Saturday, April 27, 2013

The Interdependent Self

Like the young Asian students at Cornell, Jen’s father had been born into a culture whose parenting style explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective. (Parents engage in short, selective conversation with their children, emphasizing “proper behavior, self-restraint and attunement to others.”) What this “low elaborative” parenting style aims at instead is the creation of an “interdependent self,” defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself. The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world.
More here

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Eliminating inner negativity

"Holy is the warrior who goes to war with himself."

In this Hadith (saying) the Prophet Muhammad made it clear that one should eliminate the ego and negativity within oneself rather than attacking others. The true meaning of the term jihad is inner spiritual struggle, not holy war.

Photo source: www.bbc.co.uk

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Kabir

There’s a moon in my body, but I can’t see it! 
A moon and a sun. 
A drum never touched by hands, beating,
and I can’t hear it.

As long as a human being worries about when he will die, 
and what he has that is his, 
all of his works are zero. 

When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead, 
then the work of the Teacher is over. 

The purpose of labor is to learn; 
when you know it, the labor is over. 

The apple blossom exists to create fruit; 
when that comes, the petal falls. 

The musk is inside the deer, 
but the deer does not look for it: 

It wanders around looking for grass. 

~ Kabir


Tuesday, April 02, 2013

A Memory of Paradise

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
- Peter Matthiessen