Well, that is just plain ignorant. People are dying all over, there are incurable diseases and horrible accidents. There is pain and despair and hunger.
In the current times, we think along lines promoted in America: science and fairness. It is scientific to get all the evidence and put it all in the balance when deciding what sort of world we have, isn't it? It is biased, unfair, unbalanced to consider the world happy when so many parts of it are clearly not.
It seems to me that in truth, any reasonably short description of
- my day or
- my life or
- my body or
- my community or
- how things are going
always must be an abstraction. My thought package or my feelings or my observation will only be partial. Any of them will include what I put in it, what I allow in it. I get to decide, I DO decide, at each moment, what the story or description will be.
Deepka Chopra helped me develop a feel for the importance of our senses, including our thoughts, when he emphasized that many animals hear things we don't, smell things we don't, see things we don't. It is honest to say that what they sense and what we sense is part of the world, a very specialized story or impression. Like bloggers or poets or photographers or painters, we create our impressions all the time. We decide what we will pay attention to and what we will dismiss.
A story that I happily retain is about a young man complaining to Picasso that the artist's work was unrealistic and ugly. The man pulled a photo of his girl friend from his wallet and showed it to Picasso as example of real beauty. Picasso looked at the photo and said, "Small, isn't she?"
