A BUZZING IN THE EAR

Have you heard that the famous Arabian chieftain' Hatim Tai, was deaf?
Quite a few people believed that!

But, one morning there was a fly buzzing as it struggled to escape from a
spider's web. The spider had been so still and silent that the fly had perhaps
thought it was a piece of sugar. Now it was about to learn otherwise.

Hatim Tai went over to the corner of the room where the buzzing was.

'You are caught by your own greediness,' he said to the fly. 'You won't find
honey, sugar and candy in every nook and cranny. But that's where you will
be certain to find traps and snares.' The buzzing stopped. The spider had its
pray.'

'But Hatim' said a follower who had watched all this 'how could you have possibly
heard that fly? I could only just hear it myself. yet everybody says you are deaf!'

'You're very clever,' said Hatim with a smile. 'Well, I see I must tell you about my
deafness. It's like this; Much of my time, for reasons of state, I had to be among
flatterers, the sort of people who hid my faults from me and filled my ears with praise.
I couldn't help but take in some of their talk. I grew proud, and pride made me
wretched man.

'Then I gradually allowed them to think I was deaf. Naturally, there was much sad
shaking of heads. But then came two great advantages.

'The first was that they stopped bothering to flatter me. They soon saw that it got them
nowhere- all they had for their effort was my blank face.

'The second was that I began to hear the truth about myself. When they thought I couldn't
hear, they were quite frank about my good and bad qualities. It was always pleasant to
hear my sins discussed publicly, but it quickly abolished my pride and helped me in avoiding
further wickedness.'
                                                           SAADI

SAYING OF MAHMUD SHABISTARI

-There is only one light, and 'you' and 'me' are
  holes in the lamp shade.

-The world exists only as an appearance.
  From beginning to end it is a playful game.

-See unity, utter unity, know unity,
  In this is to be summarized the trunk and
   the branches of the tree of faith.

- Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
   Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
   When you depart out He will enter it.
    If you , void of yourself, will
    He display His beauties.

- The eye is not strong enough
        to look at the brilliant sun;
   But you can watch its light
        reflected in water.
    Pure Being is to bright to behold.
        yet it can be seen
       reflected in the mirror of the world.
    For non-Being.
       is set opposite of Being,
       and catches its image in every moment.

-Every particle of the world is a mirror,
  In each atom lies the blazing light
      of a thousand suns.
Cleave the heart of a rain drop,
   a hundred pure oceans will flow forth.
 Look closely at a grain of sand,
   the seed of a thousand beings can be seen...
 within the pulp of a millet seed
    an entire Universe can be found.
In the wing of a fly,
    an ocean of wonders;
 In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.
 Though the inner chamber of the heart is small,
     the lord of both worlds
 gladly make His home there.

THOUGHTS OF SCIENTISTS

The difference between me at five and me now is that at five I didn't have much invested emotionally in the Universe being a certain way. Being "wrong" never was a concern. It was all learning. Now I keep reminding myself : In science there is no such thing as a failed experiment. Learning that I was testing simply does not work is actually a success.

                                             WILL

I have found that I find a particular excitement in suddenly realizing I don't know the answer to something. It's like coming to the edge of a cliff in my mind.

In this space of "nothing" or not knowing, I get this intense feeling of anticipation. The reason I get excited is because I've come to the edge of what I know, and I realize that shortly an understanding will arrive in my head that will be staggering and will not have existed in me the moment before.

 It will be this huge ah-ha. I learned recently that an ah-ha stimulates the pleasure center of the brain---Evidently I'm addicted to this feeling.

                                                             MARK

You can never come to a conclusion about life. Life is an internal thing just as we are an internal thing.

We have to start searching for more meaning of what we are. Well the meaning of what we are has yet to be discovered by us.

                                   RAMTHA

In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning toward God, the soul grows upward and find the fulfillment of some thing in planted in its nature....The pursuit of science (also) springs from a striving which the mind is implied to follow, a questioning that will not suppressed. Whether in the intellectual pursuit of science or in the mystical pursuit of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON ASTROPHYSICIST, IN NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD.

The riff between science and spirit affects us today because the scientists who are involve in this sort of debate know very little about the teaching of spirit. They simply take the characters that they find retailed from every pulpit throughout the land and take this as a scientific spirit when in fact it's only a version of the science of the spirit. And, unfortunately, the churchman don't know their science either, so the two sides are actually firing at cross targets. these are simply two complimentary ways of looking at reality.

                  MICEAL LEDWITH