball bats and two-by-fours awaited them, that murder and death awaited them, that cruelty and brutal contempt awaited them. And they went, they took a beating, they died, eventually they won – for all time, for America, for us.
In the Berlin of the '80s young Berliners, and not the state, not the officaldom, took to the streets and took their share of heavy bruises confronting and fighting neo-Nazis in defense of Berlin's Jews (who were not themselves by the way visibly present nor were any Muslims) - these Berliners understood what serious confrontation requires.

IF I were a yarmulke (Kippa) wearer, I'd rather take a slug to the chops for wearing it than slink in imaginary safety around my own resident – if not native to boot – city or neighborhood hiding what I am and being the good little citizen. Am I putting my money where my mouth is?

I've already long since begun wearng my T-shirt around with “shari'a“ in Arabic stricken through on the front side, and on the back, in German: “shari'a?...no thanks“. If this doesn't get me killed, the following might:

As of right now I go out in public, and will soon likewise in the much more Islamically populated districts, wearing my conspicuously blue yarmulke (Kippa) and let my little six-pointed star dangle merrily at my throat. From some reactions I've gotten I notice they already feel provoked. Good. It's not about the Germans, had it been that I wouldn't have waited 24 years...

So I want to see how "multi-kulti" Berlin really is, I want to test this out:  if Berlin is really multi-cultural then I should have no problem wearing a star of David (Davidstern) or a yarmulke (Kippa) - not even a glance I should receive, let alone get hospitalized or receive Kaddish over my remains, for something so normal, you would think.  If Berlin is the capital of a democratic western country with old Christian roots and old Jewish ones as well, then my T-shirt should not get me killed, although the mere thought of my wearing it has co-workers very concerned for my life.

I may have a new T-shirt made up, here are the runners-up:
front: VORSICHT: Jude ohne Basecap (Beware: Jew withot baseball cap)
back: Amok aber koscher (On the loose but kosher...which I'm not of course)
front: Krankenpfleger jüdischer Herkünft (Registered nurse of Jewish background)
back: Jude – und kein Opfer (Jew - and no victim)
front: Diese Jude ist kein Opfer (This Jew is no victim)
back: Na los – frag mich wo mein Basecap ist (Go ahead – ask me where my baseball cap is)
front: Jude mit (Herz) auch für Muslime (Jew with (heart) also for Muslims)
back: ...und ich bin Gott sehr dankbar für Schweinefleisch (...and I'm very grateful to God for pork)

If I'm sending any a message to Berliners themselves, to Germans in this, an unspoken statement through the glance, it's “Hey folks, you've been led gradually to take so much Islamic parading for granted over the past decade, until it so fills your view everywhere you look that you've gotten used to it. Okay, now get used to this. Here's a Jew among you. Yeah, your neighbor of how many years now.“

But to the Muslims I'm saying with a blatantly confident and friendly glance, “Right, believe it, we're here. And you will not take over and make us all “like you“ and run this place on shari'a like you wish.“

The source of that confidence is in remaining centered in my own Being, the source of that friendliness is in being united with all the illuminated souls who form the embodiment of the master, the spirit of guidance.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YcOQY-n-EWs

You are a child of the Universe...and everything is Universe, and everything is You

http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/noindex/picture.original/12672653/Messier_56_by_Hubble_Space_Telescope_36p

Have a long, slow look at this, it's too large to post - and scroll up and down with it, left and right:  THAT is YOUR Source.

An excerpt from one of my poems, "Cornerstone of Your Faith" (see blog, Colfax Avenue, May 2011) challenges you with:
                                 

Remembering God for His own sake
           relieves you of poverty-mind:  always let
   the majesty and dignity of your Noble Lord and Cherisher
 overwhelm you, and join it - acknowledging, after all,

                                         that He dwells within you as you.

Go now, and make yourself a fragrant gift to the world,

a reflection of Paradise Here and Now, and in Reality.

See the image on this link?  This is not God, this is a fabulous Reflection of God, because the universe, being a mental construct, is, even considering this image here, only as infinite as the mind, and God is above and beyond mind, so it is just a Reflection but a damned great one, in fact looking at this defies any words you can give it, so we won't even try.  Let's just say, to hold the impression and let it deepen in you, "this is God."  When Jesus said "I come from the Father and He and I are one," he was speaking in the language of the day, he could have said Mother, it wouldn't have mattered.  He wasn't talking about some gray bearded old bastard with a bent for sick jokes and wrathful consequences, he wasn't talking about any Sistine Chapel Deity.  He was talking about Source, YOUR Source, our Source of Origin.  A parent is a metaphor to express that, nothing more.  And Jesus also reminded us, that "not a sparrow falleth to the ground, but the Father knoweth."  Now take another look at that link and take a long, deep breath.  Got it?

Still think it's all indifferent, this vastness?  Yes, in a way, like nature is indifferent, but actually that's only a perception relative to our emotions.  It is an insult to God to say He would not have the expansion and timeless capacity, the patience, to allow for a mere several billion earth years and a big bang or two to let dinosaurs come and go, mammals develop, and primates evolve into Humans - who anyway are still not evolved.  And God is love.  Can you trust That?  Can you look at this image here and, seeing how insignificant you and your petty little dramas are, can you look without ego and trust That, can you grasp the ungraspable, that it is love which created all of this and out of love it was made?  As Paul tells us in Acts and I think in the Epistles as well, "in THAT we live and move and have our Being"... The light of all those lights, is a light which no eye can percieve, a light you cannot conceive of, and that light IS YOUR OWN SOURCE, and the only Source of your joy.  Is it getting in, am I making a dent?  So when Jesus speaks of the Father, this is a Reflection of what was meant.  The Secret Gospel of John delivers something along this line very clearly.  But I'm not here to quote all the passages, they're in there.

So here's what to do:
If you're a Jew you ought to breathe in "ha-shem echad" and breathe out "baruch ha-shem" while drawing into you the power of this link's image and radiating out love, joy, peace - in that order.  So cut the bullshit of mystifying everything so you can go on controlling others - and just get it.
If you're a Christian, period, you ought to breathe in "Christ-in-me" and breathe out "United with All" contemplating loving, serving and remembering.  I've already mentioned before, that you can only remember where you've been or what you are, so what is obviously implied is, you've already been there.  So cut the bullshit of oversimplifying everything so you can go on controlling others - and just get it.
If you're a Muslim, you ought to mind your own business instead of everyone else's, and breathe in "Allah" and out, letting God's love for all of Humankind, for once rattle your cage - and you can start by reading "Cornerstone of Your Faith" in it's entirety, as it was written to you - so just get it.
If you're a Hindu, just look at that image and scream "RAM!" You know what I'm talking about, you got it.
If you're a Sikh, say "ek ong kar sat nam siri wahe guru!"  That pretty damned well delivers what this Hubble-bubble photo is trying to tell us, you definitely got it.
If you're Buddhist, you don't have to say anything, just get it.

So once more, the link, go there:

http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/noindex/picture.original/12672653/Messier_56_by_Hubble_Space_Telescope_36p

  3 von 14  

Hazrat Inayat Khan, 27 Aug: “THE SOUL OF CHRIST IS THE LIGHT OF THE UNIVERSE.“

Murshid Sam Lewis, commenting: “The single expression “Nuri Muhammad“ characterizes both these terms. This light permeates the cosmos, and it is through this that man finds all love, all wisdom, all joy.“

Sam Inayat-Chisti: “Word.“

Rumi: “Atoms reel in praise of Thee.“

Kabir (Robt. Bly's): “...There is a Secret One inside us; the planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads. That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes. … Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire, and the Secret One slowly growing a body. Kabir caught one glimpse of that – it made him a servant for life.“

Pir Vilayat Khan: “Here our practices with breath begin: Slow down your breath. Slow down your heart beat, the vibrations of the blood, slow down the tonus of your emotions, clear your breath, clear the mind of thoughts, refine your breath, surround yourself with a zone of silence, simply be intensely aware of breathing.

Become conscious of the convergence of the whole universe into the center of your Being, your solar plexus, as you inhale. Consciousness is just a focal center in the totality, an eddy in the sea of cosmic consciousness, an egg in the totality. Concentrate the totality in the center, as you inhale.

The solar plexus is a receptive center, it is the depth of your Being, almost like a pit, a deep sea, a sea of fire. Inhale deep within the solar plexus, imagine that you are rolled within and that you are walled in, so that there is no exit to the outside, and then you discover this vast empty space, an infinity of space within.

The heart center is a center of expression, of radiation, in fact it is very much like the sun, it is the center of the etheric body. As you breathe out you go out from the center, radiating into the totality, broadcasting magnetism, warmth, love, understanding, energy, like the sun.

You begin to be conscious of an emanation, which you feel precisely around the shoulders, a mantle of light -- but to start with simply a magnetic field that seems to be carrying light at its edge. A magnetic field can give out light, light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and in fact: the aura is born. It emanates from the magnetic body. Experience expansion, to the point of merging with the totality, disidentify with the denseness of the physical body. Experience yourself as empty and light, indeed etheric, like steam. The physical body seems to be the condensaion and crystalization of that steam, static and fossilized, as compared with the pulsation of the magnetic field, which is breathing all the time. As it breathes in it contracts, as it breathes out it expands. And the same thing with the light which issues forth: it is like a pulsating star.“

Moreover, I was sitting next to Sheikh Muzaffer Effendi of the Halveti-Jerrahi Order that evening in Manhatten when he said, “If you're out walking and come upon a pile of dog shit in the road you say to yourself, logically, 'Oh, a dog was here.' Why then, when we look at the vast nature all around us, don't we observe likewise, 'Ah, God was here.'?“

One last note:

"Entre les étoiles, le Seigneur a écrit ton nom, entre les étoiles, tous la-haut dans sa maison; entre les étoiles, le Seigneur a posé ta vie, entre les étoiles, près de lui en paradis..." Now that's the refrain to a lovely song by the Singing Nun from the '60s, it's telling us, as I often sang it to my children at bedtime: "Among the stars the Lord has written your name, high up in His abode; among the stars the Lord has placed your life, near to Himself in paradise."

The first of the three verses, which I'll just translate for space, is so precious, such a stroke of genius, it runs: "The night when the Lord desired you into existence, the night; the night when He created your life from two lumps of flesh, the night; the night when his primordial love smiled on you: ah, blesséd, the night!"

NOW THAT WAS A NUN WE COULD ALL STAND TO HAVE A LOT MORE OF!

http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2012/08/for-my-children-and-grandchildren-trust.html 

Faith is like . . .

Faith is like this: if you can explain it, that's not it. And if you cannot explain it, you're just complicating the matter. Religion is a house which had seven sides, each with a door. Someone stood before each door, claiming that through this door alone one would enter into direct knowledge of God. And comers were prevented from checking the other doors. The weird thing was, those guarding each door had personally never gone through it themselves, but blocked others from doing so. What nobody got to discover for themselves was that inside this house with seven sides and seven doors was one single huge room, and had they gone through their respective doors they would have met in there. So how shall this parable end?

For My Children and Grandchildren: Trust Me On This

You might wonder what religion is, is there a use for it, which do you choose, where's the point, does "God" exist.  I am giving you, once and for all, the five essential things you will ever need to guide you on this, as it will affect your life and direction whether you accept this or reject it, take it to heart or let it go.  Call it: Religion without ego.  Trust me on this.

1. God is the source of all existence, and the source of yours, entirely.  By whatever name you relate to "him," for starters relate - as everything exists in God and God alone is existent.  So relate to it and celebrate and be grateful that you're here.

 2. Belief isn't faith but can get you there, and faith isn't experience but can mature and prepare you for it.  You could say - belief is a desire, faith is a trust, experience is a knowing.

3. Place two fingers on your carotid artery, left or right at your neck, feel the clear pulse coursing:  God is closer to you than that.  Take a long, deep breath through the nostrils into the lungs, and down into the belly, hold it, let it out slowly and consciously:  God is closer to you than that as well.  Trust me on this.

4. God is love, and loves you more than a mother loves her own child, and that's pushing the envelope.

 5. Your most profound expression of God or faith is, and will ever be:  love.  So keep in the heart and trust that.  Don't let big talkers mow you down.

Beloved Swami tells us:  See God in everyone.  And that the best form to worship God is every form.  This will make you strong and resistent to all poisonous influences.  Let the God-in-you love everyone, serve everyone and remember God.  And Beloved Swami assures us:  "Understand your Self, seek your Self and find your Self; all the sacred names or forms from East or West, all dwell within you; kneel to your own Self, honor and worship your own Being. Chant the mantra always going on within you, meditate on your own Self: God dwells within you as you."  Trust him on this, take it and go with it!

Wailing Wall Address

The speech I'd like to - but dare not - deliver at the “Wailing Wall“:

People of Jerusalem! I come to your fair and ancient City, so steeped in traditions, so laden with history, so riddled with bullets - and am immediately struck by two things, neither of which are bullets:

The Dome of the Rock may be a lovely piece of work, but do we need it? Hey, Muslims, you have Mecca, you have Medina. You don't need al-Quds, namely Jerusalem, give it up!

And this chunk of temple siding takes up way too much attention, you Jews are so fixated on the Temple Mount, take a note from the Christians and acquaint yourselves for once with the Sermon on the Mount.

Excessive zeal for a religious form has nothing to do with love of or toward God, still less with any experience of God, and therefore does no favors for Humankind. Please, someone prove me wrong. You can't.

So in conclusion, to those Christians running the Church of the Tomb: teamwork, fellas, teamwork. To the Muslims in the City: hey, the Jews were already here before you had your religion, they got driven out, you rode in and conquered, they came back and reconquered, deal with it – cut your losses, take what you had pre-'67, leave them in peace and build something for yourselves. Everyone here please stop playing the goddamn victim, and everyone stop being each other's aggressor.

And as to the City's Jews, ship the Haredi all back to Europe, they don't believe in your State anyway, they won't pay taxes, serve in your forces, get a job, get a life; they just take your bread and social, crank out kids as if they were discount. Dump them, dump the settlements, dump the dead weight and develop something that'll shut the Arabs and the UN up.

And finally - Mr. Netanyahu: TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

Levi

(16 Jan 2012)

Like a levee overlooking a great river in winter -

this child will grow to give refuge and succor and comfort

to many who are drawn over vast waters to her shore.

Khadija's daughter, she will teach faith to the doubting,

the desperate, the anguished: Rock of Compassion!

She will know what to provide and in what measure,

and to whom.

The lost will find her,

she will raise them up.

Now she is but a child, infant unknowing,

beloved breath of a beauty -

then she will be mature in vision,

on her breath will many be guided

over the impassable rivers of coming times,

through the severe winters approaching.

Some may call this the vacant wishes

of some distant unknown grandfather -

or God may just confirm him as it is spoken.

God who is neither distant nor unknown,

who draws near whom He will

and makes known what was not.

Levi, even as I breathe,

on every pulse beat I know you are there,

and you are real to me.

http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2014/06/there-is-river.html
http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2014/05/schwester-des-flusses.html
http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2012/04/source.html
http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2012/08/for-my-children-and-grandchildren-trust.html

Loving, Serving, Remembering

Love, serve, remember:

Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.

There is only one way one actually can love everyone, serve everyone – that is to remember God, there is absolutely no other possibility. Otherwise one is “trying to“ and that is either helper-syndrome which is based on a need of one's own, or social concern which is admirable but greatly limited and frustrating – because in both there is only ego. It is in remembering God that the inner movement comes, and from which the grace may come to indeed love everyone, serve or feed or nourish everyone.

One isn't at all distanced from the human side of giving, of being available, attentive, or generous – one's humanity and warmth is not forgotten but enhanced, empowered and rendered conscious. Remembering God is not like "remembering to believe in," this would be to remain trapped in the external, like remembering "someone else". One can only remember what one has experienced, where one has been. That's why we're instructed to remember. God is your Origin and your Source, That's where you came from, so buy it or not, That's where you return to and Remember, because That never “left or abandoned“ you (for where?), because That Alone exists and not your ego. And That, therefore, is Who actually loves, Who actually serves and nourishes – and Who actually Remembers, in you and as you when you are in the act of Remembrance. The practice and the mastery and the conscious absorption in Remembrance is 24/7 on every breath. That is serving everyone, that is nourishing the planet and all those around one. Any outward "form" of service or generosity will come from this and will make its mark in the world.

The surest way of becoming acquainted with all this is through love, in falling in love. When one meets, directly in-person or indirectly, a Being who thoroughly embodies this, one will be smitten with love for that Being – who is both mirror and enabler – who is worthy of all love and reverence. Through such a one will one grasp Remembrance of God.

Repetition of mantra is not for building up points in a merit system for oneself, that's all external religion, tailored to ego. Like dhikr-allah among the Islamic-expressive dervishes, or it's silent form, fikr – the former coming from the Arabic “to remember“ and the latter "to think" or hold in thought – one is keeping in the Eternal Moment of Remembrance through the repetition, whatever the mantra - let's take om sri ram jai ram jai jai ram. (Was Rama really God or someone merged in God, is God Ram and we say Rama when referring to this guy who lived and had this adventure in the Ramayana and was there a Hanuman?) Lovely work, inspiring, multi-layered as always – but if one wants to get super-involved in all that, one can go spend 20 years with pundits in the Himalayas. Or one can practice, here and now, immersing oneself in this love-bond with the Beloved. Om is now and every-other-now. Sri isn't just some holy application, it means all forms, male or female, are of the Divine Mother. Ram is God and God is Love. Jai is victory. So: God always wins. With God is victory. God is Most Great. Allahu-akbar.

Where is this divinity? Don't look around, it's in the mantra or dhikr itself, God is there in every syllable, they are atomic and loaded. Repeat them consciously. What is their power? They will awaken in one the Memory of Origin, the faculty of Remembrance. So one can go on Remembering, ever more consciously until the only one left Remembering is God/Allah/Ram HimSelf, as the ego becomes more and more absorbed in this love and less and less in itself.

One does what one does, but dropping the ego from the doing every time the identity with it asserts itself, one stays in the Remembrance, on the breath or intoned, and remains concentrated and relaxed. As Krishna also instructs in the Bhagavad Gita.

Two big things lost through all this are pity and self-pity, which are almost the same thing. Also envy, jealousy, resentments and grudges.  Expectations and judgment will be tamed, disappointments overcome or less important. Drama and trouble will be survived and gotten through intact. One will take oneself far less seriously and remain one-pointed in love, on God. One will be present and available for others in a way never imagined, instead of breaking one's neck trying to "be there" for "others" - as the illusion of "others" is not being nourished here, through the repetition of Remembrance: that there is no "other," only the One Self - which is awakened in the atmosphere around the very one absorbed in the practice of Remembrance.

Now that is love, that is serving, that is remembering.

Conversation Over A One-sided Smoke

• Why do you always smoke that pipe?

• I once tried cigarettes, it didn't agree with me, it wasn't my...idiom.
• And you can't stop smoking the pipe?
• Certainly, in fact there's nothing like a good, pricey cigar. Except a good clean pipe tobacco.
• Why don't you quit, though?
• I started when I was 17, see...
• ...and so you're hooked. That's...40 years of your life!
• 40 years and many more to come. It's not 'hooked' if you in-joy it.
• Sure it is, you're addicted, you couldn't stop if you wanted to.
• I wouldn't know, never wanted to.
• I dare you to quit.
• Don't dare!...I don't. But I have taken long hiatuses – or hiati...ever been to Haiti?
• Make good cigars there?
• Wouldn't know, never been. I have taken long breaks from smoking, never with the 'intention' of quitting however – or rather, of no-longer-smoking, I don't much like the word 'quitting' or 'giving up' – it sounds like capitulation to all the ex-smokers.
• You're ruining your health. You're a ticking time bomb for heart failure or lung disease. Have you ever once thought of just quitting, just hanging it up?
• Thank you. I won't mention your health, though I wish you much of it of course, but yes – for one tiny little moment - I'll tell you what happened when I was about...say, 53. I had just gotten off the 120 bus at Paracelsus-Bad, where Roedernallee crosses Lindauer Allee. It was winter, I had my winter jacket on and my pipe had slipped out of my pocket onto the seat. As I reached for it and found it missing I realized what had happened, hammered on the bus window before the driver took off. But he had just edged from the curb and they can't stop once they've done that. He did understand what I was hammering about but pulled out anyway, what could he do, he had rules to follow. And I had no pipe.
  

  
  

  
• So? Dja go after 'im?
• Without having done much in the way of 'exercise' at that particular time of my life, and wearing this jacket laden with gloves and other stuff, I stopped and considered for one long quarter of a second: what if it's really a sign, a message from the universe to let it go and never smoke again. I really gave that a thought.
• And? Made sense?
  

  

   
• Hell no, I took after the bus and chased it to the next stop. He got there about a quarter of a minute before me, and actually waited for me when he saw me tearing the sidewalk up in my big jacket. He couldn't legitimately wait all too long, but he did it and I think if he had had a stopwatch he'd have been timing this. As I got to the door of the bus, which he'd held open, I saw my pipe in the driver's hand, extended to me, and his smile was classic.
• Did he say anything?
• Yeah, 'Good work' and a nod. Not out of breath but excited and relieved, I thanked him of course. He drove on and I walked back with pipe lit, picking up my fallen gloves along the way. But of course, I was 53 after all.
• So that makes it 'alright'...?
• No, it means I was less in condition than now.
• At 57?....Hright.
• Well, if it were today I'd have been waiting for him at the next stop.
• You're addicted.
• My name's not Ted. And you're being a dick-head.
  
  

  

Pulse and Breath

Take two fingers, either hand, and place them on your neck, either side. Right there on your carotid artery. Feel something? God is closer to you than that – every beat.

Now take a breath, inhale once, hold it for just one second, and exhale. Easy enough? God is closer to you than that.

Need I say more? Good - I'll hand this back over to Kabir, version by Robt. Bly:

"I laugh when I hear the fish in the water is thirsty.

You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is
inside your own house;
and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!

Kabir will tell you the truth: Go wherever you like,
to Calcutta or Tibet;
If you can't find where your soul is hidden, for you the world will
never be real!"