Full Description
These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait "hot takes" stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world's information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom.
A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life's hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century:
Receiving knowledge.
Practicing detachment.
Experiencing tranquility.
Cultivating transcendence.
These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them.
In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.
Contents
Introduction
KNOWLEDGE
Chapter 1. Knowledge and Wisdom
Chapter 2. Data Driven
Chapter 3. Holding the End in Mind
DETACHMENT
Chapter 4. Detachment and Wisdom
Chapter 5. Pain, Suffering, and Detachment
Chapter 6. Detachment Strategies
TRANQUILITY
Chapter 7. Tranquility and Wisdom
Chapter 8. Here Be Dragons
Chapter 9. Three Treasures
TRANSCENDENCE
Chapter 10. Transcendence and Wisdom
Chapter 11. Metric World
Chapter 12. The Fourth Dimension
Acknowledgments
Appendix
