Fifth blog: Bakhya Ibn Pakuda

The reading of Bakhya Ibn Pakuda's writing inspires thought about where humans have gone with their society. Bakhya Ibn Pakuda describes the ideal religious people, people who practice perfectly. They are content whether they are suffering or on top of the world. While this may be what the ideal is among religious people, I highly doubt whether people respond accordingly. Especially considering the idea of people with more possessions being able to concentrate on doing what is right. It's more along the lines of people with more money and goods are more focused on keeping it that way. Whereas people with less are rather than being content, trying to become those with more. In this way our world continues down a path to destruction. With people grasping at willy nilly in order to fill their void with material possessions as humans we have over-reached our bounds.

If people could honestly follow Bakhya Ibn Pakuda's teaching I think a lot of the threats facing our world would recede. Just the basic idea of being happy with what you have is a wise teaching that really should be prevalent, but our society is especially obsessed with the idea of “rising up”, whenall that is is adding more stuff to your pile. Then we proceed to guard that crap that we pile up with as much security as we can provide. In any case, Bakhya Ibn Pakuda probably could see into the future and was trying to warn humans in a simple way of how to avoid a lot of problems which are now on our plates.