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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 10:24 am
Subject: Find Meaning in Every Moment om_namah_shi...

Sitaram comments:

A famous rabbi was once asked, "Tell us about your greatest teacher?"

The rabbi replied, "My greatest teacher was whatever I happened to be
doing at any particular moment."

========
Imagine what it must be like to be shipped like cargo along with your
whole family to a place, the only purpose of which is to kill people.
Imagine struggling to stay alive physically and spiritually in that
setting, not knowing what has happened to the rest of your family,
but believing that they were exterminated in gas chambers or ovens.
This was the common experience of people referred to as holocaust
survivors.

One survivor was Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who emerged from the
experience with extraordinary insights valuable to all of us.
In "Man's Search for Meaning" he says, "We who lived in concentration
camps can remember the men who walked throughout the huts comforting
others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few
in number, but they offer
sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one
thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in
any given set of circumstances; to choose one's own way."

"Every prisoner had a moral choice to make," he said, "to surrender
one's inner self to the Nazis, or to find the meaning in one's life
that would give one the strength to go on."

The lessons we can learn are that no matter how bad our troubles are,
we can survive them if we choose to survive; that the best way to
survive, in fact, the best way to thrive is to find meaning in every
moment of existence, every memory and every possibility for our
future.

- Michael Josephson

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