There is real danger ahead, character testing times. Perhaps we will turn inward, and in so doing, turn our backs on our fellow man. I wonder how many of us will end up embracing philosophies that are anti human. If these philsophies are anti-human, they are essentially anti-social or sociopathic. We could end up becoming the monster we are trying to defeat. Where are we heading? Where is our grief about the present state of affairs leading us, ideologically and spiritually?
From Common Ground:
I’ve heard from so many people who are disgusted by the ascendancy of bullshit and hypocrisy over decency and truth. And even those who avoid the newspaper and evening news are feeling a free-floating anxiety about the world’s state.
They may disguise it with cynical humour or ironic distance, but at its source, it’s about grief. I feel it myself. But there’s an odd thing about grief as an emotional state. It’s only a degree of separation, a hair-breadth away, from joy.
Knowledge, in some esoteric traditions, is considered a false crown. I suspect that it’s not cleverness, but compassion, that will test our fitness as a species. I have no academic citations handy for this, no journalistic references. The closest I can come is an anecdote from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, about one of the twentieth century’s great minds, Aldous Huxley.
As the author of Brave New World lay dying, someone asked what he had learned from a lifetime of studying spiritual practices and traditions, as well as his own experiences. His response: “It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.
http://commonground.ca/iss/0707192/cg192_future.shtml