WELCOME

Today I announced my first time ever blogs. I have been motivated to do this by Maya who has been blogging for some years and recently started a new blog with the purpose of letting off steam. So I thought I also can use some letting off steam. At first I thought “who’s going to read these anyway?” but then I realized I don’t need to care. It’s more like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean of the internet. Someone will read it one day, someone with patience. I have a lot to share and I know I like to keep it as detailed as it gets (one could say “I have a problem with keeping it short” but I rather not see it as a problem). I hope you have the patience

So I started this blog and three others about a month ago. I’ve been updating it quite often ever since but this may not be sustained as I’m not this much online when I’m on the road. I’ve decided to make use of this period of temporarily settling in a ‘civilized’ place by sharing things.

I was waiting to be more satisfied with the first part of the content to invite you here but I realized that’s very hard. I’m not that happy with my blogging skills but it’s a new thing for me anyway. I feel like I’m writing an e-mail to a good, concerned friend who doesn’t have a face or a name. It’s like keeping a diary starting with “dear journal” and then letting the world see it. It’s weird. I just hope it’s not boring and that you have a little patience to see what I have to share.

I just learned that the order of blog posts go reverse. So what you see right below this one is the last post I sent and the first post I wrote is at the bottom of this page, or even on the ‘history’ part which can be reached through the side panel. I would really appreciate it if you can start with the couple of first entries rather than the last ones, so that the blog gains a little relevance.

I would really like to hear some comments about what I wrote so please click the ‘comment’ link right under the posts to give me some feedback. If you really like what I write and want to see what I write as soon as I put it online you can ‘subscribe’ to this blog using the ‘subscribe’ links on the side panel (RSS).

As I said I have 4 blogs now. This one is about my inner journey and I have one on traveling, one on my inner journey and one in Turkish.


Welcome to my little web.

But this is an old tale you tell – they say.

But surely this is a new tale you tell – some say.

Tell it once again – they say;

Or, do not tell it again – others say.

But I have heard all this before –say some;

Or, but this is not how it was told before – say the rest.

And these, these are our people, Dervish Baba, this is man.


Naqshibandi Recital

as quoted in The Way of The Sufi by Idries Shah

What is Love?

At the end of my first meditation retreat in Suan Mokkh, Thailand, in the nice library of the monastery, I found this little booklet called Love and Marriage – A Buddhist Perspective by The Friends of Buddhism of Malaysia. Apart from all the points it made about what relationships are supposed to be like and the dangers today’s life styles bring into them, it made a few nice points about what we shall be looking for in a love relationship. We always find ourselves talking about what love means for you and for me, when you said it was love did you mean this love or that love, is love one or are there different types of love. This little booklet has it’s humble answers from a Buddhist point of view.

The six types of love (least wholesome to wholesome)

• Mania or dependent love (or neurotic love)
• Ludus or self-centered love (sometimes called narcissism)
• Eros or romantic love (or erotic love)
• Storge or friendly love (or platonic love)
• Pragma or practical love (or logical-sensible love)
• Agape or other-centered love (close to loving-kindness)

We all can remember some time in our lives when we felt each of these different types of love (although sometimes we didn’t acknowledge it as love) and it goes to show that it is useless to have discussions like “this is love and that is not love”. I’ve had this with few people who didn’t feel so at home expressing themselves sexually, that they tend to think sexual love (Eros) is not love at all. Although it is a ‘lesser’ form of love it is still love. Even self-love or addicted love is still love. Of course, we must not fool ourselves by thinking that this is it and we need not reach out for something more wholesome. I believe we all are, consciously or unconsciously, on the way to find greater love, the Love of God if you like, but on the way we get our inspiration by feeling other forms of love. The sufi Hakim Jami said “ordinary human love is capable of raising man to the experience of real love” and I believe this. There are moments I feel the love I feel expands to cover all existence and there are times I feel love in a seemingly selfish way. I love to love (“but my baby she loves to dance” :o) )

Alan Watts, who is to some extend responsible for the popularity of Zen Buddhism in the West, the writer of The Way of Zen, has this to say about love in his book Wisdom of Insecurity:

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when convinced of the impossibility and frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only through the awareness that one has no self to love.

Blog

Eve said she won’t read Adam’s blog because she knows that it will make her mind boil. And although Adam knows it’s good to know oneself, he had done this blog mostly for her and he’d been careful with his tone and what he wrote. But Eve said she cannot control her anger and perhaps it’s better she doesn’t read it.

Adam is not very happy about this. Perhaps he won’t write much on this one anymore.

[By the way Eve also didn’t read Adam’s other blogs yet. She said they are too long. Adam had read her blogs completely although they were 10 times longer and even almost studied them and talked about them with her and all. But she doesn’t seem to be that interested about what’s inside Adam as much as he is interested to know what Eve has to write. Now she has a new laptop and he hopes this will improve the situation. His only hope at this moment is that she’ll keep on writing to her two blogs that he already knows the address of and not on one which is hidden from him. Eve doesn’t like being public much (although she blogs) and she has many e-mail addresses, different blogs, some other hidden stuff perhaps. Adam has multiple addresses also, but he uses them only for completely mundane purposes. :) ]

A Dino Buzzati story

The great Italian writer Dino Buzzati has this very nice story about the priest of a little village who saw a UFO land on the roof of his church one night. He picked up his rifle and ran out to welcome them. Two creatures came out and said to him “we’ve been observing you for some time and we know more or less everything about you but there is one thing we couldn’t understand and we are here to ask you that: Why do you have these antennas everywhere?” They pointed at the cross on top of the bell tower. “You put them on top of buildings which we understand but you also put them indoors and sometimes you plant whole fields with many of them. We even noticed that you hang little ones on your necks. But we couldn’t figure out where they are connected to. So can you please tell us what these antennas are for?”

Seeing this as an opportunity to gain more followers even outside his planet, the priest invited them into his house and started to tell them about Jesus.

“God had a son and his son was here on Earth.”

The aliens started to giggle shaking their tentacles.

“God had a son? Really. And you had him here? Wow. So what did you do with him? Did you make him your king and follow every word he said?”

“Not exactly. There was a misunderstanding and that’s why he ended up on the cross.”

“God’s son was here and you killed him?”

Seeing that he won’t reach anywhere from here, the priest decided to change the subject a little.

“Let me tell you the story from the very beginning. When God created the first human beings, Adam and Eve, he put them in the Garden of Eden. In that garden there was the Tree of Knowledge and he told them not to eat it’s fruits.”

“Sure, you can’t eat them,” said the extraterrestrials.

“What? Do you know these trees?”

“Sure, the Trees of Knowledge, where we live they are everywhere.”

“And do you eat their fruits?”

“Never.”

“Why?”

“It’s forbidden.”

It suddenly dawned on the priest that these aliens were as pure as Adam and Eve in Heaven. They have never touched the fruit. After some silence their tentacles started to shake with more giggles. “Oh, you ate the fruits, didn’t you?”

“Yes we did and that’s why we are here on this earth.”

There was silence. Overcoming his first wave of awe the priest thought that God needed humans more than these pure aliens. We made mistakes, we made sins, and we had to follow the path of God and remember him all the time and pray and always strive to correct ourselves. But what good were these pure creatures of Garden of Eden for? God didn’t need them; they were just being; they were perfect and that was it.

The aliens asked his permission and went back to their spaceship. When the UFO lifted off and shot towards the sky the priest took his rifle and shot twice after them. Another threat had successfully been eliminated.

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Appear originally in Italian as "...e il disco si posò", in the book “Il Crollo della Baliverna”, 1954 and reprinted in other collections later, like "La Boutique del Mistero" (first print 1968, latest 2001), "The Mistery Shop" (1991).

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This is a humble summary of the original story. I apologize if I have made any mistakes but this is how I remember it and it always brings a smile on my face and some sparks in my mind.