We are perfect in our imperfections
Author: ojinoto
Trying to do good. Born and raised and living in NYC.
The Present Moment is a Gift
The Present moment is a gift. That’s why they call it the “present.”
(Darrell Scott is the father of Rachel from “Rachel’s Challenge”)
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-William James
Where Courage Lives
Even where there is fear, it doesnt mean we wont overcome. That is where courage lives.
I did a public reading of my book Spark the Flame at BookCon at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City on June 2, 2018. I read from the section/chapater titled “Theory of General Positivity”, pages 46 – 49.
“Every person is sacred. Every human life is a parable, a story which has spiritual value.”
-Anthony T. Padovano
Just wanted to share, that it seems like I will be required to be mostly straightedge. Maybe a little portion of a hookah every once in a blue might be ok, but even that I dont know.
- I cannot smoke cigarettes because even one now will create in me a hacking coughing fit
- I cannot drink alcohol because even one sip may cause me to binge where I become a danger to the lives of myself and others
- I cannot smoke weed, because the last two times I broke my abstinence from marijuana I became extremely emotionally distraught, where I am at risk of wanting to leave this world.
Looks like this leaves me with tea and hot sauce 🙂
“For a growing number of physicists, the fine-tuning problem can be solved only by accepting that the entire cosmos is a single, continuous entity, working in seamless harmony like the human body. Everyone accepts that individual cells in the heart, liver, brain and so on are linked to the activity of the entire body. If you look at a cell in isolation, its relationship to the whole is lost. All you see are chemical reactions swirling in, out, and through the cell. What you cannot see is that these reactions do two things simultaneously: at the local level they keep the individual cell alive, while a t the holistic level they keep the entire body alive.”
Deepak Chopra – You are the Universe
I recently heard Deepak Chopra and Anoop Kumar both speak their opinion that “God” is the same as the infinite, which is the same as consciousness.
I found this idea interesting – here are some quotes:
“…What we call Life, really doesnt have an opposite. The opposite of birth is death, and the opposite of death is birth. But Life doesnt have an opposite.” – Anoop Kumar
“Consciousness is primary, and what we call ‘matter’ is an experience in our consciousness. Now if consciousness is primary, it’s also infinite….Not only is consciousness infinite, but the infinite has always been the ultimate description of what we call God. The more common notions, the more familiar notions, they are aspects of God. So there is infinite, but then we talk about infinite wisdom, infinite compassion, infinite mercy, infinite understanding, these are aspects of infinite. And this infinite shows up, not only in religion, but it shows up in mathematics, and philosophy, as different aspects, different approaches. Each of these is a unique perspective, and therefore each has unique data, to contribute about something that’s beyond all concepts. The more we evolve, the more we see the infinite underlying nature of all things. Call it religious, call it spiritual, call it secular, or simply the practical experience of knowing ourselves and eachother more deeply.” – Anoop Kumar
“Consciousness, or God, is all-knows, all modes of knowing, and all experiences known. Consciousness is invisible. Why? Because it has no form. But without consciousness there is no experience of that which we call visible. Consciousness is beyond perception. Why again? Because it’s formless, it’s boundless. You cannot imagine consciousness, you cant imagine God because if you imagine God it’s not God. The infinite cannot be imagined. But without consciousness there is no imagination.” – Deepak Chopra
The quotes above are from this debate on NPR.
Jim Carrey has been going through an “existential discovery” for some years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbLsOF4avIs
“I used to be a guy who was experiencing the world, and now I feel like the world and the universe experiencing a guy.”
-Jim Carrey
We are beautiful, and spiritually cleaning ourselves, when we keep looking and loving for healthy answers.
I ran into this very nice talk, and included some great quotes below:
“…for a life to be meaningful, you cant keep looking at the life. You have to see how that life is placed in larger, broader context.”
“…a life that is rich in happiness and rich in meaning….theologian Frederick Buechner I think would label that: finding your calling.”
“Your calling, Buechner says, is that place where your deep gladness, and the world’s deep hunger, meets. Your deep gladness is about you, about what makes you engaged and alive.”
“Finding your calling is discovering what it is that makes you feel alive. And then taking those gifts and skills and moving them out into the world to feed the world’s hunger.”
“…the tension we feel between what we want and what the world needs, is in fact something we don’t want to eliminate, but instead we want to encourage and cultivate.”
“When the world pushes and presses and prods and occasionally pummels you, it is in those moments that you can begin to imagine something different. You need the world and all its adversity, just as desperately as the world needs you.”
“To lead a happy and meaningful life, is to understand the tension that exists between what we want and what the world needs, and to recognize that tension as the gift that it is.”
-Mark Hébert
“Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to.”
Emily Esfahani Smith
“Here’s the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets…We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.”
–Kathryn Schulz