Daily Meditation: Monday, December 14, 2009

In this day and age, the world is teeming with specialists. …

12/14/2009

In this day and age, the world is teeming with specialists. Of course, specialization is useful and necessary, but before specializing it is preferable to have a view of the whole. If you begin by exploring a small parcel of terrain, you’ll reason and classify things wrongly, because you won’t know anything about the whole to which it belongs; whereas, if you’ve gained an overview, you can allow yourself to focus in on a particular spot without the risk of making a mistake. Life is too short to make a detailed study of every domain, so the method used by the initiates of first considering the whole, although it does not yield such precise knowledge, does at least give an overall impression that’s true to reality. And if they later decide to concentrate on a particular subject, they acquire a much deeper knowledge of it than a specialist, who has no notion of the whole. The knowledge they have of the whole, of oneness, sheds light for them on any tiny particle that’s been isolated from the whole: they are able to know precisely where it belongs.