New Group 'Wisdom Questions', St Augustine and Perennial Philosopy

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'Wisdom Questions'

"Wisdom is the faculty of making the use of knowledge, a combination of discernment, judgement, sagacity and similar powers. If knowledge is the accumulation of facts and intelligence the development of reason, wisdom is emotional and spiritual discernment. More than knowledge, it is the right application of knowledge in moral and spiritual matters, in handling dilemmas, in negotiating complex relationships. Wisdom is nine-tenths a matter of being wise in time. Most of us are often too wise after the event! It is insight into the heart of the matter." Wise people see beyond the facts and figures. They avoid problems before they occur. Wisdom is gained through experience, patience and listening.       Definition by Evan Owens CEO of CentreSource - HERE

Some questions to 'kick-off'

Does anyone want to make out a case for the wisdom of woman being different to, or the same as, the wisdom of men?

Is science the only method for connecting to reality?

Do the great wisdom traditions really teach the same about what it is to be wholly & fully human - in the world with others - in relation to the mysterious Whole?

Are the arts a means to reality - or just self indulgence?

If we base the education of our children on whole-person leaning might they contribute toward a better world?

Do we agree with Evan Owens in his definition (see above) ?

Are (some) children wiser than many experienced adults - if yes why & how is this?

Some friends and I are starting a new group - both locally in Brighton and online.  Online details below.

The suggested group title is a play on a) the wisdom we have (should) question - ourselves, our world and reality - AND we can have fun, enjoyment and learning in framing questions to ask of 'our accumulated, or realized, wisdom'!

THE WIDER CONTEXT OF PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

Here is an ancient poetic summation of the state of being human, and implicitly of The Perennial Philosophy -  from the Bhagavad Gita;

“Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the

individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches of the

self same tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits of the

tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.

“The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the

divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he

recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own true Self, and beholds his

glory, he grieves no more.”

This so beautifully describes .... well what do you think?

Stunningly just yesterday I discovered that St Augustine wrote.......... 

"The fact, which is now called the Christian Religion," he boldly says, with the earlier Apologists, "existed among the ancients, and was never lacking from the origin of the human race."  - 

C C Martindale SJ -  SOURCE

Those who want to dig deeper can compare the above two quotations with the contemporary re-presentation of Perennial Philosophy in Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy or Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now or Stillness Speaks – or Ken Wilber or Karen Armstrong, or Wayne Teasdale, or Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thomas Merton or Shaikh Helminski etc. - each I suugest speaks in different language and cultural clothing but teach the same message?

-0-

This is St Augustine not me! -  Lol

Picture source and helpful list of facts on Augustine & Aquinas by Jeffrey Hays - HERE

The 'Wisdom Questions group ON-LINE

My contributions to this group's interests will go to my general blog - http://sunwalked.wordpress.com/ - along with my other core projects

1 whole-person learning, 

2 photographic art, 

3 social justice, 

4 inter-spirituality

5 transforming IPF, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis into something life-enhancing

i.e. http://sunwalked.wordpress.com/ is a metablog of all my blogs

however the dedicated site for Wisdom Questions and inter-spirituality is - http://universalistspirit.wordpress.com/ - you can comment on or add 'gems' to either or both!

All good wishes

Roger

TAGS:  wisdom, wisdom questions, Christianity, St Augustine, new group, women and wisdom, universalism, interspirituality, inter-spirituality, interfaith, Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now,  Stillness Speaks,  Ken Wilber, Karen Armstrong,  Wayne Teasdale, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton, Shaikh Helminski, knowledge,  whole-person learning, photographic art, social justice, IPF,

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The future of cancer research - but what about IPF?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mAGhNhrHMJs#!

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Bob Thurman: We can be Buddhas

The first American to be ordained a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama, Robert A.F. Thurman is a scholar, author and tireless proponent of peace.

[ted id=130 width=640 height=360]

Thank you. And I feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me. I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaishali, and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him. All the young people, actually, from the city. The old fogeys don't come because they're mad at Buddha, because when he came to their city he accepted -- he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him, from whoever it is, and the local geisha, a movie-star sort of person, raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first.

So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: "He's supposed to be religious and all this. What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks," and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him. They wouldn't go listen to him. But the young people all came. And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground. And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes.

And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets. So they don't -- when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky -- they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding. They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that.

He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnectionand interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected. And then Leilei -- I know his other name -- told us about interconnection, and how we're all totally interconnected here, and how we've all known each other. And of course in the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times in many, many lifetimes in the past. And I didn't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment. I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet.

And therefore it will become intolerable -- what compassion is, is where it will become intolerable for us, totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoyingthe life of the mind or whatever it is, and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place, or they're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth. It just becomes intolerable. With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.

And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do. Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer. We do enjoy our misery in a certain way. We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there. And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each one tries to get out of their own, and ultimately it fails of course, and then we're back into this thing.

Because our egocentric perception -- from the Buddha's point of view, misperception -- is that all we are is what is inside our skin. And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different. And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right? You know, someone sitting next to you in a seat -- that's OK because you're in a theater, but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you, you'd freak out. What do they want from me? Like, who's that?And so you wouldn't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it's you versus the universe -- that's all Buddha discovered. Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it? Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world? Who's going to get enough out of the world? Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings -- if you're different from all the other beings?

So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually,knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings. You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel.Luckily, they say -- I still am not sure -- but luckily, they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature, they say, "Oh who would really want to be compassionate? How awful! I'm so miserable on my own. My head is aching.My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I'm never satisfied. I never have enough, even if I'm a billionaire, I don't have enough. I need a hundred billion." So I'm like that.Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering. It would be terrible.

But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. When you're no longer locked in yourself,and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing.

You know, we really learned everything in the '60s. Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then. I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange. It's totally strange. The Dalai Lama always likes to say -- he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know -- and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. Like, even when you're having a good time, when is the good time over? The good time is over when you think, how good is it? And then it's never good enough.

I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time. I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that. I wish he'd been there to hear that. He once told me -- he looked kind of sad; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots. He looked a little sad, because he said, well, a hundred years ago, they went and took everything away from the haves. You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth.They took it all away by violence, saying they were going to give it to everyone, and then they were even worse. They didn't help at all.

So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today? And so then he looks at me. So I said, "Well, you know, you're all in this yourself. You teach: it's generosity," was all I could think of. What is virtue? But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly. Even though his people are being genocided -- and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. I won't even say what they do. But he feels it. And yet he's very jolly. He's extremely jolly.

Because when you open up like that, then you can't just -- what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed. Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man. She scared us with the lava man is coming, then the tsunami is coming, but then finally there were flowers and trees, and it was very beautiful. It's really lovely.

So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion. The human being is almost out of time. The human being is compassion because what is our brain for? Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac. But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is, he will, he did. He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings. And he would have tremendous fun doing that.

So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of, how happy am I, aaaa

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A DECLARATION OF ONENESS CONSCIOUSNESS Sixteen Points drafted by Ervin Laszlo

1.    I am part of the world. The world is not outside of me, and I am not outside of the world. The world is in me, and I am in the world.

2.    I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with all living things. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the web of life on the planet.

3.    I am part of society, and society is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with my fellow humans. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the community of humans on the planet.

4.    I am more than a skin-and-bone material organism: my body, and its cells and organs are manifestations of what is truly me: a self-sustaining, self-evolving dynamic system arising, persisting and evolving in interaction with everything around me.

5.    I am one of the highest, most evolved manifestations of the drive toward coherence and wholeness in the universe. All systems drive toward coherence and wholeness in interaction with all other systems, and my essence is this cosmic drive. It is the same essence, the same spirit that is inherent in all the things that arise and evolve in nature, whether on this planet or elsewhere in the infinite reaches of space and time.

6.    There are no absolute boundaries and divisions in this world, only transition points where one set of relations yields prevalence to another. In me, in this self-maintaining and self-evolving coherence- and wholeness-oriented system, the relations that integrate the cells and organs of my body are prevalent.  Beyond my body other relations gain prevalence: those that drive toward coherence and wholeness in society and in nature.

7.    The separate identity I attach to other humans and other things is but a convenient convention that facilitates my interaction with them. My family and my community are just as much “me” as the organs of my body. My body and mind, my family and my community, are interacting and interpenetrating, variously prevalent elements in the network of relations that encompasses all things in nature and the human world.

8.    The whole gamut of concepts and ideas that separates my identity, or the identity of any person or community, from the identity of other persons and communities are manifestations of this convenient but arbitrary convention. There are only gradients distinguishing individuals from each other and from their environment and no real divisions and boundaries. There are no “others” in the world: we are all living systems and we are all part of each other.

9.    Attempting to maintain the system I know as “me” through ruthless competition with the system I know as “you” is a grave mistake: it could damage the integrity of the embracing whole that frames both your life and mine. I cannot preserve my own life and wholeness by damaging that whole, even if damaging a part of it seems to bring me short-term advantage. When I harm you, or anyone else around me, I harm myself.

To read the whole declaration click HERE

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'Stillness' talk by Eckhart Tolle

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Test 2

Test 2

Voice 001.amr Listen on Posterous

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More than 1 million prostituted girls in India

India: breaking the supply chain of human beings                  (read full article HERE)

Ruchira Gupta [1] 2 December 2012

There are more than one million prostituted girls in India. "Only when the buyers of sex are arrested will the brothels close down; and only when the brothels are closed will we be safe,” Uma Das, speaking to Hillary Clinton in India 

When President Barak Obama recently called human trafficking “one of the great human rights causes of our time” and vowed to take steps to end it, I felt greatly re-assured that our work for the last decade and more to end sex trafficking would gain momentum.

Sex trafficking is a billion dollar industry [17] in India that is aided and abetted by entrenched attitudes of patriarchy, gender discrimination and a lax legal system. In Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata the great cities of India, girls as young as 9 years of age, are raped by eight to ten men every night. A million girls and women are forced into living in inhuman conditions of brutal violence and repeated rapes because there is a market created by men who buy sex. The Central Bureau of Investigation says that there were 3 million prostituted females in India of which 1.2 million are girls [18]. And the National Human Rights Commission of India [19] says that the numbers of the trafficked are going up and the ages coming down [20] with the average age of recruitment into prostitution of an Indian female between nine and twelve years.

Research has established that trafficking of women and children has grown in  leaps and bounds because the sex trade often takes place under the facade of a legal venture.  Massage parlours, tourism companies, ‘Friendship clubs’ and even the institution of marriage have all become instruments of sex trafficking.

I was inspired to found Apne Aap Women Worldwide in 2002 after working closely with twenty two courageous young women in prostitution in the brothels of Mumbai. I first met them in the late 1990s when I was the field producer for the Emmy Award winning documentary, The Selling of Innocents[21] .The documentary made visible the fact that prostitution was not simply poor women eking out an existence and migrant lonely men getting sex in exchange, but a whole system based on pimps, brothel owners, recruiters, transporters and money-lenders running a supply chain of human beings. I leveraged the Emmy and turned it into a road show [22], taking it to the United Nations and the United States Senate[1] to create and change policies to end sex-trafficking.

[23]Bihar Apne Aap self empowerment group

Though the twenty-two founding women have since passed away from hunger, suicide, and AIDS-related complications, Apne Aap’s work continues. Small self-empowerment groups of ten women meet at Apne Aap community centres across the country to access education, improve their livelihood and receive legal rights training. Today, Apne Aap’s work reaches over 15,000 women and girls and continues to strive towards making the vision of the founding twenty-two women come true.

  (read full article HERE)

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