“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Way is not a path. A path is a prescribed road, a defined direction. In my life prescribed paths – the conventional yellow brick roads to happiness have often disappointed me.
The clear avenues to the pinnacle of existence are often graphically displayed in magazines. The picture consists of a pool somewhere in the Caribbean or some such place. If you are a man you are in a pool next to a woman who has had her breasts augmented. Between you and this beauty is a floating coaster with a mixed drink on it, maybe a daiquiri, perhaps there is a little umbrella in it – O.K. the little umbrella is cool. You are both smiling. You have incredible dentists.
The question becomes: how are we paying for all this? Often, spending our lives working in some structure (path) that we probably don’t really believe in and doesn’t give us joy. Squandering our lives in “quiet desperation.”
Emerson and Thoreau saw all this a long time ago. They were among the first Americans to be interested in Transcendentalism and Buddhism. They didn’t care to waste their lives. Paths can choke the life out of you. Even Zen and Buddhist paths.
Emerson didn’t practice Zen. He certainly wasn’t interested in the hierarchy, politics and authoritarianism that seem to have been added to Zen. He did practice following his own heart and conscience. He had integrity.
He was a follower of the Way.
Reading this brings me to a new space, I think.
All that really matters is what I do and how I do it.
If I act with integrity then, perhaps, the need to take sides and the mental noise that spins with my/our lives will, slowly, fade away?
Thank you.
perhaps if i focus on me and my actions, on my integrity, then all the rest of it (the taking sides, the mental noise, the fear, the anxiety, the anger etc.) will, slowly, fade away?
sorry all. the first comment didn’t seem to appear – so i tried again. when i posted number 2, the first comment appeared. magic, magic, everywhere:-)
Wonderful thoughts.
Never thought of the difference between The Way and a Path before this post. I love the freedom expressed in this post. I’m going to dust off my old Emerson essays and re-read.
The little umbrella is the best thing about that “picture of happiness” and it’s also the least expensive
I’ve never thought of Emerson and Thoreau as warriors in the Don Juan/Carlos Castaneda sense of the word but they were!
Because you once said that Lost Coin is a culture, I investigated a little about integrity as an ethical concept in European philosophy. As far as I found out, integrity is not a common concept in philosophical ethics. Maybe it’s too practical or, say, not theoretical enough for philosophers.
Usually, in ethics, we try to find models about how we should act if certain circumstances take place. It’s all about models and theories about how to act. Technically, these concepts are very consistent and even logical, but it’s very difficult to verify or falsify ethical models or theories once it comes up to real situations. Life escapes theories. Therefore, I tried to find flexible philosophical models. My request about integrity led me back to some of my all time favourite philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle and the Renaissance philosophers Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino who come up with more flexible models.
I’ve always loved Plato because he builds up his ethics on not knowing (at least that’s how I understand him). He says, e.g., that courage, one of the human virtues, can mean to continue a fight. In some cases, however, courage can mean to stop fighting and to escape. You don’t know what courage really means until you get into the situation. Aristotle developed a more academic way of finding out what to do. His ethics is based on trying to find the point of balance between complementary terms. Courage would be the point of balance between fear and foolhardiness. Pico was one of these cool wild Renaissance guys who believed in love, creativity, and the dignity of man. It is said that one night he went out and wrote his assumptions about man on a wall. I love Pico for believing that humans are free and can always find ways to improve themselves and to make the world a great place to live in. To say integrity is to follow one’s own heart and conscience brings ethics into here and now. It brings ethics to a point of action, a point where ethics starts to breathe and to be alive.