The source of today's personal and commune conflicts
I was experimenting with my stumble tool of stumbleupon.com, what an amazing resource. The websites and blogs that I've discovered since trying out this tool have let me to bits of extra useful knowledge. And a moment ago I came across this, which provides deep insight into the personal and commune problems experienced today:
The paradox of our age
- We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time. - We have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment;
- More experts, but more problems;
- More medicines but less healthiness.
- We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbour.
- We built more computers to hold more copies than ever,
But have less real communication; - We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality. - These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
- Tall mean but short characters;
- Steep profits but shallow relationships.
- It’s a time when there is much in the window
But nothing in the room.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
_Email this to a friend by clicking on the 'envelope' below_
7 comments:
I like the paradoxes of our age-quite interesting. Sadly they (paradoxes) cause us not to not have a clear sense of vision and "insanity" in our community. We are growing sick even though we can prescribe the right medicine. We know the right foods to eat but we eat fastfood.
It aint anonymous-it's dizaya-dizaya.blogspot.com. Had a challenge leaving a comment.
Dizaya-dizaya, isn't that sad. That we are the most intelligent generation,the most informed and advanced, yet the saddest and most gullible - hurting ourselves and communities in turn. But I'm sure a few hear and there are getting it right. And from an individual level, we can start a ripple that can catch on to a mass.
Will be checking out dizaya-dizaya blog right away.
Hi Izz - howz everything? Hope all is well. I think it is so important to learn from people like the Dalai Lama - the answers are many times right in front of our noses - and still - most of the time we fail to notice them.
May be you have read the interview Ishtar did with me - in which I say - that "something is wrong with the first world" - and what we call the developed world is actually much more backward in many ways than some of the "second world" and "third world" cultures or the people/cultures that came before us.
These questions have been on my mind for a while (of course especially the one about the value of having degrees) - to figure out how things got so out of balance.
Yesterday I was at the Live Earth concert - whith many of my favourite musicians performing - during the concert there was a lot of talk about the ridiculuously wasteful life we all live - even though we all know it is not right - something makes us make all these mistakes again and again.
I think it'd be interesting to have a chat with all your readers about situations where they decided not to choose the "wrong" choice and walked the path that was the right one (even if they had to do it alone).
Izz, I think you should read an article written by my father twenty years ago, when the Eden project had just been started. It talks the values we've lost in our "modern" society, about impossibility in our eyes of the poor and the cripples laughing. He writes:
"I belong to a generation that has become disillusioned. It used to march and believe in new slogans that were very simplistic - but not any more. Our news is filled with bad news. We love to read about crime, we love to read about corruption. We love to read about the tragedies of the world, but there is one tragedy that we do not really like to read about. That is the tragedy of so many people suffering in a time when we believe ourselves to be civilised. We do not really want to be reminded of this. [...] Why such a world view? Why are people seen as different? Well, it is not so much their colour any longer, but it is more the way they live and the way they think that we do not understand, their priorities and values. Sometimes we are bothered by the mere thought of them surviving a life without any material pleasures. It reminds us of something fundamentally wrong in our societies where people are jumping off roofs and killing themselves with needles, when people who do not even have the basic necessities of life seem to have joy and laughter, when crippled are happy and spread their joy, when the hopeless are full of hope and confidence and when we who should really believe in the future seem so disillusioned and have totally lost faith."
You'll find the full text at the Eden website. It's a controversial piece, but I think you'll enjoy it. Good food for thought and gives a good insight in the perspective that drives us in our work in the Tanout region.
http://www.eden-foundation.org/project/articles_lost_treasures_of_eden.html
Greetings,
Esther/Ishtar/Star
:-)
PS: Compliments once again on a good post!
Your thoughts on these matters, which matter very much, are extremely fulfilling to say the least. It's more than humbling to know that there are people out there who do put in the effort to get it right. Those who travel the path least favoured by the crowds, for the ways of the crowds are littered with comfort that is full of emptiness from within. Everything in the road of the crowd is so pretty and full from the outside - almost to make a bedazzling display that lures more followers, but the least travelled narrow path provides the kind of happines, no infact, joy, that is infinite and not determined by material attachment. A joy that depends only on itself. Pity that we all have such an innate ability to recognise such joy but we do not accept it.
Thanks Star for the suggested article, and I feel that it hinders quite a bit on the parable that I was engaged in writing in the 48 hours of my dry fast during the weekend, and thanks for wishing me luck, I got it right and I feel new.
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