“In the discordant noise of our time, it may seem that harmony and balance are lost to us as soul-less science and life-less religion each noisily clamor to be heard over the other. In this fragmentation we lose our story, we lose our holy nature, and we fail to live up to our potential as co-creators with the divine. Yet the sacred harmony is not lost to us as much as we are lost to it.”
Judith L. Nilan, A Legacy Of Wisdom

To live among those who are bereft of any sense of the sacred or any intellectual tenacity for critical thinking can often be a bothersome challenge. The work at hand requires patience, caution and perseverance. For make no mistake, like cliched crabs in a bucket, the ignorance born of insecurity and fear will seek to discount and ridicule the wise at every opportunity as an antidote to their own shortsighted lives.

They refuse to study their own psychology or tend to their own inner turmoils. Malcontent, and often indolent, they consistently fail to see the finger they point leaves three more self-directed. Often fluent in passive-aggressive tendencies and typically condescending, they become recalcitrant reformers, staunchly insistent in imposing their own views while refusing to see they’ve already abdicated their own in so many ways, and have yet so much to learn. This lack of humility shines incredibly bright in our world today, and fuels a relentless wildfire of ignorance on a great hamster wheel of rhetoric. While more than happy to project their own psychosis upon others, their connivances are easily dismantled in the light of truth.

Perhaps the greatest hurdle they face and are unable and unwilling to accept is the challenge of the road within. To step in front of the proverbial mirror and turn an inward eye to our own minds, our own conscious and subconscious psychologies, is the greatest work any of us will ever engage in. From this only, will greatness shine. Think how quiet the world would suddenly become if every one of us realized this truth, rather than continue on distracted and outwardly directed by a culture that insanely bombards its people with fear, disorder, and disease. True, one must also tend to the tasks at hand in a chaotic world such as ours, but the most important fire to tend will always be the one that burns within. True warriorship is born of this, and wedded with serving a greater truth. Modern culture consistently fails to teach this, while indigenous wisdom has always known this, and for millennia has taught and practiced these ways.

The problem with ignorance and those who practice daily the contrivances of a misled society are often the most challenging part of the process of awakening to and practicing deeper truth. For ultimately wisdom tells us we must leave them where they stand to discover for themselves what they will at their own pace, and accept that perhaps they never will. Wisdom is always a matter of choice, and each of us can only master his or her own path to the degree with which effort is given. No more, no less.