Knowledge without Discipline

2009-04-06T02:04:45Z

we're currently still in the information age. however information is a commodity that is without purpose if it is not used in service of something greater.

wisdom is certainly the principle thing. with all of your getting get understanding too because it makes a use out of all of your knowledge.

in fact if you have a choice between knowledge or wisdom. get the wisdom. simply because knowledge has no use without wisdom. it is actually very dangerous without wisdom. but wisdom or understanding can create a vast many things with just a little bit of knowledge.

i was thinking with myself, what is the deal? what is wrong? why am i where i am. i usually think intently until i fully understand something. even then, i keep studying. i realized something one day in the midst of all that is going on around me and in our country and world. i realized that the world is still very much the wild west. Even though we have made so much so-called progress and have created a great many good things. we have even run cords and pipes to much of the world and our progress is coming along quickly. cords for power and communications. pipes for fuels, water and sanitation. all good things. perhaps. were even on our way to hook up even the most remote of populations. hook them all up to the grid.

so we've arrived when we can do this. it may appear that our ultimate success is just on the horizons. but maybe, just maybe we aren't even close to arrival. why is it that we think that we need to hook everything up? why do we think we need to string along copper lines to achieve some sort of progress. what does this all really do? is it even that important? even wirelessly, is it that important?

one thing that you find out when you have silence is that you have time to think. time to reflect. time to ponder. with 24 hour communications and information, and that press thing called news, we seem to have a massive load of information at our disposal. well perhaps the disposal is where we should put it all. perhaps we should turn a bit of it off. unplug. cut the cord. jam the wireless. stop the flow. silence.

in all our getting of information, we haven't gained the most important knowledge. discipline. that's because information by it self is like hair without a head. it's gross and useless. ever notice how when hair is on your head and it is nice and kept up people appreciate it. but when there is a stray hair, they usually just cast it away. if that hair shows up in something like their meal, people are usually disgusted. well that's just what our world of knowledge has come to: a hair in our meal. it's out of place. out of time. out of line.

it's been said by the chiefest of sources that wisdom is a great prize that we should seek like an archeologist seeks worlds of old. like Indy seeks a Crystal Skull. wisdom is a prize that is worth spending the lot of our life to attain just an ounce. well if this is the case. why is it that we feel we must seek knowledge? why is it that rather than reflecting in thought, we seek out the great oracles google, yahoo, live? is knowledge power? no, not hardly. it's a tip. a mirage if you will. great power actually comes in the application of information. classifying it into useful data. knowledge wielded by a person of understanding is hitting real close to the prize called wisdom. an essential component in reaching that goal is discipline.

many of us are well versed, we love to learn about new things, we seek out understanding. we keep up to date with all of the information out there in order to increase our knowledge. but for what? what is the goal of everything we know? what is the point in knowing what we know? so we can make more money? maybe because we think more money will help us to solve it. whatever it is. well what do we need all of the money for? so we can find more knowledge? well the word knowledge even gives us a clue that there is much more than just information to seek after. knowing is just the ledge, just the tip, just the beginning. focus only on it, can also be our end.

when your going a short distance, you might just guess at a the general direction. usually, we arrive at our intended location, sometimes with a bit of adjustment when we get there or get close. but the further we go, we begin to see that aim and direction are extremely important. we also understand that planning and careful consideration is equality important. when you need to go across town, to a place that you are not exactly sure where is, you might drive in that direction and then circle around until you find where you need to be. the next time you need to go to this place, you can get there a lot faster because you already know where you are going. apply this same model to traveling a much further distance like across the country. in this model you have to arrive at a place you have never been before at a certain time. let's also say that when you get there you need to claim a large sum of money. how would you deal with this situation? would you take a few minutes to study a map? would you take the map with you along the way to make any adjustments that you need to make before it is too late?

think of your life as the longest journey that you will ever go on. you don't know exactly how long it will take you to get there, but you know that you don't have any time to waste. you know that you won't have time to adjust your plans when and if you discover you are way off course, so, how can you head in the right direction from the start?

there are some powerful tools that are essential to your journey. perhaps none more powerful than discipline. another word for discipline is restraint. huh? what's that word? do we see the application of that word in our modern society? not often. everyone is banking on the impulse sale. 24-hour news cycles demand the spewing of any information with no responsibility for how that information is used or how it affects people. the government urges us to spend, spend, spend. and if we don't have money to spend, they encourage us to borrow to spend. we're told to do so quickly, move now. because we have no time to loose. but is this really so? not hardly.

it is quite obvious that a lack of restraint and careful consideration of direction has brought us before the masters of our current situation. these things are masters and they have names. they also have chains. they will enslave you and likely have already. debt, lying, immoral lawlessness and fear of loss are a few and there are many more. they all have names. define them. expose them. you cannot do this if you are distracted. if you are on the info-mation-train. knowledge without discipline has produced what we have now. it has taken away from us something more important that we had - then. similar to how all of the tv gold buyers are taking away our valuable gold, and exchanging it for the ever worthless dollar. the pure pursuit and trust of information as the be-all, end-all is robbing us of that which is more precious.

for some it may indeed be too late, because they have gone on and their voices are no longer heard, their actions are not longer seen or felt. but it's amazing that with the right method of transportation, we can arrive at the correct location very quickly.

illustrated in terms of space travel where precise calculations are so important that if you are off even a fraction of a fraction, your space craft will end up light years off course. the only way to correct this mishap is to travel at light speed.

discipline, restraint is a kind of time machine. a boat capable of traveling at light speed. even faster still.

discipline is very hard to attain says some. well here is a tip, a powerful tip: make discipline, make restraint a habit.

just like bad habits have cast many off track. they have wound up in locations they have not intended like debt. a place they may have said they would never be or never be again after going through a bankruptcy and learning a lesson. the habit of acting on impulse, of reckless spending without considering future perils, the habit of lack of restraint, and addiction to having information (buying computers, games, tv's, movies, magazines) introduced them to a master called debt. a master that introduced them to another master. this master lied to them. tricked them into playing another game. this game is called the credit system.

The lie goes like this. monitor your activities and spend on credit so that you can get your score up and therefore get more credit at better rates. we that sounds fine and good. but it distracts you. it lies to you. it convinces you to play this game of credit because everyone else is playing it and you dont want to be left out, or worse you don't want to be seen as having a "bad" score. that's the bait. the switch is that it distracts you from the fact that you should not be enslaved to anyone or anything. before you know it, you are serving a master that is taking you off course. causing you to be concerned with something not even relevant.

if disciplining yourself is too hard. make it a habit. habits are typically thought of as bad things, but they are actually helpers. you can program yourself to do things automatically. some people habitually make up their bed, others habitually brush their teeth, others habitually save their change. program yourself to habitually do anything that you want to do, like smile. before you know it you'll be back on track.

program yourself for restraint. take time out now to decide who you want to be, what you want to do, and how you want to be remembered. figure out what you want people to say about you at your funeral and what you would like your children to think of you.

once you have a vision, you can then decide how to get there.

it's important to get to a quiet point where you can reflect. your enemies know this, that;s why they keep you inundated with cares that are not your own. that's why they try to get you bound to cares that you do not want. cut off the tv. silence the radio, recycle those stupid magazines. forsake the worthless internet. find yourself. decide who you will be and make a plan to get there. program your habits to do your bidding. you'll be on your way to wisdom in short order and your life will have purpose and you will turn the tides of the current situation into something much greater.

Daniel Hannan : Outspoken Wisdom We All Should Be Emulating

2009-03-26T10:03:40Z

Daniel Hannan : Outspoken British Wisdom We All Should Be Emulating

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/Daniel_Hannan

[youtube:94lW6Y4tBXs]

Globalization is bad, digging deep roots is good.

2009-03-19T12:03:11Z

dig deep roots.

don't tell me how big you are, how world-wide you are, how global. enough already. who is so stupid that they believe the crap that globalization is a good thing? it decimates, it destroys. globalization erodes the uniqueness of locality.

digging deep creates ties and knowledge of your community that a global short-sighted power-monger cannot ever build.

centralized control is the most archaic of management forms. without morals it simply does not work. distributed controls are much more viable.

globalization is not even "green". how ludicrous to ship an item half way around the world for consumption? not to mention how the producing countries like China are basically slave states. does it make you feel better to save a few cents at walmart so that a slave worker on a country that does not even practice green manufacturing can make for the entire day a few cents. that's if they didn't put a label on crooked and get scammed out of their day's wage.

not allowing other countries to make their own goods, and not making our own goods, destroys our individual sense of uniqueness.

i don't want an American car made in Mexico, i don't want a Japanese car made in the USA. i mean what is that? how stupid. sure, products should be made as close to where they are sold as possible, but don't try to fool anyone with made up takes on nostalgia.

stop the lie of globalization.

it was someones misguided idea of short-term profit. in the medium to long term globalization ruins economies and destroys profit.

most countries want to sell exports but don't want to buy imports. what good is it to simply swap items eye-for-eye. let's move something from here to there, and something from there to here. how stupid. if your a tree hugger, how can you stand by and let this happen?

green peace where are you?

i mean don't even get me started on how there would be a dramatic reduction in wars if we all sourced and bought local. for instance, the U.S. has more oil than anywhere on earth. not just off shore, but in the Rockies too, and in ANWAR - a barren wasteland - it's not the picture of pristine animal habitat that they have shown you. not even in the slightest. it's frozen, it's barren. it's so bad, that the Russians laughed at us for wanting to buy it. i mean come on.

so am i saying misguided environmental activists are to blame for all of the deaths in many of the wars in the last 50 years? yea, I'm considering it.

would we have even been in Iraq had we had access to our own oil here? the oil that we can responsibly, and cleanly drill and refine. I'm a tree hugger myself. but i don't stand chained to a tree and then force my brothers (of whom i have lost a few to the war) to go fight a war a world away, so that we can protect our access to the oil pipeline in a desert where the green peace, environmental activist, tree-huggers have not yet set up shop.

this is starting to sound as if democrat, environmental activists are responsible for all of the ills in the world. then out of their continued stupidity, they try to put the blame on those who actually attempt to do good things. how stupid?

dig some roots, care for your ground.

in the words of a little band "grow, grow where you are, anchor your roots underneath, doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs."

Terminal Observations

Knowledge without Discipline

Daniel Hannan : Outspoken Wisdom We All Should Be Emulating

Globalization is bad, digging deep roots is good.