Leon's No News Bulletin 115 Sat 8th Aug 09

Dear Friends, shalom,

Nothing new under the sun.

I’m not one of those people who grumble about all the new fangled ideas which have pushed the “good” old ideas aside and revolutionized the way we do many things these days (if we have become smart like the kids and done our homework)

As far as I’m concerned life is a process of adaptation. We should rejoice in our ability to adapt to new circumstances and not grumble about the need to do this. It’s the key to happiness.

When king Solomon said that there’s nothing new under the sun he meant that the components of any newly created thing have always existed from the beginning of creation. What we refer to as new isn’t new; it just appears new because existing phenomena have been combined in a relationship which is unfamiliar to us. Once we familiarize ourselves with the so called new object we become aware that it isn’t new at all. Familiarization is the process of becoming aware that the components which make up an object aren’t new.

Even animals learn to adapt. For example I learned that bees in England have learned to enjoy living in the cities rather than in the countryside because there are more flowers in home gardens in the city than there are in the wild countryside.

This morning I read about a mouse that had made his home in the $20 bills in an ATM Machine. The headline in Yahoo was “Mouse builds nest egg.”

So if animals can adapt people who are smarter than animals can and must adapt.

For example emails, unlike the old regular mail, if you don’t know the person who sent it you can’t tell, by just looking at the address where the letter was sent from. It might indicate “il” for Israel or “us” for America but the address doesn’t tell you anything about the exact geographic location.

That’s really a revolutionary idea when you think about it; the idea is that geographic location really isn’t an important part of understanding the contents of a letter.

For those wanting more information about a person there’s “facebook” as a means of finding personal information like where exactly a person lives and other personal information which he chooses to put on line.

Facebook is voluntary; people give only the personal information they want others to know. You can decide the level of personal information and how far into the general public you want it to go.

I looked up the name of a person who sent me an email. Although I didn’t find where he lived immediately, I found a picture he’d placed on facebook showing himself and his family standing in front of a store which had a partly visible sign over the entrance where the letters LA were clearly visible.

At least I know that he lives in LA or visited there. Now I’ll write him and get more details. So facebook and the internet has been very useful but I had to learn how to use it. I had to adapt.

Thought and Feeling.

Our ability to adapt however applies only to intellectual matters not to emotional matters. For example there are events, situations, ideas, objects, people etc. that the thought of encountering them excites us emotionally and the actual encounter is even more exciting.

Other situations, objects, people etc. disappoint us and we have no control over these emotions.

Unlike thought emotions like excitement or disappointment can’t be created; either one feels excited or one doesn’t feel excited about the meeting.

Every time we have an emotion it appears new and it’s really difficult to become familiar with it.

Like becoming familiar with anything else this also requires thought.

This is a really strange characteristic of feelings; on the one hand we can’t decide to have a certain feeling but, on the other we can decide to think about a feeling we have.

This brings thought and feeling together and it’s absolutely essential. The only way that we can know how another person feels is by thinking about him or her and his/her feelings.

We can’t create a feeling for ourselves and we can’t create a feeling for someone else. The best we can do is to think about all the information we have about another person and come to a decision about what he feels in a particular situation.

This is much more difficult than it sounds; just think how difficult it is to know how we ourselves would feel in a certain situation. In spite of this difficulty we tend to base our decision about what someone else feels on what we think we would feel in a certain situation.

Unlike having feelings themselves we can decide to think about what feeling we are actually having. In fact the only way to know what we are feeling is to think about the feelings.

We can’t create feelings but we can create thought about feelings. This is the only way to know what we are feeling and what others are feeling.

When I met Avishai yesterday at Café Noir, where he works I decided, without thinking about it that I will eat lunch there. Avishai was very happy and I hadn’t even considered this aspect when I made my decision.

It’s clear that I made him happy without meaning to; I just wanted to eat lunch. In the same way I realized that it’s possible that we can make someone unhappy without meaning to and both of these situations can be brought about in a planned way by thinking about what the other person would feel and then acting accordingly to achieve the required result.

It all means that we have tremendous power to make others happy or unhappy and often we aren’t even aware that we are using this power. The only way to become aware of it and to use it properly is to think about what we and others are feeling.

Wishing you a great no news day

Yours truly

Leon Gork

Come for a Jerusalem Walk with Leon Gork

Jerusalemwalks.com legork@netvision.net.il Tel: 052 3801867