Time - Friend or Foe?

We have all heard of the expressions of time: time is money, living on borrowed time, time is of the essence...time time time.  We have also heard from scientists, spiritual seekers and metaphysicist on how time is only a concept of this reality and that it represents the dualistic world which we are all in.  It is easy to understand this intellectually but our daily lives are indeed very often dictated by what is going on round the clock.  From a student taking his first test in school to an athlete trying to break his record, we are always trying to work within the limits of time, or more so, to beat it.  If not, why are people trying so hard to rejuvenate themselves and get hung up on the age-reversal process?

This is all fine when time is your ally and you are using it as means to progress or improve yourself.  However, it may not work so well when you crucify yourselves between two thieves - regrets for the past and worries of the future.  In this mundane world of ours, time is simply a tool without which we can have no human advancement.  But we have to believe that we are always at the right time at the right place with the right people, though it may not seem so at times.  When you can truly be in the here and now, and only in the here and now, joy is natural pheneonomen.   

Trust.    

Can Happiness be Synthesized?

Many enlightened ones have said that happiness cannot be sought, it is inherently there - a birthright.  That said, it is a matter of resuming to our original state of bliss and "remembering".  Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert's research work may shed some light on this topic.  He defines synthetic happiness as what we make when we don't get what we wanted, and natural happiness as what we get when we get what we wanted.

Apparently, according to Gilbert, they are mutually exclusive.  Natural happiness generate freedom when we get what we wanted, a point well understood and experienced by most.  When you can go to a restaurant and order whatever you would like to have without having to worry if you can afford it, that is natural happiness as a by-product of the freedom to choose.  But often as we become more abundant in an affluent society, we might have taken it for granted and thus causing us to be too complacent to connect with the feeling of happiness.

Such freedom is also associated with the freedom to change and decide.  However, it is also described as the enemy of synthetic happiness.  So what happens when we are stuck with no choice?  His experiments show that our human brains are well equipped with a psychological immune system to ensure that we can synthesise our happiness.  It seems that it is a natural adaptation that help us cope with things that we are stuck with, and that subjects were happier with the condition that they were in at the end.  In a nutshell, when we don't have choices we grow to like what we have got, more than what we originally predicted.  And this applies even to amnesiacs.

There are two things that are worth contemplating here: First of all, if natural happiness is attained when we can get what we wanted, why are there still so many people unhappy after they have married the love of their lives or have created the wealth beyond dreams?  What are the blockages to happiness?  Is it the loss of gratefulness?  Secondly, if we are born to be happy one way or the other, what is there to be sought beyond our DNA?  And why are we so afraid of the choices that we have made and thinking that there are better choices otherwise?

No doubt, the impact and intensity of those different choices are often way out of proportion, and our disproportionate worries always distort the true picture.

Words from the Shadow

My name is Shadow, nicknamed Dark
My counterpart is Light, with which I long to merge
I am shunned and he is lauded
I am a disowned child born by you and yet abhorrently denied

Disquietude is the state when we collide
Yet I yearn to rare my head
Just so I can be acknowledged and embraced
Love me please, I am here