Knowing the Time of Harvest

 

 

Good comes only out of harmony.  Harmony is to know the best time to gather the fruit.

There are many that cut the fruit when it is not ripened because they are anxious and cannot control their palate.  What happens is after they cut it they cannot eat it, and those people become weak or even die from hunger.

And there are also many others who, while the fruit is ready for consumption, are busy with  some other building work in some distant city. When their food gets low, then out of necessity they go back to their village to cut the fruit but they find none.  They also become weak and many die.

Building structures in the city is very profitable and comfortable.  But to take care of a fruit grove for living takes courage and great faith, and it is not always comfortable and profitable.  There is not a paycheck at the end of every month.  Because people in our age have lost that kind of courage and faith, they have lost their ability to think and see reality.  They see evil as good and good as evil.  They see weakness as strength and strength as weakness.  They see the entering of the battle field as the departure from it.  They see courage as cowardice.  They lose their ability to perceive.

And this happens because people always judge based on what their belief is.  And if they believe that this religion or that philosophy, this race or that culture is the best, then  they become unable to see reality.  Every race, culture, religion and philosophical system has good and bad in it.  It is up to us to find the good and ignore the bad, and apply the good into our lives.  Not to just talk about it but to actually apply it.

The best Greek philosophers were virtually poor fellows on the streets.  We have the tendency to forget that.  Their wisdom came out of that great faith in the unseen, not on the security that our societal structures provide to people today.  Socrates is the closest to my heart and yet he is the least quoted, if I am not mistaken.  He also spoke of the unseen and he was joyful to give his life, leaving behind a wife and children for what he believed in.  The philosophers that are mostly quoted did speak but did they apply their teachings in their daily lives?  How many of them?  I do not know because I was not there.  But I know, and I am not mistaken, that in every generation there are many who speak but few who act.  The doers are the ones that shape history and usually they pay dearly with long jail sentences, and many with their lives.

To me, it is a wonder why many people, when they see these giants of compassion and courage, try to stop them and discourage them.  You would think that they would love them and follow them, but only a few do so.  Thus they walk their lonely path holding the flame high and their name becomes known: Mahatma Gandhi, Badshah Khan, Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Martin Luther King, Black Elk, St. Francis of Assisi, and so many others from every religion and nation of the world.

Only very few people know the gathering time of opportunities for social change.

I am convinced that to know the time of harvest a person must always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.  If people are deprived of the infinitely great, they cannot go on living and they die of despair.

Mr. Andreas Toupadakis, Ph.D. is a Former Research Scientist of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.