Photo:bing.com
Composing a New Life, it’s all about taking the broadest possible view of ideas, people, places, and things to make better choices for the long term. At the centre of it all is the notion of wisdom and taking action in the interest of the common good.
“Wisdom is the property of West and East together; it's the private garden of all humanity, a shared ocean of advancement for the sons and daughters of Adam. The profound knowledge leading to wisdom is a bowl which is uniting rather than segregating, a line drawn to encompass, not to dissect. A short glimpse across the flipped pages of history is enough to come across a handful of people who lived as lighthouses, illuminating the way to wisdom, despite using various languages and separate tools.”-Fethullah Simsek, The Fountain Magazine
Composing a New Life: A GCGI Project Calling for Imagining a Better World, A World of Beauty and Love, Guided by WISDOM
Composing a New Life will allow us to explore the various identities we carry in an effort to better understand what it means to be human and what it entails to be a member of the human community. We will explore about how we may choose a path to beauty, love and wisdom. The assigned readings below will represent an array of interdisciplinary perspectives from diverse authors on our work as a scholarly and searching community within the GCGI family.
Composing a New Life will serve as a foundation to excellent reading and writing habits that will be necessary for our academic and spiritual success, as well as our physical and emotional well-being.
The Way of Wisdom: In the Footsteps of Remarkable People, Thoughts and Imagination
Photo: bing.com
Part I -A timely reflection on one of the most ancient subjects in philosophy - Wisdom.
- What does it mean to be wise?
- What is wisdom and how does one achieve it?
- Has the meaning or nature of wisdom changed over time?
- Why is wisdom important?
In a nutshell, there are no short answers to the questions above—to the nature and value of wisdom—but there are answers. There are sources we can search for which can provide us with a rich and diverse array of thoughtful responses to these questions, intended to educate the human mind and inspire the human spirit.
Indeed, wisdom is a multi-faceted synthesis of many human qualities. For millennia, students of wisdom and writers about it have associated wisdom with a number of positive human character strengths and virtues.
For our purpose here, I wish to share the following with you and then guide you to excellent sources for your own further research and thoughtful reflection:
‘Wise people live their daily lives in accord with wise perspectives and wise values. As a result, their actions make the world around them a better place. They help others to grow. They live compassionately. They resolve conflicts and in other ways maximize harmony and general well-being. If their own growth in wisdom is carried to the point where identification with Being takes place, they stop differentiating between themselves, the universe, and what needs to be done. At that point they see themselves and the rest of humanity as Being itself — evolving, and living progressively higher values.
As Maslow pointed out, when you see clearly what is, you automatically know what to do. Reality, in other words, has its own ethical imperatives. These ethical "musts" become obvious when the mind becomes quiet — when the clear truth about what needs to be done is not obscured by personal wants, fears, and dislikes. Wise people are able to sense ethical imperatives and act on them because intuition and intellect — working as coordinated partners — now run the show. What to do becomes clear under these conditions. So does what not to do. Wise people not only work to uplevel the process, they refuse to commit their time and energy to the unhelpful.’-Copthorne Macdonald, Founder, The Wise Page
A bit more On Wisdom
It’s woven from many strands
Photo:theschooloflife.com
‘The wise are, first and foremost, ‘realistic’ about how challenging many things can be. They aren’t devoid of hope (that would be a folly of its own), but they are conscious of the complexities entailed in any project: for example, raising a child, starting a business, spending an agreeable weekend with the family, changing the nation, falling in love… Knowing that something difficult is being attempted doesn’t rob the wise of ambitions, but it makes them more steadfast, calmer and less prone to panic about the problems that will invariably come their way.
Properly aware that much can and does go wrong, the wise are unusually alive to moments of calm and beauty, even extremely modest ones, of the kind that those with grander plans rush past. With the dangers and tragedies of existence firmly in mind, they can take pleasure in a single, uneventful, sunny day, or some pretty flowers growing by a brick wall, the charm of a three-year-old playing in a garden or an evening of banter among a few friends. It isn’t that they are sentimental and naive, precisely the opposite: because they have seen how hard things can get, they know how to draw the full value from the peaceful and the sweet – whenever and wherever these arise.’- Virtues of Character, The Book of Life
What Is Wrong with Modern Times – and How to Regain Wisdom
To deal with the ills of modernity in this challenging times and to suggest possible path/s to a better life, requires us to be wise!
‘The conditions of modernity are in many ways profoundly better than those under which the vast majority of humanity lived for more or less the whole of history. But, along with its manifest benefits, modernity has brought a special range of troubles into our lives which we would be wise to try to unpick and to understand.’- The Book of Life
Part II- The GCGI Wisdom Corner: Sharing the Wisdom to Build a Better World, a Better, Fulfilling Life
What is this life all about?
Why am I here? What’s my Life’s purpose? How can I make the most of my Life?
The GCGI Wisdom Corner
Photo:"Passing of Knowledge" by Victor Tan Wee Tar
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”- Jalaluddin Rumi, The Persian Sage of Beauty, Wisdom and Love.
Come, come, whoever you are, come
Do you hear that voice calling you, calling us?