From Lao-tze, in English translation:
Stop thinking, and end your problems.
How true! A problem is a problem as long as the mind classifies it as such—conditions and facts are cold; qualification is mental work. Once one has the problem, the consequences: anxiety, worry, conflict, psychological disturbance. Annul the mind, bridle thoughts… if there is peace possible to man, here is the way. However…
The mind, if not controlled, withers away. To control it, the very difficult and continuous effort to discard the natural and irrepressible impulses. If the effort yields, the will establishes its dictatorship, in which reason is muzzled. The mind has its strength and freedom tied to a set of habits that it itself is responsible for dictating: if it refuses the task, it condemns itself to prostration.
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.
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.
