Contemporary North Americans are a people who like to fill their minds with facts and their lives with things. Our culture of achievement urges us to hurry from activity to activity, to fly jet planes to cities so close that take off and landing makes up most of the trip, our culture of consumption teaches to acquire more and more commodities, and convinces us that personal security is achieved by risking our fortune on a volatile market, and Thoreau tells us to simplify, simplify, simplify. Yes, simplify if we wish to live, by which he means to live with deliberation, with awareness, then we must live without being enslaved by time and things.
Thoreau echos ancient sages and prophets. For example, Socrates challenges his students to look beyond the artifacts to the ideal, he argues that the unexamined life is not worth living, to live with wisdom is his ideal, seeking riches or power are a diversion.
The Palestinian Rabbi Jesus also makes makes a Walden like point in the Sermon on the Mountain.
This is how he puts it, "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet the Source of All provides for them. Are you not as worthy as they? Which of you by worrying can add one inch to his stature?
So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of who trusts so little?
The Buddha tells us that all suffering stems from attachment, to relational objects that are transient. We cling to the thing, or to the form of a relationship, and invariably there is change. We hug the object of our devotion, hoping that it will be with us forever, and the object disappoints us, instead Buddha advises us to pay attention to being present to the moment and to do that we must live with wisdom the eight fold path constituting giving us practical advice of living lives that enable deep reflection. awareness and wisdom.
There are thousands of prophets, and poets, and who that similar stances, and while their cultural contexts vary, and while their cosmological references may be diverse, the wisdom traditions of the world, weave this common theme: that which is important in life is found in the living not not the accumulating, the meaningful life, is found in being aware of what is present and what is given rather than seeking after that which is fleeting and not yet attained, and that which makes life purposeful is found in the power of relationship, the being with, rather than the power of mastery, or control, the being over and against.
Wisdom traditions, with their wisdom teachers and students of wisdom all exist in societies of men and women who are make livings, and raise children whether the society be an indigenous sustainable community or consumer society caught up in commodity fetishism, whether agrarian or urban, and whatever their technological achievements, or status as a world power stand in variance to dominant culture's standard's of success.
