Wisdom, Not Information!

I continue to be disturbed by the lemming-like rush into oblivion over the fashionable craving for information. With the booming growth of the Internet facts are just a click away. Sufficient to say that information, and much of it just trivial and useless, abounds.Our media cannot get enough dirty underwear.Almost weekly we read of the most amazing breakthroughs in science and technology. We can get so excited when media reinforces such excitement, and for a while we might imagine things will be better. But our expectations are quickly frustrated and we relapse into the doldrums.We remain unsatisfied.

Why? Because we often give our time, priority and value to the wrong things. We allow others to set the agenda for us and we might simply go along with it beacuse we're presented with something new and which adds a sort of our necessary need for variety. Often, anything is better than nothing. Like children on summer vacation, we are lazy and have have forgotten our genius for invention and self-amusement. We live in an age where we continually expect to be entertained because reality is too hard to bear!Well, the bad news is that reality will continue to get harder as we continue to make the wong choices. Why do we not publicly celebrate the breakthroughs in the human heartand soul? Why are our newspapers and conversations not filled with compliments rather than malicious gossip?

We are the unwise-intelligents; the savant stupids.We buy personal development books by the warehouse, but little changes. Strategies abound, yet the core information we have about ourselves stops any long-term progress because we continue to upload and download rather than offload.

We talk of "getting real" as if we truly understood what the term means, while we explore avenues which take us further away from where we should be. Unable to disce
the real from the counterfeit, we operate our hamster-like treadmills at at accelerating pace until we come off or the wheel breaks! This is the destination of too much useless information within us.

There is a link between fulfillment and knowledge. We have to start making some critical choices regarding why we keep getting things wrong as individuals and societies. Why, for instance we can talk to each other through a box or a handset while thousands of miles apart, yet we cannot be civil and loving with each in the same room other. Technology continues to amaze us with its ability to sing and dance, and yet it is accelerating away from our real needs at lightening speed. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, our technology continues to escape our secular and counterfeit theologies.

The truth is we already have all the information we need in order to become more compassionate, settled and loving.It has been around for thousands of years, but we esteem it lightly because we are not courageous enough to live well and for each other. Spiritually, we have not yet evolved beyond a stumbling toddlerhood; like "cool" teenagers we continue to think we know more than we do, yet could learn.

Having entered a new millennium in the year 2000 or 2001 - whichever you prefer - the truth is that our expectations for a better world continue to be unrealised, primarily because our visions are flawed, selfish and materially based! Immersed in the thick of thin things, we just manage to keep our lips above what threatens to suck us down. We want more, but know not what is best for us, so we choose more of what already exists and which is easily available: things, and in all of its material categories.

If we do not learn from the mistakes of the past we are not only doomed to relive them at a more terrifying and destructive intensity, but we are doomed to teach them to our children, born and unborn. We speak of values and yet do not question if they are the right ones to have, or whether they are tainted or diluted from their pure forms. We use language without realising its power to build or obliterate. We are far too careless with our lives.

Over the past few decades we have embraced self-help as a religion but fail to see its real foundation is based on helping others and a fierce commitment to virtue, despite what the crowd says. A better life will not come if we are not prepared personally and as a group of responsible and selfless workers to wear out our lives by thinking and doing good.

And this is where we encounter the real difference between information and wisdom: information will only tell you about opinions, theories and the little we know of what exists; wisdom, or the guiding truths of experience, will enable and empower each of us to make better choices so that we can use our passions to create and sustain rather than to destroy. We need no longer preserve a tenuous status-quo which continues to go nowhere, despite the illusory trappings of progress. Ultimately, we must choose between facts or timeless values. It will take time and an expression of our deepest conce
s to step back from the precipice and ask questions such as: What is right? What is the best for all of us? How can we stay focused on the good?

We must truly begin to ask whether information will nourish us rather than, like hay, merely fill our bellies. Are we better off using our pooled resources on developing what we most need, or pursue what is possible, but cosmetic and useless?

We do not need to look for the answers "out there" because they already exist within us. However small the flame within, it still burns. If only we dare to listen and do what the deepest parts of us already know. We cannot any longer afford not to learn vicariously from the lives and guiding principles which have either blessed or cursed the centuries. We can no longer afford not to choose a better way, nor can we "cop out" of not choosing, because no choice is always a choice!

What will the future bring? Whatever you decide? The future history of everything depends on what you choose to learn and live by. Whether you choose the "safety" of not getting involved with wider life issues or maintaining what you have until you die will make the difference. Or not.

What and how you process what comes into your secret, private, public and global life is immensely important to you as well as to those you know or who you may never meet. You can learn or let, serve or sit. But realise there is a moral dimension to everything and that you are also part of history. Future information will include or omit your presence. Wisdom will decide whether you did or didn't do the right thing.

Meanwhile, information will continue to flood our small planet with much of which is superfluous, distractive, destructive and needless. It is the relentless child of an age of arrogance which spans thousands of years of cruelty, inferior progress and needless suffering. Wisdom has been around at least as long and teaches us about morality, or how we should treat each other.Often seen as something pretentious or unnecessary, it is our truest friend and combines the best of both head and heart.

Seek after it.Appreciate its difference from mere information. Learn from it. Fall in love with it. Live it and live for it in the creation of a better life for you and your world and it will serve you well as you as you serve those around you. nnn