Physical Beauty Vs. Wisdom

by Elena Sartison | May 9, 2019

Without compassion and intelligence the world has no purpose.

Our way of life is built on Intelligence & Wisdom.

Compassion brings out our desire to protect and build further. Intelligence tells us how we can save the planet, why it is  worth saving and what is the meaning of each and every action; for instance flying in a plane generates carbon dioxide (CO2), burning wood generates CO2, cutting a tree depletes the oxygen- if we did not have the intelligence, we would not know it, and we would have destroyed the planet long ago. Just having the intelligence does not help you either, because it does not mean that you are going to save the planet and the world would have a purpose. Only if you have compassion along with that information, now you can do the right thing for this world. You need to have the knowledge and compassion, without the knowledge compassion won’t address anything.  Everything that we do today has been built with intelligence: we have microwaves, we have  stoves, TVs and smartphones; we are not burning wood and running around the forest. Why do we have a house? Because we were able to do farming, we were able to raise animals and food and all the other things that we need, so we would not have to run around like nomads. The way we live today is because of the intelligence we built over the last 300,000 years.

“A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.” – Chanakya

“A lot of people would say ‘sexy’ is about the body. But to me, ‘sexy’ is a woman with confidence. I admire women who have very little fear.”- Allegra Versace

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.’’- Pele

 

                                                                       Who is a beautiful human being?

 Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. What you consider beauty I might not consider beauty, but intelligence is intelligence. Even what I consider beauty – is relative to time; it is beautiful today, but tomorrow my opinion might change. For example, a song you might like today- when a new song comes out tomorrow, you might not like this song anymore. Beauty is time relative. Also, beauty does not stay constant, beauty itself changes. Because beauty is based on opinion, it can always change, it is not a fact. Even if someone’s opinion does not change that person is changes, the flower changes, it dies, the mountain changes,etc. Whatever I consider a beauty does not stay frozen in time. Intelligence on the other hand only builds, it only gets better and better.                                                                          

A beautiful human being for me is somebody who has spent a lot of time gathering vast knowledge over time, implementing that knowledge to convert it to experience and convert the experience into wisdom. Knowing what works and what does not work. As you age, you are becoming wiser and wiser. Because you are continuing  to amass more knowledge and continue to actually use that knowledge to convert to experience to continue to use that experience. That is what the old saying used to be – the older a person is the wiser they are. This might not be necessarily true today, due to technology because you could amass knowledge much faster. The bottom line is that, it’s all about having the knowledge, converting it into intelligence, converting your intelligence into experience and wisdom.

                                     Where do we gain our confidence?

If you are beautiful-you are most likely insecure, because your entire identity is based on your physical beauty. A beautiful person is generally momentarily filled with confidence which lasts from one praise of an admirer to when the thoughts of insecurity temporarily set in. Every beautiful person understands, that beauty relies on two factors: other people’s opinion, and that their beauty is changing constantly. They know that other people’s opinions or their own beauty can fade tomorrow, and they can be out of luck and out of favor. Anybody trying to rely only on beauty is always under a constant threat of being eliminated. Meanwhile, anybody relying on intelligence and knowledge only gets more and more confident because now you get more experience. You can always improve yourself. 

  ’’Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.’’- Taylor Swift                                                     

                                                                                    Role of Education and continued Education.

Education is your basic block of  knowledge. You can not invent the wheel without prior knowledge. You have to amass the knowledge of what the 300,000 years of human evolution has built and we have to take it for granted. Like when your parents says: “Do not put your hands on a hot stove”, you basically understand that you don’t try to challenge them and put your hand on a hot stove, the person who does that will probably never grow in their life. Because there are facts that you have to amass, if you want to take 5 steps forward. If you do not want to take 5 steps forward you can challenge everything and be there, it does not mean that you are not intelligent, it just means that you will not be able to amass the amount of knowledge that you needed to survive and productively use today.  To educate myself daily I am reading, finding solutions to the challenges that I am facing on a daily basis, seeing if there are alternative facts that can be used and continue to expand my knowledge base.                    

’’Education is your best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.’’– Chanakya

                                                        Wisdom vs intelligence. What is wisdom?       

Experience only makes you wise if you look back and say what worked and what didn’t work and why did something work and why did something not work. How could you do it differently, how could you make your score go from 60% of the things worked and 40% things didn’t work, and on the same project how can you make 80% of things work and only 20% of things didn’t work, and on the next project 99% of things work and only 1% not work. How can you make that happen? Only if you use your experience, analyze it and come up with solutions on how to keep on increasing that work, how to decrease the things that didn’t work, what changes you have to do and what else you could do. It is very easy to blame everybody else, that’s the wrong way out of the problem. The intelligent person’s way out of the problem is saying: “How could I do it differently to have a better outcome?” – that would be wisdom. Wisdom is an asset. Intelligence is knowledge, raw facts that are needed to gain experience and experience makes you wise and you gain wisdom. Physical Beauty has to fade away one day…although it has high appeal in today’s world but wisdom is something eternal meaning wisdom survives past you and gets passed on to new people to understand how to use the wisdom and get even better. Wisdom creates character but physical beauty creates looks.                                                                           

’’He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.’’– Chanakya

                                                                                                     Advice for life.

Do not cheat, do not lie, be upfront and your life will be simpler. Time invested in learning is time that you never waste in your life. Time invested in partying or trying to eliminate what you consider as boredom is time that you loose and will never come back in your life.