ILLUMINE....

Hi all! Just wanna share this prayer which I thought it was a wonderful prayer....

"Saha nav avatu, saha nau bhunaktu, saha viryam karavavahi: tejasvi nav adhitam astu: ma vidvisavahai; aum santih, santih, santih...."

("May God protect us both; may He be pleased with us both; may we work together with vigor; may our study make us illumined; may there be no dislike between us. Amin! Peace, peace, peace....")


Swami Vivekananda considered a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga in Europe and U.S. and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness bringing Hinduism to the status of a world religion during the end of the 19th century. He is best known for his inspiring speech beginning with "sisters and Brothers of America".

This is what every religion had and share for. It is about our self awareness to face and to value our extraordinary world which always make us obviously disoriented, confused, and unsure of direction (positively or negatively). "First, believe in the world that there is meaning behind everything". Only God knows everything behind everything which is good or bad than us....

PS:
Please remember I'm not talking about one or two religions. It is about values behind all the religions. and, every people has their own right to choose their path...

INSPIRING THOUGHTS...

[BY: apasajalah]

Don’t be sad……………..

If you are stricken by poverty, others are chained in debt.

If you don’t have shoes, others have no feet.

If you feel pain now, others have been aching for years.

If your son dies, other have lost many.

If you have sinned, then repent.

If you have committed a mistake, correct it.

The doors of repentance are ever open, the fountain of forgiveness is every rich!

So, don’t be sad!

Let all by gones be by gones!

What is predestined for you, you shall see it!

Being sad will not change anything!

So don’t be sad!

Sadness spoils your life, destroys your happiness, and turns it into wretchedness!

So don’t be sad!

Supplication is your shield, prayer is your beacon, prostration is your means!

So don’t be sad!

See how vast is the earth, How nice are the gardens and forests, how bright are the stars!

All are happy, but you are sad!

So, don’t be sad!

You have sweet water to drink, fresh air to breathe, Feet to walk with!

You sleep safely in your bed!

So, why be sad?

Every cloud has a silver lining, after long nights, come the bright sun!

Life will soon give you a smile, so be ready to get it!

And don’t be sad!

Real life is that spent in happiness!

So cross out you sad days from your age!

Peace of mind is the real treasure, Sorrow avails not!

So don’t be sad!

[by syaefulimam]

Welcome to a Jungle of Emotional Turbulence

Last weekend, my friends and I went to Rancaupas for three days camping night to enjoy the nature, make a bond with earth, inhaling the clear air of no pollution…okay okay, it’s actually just another excuse to have some local beers and smoke weeds, but hey, I found myself more released after dealing with life's turbulence .

Rancaupas is a 215 ha camping ground located 43 km south of Bandung. It surrounded with hills, swamps, and dense forest. Rancaupas is cold people so make sure to bring your mattress, sleeping bag, and jacket and the weeds and the beer. And have a lot of laugh under the star-blanketed sky or you go around or just sitting to contemplate if you think your life is so miserable :-( just under the moonlight...

What I want to say is actually on how to deal with emotional turbulence. This is what Dr. Deepak Chopra—an Indian physician and famous author who has written extensively on spirituality and diverse topics in mind-body medicine—said about dealing with emotional turbulence:

"It's not easy to deal with painful emotions head-on. But it's a key to good health and well-being physically, mentally and spiritually. If we don’t deal with pain when it occurs, it will resurface as compounded emotional toxicity later on — showing up as insomnia, hostility and anger or fear and anxiety.

As a further complication, if you don’t know how to deal with feelings of anger and fear, you're likely to turn them inward at yourself, believing, “It’s all my fault.” That guilt depletes our physical, emotional and spiritual energy until any initiative or movement feels impossible. We feel exhausted and paralyzed, leading to depression.

You can learn how to recognize painful emotions right away and how to effectively "metabolize" and eliminate pain.

Overcoming difficult emotions such as fear, anger, guilt and anxiety can bring the same disguised benefits that dealing with a physical illness can bring. Patients suffering from life-threatening illness often report that their diseases have taught them to love and value the other people in their lives more deeply than before they became ill. During recovery they learn to appreciate and understand areas of life that they took for granted before. While anger, fear and worry are not diseases, we can grow from them even as we process them to become the person we want to be.

By turning to our inherent intelligence, harmony and creativity, we can create a positive outcome; but if we are emotionally turbulent, we are too agitated to access that possibility."

Whenever you feel upset try to free yourself from emotional turbulence and the underlying pain. When you do that, you’ll find that opportunities will arise more often in every area of your life.

"Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let's love turbulence and use it for change. "

— Ramsey Clark

SEKOLAH 'HIDUP'

I realised that the methodology of growing up deals mainly with learning from experiences. sounds obvious, but it's not so until you actually sit back and think about the journey you took since your very first cry to this very moment you're in now. it's hard staying on the right path.
Life is not easy, but well...
at least it is sustaining.
I wish I could learn from my mistakes,
and I'll always be in the same path with you.

peace!

lIVE LIFE WITH NO EXCUSE AND LOVE WITH NO REGRETS. FACE YOUR PAST WITHOUT REGRET. HANDLE YOUR PRESENT WITH CONFIDENCE. PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE WITHOUT FEAR. KEEP THE FAITH AND DROP THE FEAR...

GREAT MEN SAY,"LIFE HAS TO BE AN INCESSANT PROCESS OF REPAIR AND RECONSTRUCTION, OF DISCARDING EVIL AND DEVELOPING GOODNESS...IN THE JOURNEY OF LIFE, IF YOU WANT TO TRAVEL WITHOUT FEAR, YOU MUST HAVE TICKET OF A GOOD CONSCIENCE...

LESSONS:

BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE.
BE CREATIVE.
THINK POSITIVELY


MORALS:
GRATITUDE INCREASES BLESSINGS TO AN UNIMAGINABLE EXTENT.
BE GRATEFUL.
THANK GOD!

DO NOT HURT YOURSELF

HAPPY 2009

New Year’s round the corner!

It is time for heaps and loads of fun, cheer, joy, and love!

New Year is the perfect time to bid adieu to your past and welcome the future.

It is the time to move on, to leave behind the bad memories, if any, of the ending year and look forward to a happy future.

May all the dreams in your eyes, all the desires in your heart, and all the hopes in your life blend together, to give you the most spectacular New Year ever.

Happy New Year, folks!

The Suharto Effect

I remember the day president Sukarno died. It was June 21, 1970, and I was in a taxi going from Jakarta's airport into town after completing a tour of the U.S. as a student leader — a trip made possible through a program initiated by Suharto, Sukarno's successor. The streets were quiet and I asked the driver why. He replied in a neutral voice that Sukarno had just passed away.

After the chaos and isolationism of the Sukarno years, my student movement had supported Suharto's vision of stability and economic growth. Nevertheless, I felt a sad sense of passage — and anticlimax — at Sukarno's death. Nobody talked about it, because he had disappeared from public view.

Nobody knew where he was; it was not even clear where he had died, or how long he had been ill. The media never ran stories on him. Sukarno, revolutionary leader, founder of the nation, President for life, just vanished.

The atmosphere was totally different when Suharto died on Jan. 27 from multiple organ failure. For days before his lingering death, people milled around the hospital. Television crews jostled for camera space while news anchors played up the melodrama. It was like opera, with tragedy and comedy served up in equal parts: the tragedy of death, which is final and almost always sad, and the comedy of dignitaries past and present and sundry celebrities falling over themselves for a piece of the global spotlight.

Suharto's story does make for grand opera: a village boy who grows up into an army general, then acquires absolute power in the wake of a mysterious communist coup and military countercoup. Historians say those tumultuous days in the fall of 1965 sparked half a million murders, and that Suharto and his soldiers were responsible.

We students did not know about the killings at the time. If we heard anything bad, we refused to believe it. And if we believed it, we thought it justified. We chose what we thought was freedom against communism. Eventually, many of us changed our stance. I later called for Suharto's dismissal and was jailed for a while, and my TV talk show was banned.

Suharto's New Order was precisely that: if not a police state certainly a policed one, with everything kept in check — political parties, religious (and especially Islamic) groups, activists and dissidents, writers and artists. After Sukarno, there was complete regime change.

There is no sense of regime change with Suharto's death. He had been out of power, and practically out of sight, living quietly in a leafy residential neighborhood in central Jakarta, for nearly 10 years. But he was not a forgotten man — when he should have been. That says much about who he was and what he stood for.

Suharto was the very avatar of the philosophy of economic development first, and political progress later (if at all) — a model of governance that was once the rule in much of Asia. During his nearly 33 years in power, Suharto seemed to have forged a paternalistic pact with the people of Indonesia that went like this: I will build infrastructure, raise income levels, reduce poverty, battle disease and illiteracy and provide stability, and you will let me run the country as my personal fiefdom. Other strongmen have made that same deal, but no one ever implemented it on such a large scale — Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous nation — for so long.

Suharto was not forgotten for another reason: the attempts at political reform since he left power have not produced a tangible improvement in the daily lives of Indonesians. Corruption, cronyism, a lack of transparency and accountability — they are all still around. Indonesia has been reborn as a young democracy, but because Suharto did not establish durable civic institutions, that democracy is messy enough for many Indonesians to pine for his old New Order.

Suharto's eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, who was a member of her father's last Cabinet, said after his death: "If he committed mistakes, we hope all are willing to forgive him." But no one has the right to forgive Suharto other than his victims — and God. There needed to be some reckoning for Suharto, not necessarily for the sake of justice or revenge, but because a young democracy like Indonesia needs to have a sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Because Suharto did both good and evil, that distinction has been blurred. His regime is full of buts: yes, there was corruption and abuse of power, but the economy grew — that sort of thing. As a result, Indonesia lacks self-confidence and self-respect. That, more than anything else, is the legacy left by Suharto.*

*With reporting by Wimar Witoelar, once spokesman for former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, hosts a national radio show. Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008 | (Published: TIME News Magazine | Photo: AP)

"You Don't Understand Our Audience"

When Edward R. Murrow calmly said those words into a broadcast microphone during the London Blitz at the beginning of World War II, he generated an analog signal that was amplified, sent through a transatlantic cable, and relayed to transmitters that delivered his voice into millions of homes.

Broadcast technology itself delivered a world-changing cultural message to a nation well convinced by George Washington's injunction to resist foreign "entanglements." Hearing Murrow's voice made Americans understand that Europe was close by, and so were its wars.

Two years later, the United States entered World War II, and for a generation, broadcast technology would take Americans ever deeper into the battlefield, and even onto the surface of the moon. Communication technologies transformed America's view of itself, its politics, and its culture.

One might have thought that the television industry, with its history of rapid adaptation to technological change, would have become a center of innovation for the next radical transformation in communication. It did not.

Nor did the ability to transmit pictures, voices, and stories from around the world to living rooms in the U.S. heartland produce a nation that is more sophisticated about global affairs.

Instead, the United States is arguably more isolated and less educated about the world than it was a half-century ago. In a time of such broad technological change, how can this possibly be the case?

In the spring of 2005, after working in television news for 12 years, I was jettisoned from NBC News in one of the company's downsizings.

The work that I and others at Dateline NBC had done--to explore how the Internet might create new opportunities for storytelling, new audiences, and exciting new mechanisms for the creation of journalism--had come to naught.

After years of timid experiments, NBC News tacitly declared that it wasn't interested. The culmination of Dateline's Internet journalism strategy was the highly rated pile of programming debris called To Catch a Predator.

The TCAP formula is to post offers of sex with minors on the Internet and see whether anybody responds. Dateline's notion of New Media was the technological equivalent of etching "For a good time call Sally" on a men's room stall and waiting with cameras to see if anybody copied down the number.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well.

But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive.

Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities.

As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

In the years since my departure from network television, I have acquired a certain detachment about how an institution so central to American culture could shift so quickly to the margins.

Going from being a correspondent at Dateline--a rich source of material for The Daily Show--to working at the MIT Media Lab, where most students have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks, was a shock.

It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple.

I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries.

"It's such a great gadget. It changed my life," one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.

On the first Sunday after the attacks of September 11, pictures of the eventual head of NBC littered the streets and stuffed the garbage cans of New York City; Jeff Zucker was profiled that week in the New York Times Magazine.

The piles of newspapers from the weekend were everywhere at 30 Rockefeller Center. Normally, employee talk would have been about how well or badly Zucker had made out in the Times. But the breezy profile was plainly irrelevant that week.

The next morning I was in the office of David Corvo, the newly installed executive producer of Dateline, when Zucker entered to announce that the network was going to resume the prime-time schedule for the first time since the attacks.

The long stretch of commercial-free programming was expensive, and Zucker was certain about one thing: "We can't sell ads around pictures of Ground Zero."

At the same time, he proceeded to explain that the restoration of the prime-time shows Friends, Will and Grace, and Frasier was a part of America's return to normalcy, not a cash-flow decision. He instructed Corvo that a series of news specials would be scattered through the next few days, but as it was impossible to sell ads for them, scheduling would be a "day to day" proposition.

Normally I spent little time near NBC executives, but here I was at the center of power, and I felt slightly flushed at how much I coveted the sudden proximity. Something about Zucker's physical presence and bluster made him seem like a toy action figure from The Simpsons or The Sopranos.

I imagined that he could go back to his office and pull mysterious levers that opened the floodgates to pent-up advertisements and beam them to millions of households. Realistically, though, here was a man who had benefited from the timing of September 11 and also had the power to make it go away.

In a cheap sort of way it was delirious to be in his presence. At the moment Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in Corvo's office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks.

While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11.

It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters.

The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras.

Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.

With that, Zucker rushed back to his own office, many floors above Dateline's humble altitude. My meeting with Corvo was basically over. He did ask me what I thought about Zucker's idea for a reality show about firefighters.

I told him that we would have to figure a way around the fact that most of the time very little actually happens in firehouses. He nodded and muttered something about seeking a lot of "back stories" to maintain an emotional narrative.

A few weeks later, a half-dozen producers were assigned to find firehouses and produce long-form documentaries about America's rediscovered heroes. Perhaps two of these programs ever aired; the whole project was shelved very soon after it started.

Producers discovered that unlike September 11, most days featured no massive terrorist attacks that sent thousands of firefighters to their trucks and hundreds to tragic, heroic deaths. On most days nothing happened in firehouses whatsoever.

This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the "emotional center" of the American people.

Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know.

Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over.


It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.

Advertisers were aggressive in their use of new technologies long before network news divisions went anywhere near them. This is exactly the opposite of the trend in the 1960s and '70s, when the news divisions were first adopters of breakthroughs in live satellite and video technology.

But in the 1990s, advertisers were quick to use the Internet to seek information about consumers, exploiting the potential of communities that formed around products and brands. Throughout the time I was at the network, GE ads were all over NBC programs like Meet the Press and CNBC's business shows, but they seemed never to appear on Dateline.

(They also had far higher production values than the news programs and even some entertainment shows.) Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and N.W.A were already major cultural icons; grunge and hip-hop were the soundtrack for commercials at the moment networks were passing on stories about Kurt Cobain's suicide and Tupac Shakur's murder.

Meanwhile, on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney famously declared his own irrelevance by being disgusted that a spoiled Cobain could find so little to love about being a rock star that he would kill himself.

Humor in commercials was hip--subtle, even, in its use of obscure pop-cultural references--but if there were any jokes at all in news stories, they were telegraphed, blunt visual gags, usually involving weathermen.

That disjunction remains: at the precise moment that Apple cast John Hodgman and Justin Long as dead-on avatars of the PC and the Mac, news anchors on networks that ran those ads were introducing people to multibillion-dollar phenomena like MySpace and Facebook with the cringingly naïve attitude of "What will those nerds think of next?"

Entertainment programs often took on issues that would never fly on Dateline. On a Thursday night, ER could do a story line on the medically uninsured, but a night later, such a "downer policy story" was a much harder sell.

In the time I was at NBC, you were more likely to hear federal agriculture policy discussed on The West Wing, or even on Jon Stewart, than you were to see it reported in any depth on Dateline.

Sometimes entertainment actually drove selection of news stories. Since Dateline was the lead-in to the hit series Law & Order on Friday nights, it was understood that on Fridays we did crime. Sunday was a little looser but still a hard sell for news that wasn't obvious or close to the all-important emotional center.

In 2003, I was told that a story on the emergence from prison of a former member of the Weather Underground, whose son had graduated from Yale University and won a Rhodes Scholarship, would not fly unless it dovetailed with a story line on a then-struggling, soon-to-be-cancelled, and now-forgotten Sunday-night drama called American Dreams, which was set in the 1960s.

I was told that the Weather Underground story might be viable if American Dreams did an episode on "protesters or something." At the time, Dateline's priority was another series of specials about the late Princess Diana.

This blockbuster was going to blow the lid off the Diana affair and deliver the shocking revelation that the poor princess was in fact even more miserable being married to Prince Charles than we all suspected.

Diana's emotional center was coveted in prime time even though its relevance to anything going on in 2003 was surely out on some voyeuristic fringe.

To get airtime, not only did serious news have to audition against the travails of Diana or a new book by Dr. Phil, but it also had to satisfy bizarre conditions. In 2003, one of our producers obtained from a trial lawyer in Connecticut video footage of guards subduing a mentally ill prisoner.

Guards themselves took the footage as part of a safety program to ensure that deadly force was avoided and abuses were documented for official review. We saw guards haul the prisoner down a greenish corridor, then heard hysterical screaming as the guard shooting the video dispassionately announced, "The prisoner is resisting."

For 90 seconds several guards pressed the inmate into a bunk. All that could be seen of him was his feet. By the end of the video the inmate was motionless. Asphyxiation would be the official cause of death.

This kind of gruesome video was rare. We also had footage of raw and moving interviews with this and another victim's relatives. The story had the added relevance that one of the state prison officials had been hired as a consultant to the prison authority in Iraq as the Abu Ghraib debacle was unfolding.

There didn't seem to be much doubt about either the newsworthiness or the topicality of the story. Yet at the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely.

"These inmates aren't necessarily sympathetic to our audience," he said. The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn't seem as if anything was wrong.

"Except that the inmate died," I offered.

"But that's not what it looks like. All you can see is his feet."

"With all those guards on top of him."

"Sure, but he just looks like he's being restrained."

"But," I pleaded, "the man died. That's just a fact. The prison guards shot this footage, and I don't think their idea was to get it on Dateline."

"Look," the producer said sharply, "in an era when most of our audience has seen the Rodney King video, where you can clearly see someone being beaten, this just doesn't hold up."

"Rodney King wasn't a prisoner," I appealed. "He didn't die, and this mentally ill inmate is not auditioning to be the next Rodney King. These are the actual pictures of his death."

"You don't understand our audience."

"I'm not trying to understand our audience," I said. I was getting pretty heated at this point--always a bad idea. "I'm doing a story on the abuse of mentally ill inmates in Connecticut."

"You don't get it," he said, shaking his head.

The story aired many months later, at less than its original length, between stories that apparently reflected a better understanding of the audience.

During my time at Dateline, I did plenty of stories that led the broadcast and many full hours that were heavily promoted on the network.

But few if any of my stories were more tragic, or more significant in news value, than this investigation into the Connecticut prison system.

Networks have so completely abandoned the mission of reporting the news that someone like entrepreneur Charles Ferguson, who sold an Internet software company to Microsoft in 1996 [and whose writing has appeared in this magazine; see "What's Next for Google," January 2005 --Ed.], can spend $2 million of his own money to make an utterly unadorned documentary about Iraq and see it become an indie hit.

Ferguson's No End in Sight simply lays out, without any emotional digressions or narrative froth, how the U.S. military missed the growing insurgency.

The straightforward questions and answers posed by this film are so rare in network news today that they seem like an exotic, innovative form of cinema, although they're techniques that belong to the Murrow era.

In its way, Ferguson's film is as devastating an indictment of network television as it is of the Bush administration.

[By John Hockenberry]