Have you ever thought how would life be if you could travel back to more than two thousands years ago? How did the people live? What would be their past time? What did they do for a living? What did they study?
From the history that we learned, could we really tell the complete story of the people who lived more than two thousand years ago? We learned about the dark ages, industrial revolution, flourish and decline of various civilizations in the world, the born of world great philosophers and thinkers, major world events that took place such as world wars, mass massacres of certain races or religions, economy depression and recessions, etc.
Fast forward to today, it is an age of fast pace, with great advancement in technology, science and medicine. We talk about high speed in basically anything and everything. Information could be obtained in split second, high speed train, gigabytes broadband access, entertainment program in demand (without having to wait for the program), express delivery, 5-min hair cut and the list goes on.
On the other hand of the unprecedented progress which seems to be a positive development, there are some dark sides behind the development as it could be abused by some socially irresponsible individuals. Technology could be abused for some selfish purpose such as the invention of nuclear power which was initially aimed for a clean energy and later turned into mass killing weapons. There are other issues derived from development such as global warming, environmental issues and yet there are still issues such as racism, poverty and religious conflict could not be tackled by the development.
Then we may ask, what is the ultimate solution to all these pressing issues? When we analyse all these issues from a standpoint of Buddhism, all these derive from the three poisons in life which are greed, hunger and stupidity. Greed is behind irresponsible, lopsided development at the expense of natural resources and environment. When profit making is the only goal and purpose, other basic values are compromised. Hunger and greed are closely related like siblings, when there is always not enough, more development will be created and lead to more resources to be exploited, nations are competing to create something deem 'great' such as tall towers (which most of the times were built at the expense of others' life) just to prove to the world that they could do it and to cover up the weaknesses. Sense of insecurity of losing power motivates world powerful countries to control and suppress the weak ones. How about stupidity? Ignorance of the inherent greatness in oneself and others, disregards and disrespect life such as what is being portrayed through discrimination, slavery, various wars and conflicts that we have seen in the history and even up to now.
We need to develop the wisdom and ability to see beyond whatever we see on the surface in order to tackle the real issues that are threatening human existence and robbing sanctity of life. It is everyone's responsibility to make this world a better place to live for ourselves and for our future generations. We need to compete in term of humanism, not just merely competing in the areas we have already done in a century that no doubt have improved our life tremendously but with the sad fact that we are losing our humanity.
Therefore, it's important to look within our life for answers and take full responsibility of our life instead of seeking real happiness from outside or blame something or someone when we are in unfavourable circumstances. When we are able to take charge of our life we are able to change our community, society and the world at large.