The like attracts the like

September 9th, 2007

(”Birthday Greetings to Xonti”,herbert bayer, 1930)

Some days ago, Armand wrote about:

“… I was telling you that the whole universe is made of energy. Everything is energy in different frequencies.

Your thoughts, emotions, feelings all are energies ……

Your thoughts are energies and you are the master of your own thoughts. Some thoughts come as a result of interactions with other energy fields, but it is you who create your thoughts and it is you, who control them.

Now if we take into consideration the fact that like energy attracted like energy, the implications are enormous……”

It has taken me several days to re-think about this concept and logic.

Thanks Armand for your sharing, which helps me to review the basic concept of “new age”, i.e. we select the lessons to be learnt in “this life”, we design the energies we have or we don’t have in this life in order to learn those lessons we selected, we write our own scripts, we even choose our own parents and select our own birth days, etc.

Our lives could be prescribed as the flow of energies. ”Like energies attracks like energies”, ”like thoughts attract like thoughts”, and here forms the basis of “self fulfilling prophecy”.

Don’t under estimate the power of our thoughts. What we think, what we believe, would eventually come true. We think we are poor, we think we are unlucky, we think we are miserable, we eventually should become poor, unlucky and miserable. We think we are not good enough, we are incapable, we are not worthy, then we become so. We think we are not beloved, then we have no love. These negative thoughts would do us no good but to make us negative.

We are our own director, we are our own architecture, we paint our own lives. Take up the responsibilities now and stop blaming like:

I should certainly be more successful, but it was the overall environment that I cant achieve more.
The university life wasted all my time, I gained nothing from it.
I don’t like my work, it’s a waste of my life.
My life is so poor, everybody I love, they left me.

The actual cause is ourselves. It is us who don’t believe ourselves and don’t work hard for success; it is us who don’t make sense from anything; it is us who drive our beloved ones away.

It is not fate, it is how we think and the thinking comes true. Self fulfilling prophecy, it is what we have to learn and understand. Start thinking positive and believing ourselves today and we would notice for a change in our lives.

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The Art of Happiness - the very advice from a great thinker

September 2nd, 2007

“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is to seek happiness …” - The Art of Happiness, Dalai Lama

Thanks to this contemporary great thinker, the Dalai Lama, who reminds us the aim of our life, is to seek happiness and seek something better in our lives.

We think we all know this simple principle, do we? We are all confident that it is happiness we are pursuing for, right?

…… Are we really so sure? If we are so sure, why we are still miles away from happiness?

Dalai Lama’s happiness is not the simple materialistic pleasure or sensual satisfaction, it refers to the returning to the basic and pure state of our mind without negative thought. It is in this state that we could retrieve our gentleness, feelings of love, kindness, compassion, closeness and affection in our human nature. It is in this happiness state we could help others, grow friendship and share our love.

It is our mind who is always playing the tricks on us, creating negative thoughts, worse scenarios, bad feelings, etc., for ourselves. As a basic setting to fight for survival, our minds always drive us to to something dangerous, some crisis, some unhappy thinking such that we could prepare for the worse. This mind could not be eliminated, but we have to aware of it and understand what tricks it is playing on us. For all the negative thoughts and feelings our mind created for ourselves, 99% of those are unnecessary and damaging to us and all people around us. And it is this state of mind which separates us from happiness.

Dalai Lama, in his book, “the Art of Happiness”, suggests to us that we need to discipline our mind and to train our mind everyday, to bring in more positive thinking. He advises us: “… transforming your mind takes time. There are a lot of negative mental traits, so you need to address and counteract each one of these. It isn’t easy. It requires the repeated application of various techniques and taking the time to familiarise yourself with the practices. It’s a process of learning.”

Maybe I could share with you some of my own tips on how to train our mind towards happiness:

every morning, reminding ourselves that we would live a better day today, we feel happy and empowered
reminding ourselves to be appreciative and thankful to all the beautiful things on world and to all the people and artists creating all the beautiful things for us
reminding ourselves to be kind and gentle, love and compassionate, deep down from our hearts
reminding ourselves not to say “no” and “I can’t” to challenges, try to say “why not” and “great! let’s do it!“

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Parable of Narcissus: the myth of falling in love

August 23rd, 2007

You must have heard the parable of Narcissus. He had fallen in love with himself. Looking into a silent pool of water, he fell in love with his own reflection. - “Love, Freedom, Aloness”, Osho

“Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection - not with himself. That is not true self-love. He fell in love with the reflection; the reflection is the other. He had become two, he had become divided. Narcissus was split. He was in a kind of schizophrenia. He had become two - the lover and the loved. He had become his own object of love - and that’s what happens to so many people who think they are in love.” This is how Osho reminds us about what we think we fall in love with somebody.

The Magic of Narcissus

We are all Narcissus, the story is actually an analogy for us all. For our self reflection, it is how we think we are and what we think we want to be. Just like Narcissus, we have the “magic” of spliting ourselves and projecting out our self reflection.

Love of Narcissus

When we fall in love with somebody, just like Narcissus looking at his own image reflected in the water (an analogy of our mind), we project our self reflections to our beloved ones. Narcissus fell in love with his own image, and it is our self reflection that we fall in love with. To love somebody, turns into the fulfilling of the love to ourselves.

We take one step further than Narcissus, we do not only ask our beloved ones to fit in our self reflection, we ask them to become our self reflection in this materialistic world (how romantic this is!). That’s why we have so many expectations on our beloved ones and we experience so many frustrations in love.

Love, in this form, is a kind of “selfish” love, not love for others. Don’t blame our beloved ones for failing our expectations and bringing us the frustrations, it is our selfish love that makes us unsatisfied. The myth of Narcissus, is a reminder for us all.

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Related post: let go

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Light & Form

August 2nd, 2007

Church of Light (光の教堂), Ando Tadao (安藤忠雄 あんど　ただお), 1989.
4-3-50 Kita-Kasugaoka, Ibaraki- Shi, Osaka Perfecture.   
Tel) 0726-27-0071

Ando Tadao is one of my favourite architects. His famous artistic creation, the Church of the Light, is a valuable gift to the world.

Born in Osaka, 13 Sept 1941, Ando entered into the profession of Architecture in 1969 after doing self-study and travelling around the world between 1962 and 1969. He has won lots of architectual awards since 1979. The lastest one is the 2002 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, by his “Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum, Osaka”.

Ando’s signature is his favourite material, the fair-faced concrete (清水混凝土, in Chinese). In his master pieces, one could easily appreciate the contrasts of solid and fluid, dark and light, raw and artifice, hard and soft, form and space, concrete and abstract. His work always blends well with the natural environment, instead of confrontation and alienation, which shows his love and respect to the nature.

The Church of the Light is one of Ando’s most famous creations. Applying his favourite material, the fair-faced concrete, Ando has created a clean, quiet and humble space for people to pray and meditate. Inside the Church, a cross-shaped opening is crafted on the plain concrete wall at the shrine to allow natural light from outside to come in. One may find it miracle or even sublime that when natural light comes into the Church, a “light cross” appears at the shrine, a cross that is made form light and form only. With the non-materialistic “light cross”, one would immediately understands the concept of divine and spiritual and be “enlightened”. I would say that, the Church of the Light, by itself, incorporates Ando’s philosophy and representation of beauty with sublime beauty.

“There is a role and function for beauty in our time. In Japan it may be translated into the concept of Uskuji, which also means a beautiful life, that is, how a person lives––his or her inner life. It’s something beyond appearance, or what only meets the eye. You can’t really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you. People tend not to use this word beauty because it’s not intellectual—but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.”
- Ando Tadao, in an interview by Architectual Record, talking about “beauty”.

Awards

Annual Prize (Row House, Sumiyoshi), Architectural Institute of Japan, 1979

Cultural Design Prize (Rokko Housing One and Two), Japan, 1983

Alvar Aalto Medal, The Finnish Association of Architects, 1985

Gold Medal of Architecture, French Academy of Architecture, 1989

Carlsberg Architectural Prize, Denmark, 1992

Japan Art Academy Prize, Japan, 1993

Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1995

Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1995

Praemium Imperiale First “FRATE SOLE” Award in Architecture, Japan Art Association, 1996

Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1997

Royal Gold Medal, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), 1997

AIA Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects (AIA), 2002

In progress

House, stable, and mausoleum for former fashion designer Tom Ford , near Santa Fe, New Mexico
Expansion for the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts