On Philanthropy, the Love of Human Kind…

Based on the writings of Dr. Sherwin Nuland, in his book "How We Live" and his TED Talk below:

Hope is an abstract phenomenon, an expectation of something good that is due to happen.
But it can also be, not the expectation of things going right, but that they make sense…

“Hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense, regardless of how they come out"

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Sherwin Nuland

The world will not be saved by the internet, technology, but by the Human Spirit (not in a divine sense). By this ability we have to be better, to achieve things that we never thought to be capable of, all from the elements of the human spirit.

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”
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Percy Bysshe Shelley

Moral imagination.

A person to be greatly good must imagine clearly, must see itself and the world from the eyes of another and many others.  Must ask: what is expected of me/us?

We must be the World’s healers. Every unfairness and poverty (physical or emotional) must become our "patient". This is the same as the concept of Compassion, but goes beyond that. 

... To own a moral imagination and identify each person as they are, each tree for its own existence instead of just looking to an abstract Forest.

"When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?

Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love."

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Sherwin Nuland

Quoted from more than twenty four hundred years ago, Hippocrates said “Where there is love for mankind, there is love for the art of healing (…) The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well. (…) As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.”

We must find Hope, we must find Sense

We talk about spiritual changes, but if reality suddenly took all its clothes out and appeared in front of us, naked, unveiled, we would believe ourselves to have become mad, we would open our eyes and scream in panic, in despair, because such change in what we know would be unbearable. We don’t have that imagination.

"Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains,
the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers,
the vast compass of the ocean,
the courses of the stars,
and they pass by themselves without wondering."
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Saint Augustine