Excerpt: Life is a Coincidence (Elif Shafak)

From the Book: The Bastard of Istanbul

Family stories intermingle in such ways that what happened generations ago can have an impact on seemingly irrelevant developments of the present day. The past is anything but bygone. If Levent Kazanci hadn't grown up to be such a bitter and abusive man, would his only son, Mustafa, have ended up being a different person? If generations ago in 1915 Shushan hadn't been left an orphan, would Asya today still be a bastard?

Life is coincidence, though sometimes it takes djinni to fathom that.

Excerpt: Ego Identification (Eckhart Tolle)

From the Book: A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s purpose

One of the most basic levels of identification is with things: My toy, my car, my house, my clothes, and so on. I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don’t really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self. And so in many cases you are not buying a product but an 'identity enhancer'. Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore 'exclusive'. If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psychological value and all you would be left with would be their material value, which likely amounts to a fraction of what you paid. The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.

When you can not feel the life that you are, you are likely to fill up your life with things. Whether your sense of self-worth is bound up with things you possess. Do certain things induce a subtle feeling of importance or superiority? Does the lack of them make you feel inferior to others who have more than you? Do you casually mention things you own or show them off to increase your sense of worth in someone else’s eyes and through them in your own? Do you feel resentful or angry and somehow diminished in your sense of self when someone else has more than you or when you lose a prized possession?

Excerpt: Faith (Danish Rahi)

From the Book: The Pakish Identity: Re-imagining Pakistan through Intelligent Design

Faith (not to be confused with religion) is a key ingredient of the glue that holds the fabric of a society together. When we stop, or avoid a deep and genuine contemplation of our work, we compromise our faith which in turns weakens our societies as it makes us shallow.

Excerpt: Complexity of being Simple (Danish Rahi)

From the Book: The Pakish Identity: Re-imagining Pakistan through Intelligent Design

I predict that achieving simplicity will continue to become more complex as the definition of being special, unique and talented will continue to change and the flattening of the world will continue further. There will be so many overrated heroes that they, all together, will form layers upon layers of mediocrity. The level of noise will increase visually as more and more brands will find innovative ways to shout louder in order to reach their target audiences. At the same time, the average consciousness level of people will increase due to mass media, information resources and storms of virtual networking and relationships. Pakistan, along with the entire developing world, must realize that the massive change is already here. No entity on earth will be able to stop it. From the tribal to the capital the change will take its course as it has from the beginning of time, sometimes with a gap of several thousand years. There will be failed attempts by the unconscious or the sleeping ones to hinder evolution. The conscious ones who will be able to understand neo-consciousism, will embrace evolution and will enjoy successes in influencing its pace and its direction.

Excerpt: Pakish Identity (Danish Rahi)

From the Book: The Pakish Identity: Re-imagining Pakistan through Intelligent Design

It is often seen as small country, armed with nuclear warheads under an unreliable government and elusive opposition along with a powerful military, struggling to deal with extreme elements that are embedded in the nation on every level.

Pakistan, since the beginning, suffers from an acute problem of identity crises that has in fact grown over the years. Missing or conflicting information about the idea of Pakistan, ambiguous interpretations of being her citizen, its twisted history, highly fluctuating economy, multiple foreign influences, rumors, trauma of partition, refugee influx, terrorism and wars, all have contributed to such a crisis. The most important reason is the failure of iteration and reiteration of a robust and clear identity by the primary leaderships. Leaders, who were supposed to interject the meaning and reasoning to exist, ironically found themselves entangled in the indirect battle to justify their own existence instead of engaging in defining and promoting the identity of the nation. The dilemma is that most of the leadership has failed to realize that this battle was not even the real battle. Assuming the title of a winner just for sustaining oneself in power for as long as possible is not a goal. Until today Pakistan finds herself in a heart-breaking disagreement with the reflection she sees in the mirror. 

Excerpt: Religion as the Ultimate Truth (Eckhart Tolle)

From the Book: A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s purpose

Religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an end of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies; belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves 'right' and others 'wrong' and thus define their identity through their enemies, the 'others', the 'nonbelievers' or 'wrong believers' who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made 'God' in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnamable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as 'my god' or 'our god'...and yet in spite of all the insane deeds perpetrated in the name of religion, the Truth to which they point still shines at their core. It still shines, however dimly, through layers upon layers of distortion and misinterpretation. It is unlikely; however, that you will be able to perceive it there unless you have at least already had glimpse of that Truth within yourself. Throughout history, there have always been rare individuals who experienced a shift in consciousness and so realized within themselves that toward which all religions point. To describe that non-conceptual Truth, they then used the conceptual framework of their own religions.

Excerpt: Words (Eckhart Tolle)

From the Book: A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s purpose

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg…

Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.

When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with.

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty – but do we need to become imprisoned in them?

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn't very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are, or the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in its depth?"

Excerpt: The Lost Ring (Eckhart Tolle)

From the Book: A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s purpose

When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I would visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer. She was a school teacher in her mid-forties and had been given no more than a few months to live by her doctors. Sometimes a few words were spoken during those visits, but mostly we would sit together in silence, and as we did, she had her first glimpse of the stillness within herself that she never knew existed during her busy life as a school teacher.

One day, however, I arrived to find her in a state of great distress and anger. 'What happened', I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said she was sure it had been stolen by the woman who came to look after her for a few hours every day. She said she didn't understand how anybody could be so callous and heartless as to do this to her. She asked me whether she should confront the woman or whether it would be better to call the police immediately. I said I couldn't tell her what to do, but asked her to find out how important a ring or anything else was at this point in her life. 'You don't understand,' she said. 'This was my grandmother's ring. I used to wear it every day until I got ill and my hands became too swollen. It's more than just a ring to me. How can I not be upset?' The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her voice were indications that she had not yet become present enough to look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe them both. Her anger and defensiveness were signs that the ego was still speaking through her.

I said, 'I am going to ask you a few questions, but instead of answering them now, see if you can find the answers within you. I will pause briefly after each question. When an answer comes, it may not necessarily come in the form of words.' She said she was ready to listen. I asked: 'Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss?' There were a few minutes of silence after the last question. When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face, and she seemed at peace. 'The last question made me realize something important. First, I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said, 'Yes, of course you have been diminished'. Then I asked myself the question again, 'Has who I am become diminished?' This time I tried to feel rather than think the answer. And suddenly I could feel my I Amness. I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I Am so strongly, then who I am hasn't been diminished at all. I can still feel it now, something peaceful but very alive.'

'That is the joy of Being,' I said. 'You can only feel it when you get out of your head. Being must be felt. It can't be thought. The ego doesn't know about it because thought is what it consists of. The ring was really in your head as a thought that you confused with the sense of I Am. You thought the I Am or a part of it was in the ring. 'Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has 'I', 'me', or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.' She said, 'Now I understand something Jesus said that never made much sense to me before: 'If someone takes your shirt, let him have your coat as well'. 'That's right', I said. 'It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.'

In the last few weeks of her life as her body became weaker, she became more and more radiant, as if light were shining through her. She gave many of her possessions away, some to the woman she thought had stolen the ring, and with each thing she gave away, her joy deepened. When her mother called me to let me know she had passed away, she also mentioned that after her death they found her ring in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Did the woman return the ring, or had it been there all the time? Nobody will ever know. One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment. Is it wrong then to be proud of one's possessions or to feel resentful toward people to have more than you? Not at all. That sense of pride, of needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one's self through 'more than' and diminishment through 'less than' is neither right nor wrong – it is the ego. The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

Many people don't realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their life, they then also realize that while they were looking throughout their lives for a more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for, their Being, had actually always already been there, but had been largely obscured by their identification with things, which ultimately means identification with their mind.

There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires. If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly find another. It ultimately doesn't mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity. Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong, which is one of the principal egoic mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.

Excerpt: Pride of the Peacock (Victoria Holt)

"They were long days of waiting, and with the passing of each one it became clear that Ben could not be long with us. He died in his sleep. Hannah called me and I went to his bed and was struck by the utter peace of his face. It was almost as though he were smiling at me. I kissed his cold brow and went away. We buried him in the churchyard not far from the Clavering section. It was what he would have wanted. Joss and I stood, side by side at the graveside and as I listened to the clods of earth falling on his coffin I knew that was the end of a phase. My new life was about to begin. 

There were solicitors to be seen. I had begun to wonder whether Ben had played a trick on us and had not changed his will at all with the new conditions. I was wrong. It was precisely what he had done".

Excerpt: The Sky outlives Everything (Greg Mortenson)

From the Book: Three Cups of Tea
Writing by Bowa Johar a poet from Baltistan

No human, nor any living thing, survives long under the eternal sky.
the most beautiful women, the most learned men,
even Muhammad (PBUH), who heard Allah's voice,
all did wither and die. All is temporary.
The sky outlives everything. Even suffering.

Excerpt: Stones of Silence (George Schaller)

In the immensity of these ranges, at the limit of existence where men may visit but can not dwell,
life has a new importance...but mountains are not chivalrous; one forgets their violence.
Indifferently, they lash those who venture among them with snow, rock, wind, cold.

Excerpt: The Warrior Song of King Gezar (Douglas J. Penick)

This harsh and splendid land,

with snow-covered rock mountains,cold-crystal streams,

deep forests of cypress, juniper and ash

Is as much my body as what you see before you here.

I can not be separated from this or from you.

Our many hearts have only a single beat.

The seeming opposition between life and death is now cut through.

Do not thrash or lunge or flee.

There is no longer a container or anything to be contained.

All is resolved in dazzling measureless freedom.

Our earth is wounded.
Her oceans and lakes are sick; her rivers are like running sores;
The air is filled with subtle poisons.
And the oily smoke of countless hellish fires blackens the sun.
Men and women scattered from homeland,
family, friends, wander desolate and uncertain, scorched by a toxic sun....
In this desert of frightened, blind uncertainty,
Some take refuge in the pursuit of power.
Some become manipulators of illusion and deceit.
If wisdom and harmony still dwells in this world,
as other than a dream lost in an unopened book,
they are hidden in our heartbeat.
And it is from our hearts that we cry out.
We cry out and our voices are the single voices of this wounded earth.
Our cries are a great wind across the earth.

A brilliant justification of art (Asim Butt)

"I paint because it allows me to stare shamelessly, to be able to flesh out an idea, emotion, or commit to an image a shadow of the world around me. I paint because there is a spillover of energy within that must find form or else it will haunt and twist me. I paint to commit an act of magic and pleasure, for myself, for the love of my audience, and for an abstract notion of my muse's gaze. I paint to validate my Self and to discover surprises within and without. I paint as a penance for my inadequacies. I paint to understand the world around me and to own and disown what I desire or dislike in it. I paint as a political act: to express my power over power larger than myself. I paint to create what it is I want to see, to fill an absence in the world. I paint in conversation with other images, words and music that require, comment, critique or tribute."

(A brilliant justification of art! Asim Butt (1978-2010) a graffiti activist, a painter, a sculptor, a visionary and a believer of Stuckist Art Movement was a creative individual with a sensitive mind and an emotional heart. What could have pushed him to commit suicide at a young age of 32 might remain unknown but he will always be remembered in art circles as a unique artist and a fearless activist who at least took a bold stand to depict all wrong acts that are readily becoming the right acts in our society)