When you wake up this morning, tell yourself: The people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him or her. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him or her: these are obstructions.
Hard to believe that the meditation came from Marcus Aurelius in around 160 CE. There is no evidence that he ever intended these thoughts to be made public. The riches of his meditations have influenced thousands over the centuries. They ring as accurate to experience, for those on the path of enlightenment, two thousand years later as they did then.
When you wake up this morning, tell yourself: The people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him or her. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him or her: these are obstructions.
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I am reading Nikolai Berdyaev, the philosopher of freedom (which he also refers to as creativity). I have embedded a useful video from a Russian philosopher who effectively outlines the ethics of creativity. In the video, ethics means the type of paradigm or framework the human person uses to direct their activity. For Berdyaev, the ultimate ethic is the ethics of freedom or creativity. She draws on his work in the Destiny of Man, but I am drawing on his work, The Meaning of the Creative Act. The quotes below are from it. Freedom from law or convention does not mean anarchic chaos. “There is nothing creative in chaotic revolt: this is always reaction and deserves denunciation by the law. Creativity is cosmic, not chaotic, hence it lies outside any denunciation by the law which is always oriented towards the ancient chaos. Creativity is least of all anarch”. Creativity is a wellspring of life that emerges from consciousness and is completely subjective although it may have social and political impact. "Only the creative epoch will lead to the human person’s positive consciousness of themselves, will liberate the human person from an exclusively negative self- consciousness. The ethic of creativity will give inspiration towards new and hitherto unknown life. This is life in the Spirit, rather than in the world, life spiritually free from reaction to the world and everything worldly. A new evaluation of the social, also, will flow from the ethic of creativeness." In real terms if we adopt a new paradigm in our minds FIRST, changes in the world will follow and flow from that creative process. |
My PenséesThe title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal. This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health, education, and human rights. I write and am a human rights advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog. Archives
December 2021
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