ISLAM

I have finished reading a book - "My Voyage into Islam". The author is an English woman who is now living in New Zealand. This book is simply her autobiography giving accounts of her Marriage with Willy, a Fijian Muslim and her eventually conversion to Islam. She gave a lot of explanations to the Islamic practices in the second half of the book. These practices include the question of Muslim's polygamy, woman's dresses and position in Islam, Ramadan, Hajj (Pilgrimage to Mecca) and so on.

It is interesting to know that Muslims believe there are two angels with every human being. One on the left shoulder and the other on the right shoulder. The angel on the right records that person's good deeds while the one on the left records all the wrong doings. So if you are doing something bad next time, cover your left shoulder!

COUNSELLING

I have just finished reading the book "Basic Personal counselling"written by David Geldard. I feel this is a very good book in introducing a lot of counselling basic skills. It gives very brief and concise account of the Counselling "micro-skills" and also the "Macro-skills" which is the whole counselling process. The book also touches the telephone counselling and cirisis intervention. The last part of the book deals with some particular problems in counselling such as counselling angry client, depressed client, grief and loss counselling and counselling the suicidal client.

The book is so good that it arouses my interest in studying counselling and absorbs me to the fantasy of becoming a Counseller. Although it might not be practical for me to study a professional Counselling qualification, I feel good to have some knowledge of Counselling that I may one day use it to help people around me or even myself.

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

I have finished reading the above book written by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who is well known in her study of dying and death. She is well known for her findings in respect of the emotional responses of terminally ill person. According the Dr. Elisabeth, people will usually undergo the stages of anger, denial, bargain, depressed and acceptance.

This book is nonetheless her own autobiography, recording her life and her work in the past 60 or 70 years. She talked about NDEs (near death experiencea), her encouter with guides who are spiritual beings, her suffering due to paralysis caused by strokes. What her conclusion is the purpose of life is to give and accept unconditional love. Everyone grows by learning to love. If a person does not learn the lesson, he or she will come back to learn again. I interpret this as reincarnation. It seems her viewpoint is very similar to another well known NDE writter - Dr. Raymond Moody. He also studied NDEs and used hyposis to regress a person to his previous life or lives.

I feel this is the very center of New age movement that it talks about the presence of God (irrespective of what religion it is) and love. There is reincarnation and there seems to be no final judgement after death as propounded by Christianity. The title of the book "The wheel of life" speaks for itself.

END OF LEARNING 2.0

I am glad to have come to the end of Learning 2.0. I do think this is an awesome learning experience. If not because of doing exercises of learning 2.0, I shall probably not know what is RSS, bloglines, Flickr, del.icio.us, Myspace, Wikis, tags, Zoho writer, podcast, ebook and many other Web 2.0 applications.

I had actually completed the learning 2.0 two or three months ago. I then reviewed my work and completed those parts that I had missed out. Perhaps I have not done everything 100% correct, I can say I have tried my best and I did learn a lot of computer stuff after doing all the excercises.

I shall keep writing my blogs and share it with others.

Cheers!