The Way To Inner Peace

By Jonathan Aquino

The original form of the magazine stories first appeared in Manila Bulletin and Philippine Star from 2005 to 2013 in my job as a freelance writer. I revised them all in the summer of 2016 in a way that they might become more rewarding to all the readers. We all need to find inspiration wherever we can, and I hope this will be a good place to start.

As human beings, we all respond to the emotional cadences of our collective music, as these stories deals with the universal human emotions that often show themselves in our day-to-day existence

The original form of the magazine stories first appeared in Manila Bulletin and Philippine Star from 2005 to 2013 in my job as a freelance writer. I revised them all in the summer of 2016 in a way that they might become more rewarding to all the readers. We all need to find inspiration wherever we can, and I hope this will be a good place to start.

As human beings, we all respond to the emotional cadences of our collective music, as these stories deals with the universal human emotions that often show themselves in our day-to-day existence

This volume is a young man's odyssey as a writer as told through an unforgettable collection of timeless stories. The author weaves the magic of his passion for the written word with a true artisan's deep love for his craft, creating stories that will stand the test of time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Aquino
• Release date: Dec 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310092565

Jonathan Aquino

Jonathan Aquino is the author of Fisherboy, A Wonderful World, A Celebration of Life and The Way To Inner Peace. His stories, essays, articles, poetry and special reports have appeared in various major publications. His Saturday night blog 2Rivers.blogspot.com is about music and individual self expression. His plays have aired on national radio in the Philippines. Jonathan's philosophy is summed up in Ralph Waldo Emerson's On Self-Reliance: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages."

Book preview

The Way To Inner Peace

Jonathan Aquino

Copyright 2013 Jonathan Aquino

Smashwords Edition

Introduction

Book I: The Magazine Stories

Book II: The Huggybear Diaries

Book III: A State of Grace

About The Author

Book 1:

The Magazine Stories

What Happens At The Hour of Our Death?

Do You Know A Leader When You See One?

Good Day Sunshine: How To Be A Positive Thinker

Can You Go With the Intuitive Flow?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Celebrities

The Way To Inner Peace

The Courage of My Convictions

Shay Cullen: Changing The World, One Child At A Time

My Journey With Shirley MacLaine

Knowledge Power From Wealth Wizards

Insights From My Virtual Mentors

The Seven Areas of Intelligence

The Top 10 Signs of Leadership

My Most Unforgettable Literary Characters

You Are A Child of the Universe

Forever Jung: A Study of Jungian Psychology In Pop Culture

Albert Einstein: A Mind Apart

Healing from Jeffrey Sachs

The Wonderful World of James Herriot

Jack Canfield Gets You Going

Why The World Needs Cory Aquino

Paulo Coelho’s Journeys To Enlightenment

Timeless Insights from Norman Vincent Peale

Og Mandino's Messages of Hope

Book 2:

The Huggybear Diaries

Chapter I: 2015

A Wonderful Journey

The Attitude of Gratitude

The Many Changes In My Life

Defying Death With Grace

Eternity

Something New In My Life

Everyday Is A New Beginning

On The Road With My Teachers

A Powerful Affirmation

Postcard To God

Birdsong Poetry

Oversoul Chronicles

Where Does Happiness Come From?

What Do You See Behind The Masks?

My Conversation With God

I Wonder How I Will Die?

Are You In A Friendly Universe?

My Own Fortress of Solitude

Finding Transcendence

Points of View

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

When I Go To The Moon

My Vortex of Creation

Chapter II: 2014

Being Charming and Having Fun

Seeing The Miracles of Nature

This I Believe To Be True

Prana with Open Arms

All The Time

Rammasun Morning Meditation

Wanna Be Somebody Else?

That Thing You Do

What Friends Are For

What Drives Me

Every Day Wisdom

Life Is About Abundance

Paradigm Shift

Chapter III. 2013

A Wonderful World

Life Goes On

My Inner Odyssey

One Family

Emotional Renewal

In The Arms of The Angels

As Above, So Below

Afterglow of Day

Remembrances of Heroes Past

Kaleidoscope Words

Nobody's Child No More

No Ordinary Moments

The People Who Changed My Life

Roads Less Taken

The Universe Is Unfolding

This Is My Autograph

Book 3:

A State of Grace

(A Story)

Introduction

Why did Richard Bach, Og Mandino and Mitch Albom became best-selling authors? I believe it is because people from all walks of life need to be inspired, to find some guidelines to help them cope with the uncertainties of everyday life.

The original form of the magazine stories first appeared in Manila Bulletin and Philippine Star from 2005 to 2013 in my job as a freelance writer. I revised them all in the summer of 2016 in a way that they might become more rewarding to all the readers. We all need to find inspiration wherever we can, and I hope this will be a good place to start.

As human beings, we all respond to the emotional cadences of our collective music, as these stories deals with the universal human emotions that often show themselves in our day-to-day existence

This volume is a young man's odyssey as a writer as told through an unforgettable collection of timeless stories. The author weaves the magic of his passion for the written word with a true artisan's deep love for his craft, creating stories that will stand the test of time.

Book I: The Magazine Stories

What Happens At The Hour of Our Death?

2009

The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt were held as the incarnations of the god Osiris. To prove worthy, they are sealed in a tomb deep inside the Great Pyramid. They suffocate, die and were revived. The white-robed priests record their experiences.

All who went through this ceremony tell of the same journey. A pharaoh would leave his body and glide through a tunnel toward a light. There he will face a life review – and a being of pure radiance.

One of the most consistent and well-documented phenomena in the world are the stories of near-death experiences (NDEs). If these are just fantasies or hallucinations, then recorded history itself would need to be rewritten.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is the hieroglyphic story of an NDE. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that the soul will meet the Radiance of the Fundamental Clear Light of Reality. The Aztec Song of the Dead is the poetic afterlife rebirth of the god-king Quetzalcoatl.

Saint Paul in his Second Book of Corinthians (12:1-4, TEV) tells of a Christian who went to Paradise and there he heard things that cannot be put into words. The Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg saw the Light of the Lord in his NDE. The Harvard scholar Dr. Carol Zaleski in her epic work Otherworldly Journeys compiled many stories of NDEs from various cultures from the medieval era to modern times, and they were all saying the same things.

Plato describes the NDE of a Greek warrior named Er in Book X of The Republic. Among the many spiritual leaders in history who have been transformed by their similar NDEs are the Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, the Native American chief Black Elk and the Hindu guru Paramahansa Yogananda.

Dr. Raymond Moody of the University of Virginia is the pioneer for the modern scientific study of the NDE phenomena. In 1975 he gathered his extensive research and personal interviews with hundreds of people who have had a near-death experience, that is, those who have been medically declared dead but have revived, in his landmark book Life After Life. His case studies came from diverse backgrounds – but they all tell the same story.

A man dies. He begins to realize he is floating above his physical body. He tries to talk to people but nobody can hear him. Then he feels himself moving rapidly away. He is now in what seems like a tunnel because at the end of it there a light, and that light shines with a brilliance that words cannot convey.

A sense of indescribable peace embraces him throughout the journey. He sees a being of pure light appear to welcome him, radiant with pure acceptance and unconditional love.

He is overwhelmed, says Moody, by intense feelings of joy, love and peace.

Then he sees all his loved ones who have died. They are together again in pure bliss. There is a kind of holographic, multidimensional, highly detailed review of his entire life. There is no judgment, only a complete and utter sense of wholeness, and he finds the answers to all the questions he had ever asked.

But he is told to go back because it is not yet his time. He tries to protest, wanting desperately to stay there forever.

Here in the land of the living, he couldn't express those experiences in words. Some people would scoff at him, so he stops trying. Yet all those who know him can see his profound transformation. He now possesses an unshakable inner peace and a deep reverence for life. He can now find forgiveness for all those who have hurt him. Above all, he is no longer afraid of death.

Today the leading authority on the field is Dr. Melvin Morse of the George Washington University. He has been studying the NDEs of kids since the eighties with his trailblazing Seattle Study. What he learned is what the ancient wise men have known all along: we should never fear death.

There is a light we will all experience after death, he says in Closer To The Light: Learning From The Near-Death Experiences of Children co-written by Paul Perry, and the light represents joy, peace and unconditional love.

Can a skeptic be convinced they are real? Can a man born blind see Van Gogh's flowers? The greater the ignorance, as Sir William Osler, M.D., says, the greater the dogmatism. You can't open the eyes of those who want to keep them closed. The most you can do is to present the facts.

The sense of awareness during NDEs is the direct opposite of the mental confusion induced by narcotics, halothane, surital, nitrous oxide and Nembutal. The vivid memory of the event is the direct opposite of the amnesia caused by Valium and other anesthetics. On top of which, these drugs do not cause hallucinations.

The sense of bliss is the direct opposite of the effects of morphine and heroin, which includes nausea, among others. The sense of unconditional love from the being of light is the direct opposite of the paranoia cause by marijuana, cocaine, PCP, amphetamines and barbiturates.

Moreover, these core elements of NDEs are never experienced by those who use the 60s hippie drug LSD (lysergic acid).

There is no evidence in scientific literature that the brain produces endorphins or any other neurotransmitters during death. The medical records of patients who had NDEs show that almost none of them suffered hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation.

A significant number of people with NDEs were delivered by C-section, which disproves Carl Sagan’s hypothesis that NDEs are subconscious recollections of being born.

Wilder Penfield, the father of neurosurgery, says it best. Whether there is such a thing as communication between man and God, and whether energy can come to the mind of man from an outside source after his death is for each individual to decide for himself. Science has no such answers.

Do You Know A Leader When You See One?

2009

In the classic ballad You Made Me Live Again, Janet Basco sings of being lost in the dark with her lonely broken heart. Then someone came along, took her home and made her his own.

A person who inspires you to be your best, who raise you up to more than you can be, is a true leader. The difference between a true leader and someone in a position of leadership is the difference a microchip and a potato chip. Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi have never been in the corporate world yet they changed the world. Here are some of the ways to identify and emulate authentic leadership based on The Motivating Team Leader by Lewis E. Losoncy.

Leaders emphatize with the personal circumstances of others. The late U.S. Secretary of State will be revered forever as the man who drew up what came to be known as the Marshall Plan, the unprecedented aid program that revived the shattered economies of post-War Europe, and shielded most of it from Soviet domination. Marshall's personal discipline and his fearless debates in matters of tactics and logistics with the equally formidable President Franklin Roosevelt have become legendary.

But it was Marshall's human touch, the way he fought for the welfare of the troops and his acts of kindness as he reached out to orphans and widows, that made his legacy all the more profound and unforgettable.

Leaders help people find a higher purpose. Thomas Dooley inspired generations of medical volunteers by the way he spent his life saving countless lives in the most primitive areas of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The young doctor tried to recruit as many as he could. A woman named Barbara Boyd turned him down, saying that she wanted a glamorous career as an airline flight attendant. She achieved her dream, and years later, they met again in a flight that changed her life.

Tom Dooley told her that teaching a child in an isolated Lao village to brush his teeth is more meaningful than jumping up every twenty seconds to give some grouchy passenger a glass of scotch. Then, weeks later, at the prime of his life at and at the height of his popularity at 34, Tom Dooley died of cancer on January 1961. Barbara was stricken with grief and regret, remembering the last time they saw each other. The day after she heard the news, she volunteered in one his medical missions. She then realized that she found her true calling – just as Tom told her she would – in the remote backwaters of the Third World.

Leaders reframe people's roles so they would see their full significance. When a pope dies, the Vatican's de facto leader during the papal election is called the camerlengo. In Dan Brown's bestselling novel Angels & Demons, the camerlengo is Fr. Carlo Ventresca, who broke tradition by entering the secret conclave along with BBC journalists. The young priest had a shocking revelation: they are being held hostage by an ancient anti-Roman brotherhood called the Illuminati. Somewhere in the Vatican is an explosive device powered by anti-matter, the most destructive force in the universe. Time was running out.

He confessed that science has won over religion, but the prize was a world without meaning and purpose. The Church, however imperfect her leaders, is still needed today. When he asked them all to pray with him, the millions of people around the world, stunned by the live broadcast, knelt with him in prayer and human solidarity.

Good Day Sunshine: How To Be A Positive Thinker

2007

Joanne Kathleen Rowling is the wizard behind the spellbinding Harry Potter saga but the media has bewitched her image. She did write mostly in cafes and there have been times when she was broke, says the creator of Hogwarts, Quidditch and The Daily Prophet in a Reader's Digest interview. But her struggles have been emphasized too much that she seemed to have been hopelessly doomed. The write-ups ignored her degree in French, her middle-class background and her strategy of working as a