Insights on Personal Growth

On Men-Women Equality

Equality is a utopian expectation. Equality in power, in authority, in rewards. It can not be over time because of change. Situations change. The demands of the situations change. People change. Different situations require different competencies to deal with them. And the more change, the bigger the inequalities.

Tested Love

We are all human; we have strengths and weaknesses. When we have a problem, we look for help in somebody we look up to, somebody as close to perfection as possible, so that we can trust their advice. Thus, I think, at least subconsciously, we look for somebody we don't know, because the moment we know them, we know their weaknesses.

What is Love All About, Anyway?

I always thought that love is the opposite of hate. Like white is the opposite of black. Here at the Sahaj Marg Ashram in the Himalayas, I am taught differently.Chariji, the Master, told me that love is absolute. It is not the opposite of anything, like God is absolute."What a...

What Makes a Person Attractive?

If you ask a man what makes a person attractive, you will get different answers than if you ask a woman.Men, as I understand, usually focus on physical attributes: the legs, the breasts, etc.Women tend to focus on the brain and on a man’s ability to support and defend, etc.I h...

How to Resist Temptations

Professor Deborah MacInnis, a professor and Vice Dean for Research and Strategy at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, has done some fascinating research that may have significant applications for management.She and a colleague teste...

My Jazz Revelation

I really hated modern jazz. There is no melody––or at least that is what I thought––just a diarrhea of sound that gave me a headache.Well, as God would want it, my 17-year-old son is a fanatical aficionado of jazz. He plays the saxophone and studies jazz at a boarding school t...

What is a Vacation?

My wife and I took a vacation this week. We went to visit a friend of mine and his wife who have a chalet in Chamonix, France. From my window I can see the MontBlanc.It occurred to me that the last––and only––vacation I have ever had was more than fifty years ago, in 1957, whe...

The Relation of Love and Change

Why do love and pain go together (or, as a Serb song says: “Zar bez suza ima ljubavi”: “Can there be love without tears?”)Here is a commentary by Hazrat Inayat Khan (the founder of Western Sufism, who lived from 1882 to 1927):“The effect of love is pain. The love that has no p...

Insights from Passover Night

An allegory of slaveryWhy did the Hebrews wander in the desert for forty years, looking for the Promised Land? Could not God, the all-powerful, the One Who knows it all, have shown them the way and gotten them there sooner?The story of the Exodus can be seen as an allegory, wh...

What Makes us Human?

In my lectures, I claim that everything has a life, even stones. There are old stones and new stones. There are young stars and old stars. And by the same token, there are new and old cars.What is the difference between, say, a stone and a tree or an animal? And what is the di...