A Kaleidoscope of Diamonds - Amazon S3

A Kaleidoscope of Diamonds

Volume One Finding a Pattern of Beauty in Life's Chaos, Pain and Passion

by Desmond Ford

Desmond Ford Publications

A KALEIDOSCOPE OF DIAMONDS Copyright ? 2012

Desmond Ford Publication

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Dedicated to my captive audiences, mainly college students, across several continents who patiently taught me so much.

Desmond Ford (Ph.D. MSU Mich., Ph.D. Manchester, England) has lectured on life's problems in any countries of the world over the last forty years. He is the author of a dozen books, and is well-known as the speaker over Good News Unlimited radio and TV programs. As a College professor, he has taught thousands of students in Australia and USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Miracle of a New Look Chapter 1: A Crazy Scene\The Dis-Ease of Life Chapter 2: Clues to the Diagnosis\A Pattern Emerges (Part One) Not Chance But Law Within and Without Chapter 3: Clues to the Diagnosis\A Pattern Emerges (Part Two) Surprised by Joy Chapter 4: Who's Looking at Whom? Chapter 5: The Physician Appears Next: (Part One) Ghost or God? Chapter 6: The Physician: (Part Two) The Shortcut Chapter 7: The Physician: (Part Three) The Light of the World Chapter 8: Watching the Physician's Panacea at Work (Part One) New Views and Good News Chapter 9: Watching the Physician's Panacea at Work (Part Two) Crisis and Transformation Chapter10: Watching the Physician at Work (Part Three) The Look Becomes a Gaze, and the Crooked Become Straight

Introduction

The Miracle of a New Look

How long is it since you felt like cheering, singing and dancing? By the time you are less than halfway through this little book, we think that's how it will be with you. These pages have some tremendous things to say (not original, but mostly forgottenthe author's contribution being but a mite to the treasury), things that vitally affect you today, tomorrow and forever. What's more, we can even guarantee doing something about those yesterdays you would gladly forget. Impossible? Read and see.

An hour with a book would have brought to his mind The secret it took him a whole year to find, The facts that he learned at enormous expense Were all on a library shelf to commence.

How to see from life's cul-de-sacs into infinity, a joyous infinitythat's the theme of this book. We offer you here Aladdin's lamp, Ali Baba's cave, Treasure Island, the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Apple of Hercules, Klondike's goldfields, the mystic philosophers' stone that could turn common metal into gold, and the Thread of Adrienne which showed the path through the labyrinth to the light.

A kaleidoscope suggests all of these. Bits of colored glass- that's what one sees when looking through a kaleidoscope. But lo, as you turn the cylinder, symmetrical patterns of wonder appear. Instead of chaos, there is beauty. Can it be that way with life? We each wander over life's battlefields and find it littered with the dead and the dying. We too are wounded and are desperately trying to find the answer to the question as to whether the disparate fragments of our experience have been projected by a universe of blind chance, or whether there is some pattern to it all. We do know that for some weary fighters, the battlefield has ultimately become the place of vision. They learned to see further through a tear than through a telescope. Can we learn that too?

Does not everything depend on how we turn the cylinder of vision? You have heard often of the two men who looked out of prison barsone saw mud and the other stars. Two boys belonging to the same family can construe life so differently. One sees mainly the sordid and the sorrowful, while the other working by his own private compass is guided by shining orbed idealism. Its gleam transforms for him all that is dark or dingy and enables him to labor on, whatever the discouragements.

Not only beauty, but truth is in the eye of the beholder. We habitually see with the eye and not through it. What is already present in the mind and heart determines what we make of all around us. Experience is not what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us. Some, like Admiral Nelson, view all around them with their glass eye and misinterpret reality. Others choose to wonder rather than worry when their twist of life's kaleidoscope yields surprising and joyous patterns.

Most of us admit to being cross and crooked at times under the bludgeoning of our days. Does not life seem cross with us? Does not contradiction and ambiguity

characterize much of what happens to us? The inner eye needs a map of Treasure Island, an Aladdin's lamp for rubbing, an Ali Baba's cave for enteringa magic kaleidoscope which will make ordinary things extraordinary, common things glorious, cruel things kind and bewildering fragments a jeweled pattern.

And in case all that sounds too ethereal and idealistic, let us hasten to add: this book may be the most practical book you have ever read. In a country where 350,000 people a year die of tobacco-related diseases, and where ninety percent of heavy smokers wish they could give up the habit; in a country where the majority of people past their thirties are overweight, and many of them dangerously so, and where millions would do almost anything to regain a normal appearance; in a world where it is estimated that seventy percent of diseases are diseases of choice, and where untold millions die decades earlier than they need, and where the major cause of death under thirty is auto accidents caused by lack of self-control; a world where successful marriages are almost as rare as hen's teethin such a country and in such a world, a distillation of the wisdom of a great host who mastered the art of living offers priceless treasures of inspiration and motivation.

Most of us can do almost anything that we want to do, but it's that wanting that's so often missing. The "wants" of good sense are usually overridden by the "want" of physical or psychological desire. "Carve the granite with a razor, moor the vessel with a thread of silk, then you may hope by knowledge and reason to curb those giantsthe passions and pride of man: So said John Henry Newman years ago, and his words were never more true than in our own day.

Grant us the will to fashion as we feel, Grant us the strength to labor as we know, Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel To strike the blow.

New knowledge we ask not, Knowledge thou bast lent But, Lord, the will; there lies our bitter need. Grant us to build above the deep intent The deed, the deed.

John Drinkwater

A large part of life is learning to tap resources of power to do what we ought. Only a totally new perspective from some magic kaleidoscope can offer the motivating powers of faith, hope and love which will transform the life of every possessor. Again you may be tempted to say, "I'm not interested in things I cannot see. Hope, faith and love are not tangible." True, but neither are ideas, and ideas are more real than anything else in our world. They literally make our world. Love is invisible and the presence or lack of it makes or mars each of us. In fact, all the real forces in the world are invisible, not just gravity, and electricity and thought.

Oh world invisible, we view thee, Oh world intangible, we touch thee, Oh world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we touch thee.

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