Dreams For Peace

I can see that my daughter was put into our family to hold everyone together. She is the glue. She has started this game where she tells everyone in the family that she loves them and then tells them to say it back to her. And then she gets us to say to it each other. And she does this all day long.  It’s amazing how she can already say exactly what she needs and get her point across despite her limited language skills. I mean, who would have thought that a two year old would be the one that makes all the family love each other more? And she does it in such a fun way that we’re all laughing too. It’s an amazing gift.

I received this message recently from a mother working to see the best in her children.  Unfortunately she is the exception and not the rule.   It is almost universal that parents do the opposite, which in my opinion is the reason the world is in such a mess.    Most parents and supervisors believe that in order for someone to improve that you need to constantly be telling them where their shortcomings are and then threatening them with consequences if they don’t do what is being asked. This is how the world acts.  This is our pattern of behavior.

There is only one problem with the shortcomings approach.   It doesn’t work.   Every piece of research shows its ineffectiveness, but it persists.    The process that works and is reinforced consistently by science is to constantly be in search for the multitude of very positive qualities that exist in others, to acknowledge them, and then to give helpful guidance along the path.  It is illustrated by the tennis lesson I had the other day.    My tennis instructor is Indian Malaysian and I chose him because he is so positive when he works with people.   For the longest time we had problems getting together because of my injuries, illnesses, or the rain, but the other day he started working on my backhand.   First of all he just let me do what I was currently doing so he could see where to change what I was doing.  He made some nice comments and then stopped my played and had me show him my grip.   He made a correction in my grip, then started giving my drills to practice it.   When I hit a good shot, he just told me how great it was and repeated saying it whenever I used the grip correctly.   My backhand improved dramatically in the space of about 5 minutes.   Then he made another suggestion in a very kind voice and normal tone and when I started using that suggestion, my stroke improved even more.   He just kept praising the progress and the shots.   It was so exciting to get the feedback, both positive and instructive without ever once giving me a critical tone or threatening me with consequences.   His method worked.

When you have a critical tone and threaten your children or the people you are teaching or supervising,  it is because you are lazy.   It is plain and simple.    Parents or supervisors who do not take the time to see the multitude of gifts in their children or workers, then meditate on how to bring them out more in a positive manner are just taking the easy way out.   It doesn’t work.  No one changes through criticism and threatening.  They just get more protective and afraid.

The method that works is being able to see the gems that already are being shown, to acknowledge them with enthusiasm constantly, then to believe in the unseen gems,  acknowledge them also and then to spend time meditating and planning how to bring them out.     The natural tendency for most human beings is to forget their positive qualities.  They forget the qualities because the negative emotions are always in their face making them think about the next change.    I knew that my backhand needed a lot of work.  No one had to tell me that it sucked and then tell me how many games I would lose because of it.    I am not that stupid,  but that is exactly the method that the whole world uses.   My tennis teacher saw what I was doing well already, kept acknowledging my good points repeatedly, then thought about what to do to help me take the next step without being critical in the least way.   In a matter of fact manner he helped me by showing me new ways of doing things, gave me lots of practice to try out the new ways and then kept saying positive things over and over.

The mistake that we seem to make with each other is that we dwell on the negative behaviors rather than dwelling and planning for the gems to come out.    It is as if there is diamond buried in a heap of other rubble so we all criticize the rubble in us instead of believing in the diamond and then meditating on how to find it and bring out its shine.    Criticizing the rubble just makes us see more and more rubble until we believe that that is who we are, rubble.    Most people believe that they are rubble because that is how they are seen.   They are not told that their true reality is the diamond.

The lazy part of supervision or teaching is the threat.  The part that takes self-discipline and self control is the meditation, but it first rests on the principle of seeing and believing in the gems.  When a supervisor uses threats to get a change,  it is because they do not believe in the gems.   The threat is for their sake and not for the sake of the worker or learner.   They see what they are going to get out of the situation and then do the least possible to get to it.   This is the lazy part.   When you see the gold in another person, it makes you automatically wonder how to bring it out.

In the opening paragraph the mother saw the daughter as glue, which is the capacity to unify people.  When she saw this ability, it made her marvel in it.   Most of the world, unfortunately, would never see their children as glue or any other positive quality because they only think about themselves and making their life easier so they ignore others’ gifts.    Now that the mother has seen the gift she can meditate on the next step which is how to bring out the glue even more.

In short, see the gems, not the rubble, and meditate for a long time on how to bring out the gems, not on threatening the rubble for your own sake.

“Truthfulness is the foundation of all virtues.”  Baha’u’llah

So here I am at the end of the semester teaching my young children some balls skills in the gym.  They are full of excitement about each basket they make and every game they play especially dodgeball.   When there is a break between classes, I do the 21st century thing.  I check my cell phone for messages.   Why do we all do this?  I guess that is for another posting some time.  To my astonishment the message I am reading is not the one I get everyday.    It is from a person who wants to end her life, who has lost all hope.    She says she is going to do it tomorrow, but because of her children decides first to text me.

I have to say that when I am reading this message, I am already exhausted from the semester.  It is the last day of school and this is the last thing I want to receive.   Why me?    The first thing that goes through my mind is that while she is in a state of hopelessness, she has decided to put off the suicide until tomorrow.   This means she is reaching out and it also means she has some hope despite it not being apparent to her.     I have worked with a person who called me while he was in the process of taking a huge number of pills and drinking a lot of alcohol to kill himself before so I know the first rule in these cases is to take the person seriously.  In that case I was not sure if the person was actually telling me the truth, but after a few minutes I could hear the way his voice was changing.  He told me that he called because I was a great friend and big support to him, that he wanted to thank me for what I had done for him.     We managed somehow to get the fire department to his house without him knowing it to save him, but he was pretty upset with me for a long time.   His life was just a big mess.

On this day I am calling my wife, Debby, forwarding her the message, and asking her to see if she can go to woman’s apartment and do something.   She cannot reach her by phone,  so she goes to her apartment knocks on her door and spends an hour or two with her.   By the time she finishes, they are on their way to the psychiatrist.     Later, the woman will say that she could not believe it that Debby just showed up at her door.   It was more than she could ever hope for.

The psychiatrist is brief, barely listens to the story and then gives something to help the woman sleep.   This is a true story so the behavior of the psychiatrist is pretty shocking.  Debby tells her to come stay with us for a couple of days.  My tired, exhausted body wants to not deal with this, but I put it aside for the time being so that my mind and spirit can do their work.

After a couple of hours of sleep,  she comes to the dinner table with us.   How do you start a conversation with someone who is at the end of her rope?    I mean most of us have been to the end of our ropes, but not enough to end our lives.    I am thinking that well maybe she will just go to sleep and we will start the healing processes tomorrow.  I am not sure if that was my tired body speaking.  It certainly was not my soul.    A minute later I am making some introductory questions and then for the next few hours we are fully into process.   I think that I am officially on my holiday from school,  but God has another agenda for me and her.

The key for me in helping someone like this is the movement from depression and hopelessness to a life full of hope.   Hope is a future capability.  With hope you see the future as bright and wonderful and do everything you can to move toward it.   When you don’t have hope, your future is usually dark and full of negative possibilities.   Most people feel all alone.

To get to being hopeful and enthused about her life I start with the darkness and loneliness.   It seems to me as I am working with her, that being able to sit and listen to someone’s negative truth without your own ego interfering is a great gift you can give someone.    They have pain.  They are all alone and most of their life is spent hiding it.      I am listening to her because I want to find out what her truly positive life is all about,  but I can only get there when I allow her to speak her truth, her pain.

The pain is the thing.    Most people do not want to hear the pain of others, but as I listen to her loneliness, it gives me a lot of clues as to where her life might be wanting to take her.

One of my colleagues lost one of her siblings this year.  It has been an extremely agonizing experience for her because really they were best of friends.    At a staff meeting the other day, while we were eating Christmas treats,  I ask her how its going with the loss of her sister.   We talk for several minutes with other colleagues joining in.   It is such a simple question, but the pressure of daily life especially in a school makes this kind of conversation rarer than it ought to be.   The next day she approaches me and thanks me several times for the conversation because in some small way it has allowed her to move forward.

We all have pain.  It is part of life.   I have been fired from the last three jobs I have had when I thought I was doing my very best work.   Someone else thought I wasn’t.   Its funny because when I tell some people, they feel uncomfortable about it and want to change the conversation,  but it is where most of my pain has come in the last decade.    Without the pain, I would have no hope.

It reminds me when I am talking to the woman who wants to end her life,  that there were people who wanted to end my life as I knew it and did.    One day I was in a country and the next day I was gone.   The pain is great when someone takes the life you know away from you.    But as the saying goes, hope springs eternal.   On a different day I have a new life in a new country full of wonder and joy, but especially a lot of hope.

Last night we had a very wonderful meeting in our house with about 15 guests on the topic of Inner Peace.   Debby and I have never hosted a meeting on this topic so it was quite exciting for us to explore this new domain especially with a multi-cultural and multi-religious group.

We started with reading a few quotes and then sharing about them.

1.  The first quote was from the Family Virtues Guide, p. 205 on Peacefulness.   Part of it reads, “Peacefulness is giving up the love of power for the power of love.” As part of the sharing we had a former Israeli Air Force pilot in the group.  He talked about the fact that all during his childhood he was just obsessed with flying in that it was his real passion so when he had the opportunity to join the air force and fly jets he jumped at the opportunity.  He turned out to be an excellent fighter pilot,  but along the way he had to do what air force fighter pilots do, he had to kill others.    This became a thing that after awhile he could no longer endure so he gave up his career in the thing he loved the most flying, and set out on something else.    It was very moving for us all.

2. I charge you all that each one of you concentrate all the thoughts of your heart on love and unity. When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love. Thoughts of war bring destruction to all harmony, well-being, restfulness and content.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Singapore to do a dream meeting in one our very good friend’s home.    I have done a lot of dream meetings in Asia and it never fails that  people from Chinese origin have similar themes in their dreams.  Below is one of those dreams.

I was walking down a dirt path when I came upon a two story house.  In the house there was a man with shot gun. He was on the top floor of the house, had his shot gun out and was trying to shoot me.  When I looked at the man, I saw that it was my husband.  I tried to get away and then I woke up.

This is as universal as it gets for a woman living in a Chinese home.  Please forgive the negative generalization, but it is characteristic of almost every Chinese relationship that I have met.   In the relationship between a man a woman,  men always see themselves as higher than women.  In this dream the man is on the second floor while the women is below.   It shows how men see themselves and how women experience the inequality. Men are on top.  Women are below.   Wherever I go in Asia I always tell people that the number one issue is Asia is the inequality between men and women.

It is a strange thing for me.   In the 1950s when I was growing up in America,  we were transitioning from this model.  I think that most of the people I knew grew up in households where men thought of themselves as superior, but this was never the case in my home.  My mother and father were equal even though my father was the primary provider.   They both had their own voice that wasn’t always the same.     So I always feel a bit strange when people from Asia tell me their stories.   I never wanted to be the God of my home because I knew the value of equality.

Yet in almost every Chinese home, the women and children complain that their father is aloof, very demanding including not allowing others to have their own opinion,  and never allowing others to choose their own life path.   Men take the place of God only in a negative way because God were never act as badly as they do.

In the dream the woman is trying to walk down a road which means that she is trying to go down her own life path.   This is a process that every single human being goes through.   They are called internally to follow their path.  But in this dream, the woman is being shot at by her husband.  This is because the husband is extremely jealous of his power and position.  After all he believes that he is God and has the right to choose everyone’s path.   So if a woman begins traveling down her own path,  she is shot down.

Many men believe that they have the right to control the lives of others which includes the right to become extremely angry and even use violence to keep the women and children in line.    Let’s face it.  If you are God by cultural birthright,  are you going to give it up easily?    I don’t think so.  It is very difficult for a man who has tasted power to relinquish it for equality because he just feels more superior and more powerful than others.

He doesn’t see that a relationship based upon equality is much more powerful and capable of doing more because that is not his concern.   He, for the most part, is drunk and addicted to power.

What can a woman do who is faced with this kind of power?    The answer is fairly simple, but also very difficult to do.    What she can do is realize that her path is given to her by the one true God and not by the false god living in the house.     She can also realize that in the house where the false god lives, there is no space for her own true self.   The only space available is for the ego of the husband.    When she steps away from that house and follows her own path, she will find a new self, a new house which is based upon equality between all people.      The husband can choose to enter that new house only by giving up his attachment to being a false god.

It is extremely difficult for men until they begin to believe in equality. It also takes a lot of courage for women to leave their old selves and walk a new path.    Men usually don’t get it because the life of privilege is too tempting.

The problem with most men in this situation is that they wake up one day and find that they are all alone and don’t have a clue about why.    This is because of one very powerful spiritual principle. You cannot be guided by the true God or by the spiritual world until you give up your own godhood.   You will be left alone, separated from others, which is unfortunately the case of so many Chinese men.

Once again, I am sorry about the generalization because I have met some wonderful Chinese men who have embraced equality and then become wonderful fathers and husbands, but the problem is still very much at epidemic levels.

So depending upon which side of the equation you are, you can ask one of the following two questions.

1.  How can I develop the courage to walk my own path?

2.  How can I give up trying to be God in my relationships?   You usually know that you are trying to be God when you have a lot of anger when people don’t do what you want them to do.  This usually happens to me when I am working with children.     What I have found that works for me to get off the god stool is to just say to myself that whatever I did with the children is not working, that I can just let it go and change what I am doing.    As soon as I do this it always works.

I am pretty certain, though I have no research to back me up,  that the practice of blaming others is the number one reason why we are unable to achieve what we set out to do.      It is a delicious habit and so easy to do.  It begins young and flourishes at school and into adult life.   We all seem to do it.  And we think we are RIGHT.    That is the problem.

So what is so wrong and bad about blame if we are so right.    Let’s face it.   There are a lot of leaders and ordinary people who do a lot of nasty stuff.   They deserve our blame,  don’t they?   Well at least a good kick in the a…. for sure.

Here’s the problem with blame.    So when I got fired or when I get fired,   I immediately blame the person who fired me for ruining my life.  Then I hold a great deal of negative energy toward that person because in my mind they deserve to have me feeling negative toward them.   What is the end result?   Besides not having the job, now I also aim negative energy toward another which has the effect of taking a lot of my positive energy away from what I want to accomplish.      The reason why blame doesn’t work, even when someone else has done something really horrible,  is that as soon as you start laying blame, you hand the responsibility for achieving your life’s ambitions over to the perpetrator and then you stay stuck in a pool of muck.

The other night I was watching the movie,  Precious,  which recounts the life of a teenage girl who has been abused repeatedly sexually, emotionally, and verbally throughout her young life which leaves her uneducated and with two small children.    What humbled me, in watching the film,  was how she managed to not only survive her mistreatment, but to start taking a lot of steps forward to improve everything about her life.     There is no denying what her mother and father did to her.  It was horrendous,  but at some point, she just left the blame behind, and went forward.

In my weaker moments I am much worse than her because I can hold onto blame for a long time.   She just let it go and got on with her education and motherhood.   I can easily stew forever.      So I asked myself this question when I was realizing that I could start letting go of how I was blaming others.   How long do you need to hold onto blaming the leaders or your parents or your spouse before you will just wake up and realize that what they did has absolutely zero, zero, zero to do with accomplishing the things you really want to do?

This is painful to realize because blame is such a tasty meal.    Whatever anyone has done to me is  history.  It is just a story.   The only reason I cannot accomplish what I  truly want to do is what I have left undone.     When I believe the story, “I have been abused”,  then I can put the onus of responsibility on the person who did the abusing, and then I can do nothing and feel like I am right.   This is how blame works.    You have a bad experience then you say that you were wronged.   As soon as you start saying how you were wrong, you can transfer the responsibility to the guilty party and then you don’t have to do any work toward your own inner development.    And you can feel self-righteous.   Hooray for you!!!

So if blaming gets you stuck in the muck,  what else can you do?

Taking the example of being fired,  the first principle to understand is that the spiritual world, the unseen greater positive energy, is always conspiring to help you develop all of your true goals.   Nothing that happens can keep you from developing your inner self and everything that happens is for the positive.     So all I have to realize upon being fired, is that despite the injustice of it all,  it is for the best.    As soon as I let go of blaming them for firing me, then the responsibility for my own growth and development stays with me which is where I want it.

The delicious nature of blame is that,  with it, you can completely and totally stop developing and growing and give it over to the abuser, who unconsciously you know will never do anything.   You may even be waiting for an apology before you start going forward which is a little like waiting for hell to freeze over.

Our lives are in our hands, not the hands of the perpetrators.    What I realized from being fired was that I was paying too much attention to a great many goals that were from the egos of others.  I wasn’t paying attention to my own goals.   Now I am seeing that I have a lot of things that I have left un- and underdeveloped for a long time.

I would like to blame Osama Bin-Laden for ruining my life is some way.  Wouldn’t you?  Well, if not him, at least the government.

I have been working on this theory for quite some time now and I have not found any cases where it does not work well.   The theory is that the core fear behind every kind of fear such as fear of heights, fear of the dark, fear of closed in spaces,  fear of making mistakes, fear of losing, etc.,  is the fear of being excluded, abandoned, left out.       When children come into this world, they are given a mother who has two breasts that nurture the child from day one.  The first goal of every child is to latch on to his mother’s breasts and then become extremely close to her in a love bond.   When this is done successfully,  children become free to explore and learn about the world around them.     When the bond is broken such as in being abandoned or when a mother is sick and unavailable for long periods,  then the bond is damaged.   It is then replaced with fear of one kind or another as a kind of coping device.

It happens in school the same way it happens at home.   When there is a strong bond between the teacher and the student,  the student works like crazy because of the love bond.  The result is great achievement.   Nothing great is ever achieved unless there is love.

In my opinion, the thing that has happened to the world is that many people who have breaks in the bonding process have arisen to positions of power in governments, communities, schools, and businesses.    Instead of being in love with what they are doing and creating bonds of friendship and cooperation among others, the great tendency is for them to advance on the backs of others, i.e. on pointing out the weaknesses of others, while making others believe they are superior.   Once in power they consistently use the one weapon for which most people have a lot of fear, exclusion.   When they have to power to eliminate you, decrease your influence, or take your authority away, they use it without hesitation.   This is because they have no bonds, no attachments.    When you are bonded to others, firing or eliminating is excruciating  pain because you are in love with them and don’t want to break it off.

People without attachments can fire at will and restructure, while giving themselves huge bonuses because they have no feelings for others.  They only are addicted to power and the adrenaline of making a big score.   If you have a hard time firing someone, then something is so totally right about you.  You can attach to others and work closely with them cooperatively and harmoniously.    The power seekers would have you believe that you are just not tough enough for leadership, but the fact of the matter is,  power seekers are extremely fearful all the time that someone else is going to take their position.  Much of their negative behavior is about jealousy.   Instead of seeing others as friends and helpmates, they regard them as threats.

So when you have any fear, the first question always is how am I being excluded?

Suppose that you are fearful of traveling which makes you just stay in your house all the time instead of being adventurous.    When you ask the question how was I excluded,  then all kinds of things of interesting things come up.

The world’s most pressing needs are love, unity, and cooperation.   Everything else is secondary.    If you are not going for making the world a more loving and cooperative place, then you are fearful of being eliminated.   It is really that simple.   But don’t take my word for it.  Try it out  on some of your fears and you will find that love is always there begging to come out.

This afternoon an extraordinary thing happened when I was teaching a class of 7 years olds on the climbing wall at my school.   There is one particular challenge on the wall that can not be achieved unless a person overcome a certain amount of fear.   Well, there I was in utter shock because a boy that I thought would never achieve this goal because of the long list of diagnostic labels that he wears, scaled the height, rang the bell, and was on his way back.    Most children jump from the height which is maybe 8 feet onto cushioned mats, but when this boy looked down, he was filled with terror and expressed it openly and loudly to the group.    Two other children were on the same obstacle trying to finish the climb, which made it seem to him that he could not climb his way down.   So he was terrified to jump and stuck from climbing back down.

As I was watching him and began to make my way over to help intervene,   a few children started saying things like, “Don’t be scared!”  I knew this was not helpful.      When a person is in a fearful state, their logical rational mind that is calm does not function well.   They go to their unconscious stressed mind.   In that state,  don’t be scared means that you should be terrified.   The unconscious doesn’t deal with polar opposites and specifically negatives.  It only hears, “Be scared.”

So I convinced the other children on the wall to jump off thus giving a path for this boy to climb his way down.   As I was speaking to him,  I kept giving him a lot of reassurance that he was doing really well with each step.   Meanwhile a few children were still yelling, “Don’t be scared.”    I told them that it wasn’t very helpful to use those words because they don’t work, and somehow they got it.    Instead of negative comments, they started saying things like, “You are doing great.”  The more we all said these things, along with some specific technical advice about where to place his hands and feet, the faster he came down.   It was pretty fascinating that they all just changed on a dime.

Later, when I was talking to the climber, he kept talking about his fear and the technical problems, but he was fully encouraged about doing it again on a different day despite the emotional turmoil he had experienced.

I was thinking later that the principle in helping a person through fear is not to tell them not to have the fear because that seems to just exacerbate the experience.    The principle is to tell someone how well they are working through the fear by constantly giving them positive statements.     The problem with telling a person to “not” something is that it still keeps all of the attention on the something.   When you tell them how well they are doing,  the attention moves from the fear to competence because they can see that they are making progress in spite of the fear.

The tennis instructor in my condo uses this principle in a less fearful situation, but it is still the same.   He starts people off by giving a small amount of technical advice.  Then he puts them through a drill to practice the new skill.  As the skill is being practiced he gives constant positive feedback when they are doing it right.   If I child hits 25 out of 30 balls correctly,  he will hear the instructor say something positive 25 times.  The instructor never says anything about the missed shots.   This so works so well because the positive comments keep you in the same successful mode, while at the same time allows you to disregard the negative missed shots.    If he were to be critical,  focusing on the 5 missed shots, rather than the 25 correct,  then the child would eventually learn to pay attention only to mistakes and become discouraged by them.   This instructor is loaded with business.

How do you change the past?   Let’s put it this way.  You cannot change the actual content of the past, but you can change everything else about it, and then that changes everything.

Consider the question, “Who won the Vietnam War?”   In 1976 it was obvious in the eyes of many that the winner of the war was communism because it managed to take over the whole country.   But then when its policies failed in some huge ways, it became one of the poorest countries on the planet. What really was going on was a struggle between a socialist society and a capitalist one.   No one really ever asked the question about what was the best combination of socialism and capitalism.   In the last 1980s Vietnam changed its socialism into a more capitalist state with freer markets and when  Pres. Clinton lifted the embargo, the plight of the country has gradually gotten better.   How could this have happened?

At some point in the mind of the communist leadership, how they looked at the past had to have changed because in the 60s capitalism was the great evil.  Somewhere between then and the late 1980s capitalism was no longer the great evil even though the historical points that lead communist leaders to accept its ideologies had not changed.  Unchecked capitalism is usually characterized by huge discrepancies between the rich and poor, something communism was trying to resolve,  but in the midst of trying to apply communism, the leadership realized leaving out individual initiative was ticket to disaster.    You can say that communists used to believe that you had to eliminate the individual from the economic picture and then you could have equity and justice.   inside the communist mind was big evil individual initiative that had to eliminated.  What happened?

At some point the size of the evil changed.  What individuals did in the name of initiative that was unjust in the past had not changed, but how they were being perceived changed.   The size of their evil changed.  It diminished in size because this is the only way that freer markets could be factored in again to the economic equation.

You can say that when the Vietnamese government changed the size of the negative in the past, it changed its future.  However,  at first it did the opposite.  When it tried to just change the future without changing the perception of the past, it became the poorest country in the world.  At first it was so  attached to individual initiative being evil that it destroyed  its own economy.  In my last post I wrote about the future is God’s business and not our own. You can imagine that if you are a philosophy that doesn’t allow God into the future, that you believe that you can control the future by increasing the size of the evil of a key component to economic success because of your own hurt, then you will drive your future right into the toilet, which is what they did.

The lesson is that you cannot make a more positive future unless and until you can change the way the past is perceived.   Visualizing a positive future without dealing with the perceptions of the past does not work, but when you are going for a new process such as more courage, the future automatically becomes much better when you deal with the way fear is being perceived in the past.

On an individual way, you can release positive energy inside yourself, by identifying the process you need such as being able to finish what you start,  then see the way the past is organized to hold you from finishing what you start.  When you can undo the structure of the past of not being able to finish, then the structure of the future can become apparent.    For instance, most people who don’t finish things well have a certain amount of procrastinating behavior around the fear of things not being really perfect, the fear of making mistakes which is fueled by dosages of constant criticism.    Inside your brain you see pictures of failure that get amplified because you believe that things have to be perfect in order to be finished.  You may also hear people criticizing you which then brings you to a standstill.

Changing the past means diminishing the size of the mistakes and imperfections and criticisms so that they don’t seem so important, which they are not.   When making a mistake is perceived as just a part of learning and criticism is just feedback to be evaluated and used or discarded,  then it is so much easier to finish whatever you start.  You cannot change the negative things people say to you in the past, but you can change how they mess with your brain.  A

When I was let go in one of my jobs a number of years ago,  I felt very hurt and held a lot of negative feelings toward those who let me go.  They were just big and evil inside of me which had a way of generalizing my mind to believing that all leaders were evil.    The effect of the hurt and the perception was that I was held back from working fully with any leaders and this greatly diminished the positive picture in my future.   If I would try to just change the picture of the future to more positive ones, then I just ended up with more bad leaders.

When I changed the structure of the hurt by changing the perception of the size of the evil of the leaders, then the future suddenly became a lot more positive and brighter.    I had seen the leaders as evil and made that evil very large, which then  stopped me from seeing the future in a positive way.  I just saw the world filled with bad leaders.    To diminish the size of the evil I changed my belief in how important the leaders are to an organization and that, in any other position, what their behavior is like, does not have a big effect on me.     Now it helps me see that every human being is essentially the same, they have positive and negative qualities,  and that the more positive that exists in the world, the better everyone is.  So in my future, I can now see that everyone is better and that provides with a huge amount of motivation in the present.

Many people have told me about dreams that have come true in real life like after the tsunami of December 2004 a lot of people said that they had dreamt it ahead of time.    The problem we have when we have a dream that seems like something is going to happen either bad or good is knowing what to do with it.

Oftentimes people dream of something bad occurring to a loved one or to a group of people. What should you do?

Here is my advice.    First of all I am not God and neither are you so there is no way of knowing the future for sure.   If you can leave the future in the hands of God realizing that He knows what is best for you, then you can usually act a lot more fully in the present.   The future is really God’s business. Your business is the present. He has left that for us.

It is easy enough for me to say the above,  but if I have a dream where my wife is shot and it seems so real, my only thought is to tell her the dream so that she can be protected somehow.   But then I have to ask myself the question why am I having the dream about her?  Why, if she is going to die, am I having the dream?

Since dreams are a spiritual phenomenon, then  the place I go with this dream is into the spiritual realm and then the physical one, but not the other way around.    In the spiritual realm there is no life or death because time is eternal so being shot down in a spiritual sense means something like being shot down psychologically or emotionally in some way.   As soon as I start thinking about the two possibilities, spiritual or physical one, then it has the effect of slowing down my process somewhat.  Instead of trying to protect her or rescue her from doom, I have to start thinking about my reaction to her being shot down.

My initial reaction to someone shooting my wife is to go after the culprit because I have a mixture of anger and grief that just wants revenge.   But if it is a spiritual shooting, then going after the culprit doesn’t do anything other than dig my own grave.  When my wife is shot down, it is my reaction that I have to deal with.    I am feeling angry and want to go after someone to get revenge,  but is that what she needs?      I think not.   The real thing she needs is upliftment after having been shot down.   This is the task God is giving me.   I am being called upon to be more uplifting to others rather than vindictive.

So if it is a metaphoric dream (my wife being shot) then my message is to be more uplifting to her, but it were a literal dream and my wife actually dies, then it is still about upliftment, but upliftment of myself so that I can have a fulfilling life despite her presence.   One way or another my job is upliftment.

But what happens if you dream something like a tsunami that has great destructive powers.    The answer is the same.  You may not be able to do anything about the actual tsunami, but you can be a positive tsunami in other people’s lives and do lots of positive things.  This is why you have the tsunami dream so that you can be a positive force.

For sure there is no way to control the future, but we can be a really positive influence on it, by acting in the way that the dream is instructing us.     Whether or not a dream is going to come true is never really the essential question. The essential question is how to be a positive force in the world by developing the qualities it needs.

Have you ever wondered why when you are doing something that you love to do, that time goes by swiftly as if it didn’t exist at all, but that when you are doing something you are dreading, that the clock is at a standstill?

Or even worse why do we think that something that we are dreading doing is going to take so long, when often it only takes a short time?   And how is it that we can manage to put off things that are good for us while at the same spending an inordinate amount of time being a workaholic for someone else?

So, for instance, suppose that you get a message from your boss that she wants to meet with you or worse yet when your spouse says, “We need to talk?”    For many of us a message from a higher authority fills us with fear  and then every moment before the meeting is like an eternity because you just know it is going to bad, which it usually is. What distorts the time is the fear.  The sun is still traveling around the earth at the same speed and tomorrow there will beh a sunrise just as today, but it just seems like the clock has gone into a freeze.

So how does fear do it?  How is it able to take over the realm of time and allow its miserable self to be felt in an excruciating manner?   To answer this question it is good to know that your fear has a purpose, which is almost always to protect you.   So when your boss gives you the notice of a meeting, your mind goes to all of the worst possibilities and then you spend an eternity going over how to respond.  Should you fight?  Should you flee?  Should you get ill and miss the meeting hoping that your boss will forget you? These are attempts of the ego (the fear) to protect you in some way from harm.

The question then becomes how do you get from endless goings on of the mind that robs you of your time to feeling love and joy in what you are doing in the moment.   The  first part of the answer is that the distortion of time always happens because of what you fear from someone else.  Like if you put off homework or taxes, it is the fear of what is going to happen to you by others.    If you really want to paint, but you are putting it off, then someone’s else reaction to your painting is what is distorting your time.

As soon we allow others behavior such as judgmental behavior to evoke a negative reaction in us, then time gets distorted and does all kinds of strange things.   If you were able to just not have the fear, then there would be love and joy for the activity and you could keep doing it and time would be as if you were living in the present tense.   Fear often makes you live out into the negative future to try to change something beyond your control.

One of the things that I have learned, for instance, is that if you are going to get fired, then you are going to get fired and there is not much you can do about it,  but how you deal with the actual firing makes all of the difference.   It is possible to see being fired as a great opportunity, a new door opening which it almost always is.

I have a good friend who works for an organization that goes into the worst places in the world and gives service to the people in the affected area.  In fact sometimes we joke when we read about a disaster because we know that our friend will be there.   In the face of overwhelming conditions, she is extremely present and joyful in her work, and because of it the people in the disaster areas are always much better off than before she came.   It is a simple thing she does, which is that she does not allow the negative conditions and behavior of those around her to affect her internal state. She can remain extremely resourceful and love her work despite what is happening.

So the key to having undistorted time or time in a positive way is to find the love no matter in what situation you are in and to disregard the negative behavior of others as being that important.  Where there is love, time becomes eternal in a positive way.

So if you aren’t going to go on that run, or spend time with the person you love, ask yourself this question.  Who am iIallowing to control my emotion?

Yesterday was Will’s birthday.  He is now 2 years old.   Some people call two year olds terrible as in the terrible twos mainly because they are so willful, but when you are around our Will, you just feel wonderful all the time.  When Will was born and I was holding him,  I remember thinking that I just couldn’t get enough of him.  Now that he is two you can see already in his character that he is just full of life,  exercises 24 hours a day, has a huge bright smile, enjoys life to the max, and can never get enough activity, and laughs easily and plentiful.     He is definitely a role model for me and I am very grateful that he is a part of our family.

He had what I think is probably the perfect birthday a two year could have.   We all went to Trout Lake in Vancouver on a beautiful afternoon around 26 C., swam and played in the sand for a couple of hours, followed by big portions of sushi from Samurai Sushi,  played on the playground and of course had grandma’s carrot cake with ice cream.    Here are some shots of the party.

That is Will with his cousins opening up “My Big Truck Book”.  He is so excited about trucks and backhoes that it is about the only time he stops to really watch things for a long time.

These are two videos of my grandchildren.   In the first one Will who will be two this week just had tried to do a skim board a few days ago at Spanish Banks in Vancouver.  Then he took what he learned and generalized it at the pool   It is pretty incredible to think what is going on in his mind.

Here are a few shots of my grandchildren.

Arne and Hildegund Kittang came to Vista in 1981 to study Anisa in the same way that Liv and Michael had several months earlier.   On Sunday, we visited their home outside of Oslo and caught up on the last 30 years.  Because the Norway discovered oil in the 1960s they have the highest % of foreign aid per capita of any country in the world.  The Baha’is of Norway have combined with the govt.  to do several projects around the world.  Arne has done a lot of work in India and Uganda.   He’s anxious to spend some of the year in Uganda.   This kind of work gets in your blood as some of us know.

The next morning we board the train from Oslo to Bergen.  (east to west)  It passes through some gorgeous countryside even to a glacier.

At Myrdal we board another train that takes us on steep ride down to the sea full of spectacular waterfalls and Norwegian countryside. I am trying a high tech option here with one of the waterfalls.   Enjoy the power.

The end of the line is Flam, which takes on a two hour cruise in a few fjords.    I think this is what makes Norway, Norway.

After the trip along the fjords we took a bus and train to  Bergen.  Here are a couple of

pics of that trip.

So we arrived in the evening around 9 pm in Bergen staying at a self-service hotel called the Citybox.  Of course we couldn’t to do the self service part.  After living in SE Asia and Brazil where self service is a non-concept,  we just couldn’t figure it out.  Thank God for telephones.

Debby went to bed so I took an evening walk in the city.  This photo was taken at 10:45 pm. Sunset

The next day we did a huge amount of tourist-like things including going up the mountain to get great shots of the city, visiting the fort that once protected the city which at one time was the capital of Norway, the Bryggen, which is a world heritage site of some early houses where a lot of trade happened.  We even spent part of the day with Pablo,  Picasso that is and some other artists like Edvard Munch.

In the evening we had a fantastic treat because we found that the Paul Taylor Dance Company was in town performing right across from our hotel in the performing arts center.

Today we took a 5 hour boat ride from Bergen to Stavanger.  It was a total adventure trying to find the hostel we are staying in because although Norwegians speak English well, hostel to them is more like a hotel.  Anyway, we are here and there is a nice lake in front us where I took a shot of the local wildlife.

One of the nice things about staying in a hostel is that you meet a lot of travelers and get a lot of info on what to do.   We have met some Germans, Spaniards, Aussies,  Algerians,  Swedes,  Chinese, and Dutch here.

It is already 00:30 am, Saturday,  June 4th.  You would think that after a long and not so un-stressful school year that we would have the sense to take a few days rest, but not so this sometimes not-so-sane duet.   Instead we are in KLIA (that is Kuala Lumpur International Airport) at the end of yet another runway (not the posing type) inside a Malaysian Airlines 777 headed for Istanbul.     We are in the air not 30 minutes when down the aisle comes the cart full of food.   Nothing like eating dinner at 1:00 am.  Ten hours and some odd minutes later we are in the Istanbul Airport.   You can tell that Turkey would be a great place for an adventure because at the transfer desk there are 20+ people doing the job of 8.   In my mind I am back in Brazil because everyone knows it is not about the work and the task but about the socializing.   So what do you in a Turkish airport waiting for your next flight?   Of course you know. You shop for turkish delight.  Debby does.  Succeeds.  And then onto Oslo.  That’s right Oslo, Norway.

Myth #1 about Norwegians:  They are all really quiet and subdued.

Ok, before I get into dispelling the quiet myth,  one thing that is so impressive about Norwegian trains is that you can set your clock by them.  So we are on the 13:08 train from Oslo airport to the central station downtown, a ride that takes about 25 minutes.   The train pulls in about 13:04 and some seconds.  By the time we put our luggage in, find a seat, I have just enough time to look at my watch.  I say to Debby, “let’s see if the train leaves at exactly 13:08.   At 13:07 and 55 seconds I am eying the start and then when the watch hits 8, the train begins to move.   We are definitely not in Cambodia!!!

Camilla meets us at the train station.  Camilla is the daughter of our long time friends Liv and Michael Vitols, who I happened to meet in the office of my great mentor, Dr. Daniel Jordan, in the fall of 1980.  Liv and Michael had not yet found a place to live or stay so I invited them to our home, a small two bedroom apartment in Vista, California.  After a week with us they rented an apartment two doors down.    Since that wondrous time together, we have only seen each other 3 times. Once in Canada, another in Brazil, and then in Norway.    Seeing Camilla at the station reminds me that life is not about work.  Its about the friends you meet along the way and the connections you make.

Ok back to myth #1 about Norwegians.  As we are riding the bus to where we will stay the night, it seems like every Norwegian in the country is out on the street wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts.  I am sure that no one in the whole country is indoors.  The temperature is only 20C rather freezing for us from Malaysia where the lowest low is 23 C on a cold night with 90% humidity.   After a short nap to try to deal with jet lag, we are off on a city tour, walking.

Here are the nice quiet Norwegians!!!  That’s right sitting downtown in their beanbag chairs.

Two Norwegians at a local restaurant.   The adventurous one on the right just ordered King Crab for the first time.

This is not where we are staying, but somebody famous stayed here.  Well a lot of famous people have stayed here because this is where everyone stays who receives the Nobel Peace Prize.  Ok we didn’t win this year, but we should have after the year we have been through.  Anyway,  you guessed it. Obama was here!!

In case you didn’t know.   Norway has a king.  His name is Harold and this is where he lives and these are his royal guards.    His line only began in 1905 or thereabouts.   Before the British had given Norway to Sweden during the Napoleonic Wars because at that time Norway was together with Denmark,  but the Brits attacked the Danish fleet and captured it.   As a reward for helping them defeat Napoleon they decided to give Norway to Sweden, something that the Norwegians never fully accepted.  Such is the way of the world at times.

House of Peace:  You have to love a country that gives out medals for peace instead of war. This is where they do it.

So by the time we got home it was 10:00 pm.  The sun had not quite set and across the way from our apartment was a party with Norwegians in their short sleeves.  I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to find the bed, but as is the case, with my type of jet lag, I wake up at 3:30ish.   The party is still going on with Norwegians in short sleeves.  The temp is now only 13 C.  An hour later I go back to bed. By 6:00 am, you guessed it the party was still going on.  I am up for the remainder.  So much for the quiet Norwegian myth.

I have a certain sadness in my life that has appeared recently about the fact that work that I have done to advance programs in many schools has largely been lost after I have left the schools.    Most of what I have focused on in my career has been on taking the radical direction, in going to new ways to do things in positive ways that have largely been untried.   Inevitably the door closes in favor of more conservative and traditional approaches in the place I have been.

So how do I let go of the grief because it keeps me from moving forward to keep doing new things, to keep being radical.   As Byron Katie would say, “Is it true that your work has been lost?”   Knowing that the answer is always no to that question it begs the process of where  the work still might be found.   I think I get it.  The lost part is in the school building.  What remains is the work I have done with all of my students and colleagues?    That is never lost.  A  true school is not a place and the lessons keep producing.

Ok, it is easy enough to let go.  The new place is really exciting and I am headed toward it.