"The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others." ~Solomon Ibn Gabriol (the great Hebrew poet and philosopher)
I find the above words of wisdom by Solomon to be very practical. Most people (yes including myself) speaks and judge others too quickly. In life, not everything is as easily recognizable as black and white, right and wrong, evil and good. I am ready to be criticized by having lack of principles, weak in dharma or moral ethics. I do agree also with the other participants in this forum that people do not speak against evil because of not wanting to be nosy. I do think it stems from not wanting to take responsibility to do something about it.
Can one person speaking out move mountains? Yes I do think so as looking at history, there has been influential (both good and evil) men who have used their speech to create peace and war.
There is great victory in breaking the silent to what is outright evil and wrong. If it's not because of the persistent courage of many who broke the silent and strong hold of racism, today, we will not have Obama to lead the great America. This is one of many great outcomes of breaking the evil silent.
There is great danger in breaking the silent out of peer pressure and lack of wisdom..."ya, let's all jump on the wagon else I will be ostracized" mentality and fear. It starts from becoming bullies in schools, to using speech for war. ..to the point that people are influenced to commit the act, remain silent and not capable of repenting.
I pray the the Wisdom Buddha Dorje Shugden grants us unobscured wisdom that our body, speech and mind are used to benefit ourselves and others.
Source :
http://iss.sagepub.com/content/7/2/187.shortPRESSURE AND GUILT: WAR EXPERIENCES OF A YOUNG GERMAN SOLDIER AND THEIR BIOGRAPHICAL IMPLICATIONS (PART 1)
The psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich claimed in their widely discussed article (1977) that Germans would be incapable of mourning about and repenting of the disaster of the Second World War, the millions of deaths and suffering of the victims of Nazi terror.
They argued that Germans would repress or deny what had happened to avoid suffering from severe depression. The Mitscherlich thesis is criticised in this study by displaying the wide landscape of deep personal involvement (called a `trajectory') in various autobiographical differentations of living within a world of total collective moral deterioration.
The research necessary to prove or disprove such a thesis works with `autobiographical narrative interviews' conceived by the author. The research style of meticulous structural descriptions is developed to utilise formal text indicators for localising such phenomena like fading out, delayed recollection, and compartmentalised phases of working-through. Typical for this method, its data arise from interviewing single cases, here that of an ideologically non-committed German. As a young German soldier in the Second World War, he too showed phases of incapacity to mourn and repent. But the informant did not remain in that state. Severe crisis experiences in his later private life led to sudden recollections of encounters with victims of Nazi terror. He started to mourn and repent. Besides empirical evidence of the feeling of personal entanglement in collective guilt also among those not engaged in intentional acts of immoral behaviour, we encounter the interesting phenomenon of delayed mourning about and repenting of the moral deterioration within the collectivity of `We, the Germans'. This finding is corroborated by data from many narrative interviews with other Germans who were non-committed to Nazi ideology but active in the German war machinery.
