It is no little wisdom for you...

This morning I got an email from from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By as I've subscribed to The Thought for the Day, by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. I like to share the email to you:

"It is no little wisdom for you to keep yourself in silence and in good peace when evil words are spoken to you, and to turn your heart to God and not to be troubled with the judgment of others."

~ Thomas a Kempis

Most of us appreciate praise, but it is disastrous to become dependent on it. If we are going to allow our security to be bolstered up by the praise, appreciation, and applause of others, we are done for. I have heard about a well-known movie star who goes to sleep at night with a tape of recorded applause playing. This is going to make him more and more insecure.

Why should we get agitated if someone ignores us? There are, after all, advantages to being ignored. We can go anywhere in freedom. Nobody recognizes us - how good it is! In life, there are occasions when we are ignored and sometimes forgotten. That is the time for us to remind ourselves, "Why do I need anybody's attention?" This attitude can be cultivated skillfully.

Even those of us who are the most sensitive to praise and appreciation can learn to be so secure within ourselves that the word rejected can be expelled from our dictionary. The one person who will never reject us is the divine Self within, and that is enough to make up for all the rejections we may have to undergo at the hands of everyone else. ***

That's how they live in a mutual relationship

I've just found an article about mutual relationship between trees and ants. It is not new to us, but it resounds that we live with them and we can learn from them about our living as a community.





Another article about ants on this blog: Teacher of Achievement.

Simple heart

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Nature is what we know - Yet have not art to say - So impotent our wisdom is to her simplicity” ~ Emily Dickinson

To learn wisdoms from the nature we should put on “simplicity” (simplicitas cordis means “simple heart”). By nature everything comes from simple matter. Due to this simplicity we often do not pay attention to progresses that really happen to things around us. Do you notice: the growth of the grass in the yard, flowing water in small river, shaping clouds in the sky, lining ants on the wall, falling leaves from their tress, sunshine in the morning, buzzing bugs over there, wind blow, etc.? As far as we do not notice them, we do not realize that they could be so special.

Simple is beautiful. However beautiful could be not so simple. We have to find something special from a subject to say that it is beautiful. To detect such of sense of beauty we may notice what Socrates said, “Wisdom begins in wonder!” and “The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible!” and again “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” I hope you could understand the words “simple”, “little” and “young” in the term of wisdom.

This modern world has been supported and accelerated by many inventions of machines. Theories to explain natural phenomena have also led humankind to know deeper about this planet and its facts. But those happened since ones did not let simple facts go away from their attention. Put Isaac Newton for instance. He was so astonished by an apple dropping down from its tree, and then he tried to formulate the fact into a theory of gravitation! What a special dropping apple!

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” ~ Isaac Newton