living, loving and learning

By Leo Buscaglia, Ph.D.


By:

Flores, Persis Micah
Giray, Jean Ivy
Iguban, John Paolo
Limbaga, Veroniva
Llagas, Jheziel







People learn themselves. The senate minds, our minds, emphatically disbelieve in the power of love. It appears to us something illusionary and we call it self-deception, the opiate of a people’s mind, idealistic thoughts and unscientific illusion. We are biased against all theories that try to prove the power of love in other positive forces in determining human behavior and personality, in influencing the course of biological, social, moral and mental evolution, in affecting the direction of historical events, in shaping social institutions and cultures. To learn something is fantastic because every time you learn something you become something new. You can’t learn anything without having to read just everything that you are around the new things that you’ve learned. To be called a loving person, he should first love himself. The loving person is not satisfied only to be unique, to develop his uniqueness, and to fight to maintain his uniqueness. He wants to be the greatest, because he realizes that this is something he can give away.

Another thing in a loving individual is that he frees himself from labels. You know, man is an incredible creature, really incredible. He does wonderful things. He has a marvelous creative mind. He created time but then was ruled by time. We also create words and words are supposed to make us able to communicate. But words became boxes and bags in which we became trapped. A loving person must rule words and not the words will rule the person. You will tell yourself what this word means after you find out by experience what it means; not by believing what people have told you it means. “Love is learned,” and it is. Love is learned, fear is learned, prejudice is learned, hate is learned, concern is learned, responsibility is learned, commitment is learned, respect is learned, and kindness and gentility are learned. All of these are learned in a society, in the home, in a relationship.

A loving individual is spontaneous. The one thing that we would like to see more than anything else in the world is our returning again to our initial spontaneity, we are so ruled by what people tell us we must be that we have forgotten who we are. The loving individual is one who hasn’t forgotten his own needs. We don’t really need too much physically, even though we believe we do, but we spend all of our time satisfying our physical needs and those of our children. So many people are trying to make us what they want us to be, and after a while we just give up and decide that maybe this is what we called “adjustment.” To learn and to change and to become, man also needs freedom. You’ve got to be free in order to learn. You’ve got to have people who are interested in your tree, not to lollipop tree, and you’ve got to be interested in their tree.

Our learning is essential, and we’ve become addicted to our learning. We forget that facts are not wisdom. We learn facts, and spend our lives filling our minds with facts that we consider to be essential. But these facts are mostly useless static. And we became addicted to this static remember that your learning can hamper you if you believe that what you know is reality and therefore, you are screening out all things that are coming in. through that kind of static you will never grow, you will never change. Knowledge is not wisdom. Learning alone is not wisdom. Wisdom is the application of knowledge and facts. Wisdom is realizing you know nothing. Wisdom is saying, “My mind is open. Wherever I am, I’m just beginning. There is more to be realized by a hundred-fold than what I know.” That’s the beginning of wisdom.

I have asked to keep the lights turned up because those of you with whom I’ve talked before know I need your eyeballs, and, for some reason, tonight I need them as never before. This is an enormous group, and I feel such tremendous sense of responsibility that I want to give you all that I am.

I’m really a lucky human person because I have been able to go to so many places all over the world, and I come into contact with fantastically interesting things. I’m going to share with you one thing that I’m finding that too many of us have become lost on the “external trip.” This “outer” trip involves the collecting of things and being the wealthiest, the biggest and the best. Now we most have the things we need for “comfort,” and they haven’t gotten us very far. We’re basically still fairly lonely, many of us are lost, and most of us are confused.
There does seem to be a trend to go to another direction, and that is the inner trip. And I am really excited about it because I realized, having worked with the children all of my life, that the only thing of value we can give these kids is what we are not what we have. Too often we give only the external things. But we have learned in our wisdom, as we get older, that those aren’t the most important things. In dealing with children the most essential thing we have to give them is who and what we are. It delights me when I see people really interested in finding out just what that is. That’s why, when I was asked to speak tonight, I decided I would like to talk on the subject of “What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye.” Many of you lit up when I spoke that statement because you recognized it. It’s a quote from a beautiful book called The Little Prince, by Saint Exupery.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye. . . ”
Several years ago I went away to Cornwall, and I bought all the holy books that I could get my hands on to take with me. This was the commonality of them all: If you look only at the externals of life and man, you are missing what is essential. Again, let me define: when I am talking about a teacher, I’m no just talking about somebody who has a diploma that says he has taken so many boring courses. I’m talking about parents, I’m talking about custodians, I’m talking about the person who sells ice cream on the corner. Everybody teaches all of the time, and therefore, it is imperative that we all know as teachers what is essential because only when we know collectively what is essential, can we know what is possible. And the wonder of it all is that what is essential is so vast and so marvelous and what is visible to the eye is so limited and so small.
Those of us who work with children should be bound and determined that we’re not only going of find ourselves the “I of I” so that we can share it with these kids, but we’re also going to help them and set them free so they can find the “I of I” in themselves, develop it, revel in the wonder of it, and then share it with others.
When you have come to grips, for instance, with what is essential about yourself, only then will you be able to decide what is essential about your children. And the truth of it is that so often we professionals tend to see children as their externally manifested bits and pieces. We tend to divide them up. We tend to see each other, also, as our bits and pieces instead of our external whole.
It always interests me how we look at kids. I’ve been in the educational scene all my life as far back as I can remember, and I’ve seen the following: the language pathologist sees the child as a lisp or a stutter or a language problem; the school psychologist sees him s a learning or emotional problem, the neurologist as a central nervous system disorder, the administrator as an organizational problem, and the teacher sees him as an enigma and often as a pain in the neck! And here’s Mama and Papa trying to see him as an integrated whole, but pretty soon we convince them this is not so. So even to them, the child become a “problem child.” This, to me, is really not seeing what is essential.
What are some of the factors that keep us from seeing what is essential? Our central nervous system. And this system is there to screen out, to take out. And so,our learning is limited.
We consider our ego as essential. But you haven’t constructed that self. Somebody has done it for you. People have told you who you should be, and whom you should not be. We view our “addictions” as essential. We are literally addicted to weird ideas.
Existence is beyond the power of words to define. Terms may be used but none of them are absolute. If a name be needed, wonder names them both. From wonder into wonder existence opens. The you of you is limitless. The children that we work with no matter what label we put on them is limitless. Those of you who have worked with children knows they have limitless potential. Make it possible for them to recognize it in their way. “And the name be wonder,” they are all going to succeed.
A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination of purpose. Don’t ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry, and only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.
It all starts with you, and the great bridge that leads to everybody is your bridge. That’s the important one. The time to come out is now. The time to start building bridges to others is now. Life is in your hands. You can select joy if you want or you can find despair everywhere you look. It is all yours.
The final bridge: all of these bridges must be built in love.

“There is a land of the living and the land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival and the only meaning.”

The most exciting thing in the world is the realization that I have the potential of being fully human. I can’t be a God, but I can be a fully functioning being!
So remember that it all starts with you, and you can’t celebrate anybody else in this world until you celebrate yourself. With all your kookiness! Your forgetfulness! Even your ability to hurt.
One of the greatest attributes is forgiveness. I forgive you for being less than perfect. I will demand that everybody else be perfect the day that I become perfect. So you’re all safe! And so you celebrate your humanness with joy and with wonder and with magic. And along with that, you celebrate others. Oh, the joy of my celebrating you!
Let’s face it: each of us is a little cuckoo. Oh, the joy of getting in touch with that cuckooness again! Live nutty. Just occasionally. Just once in a while. And see what happens. It brightens up the day.

You know, I have a strong feeling that this wonderful quality of humanness, with all of its wonder, is God’s gift to you. And what do you do with it is your gift to God. Don’t satisfy yourself with anything less than offering God the perfect gift that you are.

Every year should be a year of the Child and its about time that we recognized it. And we can move together recognizing that children desperately need us. The concept of the Child –Lover or loser, is what I’m here to talk to.: Starting on reading a passage by Anthony Storr from his marvelous book called The World of children. He says we are all children if most of us have forgotten. I think it would be nice if we could get back in touch with what it was like in beginning process. And that’s what gives life its marvel and its magic. Like what Storr say this:
How ignominious it is to be child .To be so small that you can picked up .to be moved about at the whim of others. Each one of us may be a tiny atom in an enormous universe, but we need the illusion that we count-that our individuality demands is a kind of death in life against which we are compelled to fight with all of our strength.
And who are in the helping profession know , perhaps more than anybody else ,how hard it is to find that self and to be able to stand up and say not “ I am” I am becoming that there is no school for life and there damn of few models only your self can help and can truly stand up .There is beautiful book that has always been her favorites, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It’s a big fat tome, but its worth it, because its magical. He writes about Prince Myshkin, who is kind of a misguided saint in a sinful world. It seems sa if everything he touches in good, turns to pain and despair, and he cannot understand it. He has epileptic seizures and every time he has epileptic seizures he gain enormous insight. The magic of Dostoyevsky’s pen describes it this way: All of his uneasiness all of his doubts ,all of his anxieties were relieved .But this moment these flashes were only the prelude of the final second with which the fit began. But each time he has seizure, insight occurs to him, and at one point, very close to the end of the Novel ,it all flashes in his mind ,and he scream out “ Oh God, why we don’t tell the children ? And you know ,I echo this “ Why don’t tell the children ? Why don’t we tell them that they have choice ,that the become a lovers and they need become losers. That there is always a solution of anyone problems. Because when you look around ,there are an awful lot of losers . They make him scares, like a successful suicide in United States every year, the crimes of violence. Have increased seven percent across the nation . We’ve not been allowed to see what life is all about as if life is ugly and be feared and therefore we have to raised behind artificial walls in garden full of flowers and wonder. Its not until adolescence that we climb eagerly over the wall and we find that we don’t have the tools to survive the reality that we don’t have to suffer the pain so we take pills drugs, we get stoned out our minds ,we get drunk. Were afraid to live, but were even more afraid to die.
We’re suspicious of others but most suspicious to ourselves. We don’t know that we have choices and that we can select joy. We lack purpose and we don’t understand what life is all about. We never asked ourselves “ what am I doing here?” Is your role to be here just to take place?
Spending a lot of time in Zen monasteries and Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist monasteries and ashrams in India try to learn as many things as could in cultures It was very fortunate to be able to learn but there was one thing in India is that never seen in Calcutta. I saw every single thing children starving it taken that life all about.
And that’s what that we deny children life .We wait until we’re adults to teach about death. Children believe that life indeed a rose garden. How disappointing when they find out it isn’t. But we can teach children life, we’ve got to learn again how to simply talk with them. “ How to Talk Children” In order to talk with a kids ,we’ve got to practice deep knee bends and we’ve got to face-to face and listen them. And ask what they want and understand what they want. The final thing share children is that life is not only pain misery and despair as heard on the seven o’clock news and read newspaper .We can choose . We have choice. You can choice how you want to live your life. You can select joy, freedom, creativity, or apathy and boredom. And you can choice what you want. We need to tell children that they have choice to become lovers or losers . There is land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridged is love.

I truly feel that if there is, in this world one person whom we can touch totally, unabashedly and unashamedly, we will never die of loneliness. One person! I don’t say fifty, a hundred, a thousand. It really doesn’t matter who that person is, woman to woman, man to man, someone you can go to and lay it on the line, who will listen. Someone you don’t have to hide from. Someone to whom you can say “These are my feelings,” and they say, “Good. It’s all right.” “This is me!” “That’s O.K.”

There aren’t many who know real intimacy. That’s frightening. But, we can select the joy of intimacy. Why not? Let me read you some of the reasons that people give for not choosing intimacy. (The amazing part is that I found myself in these answers just as you’ll find yourself.) Listen to what they said: “I’m not afraid of intimacy; I’m afraid to be hurt.” “I get bored with relationships right away. As soon as we know each other, and the newness vanishes, so does the excitement.” “People don’t want intimacy, they just want sex.” “I’m afraid to let anyone know who I really knew they’d be horrified.” “I don’t believe in intimacy, I don’t think it’s possible. People are just too different.” “Intimacy always makes me feel insecure and jealous. The deeper I feel about someone, the deeper the insecurity and jealousy, so I’d rather be casual, and then I won’t be hurt.” “Every time I form an intimate relationship, I always feel cheated. I know there must be more, and so I go around looking for it and I ruin everything.

George Leonard says, “We can orbit the earth, we can touch the moon, but this society has not devised a way for two people to live together in harmony for seven straight days without wanting to strangle each other.” They tell us that intimacy is out of date, but I say that intimacy is absolutely essential or we are all going to go mad. Go ahead and live in isolation, if you can. I believe that you can judge your level of mental health to the degree that you can form meaningful and lasting relationships. Not the quantity of these relationships, but the quality of the relationships.

Show what you feel in relationships. I f you feel like crying, cry your eyes out! When you feel like laughing, laugh your eyes out! Scream when you want to scream. Roll on the floor. Surprise everybody!
Please don’t wait to communicate your feelings. I think one of the greatest destructive elements in relationships and intimacy is our inability to relate what we’re feeling now.
If we ever needed each other, we need each other now. The family is disintegrating, divorce rates are growing; relationships are casual and mostly meaningless. The suicide rate is doubling, especially among young people. Intimacy is not simple. It’s great challenge to our maturity. It’s our greatest hope.
To me the greatest thing we have is life. And where there is life-as the old adage goes-there is hope. So maybe, if we can get into choosing life, it won’t be as difficult as we might imagine. And yet there are so many who don’t choose it. Not too long ago one of my students came into the university. H e was really despondent. He said, “You and your ideas about life. You make me sick. You say ‘choose life.’ Why the hell should I? Life chose me. I didn’t ask to be born. I was made to come on this earth, and if I don’t choose to live it, I don’t see why it’s my responsibility to choose it.”
Thousands of people got to mental hospitals every year and relinquish their lives to doctors and therapists. Other people give it up and say, “You live my life for me,” instead of taking this incredible gift and living it fully.
Have you ever thought about going to see what the dictionary says about a word like life? I’m going to read you what I found because it’s glorious: “Life is the quality which distinguishes a vital and functioning being from a dead one.” The other one says. “The period of usefulness of something.” I thought, if usefulness is the determinant of our being alive or dead, then there are an awful lot of dead people running around the place. The one I love the best is the third definition: “To pass through or spend duration.” You know, most of us are really passing through the real sense of the word, alive and living fully. The thing is, I’m certain that as long as you leave your life in the hands of other people, you’ll never live. You have to take the responsibility for choosing and defining your own life.
But you must decide yourself, for yourself. “What does life mean to me?” I’m convinced if we spent as much time- no one quarter as much time- no, living and loving as we do planning a meal, we’d be incredible! In order to these things we’ve got a lot of choices to make. One of the major choices is “choose you.” You’ve got to choose yourself. I’m sure the people who take their lives, who don’t live, are basically those who have no feeling of respect. I don’t know when the last time was that anybody told you this, but I want to stress it: You are a miracle.
Our lives are overburdened, and living often seems to us a terrible complicated affair. The problems of the world are so incredibly complex and we see that there are no simple answers.
So how we look for our lives and living becomes tremendously important.
Certainly we can talk together, and we can work together, and we can learn together, but in the end, each one must define his or her individual life. For it is your life alone, nobody else’s. And there’s no other way.
Choose Life!
One of the first things that we must teach our children-and we can’t teach it unless we believe it ourselves-is that each of you is a “holy” thing.
Why do we protect children from life? It’s no wonder that we become afraid to live. We’re not told what life really is. We’re not told that life is joy and wonder and magic and even rapture, if you can get involved enough. We’re not told that life is also pain, misery, despair, unhappiness and tears. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss any of it. I want to embrace life, and I want to find out what it’s all about. I wouldn’t want to go through life without knowing what it is to cry. That’s why I have lachrymal ducts. If I wasn’t meant to cry, I wouldn’t have them. It’s all right to cry a little bit. I always find that tears clear my eyes.
Then I think we need to teach children the importance of others, and that they cannot grow in this world without taking in others. The more worlds they take in, these unique worlds, the more they can become. We need to teach, because we’re all frightened to death of each other. We’re building higher and higher walls, stronger and stronger locks. Tear down the walls! Every day I see how we’re distrusting and it hurts.
I also think it’s important to tell children about the continuity of life. We live in a stratified society. Little children are kept together. Adolescents are kept together. Young marrieds are together. And if you remain single you lose your best friends. Old people, for goodness sakes, are kept together.
Everybody needs a hug. It changes your metabolism. Risk!
I want you to read this:
“To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.” Well, so what? Fools have a lot of fun.
“To weep is to risk being called sentimental.” Of course I’m sentimental. I love it! Tears can help.
“To reach out to another is to risk involvement.” Who’s risking involvement? I want to be involved.
“To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self.” What else do I have to show?
“To place your ideas and your dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naïve.” Oh, I’m called worse things than that.
“To love is to risk not being loved in return.” I don’t love to be loved in return,
“To live is to risk dying.” I’m ready for it. Don’t you dare shed one tear if you hear that Buscaglia blew up in the air or dropped dead. He did it with enthusiasm.
“To hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure.” But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing. The person, who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live. Chained by his certitudes, he’s a slave. He’s forfeited his freedom. Only the person who risks is truly free. Try it and see what happens.

Don’t miss love. It’s an incredible gift. We love to think that the day we’re born, we’re given the world as our birthday present. It’s just full of love, magic, life, joy, wonder, pain and tears. We’ve been concerned for such a long time about love that we looked at hundreds of textbooks, looking among professionals who really should be the people concerned about this to see what they said. But who do we really think is the loving person? The loving person is the person who loves himself or herself. You will never be able to love anybody else until you love yourself. Under the guise of love oftentimes comes the greatest violation of the person, because our love is always given within conditions. And the most difficult things you’re going to have to do – it should be the simplest- is to be you, to find out who you are and what you have to share. And then dedicate yourself to the process of developing it so that you can give it away to everybody else, because that’s the only reason in the world for having anything. The wonderful thing about the self is that is isn’t anything that’s concrete. The thing that you’ll leave behind is something that’s not tangible. That’s what’s so wonderful. It’s a great spiritual something. So the hardest battle you’re ever going to fight is the battle to be just you. You’re going to have to fight it for the rest of your life in a world where people feel more comfortable if you can be there for their convenience. But if you give up, there’s nothing left.

We really became human at the point of reaching out and risking and trusting to bring people in. life is not a trip in itself. It’s not a goal. It’s a process you get there step by step. And if every step is wondrous, and every step is magical, that’s what life will be. And you’ll never be one of those people who reach the point of death without ever having lived.

Its amazing – You may not realized it but so much of you are not is because you are literally standing in your own way becoming. And what I’m pleading get the hell out of your way! Fly and love is available to you! Do your all responsibility and grasps it. But if you don’t trust yourselves its makes you defeat yourself so the confidence in yourself make strong to do everything without scared or afraid doing failures or mistakes because its makes you perfect and learning flowing. TO keep you hidden to lose you because of SELF-DEFEATING IDEAS is to die .Don’t let it happen. Your greatest responsibility is to become everything that you are.
















LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING
REACTION


Life changes, that’s a fact. And in every second of our life, we change, everything change. We can’t stop the time to make us change. We change through our experience, values and behavior of others and through that, we become better persons. We learn how to respect each others, we learn how to live life and we learn how to love.

Living is a simple way of being you. It’s the process of which you express yourself, to be yourself but sometimes, we adjust to get the respect of others. We adjust on our environment, on the behavior of others and also we adjust to get respect. The essence of living is to be committed to our family, to our friends, to others and especially to God. It’s the process of which we respect the older ones, respect other people, being ethical, being moral and being good. Once you start living, you can’t stop it. We exist to the way we want to be but we also live to adjust in the behavior of others. We also have no choice of what color we're born or who our parents are or whether we're rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we’re here in this world. We have our unique identity which is can be good or bad to others. We choose the way we live. Existence of our life is sometimes unfair but we can’t stop it because life is not unfair, it’s just because there are some decisions which tend to be our mistake but we cannot truly face life until we face the fact that it will be taken away from us.

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something, and love, begins there.

Loving is the process of which we tend to care for others. Love is mysterious which is nobody can’t explain its true meaning but we tend to love. We tend to care for others, to love them and especially to be with them. Love has many divisions; there is love for our family, love for our friends, love for your special someone and especially love to our one and only God. They say that love is unconditional but sometimes, love can kill. We try to experience love but sometimes, we tend to hurt each others feeling which can also be a lesson to us. We learn on our mistakes which we really give importance and cherish them a lot so its really true that our best teacher is our experience. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us, that’s the essence of loving. We try to sacrifice some important matters and for our priorities because of love. A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror. We meet some higher persons from us because of their learning’s in life which we also tend to learn from them.

Life is very short so we tend to live life to the fullest, we try to search for love but we tend to see that the person beside you loves you. From them we learn some moral lessons which we can also apply in our life.

Learning is the best way to enjoy life. We learn in the teachings of our professors but we learn much better in our experience especially on our everyday life. Sometimes we take the risk for the better of others in which we learn some good lessons and sometimes we also get good values from it. We also get values and lesson form our mistakes but we can’t always have mistakes. We learn good lessons and also bad lessons which can give us guide to live life.

Living, Loving and Learning is the best way to be you, to be complete and to be a better person for others.





LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING
Lesson learns


We have learned more values and lessons about life. We learn how adjust in life. We learn to be better persons and to begin love within us. We learn how to respect others, to be respected and also to live our life the way we want.
There are a thousand paths to discovering ourselves. Each path is only one of a million paths. Therefore, you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path. If you feel that you must noe follow it, you need not stay with it under any circumstances. Any path is only a path. There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear and ambition. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as we think necessary.
We’ve got to stop imposing ourselves on others, and our value systems upon them, we’ve got to be real, and we’ve got to learn to listen. We’ve got to be real. Don’t be a phony. The hardest thing in the world is to be something you’re not. As you get closer and closer to what you are, be that, and come an all the time that way. You’ll find it’s an easy way to live. The easiest thing to be in the world is you. And the most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.
We must remind ourselves, however, that no change takes place without working hard and without getting your hands dirty. We just have to remember this: we exist, we’re what we are, we’re here, we’re becoming, we make our life and no one else makes it for us. We must face our own shortcomings, mistakes, transgressions. No one can suffer our non-being, but tomorrow is another day. And we must decide to live again. And if we fail, we don’t have the comfort of blaming others or life or God.