“It is essential [to] acquire an understanding of and lively feeling for values.”
Attitudes, beliefs and values influence our behavior. They contribute directly to our well-being or lack of. Seth says that if “you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume that your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them.”[i]
Historian Ray Allen wrote about American values in 1958. They “squander their natural resources with an abandon unknown elsewhere; they have developed a mobility both social and physical that marks them as a people apart. In few other lands is the democratic ideal worshipped so intensely, or nationalism carried to such extremes of isolationism or international arrogance. Rarely do other people display such indifference toward intellectualism or aesthetic values; seldom in comparable cultural areas do they cling so tenaciously to the shibboleth of rugged individualism.”[ii]
Writer and filmmaker T. C. McLuhan says: “The man who preserves his selfhood is ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; not a ripple upon the surface of the shining pool—his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.”[iii]
Insight # 78 comes to us from Albert Einstein (1879-1955) a German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity and received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for theoretical physics.
“It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he, with his specialized knowledge, more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.”[iv]
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Additional Reading:
- Attitudes, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol
- Beliefs, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
- Values, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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#78 Attitudes, Beliefs and Values
[i] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 35.
[ii] Billington, Ray Allen. “How the Frontier Shaped the American Character.” American Heritage. April 1958, p. 88.
[iii] McLuhan, T. C. Touch the Earth. Promontory Press, 1971.
[iv] Einstein, Albert. “Education for Independent Thought,” The New York Times, October 5, 1952.
