Autographs

Now that I have retired, I was going through the accumulation of odds and ends over the years and came across my old autograph which I had maintained till the end of my school days. In it I came across the following poem written by my maths teacher, Mrs. Tha Sein of the Seventh Day Adventist School in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma (Myanmar).

Is there aught so dear to me
That I cannot share with thee.
In the casket of my heart
Do I hide from thee a part.

All my treasures now I pour
At thy feet for evermore.
Love and life and will are thine,
I a rich if thou art mine.

Beautiful isn't it?

This, naturally, brought me memories of these school days when my Headmistress was a Miss Lockie Gifford and my old friends. like Jennifer Rees. Like in the song "Those were the days"; we had a lot of dreams and after all these years, we are still the same, still having those dreams in our hearts.

An Exciting Test

This is a small test that I came across long time back. It has only four (4) questions, and you will be surprised about the results. I will publish the results in the next blog. By that time I hope that you have got your answers ready and jotted down. Please Follow the Instruction.

MAKE A WISH BEFORE STARTING

CAUTION ! Answer the questions step by step. Read on slowly and WRITE down your answers after careful thought. This is a serious questionnaire and will tell you a lot about yourself.

Question 1.
Place the following animals in an order according to your preference.
Cow, Tiger, Sheep, Horse and Pig.

Question 2.
Write a word that qualifies / describes each of the following.
Dog, Cat, Rat, Coffee and Ocean

Question 3.
Think about someone (who knows you and is important to you) that can be related to the
following colours (do not repeat your answer). Name only one person per colour.
Yellow, Orange, Red, White and Green.

Question 4.
Write down your favourite number (between 1 and 9 both inclusive)

Hell

This is only an excerpt from an answer give by a student to a question on whether Hell is Endothermic or Exothermic.

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong
to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. "

I'm leaving it to you to guess the remaining part of the answer. If you want to know how the student concluded his analysis you can mail me at oddjams@yahoo.com.

Bhutan

If you got to Bhutan, a country which is predominantly Buddhist, you will find a lot of monasteries. And in almost all of the monasteries you will find a tower where you have to climb a substantial number of very steep and narrow stairs to get to the top. You really have to put in a lot of effort to get to the top. An when you get to the top, what do you find? A prayer hall? A temple with a magnificent figure of Buddha? A silent place for meditation? No. All you find is nothing. Just an empty space under a roof with the beams and struts that shoulder the roof. Then why climb all these stairs to get to the top? Is it to impress upon you that all your efforts in this world are in vain? Or is it something else. Being on a tight schedule I couldn't find out why.

World Wildlife Fund

I recommend Hotels Combined and sent $20 to W.W.F.!

You can shout and help too.

What Is Death?

What is death? Nobody seems to know. Those who died do not come back to tell us what death is. But everybody knows that death will catch up with them someday or the other. And everyone fears death. Some may say that they do not fear death but the fear of death is built into every human being ever since he started to walk on this earth. Men did not only fear death, they feared everything that they did not understand, even the darkness that they knew would be dispelled at the rising of the sun. Even if one does not fear death, the fear of how death will come to them, at least, must be there in the minds of most people; especially when we they see the different inexplicable ways that people die. The suffering that some undergo before they die. The mass death of innocent children dying in a fire. And as the time for death slowly draws nearer and nearer, there must be a tinge of apprehension in everyone’s mind, even the ones that boast of not being afraid to die.

What about the people who had near death experiences? Do not they know death? It is again doubtful whether they know death. They did not die to know death. They claim to know that they nearly died. It is only hearsay evidence. There is a claim of a near death experience. Then another surfaces and then another, of course far apart in space and time but strikingly same. They all relate that they have been led away by some unknown entities by mistake and, when the mistake is discovered, usually by another entity that maintains some sort of record as to who should be brought and who shouldn’t be, are sent back. This is the experience of the Oriental near death individual. A marked difference between the experience of the Westerner who usually sees a tunnel of light or darkness through which he passes. And this difference in the near death experiences between the Oriental and the Western makes it more suspect. Why should human beings who descended from the same root have different near death experience? He or she shares the same emotions, the same fears that the other does. Then why the difference? Could it be attributed to the fact that they do not share the same culture or the beliefs that they have regarding death. The Oriental, practically all of them, believe that there is a person who keeps track of the lives of people and that there is a kind of book of death wherein the specific time that a particular individual should die is recorded and that when the time is at hand an emissary is sent to bring that specific person to the throne of judgment, or whatever, where his acts of omission and commission are judged and he is sentenced accordingly. As such, his near death experience relates to his knowledge of the subject.

There is another curious but seemingly unexplained phenomenon that makes a telling difference in the near death experience of an Oriental and a Westerner. A Westerner almost always sees his body lying prone and the activities that are taking place around him. For example, when an operation takes place and a near death experience takes place. The individual, it seems, describes the operational procedure that was carried out and the surgical instruments that surrounded him during the operation. But this is not so in the case of an Oriental’s experience though the astral body and the silver chord are oriental concepts.

The question of life after death also is interesting. Every religion states that there is life after death. It is the kind of life that you are going to live after the death in this world that is the difference. The oriental believes that he will be reborn into this world as a human being till he attains his Karma and once he attains it he becomes one with (merges with) the godhead from whom he believes he originally came from. This is not the belief of the monotheist religions. They believe that once they die they are united with the godhead, not merge into him.

To be continued when further thoughts come into my mind ....

Friendship

Wish we humans could live like this.