The Heart of the Matter
November 27, 2010
The Wheel Spins

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The wheel spins, but the hub goes nowhere. In the middle of the hub is another hub and inside that, another yet. It too, spins, but too slowly for anyone to notice.

I'll meet you there after the world shuts down.

Sometime later in that silence, tea brewing, cat curled up in the corner of forever, one of us will speak the poetry God longs to hear. Everything will stop. A moment later neither of us will remember a single word of what was said nor will we need to.

More poetry
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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:28 PM | Comments (1)

November 24, 2010
No Attachments

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Thanks to Ellen Kirschner for the heads up
Cartoon

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:23 PM | Comments (4)

November 23, 2010
The Art of Living

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"The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
- Buddha

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2010
Water to Wine

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Pour each glass of water
like a glass of wine.
Move differently,
more like cabernet than tap.
Pause
before raising your glass.
Breathe.
Savor your
toast to all that is
sacred.
Sip,
really sip,
taste the
sweetness
on your lips.

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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2010
The Beautiful Diamond

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There is a beautiful diamond
inside me.
For years it was covered
with dust and dirt
and my own wild thoughts
about what the diamond was.
Then the Master entered my life.
He blew the dust and dirt away.
He invited me
to polish the gem
and watch it shine,
Now I am
the richest person in the world
and so are you.

More
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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:48 PM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2010
Yin, Yang, and Jung

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She

wanted

more

space,

I

gave

her

the

universe.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:33 PM | Comments (1)

November 16, 2010
Peacecards!

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There's a great new service now available at Words of Peace Global. It's called Peacecards -- a collection of 23 beautifully designed virtual postcards you can personalize and email. Quotes from Prem Rawat, Rumi, Kabir, Einstein, Thomas Merton and others. Check it out.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:18 AM | Comments (3)

November 12, 2010
What's in a Name?

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Words of Peace Global
has just published a
third in a series
of weekly blogs --
this one a light-hearted
look at the phenomenon
of attempting to name
one's relationship
to Maharaji.
Take a look.
See if you can relate.
If you want to comment,
go right ahead.
Speak your truth,
share your feeling,
let it rip.

Videos of Maharaji

More

A big thank you to Julian West, Sara Shaffer, and Jossi Fresco for all the work they're doing to bring the WOPG blog alive!

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)

The Big Distinction

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Source: http://www.ypi.net

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:46 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2010
25 Awesome Quotes on Creativity

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"The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity." - Alfred North Whitehead

"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good" sense.'" - Pablo Picasso

"Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference." - Nolan Bushnell

"As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems." - Edward de Bono

"I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them." - Thomas Edison

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." - Theodore Levitt

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"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity." - Edwin Land

"There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there isn't." - Tori Amos

"The key question isn't 'What fosters creativity?' But it is why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create, but why do people not create." - Abraham Maslow

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." - Joseph Chilton Pierce

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"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." - Maya Angelou

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Nikos Kazantzakis

"Creativity is discontent translated into arts." - Eric Hoffer

"A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations." - Gerald Jampolsky

"Things are only impossible until they're not." - Jean-Luc Picard

"Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity." - T.S. Eliot

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." - Bill Moyers

"The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization." - Otto Rank

"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."
- Arthur Koestler

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
- Henry David Thoreau

"If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself." - Carl Jung

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

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Illustration
Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding these great quotes.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:27 PM | Comments (2)

November 07, 2010
Plain Sight

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Click here
for the second
in a series
of weekly blog postings
- this one by Joel Metzger -
now being
published by
Words of Peace Global,
the always evolving website
that communicates
all about the message
of Prem Rawat (aka Maharaji).
Take a look.
Joel deftly describes
the phenomenon of
how what we're looking for
is right in front of us.

Illustration: Sara Shaffer
(Can you find the parrot)

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:11 PM | Comments (1)

November 05, 2010
Trust Yourself

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"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." - Benjamin Spock

"Systems die; instincts remain." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover." - Henri Poincare

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." - John Naisbitt

"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something." - Frank Capra

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's. - Billy Wilder

"It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner." - Jonas Salk

"All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas." - Immanuel Kant

"Your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinion drown your own inner voice. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

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"The more and more each is impelled by that which is intuitive, or the relying upon the soul force within, the greater, the farther, the deeper, the broader, the more constructive may be the result." - Edgar Cayce

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go along against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." - Kim Basinger

"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer." - Robert Graves

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant
and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein

"You must train your intuition. Uou must trust the small voice inside which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide." - Ingrid Bergman

"The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days." - Lao Tzu

"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind." - William Butler Yeats

"Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives."- Carlos Casteneda

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away
just below the conscious level." - Dr. Joyce Brothers

"Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself."
- Oprah Winfrey


Free the Genie

Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding most of these quotes

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Illustration


Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:01 AM | Comments (1)

November 03, 2010
Outside, On a Break

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On October 22nd, I had the great good fortune to see and listen to Maharaji (AKA Prem Rawat) at an all-day event, at the Jackie Gleason Theater, in Miami Beach.

As always, being with him had great impact on me. Kind of like I was a car being recalled to the factory, not because anything was wrong with the car, but because -- somehow -- I forgot the car could fly.

During the first break, I walked outside to get some air. Everything seemed a bit different than before. The sky seemed bluer. The air seemed sweeter. The breezes, seemed, well... breezier.

Standing there, free of anything to do, I liked how I felt -- buoyant, refreshed, alive -- a moment that could have easily gone on forever and never exhausted its momentousness.

People came and went. Some of them, who knew me from the past, smiled. All of them, including those whose names I couldn't quite remember, were quite happy -- as if they'd just danced at the wedding of their best friend.

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Agents of delight they were -- champagne bubbles popping -- and everybody was thirsty for more.

Two old friends approach me and speak of their unshakable desire to serve -- to express the love they feel so thousands of others, around the world, might have easier access to the experience the three of us were now enjoying.

To my left, I see people beginning to re-enter the hall. The second movement of the morning's symphony is upon us.

I reach into my pocket and find my ticket. There it is! Row PP, seat 28 -- the last row in the theater on this, the first day of the rest of my life.

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By the way, in case you're wondering, the photo on the first screen is from an old American tv show, called the Honeymooners -- staring comedian, Jackie Gleason, the man for whom the Miami theater was named.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:32 PM | Comments (3)

November 02, 2010
But I Already Know This!

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This just in!
Words of Peace Global has just added a blog to it's already superfine website.

The first posting is all about the phenomenon of people thinking "but I already know this" upon first hearing the words of a great teacher.

The kickoff entry was written by someone my two teenagers keep telling me embarrasses them, no end. If I ever meet this guy, I'm going to give him a piece of what's left of my mind.

Check it out -- and please feel free to forward it to friends or family who may be familiar with the "I already know this" phenomenon.

More
Illustration: Sara Shaffer

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:40 PM | Comments (1)

Welcome to Mitch Ditkoff's blog about what's really important in this life: Peace, gratitude, love, joy, clarity, and the effort required to wake up and smell the roses. Enjoy!

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