understanding

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)

Because it__ no longer enough to be a decent person. It__ no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what__ going on in his heart and mind.

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.

Truth is only relative to those that ignore hard evidence.

Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.

There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine.

Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Let our information and social technologies raise awareness and not propaganda, build connections and not passive-aggression.

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

Love is a chemical reaction,But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science.And though a body cannot exist without a soul,It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy,But science cannot decipher its elements.Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love,But even the most advanced physicianCannot prescribe it as medicine.INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem

They say that wisdom comes from suffering. This is not true. Wisdom comes from having unconditional empathy for all mankind. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you. If you do not feel love for all mankind, nor see everyone around you as a valuable human and an extension of yourself, then you will never feel real empathy. And if you do not have empathy, then you will not gain, learn and remember valuable knowledge from your experiences, or those around you, so that you one day become wise. Yet most importantly, wisdom comes from having a good memory. If you do not remember anything, or are so disconnected from basic humanism to even care to dissect lessons to be gained from every experience in your life and from those around you - using simple reason and the juggling of feelings, then wisdom will forever remain a faraway planet to you.