2. Burlesque
a) Humorous
b) Pathetic
c) Hidden
d) Emotion

3. Harlotry
a) Weak
b) Prostitution
c) Loose Talk
d) A Manner of conduct

4. Frigid
a) Unresponsive
b) Hot
c) Slow understanding
d) Cold

5. Orchestration
a) Musical instruments
b) Planned maneuver
c) Artificial
d) A band of actors

6. Penury
a) A small gathering
b) An act of revenge
c) Extreme poverty
d) Richness

7. Regal
a) Related to power
b) Royal
c) A gala
d) Expensive clothes

8. Zing
a) A deceptive scheme
b) Muscle weakness
c) A mythical creature
d) Vitality

9. Veritable
a) Objectionable
b) Passive
c) True
d) Believable

10. Hermetically
a) Completely
b) Air-tight
c) Willingly
d) Openly

Answers:
1. (b) 2. (a) 3. (b) 4. (d) 5 (b) 6 (c) 7 (b) 8 (d) 9. (c) 10 (b)

Your Score:
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

⁽⁰⁾

Each day we shed loose hair, trees their leaves, a stone erodes, the river changes course, islands sink but simultaneously, we grow new hair, trees dress in new leaves, soils become fertile, new settlements materialize and hills are waiting to emerge from the oceans.

Nature is always the best teacher. It tells us, status quo is not good. Shift is. If we have a certain setting in our living room, we need to change it a few days later. It will not only give a sense of freshness to the room but also to its inhabitants. If we have always grown tomatoes in our kitchen garden, maybe we could try peas this year. If we have slept on the left side of the bed always, maybe we try sleeping the other side. Small things, but having the potency to make life beautiful, refreshing and spicy. Small changes, good ones, not trying pot for few years. That is calamity. Devastating for you and the co-habitants.

There is so much to amend, restore and shift. For the start let us shed the old cloak of ostentation, flamboyance and pretension and sew the new apparel of modesty, humility and just being oneself. Let us make friends with our soul, the best friend, guide and companion. Let us not leave our structures untouched, crying out for renewal. Lest they are dilapidated or be haunted by the Vice, let Virtue take over. And let time establish how good (or bad?) this change was. Whether better or worse, with the observations we will find the cause for another change, another shift, another purpose—to evolve and strive for perfection.

With love and best wishes for perfecting,
Manjit

⁽⁰⁾

No hope, no joy, no love.
Only hate and fear.
Regretted my past, focused on tomorrow,
Wondered when I will end this struggle within myself.

Now listen, my heart beating like the Sun that doesn't know how to rest,
See, the air I breathe, precious as millions of diamond droplets.
Feel my own blood capturing my spirit.
Close my eyes and be awake.

Now, feel the light on your face,
Create a shadow to create a light,
Feel the colours of your mind,
Four, three, the sky so blue and clear,
Three, two, my mind is as light as a feather,
Two, one, I see now, I feel now, I want to Live Now.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery,
Now is the time, time to Live.

Michelle Kang is a student at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.
.............................................................
A Child’s Cry
by Sumiti Jain
I wake at three in some slight pain
I hear no sound of clock or rain,
Only a child’s cry echoes in my ear
I can feel his pain it’s just too much to bear.

Something is in his blood
Something he can’t let go of,
He’s looking for someone, anyone
Who could grant him some love.

He knows that he isn’t alone
And that the whole world shares his tears,
Some for a day or two
And some for all their years!

Sumiti Jain is a student of Master of Sciences at the Faculty of the Health Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

⁽¹⁾

An Indian Punjabi in origin, Prem Behl had one son when she came to Canada with her husband. Soon after, her second son was born. The marriage and her family life was not a happy affair for she suffered a lot of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her alcoholic husband.

A case ensued against her husband and initially their friends stood by her husband’s side staying witness against her but gradually after the DNA test when her husband was found guilty they retreated for the fear of being considered a party to her maltreatment. After a two and half year trial her husband was sent to jail for three and half years.

Next she joined Family Counseling in Burlington, Ontario, which is where she lived and got a support group. In the due course she lost almost all the Indian friends, some of which took her husband’s side and the rest were so confused to be supportive. Even her parental family and brothers were not happy with that stigmatic “divorce”. As a result Prem got “detached” from the Indian community and eventually made some Canadian friends. Her two sons also had a typical Canadian upbringing (which she does not regret in the least) and today they both have Canadian girlfriends.

Prem got remarried after a few years to a religious Indian Sikh man with whom she was blissfully happy and even had a daughter (studying in fourth grade) but unfortunately she had a workplace mishap in the year 2003 that has further warped her life. This is a company (where she was working for almost seventeen to eighteen years) where she was pulling a bench which was stuck to a sticky surface and in that process of pulling she twisted her back. Ever since, she has been suffering from an acute back pain. Unable to work she discontinued going to her job. The company wrote to her asking to come back soon but as she could not even drive at that time, she refused to join. She also sought the help of her doctor who wrote to her employer about her critical condition. But they did not pay a heed and terminated her job. She also offered later to join for short hours of work but they would not agree to that. She got a lawyer so that she got compensation but they were of no help she thinks, because generally they did not return calls or even if they did they have however not been able to get her justice. She is merely a file number for them. The thing that hurts her the most is, that a company where she worked for so long as almost two decades could not even provide her with a compensatory plan. Ever since 2003, Prem is on medication, emotionally unstable and depressed. She takes pain killers and is on anti-depressants.

Prem’s strategies of coping with pain apart from pills:
(a) She joined a pain management clinic where she learned the art of “what she can do now, rather than what she used to do”.
(b) Going spiritual—a practicing Sikh she listens to shabads (hymns) and says prayers regularly.
(c) Does meditation and relaxation exercises including yoga and breathing exercises.
(d) Knowledge helps—She does a lot of reading on health issues, yoga and Ayurveda.

Her message to the readers:
“Don’t ever give up, Keep fighting. You might not be a winner, but it has to go on”.

Her only regret in life:
Wanted to study more. Was married off very young. Family did not give her a chance.

Her suggestion for the Indian parents:
Should not force their opinions on their kids and let them make their own choices be it life in general or choosing life-partners.

After all this, Prem does not blame anybody for anything. She has no grudges against anybody and believes that its “you yourself” who can make your life either happy or miserable. So there is no question of blaming anybody.

Given another chance to re-live her life or even given another chance of a painless healthy life, she would like to volunteer and do some social work for the community.

No one can fight destiny but whatever it offers us in the form of happiness or physical, mental and emotional pain, it is the acceptance of “the condition” without over-reacting and finding strategies to live a quality life within those strictures without feeling a thread of jealousy for the better placed, that one can be truly considered a valiant warrior. Prem has already reached that high point.

And we grant her that cachet!

⁽¹⁾

Mind thrives on challenges, acquisitions and logicizing; its existence depends upon hankering, prevarications, deceptions, selfish endeavors and above all splitting things or life into piecemeal to understand it.

But how can mind capture something which lies beyond it own self?

Tolle’s Silence Speaks is an anthology of those non-mental non-efforts or what Zen masters say ‘non-doing’. Though it sounds paradoxical, silence does speak but not exactly in the same manner as the words ring through our ears. Silence rings through a different plane; it is related to ‘allowing’ rather than ‘reaching’. Words reach, silence happens in “the moment of noticing the silence around you, [when] you are not thinking. You are aware but not thinking.” (pg. 4) The commerce is non-linguistic, there are no words involved in that kind of understanding. It is just akin to, when you open the windows of your home and the rays of the Sun rush in. The Sun was shining and it was waiting to light your home but your window was preventing it. Same thing happens in silence, it embraces you when you open the doors of your inner self without ‘seeking’ it. This stage is of complete surrender, a productive ‘non-doing’.

Mind is good at technical things. In fact, all the material comforts and technical gadgetry we enjoy today are the produce of mind. There is no denying the fact that we could not have done that without mind and yet it is the first stumbling block in the spiritual journey. Because it creates a division between you and yourself; it says, “I want to know myself” (pg.55) without knowing that, “You are the ‘I’.”(pg.55) and the only thing you need to do is to eliminate the dividing line between the ‘knower’ and ‘known’.

The antidote of mind is silence, not an enforced silence or an absence of words. It is a state of being where you feel in the heart of your being that, “wherever you go, there you are. In other words, you are here.” (pg.64) In this state, there is neither a past nor future, you are fully alive in the moment, here and now. You become part of the existential stream, a gigantic wave of consciousness or void that gives birth to everything from bosons to a beautiful song dancing on the lips of an opera singer. That endless stream is what silence is all about—it is not an absence of words but presence of fullness which speaks to us through the rhythms of our own being.

Stillness Speaks is a collection of those nuggets which can act as a catalyst to help us catapult into that silence. This is not something which one can ‘think’ about. You have to go one step further, experience it. Otherwise, it will end up becoming another mental exercise, nothing better than solving algebraic equations. Tolle has done well by staying away from sounding didactic in this collection. He sounds like a medium, like the Native American Elder, who whispers the secrets of life with great respect and humility—and then lets us hear the silence.

Stillness Speaks
Eckhart Tolle
New World Library
Hardcover, 2003 | Pages, 144 |
ISBN: 1-57731-400-X

About the Author
Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary spiritual teacher who is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition. He travels extensively, taking his teachings throughout the world. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

⁽¹⁾

Carl G. Jung strongly believed that myths were part of the “collective unconscious” and were helpful messengers of deeper wisdom intent on bringing healing and wholeness to the psyche.

The Himalayas, a perpetual house of marvel and awe have plenty of myths tied to them. One of them is that of the “Yeti”. Yeti means “a magical creature” but is better known as the “the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas”, the name given by the western newspapers on account of the terror it causes in the people living in close quarters to the mountain range. The people of Nepal call it rakshasa which means “demon” in Sanskrit. According to them, stories of Yeti’s existence go back to the 4th century BC.

As per the legends the Yeti has reddish hair (some say it is gray), smells terrible, is big and strong and throws boulders as if they were pebbles. It makes an undulating and whistling sound or even roars like a lion sometimes. Absurd as it would sound, it is fond of alcoholic drinks.

In 1951, an expedition found a track on the Menlung Glacier between Tibet and Nepal, at an altitude of 6000meters. The footprints they saw were 33cm by 45 cm. The foot had five toes of which the inner toes were larger than the others and the heel was flat. The track appeared to be fresh and the footprints were not enlarged by the melting snow. This was clear from the photographs taken by the members of the expedition. Although there were many doubts about the pictures but one thing that was assured from them was that the footprints were not made by any identified animal.

There have been many expeditions to the Himalayas; some of the remarkable ones have been by Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay, the firsts to climb the highest peak Mount Everest. On one of their expeditions they had seen footprints of a Yeti and brought back an artifact which was supposedly the upper half of the skull of a Yeti. Kept as a relic in the Khumjung Gompa (monastery) in Nepal, it was found to be around 300 years old and 20 cm high with a circumference of 65cm. Scientists came to the conclusion that it belonged to a serow or a mountain goat.

Many a people have gone on expeditions to the Himalayas but not more than their tracks or footprints have been found. Interestingly the Yeti is the national symbol of Nepal and even stamps have been issued with its picture which is surely made out of imagination and various ideas of the animal handed out through the generations.

Some say that the Yeti is a descendant of a race of giant apes called the “gigantophitecus” who had made the Himalayas their abode around 500,000 years ago. Another group of skeptics believe that the tracks were made by ordinary animals like a bear or an ape.

No matter what they all say, each time someone thinks of being en route to the Himalayas, he goes with a strange anticipation of seeing a Yeti. The fact remains that nobody still knows whether a Yeti exists or not.

Figuratively speaking, is not Yeti that collective expression of the dark, unconscious and monstrous self? The Devil, Mephistopheles, Iago or Satan? The villain we would like to confront but for the lack of courage; the scoundrel which is within us and we keep looking for it outside, somewhere in the world, in others?

It is for us to conquer that Yeti and enter the realm of individuation, psychologically grow up and discern those favorable and unfavorable facets of our total self. Not an easy task, it requires an extra amount of courage and absolute honesty to reach the summit and destination of self recognition. Nevertheless, it is worth a try if one yearns to attain a perfectly balanced individuality and understand the true meaning of life.

It is essential that each individual realizes the earnestness of the concept of the balanced self so that there are no monstrous trails we leave in the rear for our progeny and evoke dread, fear or terror but tracks and footprints worth pursuing.

Let us be those ancestors, who when they look back, their hearts swell with pride.

⁽⁰⁾

I am with you O man
I am with you
Not in prayers, nor in meditation
Neither in fasting
Not in yogic exercises
Neither in renunciation
Neither in the vital force nor in the body
Not even in the ethereal space
Neither in the womb of Nature
Not in the breath of the breath
Seek earnestly and discover
In but a moment of search
Says Kabir, Listen with care
Where your faith is, I am there.
—St. Kabir

If you want to be free from this world of suffering,
First you must contemplate impermanence.
—Torei

⁽⁰⁾

In this regard, the road to truth is itself the truth, for where there is no striving, there can be no meaning. This is the Way or Dao spoken of by the ancient Confucians, and it is what Mencius called “actively awaiting one’s destiny (ming), in steadfastness of purpose” (see Mencius, 7A1 & 7B33). ⁱⁱ In matters of life and death, there is, of course, no such thing as “the one and only right way” (contrary to what the scientistic mentality and the modern obsession with “method” and standardized how-to techniques would have us believe).

Finding and pursuing what Confucius called the Middle Way (cf. Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean) is a matter of forging one’s own destiny through the daily exercise of practical or interpretive judgment (phronesis). There are many ways of following the Way; the Way, the Process, is whatever, given their unique circumstances, individuals must do for themselves in order to pursue with determination the task, which is universally binding on all alike (cf. Analects, 6.17), of becoming-human (zuoren). There are, in other words, many different kinds of human “callings” in the pursuit of which individuals can realize what is properly human in themselves. As it is said in the Yijing (I Ching, Book of Changes), “In the world there are many different roads, but the destination is the same” (“Appended Remarks,” pt. 2, ch. 5).

That having been said, it must be stated unequivocally that, however much technology and medicine may be able to come to our aid in some of the difficult situations of life, there are no scientific-technological shortcuts to “the good life” and no medicinal quick fixes for human well-being—“If you crave speed, you will never reach your goal” (Analects, 13.17)—for “the good life” is not merely a comfortable and healthy life as medicine and psychiatry conceive of it, i.e., a life blissfully free of illness, frailty, infirmity, anxiety, and suffering. A proper understanding of what it means to be human, which is to say, to “living in truth,” must of necessity resist the modernist attempt at technologizing human experiencing and medicalizing self-understanding. The only way to live truly is by patiently and persistently attempting to follow (in one’s own individual way) the arduous Way or Dao-process of wisdom and virtue and by seeking to live in harmony (he, as a Confucian would say) with Nature.

Following the Way—the Way of determination, fortitude, persistence, and patience—is a matter of learning to live in an affirmative recognition of the mystery of being. All paths leading to an authentic mode of being-in-the-world have their twists and turns, are beset with obstacles, and occasionally run into dead-ends (humiliation and defeat are also part of life). True nobility comes from struggling against adversity—even when, in the end, those who do so struggle lose the battle. Nonetheless, as one phenomenologist has rightly observed, “If in the encounter with mystery there is neither certainty nor even reasonable belief, there remains the imperative of hope.” As Paul Fairfield goes on to say: “The basic movement of life is toward more life—toward unceasing expansion and the anticipation of a future. It is a movement toward exuberance and self-affirmation, one that compels us to hope for some manner of personal survival beyond death, even as wisdom disciplines that hope.” ⁱⁱⁱ The “imperative of hope” is synonymous with the will to believe and the will to meaning—and thus with life itself. The sentiment of hope—of striving and of deliverance—is one to which Oliver Wendell Holmes gave eloquent expression in his poem “The Chambered Nautilus,” in which the poet contemplates the abandoned and lifeless shell of a chambered nautilus—a unique and enigmatic creature of the sea that was an object of fascination for the ancient Greeks—that had washed up on the shore.

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren signs,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised celing rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathéd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

Hope in the proper sense of the term is not mere optimism, wishful thinking, or false cheer. Like faith in the unseen and the unknowable, it is a deep-seated (habitualized) existential disposition which consists, in the words of Mencius, in actively awaiting one’s destiny in steadfastness of purpose. True hope is without presumption; it is without illusions, is devoid of metaphysical conceits, and poses no demands. It is, when all is said and done, bound up with the wisdom and peace of mind that are themselves a simple matter of being able to respond to the mystery of being by learning to say, in a spirit of gratitude and humility, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job, 1:21). ^iv
...................................................
ⁱAristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1098a19.
ⁱⁱThe key word here is "actively".
ⁱⁱⁱPaul Fairfield, Death and Life, 174-75.
^ivA simple matter. . . Mencius said: "The Way is like a wide road. It is not at all difficult to find. The trouble with people is simply that they do not look for it" (6B2).

(Extracted from the paper 'On Suffering')

Dr. Gary B. Madison is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McMaster University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on phenomenology, hermeneutics, political philosophy, and economic theory. Professor Madison taught at McMaster from 1970 until his retirement in 1996. In the course of a long and distinguished career, Professor Madison supervised over 30 Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses.

Through his research, teaching, and graduate supervision, he has helped the McMaster-Guelph-Laurier Doctoral Program in Philosophy achieve an international profile within the field of Continental philosophy. Professor Madison was instrumental in setting up Hans-Georg Gadamer's visits to McMaster. He was among the original founders of The Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought in 1984. And his early involvement with the McMaster Globalization Institute helped launch an interdisciplinary project that continues today.

Although he is now retired, Professor Madison continues to assist the faculty as a member of dissertation committees and by offering reading courses.

⁽⁰⁾