balance10: Tortoise and hare fable contains a secret or two.

Long before Bacon/Shakespeare proclaimed that “Thought is power;” “nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” (also other keys further down this page)--and thereby launched a profound learning revolution, in a simple corner of Attica a not-prominent character collected some notes that ended up enduring far past the quaint garb of his scribbled brief storylines. How could tortoise and hare matter much compared to the march of empire of power and money? How could a quaint quasi-empire of kids’ stories endure except as an irrelevant footnote to the great powerful Empire of Steel and Glass Skyscrapers with its Worldwide Grip?

Strangely enough for Aesop, tortoise does not actually quite beat hare. The patient persistent course which marks the road and lets other matters alone is not easily dispensed with, true, but check out Bugs Bunny who makes fun of the great great Elmer Fudd--it’s the other side of the coin.

One is better off not being overly serious, overly important, overly triumphant. Lose a race or two, fool around some, lighten up, let yourself go off the track a bit at some point, hop along/skip along, see another side of things. However hare does not quite beat tortoise either. Ha. The road is perhaps longer than in the given hare-tortoise account--or else we might all be tortoises by now. -r, mt. shasta

-Bugs and Elmer-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVKFq9qUiQ

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The level of spiritual culture of the world has waned with the increase of material knowledge and emphasis that has been placed upon worldly success. Let me make clear that mankind need not cast aside prosperity and success in order to be spiritual, but by a like token they do not need to cast aside spirituality in order to be materially prosperous and successful. High ethics and high standards always evoke a benevolent karma wherein all success can be translated into God-success….

Now I would like to point out the shifting pattern in the values of men that has been outpictured in the current age. This is the result of the interplay of old karmic patterns upon a new permissiveness in society which has been advocated through works of fiction and nonfiction dramatized on stage, on film and in radio and television. We find that this accent on material happiness has led to a greater preoccupation with materialism not only among those who are financially successful but also among the young men and women in colleges and universities….

Since men have the tendency to take sides, those who would manipulate nations and peoples find it to their advantage to divide humanity and to pit them again one another as a means of controlling the world. While political parties, various interest groups and matters of foreign policy provide the means of dividing people on a national scale, miniature power blocks are sustained even within families and small business firms. Furthermore the smoke-screen that is created through deliberate release of misinformation through the press and other news media makes it literally impossible for either the people or their elected representative to properly assess the issues and to formulate sound policy….

In the manifold strata of society and the present cultural polarization the individual is the key: the Brotherhood does not welcome the destruction of individuality and the harmony of the soul with his God Presence….

I remain an emissary of freedom and peace for the Brotherhood,

Alexander Gaylord: Pearls of Wisdom 13:26

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The more ancient of the Greeks (whose writings are lost) took up with better judgment a position between these two extremes — between the presumption of pronouncing on everything, and the despair of comprehending anything; and though frequently and bitterly complaining of the difficulty of inquiry and the obscurity of things, and like impatient horses champing at the bit, they did not the less follow up their object and engage with nature, thinking (it seems) that this very question — viz., whether or not anything can be known — was to be settled not by arguing, but by trying. And yet they too, trusting entirely to the force of their understanding, applied no rule, but made everything turn upon hard thinking and perpetual working and exercise of the mind.

Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception. The necessity of this was felt, no doubt, by those who attributed so much importance to logic, showing thereby that they were in search of helps for the understanding, and had no confidence in the native and spontaneous process of the mind. But this remedy comes too late to do any good, when the mind is already through the daily intercourse and conversation of life occupied with unsound doctrines and beset on all sides by vain imaginations.

And therefore that art of logic, coming (as I said) too late to the rescue, and no way able to set matters right again, has had the effect of fixing errors rather than disclosing truth. There remains but one course for the recovery of a sound and healthy condition — namely that the entire work of the understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business be done as if by machinery. Certainly if in things mechanical men had set to work with their naked hands, without help or force of instruments, just as in things intellectual they have set to work with little else than the naked forces of the understanding, very small would the matters have been which, even with their best efforts applied in conjunction, they could have attempted or accomplished. …

(So) let there in short be one method for the cultivation, another for the invention, of knowledge. And for those who prefer the former, either from hurry or from considerations of business or for want of mental power to take in and embrace the other (which must needs be most men's case), I wish that they may succeed to their desire in what they are about, and obtain what they are pursuing….

It is but reasonable however (especially in so great a restoration of learning and knowledge) that I should claim of men one favor in return, which is this: if anyone would form an opinion or judgment either out of his own observation, or out of the crowd of authorities, or out of the forms of demonstration (which have now acquired a sanction like that of judicial laws) concerning these speculations of mine, let him not hope that he can do it in passage or by the by; but let him examine the thing thoroughly; let him make some little trial for himself of the way which I describe and lay out; let him familiarize his thoughts with that subtlety of nature to which experience bears witness; let him correct by seasonable patience and due delay the depraved and deep-rooted habits of his mind. And when all this is done and he has begun to be his own master, let him (if he will) use his own judgment.

(by N. Hilliard, 1578)