wedding day!

Today my sister gets married, and I’ll be emceeing the reception. So many of my friends are getting married, or have recently gotten married that it seems like it’s the socially expected thing to do. From my social psychology studies, I’ve learned that all of us engage in what’s called social comparison. According to the social comparison theory, we’re always comparing our own situation and status to that of others, in order to gauge how well (or not so well) we’re doing in life. Such comparison is unavoidable and happens naturally. Healthy individuals are able to accurately gauge their own situation; whereas, unhealthy minds seemingly become frustrated and down when they cannot accept their own situation in comparison to others. Often such people don’t actually realize how good they have it, and are blind to the fact that they still have good lives – they have food, shelter, friends… whereas millions of people around the world go hungry and starve every single day.

50 Reasons

Gordon Ramsay recipe of the day

Flat bread, pita, and chick pea salad! I’ll be making this later today.

UPDATE:  I just made this recipe…  fantastic!  Quick, easy, and very tasty for a vegetarian dish.

what is a friend?

Anthony de Mello, SJ

I was browsing through a bookstore tonight and came across a fascinating little book about reflections on love. Usually, if there’s a book I find interesting, I’ll go borrow it from the public library; however, this time I found myself purchasing the book, entitled The Way to Love. The author…

…grapples with the ultimate question of love. In thirty-one meditations, he implores his readers with his usual pithiness to break through illusion, the great obstacle to love. “Love springs from awareness,” [the author] insists, saying that it is only when we see others as they are that we can begin to really love. But not only must we seek to see others with clarity, we must examine ourselves without misconception. The task, however, is not easy. “The most painful act,” [the author] says, “is the act of seeing. But in that act of seeing that love is born.”

Who is the author of this intriguing book? It is Anthony de Mello, a catholic priest.

Here’s a sample of his writing style, excerpted from his website.

So if you stop to think, you would see that there’s nothing to be very proud of after all. What does this do to your relationship with people? What are you complaining about? A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot — you glorified her, didn’t you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They’re not! They’re not nice. They’re as bad as you are — bad, you understand? They’re asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference. Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

Read the rest of this article entitled Seeing People As They Are – And Not As I Wish Them To Be.

MC Episode #9

My visit to the chiropractor! Ever wondered what they do?; New Age spirituality vs. Christianity.

• YouTube video of a chiropractic adjustment
• Vatican document: Jesus Christ the Bearer of Life: a Christian Reflection on the “New Age”

Download | Subscribe with iTunes

the New Age rant

The current popularity of yoga certainly has stimulated interest in contrasting New Age spirituality with Christianity. The following excerpts are taken from the Vatican’s official website, in an article entitled Jesus Christ the Bearer of Life: a Christian Reflection on the “New Age”.

_* Is God a being with whom we have a relationship or something to be used or a force to be harnessed?

The New Age concept of God is rather diffuse, whereas the Christian concept is a very clear one. The New Age god is an impersonal energy, really a particular extension or component of the cosmos; god in this sense is the life-force or soul of the world. Divinity is to be found in every being, in a gradation “from the lowest crystal of the mineral world up to and beyond the Galactic God himself, about Whom we can say nothing at all. This is not a man but a Great Consciousness”. In some “classic” New Age writings, it is clear that human beings are meant to think of themselves as gods: this is more fully developed in some people than in others. God is no longer to be sought beyond the world, but deep within myself. Even when “God” is something outside myself, it is there to be manipulated.

This is very different from the Christian understanding of God as the maker of heaven and earth and the source of all personal life. God is in himself personal, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who created the universe in order to share the communion of his life with creaturely persons. “God, who ‘dwells in unapprochable light’, wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son. By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him, and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity”. God is not identified with the Life-principle understood as the “Spirit” or “basic energy” of the cosmos, but is that love which is absolutely different from the world, and yet creatively present in everything, and leading human beings to salvation.

_* Do we invent truth or do we embrace it?

New Age truth is about good vibrations, cosmic correspondences, harmony and ecstasy, in general pleasant experiences. It is a matter of finding one’s own truth in accordance with the feel- good factor. Evaluating religion and ethical questions is obviously relative to one’s own feelings and experiences.

Jesus Christ is presented in Christian teaching as “The Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14.6). His followers are asked to open their whole lives to him and to his values, in other words to an objective set of requirements which are part of an objective reality ultimately knowable by all.

_* Prayer and meditation: are we talking to ourselves or to God?

The tendency to confuse psychology and spirituality makes it hard not to insist that many of the meditation techniques now used are not prayer. They are often a good preparation for prayer, but no more, even if they lead to a more pleasant state of mind or bodily comfort. The experiences involved are genuinely intense, but to remain at this level is to remain alone, not yet in the presence of the other. The achievement of silence can confront us with emptiness, rather than the silence of contemplating the beloved. It is also true that techniques for going deeper into one’s own soul are ultimately an appeal to one’s own ability to reach the divine, or even to become divine: if they forget God’s search for the human heart they are still not Christian prayer. Even when it is seen as a link with the Universal Energy, “such an easy ‘relationship’ with God, where God’s function is seen as supplying all our needs, shows the selfishness at the heart of this New Age”.

New Age practices are not really prayer, in that they are generally a question of introspection or fusion with cosmic energy, as opposed to the double orientation of Christian prayer, which involves introspection but is essentially also a meeting with God. Far from being a merely human effort, Christian mysticism is essentially a dialogue which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ’self’ to the ‘you’ of God”.“The Christian, even when he is alone and prays in secret, he is conscious that he always prays for the good of the Church in union with Christ, in the Holy Spirit and together with all the saints”.

Star Trek Voyager’s take on dating

I just saw what I would consider to be the best Star Trek Voyager episode, entitled “Someone to Watch Over Me”. What happened was that the holographic Doctor tries to teach Seven of Nine how to date. Throughout the process, Seven fails at finding a suitable date on the ship, but the Doctor ends up developing romantic interest in her. Although they are long time colleagues, the Doctor tries to overcome his fear of confessing his feelings to Seven, but ultimately he cannot find the courage to do so, and ends the episode playing a lonely tune on the piano in the holodeck.

It’s always fun watching a show where you can totally relate to the characters.  One scene I liked was where Seven commented how dating conversation is full of hidden messages and is thus irrelevant, whereas she likes the style of conversation between her and the Doctor because there are no hidden messages and their style is far more productive.  Dating would be so much easier if people didn’t send mixed messages all the time; but then again, how dull would that be.

be grateful for what you got!

I got into a discussion today about material wealth with a friend. Living here in Canada, we can sometimes take what we have for granted. Sure, it’d be nice to live in luxury – nice house, fancy car, maybe even a private jet – but really, you can’t take that all with you once you die. If you ever think that you have it pretty bad because you only have a simple house and don’t have the giant mansion you saw on TV, well, just think about the billions of other people in the world who don’t even have a roof over their heads.

Sigmund Freud and blog therapy

Flipping through the morning news before my long run, I came across a woman being interviewed for having lost a lot of weight. She used a blog to post her progress and she made an interesting comment that “blogging is a lot cheaper than psychiatry”. It makes sense of course that blogging is a way to express what one thinks about the world and life in general. Simply the act of dispensing your emotions/thoughts/feelings, having an outlet for what Freud would call your psychic energy, is beneficial. Freud would say that if we were to keep it all in, we’d turn to defense mechanisms in order to allow that psychic energy to be released. It’d be cool to see what more Freud would say about blogging if he were alive today.

For those of you wanting to give it a try, I’d encourage you to do so. It’s very simple, especially if you use WordPress!