Showing posts with label Small is Beautiful. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Small is Beautiful. Show all posts

Monday, 15 June 2009

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Quotes on Beauty of This World Is Not Real

It is unfortunate that people are attracted to the beauty of this world that is not real – it shrivels and dies.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation

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This is why people in modern Western societies are still not satisfied, even though they are so economically advanced and thus have so much facility for sense enjoyment. They always want more. As the late British economist E. F. Schumacher points out:

Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.*


What's really needed is to recognize the need for spiritual as well as material happiness. A society that has great material prosperity but lacks spiritual purpose is really a poor society. A body without the soul is a dead body—even if it is nicely decorated with fancy ornaments.

Science of Identity

*E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 25.

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When beauty is reflected through things in this world, it is but a reminder that there is real beauty of a lasting nature.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation


~ Jagad Guru (Jagad Guru Chris Butler)
© 2008 Science of Identity Foundation

Sunday, 9 November 2008

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Insights of Wisdom

In his book Small Is Beautiful, noted British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote:

Insights of wisdom … enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and nation against nation, because man’s needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.*

It is a fact that no matter how much sense gratification a person gets, he will never be satisfied. Material food, material things, material sense gratification cannot satisfy the atma (spirit soul). Just as the body needs material food, so the spirit soul needs spiritual food. To try to satisfy one’s spiritual craving with material things leads to endless consumption, greed, envy, violence, and war. Western people have as much sense gratification as one could ever want, yet they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are spiritually empty.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation


* E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 38.


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The false identification of the body as the self leads to more than just racial conflicts. International conflicts, religious conflicts, sexual conflicts, and many other conflicts are rooted in this false identification.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation


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If you are wise, you can see the person or atma within the body, and relate to the person, not to his body.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation


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If you are wise, you are free of prejudice, racism, sexism, class consciousness, and so on.

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Science of Identity Foundation


~ Jagad Guru (Jagad Guru Chris Butler)
© 2008 Science of Identity Foundation