No matter how much one reads, a list of next readings only grows, always grows, until it becomes an indomitable monster and demands, as humanly unfeasible, a new planning, from the ground, through a new list. It is always the same, and the process is inevitable. If, on the one hand, the planning of studies is fundamental, on the other hand, its full compliance is impractical, or rather, inconvenient. This is because, in the course of the process, interest expands to other paths, and nothing is more fruitful for intellectual growth than following the course of one’s own interest. The old next readings, let them be for another occasion… In short: reading lists are important guidelines designed to be disregarded and discarded. And that is just as well.
Category: Notes
Psychology Will Only Come Close to a Reasonable Definition…
Psychology will only come close to a reasonable definition of man when it turns entirely to the one who has never been to a consultation room. Let it look for a hermit, someone who despises the world, who worships silence, who sees himself as separate from the flesh, who is indifferent to pleasure and pain… Looking for such a man, it will see how useless are all the manuals, how inapplicable all the theories, and how miserably they fail to explain his behavior. Knowing that this man exists, psychology would probably feel compelled to invent for him the name of some disease—but perhaps, who knows, it might give birth to a truly transformative and universally applicable therapy.
“I Will Not Die Today”…
Again, from Tsongkhapa:
Although we all have the thought that at the end of our life will come our death, each day we think, “I will not die today” and “Today too I will not die.” In this way, right up to when we are about to die, our mind holds on to the idea that we are not going to die.
If you do not take to heart an antidote to this, if your mind is obscured by such an idea and you think that you will remain in this life, then you will keep thinking about ways of achieving happiness and eliminating suffering in this life only, thinking, “I need such and such…”
Devoid of the perception of death, addicted to thinking that he will never die, the human being deprives himself of his essence, prevents the notion of the most important from blossoming within him. He is distracted by perishable futilities, wasting his time deluding his spirit. If for a moment he understands the true nature of death, he will no longer be able to live as before, no longer accept to get lost in worldly banalities, and will demand, even at the cost of his life, a reason that justifies his reality. Since there is death, since death annihilates the body, forces a final separation of possessions and relations, what is left? Is there anything left? Searching for answers, the being transforms his behavior and cancels the dangerous notion of “I will not die today”, moving on to the obsession: “If I die today… what then?”.
Ancient Eastern Texts and Modern Psychology
It is astonishing to compare the ancient eastern texts with modern psychology, noting the gap of more than twenty centuries and the diffuse notion that the latter has revolutionized the understanding of man. Modern psychology—scientific, materialistic—limits itself to analyzing a reduced dimension of man, and if we summarize its achievements, we will say that it was responsible for creating and disseminating the idea of an inferior human model. In the Eastern texts, so ancient—and who knows when the tradition dates back to?—the human psychology is presented in a complexity that escapes to modern psychology: man is painted with a much larger dimension. All this for a very simple reason: the ancient Eastern texts were written by wise men who took their masters as a model; modern psychology is written by psychologists and psychiatrists who take their patients as a model. This is why we find in the former a vocabulary full of purification techniques, and in the latter, full of mental diseases.