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Miracles

When you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles... what others will call miracles.   [Richard Bach, Messiah’s Handbook ] Miracles are not supernatural phenomena.  We bring them about.  Through proper understanding.  Of ourselves, others and the reality around us. There’s a story by Susan Hill in which a boy named Derry has an ugly scar on his face.  One side of his face was burnt by acid.  The boy thinks no one, not even his mother, can love him because of that scar.  He hides himself from people.  One day he comes across an old man named Lamb who tells him that miracles are possible. “Miracles belong to fairy tales,” says Derry.  Some fairy comes along and kisses the ugly monster who then miraculously turns into a handsome prince. No, says Mr Lamb, miracles don’t work that way.  You are the fairy who will have to give the miraculous kiss to yourself.  Mr Lamb explains to Derry that it is his attitudes towards hi

Dreams

A scene from the movie In the 1980s movie, The Gods must be crazy , a Coke bottle dropped by the careless pilot of a helicopter upsets the lifestyle of a community of people in the Kalahari desert.  Xi, a bushman, finds the bottle falling from the sky and he takes it home.  For him as for all his people, the bottle is a miracle dropped from the heavens.  They begin to use the bottle for various purposes like grinding food, producing music, and creating artistic patterns.  Suddenly everyone wants the bottle for one purpose or another.   The bushmen had hitherto lived a very contented and happy life with the little they had.  They used to think they were blessed by the gods with whatever food and water they could get in the desert. They thought they had everything they needed.  But the bottle, descended miraculously from the heavens, becomes a bone of contention.  Everybody wants to possess it.  Jealousy and rivalry enter the community.  Discontent mounts.  Xi thinks that t

What’s in a dog’s name?

Bruno poses for me Bruno is the name of the only favourite dog on my school’s campus.  He has been on the campus for more years than I can trace my memory back to.  Recently he posed for two snaps for me.  He was so meek and obedient when I approached with my mobile phone’s camera, when the sun had already set far below the horizon, that I began to wonder who gave him the name of Bruno. The Western Christians gave the name Bruno to dogs in the olden days in order to disparage the great philosopher, mathematician, astrologer and poet of the same name who was burnt to death as a heretic by the Catholic church in the year 1600.  Bruno, according to the Catholic church, was teaching things that went against the teachings of the Bible.  It was Bruno who taught Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to recant his science for the sake of religion so that he could say, “Religion teaches how to go to heaven, science teaches how the heavens go.” [I have taken a little liberty with what he act