Flash of miracle or just a natural phenomenon!

It all started with a digital election glitch in a locale in Brussels in 2003. The officials realised that an unpopular local candidate secured more than the vote she should. The number 4096 struck a chord with the IT personnel but passed it off as teething problems of digital voting. That is the number of votes that the computers accidentally added to her tally.

A further assessment suggested that 4096 is 2 to the power of 12 (2¹²). As input into the computers is in multiples of 2 (2⁰, 2¹, 2²....2¹¹,2¹²...), somehow the part (bit) which controlled (2¹²) got lit. Hence, this flip caused the addition of 4096 to the tally. 

Now, the challenge was to ascertain where the surge to this flip came about. Investigators were soon made aware of similar unexplainable occurrences in the airline and automobile industries. There were instances where autopilot settings had to see re-set as it had gone berserk. There was even a plane that suddenly plunged into the ocean. Aircraft, as they were up in the sky, are exposed to cosmic rays. That was thought to have caused computer malfunctions, and necessary preventive measures were put in place.

When Toyota car owners were braking for their lives as computerisation started setting in into their cars at the turn of the century. Faulty electronics perpetuated by single bit flip caused by cosmic rays was suggested as a possible cause for the sudden unintended acceleration of vehicles. Toyota settled out of court and improved its computer system. They started more inputs to control a particular function.

Scientists extrapolated that these rogue 'rays' which arise from the Sun or possibly outside the Solar system (supernovas) were the aetiology for these glitches. These energy-carrying galactic cosmic rays have the capacity to work miracles. With more and more minute components in our digital devices, more puzzling events may soon become the norm. 

Now, just a thought. Since everyone believes the beginning of life heralds the handiwork of the entity of 'God' as some know it or 'Big Bang' as others refer to it and everything that happens as the effect of this, Biggs-Boson particle and all, are these cosmic rays akin to the miracle of 'God'? Are the rays like angels, djinns, daemons or fairies that are sent as messengers to Earth to save or create mayhem? Are these fragments of energy from the beginning of time arriving at sporadic intervals pure 'divine interventions' as they are the closest to what we call as 'The Maker'?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Every birth should be wanted?

Capernaum (Capharnaüm, Arabic  کفرناحوم‎, Lebanon; 2018)
Story, Screenplay, Direction: Nadine Labaki

I remember a family in Penang which had so many children that even the family members never knew how many siblings they had. The mother had so many miscarriages, stillbirths and twins that she gave away that if she were in Stalin Russia, she would have been conferred the 'Order of Maternal Glory' award. The last time the siblings counted, the tally was 16. Despite growing like wildflowers on a shoestring budget provided by the single breadwinner of the family, they all achieved success in their own accord by adulthood. Nobody had arrested psychological development due to a lack of parental attention. 

It was a time when children were viewed as God's gift. Never mind if Man a lot to do with it to make it possible. The extended family concept of living ensured that everyone, especially the older ones, was cared. 

Soon with the changes in societal values, many realised that children were not God-sent but were Nature's way of revenge and testing your resilience. They were viewed as karma's gameplay.

This Oscar-nominated film is reminiscent of many of the ones churned out of Kollywood. Of hand, Pasi and Thulabaram come to mind. Not all God's gift is divine, prudent planning is essential. Restraint in overindulgence is a no-brainer.

In the Bible, Capernaum is the name of the village Jesus sojourned after his successful fight with the temptations of Satan in the Judean desert. People in Capernaum were the testimony to many of His teachings and witness to miraculous healings. In metaphysical terms, it refers to a place of comfort. Sarcastically, the filmmaker decided to name his flick such. The family is the place where most people find solace. In this movie, the family, specifically the heads of the family are depicted as the source of all evil, the propagator of problems. 

Order of Maternal Glory

Labaki, during one of her interviews, mentioned noticing many young children running around the streets of Beirut. Her prodding of these little people finally managed to showcase something alien to most of the net-serving First-World millennials. 

Zain, a 12-year-old boy, is in court suing his parents for his birth. In a flashback manner, his life story unfolds. Having no identification papers, no school to go to, staying in a debilitated rented room for a home, growing up with parents who had all the money for cigarettes and booze but not for the kids, Zain has to work odd jobs to support himself. He sometimes feels that he has to protect his younger sister who recently attained menarche. He tries to conceal her coming of age as he knows that his parents would quickly marry her to the shopkeeper who keeps eyeing her. Before he knows it, she is whizzed off by the shopkeeper, much to his resentment. He runs away from home to befriend an Ethiopian illegal immigrant, Rahil. She is a single mother with a lactating infant. The story progress with Zain babysitting for Rahil and caring for the child when she gets arrested. 

Zain later discovers that his sister died haemorrhaging due to complications of sexual intimacies. A raged Zain stabs the shopowner, his sister's husband, and ends in jail. Through a social worker, he sues his parents.  

I remember during our childhood religious classes, we were reminded to celebrate our birthdays not by blowing candles, cutting cakes and feeding the neighbourhood, but by prostrating at the feet of both parents to show gratitude for our existence. Unfortunately, not everybody looks at their life as a blessing. A failed contraception, a deceiving partner, failure to contraception access, societal coercion, ignorance and more may be the reason for somebody's birth being unwelcomed. The birth of a child is the beginning of the series of maladies. Not to forget children who are not born in the pinkest health, in the fairest of skin tone or the preferred gender. In economically challenging times, another mouth to feed is another strain on the family dynamics. God forbid, a sick child adds many added to the husband-wife relationship.For aeons, negative value has been placed on birth. Procreation has been viewed as dirty. Our presence, our leaving of carbon footprints have shown a detrimental effect on the environment. We have been said to be the product of the Original Sin. Many Christian sects and even Buddhism have expressed their anti-natalistic stance on this matter. Celibacy is viewed as a favourable path to achieve enlightenment. 

Economists, on the other hand, would accuse this of being a communist, a neo-conservative or a leftist agenda (pick your choice). There is a concerted effort by them to depopulate the Earth and replace people with complicated algorithms to create their perceived Utopia which is actually a living hell, lifeless planet only to cater for the few elitists. For economists, people are markets to sell their product to enrich themselves.

Raphael Samuel

Suing his lawyer parents for his birth.
Just to fulfil his parents' self-centred
individual needs, he has to endure
the stresses of living a life on Earth.
The parents are quite happy for him
to file a case. If the Courts deem that
his case has its merits, they would
be glad to fight for their defence.

anti-natalism - a philosophy that argues that life is so full of misery that people should stop procreating immediately.

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Living on a prayer?

There was an anaesthetic medical officer with whom I had misfortunate to work with always had the, at least I thought so, annoying habit of encouraging the patient that he was going to anaesthetise to engage in a little prayer. He would do so as he was just going to induce sleep. The puzzling thing is that even when a regional anaesthetic failed to induce desired actions, he would ask the patient to brace and say a little prayer!

To a staunch believer, what the good doctor does seem to appear just right; that we are mere mortals, that we should not be too cocky, that everything is indeed not under our control and that we are not infallible. In the other words, we dress the wound, He heals it!

To most people, rationalists and atheists, a call for prayer may sound like a desperate measure and the one that most people resort to when all other humanly endeavours have failed! In other words, a mayday message saying, "only a miracle can save you now!"

In the modern world, in a so-called civilised culture, the name of God is rarely invoked in the day to day conversation. Everybody is expected to perform the job they are entrusted with and to do pass the buck to anybody else, especially God.

At certain times in Japan, spirituality was infused with nationalistic spirit. Failure to uphold patriotic calls would mean immediate self-murder (seppuku).


What transpired in the recent kerfuffle over the pilot's announcement PA system asking the passengers to pray when the plane went into engine problems, is probably a clash of cultures. On the pilot side, it was probably acceptable to mention God's name under his every breath whether it meant it or not. It could be a sort of figure of speech. On the recipient's side, they likely must be telling under their murmurs (and prayers), "No, you jolly well take responsibility of your whatever you have done and don't ask God to bail you out!"

Epistemology, Indian style!

Many who live in the present, enjoying the comforts of modernity, growing fat with the affluence and the ease of doing things with scientific advances abhor the many changes that happen around them. They clamour about decadence, injustice and our self-induced path to destruction. They reminisce about the good days when foods were tasty, the air was clean and leaders were honest.

The more you delve into history, the more one realises that Man's past was never anything but of turmoil. Take the instance of South India, for example. They talk about the glorious good old Golden Age of the Pandyas, Cheras and Cholas and their gargantuan seafaring, scientific and philosophical feats.

Thanjavur Periya Kovil

Sample of Chola architectural prowess

All these achievements did not come without any human sacrifices. The Hindu kings had to outdo their Jain Kings with their architecture and their wealth. They had to compete with the Buddhist for support from the masses as Buddhism appeared kinder to those who lost out in the Sanāthana Dharma's caste system and gender discrimination. Even the Buddhists were no angels either. In their animosity with the Hindus, they collaborated with the invading Mogul army only to be played out, converted and chased away. That is how Buddhism spread eastwards and that is why they did not have representation in the Din-Illahi panel. Their role as a dominant religion had fizzled out. And the peaceful paths of all religions leaves a trail of blood, death, injustice and the ego to prove their assertions.

The scene in this snippet reminds me of the time in South Indian history when one great Shaivite poet, Sambanthar, managed to convert a Jain King to become a Hindu King. The first thing that the King did afterwards was to impale 3,000 plus of his kinsmen who refused to convert!

In the movie clip, a Pandya King, puzzled after being rejected by a palace dancer, confides in his learned poet for solace. The Minister suggests divine indulgence for peace of mind. The King, a non-believer, demands proofs for the existence of God -where is He; which direction He is going to; what is He doing now?

As illustrated, the simple truths of Life were enumerated simply by a prodigy with her child-like precocious intelligence which is rampant in Hindu Purana stories.

So what or who or where is God? Like in the milk metaphor, the Milky Way (Universe) is the vessel that contains all lifeform matters and non-matters? It is the force that binds all these Existence which all culminated from The One - Milk, the elixir of life? Like the brightness from the lit candle, God, the Enlightened One, traverses all directions? That the Universe is always expanding? The Light as highlighted by the Sufi Mystics and Zoroastrians? That His 'actions' are the all the ill effects of all of Man's reckless actions, not His doings! Man does everything at the spur of the moment influenced by his ego, self-interest, compulsion, weakness and compassion that gets him into all kinds of a mess but he blames God afterwards? After all, His 'doing' is just to juggle to keep the equations of opposing forces, to thermodynamic and other universal laws in steady-state...

Is ignorance bliss?

Secret Sunshine (Korean; 2007)
Director Lee Chang-dong

Life is not easy. The inner desire for everyone is to be in control of things, especially of his own. This more so in the modern era where our way of thinking has been stimulated by philosophers and thinkers before us have told us to ask why, what, when and how? Gone are the days when subjects are just are going to take whatever told by the master wholesome without batting an eyelid. It must have been to convince someone that He was the Son of God, or He was the product of an Immaculate Conception and a virgin birth. Try doing it now!

There is something about this Korean director, Lee Chang-dong, that I find fascinating. His stories are seamlessly mostly outdoors and scenic view of the countryside. The actors also appear like everyday people like in a neorealist setup.

The film starts with Lee Shin-ae travelling to a small town named Miryang (means Secret Sunshine in ancient Chinese language) with her son. The car breaks down, and a mechanic helps her out. The mechanic, Kim, becomes her close friend as she settles in her new place. Shin-ae is starting life anew in Miryang, after losing her husband in a road traffic accident. Miryang is also her husband's hometown.

Shin-ae tries to mingle in with the crowd working as a piano teacher. She starts having a new set of friends through Kim. We are told slowly that Shin-ae's husband was no angel but a two-timing lover.

Just when everything was going on smoothly, mishap sets in. Her son is kidnapped and is killed after the ransom was not adequately raised. Losing two people close to her at such a short interval proved too much for her to stomach. Devasted, the initially atheist in her religiosity, she is drawn into Christianity. Religious indulgence gives her so much peace and coming to terms with her losses. There are eternal peace and contentment in her mind. She came to a stage when she even wanted to forgive the kidnapper who killed her son!

A visit to the state prison changed all these. The prisoner whom she wanted to forgive had already had his own realisation. He had embraced Christianity and felt that he is absolved of all his past sins. Shin-ye cannot accept this. It seems too easy! After all the misery that she had gone through, the murderer had it too simple.

That is when she flips. Too many questions keep springing in her mind. Life is just not fair. Even the religious movement that she was so engrossed in appears fake. The holy man is also not so holy after all. She has a nervous breakdown and is institutionalised. The ever faithful Kim is still hanging around, attending to her every need.

Is it better for us to accept things as they are rather than pondering much about the purpose of its occurrences? Should we fight tooth and nail for universal justice? Is nature just, anyway? Should we be apathetic? Sometimes ignorance is bliss. That is the curse of having a brain!

Blame, shame, name game

The question is whether an occurrence can solely be put on one event is questionable. It appears that our national pastime is playing the blame game and to shame the alleged perpetrator(s) in the hope that if someone can be pinpointed to have caused the gaffe, we can put closure to a catastrophe. And they hope to prevent the shortcomings in future.

It all sounds noble but unfortunately life is not so simple.

Not every bad incident has a simple etiology. Most often than not it is multi factorial. Like in Murphy's Law, when something is doomed to go wrong, it will go wrong. Airline industry have considered a 'no blame' policy but to identify the precipitating events and to take a collective approach to improve safety.
On the other hand, is a leader culpable to take the brickbats if his subordinates faltered? Should he be made to answer or just take the easy way of saying, "it wasn't me. It is not easy to control so many people's actions, you know!"?

That reminds me of a small civil court case where a minor road accident had occurred. A driver coming from the opposite side had hit him at a traffic light. The aggrieved driver insisted that he was right as the traffic light on his side was green. The learned judge decreed that he also had to take 20% of the blame as it was his duty too to ensure that his lane was clear before he started moving!

A silent punching bag

Year in year out it is the same story. December would come and like an uninvited guest would gate crash your Christmas party. The intruder would be party, a wet wild kind, to be a ruin to many, leaving its hosts wet and grounded.
It had wrecked property, upset school examination schedules and took lives from time immemorial. It must have happened all over the ages that the house designs in this part of the world involved stilts.

The annual floods this time seem to have hit us a carnage of Titanic proportions. Even medical personnel who normally be at limelight for victims to seek help now find themselves trapped in hospitals. And on top of it all, hospitals traditionally had been built on higher ground!
Rather than finding the root of the problem and thinking of ways to mete the problem with our God given minds, what do we do? Say it is all 'act of God'. Lest we forget, God helps those who help themselves.
We cut, we pilfer, we rape, we mutilate and we flatten Nature and we expect Nature not to retaliate.
Like the holy man who refused to budge from his place of worship when the river threatened to overflow its bank. He sent away a pickup van which came his way. As the tide rose further, he refused a hovercraft. His steadfast rock was the belief that he would be saved by the Almighty.
Now, he was holding on to the tallest pole of his place of worship. A helicopter was swirling around picking up stranded people. "It is okay. I'm good. God will take care of me!" he refused the rope that was hurled from the helicopter at his direction.
Unfortunately, no further aid came his way and he perished.
In the after-life, the holy man managed to secure an audience with the Big Guy. He stated his predicament of sacrificing his whole life for the work of the Divine only to be let down at the last moment through an act perceived as the wrath of God. God replied, "I sent a van, an hovercraft and a helicopter. You just refused to budge from your high chair!"

There are two Gods

PK (Tipsy, Hindi; 2014)
So it looks sightings of UFOs and visitations from alien civilisations corresponds to the affluence of a country. In the 50s, it occurred exclusively in the US. Then it was China and now, India. Put an alien in God's favourite land with the most number of God-men per square feet and a good screenwriter and what do you get? 2 and a half of laughter from a philosophical  comedy of divine proportions.
Followers of this blog would notice that some of the ideas from this movie had come up in our previous posts (here, here and here). But hey, with a ready market worth multi-millions sprawling with talents waiting to hit the jackpot in a world of survival of the fittest, ideas just ooze.
This movie pokes fun at segregation of people according to religious beliefs and the things people do in the name in the name of God.
An alien lands in the deserts of Rajasthan dressed only with a transmitter medallion. His mission is to survey Earth and return to his motherboard space ship. Unfortunately, just a few minutes upon his arrival, his medallion is snatched by a common thief who scoots off at the back of a goods' train.
Left to fend himself in the cruel world on the third rock from the Sun, he learns the cultures and idiosyncrasies as he goes along. He is a fix as he cannot return home as the medallion is the only way to contact his space craft.

Brugge, Belgium.

Along the way, he learns that God can solves all problems. Hence start the parody of man and his subdivisions of belief, all in the name of God, provided you are able to part from your hard earned money.
On the other side of the world in Brugge, Belgium (not Broga in Negri Sembilan), Jaggu's love life is cut short by a misunderstanding of sorts when her boyfriend fails to turn up at the Registrar of Marriages' office. Her love life is met with opposition from her family as the boy is a Pakistani Muslim.
Jaggu's family members are strong follower of a popular Hindu sage who is somehow able to put people under his thumb with his near Truth prediction of events and his flaunting of the alien's medallion to gain credence.
A dejected Jaggu returns to India to work as a TV reporter. Whilst looking around New Delhi for an interesting news to cover, she bumps into a seemingly lunatic character known as PK, the alien. PK, meaning tipsy, is exactly how he behaves, like someone under the influence of alcohol, always acting inappropriately.
What follows is a stomach rolling comedy of the alien trying make sense of religions and cultural beliefs.
A scene that sticks on mind is when PK tries to learn to hold the hand of Hindu widow who seem to be crying (PK has telepathic powers that transmits via the hand). PK is mobbed for doing so and is educated that widows wear white. So the next time he saw a bride in white bridal gown, he expresses his condolences only to be admonished again. She tells him that widows wear black. Next, he approaches 3 women in burqa to pacify them only to have husband walk up to give his discontent.
The climax is when the alien and the sage have a one on one debate on God.
The take home message is - there are two Gods; 1 who created us and the another who was created by us. On the other hand, the concept of God helps man to grasp on something while he continues in the struggle of dealing with bread and butter issues of daily life. Worth the while.

But, that is not real way...

Now how often have we heard people sitting high up and looking down saying, "yeah but they is the real way of doing it! They are not doing it right. There are specific ways of doing it. The Truth is all there in the scriptures!"
Yes and yet no religion is not guilty of it.
The animals are supposed to be respected and are said to be also creations of the Almighty but the way they are abused, culled and hunted, it appears like their sole purpose of existence is to be eaten, hunted and be bullied. They say that their religious way of justice is God sent and is cast on stone. If you look around, their justice is made to look so disconnected from the train of thought of contemporary man. If you do not have a living example to follow, how can you proclaim that your system is the best. We need a sign. We need a living proof of superiority of the merchandise that you are trying to sell us!
Your religious leaders allow atrocities to be carried out on fellow citizens. Yet they advise middle path as the best way to reach Enlightenment. Even your saffron robed holy men partake in these atrocities in the name of justice. Others of the same faith, however, admonish their actions by saying that their brand of seeking the truth is deviant.
You say God works in mysterious ways but yet you take it upon yourself that you must do His work on Earth. And you self appointed yourself as the chosen one.
You say everyone is sent to Earth for a specific reason but how do you know that what you doing IS the reason you are sent for? Perhaps, you still have not found you are looking for.
You think you know everything and you know are right but what if, just what if, you were wrong all the time? You cannot undo what you did to them, can you?
Are you trying to show your might as might just might be right and buries the rest?
Since we are all groping around trying to understand the things that surround us, why you give peace a chance? Maybe when the storm had cleared, you can see clearly then...
You do not want yesterday once more.

Preys pray?

Zeus

I have a friend who was devastated when his only son was afflicted with a scary form of cancer. He was aggressive in offering whatever humanly possible to nip the disease to the root of things. He has thus far successfully dodged his son's disease. At time of the initial denial phase, my friend made a vow at the spur of the moment that he who stop doing his divine duties indefinitely if his son did not escape the grab of the dreaded crab. So far, 2 years on, the Gods have not lost a devotee!
Then back to the present time, a plane goes missing. What are we told to do? To pray and invoke intervention of the unknown as the experts do not know what else to do!
How is prayers going to change the fate of things that had been predetermined through the synchronised chaos of the butterfly effects? Whatever has happened to the ill-fated vessel had already happened. Our interventions or coaxing of the Forces is not going to undo what had already happened.
What prayers could invoke is that we, the mortals, the comfort that we are actually trying to do something when all other earthly avenues are exhausted. It shifts the blame from a human side towards the unknown. In the end, everyone would just accept whatever the outcome is and take things as it is and reassure themselves that everything happens for the best.
What matters to us most in 10 hours may not mean too much at 10-days interval and possibly laughable 10 year later.
When caught in a corner and the situation is hopeless, a miracle may not happen but people will accept and move on.
If an outcome of the situation we are praying for is not a desirous one, does that mean that we have not prayed hard enough or it is that we had invoked the wrath of the Gods or do we it just accept that  everything happens for the best?  Is our prayer going to alter the path of the universe or adjust the orbits of the stars? Probably not. Then it would create another mammoth catastrophe which is bigger than life itself. There would not be anyone there to pray anymore or to pray for, would they?

Defensive mode

We are all living in a world where everybody is just waiting for another to make a mistake whilst at the same time everybody is just so careful that their posterior is not exposed and hence vulnerable to abuses.

Whenever a misadventure is encountered, the first response is mum! Nobody talks to anybody as anything you say will be used against you in any situation just to fry your goose. Silence is golden whilst the conniving officers of the law scheme out devious plans to dissociate yourself any plausible repercussions. Truth, justice, liberty you say? What is that? When you are persecuted and crucified for an event that even be beyond your control and your rice bowl is jeopardised, to hell with doing the right thing. It is the right thing alright, for yourself and your dependants. By admitting mistakes, everything would be pinned on you conveniently. In this world of fault seeking and destiny defying population, no one will empathise with you or have sympathy for your predicament. The time for Truth (a.k.a. God) to set things straight is long gone. We killed God long ago with our advancement in technology. There was a time when we were quite green about things around us. We had once marvelled at the splendour of many breathtaking events in our lives - how the sun was eaten by darkness; how the wrath the Mother Nature belched out boiling molten rocks whenever we thought we had wronged and how God punished the fornicators by inflicting incurable diseases!
When Man found a plausible manner to explain all these God sent events, he stopped blaming God for everything. He instead held each other responsible for misadventure, negligence or gaffe, depending on which side of the fence you are! And the sharks have no intentions to bring peace on Earth as it would affect their rice bowl and drinking chalice too - a tool of their trade.

Rabid attachment to her furry little animals, still!

Heard an interesting podcast recently...
There was this 15 year old girl in Wisconsin in 2004 who became febrile and started losing her coordination gradually. Exhaustive medical investigative procedure came to zilch. And her condition was deteriorating. She was almost in and out of coma.
While engaged in small talk during the visit by her old paediatrician, the mother mentioned about their visit to the church the previous month and how the animal lover part of the girl helped a stranded bat in the church. The bat was injured was flying helplessly banging into the glass and missing the exit. Her Good Samaritan deed earned her a bite on the hand which the family nursed it as per a usual wound. That struck an alarm... Bats, bites, rabies...Unfortunately, rabies had 100% mortality rate. The doctors could not do much but put her in a dark room, minimise stimulation, supportive care and slowly ease her path to meet her Maker.
Left with Hobson's choice, the family kept on doing the only thing that kept them sane after seeing their springy teenager slowly withering away- prayers and more prayers.
Then an infectious specialist offered an experimental form of treatment. The rationale of treatment was that rabies does not actually cause structural damage to the brain. It paralyses the vital functions of the body before our own antibodies are able combat the offending intruder. So, if there was some kind of way to maintain vital functions and organs, the body can produce enough antibodies to fight the disease. They started antiviral treatment and ventilated here for 2 weeks.
After many tense, hopeful and false alarm moments, she slowly recovered. And she continued recovering till she finally passed college with flying colours, albeit not 100% yet. And she is now working with bats and other animals aiming to be a veterinarian!

Jeanna Giese

Unfortunately, the success of the same form of treatment had not been replicated elsewhere, although some success was seen but not 100%! So, what happened? Were the parents' prayers answered? After all they were all regular church goers but then why being bitten by a bat in the church in the first place? Is this some kind of divine mirth or divine comedy or errors of divine proportions? Errors corrected by sending of a healer with knowledge to rectify? A device to garner more support from congregation by flaunting of powers?
Is it because she may been partially immunised by a lesser strain of rabies? Or the current strain is less virulent? Literature had suggested people living in close proximity with animals reputed to carry the virus had survived in anecdotal unconfirmed reports.
We can all believe in what we want to believe... At the end of the day, she and her family kept their faith and it seem stronger now.
Another discussion point in the podcast is the use of this modality of treatment to be made available to all victims who had missed the window of opportunity to receive the immunisation or symptoms have emerged. Unfortunately, there is the cost factor which needs to be considered. Guess you have to be born in a rich family or country to be bitten by a rabid animal!

May the Force be with you!

As usual things happen in waves of coincidences. Of late, quite many individuals are quite open about their beliefs and have no qualms about questioning the existence of the Almighty. Maybe, they admit the existence of a divine power or force that spins the universe but they cannot stomach the idea of God as preached by Man. Are they spiritualistic atheists?

First, in the Steve Job's biography that I am presently reading, Jobs became a non believer (he practiced Zen Buddhism later) after he refused to accept that the all knowing God refused to help the starving children of Africa. 

Then, they was another guy who questioned that no rational explanation can be given to explain the reason why his apparently healthy teenage son had to return to God after a mysterious illness. Somehow telling him that God has bigger plans and we mere mortal are at a position to comprehend the greater plans seem out of place!

The politics in the house of God also does not paint a nice picture of justice on Earth. Factions, friends with business benefits, ethnicity and other self interests prevail over the common of doing God's work on Earth.

People are giving God a bad name! And counting contribution from the donation box is a 24-hours 3shifts' job where the workers' go back smelling of money - may not be the most sanitized smell, looking at various type of people, (the good, the bad and the ugly) who would have handled the dough and donated it to wash their sins!

Above us only sky?

Osho Meditations

PRAYER

THERE is nobody to hear your prayers. Your prayer is simply a monologue; you are praying to the empty sky. Nobody is going to reward you for your prayers – remember it. If you really know what prayer is, prayer itself is its own reward. There is nobody else to reward you; the reward is not there in the future, not in the afterlife.
But praying itself is such a beautiful phenomenon that who cares about the future and who bothers about the reward? That is greed, the idea of reward. Prayer in itself is such a celebration, it brings such great joy and ecstasy, that one prays for the prayer’s sake. One does not pray out of fear and one does not pray out of greed. One prays because one enjoys it. One does not even bother whether there is a God or not.
If you enjoy dance you don’t ask whether there is a God or not. If you enjoy dance, you simply dance; whether anybody is seeing the dance from the sky or not is not your concern. Whether stars and the sun and the moon are going to reward you for your dance, you don’t care. The dance is enough of a reward unto itself. If you love singing you sing; whether anybody listens or not is not the point.

 So is prayer. It is a dance, it is a song; it is music, it is love. You enjoy it and there it is finished. Prayer is the means and prayer is the end. The end and the means are not separate – then only you know what prayer is.
When I say prayer, I mean an openness towards God. Not that you have to say something, not that you have to ask something, but just an openness, so that if He wants to give something, you are available. A
deep expectation, but with no desire – that’s what you need. Urgent expectancy – as if something is going to happen any moment. You are thrilled by the possibility of the unknown but you don’t have any desire. You don’t say that this should happen or that should not happen. Once you ask, prayer is corrupted.
When you don’t ask, when you simply remain in silence but open, ready to go anywhere, ready even to die, when you are simply in a receptivity, a passive, welcoming spirit, then prayer happens. Prayer is not something that one can do – it has nothing to do with doing. It is not an action or an activity – it is a state of mind.
If you want to talk, talk, but remember, your talk is not going to affect the existence. It will affect you, and that may be good, but prayer is not going to change God's mind. It may change you, but if it is not changing you then it is a trick. You can go on praying for years, but if it doesn’t change you, drop it, throw it, it is rubbish; don’t carry it any more.
Prayer is not going to change God. You always think that if you pray, God’s mind will change, He will be more favourable, He will be tipped a little towards your side. There is nobody who is listening to you. This vast sky cannot listen. This vast sky can be with you if you are with it – there is no other way to pray.
I also suggest to pray, but praying should be just an energy phenomenon; not a devotee-and-God phenomenon, but an energy phenomenon.

OSHO

Spare us the godswallop (Malaysiakini)

Dean Johns

Dec 1, 10 11:24am

Judging by what I've heard of her, PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan   Ismail is as good and godly a human being as Allah ever put breath into. But I wish she'd spare us the kind of codswallop she sincerely but I think unwisely spouted in her speech to the PKR party when she praised her husband Anwar Ibrahim as a “great man who has been awarded by God to all of us to be our leader”.

For a start, it's a bit presumptuous to speak on God's behalf when you couldn't possible have the slightest idea of the Almighty's thoughts, intentions, ideas or ideals.

Like clerics and their flocks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and similar earthly paradises who imagine that God demands the death penalty for those accused of adultery, blasphemy, apostasy or whatever else they deem terminally sinful.

Or potentates like the Pope (right), who claims to be God's earthly mouthpiece in making such preposterous pronouncements as his recent one that the use of condoms is now okay for male prostitutes to use to protect their clients against HIV infection, but still against divine law for the prevention of unwanted conception.

And a second and even more compelling reason for never presuming to invoke the name of God in a political or any other profane context is that so many others do it, often in support or justification of immoral, malicious and vicious activities.

For example, for centuries in Europe, generations of monarchs ruled by so-called “divine right”, claiming with the collusion of “aristocratic” cronies and Christian clerics to be destined, appointed and anointed by God to lord it over their populations of hapless peasants and serfs.

“Nobiscum deus”, Latin for “God with us”, was the claim of both the Byzantine and late Roman empires, neither of them paragons of virtue. And in more recent times, “Gott mit uns”, or in obvious English translation “God with us”, was the motto of both the German Kaiser's army in World War 1, and Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht in World War 2.

Acting 'for the glory of God'

Then there's the contemporary fact that Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and many other murderous organisations of similar ilk claim to be acting for the glory of God, and imagine that if their members die in action they're assured of berths in heaven.

And ranged against them are the massive forces of the US, which confidently considers itself to be 'God's own country', and whose former President, George W Bush (left), is on record as declaring that God advised him to invade Iraq.

God apparently has great faith in the US currency, too, as it bears the legend “In God we trust”, thus explaining perhaps why it's often referred to as 'the almighty dollar'. Though whether God had any hand in the sub-prime mortgage scandals and ensuing financial meltdown is a question that hasn't apparently yet occurred to America's fundamentalist true-believers.

Admittedly the North Korean regime doesn't attempt to pin its paranoid persecution of its own people or its poisonous posturing towards its neighbours on God, but that's only because successive members of the Kim dynasty appear to believe that they are God.

Unlike the supreme rulers of Iran and other theocracies, who apparently realise they're not actually divine, but presume to play God by threatening to finish the job that the “Gott mit uns” Nazis tried but finally failed to do on the Jews.

But we don't have to go global to find examples of the dubious company Wan Azizah puts herself in by publicly politicising God's name.

In Malaysia, as everybody knows, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was moved to swear to God on the Quran that he never met or had any dealings with the Mongolian 'model', Altantuya Shaariibuu, who was gruesomely murdered following her alleged involvement with the Scorpene submarine purchase by the Defence Ministry for which Najib was responsible at the time.

Which has me wondering, how could the self-same God who Wan Azizah assures us “awarded” Malaysians Anwar Ibrahim to be their leader believe a word that Najib tells him, let alone tolerate half a century of corrupt and criminal rule by Umno/Barisan Nasional?

Despite its sanctimonious claims to be the champions of Malays and thus Muslims, this gang of crooks would be a disgrace to any race or religion.

Systematically stealing untold billions in cash, land, timber, shares and whatever else it can get its claws on, and covering up its crimes by corrupting the country's judiciary, co-opting the nation's media and civil services, and condoning the criminalisation of the police to the point that countless killings in custody and fake 'shoot-outs' continue to occur and go unpunished.

Ungodly idols of power and profit

As I've mentioned before, however many times a day Malaysia's Umnoputras claim to pray, they seem to have no qualms whatever about preying on the populace. And whatever lengths they go to in their efforts to make it appear that they respect the Prophet, all they really worship are the ungodly idols of power and profit.

In fact they appear to have interpreted the old saying “God helps those who help themselves,” not as a proverbial encouragement to honest enterprise, but as a sign from above that they should help themselves to whatever they can get away with.

In a situation as profane as this, it seems highly counter-productive for Wan Azizah to drag God into the conversation. Especially in support of her husband right at the very moment that a parade of witnesses are busy perjuring themselves in front of the self-same God to frame him on a second trumped-up sodomy charge.

Of course Wan Azizah has a God-given right to think and say whatever she likes. But with so many people out there taking God's name in vain for their own nefarious purposes, it would be a pity if she risked looking like one of them.

Not that it's very likely, I grant you, that she'd ever be mistaken for those like Perkasa, who are walloping her for calling for an end to ketuanan Melayu, when in truth all the cods they talk about race and religion is just a cover for the fact that they're all about ketuanan money and that, as with their Umno sponsors, their only God is gold.

P.S. Malaysians will remember a certain someone who was the country's Works Minister in the 1980s when he conveniently blamed all the mishaps in the country to 'Act of God'! Er.. for those clueless on the identity of this glorified thug, it is Samy Vello (duh). FG