In the Mahabharata, King Yudishthira tells us that the greatest wonder of the world is that "no one, though he sees others dying around him, believes that he himself will die." No matter how much society tries to sough off the facts of ageing, illness, and death, the reality is that they are the only certainties in life; ageing brings with it pain, suffering, separation, and loss; death is most assured. Freud said that it is impossible for us to imagine our own death because "whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators... in his unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality." The psychologist Ernest Becker spent much of his life trying to understand why we deny death, what psychologists now call "terror management," and how we do so. According to Becker, denial of death takes many forms: heroic transcendence, crusading against justice and inequality (or evils of all kinds), even the drive towards Eros and the unity of knowledge is a quest for immortality. These transcendent meanings symbolically deny death, but its spectre looms large and eats away at man. Through the greater part of the twentieth century, the threat of nuclear annihilation became an ever more imposing and diabolical spectre of doom as countries went into overdrive stockpiling of their nuclear arsenals, reaching a mind-numbing 13,500 nuclear warheads today—as if it really would take more than a tenth of that number to completely annihilate all life atop our world and decimate the ground beneath our feet to a cinder. This fear and anxiety was everything and nothing all at once, a reaction to a threat that was both imminent and yet obscenely reparable. Psychiatrists called the resulting denial and suppression of such an omnipresent anxiety "nuclear numbing". People everywhere seemed to have anaesthetised themselves to any fear, anger, or rebelliousness to their predicament. Constant and unimaginably catastrophic threats to our existence may only be allayed by ignoring or sloughing off the barrage of data and information on the threat and diverting our minds with trivial, yet controllable pursuits—lest the suppressed and therefore vague threat become real and specific and less easily brushed aside. It's easier to ignore this problem which is our problem and foist it off as their problem, their mess. According to Becker, such denial is part of our character armour, and is countered by what we do assert for ourselves—that is, our character. Our character is the source of our inner consistency framed by the roles we choose for ourselves: parent, pundit, mentor, student, influencer, and so on. Our character and persona not only allow us to aspire to dominant positions in society, they also are a means to achieving some measure of immortality. According to Wilhelm Reich, this armour is our character itself: it is the way we behave and the manner in which we speak, walk, and act; it is our characteristic habits—whether and when we smile or smirk, whether we speak coherently or incoherently, with candour or coyness, expansively or sombrely. Character armour is everything we really think we need to do to live and act in safety and security in an uncertain world. Reich goes on to say that it is the fabricating of our personality that is at the heart of our behaviour. This fabrication is a process by which "some things have to be valued more than others, some acts have to be permitted, others forbidden, some lines of conduct have to closed, some kinds of thought can be entertained, others are taboo—and so on. Each person literally closes off his world, fences himself around, in the very process of his own growth and organisation." Becker says that it is this particularising of experiences and ways of being that is at the heart of our current predicament. In closing ourselves off from certain things and indulging too much in others, we constrain ourselves to single areas of life, and so, "if you cannot freely value everything, nor freely weight all things against all other things, then you must give disproportionate weight to some things which do not deserve this weight. You artificially inflate a small area of the world and give it a higher value in the horizon of your perception and action. Moreover, you do this because it represents an area that you can firmly hold on to, that you can skilfully manipulate, that you can use easily to justify yourself—your actions, your sense of self, your opinion of the world." So when threats of a global nature do arise that are beyond our control, we can do nothing but react in our own effete and narcissistic way. Hordes of men line up and latch on to any system of retaliation or transcendence that would serve as a vehicle of heroism for them. The "grotesque spectacle" of the poisoning of the earth that we witness today is, for Becker, caused by this hero system by which men try to triumph over evil and in the process, they ironically cause evils of all other sorts. There appears to be no redeeming him either, because "man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance," for evolution created a "limited animal with unlimited horizons… men have to artificially and arbitrarily restrict their intake of experience and focus their output on decisive action." So man thinks that the salve for his utter insignificance within a universe full of malignant forces that may end him at will and at any moment, is to immortalise himself through heroic accomplishments of science, technology, or art—acts that result in an unrestrained material growth by million of men engaged in numbed effort at millions of things. Here's the point though: that in one way or another we all engage in actions and enterprises that we hope will subdue these existential fears; that these problems stemming from the eroding of the earth's natural resources are "my" problem and "our" problem; and that our war against evil is what paradoxically feeds this very evil. The grand self-deception then is obliviousness to the impacts of our seemingly inconsequential acts—that our small and large decisions are of no great consequence. For, in this era of practicality and logic, the very antithesis of traditional society with its emphasis on natural morality, no idea is impracticable. Where creativity was previously guided by a definite purpose, whether individual or altruistic, the jettisoning of traditional values in favour of "truth" and "objectivity" meant that ideas could be acted out without any thought to their moral implications, and the only real limitations are the rules of nature and of man. Traditional teachings, naive though they may seem to be, carry within them the germ of free thinking that is also ethically constrained by propriety, proportion, and responsibility. The idea of death; the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny of man.—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973)...the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.—Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in HeavenWe are certainly not prepared for pain and death. We keep running away from them while our legs can carry us instead of turning around and facing them and getting to know them. So we end up dealing with pain more and more out of bewilderment as ordinary vicissitudes buffet our world, and the loss of loved ones lets slip our already frenetic grasping of the threads that bind us to life—even though we know, deep down, that these things are inevitable. Buddhism tells us that people fear death because they are either attached to their body so that the notion of it perishing makes them despair, or they are so habituated to sensual pleasures that they cannot accept an end to such sensations. At the heart of their despair is this need to incessantly cling to experiences and to greedily savour the pleasurable ones, instead of just living from moment to moment. Alan Watts says that life and death; and pain and pleasure; are not opposite forces, but all part of the ceaseless movement of change and "to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself." Examine closely what it means to be alive and you will find that it is not fragmented into good and bad, but is a continuous movement of exuberant encounters as well as the tedium of routine; the euphoria of love as well as the despondency of jealousy, possessiveness, and domination. There will be joy and there will be fear; and finally this this divine dance, this movement must culminate in death. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

For us, the denizens of this world of desire, it is no longer a question of episodic insufficiency; out of our affluence we have created a social world of scarcity—Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (New York, 1989)The word scarcity is derived from the Old Northern French word escarceté, meaning scanty and was used to indicate an insufficiency of goods and supplies. According to the economic historian Nicholas Xenos, it was in the fifteenth century that the word took on the more specific meaning of denoting an insufficiency or dearth of basic necessities. This particular usage likely passed into the vernacular as a direct outcome of the famines and plages that devastated lands periodically. The periods of deficit and frugality were intermittent and short-lived, so scarcity was colocated with "periods of" , or variations to that effect. However, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century as well as an abundance of new and previously limited goods brought in by trade meant that the burgeoning middle class could secure for themselves status and prestige at a price. Now everything could be commoditised—from the trinkets and trifles on our coffee tables to our genetic traits, skills, and abilities. The criteria that bestows value was continually changing and its flow subtly manipulated so as to ensure a constant "elasticity of demand". In part, this conflating of needs with desires is fuelled by evolution, which has made us social animals and compels us to seek belonging in ever wider circles. Power and prestige are attractors because they are attractive and desirable to those who aspire to the same. The drive to acquire gives the mind a tangible avenue to autonomy in the caprice of the vast integer of the universe. We are lured in by the stable and reliable categories of things and resources instead of the unknowingness of a world that is dynamic and continuous. Within this world of arbitrarily fabricated needs, we can make up the rules for how to distribute these resources and who has the right to participate and profit in their transaction. Those who are fortunate to win by the arbitrary and rigid rules that are set up have a stake in maintaining the status quo. The consequence of material needs and desires being conflated with the genuine needs of survival is that they have become deeply entrenched within structures of meaning. Recognition, prestige, and status symbols are so interwoven with the complex fabric of our being that we cannot really separate our needs and desires, either conceptually or morally. But, although it is true that we live in a world of limited resources, the basic necessities of life—food, shelter, and clothing—are not scarce. And neither are the socially constructed needs of love, caring, confidence, respectability, intimacy, sexual fulfilment and so on. If we could only turn around and examine these faux needs, we might see them for what they are—hollow categories of nothingness that trap us in modes of fear and impoverishment and prevent us from experiencing the unknowingness of a world that is dynamic and continuous.The means of satisfying our needs are not scarce, yet today we live in a world where we are led to believe that everything we need is scarce. An abnormal amount of fear is induced when we transmute characteristics that are particular to certain systems to the universe as a whole. Take entropy for example. The term was originally meant to describe the transfer of energy in micro systems that exist within a closed loop. But when the German mathematician and physicist Rudolph Clausius formulated the theory of thermodynamics, he postulated in his second law that all entities in nature undergo transformation "without compensation" and from this he generalised that "the universe must consequently approach incessantly a limiting condition." Soon social philosophers had adopted and extended the concept to include communities or other temporal systems characterised by patterns of behaviour. It was extended and generalised to include the entire universe, the degradation spreading outwards, from our ageing bodies, to our society, to our planet itself and the universe at large. And since all systems break down eventually there is a constant need to improve and fix them by involving more people. So socially and economically, the idea of entropy keeps the labour and technology markets turning. After all, there is more opportunity for involvement in a system that degrade over time, than in one that repairs itself or gets better. This allows us to feel some measure of control over the systems and institutions in our lives, and injects a measure of predictability in an uncertain world. This idea of a degenerating universe is as ancient as civilisation itself. Plato believed in a cycle of degeneration where the world descends from a pinnacular utopia to rapid degradation as time progresses. In the Reign of Cronos myth in the Statesman, a Golden Age existed in which Cronos himself ruled over the world (The origin of this myth can be traced back to Hesiod's Works and Days). This Great Year, roughly equivalent to 36,000 regular years, comprises of a period of tranquility and growth, corresponding to spring and summer, and a nether period of degradation and decay, corresponding to autumn and winter. This age coincided with the birth of man and during that time neither the concepts of property or ownership existed, and ergo the world knew neither social conflict nor war. This age is followed by the age of Zeus—our current age. This is the age in which mankind has been abandoned by the Gods and left to its own devices so that greed and corruption reign supreme. But we are eventually to be redeemed—in Plato's story of the Statesman, Plato suggests that when mankind has reached its lowest point of complete corruption, the Gods will once again descend upon the earth and take charge, setting us back on a halcyon course. Sound familiar?The object which at first appears to be at hand flees more quickly than it can be pursued. When one believes that one has reached it, it transforms and reveals itself in the distance ahead of us. No longer seeing the country we have already crossed, we count it for nothing; what remains to cross ceaselessly grows and extends. Thus one exhausts oneself without getting to the end, and the more one gains on enjoyment, the further happiness gets from us.—Jean-Jacques RousseauThis is a world that encourages us to use any means necessary to succeed, get ahead, make money. The people who rapaciously pursue such values try to dress them up so that they sound better, but this is exactly what they are, and when they do realise the folly of such pursuits, it is usually too late. So what then is the salve to this existential angst? James Gleich says this in his book The Information: "Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways-miracles of patterns and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe." The human constitution seems predisposed towards attending to only contrasts, differences, deficiencies, and other forms of disorder. No doubt, this predilection is hard-wired into us by a survival instinct. In the process we fail to notice or we take for granted the perfectly-ordered processes continuously taking place around us, that have been going on for a thousand million years, and are occurring in a myriad different ways at this very moment within your body and mine. These continuous processes take place with such remarkable precision that the probability of something going wrong is incredibly minute. It is this perfection that has prolonged life for these thousand million years and continues to do so with most supreme efficiency, making subtle modifications along the way so that living systems don't merely exist but are given more and more facility to be more and do more. Life seems to be continuously developing, mutating, and evolving, and especially in man it would seem to be creating without boundary. We need to pay closer attention to this marvellous foundation on which all life and all change rests. There is an abundance in just being in the here and now, and you can shape you present moment by choosing what you focus on. So really examine your desires; see what's at the back of them, and you will realise that you can usually get what you want without compromising, whether it be love, or confidence, or security, or self-esteem, or any of the things we really value in life. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: "Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?" Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word "Attention." "Is that all?" asked the man. "Will you not add something more?" Ikkyu then wrote twice running: "Attention. Attention." "Well," remarked the man rather irritably, "I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written." Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: "Attention. Attention. Attention." Half angered, the man demanded: "What does that word 'Attention' mean anyway?" And Ikkyu answered gently: "Attention means attention."—Philip Kapleau Roshi, The Three Pillars of ZenWhat can you do with attention? Apparently you can pay it, lend it (because you want it back), make it (because you create it), focus it (because it is spread out), devote it (because it is sacred), gift it (because it shows your appreciation), give it (because it is with you), and so on. Such are the rich and varied ways in which different languages "handle," "treat," and "distribute" attention.Attention is a form of analysis—a complex process which reduces the object to elements already known. In order to meet a goal or to complete any task, we must be capable of focussing—a unity of consciousness that is maintained for a duration of time. Focussing is what "holds" our attention. Since we experience our world through our five senses, an ability to selectively pick and choose the parts of it that are most relevant to ourselves can radically transform our lives. Our world radiates out from a hypothetical centre and extends as far as the limits of our senses. At a certain distance, our world fades away into noise, but within the bounds of our senses, we can shift our focus from one source of stimulus to another. What was once background becomes foreground, and vice-versa. Moreover, we seem to only use one or two of our senses at a time, and, as magical numbers go, we take in only 7 ± 2 distinct artefacts from an experience. This does not mean that the input from the remaining senses are nullified, on the contrary, studies have shown that we register a remarkable amount of seemingly redundant information from our senses which is not stored in our working memory, but subsists in a nebulous form in some dusty back office of the mind. In fact, you can imagine the mechanism of mental life as a continual coming and going of impressions from without and the sensations, feelings, ideas, and images they evoke, which in turn associate or repel each other according to certain laws. Indeed then, as the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing observed, "what we fail to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." Unless we take the time to take apart our actions through meditative reflection and mindfulness, we will forever be slaves to our emotional states as they arise and cause us to act in so-called "irrational ways". The mind is indeed a tangle of thoughts and sensations, feelings and emotions. The French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839 - 1916) differentiated attention into two types—spontaneous and voluntary. Spontaneous attention is its common form and a natural convergence of our consciousness towards a single object within our world. The mind is the more balanced when it maintains a close correspondence between our mental representations and the external world, past and present. Sigmund Freud noted that those who observe well have perceptions that correspond to reality. Simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular, and in maintaining the same 'evenly-suspended attention' ... In the face of all that one hears. In this way we avoid a danger. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This however is precisely what must not be done.—Sigmund FreudYour brain does not care if your internal representations do not bear more than a fleeting resemblance to reality. In a number of studies conducted in the 1920s and 30s, Sir Fredrick Bartlett demonstrated that memory works in creative and constructive ways, distorting, omitting, and even deleting our perceptual experiences. In fact, we seem to be able to selectively access one and perhaps no more than two of our sensory channels of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell in any given perceptual experience. So all perception is only a hypothesis, which is based on a very limited number of these elementary sensations, which are further "edited" and completed by competing and interfering information in memories past. Furthermore, the quality of the memory that is tucked away in the recesses of the brain is subject to many factors such as the environment of the original experience, the location and shape of the memory in the brain, and the present stimulus that invokes the memory. Memories themselves are complex and are linked to understanding—that is the way we formulate experience as a "comprehensible reality". It involves our entire being: our bodily attributes, capacities and characteristics; our values, moods, attitudes, cultural beliefs, faiths, fears, anticipations, instincts, and superstitions as well as our thoughts and feelings about the experience itself. The memory, once encoded, is dispersed in various parts of the brain. But the human brain has trouble separating fantasy from fact, seeing things that are not there and not seeing things that are there. This neural ambiguity is the cornerstone of our imaginative capacity and enables us to "see" and "create" novel things in our world—some astonishingly utopian in utility or proportion and others banal and useless. The creative faculty then assumes an entirely analytical and practical modus operandi in materialising the imagination. Since the logic and reasoning are the processes of the frontal lobe, when we conceive of an action, however trivial, this part of the brain not only forms an objective opinion of the probability of the desired outcome, but also of the sequence of events, involved in the action, taking place. It calculates this probability by weighing all the factors for and against the factors that would produce it and those that would prevent it. Thus a factor that is supported by a desire to take place is evoked in the mind simultaneously with a reciprocal but opposite factor that is supported by the fear that it will fail. The dominant factor acts as an antagonistic reducer to its opposing counterpart. The conflict between extreme optimists and pessimists as to the imminent or remote consequences of the same social events which are unfolded before their eyes, is due to their respective excessive affectivities, each taking into consideration only a part of the relevant factors.—Eugenio Rignano, The Psychology of Reasoning (1920)When you decide upon the worthy goal of true happiness and freedom, you need to put aside your past experience of pains, illnesses, ageing, bereavement and all that old karma. When you focus your mind on your goals with intensity and keep that going for a commensurate amount of time, your attention is at its peak state. Being intent on pursuing your aim your concentration is reflected in your sensitivity to the subtle fluctuations in your breath: when it is shallow and when it is deep; when it is torpid and when it is manic. The duration aspect is important so that you're not doing bits and pieces between temptation and distraction, but focussing your mind on one thing for long stretches of time. And when you're really making progress, when you can see yourself approaching your goal, it's easy to lose your footing and be carried away by your accomplishments. You need to maintain that equanimity so that you're not put off balance by your successes or failures, but are immediately scrutinising your outcomes from the other side. Just like all efforts of the mind, the concentration itself is a fabrication, so remember that you are making it happen, you're in control of your state of mind. You make careful adjustments to your breath so that the experience is pleasurable, comfortable, and enjoyable for the mind. When the mind is in a good place, it is not going to wander off. Finally, you know that you will inevitably encounter thoughts that will try to pull you off course; to drag the mind in unproductive directions. Once again, remind yourself that these thoughts are fabrications of perception and that they are not strictly your thoughts, but rather the product of certain natural processes of the mind. You can let them arise and subside of their own volition without interfering, but simply watching the process taking place. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

We know that the mind grasps by conceptions and the very act of perceiving is a distortion that stands in the way of direct encounters with the real, moving world. The machinery of semantic thought must categorise and label everything, and so every thought and feeling can really be considered to be a fabrication—constructed not only from a myriad different sensations and revived images of sensations, but also the subtle faiths, fears, anticipations, instincts, superstitions, and blind impulses that plague the soul. The Buddhist concept of saṅkhāra encapsulates this inner fabrication—an intentional doing that is central to our practice. The other aspect of fabrication is the nature of reality itself. What each of us perceives as reality is really just what is apparent to us, and by the very nature of perception, is a dependent rather than an absolute reality. And so Brahmanism maintains that all perceivable things are mithyã. All objectifiable things may be resolved into ever finer detail by progressive resolution into their constituents and so it is only by the confluence of various internal factors that we perceive their finite forms: where they begin and where they end. Even now, we need to keep reminding ourselves of this, lest we slip into the classical view of objectivism, which insists that the categories that we cognise with are universal and objective; that reality is an absolute; and that deviation is an insanity. Modern research has shown that imagination plays a key role in modifying universal categories to fit our conceptualisation of the world. Although we are endowed with essentially anatomically and physiologically similar sensory apparatus, the unique nature of our bodies means that our worlds radiate from very different focal points, based on our physical size, perceptual capacities, and motor skills. The American philosopher, Susanne Langer gives us the useful distinctions of "concept" versus "conceptions" to help us distinguish the subjective from the objective. Concepts are the objective, universal structures for understanding that allow us to experience the world in roughly the same way. Conceptions are the personal meaning structures that we create around the abstract concept. I have called the terms of our thinking conceptions, not concepts. Concepts are abstract forms embodied in conceptions; their bare presentation may be approximated by so-called "abstract thought", but in ordinary mental life they no more figure as naked factors than skeletons are seen walking the street. Concepts, like decent living skeletons, are always embodied – sometimes rather too much. A concept is all that a symbol really conveys. But just as quickly as the concept is symbolized to us, our own imagination dresses it up in a private, personal conception, which we can distinguish from the communicable public concept only by a process of abstraction.—Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)Traditional teachings acknowledge this uniqueness of perception through the concepts of mithyā and sankhara. That is, all reality is a fabrication. It is a fabrication because, in order to experience something, we must take the signals from our senses and combine them with our feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and previous experiences to form an aggregate from the potential signals. Even when we sit still and will ourselves to do nothing we are deliberately creating the state that we wish to be in. The very process of thought is a labelling of inner and outer entities. We attach labels to the feelings we experience and all our movements and actions are intended towards something. To begin wilfully directing what states we create, we need to understand the primary modes of fabrication. Kaya Sankhara is what sustains life itself. With each breath we take in a nourishing lungful of air and the process is so essential to our existence that we do not even notice how we take in the breath. When you are angry or fearful, you will notice that your breath is shallow instead of full. When it feels threatened, the body prepares itself for fight or flight: adrenaline floods the system and the heart rate increases, a heaviness descends on the vital organs resulting in protracted and laboured breathing. If you have ever observed this state in someone else, you will have noticed the outward signs of the tautness and tension within the body. The noted psychologist Sam Keen points out how agitated men have their "shoulders back, chest out, stomach pulled in, anal sphincter tight, balls drawn up into the body as far as possible, eyes narrowed, breathing foreshortened and anxious, heart rate accelerated, testosterone in full flow." The breath is one of the fabrications that is so easily swayed by other factors that we can easily forget that we are in control of it. Thoughts seem to activate certain areas of the body, making them tense as feelings arise and then fade away. To do this, the brain sends a trickle charge from its limited energy field to the relevant areas of the body and at the same time, subdues or inhibits other parts of the body. When you perceive threats in your surrounding, whether they be to your life or to your ego, more areas of the body need to be primed for activation and more energy is depleted from the already limited pool of energy available. The more fragile your ego and the more vulnerable the self, the more will be the energy dispelled in maintaining a turgid state in those parts of the body and, consequently, there is less energy for noticing what is actually going on. The first step to gaining a measure of control over kaya sankhara is to notice when parts of the body become tense and to imagine gentle movement through them. Notice how your breathing changes when you focus on doing this and keep the breath in a healing rhythm as you relax those parts of the body. The next step is to then counter the stimulus with an opposite sensation: when you are worked up or frenetic, or just plain giddy, ground that excessive energy by planting both feet firmly on the ground; when parts of your body seem rigid and unmovable, you can spread that firmness to other parts of the body so that you have a good, solid, and upright frame instead; when you are depressed, which is a sort of compression and is accompanied by the feeling of being weighed down, use the breath to lift those parts of the body and make them lighter; and so on with other sensations, you get the point. All the while that you're working with the breath, you're also verbalising your flow and motions internally. Vaci Sankhara is this internal verbalising, including the deliberate thought fabrications and the dialogue with your body that comes with noticing. You're using your thoughts to manoeuvre the sensations and checking the new feeling by asking yourself how they feel. Let me try this; does that feel good or not? The body, being the child of nature, does not reply to questions unless they are put to it in the form of experiments to which it can say "yes" or "no". This is the most basic level of conversation you can have with your body. As you become aware of your internal verbalising, you can observe how your mind perceives what is good and what is bad by the labels it attaches to the sensations from both within and without. Citta Sankhara is the act of labelling things and feelings as good or bad. Perception always seeks to gain some measure of finality as a means to grasp the unknown and categorise the known. When you step back and observe the process, you can take it apart and review the snap judgements your mind makes into the broader categories of what is pleasurable and what is painful and what is neither. You can also see how the mind is labelling the breath as it happens; labelling the feelings that arise in the body in response to the breath; and even when things are quiet and the breath becomes perfectly still, there is a "stillness" happening. As you observe one label and drop it, another pops up to fill the void. This goes on all the way up to the realm of emptiness, leaving a trail of "perception attainments" along the way.According to the Buddha, all fabrication, all sankahra leads to stress, but there is no way to drop the fabrication because the very act of doing this would be a fabrication in itself. The only way to sublimate the process of fabrication is to approach it more skilfully. You accept the stress unconditionally and acknowledge the fear inherent in the unknown. By acknowledging the presence of things that are stressful—the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts—you can unravel them with simpler fabrications until you get to their roots and then take those apart as well. As you delve deeper and gain that self-knowledge that enables you to drop the fabrication, you will reach a point where you no longer need to cling to the labels or fill the empty space with anything. You can just be in the here and now. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

From 1770 until his death in 1804, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to unify his theories concerning the nature of human reasoning into a critical study, spanning his three famous Critiques (of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgement). Kant's theory of imagination is spread across these volumes and represents a radical departure from the classical notion.Kant was the first philosopher to elevate imagination to a respectable place within human cognition, and in so doing, gave creativity its rightful place within the arts. Before Kant, the prevailing belief stemmed from the Platonic tradition: that imagination was a faculty that was not to be trusted; that the vivid images it conjures up at the hand of the artist, though they may foment our passions, are not the product of a rational faculty but rather borne in the throes of the artist's possession by the daimon of his creativity. This we glean from Ion, Plato's closing dialogue in the Symposium, where he concludes that it is "[not] by art, then, they make their poetry with all those fine things about all sorts of matters—like your speeches about Homer—not by art, but by divine dispensation." Aristotle, would later recast Plato's abstract notion of imagination in his empirical and practical light as a recollection of previous sensual experiences that are made available from memory, as images representing our knowledge of the physical world. For Aristotle, imagination is a physical and external reenactment of sensual knowledge and the sense images, phantasmata, are corporeal, not "mental." This view lent no more credence to imagination than that of Plato’s, and is the view that persisted right up to the period of enlightenment in the eighteenth century—evinced by interchangeability of "imagination" and "fancy" in popular culture. Kant was the first to formulate a working theory of the mechanism of thought. In his construction, knowledge is still gained through the senses, but it is our concepts that structure the raw sense data into what we perceive, the organisation taking place in both space and in time. A concept is an abstraction: a rule by which the representations gained from perception may be structured in a more meaningful way to us. Kant further speculates that concepts are shared because nature is characterised by certain immutable natural laws, and we can largely agree upon convergent realities. So (he deduces), our consciousness itself shares a common structure—a collective human consciousness. This objective structure he calls a transcendental unity of consciousness. Kant termed this peculiar objective correlative, productive imagination, which is nothing other than the universally harmonising conceptual structures by which any object allows itself to be experienced in the human mind. Subtleties and nuances tinge our productive imagination, but these do not, in most cases, distort the near-public apperception. We use our judgement to fit the content from our senses into our conceptions; for, as Susanne Langer says, "just as quickly as the concept is symbolised to us, our own imagination dresses it up in a private, personal conception, which we can distinguish from the communicable public concept only by a process of abstraction."The vitalities and energies of the imagination do not operate at will; they are fountains, not machinery.—D.G. James, Skepticism and PoetryKant's theory of imagination gives us a much more accessible path towards understanding and utilising imagination. Imagination plays a central role in formulating and moving towards our goals. Imagination is a spontaneity that may only be directed by reflection. When we reflect, we recall past images, sensations, perceptions, and conceptions so that we may shape them up into a coherent whole, an object, or an end. We use our judgement to recognise novel representations from the conceptions that we already have available to us. Imagination is also what propels us towards the object or end it conjures up for us, for it is process of doing and an inner, abstract enactment.There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in or in which he would like to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.—G.K. ChestertonThe process of visualisation is integral to imagination. Creative people are able to generate a vivid image of the object of their imagination and then hold it at the front of their mind, where they may scrutinise every aspect of its design and every detail of its construction, rearranging their characteristics and directing the mise en scène to represent the particular spiritual or emotional state they seek. For our purposes, we can explore the ramifications of each element in the image and check it against the feeling and the sense of rightness within the scene desired. Usually we construct our goals to counter and overcome problems in our world, so visualising a solution activates the cognitive circuits involved in those knowledge-centres of the brain and calls forth latent memories conducive to a solution. We have such extraneous data in the recesses of the mind because our visual system doesn't operate like a camera; that is, we don't imprint to memory a true representation of an experience through our senses, with all the actors and artefacts in vivid detail. Rather, we only register the finer details at the centre of our visual field, which stand out in marked relief to a mostly superfluous background. This visual field is the portion at the apex of the retina which truncates into the fovea—an area of the eye that contains a dense array of closely-packed cone receptors that are capable of detecting colour and visual detail with great acuity. Tangentially, we sample our periphery by rapid eye movement which sporadically captures elements of the peripheral space surrounding the object of our interest. The fovea always settles only on those details that catch our attention. The rest of our mental picture is constructed from a partial view of the objects that make up a scene, based on their perceived fundamental properties (light level, wavelength, spatial position, and so on). When we imagine a solution to a problem or a more favourable situation, the wealth of subconscious knowledge is called forth by the mind, which always demonstrates remarkable sagacity in the choice of means it employs in moving us swiftly towards our destination. It's almost as if there is a chorus of life which goes on in the wings instead of the stage, ceaselessly teeming with vigorous activity and ready to spring forth into the limelight in response to right stage cue. The more you practice this skill of imagining, the better you will become at directing your intentions towards desirable outcomes. How skilled you become at this art is contingent upon your positivity, energy, and discipline. Imagination doesn't take the conventional route of ordinary causality in realising itself, but seems to translate into its own language and cast in its own mould the perceptions incident from the outside. Suggestions and solicitations may act upon the imagination from the outside and these things influence it only in the condition in which they find us. To make a novel or radical change in our circumstances, we must notice their influence upon us and alter our conception of them in ways that align with our goals. We analyse the impressions we receive from them and see them for what they really are, we then use our judgement to reassess their validity or lack thereof, but this time we do it deliberately. For, what is impressed on us from outside is less of a force than a question to which we are required to answer in equal measure. Things influence him far more through the situation in which they find him than through their own nature... [E]ach of their impressions upon him depends far more, for his happiness or his misery, upon the condition in which they find him, than upon the sensation they produce or the accidental change in him they cause. Thus, in each separate moment of his life, to be what he ought to be, is of the highest importance to man.—Étienne Pivert de Senancour Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

We are continually converging towards the ends we desire through imagination and action. Every action we perform, from sipping our morning tea to reading the words right here on this page, is charted first on the mind’s whiteboard and then enacted by the body. So, wilfully or not, we are always working through the teleology of goals in our most fundamental level of being. But when we think about goals, we specifically mean those far-reaching ideals or lofty aspirations—nice to have, but all right to forgo. And so, little by little, we give up the hope of changing our world or shaping our lives and accept our “fate”. We have to remind ourselves that our lives aren’t written in stone; that we aren’t mere cogs in a huge clockwork mechanism, immutability interlocked with and subordinate to its every movement, right down to the tiny escapement that is beating in our own heart. For in this life, the only certainties are ageing and death. Ageing brings sickness and infirmity, so we are given only so much time to prepare for death. It is only normal then that even in our noblest intentions, we want for something and we intend to get it. Every waking moment we are engaged in deconstructing and reassembling our world so that it fits within our meaning structure. We are willing our way towards a better life, better health, communion with God, or some other sort of personal or spiritual improvement. Yet this forceful intending is the paradoxical block in the getting. We want to take control of our lives and actively transcend the limitations of our existence by formulating and pursuing the goals that we choose. But insofar as we attempt to will our plans into being, we condemn them to die on the vine. A goal is won only when there is a certain spontaneity in our movement towards it. Life is a doing and this spontaneity cannot be an inner, abstract imagining, but rather real and tangible actions that involve the whole of our being, such that this spontaneity is realised and the end is achieved. So before you throw yourself into a such an endeavour, make sure it is a worthwhile aim that you can pursue with the whole of your being. One of the best ways to ascertain worthwhile aims is to determine if they will give you what you are missing in your life. So ask yourself if you are ready for death, and if not, what would complete your existence? What is lacking right now? When you ask yourself such questions you realise how your mind is drawn towards quick fixes and easy, cunning ploys. The mind finds its pleasure in little places and things that gain it no real fulfilment. Goals that are aimed at securing pleasure and possessions are mere delusions of the mind, for after all pleasure is fleeting and possessions only weigh you down; they are usually acquired at the cost to another, and in the end, you cannot take them away with when you die. So isn't it better to instead aim for a peaceful state of being rather than the reactionary states of lust, anger, fear, and other strong feelings that you are so easily led into by hubris and temptation? You cannot achieve peace or freedom when you pursue material wealth—the opulent house, the high profile job, the exclusive holiday so that you can get away from your work and responsibilities—things that you cannot take with you when you die and hollow experiences that fade away with age. You're going to need to frame worthy goals: ones that push you not too little and not too much. You need to aim for something that is outside your realm; outside of your ordinary and habitual world. You're going to have to use your imagination to see your goal and adjust it until it feels right, then you need to determine the actions that will get you there, and finally you're going to need determination and concentration to carry you through. Great personal change brings with it the frustration of failure and you may be advised that to avoid dissatisfaction and failure you should lower your standards and humbly accept who and what you are. There are people who are so averse to defeat and failure that they form no goals or plans and keep themselves from ever doing anything. When life is devoid of any goals, man has nothing to look forward to and must instead seek fulfilment in the present by indulging in sensual pleasures and giving free rein to the impulses of the moment. But nobody would ever consider such wanton, heedless, and capricious indulgence an achievement of any sort or an exercise of free will. So we need to dream big.As we have seen earlier, a good goal leads to true and lasting happiness. Notice that the goal itself is an emotion—happiness—which has particular meaning within your emotion spectrum. Your emotion spectrum is the range and degrees by which you distinguish between closely related, but subtly different feelings that hover around a central locus. Happiness is a spectrum, ranging from being "satisfied", "content", "glad", "pleased", "blissful", "cheerful", to being, "delighted", "joyful", "rapturous", "ecstatic", "euphoric", "jubilant". In general, someone who is able to distinguish between different feelings using different words exhibits emotional granularity. They do this by paying attention to their physical cues or reactions for each emotion and interpreting their degree using roughly synonymous but subtly different feeling-words. Such sommeliers of emotion have a deep and nuanced lexicon to identify an emotion as they encounter it in the wild. On the other hand, people who assess experiences with a lower emotional granularity use a handful of words interchangeably to represent their reactions at the locus of the emotion. Remember that emotions are consciously felt responses to situations, and our goals at the highest level are to seek favourable outcomes in any situation. They are the responses to such questions (or aims) as how can I feel less frustrated by events? How can I feel less disgruntled in my job? As you tackle these baser requirements for happiness, you can ascend to more complex goals like "How can I find a more dependable form of happiness?" Of course, in the course of our practice, we will encounter reactionary emotions like "sadness", "fear", "disgust", and even "excitement". English and many other languages (stemming from its antecedents) construe emotional concepts as internal feelings rather than as a means to describe the situation. So we need to acknowledge that words have an inner life and understand how they affect us, while seeking greater situational awareness when feelings do arise. For such emotional dexterity, we can see how important it is to gain real self-knowledge. We want a sophisticated verbal grab-bag so that we don't conflate our aims and also so that we can accurately check the validity of concerning instances of "guilt", "shame", "pride", "contempt", "embarrassment", and other caustic emotions, and choose to replace them with more constructive emotions like "gratitude" and "love". The emotion spectrum of love is diverse and encompasses such platonic tones as "close-friendship", "comfort", "well-being" and so on. Caustic emotions on the other hand result in chronic priming of the nervous system: the heartbeat speeds up, adrenaline courses through the system, the breathing gets more laboured, all of which flood the system with toxins, before the emotion itself disappears. But the physical reactions themselves may take a while to recede. Once you have identified, very specifically, negative feelings that are attached to your experiences, past, present, and future, you can frame new goals that give you better results.Finally, when you have figured out worthy goals, you need to move swiftly through the actions that will get you to your results. It's easy to do the things that we like to do that give good results and and avoid the things that we don't like to do that give bad results. But the true test of your determination and commitment to your goals as well as your wisdom and sagacity is how you discern between the things you like to do that give bad results and the things you don't like to do that give good results; for we know that the actions that truly make a difference are these hard-fought ones. These actions are difficult for everybody, but wise and successful people learn to navigate around the mind's habitual lethargy by experimenting with different approaches and alternatives. Remember that your mind is a product of the structured flow of external impulses, and it is only through a concerted effort that you can stem the tide, or else, allow yourself to be swept along with the suggestions and solicitations from without. The best way to motivate yourself to stay the course is to make your tasks more enjoyable. Have you noticed how you naturally begin to do something when it is enjoyable? Learn to give yourself encouragement when you make a breakthrough. Celebrate the small wins with a kind and encouraging word and challenge yourself to do better. When you are habitually lazy about making real goals or procrastinating over the tasks you set yourself, you begin to see yourself as lazy. So avoid the trap of identifying strongly with your past actions and encourage yourself back onto your path when you stray. Remember that it is, as Simone de Beauvoir said, only in "laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, [that] one wills onsself not free." Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

On a fine summer’s day in 1749, a 37 year old Jean Jacques Rousseau stopped in at the grocer’s on the way to Vincennes from Paris and chanced upon a newspaper advertisement for an essay competition. The competition was sponsored by the Academy of Dijon and the theme for the prize essay to be judged the following year was: “Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals?” The words were a revelation for Rousseau, who wrote later in his Confessions, “From the moment I read these words, I beheld another world and became another man… on my arrival at Vincennes I was in a state of agitation bordering on madness.” Rousseau would go on to win the prize and his essay Discourse on the Sciences and Arts would form his first discourse, which along with his later discourses, rested on the same fundamental theoretical foundation that man is essentially good, but society corrupts him and makes him desperate. Ten years later, Rousseau had become the most reviled man in France following the publishing of the Social Contract and Emile. Right from the onset of the Social Contract, Rousseau fulminates against the established order of things by saying that man “is born free, but every where he is in chains.” But it was the lengthy theological discourse in the form of a dialogue between Rousseau and a Savoyard priest that concludes that the only religious instruction to be given to children and adolescents is the rudiments of “natural religion”, which has “neither temples, nor altars, nor rites and is confined to the purely internal cult of the supreme God and the eternal obligations of morality.” This drew the ire of the Archbishop of Paris. Charged with heresy, an arrest warrant was issued for him and his books were publicly burned. Fleeing to his native Geneva did not afford him any protection either, for the Calvinist populace there were equally incised by his doctrines as the catholic Parisians. A mob attacked the house in which he was staying along with his mistress Therese la Vasseur and his dog Sultan, forcing him to seek refuge elsewhere.Rousseau’s saviour was the Scotsman David Hume who had recently returned from the salons of Paris where he was hailed affectionately as Le Bon David. Like other writers of the eighteenth century, Hume concerned himself with the moral aspects of wealth and luxury. By Hume’s time, the nepotic tradition of the court system had largely disintegrated. Rich merchants could acquire status from the purchase of houses and lands of the dispossessed gentry. The Industrial Revolution, then underway, was ushering in a new “Consumer Revolution”. Hume believed that consumerism is necessary for rousing “men from their indolence” and keeping humanity moving forward through a continual refinement of tastes and the needs they invoke.Such is the delicacy of man alone, that no object is produced to his liking. He finds that in everything there is need for improvement…. The whole industry of human life is employed not in procuring the supply of our three humble necessities, food, clothes and lodging, but in procuring the conveniences of it according to the nicety and delicacy of our tastes.Adam Smith, Lectures on jurisprudence (1766), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978Whereas previously, the produce of a land along with its natural riches constituted its wealth, now the fruits of society’s labour in fabricating such conveniences as to meet the ever burgeoning refinements of taste. So the wealthiest nations provide their subjects with widest variety of conveniences to exercise as many desires. Such commerce is what drives the arts and sciences and gives them an unceasing patronage, producing aesthetic objects of beauty to appease and delight every imagination and all manner of contraptions. Now these material objects were the measure of social status and possessing these objects of desire. The line between needs and wants is blurred and they become conceptually indistinguishable and we cannot distinguish morally between needs and luxuries. Social needs of recognition and prestige are what fuel our consumerist desires. And in such a consumerist society, it is possible to acquire prestige from material possessions, achievements, to even physical attributes, as long as they are novel or unprecedented in some way. Rousseau saw through this affectation and false system of values. To him, man is pure before he is corrupted by society and man’s very character is socially constructed so that he knows not where his true self lurks and which of his desires are truly his own.While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them. Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 1750Being social animals, we invest a large part of our time and energy in our bid to belong. While cooperation and contribution were the only means to secure esteem, social status is now a commodity that can be acquired by procuring material objects and displaying our skills and abilities in battles oneupmanship. Rousseau saw how social slavery and the drive to acquire the symbols of success is a way for the mind to seize some measure of control and fixity in a world that is rapidly changing around us. The categories of things and the symbols of social etiquette and propriety lure us into a false sense of stability instead of embracing a dynamic and ever-changing world. Within this social reality, we can construct rules to distribute our resources, and those who play by the rules and fabricate a socially acceptable (and perhaps even exceptional) self are deemed suitable to win by such arbitrary and rigid rules. The desire for recognition and esteem provokes all individuals in society to construct a socially acceptable self. “The one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded” says Rousseau, “[to] be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.” The need to be noticed compels us to attract considerations by affecting them, and to do so became possible because character is hidden behind “conventions of etiquette and propriety” in modern society. But once we realise that these categories and characterisations are of our own making and question the needs we have adopted from without, we can never go back to being comfortable with our selves again. For Rousseau, the fracturing of his reality began with a single sentence read in a newspaper; words that fomented a lifelong quest to excavate his true self, challenge all his perceptions and beliefs and critically examine what is “genuine and artificial” in the makeup of his personality.¹The inner possibility of growth in a person is a dangerous thing because either you say yes to it and go ahead, or you are killed by it. There is no other choice. It is a destiny which has to be accepted.Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, London, 1970To understand Rousseau’s struggle, we must travel forward two centuries to 1954, to the publishing of the humanist philosopher, Abraham Maslow’s seminal and groundbreaking analysis of human motivations. Called the Hierarchy of Needs, this examination of human motivations situates the baser and more physiological needs like satiating hunger and natural desires at the bottom and ascends towards more refined needs like social recognition and achievement, culminating with what he called self-actualisation at the capstone. As we move on to more refined and elaborate needs, we leave the lower ones behind—when bread is aplenty, other needs emerge which are not physiological, and when these are satisfied, other needs emerge which are more advanced and refined, and so on and so forth. Self-actualisation is attained when we become our true selves and form a concrete identity. Self-actualised individuals have developed the self-assurance and self-confidence to express their views and construct a fairly robust worldview. Prime examples of self-actualisers are people who hold positions of power, such as leaders of nations, CEOs, and even certain celebrities. In his journals, Maslow identifies Eisenhower and Truman as two presidents who fit the mould, but in 1967, he adds “they are clearly not B-people”. Being-Cognition (shorted to B-) is a character trait that Maslow identified after he had published his initial model. “B-cognisers” are people who have gone past self-actualisation and exist in a higher state of consciousness. At this level of being, one is less concerned with seeking autonomy or selfhood, or any of the other needs of the ego, but rather seeks to “transcended the geographical limitations of the self.” This transpersonal or transhuministic pursuit involves mystical experiences such as a union or oneness with nature or an intimate communion with another human being—any experience that effaces the personal identity of self that we have nurtured as we transcended through our needs. People at this stage of their lives feel safe and secure, they are able to love and be loved, they feel respected and respect everyone and everything in return; consequently they seek to be of service to others, or devotion to an ideal or a cause. They realise that self-actualisation is not enough and what is truly good and worth striving for is not freedom or autonomy or self-esteem, or any of the other personal goals, but what is good for both other people and also good for the self.…it is quite clear that a purely intrapsychic, individualistic psychology, without preference to other people and social conditions, is not adequate.From Maslow’s unpublished 1966 paper, Critique of Self-Actualization TheoryI previously told you about the value of eliciting your personal values. Maslow refers to these transcendent values as higher needs: “higher human needs are … biological, and I speak here of love, the need of love, for friendship, for dignity, for self-respect, for individuality, for self-fulfilment, and so on.” It is when these higher needs are met that self-transcendence becomes a possibility. Encountering people who are “awakened” and “illuminated” is like entering another realm. “The … point of departure, into this transhumanistic realm” says Maslow, comes when they answer the following kind of questions: ‘What are the moments which give you … the greatest satisfaction? … What are the moments of reward which make your work and your life worthwhile?’” B-cognisers frame their answers to these questions in terms of the universal values (verities) such as truth, goodness, beauty. Such values are of a higher order than the baser ones and can no way be classified as selfish. Such people are rare according to Maslow for they are “fully developed (and very fortunate) human being working under the best conditions”. But even for those operating on such stable footing, the transition engenders a widespread dislocation of being, the disintegration of the centre of personal gravity, for when one seeks to make the transition to this high plateau, “then troubles (of the highest type) begin.” Maslow called this disruption Value Pathologies (also referred to as metapathologies). When one deliberately abstains from the baser and ordinary needs of life—the lack of fulfilment of metamotivations—cynicism, apathy, boredom, loss of zest, despair, hopelessness, a sense of powerlessness, and nihilism ensue. In this sense, those in the process of transcending must go through a right of passage wherein the self disintegrates.²Value pathologies can be a very high achievement. And one can respect profoundly those in whom one can see—through the symptoms of frustrated idealism—the beautiful B-realm that they are reaching for and may therefore get to. The ones who are struggling & reaching upward really have a better prognosis than the ones who rest perfectly content at the SA [self-actualisation] level.The Journals of Abraham MaslowRousseau was compelled to expunge parts of his identity by constantly interrogating his motivations in the quest for truth. Hume was comfortable in his skin as a self-actualiser with no interest in transcending his worldview, or perhaps was oblivious to this other realm. Those of us like Rousseau have no choice but to follow through with this transition, even if it means the effacement of everything that is familiar to us. The most important thing to ask yourself is what you value above all else and then give yourself over to its whims and vicissitudes. Just as the more we love someone, the more we must grieve for their loss; the more of ourselves that we give to love, the more we risk losing when it’s gone; when we give all of ourselves away to our singular verity, we also chance the void of selflessness. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

It is a fundamental neurological truth that your thoughts affect the physiological functioning of your body. Positive thoughts neurologically suppress negative ones. The ordinary mechanism of action is to evaluate and weigh all the factors that contribute to produce it, and at the same time, all the other factors that tend to prevent it. We do this by evoking the schemas of past experiences and keeping as many of the relevant ones in front of the mind for as long as possible. This enables those possibilities that are in the majority to surface and act as antagonistic reducers¹ of those in the minority. If the possibility is supported by a desire for the event to take place, then there must also be considered other possibilities that involve the affectivity of fear that the event will not take place; these latent possibilities serve to bring into awareness those facts that the overpowering desire would have suppressed or inhibited. This mechanism is imperative for our survival in presenting us with the best alternatives when facing a life-or-death situation—say when we cross paths with a lion or find ourselves trapped in a burning building. The difference between optimists and pessimists is that, given the same social event or experience, the former’s desire trumps the antagonistic affectivities so that the fear of making a mistake which keeps the mind in suspense and attention is diminished in the presence of overwhelming desire, allowing an unconscious flow to replace the primary affectivity. This is the necessary condition for all actions to be performed with any degree of success. When you’re feeling happy and optimistic, your brain produces serotonin, which is thought to inhibit negative thoughts and opposing facts from past experiences. The English philosopher Herbert Spenser² believed that weaker ideas are not entirely vanquished, but instead subsist in the subconscious, constantly exerting a pressure on the stratum of consciousness, the dominant ideas threatening to topple and overthrow even the most long-standing and well-entrenched ones.Just like overwhelming desire overrides the apprehensions of the moment, long-term goals and ideas are realised when you have an instinctive interest that they could realise, or a deep-seated and uninhibited tendency they could satisfy. Our tendencies are our virtual perceptions. They are stored snippets of experience that have produced in us a positive, negative, or neutral reaction. They are our tastes, inclinations, and passions, but are also constituted by primordial tendencies that are governed by the instinct for self-preservation. Every physical and material condition in your life is a product and consequence of your tendencies. Your habitual tendencies are shaped by your character—that is, the way that you regard your personal life in relation to all life. Hillman³ defines character as the “deep structures of personality that are particularly resistant to change”. Your character could be frivolous, deep, open, restive, vulgar, and so on, depending on the personality types you identify with. Your values shape your character. They influence your sense perceptions, or rather they control the level of selective (or voluntary) attention from the sensory channels and how your experience varies with the sensory input.With our innate predilection for categories, it’s no surprise that psychology has categorised humanity based on personality types. Eduard Spranger (1882 – 1963) was a humanist philosopher who theorised that human personalities fell into six value orientations: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. Theoretical types are the idealists who thirst for knowledge above all else. When your value system is primarily theoretical, your energies are directed towards discovering and categorising knowledge, to seek eros—the unification of truth and experience. People who are economically minded are materialists who evaluate all actions based on their profitability. When your value system is economic, you will only gravitate towards those goals that provide a commensurate return on any investment of time or effort. If you value the aesthetic, you are drawn towards beauty and life experiences. If you are altruistic and feel a deep sympathy for the plight of your fellow man, then you will invest your time and resources in helping others. Politically minded people are individualistic and seek power, prestige, and position so that they may influence others. Finally, those who are religious hold spiritual endeavours in highest esteem. Personality types are never singular, nor are they consistent, given our scattered and fragmentary sense of self. Depending on the primary types we identify with, we adopt sets of categories that encapsulate our world view with regard to objects and phenomena. Conveniently for us, we have well-formed, ready made categories in the form of ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, libertarianism, populism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the myriad of other ‘-isms’ that rise and fall with the progress of civilisation and under which humanity lies “groaning, half crushed under the weight of the progress it has made.”⁴ G. W. Allport and P. E. Vernon were the first to formalise a personality-eliciting questionnaire based on Spranger’s categories. In a 1948 study, participants were first evaluated using the questionnaire to determine their primary personality types and then evaluated on their ability to recognise words flashed briefly on a screen by a device called a tachistoscope. These words were associated with values. For example, religious words like prayer, God, and purgatory; and political words like govern, citizen, and law. Subjects varied with their ability to recognise the words depending on their measured personality type, and the higher their score on a particular value, the faster they were able to recognise the word.The ideas and goals that you have an instinctive interest in typically tend to be realised. Conversely, the things that spontaneously capture your attention reveal your character. You can only begin to understand what makes you tick by observing how you act and react in different situations. What satisfies or antagonises your tendencies is usually felt instinctively as pleasure or pain. According to William James, the idea to be sought must be first and foremost a reasonable one; that there are “laws of connection between our consciousness and our nervous system”; and that the necessary neurological changes occur when the object is made the centre of attention. This deliberate focussing of attention is what Ribot terms voluntary attention. “Just as a balance turns on its knife edge, so on voluntary attention our moral destiny turns.” Basically, you get what you focus on. More specifically, the outcomes that you direct your selective attention towards are usually fulfilled. Since the subconscious mind possesses knowledge and memories that we are not consciously aware of, it will exhibit remarkable sagacity in choosing the means employed to expedite the acquisitions and outcomes we desire.Throughout history, successful people have used their values to achieve standards of excellence in their lives. Bruce Lee’s aim may have been to be the highest paid Oriental star in Hollywood⁵, but he sought through that, freedom, inner harmony, and happiness. Money for him was just the enabler; a symbol for the values symbolised. Being spiritually inclined, his end goal was to attain the space for serenity and the peace of mind that money would bring him in providing for his growing family. Oprah Winfrey’s mission in life was to be a renowned and respected teacher. Her love for people led her into the social life par excellence. Richard Branson, the consummate adventurer lives to experience the world and all that it has to offer. The poet Maya Angelou declared that her “mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.” Her altruistic and aesthetic inclinations shine through in her words, art, and life. Compassion is an often overlooked and underrated value. Suffering and pain are a part life and so hardships in some way, shape, or form are experienced by one and all. Recognising the struggles of others indicates a deeper connection with our own being. Values not only represent the outward world of wants, desires, and aspirations, they also reflect the core of our being—our inner life of hopes, defeats, triumphs, joy, and grief. So don’t talk about aims and goals. Aims and goals are merely the symbols, they change from day to day. Your desires must be in line with your tendencies and your character—the reasonable idea for you. Do not reject or suppress your desires for baser things like money as being amoral, mercenary, or avaricious, but dig deeper to uncover the needs that money will fulfil. If money will secure you independence and autonomy to create the things you love (say), then freedom is that which is symbolised by money. Now you can pursue freedom in all its forms that are meaningful for you. The same is true for other symbolic desires like sex (intimacy, love), fame (recognition, belonging, love), power (control over an unpredictable universe, acceptance, belonging). Beyond the superficial desire lies that which is necessary for us, but is buried under several strata of half-true and partially relevant values. Successful and more importantly, happier people, have plunged the depths of their desires and excavated their true values. It’s not easy to acknowledge our true desires and tendencies; to come face-to-face with our true character, but it is the necessary first step to reaching the meaningful; to getting to the truth. Only by embracing what lies at the depths of our personality and by developing our awareness of ourselves more fully can we transcend the egocentric and superficial wants whose pursuit only results in the affectivities of fear, self-pity, self-satisfaction, and competitiveness. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub

Twenty-five thousand years ago, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus recorded the aphorism Ethos anthropoi daimon in his fragments—which we have taken, nemine contradicente, to mean character is fate. The word ethics, though etymologically derived from the Greek ēthos, is entangled with theological and eschatological conceptions, owing to the later Roman and Christian religiosity that adopted and adapted its meaning to suit their purposes. In its original form, as intended by Heraclitus, ethos is character. It is something engraved on the soul, formed by the repeated action of habit. Hillman¹ defines character as the “deep structures of personality that are particularly resistant to change” and habit the “invisible source of inner consistently”. Character is engraved on the soul and the daimon is our genius, according to the ancient texts. In modern terms, the daimon is likened to fate; it is where your wisdom and creativity reside; it is your unconscious self, your undermind. According to Ancient Greek myth, the daimon is potentially divine and is the intermediary between the mortal and the divine. In the Symposium, Plato wrote that Eros and other demons were intermediaries between human beings and the gods. But to better understand what the daimon is, we must return to the ancient myths; that of Plato’s Myth of Er.Plato concludes the Republic with the Myth of Er. When Er dies in battle, his body is piled away with his other slain comrades. But, even after ten days, his body remains undecomposed and is sent to his home for cremation. Twelve days after his death, he wakes up on the funeral pyre and tells the extraordinary tale of his sojourn in the underworld. Here, the souls of those who have departed this world await their lot in the new life, as allotted by Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity, whose name derives from Lachos – one’s spiritual lot or portion of fate. In Timaeus Plato tells us that the demiurge created the world and all living creatures from their eternal paradigm. Our paradeigma is thus a moving image, which is a semblance of eternity, and is also the “lot” that encompasses our fate. This lot is infinitely extensible, or conversely, fully collapsible. It is everything we are and are given in our lifetime, including the portion of the world we occupy, all that comes into it or is taken away from it, and all of this is rolled up into that single image, your paradeigma. It is Lachesis who allocates to the soul its lot, based on the soul’s particular temperament, and sends with each soul a daimon as guardian to its life and as fulfiller of its allotment. Our soul is guided by the daimon to our particular body, our singular circumstances and place in the world. The daimon is your inner spirit, your psuché. It represents your potential, that life of the higher soul which you can live only when you recognise its presence and heed its call. It is the essence of our passions and potential. Living in harmony with our daimon brings happiness and fulfillment to our lives. Living in harmony with the daimon is called eudaimonia, since the Greek prefix eu- means good, well, pleasant, or true. Living in harmony with your daimon means embracing the life, customs, and traditions that are a part of your paradeigma, in the place you were meant to be. The Ancient Greeks called this divine act of contemplative soul-searching Moira, personified as a goddess, and derived from the root mer (from merimna, meaning to consider with “thought and care”). While the daimon binds us to our lot, it has no dominion over the outcome of our life. So we need to carefully consider what is apportioned to us by fate that we have no control over as well as that portion of destiny which is in our hands, representing all we have done, could have done and can do². Rousseau says that this harmonious questing of our “natural desires” is the path to happiness, for when our desires are in tune with our inclinations, we are less removed from being happy, for “unhappiness consists not in the privation of things but in the need that is felt for them.”³ Dostoevsky, the preeminent psychoanalyst, informs us that “man lives most of all when he is seeking something and striving; at such moments he feels within himself a most natural desire for everything harmonious, for tranquility, and in beauty there is both harmony and tranquility…”; and when we are no longer seeking that which is in harmony with our natural desires, when life is “choked by the absence of a goal,” the future no longer impels us forward and we seek to only maximise gratification in the present. “Everything passes into the body, everything plunges into physical debauchery, and, in order to fill in for the higher spiritual impressions which are lacking, people excite their nerves, their body with everything that can possibly arouse.”⁴.David Kirkpatrick says that, at 15, River Phoenix could never understand why he was “always waiting” and “never arrive”. “Except when the camera rolls. I never quite know who I am. I am only alive when I am somebody else.” Eight years later, he collapsed on the sidewalk outside a Hollywood club and died of an overdose. Contrast Pheonix’s turbulent and short-lived struggle with that of Billie Holliday, who at twelve years of age would run errands and scrub floors at a brothel just so that she could listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the victrola in the front parlour. “I remember Pops’ recording of ‘West End Blues’ and how it used to gas me” she recalls “It was the first time I ever heard anybody sing without using any words. I didn’t know he was singing whatever came into his head when he forgot the lyrics. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba and the rest of it had plenty of meaning for me—just as much meaning as some of the other words that I didn’t always understand. But the meaning used to change, depending on how I felt. Sometimes the record would make me so sad I’d cry up a storm. Other times the same damn record would make me so happy I’d forget about how much hard-earned money the session in the parlor was costing me.”⁵ A beautiful, fulsome, young lady, she lived a lifetime by the time she wrote Strange Fruit at the tender age of twenty two; a song that would make her physically sick every time she sang it, so much of her heart went into her singing. “When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick. It takes all the strength out of me… I was in no mood to be bothered with the scenes that always come on when I do that number in the South… When I came to the final phrase of the lyrics I was in the angriest and strongest voice I had been in for months… When I said ‘…for the sun to rot,’ and then a piano punctuation, ‘… for the wind to suck,’ I pounced on those words lake they had never been hit before”. At forty-four, she had cirrhosis of the liver because of chronic drinking; heart and lung problems from chronic smoking; and ulcers from where she had started injecting herself with street heroin that her husband, according to Miles Davis, used to keep her on so that he could control her. “He kept all the drugs and gave them to Billie whenever he felt like it; this was his way of keeping her in line”, he wrote in his autobiography, adding that Holiday confided in him that “I told him he could leave me alone. He could have our house, everything, but just leave me alone.”Franz Kafka’s daimon compelled an unrelenting exhumation of the skeletons of the past. A disinterring that reveals itself in the myriad of obscure and dense metaphors that he has left his readers to decipher. Like Holiday, the evocations though cathartic, were also physically trying. To stymie their tide meant to also cessate the flow of life itself. Aldo Carotenuto writes that in his last days, Kafka could neither eat nor speak⁶. For John Updike Kafka “epitomizes one aspect of this modern mindset: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose centre cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain.” Tolstoy understood the power of the daimon and the need to channel and direct its forces. “At the time I felt that this world had some meaning” he wrote in his confession, “Living as I was then, like any individual I was tormented by the problem of how to live a better life. I did not yet understand that in answering “live in conformity with progress”, I was speaking exactly like a person who is in a boat being carried along by wind and waves and who when asked the most important and vital question, ‘Where should I steer?’ avoids answering by saying, ‘We are being carried somewhere.’”⁷.The daimon is the driving force in our lives, but it is also the real unconscious; what Needleman describes as the “sensitive current of feeling that is meant to permeate the entire being as an indispensable organ of knowledge”. A according to the ancient teachings, this real unconscious is the wholeness of being whose memory has been eradicated on the plains of forgetting and left behind in childhood. But it still subsists within man, and where his wisdom and creativity come from in those brief moments when he gives up the struggle for life. Needleman calls the emotions of fear, self-satisfaction, self-pity, and competitiveness, the emotions of the ego, which when blended with the “extremely volatile and combative energies of sex”, appear to be so innate that they are deemed to be the real nature of man, once he has shrugged off the veneer of public propriety.In the ancient teachings, the real unconscious is the hidden psychic integrity, which has been forgotten and left behind since childhood, and which requires for its development not egoistic satisfactions, not “recognition from others”, not sexual or labidinal pleasure, not even physical security, food, and shelter… Thus, according to tradition, there is something potentially divine within man, which is born when his physical body is born but which needs for its growth an entirely different sustenance from what is needed by the physical body or the social self.Jacob Needleman, Awakening the Heart.To nurture the divine daimon, we need to strive for true freedom. We need to learn stop demonising fate and strive to realise our inner potential. Virginia Satir, the eminent family therapist, cast fate in the light of five freedoms that are available to us if we so choose: The freedom to say what you feel and think instead of what you should; the freedom to feel what you feel instead of what you ought; the freedom to ask for what you want instead of always waiting for permission; the freedom to take risks on your own behalf, instead of choosing to be secure and not rock the boat. Our inequalities are what make us unique and, paradoxically equal, for there is no other being who is exactly the same as me, therefore it is only I who am blessed with one or more unique skills and abilities, whose confluence with my experiences yield the essence that is my singular character. In the absence of any sense of self-worth, it is human nature to cling to the notion of racism, confusing hubris for spiritual belonging. To see the true image of the world is to look with the heart instead of the mind, to see people for who they are, and not what they are said to be by types and classes.We need to strive to prevent the image that was transmitted with our daimon from being distorted and fragmented by an egocentric world and begin to construct an image of ourselves based on what we see, feel, and believe about the things we encounter in life. This image should be adaptable; it needs to be constantly compared and contrasted with your paradeigma, which is the only true representation of your being and which you must edge closer towards as you encounter new vistas of experience and revise the image accordingly. Only then can you truly live the life you were fated to live. Only then can you truly make a difference to the lives of the people around you. Get on the email list at substack.maitri.pub