Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.
It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.
Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.
To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
Though we feel extremely connected through all this technology [social networks], there's also this disconnect that happens. Because you're not actually talking to anyone. You're not actually meeting them for coffee. To me, social media is about "you". It's like, "Well, twenty people like this thing I said", so that's about me.
Every time I've learned something, I've realized there are a hundred more things I don't know about the thing I just learned.
I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that.
The education of attention would be an education par excellence