We grow up in a world where it’s getting increasingly hard for humans to be happy. Give chimps – the species that share more than 98.8% of our DNA – food to eat, a warm place to live, and they’ll be more than content with it. They don’t need animal rights or anything, cause without humans, that concept wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Sure they’ll get into fight, but they wouldn’t also know how to deal with it.
For other animals, survival is what they have to deal with on a daily basis. Not anymore for Homo Sapiens. We all try to develop a world where humans can finally be happy. When a new invention is made, everyone thinks this is going to be the end of suffering – but it’s not. Yes they’re cure for polio now, and mothers have to grieve less for losing their child to polio, but other human-made disesases like HIV are roaming the Earth now, and there’s no guarantee that you can save your child from that. Or even when you have a healthy child, you’re still going to be upset every now and then when he or she came back home with emo eyeliner and weird hairstyle that you wish your neighbors and relatives never see it.
We’d shot for the moon, created the internet, invented new, nice things like iphones and vaccines, but why are we still so unhappy? Probably even more unhappy than our ancestors when they’re still living in hunter-gatherer way of life. The answer is simple, our mind has made it more difficult to be happy, it has set up expectations, it has told us that we’ll be happy, when we get that thing. Such things are harmful for individuals, but are highly beneficial for business and capitalism. However, to harm others is also to harm ourselves, and no one in us can leave that loop of suffering if we’re not connected to ourselves.
We have known almost all, but we haven’t understood enough. We don’t need to pursue all knowledge, but enough knowledge. If we could travel back in time, ask ourselves: “Is this enough for me to be happy?” and question the nature of happiness, we wouldn’t have to beat around the bush for solutions of problems that shouldn’t have arisen in the first place.
There is no point in advancing while forgeting the way to be happy.
It’s simple, yet often overlooked.
To forget fiction is to forget who we are
At the end of the day, our brain is the result of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, all rolled into one. No one will understand the true impact of a world war if you only feed them statistics, you have to tell them stories about families of casualties, and they’ll hopefully understand it more readily.
We live in a cutting-edge world with the latest technology, we also live in a world where people are fighting others for the sake of their religion. We live in a world where science is dubbed as important, we also live in a world where history and religions are seen as negligible, unimportant stuff.
“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
― Luke 10:38-42
“You can’t give what you don’t have.”
― Greg Hiebert
“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
What I want to say here is, you can’t end suffering for others, when you don’t know how to end it for yourself. Such wisdom, even when you’d mastered it, is not always communicable of transferable. That person will still have to fend for himself or herself, you can only help, not save she or he. Siddhartha can’t save Govinda, he’ll have to learn how to save himself first, and Govinda’ll hopefully know how to do it.
But this doesn’t mean that non-fiction is useless
Although fiction is more important than non-fiction, a world without science will be where human drink contaminated water because they thought it was holy, and torture one another as rituals for God. Non-fiction helps lay a stable foundation for our lives, which fiction helps us reach the spiritual awakening that we haven’t got.
Walking forward is a balancing act of fiction and non-fiction, knowing all and knowing enough, as well as knowing what and knowing why. We can’t save the world, each of us will have to save ourselves first (but you can still help them though.)
Σχόλια