Friday, 6 May 2011

a Moment for Wisdom…

DAILY WISDOM:

“What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.

Epictetus

When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough.

When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.

Fen-Yang

Personal Wisdom:

·
How good are you at spotting the truth? Detecting  falsehood?

·
Do you ever delude yourself? When? How?  Why?

·
Are you aware of “reality”, as opposed to the appearance of reality?

·
Does your thinking ever get in the way of “reality”?

·
What do you doubt about yourself?
Others?

Societal Wisdom:

·
Is the society in which you live deluded? How? Why?

·
What would it take to wake up from societal delusion?

·
Do you have any experiences of societies that have awakened from delusion? (I am thinking about post-WWII German society, where the “good German” realized the
atrocities that had been committed in their name. Do you have any other examples?)

a Moment with Sharif…

Greetings;

This is about perception, awareness and reality.

We all have the experience of something appearing one way, when the reality is the other way.

Actually, there is no objective “reality”, only the subjective experiences, ones that each of us take through our neural network and piece together to determine what is “real”. (Enough of us share these subjective experiences to weave together a consensus “reality”.) But, most of us don’t treat the world that way – we act like what we see/experience is “real”… although others may have a very different perception of the world, their own actions and our behavior.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I took an action with the “best” of intentions, only to see that action get interpreted by someone else’s neural network as “bad” or “evil”.

Fen-Yang’s quote reminds us that “reality” is not found in books and writings. “Reality” is not in the land of concepts. Once we have freed our mind from concepts, our libraries full of books are at best supportive, at worst interferences with “what is”.

Fen-Yang’s quote reminds me of another, this one by Jellaladin Rumi:

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other, doesn’t make any sense.

The world is too full to talk about. Even one word is too much. Let’s just lie down in the
grass…

Peace,

Sharif

Acknowledgments:

All photos by Sharif Abdullah, unless otherwise noted.