Tomichan Matheikal's blog

18 th century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon wrote that the people of America had small and feeble sex organs so much so the men living there had “no ardour for the female.”   He wrote that and much more in his much-esteemed book Histoire Naturelle .   America was a land where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigour, their constitutions weakened by the noxious vapours that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests.   The environment sapped the vitality of even the native Indians who had “no beard or body hair.” Many writers embraced Buffon’s views and took them to more readers.   One popular Dutch writer added that the American males lacked vitality so much that “they had milk in their breasts.”   The views found their way to many European books until almost the end of the 19 th century. People are eager to believe the written word.   It’s even more so when the text is something that belittles others.   The

Everyone wants to be happy.   The Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism, is of the opinion that we possess the key to happiness.   We are like the person who has been knocking on a door again and again without ever checking whether the door was locked in the first place.   The door to happiness is not locked.   So we don’t need any key.   We just need a change of attitudes . Image Courtesy We are like the woman who was searching for her lost earring in the sunlit front yard of the house though she had lost it inside the house.   When asked about it she said, “But there’s no light inside.”   She was searching for the right thing in the wrong place.   We keep searching for happiness in wrong places like wealth, position, luxury, etc. The Dalai Lama puts compassion in the top of the list of attitudes that generate happiness.   Compassion for other people is essential not only for our personal inner development but also for happiness.   A happy human being feels respons

Perspective matters more than anything else because it determines how you see the world and how you see determines what you do with it.   All these people who go about fighting and killing in the name of their gods and totems have their own perspectives.   Those who create the flyovers and skyscrapers have their perspectives too.   What should really worry us is the importance enjoyed by the fighter and the killer while the builder remains in the darkness of the background.   The fighters and killers have become important because our own perspectives are so limited, so contaminated and so perverted.   If only we could see a world in a grain of sand, like William Blake, and heaven in a wild flower, we would be infinitely more spiritual than all these fighters and killers who claim to be god’s own people.   As Albert Einstein said, a person who is religiously enlightened is one who has liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoug