Tag: philosophy

Theosophists say, to my amusement, that man is given the freedom to choose his birthplace. My mind flies… The veracity of this curious revelation matters little: the fun is to reason about the hypothesis. I imagine myself, in front of a supreme entity, pointing out, on a map of the world, the city where I was born. Infinite options and, by simple volition, I choose a city in the interior of São Paulo—a city of which I have not a single and solitary memory. I want to believe that the entity has presented me with other places, exposed me from its geographical to its cultural aspects and that, even so, I chose to be born where I was born. The next question is: why? One single justification seems reasonable to me: my pride—and correct me the theosophists if manifestations of pride are possible in these spheres of existence—must have thought something like: “I will prove that I am capable of developing in an environment hostile to my nature.” Very well! Then have I and my analytical mind, after long and careful meditation, judged this one to be the most interesting of all the possibilities? Or maybe, if it is true what the theosophists say about us being born and reborn numerous times, I got sick of paradise beaches, varied architecture, high HDIs and all the rest? No, no, not “get sick”. What to conclude?

The future is a hypothesis; concretely, it does not and will never exist. To understand it is to orient oneself. Possibilities open up to the man in a fleeting lapse and continually demand immediate action to materialize, until the day when they all close forever. Meditate, and thought points to the best path: then it is to act, or annul itself in uselessness.

The state of mind that favors good manifestations is not reached in a sudden burst, it is a long, daily and fragile construction, extremely fragile… One slip, and one returns at square one. After a long effort, it becomes commonplace in the transformed daily life what once seemed impossible. Stumbling, throwing oneself back to the previous paltry reality, what one experiences is an affliction that weighs heavy on the back and smashes the face against the ground…

Twenty-six centuries ago, Lao-tze already noted that freedom from one’s own ideas is the mark of the “moderate man,” as my English translation puts it. We could change this adjective to prudent, wise, superior. If there is one trait that distinguishes low, immature, unevolved natures, it is attachment to what they think and believe. From this attachment, —these chains,— which can only be interpreted as a manifestation of vanity and stupid presumption, the days go by, and time does not improve the plastered being, the being hostile to everything new and different. Moderation, if we were to define it in the sense used in this passage from the Tao Te Ching, would be the capacity to give in and accept what is different—an unimaginable virtue for the presumptuous who considers himself to be the center of the universe.