HOW MANY ‘CAN’?
by Varun Genius
There are many things that you CAN do, and many others that you CAN’T! But how CAN we know which are the ones that we CAN and which are the ones that we CAN’T? Though there
CAN be many explanations and answers that we CAN actually rely on, but which explanation CAN be generalized? Some people believe that each person is born with some talents and abilities; that means he CAN use his talents to do things that he CAN. But for the talents that he lacks, he CAN’T perform the tasks that CAN be achieved by possession of those talents. Some people also believe that “what we CAN” and “what we CAN’T” are predefined by the Creator Himself; according to which we CAN do things not that we actually desire but those
that we are told to do or compelled to do! But this CAN’T be true! CAN it be? How do you decide what abilities you must possess and what flaws you must ignore/reject? CAN you choose to select what abilities you want? Yes, you CAN! You CAN be the master of your own life. You CAN develop the talents your way, by just believing that
you CAN. You CAN if you believe you CAN! This is the generalization. You don’t just have to think about it, you actually have to believe! It’s something from the inside. For all the things that you believed you CAN’T do, just change your belief to “yes, I CAN!”
It may not be that simple, but not difficult either. If we CAN do something, that becomes easy. But if we don’t even try to do something by just thinking that it’s difficult, it will be! For once, if you CAN think of it the other way, you CAN actually create something good out of it. If you CAN change your belief to “what I thought earlier that I CAN’T just because it was difficult for me, if now I believe that I CAN, it CAN certainly bring a change!” then you surely CAN what you earlier believed you CAN’T. The main point here is that you certainly CAN achieve what you truly believe. If you believe you CAN’T because it seems difficult, then you CAN’T. And if you believe you CAN do even the most difficult things, you really CAN. It’s all a game of beliefs…..your own beliefs! And beliefs are developed, defined, re-defined, modified, secured and lived. Beliefs are not something that CAN sprout instantly. It CAN’T be instantaneous. It is a process; it takes time and energy. So now I ask, how many ‘CAN’? Remember, all of you CAN, you just have to believe!!
True true.
Love the poetry aspect of this post. Nicely said.
Thanks Kharma 🙂
Greetings again. Enjoyed the exhange on your piece on perception, and am drawn to comment once again.
“CAN you choose to select what abilities you want? Yes, you CAN! You.”
I suspect there’s a large age difference between us that may contribute to the different ways we view what one CAN and CAN”T do. Discovering one’s self and one’s can dos and can’t dos is essential for young people. We need to test every perceived limit to flower as a human being into whatever flower or garden we are. I agree with that, but…my discovery leads me to a different conclusion about CAN and CANNOT. (see below)
There’a also, of course, the influence of different cultures. However that may be, I find the reflection akin to “the power oif Positive Thinking” that was and, to some extent, still is popular in some quarters here in the States. Think positively, think “I can,” avoid “negative” thoughts and you’ll be happy and be the master of your own destiny.
I don’t find it to be so, either in theory or in practice. Example: I cannot be a mathematician. I have no aptitude for mathematics – never have, and, no how hard I worked at it, the more despondent I became that I COULD NOT do it. Likewise, I LOVE music, played the trumpet, sang in choirs, but I CANNOT play like Miles Davis, or sing like Pavarotti. I could delude myself into thinking I can, but it would be an exercise in self-deception, a perception that is a mis-perception bordering on mental illness.
“You CAN be the master of your own life.”
Yesterday and the day before, I have dealt with three parishioners facing death. None of them chose their cancer. Each of them wishes he or she could be cancer-free or bring back their l50 year-old oved one who just died four weeks after diagnosis and assurance by the oncologist that “you CAN” live another five years, we just have to treat it like we CAN. Well, Richard did not, he COULD NOT even though the doctor said “You CAN.” His wife is left in shock because she believed a prognosis that ignored reality, a prognosis that chose a “perception” that refuses to look CANNOT in the eye without blinking or running off into the world illusion creates.
That’s just the beginning – the first ot the three CAN or CANNOT real-life situations of people with whom I’ve been trying to minister in the last three days. I have to run or I’ll be late for an appointment with my wife to clean the house. Thanks for sharing.
Gordon
Thanks Gordon, for your comment! As you stated in your example that you can’t be a mathematician, doesn’t matter how hard you think you CAN. But what this post says is that ”to be a mathematician, you have to BELIEVE than you CAN be.” And believing in something comes with confidence, not just by faking or cheating yourself. You CAN do anything that you BELIEVE you CAN!
Now, the cancer case! Even if the doctor assures that he can live for another 5 years….that doesn’t mean he’ll really do…unless we know what he actually believes, not the doctor! The patient has to believe that he can live more….! The medicines that we take as prescribed by the doctor are almost always effective. That’s simply because we believe in doctor or the medicine or both….!
And my point is that not everything depends on what I believe or you believe. It also depends on things like viruses and cancers. My 33 year old daughter Katherine was diagnosed with a rare, incurable sarcoma, Leieomyosarcoma, after six-months of nasal drip that she found annoying, but not serious. She thought she COULD live normally. She lived four years after diagnosis. She was a CAN person, if ever there was one and did everything she could to be the “master of her life” – she BELIEVED that each surgery or treatment would lead to a cure. She beliieved that she could beat the odds. No one has ever survived this cancer for more than five years. She BELIEVED and she did everything she could attitutinally, medically, and dietarily. She believed the doctors, she believed in herself. She believed death would not take her at such and early age. We all believed that if anyone COULD beat this horrible thing, Katherine could.
While you point is a good one that we do not develop the self without belief in ourselves or our capacity, it is not true that belief is everything. It’s not. Neither is peception. Reality is where the subjective and objective dimensions of reality coincide. That’s been my experience, for whatever it may be worth. But I’ve spent my 69 years working, as you are, to come to grips with reality. As I get older, I am getting more comfortable with the number of things I can’t do now that I once could. No matter how much I believe I can, I can’t.. And THAT:S the truth. 🙂
Once more: Richard died four weeks after the doctor told him he had cancer, but that he could live another five years. They started chemotherapy. Richard and his wife BELIEVED the doctor. The first chemo treatment further weakened him and he went downhill very quickly. Did Richard die ffour weeks after diagnosis because he DIDN”T believe the doctor? Did he die so soon because the DIDN”T believe in the chemo’s power to buy him five years? Did the CHEMO itself kill him? We’ll never know of course, but it is little consolation to his wife or daiughters to suggest that if he had believed, he would still be here. One of my favorite comedians is Lewis Black, and one of the memorable quotes from Lewis Black is “You can’t just make s–t up!! You CAN”T do that!!!” Sometimes believing is sane; sometimes it’s not. My further thoughts. Lastly, is there not something called illusion. And iaren’t the human capacities for self-deception, grandiosity, and delusion a fact, as well as our capacity to create, to see beauty, to hope, and to love?
I fear that death takes us when it is meant to. We live in a world with the illusion of control over the length of our. lives. The truth is, we have already decided when and how we are leaving. If it is time to go, no amount of prayer, chemo, or belief will change the fact that it is time to go.
The solace comes from knowing that although the body dies, the soul lives on. We will be reunited, but patience is required.
Hi again, Thanks for taking time to engage again. I couldn’t agree more that “we live in a world with the illusion of control over the length of our lives.” Humanity is full of illusions, dreamed-up consolations that deny the power of death.
You’re in good company in your view that death takes us when it is supposed to. I’m not there. It may seem odd that a theologian or pastor would disagree. “The truth is, we have already decided when and how we are leaving. If it is time to go, no amount of prayer, chemo, or belief will change the fact that it is time to go.” When was it that Richard decided, or Katherine decided, or my one-year-old nephew Christopher decided that he would get his head caught in a drapery cord beside his crib and strangle to death before his parents found him.
Only those who commit suicide make decisions about when they will die. To suggest otherwise is to indulge an illusion that we not only control our lives but that we are also the masters of our own death.
To be human is, in part, to come to grips with the full reality of one’s own death. One day I will die. THAT is the only fact I can know for sure. It will be over. The rest is belief and hope. To be human is not to be immortal. It is to live authentically within the limits of time that is also filled with the presence of the Eternal.
I am not stating that the conscious mind decides when to go. The conscious mind resists death. It is our soul that has already decided when to go. Keep in mind that some souls come here to learn, while others come here to teach. As for your one-year-old nephew, please do not be insulted, but I would propose that both he and his parents had formed an agreement before he was born. That agreement was that he would come to help them learn a very powerful lesson about Loss. This may sound crazy, but I would propose that Christopher’s soul is already back here, teaching new lessons, and that his parents souls are thankful for his short life and the lessons it brought.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. I think we’re just on very pages here. To suggest that the unborn Christopher (a pre-existent soul) and his parents (Dennis and Sandy) “had formed an agreement before he was born” is cruel to everything I know and believe. My antrhopology is very Hebraic. We are born of dust and to dust we shall return. Death is the one fact of human life. Everything else is belief. And some of the beliefs indulge in illusions that try to make sense out of the tragic dimension of life. I AM a living soul. You ARE a living soul. Not some part of me. This is not the idea of the “soul” that is housed in the body and flies away at death. Not some part of you. Not some spiritual part that is not subject to mortality. We are mortals. And we refuse to be what we are. To be human, in my view, is to learn to accept the fact that we are animals – no more, no less – who are called to live in love and compassion with our neighbors and with all creatures great and small. To be human is to ACCEPT limits instead of building Towers of Babel (erected by pride and mistaken ideas of mastery). Did Hitler and 6,000,000 Jews make a pact before any of them were born that the 6,000,000 innocents would die in gas chambers or be starved to death by Hitler’s madness? I’m sorry. The idea itself is an offense. It was horror. It was part of the tragic. It cannot be explained or rationalized as though the 6,000,000 and Hitler – pre-existent souls – had made a pact to teach the rest of us something. I hope you will think this through more carefully. Read Albert Camus’ The Plague, and let’s talk again. Peace to you.
I hate to say it, but yes, I would imagine Hitler and the Jews had an agreement. This is in fact not cruel information, but liberating information. Suffering is a necessary experience for all souls. Think of the Holy Trinity. What does it represent? The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Or, the Conscious Mind, the Body and the Soul. We are formed of dust and return to dust, the question is how many times? If you believe we do this only once, then yes, it is incredibly cruel to suggest that Christopher and his parents made this agreement. If you can understand that this is a cycle that happens literally infinite number of times, with a pattern and a goal, then it does not seem so cruel. The pattern is the rise and fall of Utopian societies over cycles of 12,000 years. 10,000 years of darkness and 2,000 of light. The souls involved are us, spending 10,000 years in school, in the land of suffering and then 2,000 years in rest, also know as Heaven.
To Alternative Economy: ONCE. Life is precious. Very, very precious. Everything else is speculation. The biblical figure of Job understood this. Mother Teresa understood it. She understood the horror. Faith is courage to look at the horror and not rationalize it. To do otherwise is to engage in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” – faith that flies off in fairy tales that justify what CANNOT and should not ever be justified. I’ve spent my life committed to seeking truth, distinguishing as best I can between illusion and reality. I do not believe that everything is scripted ahead of time. I do not believe that we are walk-on players speaking lines and living lives that are part of a play already written. We write the play with our lives. And, if we are lucky, we see the Infinite in the midst of our finitude, and we shudder with with awe and thanksgiving over the miracle that we are here at all. What exists ahead of us and what exists after us is Love, and what happens to me, to my loved ones, I will leave to God, Being-Itself, whose ways remain beyond human knowing. That is as it should be.
Perhaps. There is a tremendous amount of research going on in past life hypnosis. The head of psychology at MIT has had so many successes in his research that the board of trustees were unable to revoke his professorship, although they sure tried. His evidence is rock solid and points towards every patient he has seen living multiple lives. Where do you think phobias come from? We are complex creatures with long histories. Our sub-conscious has been formed over millions of years. It is true we live in a world of freedom of choice, but certain key events are written in the stars and cannot be avoided. We meet certain people and lose them because of our agreements. Agreements which can be changed, but do exist. It is not contradicting the bible. It is merely an interpretation of it. Heaven will never exist here on earth until we learn our lessons and just start being nice to each other. Until then, we will be reborn in hell. Welcome to earth.
I just read this again. “I hate to say it, but yes, I would imagine Hitler and the Jews had an agreement.” Perhaps the reason you “hate to say it ” is because it’s a ghastly idea. And you used the right word – imagination. “I would imagine.” That’s what I’ve been talking about all this time. I imagine this; I imagine that. Mental hospitals are full of people who imagine what’s not there. To excuse or to engage in some kind of spiritual imaginings that rationalize six MILLION people being deliberately starved to death, loaded into cattle cars to the gas chambers takes my breath away. Your imagination has just condoned what every decent sense of the Holy condemns. I know this is strong language. But it’s the only language I can use here to speak the truth as I know it. If the choice were between believing that Hitler and his victims “had an agreement” and being an conscientious agnostic or atheist, I would have to choose unblief. I hope you will consider reading Albert Camus’ The Plague in which the problem of human suffering is the theme, and the wonderful works of Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor, novelist, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks for listening.
I have obviously struck a nerve, but I maintain that the Truth will be revealed, in time. You imagine that no soul would ever make such an agreement. It is horrifying to you that anyone could choose this life. But you assume that in our spirit form we think in the same terms as we do here in the physical world. This is not the case. Our souls understand that every story plays a part in the formation of our humanity. The Holocaust, while horrifying, is a necessary step in the formation of who we are as a society today. The reason may not have revealed itself yet, but I guarantee an event of that magnitude had a purpose.
I would say that your version, where we have one shot at life, one chance to do it right, one opportunity to learn our lessons, is far more horrifying. In fact, it makes no sense. What sort of a God would judge us on our first attempt? God does not judge. God is Love. And Love is a journey with many ups and downs. Life is about experience. In every experience, even starving to death, there is a lesson. Perhaps the lesson is merely, “I will never do that to another, in any of my following lives.” But if we do not learn that lesson, then who is to say how we will treat others.
If you notice how history has evolved, humanity has always moved forward. We take baby steps, and have many setbacks, but each generation is a little more loving than the last. This is because our souls are growing. They are becoming more aware of their role on this earth. They are learning how to better live in Love. It requires many lives of suffering to master, however. Perhaps we are reaching a point where we have learned the lessons we need to learn. Perhaps it is time to come together and ensure no Holocaust ever happens again. We are here to learn. So let’s learn, and create a world where these atrocities will never happen again.
One quick piece of circumstantial evidence. After the Holocaust and WWII there was a world wide “Baby Boom”. One explanation is all the soldiers returning. Another explanation is all the souls returning.
Soldiers returning. Pretty clear.
There is nothing clear about what happens after death. This conversation comes down to a difference of opinion. You are Christian and I believe in Reincarnation. You believe God has a plan for us, I believe I have a plan for myself. Is one of us wrong? It doesn’t really matter. The only important thing is how we live this life. As long as we live in Love, what happens after death really doesn’t matter.
Thanks. I agree. Let me just add two qualifiers, if I might. I don NOT believe “God has a plan” for me. I believe God is love, that I am created in God’s image, that to realize my destiny (the point of my being) is to Love the Lord our God with all my heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That’s the only “plan.” In reply to an earlier exchange, I would also add that we are not here to be tested and judged for an afterlife. God is not a cop and the God who is our Judge is the same one who is our defense attorney. We do not stand before the Judge of the human courtroom. We live in the place that is beyond the Law of good and evil, and our calling is to live in the power and strength of reconciling love. With joy, with courage, with boldness. Refusing to bow the knee to the forces of greed, self-centeredness, privilege, empire, or anything else that is less than God. I agree with you, living in love is all that matters. What happens after, at the end, is not our business. Thank you so much for the discussion! Grace and Peace for this day. Gordon
I always love a good debate. Thank you as well. God is Love and therefor cannot be judgment, as you say. As for the Plan, perhaps it is simply the path to Living in Love.
Blessings and peace. New post up this morning, “Easter Morning”
I think my comment ended up in your spam…
Not sure. Can you share it again? Thanks.
I’m not sure I replied to this earlier. In case not, Yes, that’s the Plan. Pure and simple. Thanks! Hope you’ll take a look at this morning’s post on “economics” – The House We Live In. Blessings and Peace, Gordon
As for the mathematician, I feel that anyone can come to understand math, if they can come to trust in themselves to be capable of it. Math is merely logic and rules. There is no creativity, it is simply following sets of formulas. Anyone can follow a set of rules, the question is, will they take the time to commit those rules to memory, or will they decide they are too “dumb” and not even try.
Ah, “I feel that anyone can come to understand math if…” But what if you feel that because you have aptitude for rules and logic, whereas others live in a different world? My brain is not wired that way. It’s not that I think I’m “dumb” or that I haven’t tried. After falling love with philosophy during a course in contemporary philosophy and the roots of existentialiism – Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Heideggar, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Jaspers – I decided to take the “Introduction to Logic” course with the same professor. During the first week of classes, I wasn’t getting it, any more than i “got” mathematics. The philosophy professor understood. I was the top student in the contemporary philosophy course (the only one with an ‘A’), but now I was struggling to survive. With my tail between my legs because I just wasn’t getting it, and ANYONE should be able to understand logic, the professor surprised me by her response. “Get out while you can. You’re lucky that this is not your gift. You’re much too inquisitive for this. It’ll bore you stiff. You’re made for bigger thinngs. Your mind is too alive to get stuck in this ditch. It won’t let you stay here.”
I bailed on the course, and never looked back. Today I do Sudokus every morning just to challenge that side of my brain. I do fine on Monday. Tuesday is a little harder. By Thursday, I’m totally stuck. It’s a waste of time and energy, no matter how much I think i CAN. I CAN’T. And I DON”T. I fell in love with philosophical and theological exploration and discourse, a love I realize I have had since very early on in life and will pursue until my last day.I can no more be a mathematician than i can be Rembrandt or Picasso. In my worst moments, I wish I could be them all. But limits are part of our humanity. I’m at peace with my limits. Alll the great evils of the 20th century were rooted in the illusion of limitlessness, the achievement of a perfected human ideal. The “alternate economy” is one that will avoid that tendency like the Bubonic Plague. Just my thoughts. “I feel…I know that NOT EVERYONE can…and that’s just fine…because none of us is an island unto himself/herself.”
I would say that the key to this argument is not whether you “think” you can, but whether you “EXPECT” that you will. I think I can swim, but my sub-conscious expects me to sink like a stone. So I sink like a stone.
I think I can do Sudoku’s, but in my experience I have never been able to, so I EXPECT to be stumped by Thursday. And so I am. Every time.
Dear Gordon, I would like to add something here that will probably clear out some doubts and misconceptions! If you wish to be like Einstein, you can’t be until your areas of interest and your intensity of interest matches exactly with Einstein’s. If you are solving Sudokus and it seems harder for you to solve them even if you strongly believe you can, then there’s something wrong with your beliefs. Just by believing that you can do something won’t give you anything…..you have to feel it, you have to live in it…! You can’t just pass any exam by just believing that you can….you need to prepare for the exam too…you need to arrange the raw material….so that you can finally make something out of it. Believing in something without having the knowledge in that “something” will not yield you anything….just self deception and distraction!
Thanks Varun Genius. Your comments ended represent a practical expression of how the Law of Conscious Creation works in the field of human endeavor!
Thanks shifutim 🙂