Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance - the idea that when we hold two conflicting thoughts or beliefs, we unconsciously adjust to make one fit with the other. 
For example, if you have a belief that it is wrong to cheat, yet you find yourself cheating on a test, because it was a dumb class that you didn’t need anyway. Or you may say to yourself that everyone cheats so why not you? In other words, you think about your action in a different manner or context so that it no longer appears to be inconsistent with your beliefs and ease your anxiety .

Carl Sagan's public lecture at Cornell

" Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. "

From Carl Sagan's public lecture at Cornell, October 13, 1994

Melting pot or Salad bowl ?

The vision of America as a “melting pot of nations” (cf. the Latin motto “e pluribus unum” – ("one from many" –or "One out of many"  suggesting that out of many peoples, races, religions and ancestries has emerged a single people and nation—illustrating the concept of the melting pot.) , in which the foreign immigrants give up their national identity, way of life, culture and language and form a new nation, has never become reality. In the 1960s, the growing self-confidence of the minorities, their fight against discrimination, and the influx of new ethnic groups who refused to be culturally absorbed by American society, has made America look for a new image for this concept. The concept of the “salad bowl” was suggested as more accurate, accepting America as diverse, multi-cultural and pluralistic.

The Fench Revolution's backhground

The broad background of the French Revolution was colored by a number of overarching circumstances. The first of these was the rise of absolute monarchies everywhere in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In England, absolute government was instituted by the Tudor monarchs and continued by the Stuarts, James VI and Charles I. Their inflated conceptions of monarchy and their attempts to undermine Parliament eventually resulted in the Civil War (1642–1649) between the supporters of the king and those of Parliament. The latter, led by Oliver Cromwell, were victorious. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and England was ruled for a short spell by Parliament. However, the so-called Restoration of 1660 placed Charles II upon the throne.

Central Europe and Spain were also under the rule of despots, some enlightened such as Frederick II the Great of Prussia (1740–1786) and Joseph II of Austria (1780– 1790), and others more repressive such as Catherine the Great of Russia (1762–1796), who crushed a serf rebellion in 1773–1774. In France, however, the situation was dire.

Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, had promoted industry and manufacture and effectively minimized the sovereignty of the feudal nobility. The next three Bourbon kings, Louis XIV (1643–1715), Louis XV (1715–1774), and Louis XVI (1774–1792), took to new extremes the arrogation of power and the instruments of justice. Louis XIV had declared “l’état, c’est moi,” and both of his successors professed the divine right of kings.

Hence, the French Revolution was in part a reaction against the excesses of absolute government which had grown both in theory and practice since the fourteenth century.

Another factor was the economic transformation of society. The fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries had witnessed tendencies which would later foster the growth of capitalism.By the seventeenth century, England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,and Holland had become imperial powers; trade became a worldwide rather than a national or local phenomenon. By the end of the seventeenth century the bourgeoisie had achieved economic hegemony.

Another economic cause was the survival of a feudal system of privileges, whereby the higher clergy and certain classes of nobles monopolized government. Peasants resented the fees and land taxes they were obliged to pay to their lords; and the urban masses suffered greatly from high prices. The political causes included a despotic monarchy, an unsystematic mode of government, finance, taxation, and law.

The intellectual influences stemmed largely from the Enlightenment . The more specific influences on the French Revolution included Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), which justified the new political system in England that prevailed after the English revolution of 1688. Locke condemned despotic monarchy and the absolute sovereignty of parliaments and suggested that the people had a right to resist tyranny. Voltaire advocated an enlightened monarchy or republic governed by the bourgeois classes. Baron de Montesquieu also influenced the first stage of the French Revolution, advancing a liberal theory based on a separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau exerted a powerful impact on the second stage of the Revolution through his theories of democracy, egalitarianism, and the evils of private property, as advocated in his Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth

" Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth: His light (in the universe) may be likened (to the light of) a lamp in a niche: the lamp is in a glass shade: the glass shade is like a glittering star and lamp is lit with the olive oil of a blessed tree which is neither eastern nor western: its oil is (so fine) as if it were going to shine forth by itself though no fire touched it (as though all the means of increasing) light upon light (were provided ); Allah guides to His light whomever He wills. He cites parables to make the Message clear to the people; He has perfect knowledge of everything. " 

The physical light is but a reflection of the true Light in the world of Reality, and that true Light is Allah. We can only think of Allah in terms of our phenomenal experience, and in the phenomenal world, light is the purest thing we know.
The first three points in the Parable center around the symbols of the Niche, the Lamp, and the Glass.
The niche is an opening in a wall which is not a window, fairly high from the ground, in which a light (before the days of electricity) was usually placed. Its height enabled it to diffuse the light in the room and minimized the shadows.
So with the spiritual Light: it is placed high above worldly things: it has a niche or habitation of its own, in Revelation and other Signs of Allah; its access to men is by a special Way, open to all, yet closed to those who refuse its rays. The Lamp is the core of the spiritual Truth, which is the real illumination; the Niche is nothing without it.
The Glass is the transparent medium through which the Light passes. It protects the light from moths and other forms of low life (lower motives in man) and from gusts of wind (passions) ...
The glass by itself does not shine. But when the light comes into it, it shines like a brilliant star. So men of God, who preach Allah’s Truth, are themselves illuminated by Allah’s Light and become like illuminating media through which that Light spreads and permeates human life.
The mystic Olive is not localized. It is neither of the East nor the West. It is universal, for such is Allah’s Light.

اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ مَثَلُ نُورِهِ كَمِشْكَاةٍ فِيهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۖ الْمِصْبَاحُ فِي زُجَاجَةٍ ۖ الزُّجَاجَةُ كَأَنَّهَا" كَوْكَبٌ دُرِّيٌّ يُوقَدُ مِن شَجَرَةٍ مُّبَارَكَةٍ زَيْتُونَةٍ لَّا شَرْقِيَّةٍ وَلَا غَرْبِيَّةٍ يَكَادُ زَيْتُهَا يُضِيءُ وَلَوْ لَمْ تَمْسَسْهُ نَارٌ ۚ نُّورٌ عَلَىٰ نُورٍ ۗ يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَن يَشَاءُ ۚ وَيَضْرِبُ اللَّهُ الْأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ "

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

Known as the founder of French symbolism (though not himself part of the movement), and often associated with the artistic decadence and aestheticism of the later nineteenth century, Baudelaire was born in Paris where he lived a bohemian life, adopting the artistic posture of a dandy, devoted to beauty and disdainfully aloof from the vulgar bourgeois world of materialism and commerce .

Baudelaire is often credited with expressing one of the first modernistic visions, a vision of the sordidness, sensuality,

and corruption of city life, a disposition that profoundly influenced modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Baudelaire’s famous or infamous collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was published in 1857 and became the subject of a trial for obscenity in the same year for including some lesbian poems.

Baudelaire contracted syphilis and was paralyzed by a stroke before his death.

Karl Marx's thoughts

As with all socialists, Marx’s main objection to capitalism was that one particular class owned the means of economic production: “The bourgeoisie . . . has centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.”

The correlative of this is the oppression and exploitation of the working classes: “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity.”

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production . . . The need of a constantly expanding market . . . chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”

Am lit

   ♥   ღ

American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always songs) of  the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived. As a result, Native American oral literature is quite diverse. 

Tribes maintained their own religions — worshiping gods, animals, plants, or sacred persons.

Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to theocracies.

Indian stories, for example, glow with reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother.

Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics, chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and legendary histories.

In one well-known creation story, told with variations among many tribes, a turtle holds up the world. In a Cheyenne version, the creator, Maheo, has four chances to fashion the world from a watery universe. He sends four water birds diving to try to bring up earth from the bottom. The snow goose, loon, and mallard soar high into the sky and sweep down in a dive, but cannot reach bottom; but the little coot, who cannot fly, succeeds in bringing up some mud in his bill. Only one creature, humble Grandmother Turtle, is the right shape to support the mud world Maheo shapes on her shell — hence the Indian name for America, “Turtle Island.”

The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous: There are lullabies, war chants, love songs..

A Chippewa song runs:

A loon I thought it was

But it was

My love’s

splashing oar.

The Indian contribution to America is greater than is often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday

American English include “canoe,” “tobacco,” “potato,” “moccasin,” “moose,” “persimmon,” “raccoon,” “tomahawk,” and “totem.”

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In his monumental study entitled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, historian Edward Gibbon listed five reasons that the enormous empire collapsed:
1. The increase in divorce, undermining the institution of the family;
2. The imposition of higher taxes for bread and circuses;
3. The drive for pleasure, sports becoming more exciting and brutal;
4. The people lost their faith.
But the most important was the fifth reason:
5. The existence of an internal conspiracy, working to undermine the government from within, all the time that the government was proclaiming that Rome's enemy was external.
Gibbon reported that the conspiracy was building huge armaments for protection against both real and imaginary external enemies, all the while they were literally destroying the empire from within.
These causes have parallels in today's world as well.

The existence of an accepted external menace, then, is essential to social cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with the complexity of the society threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the inure society. 

The Unseen Hand

American Entry Into WW II

... But as the war in Europe continued, America's leaders were attempting to get America involved, even though the American people didn't want to become part of it. Roosevelt, the presidential candidate, was promising the American people that the Roosevelt administration would remain neutral should he be re-elected. Others knew better. One, for instance, was General Hugh Johnson, who said: "I know of no well informed Washington observer who isn't convinced that, if Mr. Roosevelt is elected (in 1940), he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that, if none presents itself, he will make one."
Roosevelt had two opportunities to involve America in World War II: Japan was at war with China, and Germany was at war with England, France and other countries. Both war zones presented plenty of opportunities to involve the American government in the war, and Roosevelt was quick to seize upon the opportunities presented.
Roosevelt's public efforts to involve America, while ostensibly remaining neutral, started in August, 1940, when the National Guard was voted into Federal service for one year. This was followed in September by the Selective Service Act, also for one year's duration.
But the key to America's early involvement occurred on September 28, 1940, when Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Treaty. This treaty required that any of the three nations had to respond by declaring war should any one of the other three be attacked by any of the Allied nations.
This meant that should Japan attack the United States, and the United States responded by declaring war against Japan, it would automatically be at war with the other two nations, Germany and Italy.
Roosevelt now knew that war with Japan meant war with Germany.
His problem was solved. He had made secret commitments to Winston Churchill and the English government to become involved in the war against Germany and he knew "... that the only way he could fulfill his secret commitments to Churchill to get us into the war, without openly dishonoring his pledges to the American people to keep us out, was by provoking Germany or Japan to attack."
Roosevelt and Churchill had conspired together to incite an incident to allow America's entry into the war. According to Churchill:
The President had said that he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces.
The United States Navy was taking over the convoy route to Iceland.
The President's orders to these escorts were to attack any U-boat which showed itself, even if it were two or three hundred miles away from the convoy...
Everything was to be done to force "an incident."
Hitler would be faced with the dilemma of either attacking the convoys and clashing with the United States Navy or holding off,thus "giving us victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. It might suit us in six or eight weeks to provoke Hitler by taunting him with this difficult choice."
Hitler was not as wise in other matters. He attacked his "ally" Russia on June 22, 1941, even though Germany and Russia had signed a treaty not to declare war on each other.
With this action, the pressure to get the United States involved in the war really accelerated. Roosevelt, on June 24, 1941, told the American people: "Of course we are going to give all the aid that we possibly can to Russia."
And an American program of Lend-Lease began, supplying Russia
enormous quantities of war materials, all on credit.
So with Hitler pre-occupied with the war against Russia and refusing to involve himself with the Americans on the open sea, Roosevelt had to turn his attentions back to Japan for the incident he needed.
The next step was to assist other countries, the English and the Dutch, to embargo oil shipments to Japan in an attempt to force them into an incident that would enable the United States to enter the war.
Japan, as a relatively small island, and with no oil industry to speak of, had to look elsewhere for its oil, and this was the reason for the proposed embargo. It was thought that this action would provoke Japan into an incident.
... President Roosevelt wasn't listening to the charges of Congress-roan Martin Dies, Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. By August of 1941, "The Dies committee had assembled a large amount of evidence which more than confirmed the suspicions which we had entertained on the basis of surface appearances: It was clear that the Japanese were preparing to invade Pearl Harbor and that they were in Possession of vital military information."
Congressman Dies was told not to release the document to the public and the Roosevelt administration did nothing.
(In April, 1964, when Dies told the American public of these revelations he added this comment: "If anyone questions the veracity and accuracy of these statements, I will be glad to furnish him with conclusive proof.")
.. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt's Secretary of War , was to repeat this concern that faced the Roosevelt administration when he testified before one of the Committees investigating Pearl Harbor. There he was quoted as saying: "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

The Unseen Hand by Ralph Epperson

Was Hitler of a Jewish descent ?

Walter Langer wrote in his book The Mind of Adolf Hitler that it was his theory that Hitler was himself one-quarter Jewish and the grandson of a Rothschild. He wrote: There is a great deal of confusion in studying Hitler's family tree.
Adolf's father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. It was generally supposed that the father of Alois Hitler was Johann Georg Hiedler...
Alois, however, was not legitimized, and he bore his mother's name until he was forty years of age when he changed it to Hitler.A peculiar series of events, prior to Hitler's birth, furnishes plenty of food for speculation.
There are some people who seriously doubt that Johann Georg Hiedler was the father of Alois. Thyssen and Koehler, for example, claim that Chancellor Dolfuss (the Chancellor of Austria) had ordered the Austrian police to conduct a thorough investigation into the Hitler family. As a result of this investigation a secret document was prepared that proved Maria Anna Shicklgruber was living in Vienna at the time she conceived.
At that time she was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. As soon as the family discovered her pregnancy she was sent back to her home in Spital where Alois was born.
In a postscript in Langer's book, Robert G.L. Waite adds this comment.
But even when Langer is mistaken and his guesses prove incorrect, he is often on the right track.
Consider his hint that Hitler's grandfather might have been a Jew. There is no reason to believe the unlikely story told by Langer's informant that Hitler's grandmother Maria Anna Schickelgruber, a peasant woman in her forties from the Waldvietral of rural Austria, had had an intimate liaison with a Baron Rothschild in Vienna.
But Hitler had worried that he might be blackmailed over a Jewish grandfather and ordered his private lawyer, Hans Frank, to investigate his paternal lineage.
Frank did so and told the Fuehrer that his grandmother had become pregnant while working as a domestic servant in a Jewish household in Graz.
The facts of this matter are in dispute — and a very lengthy dispute it has been.
The point of overriding psychological and historical importance is not whether it is true that Hitler had a Jewish grandfather, but whether he believed that it might be true.
He did so believe and the fact shaped both his personality and his public policy.
It is possible that Hitler discovered his Jewish background and his relation to the Rothschilds, and aware of their enormous power to make or break European governments, re-established contact with the family. 
This would partially explain the enormous support he received from the international banking fraternity, closely entwined with the Rothschild family, as he rose to power.
One thing is certain, however. Hitler started World War II by moving into Austria first. It has been theorized that he moved into this country for two reasons. First, he wanted to silence Dolfuss who Hitler believed knew that he was a descendant of the Rothschilds, and secondly, he wished to remove all traces of his ancestry from the Austrian records.

The Unseen Hand

Seven deadly sins

Quran

Eid al Ad'ha

" It is not their flesh, nor their blood, that reaches Allah; it is your righteousness {piety } that reaches Him….Their flesh will never reach Allah, nor yet their blood, but your devotion will reach Him" (Qur'an 22:37).
The main purpose of allowing Muslims to continue with animal sacrifices was to turn this tradition into an institution of charity. All the verses of the Qur'an which deal with the subject wind up with the proviso that the meat be fed to the poor, the needy, those who are too modest to beg as well as the mendicants.
Sacrifice is meant to be an act of worship and thanksgiving, it is meant to be an act of benevolence (Ihsan) to fulfill a social obligation. Any sacrifice that is allowed to go to waste is a sinful as well as a criminal violation.

Beware of the Lyrics

Someone once wrote: "I know a very wise man who believes that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."
A musician, Frank Zappa, the leader of the rock group called Mothers of Invention, added this incredible statement: "The loud sounds and bright lights of today are tremendous indoctrination tools. Is it possible to modify the human chemical structure with the right combination of frequencies? If the right kind of beat makes you tap your foot, what kind of beat makes you curl your fist and strike?"

The thought that music was created for the express purpose of controlling young people is an alien idea to the parents of those who listen to the music, so the message in the music had to be concealed in a special language so that only the young people would understand it. It takes very gifted musicians and song writers to write the music in such a way that the parents interpret it one way and the young people in another, but this has been the case in the modern music of today.

This concealed message was accomplished by many groups, but one of the most successful was a rock 'n roll group known as the Beatles. Their particular message was intended to teach young people the merits of drug use through such songs as:

"Yellow Submarine"  =  A "submarine" is a "downer" drug, one that slows the user down.
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"  =  The first initials of the main words in the  title, "L," "S" and "D" represent the drug LSD.
"Strawberry Fields"   =  Opium poppies are often planted in strawberry fields to avoid detection.
"Norwegian Wood"   =   A Britisher's term for marijuana .

The Unseen Hand .

The Grand Mechanism

Emanating from the features of individual kings and usurpers in Shakespeare's History plays, there gradually emerges the image of history itself. The image of the Grand Mechanism.
The flattering index of a direful pageant,
One heav'd a-high to be hurl'd down below . . . --- Richard III, 4.4.85-6

 The Grand Mechanism , a staircase by which tyrants rise to power. Each step up requires treachery and killing until they reach the top and achieve power only to fall victim to those climbing the stairs behind them. The actions that bring them to the top bring about their demise.

The Iron Mountain

...The report starts by defining the traditional view of the functions of war. It claims that there are three:

1. to defend a nation from military attack by another or to deter such an attack;
2. to defend or advance a national interest; and
3. to maintain or increase a nation's military power for its own sake.

It continues by stating that these are the "visible" functions, and that there are "invisible, or implied, functions" as well. These are spelled out in the report, but all functions have one common purpose: "War has provided both ancient and modern society with a debatable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies. No alternate method of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy that has shown it is remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness. War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained — and improved in effectiveness."

The report then goes on to detail what the "invisible functions" of war are:

War... is the principal organizing force in most societies.
... The possibility of war provided the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power.
The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure... of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution.
War... provides anti-social elements with an acceptable role in the social structure.
The younger, and more dangerous, of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System.
As a control device... the draft can again be defended...
The level of the draft calls tends to follow the major fluctuations in the unemployment rate...
Man destroys surplus members of his own species by organized warfare.
War is the principal motivational force for the development of science...
War is a... general social release... for the dissipation of general boredom.
War... enables the physically deteriorating older generation to maintain its control of the younger, destroying it if necessary.


The Unseen Hand by Ralph Epperson

A box full of Darkness

The Unseen Hand / THE ROTHSCHILD FAMILY

THE ROTHSCHILD FAMILY

This European banking family was started by the father, Amschel Moses Bauer (they were later to change their last name to Rothschild) who started in the banking business in a meager way. After some early success in the loaning of money to local governments, Amschel decided to expand his banking establishment by loaning to national governments. He set up his five sons in banking houses, each in a different country.

Meyer Rothschild was sent to Frankfort, Germany; Solomon to Vienna, Austria; Nathan to London, England; Carl to Naples, Italy; and James to Paris, France.

With the Rothschild sons scattered all over Europe, each operating a banking house, the family could easily convince any government that it should continue to pay its debts, or the force of the "balance of power" politics would be used against the debtor's nation. In other words, the Rothschild family would play one government against another by the threat of war. Each government would feel cornered into paying its debts by the threat of a war which would take away its kingdom. The brothers could finance both sides of the conflict thereby insuring not only that the debtor would pay its debts but that enormous fortunes would be made in the financing of the war.

This power was visualized by Meyer Rothschild when he summarized the strategy thus: "Permit me to control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

The Unseen Hand _ Abraham Lincoln

Mr. Abraham Lincoln started having thoughts about his own assassination during the 1860 convention.
He went upstairs and, exhausted by repressed excitement, he lay down on the couch in Mrs. Lincoln's sitting room.
While lying there he was disturbed to see in the mirror two images of himself which were alike, except that one was not so clear as the other. The double reflection awakened the primitive vein in the superstition always present in him. He rose and lay down again to see if the paler shadow would vanish, but he saw it once more....
The next morning... he went home and reclined on the couch to see if there was not something wrong with the mirror itself. He was reassured to find it played the same trick. When he tried to show it to Mrs. Lincoln, however, the second reflection failed to appear.
Mrs. Lincoln took it as a sign that he was to have two terms in the Presidency, but she feared the paleness of one of the figures signified that he would not live through the second term.
'I am sure,' he said to his partner once, 'I shall meet with some terrible end...'

The Unseen Hand

To whom should we complain?

To Whom Should We Complain?

لمن نشكوا مآسينا ؟
To whom should we complain?
ومن يُصغي لشكوانا ويُجدينا ؟
And who listens to our complaints?
أنشكو موتنا ذلاً لوالينا ؟
Should we complain of our death by humiliation to our lord and master?
وهل موتٌ سيحيينا ؟!
And will death bring us back to life?
قطيعٌ نحنُ .. والجزار راعينا
We are a herd of sheep and the butcher is our shepherd
ومنفيون …… نمشي في أراضينا
And we are exiles…walking in our own lands
ونحملُ نعشنا قسرًا … بأيدينا
We carry our coffin unwillingly
ونُعربُ عن تعازينا …… لنا .. فينا
And express our condolences…from ourselves…to ourselves

Ahmed Matar _ revolutionary Iraqi poet 

From what I have read !

"No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future. Go easy on yourself for the outcome of all affairs is determined by Allah's Decree. If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come on your way, but if it is yours by destiny, from you it cannot flee.''

(Umar ibn al-Khattab r.a)

" Indeed, with every hardship comes ease, with every hardship comes ease."

(Surah94: 5-6)

وما من كاتب إلا سيفنـى .. 

و يبقي الدهر ما كتبت يداه

فلا تكتب بكفك غير شيء .. 

يسرك في القيامة أن تراه

And no writer but they will perish

Though time will keep what they wrote

So do not write anything with your hand except

That which will please you on the day of resurrection