barış sami özgür

N: Welcome. How would you like us to call you? Barış, Sami, Özgür which one? Why do you have three names?

B: One of them is actually… “Barış Özgür” which was given as compound. That's what my parents decided when I was born. Then we had our “second birth”; then they saw Sami suiting us. This name also has a meaning; It means “hearer". We are trying to move on with our lives with the effort to turn this skill attributed to "hearing" into competence.

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“people can hear the state of a human, they can hear the state of the world, they can hear the state of the universe, and if they go further, they can hear the state of God.”

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N: NWhat do people hear? Right now, for example, when I focus, I can hear the sound of the wind, there is a construction ahead, I can hear its sound… How exactly and what do you mean hearing?

B: I think there is nothing that one cannot hear. Moreover, one cannot hear only with the ears. It can also be heard with the eyes and the skin. So they can hear something beyond the wind, beyond the tree. If we expand this a little bit; maybe then one can hear the need of another person. People can hear the state of a human, they can hear the state of the world, they can hear the state of the universe, and if they go further, they can hear the state of God. Sometimes they say to me, "You speak too philosophically". I hope to be able to integrate these things we talked about into life somehow. I have attended many seminars for self-development throughout my life, but I have learned that a person’s developing another person is not possible. When a person is born, they are born with a non-written or non-verbal contract. They surrender first to a doctor, then surrender to their mother. Then they learn to surrender to the most appropriate laws and rules that humanity has found, to surrender to an education system, to surrender to a teacher… We do not do these consciously, we say that these are things that can be surrendered anyway. Mother, father, brother, sister, close environment, social rules… But there is another type of surrender that people probably need. In my opinion, this type of surrender should be such thing that should be universal, something that can encompass all people; It should not conflict with any political view or law. For example, if we surrender to being unprejudiced, if we try to keep the beauty itself alive by noticing all the ugliness in each other, the parts we don't like, our worries and the energy that we reflect on each other. It's practical, learnable and applicable.