Category: Sage Advice

How to Lose Weight

I don’t doubt that Americans are the fattest people in the world. Some years back I landed at New York’s JFK airport after a year in Turkey. Walking from the plane into the terminal, and without having given any thought to the matter, the first thing that struck me was how obese Americans are.

Many are now speaking of an ‘epidemic’ of obesity in the USA as if obesity were a disease. This is liberal nonsense, of course, and needs to be exposed as such. It is nonsense raised to the second power when calls are issued for Federal programs to combat the problem. First of all, obesity is not a disease, but a condition caused and maintained by the voluntary act of overeating. No doubt, some people have more of a propensity to put on weight than others: basal metabolic rates and other factors vary from person to person. But this does nothing to change the fact that one’s weight depends on the quality and quantity of what one freely shovels into one’s mouth. Second, obesity is a personal problem to be solved at the personal level. The last thing we need are more Federal programs.

How to Become Wealthy Overnight

John Blofeld, Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 153:

For the sake of wealth, people already well above the poverty line slave all their lives, not realising that withdrawal from the rat-race would immediately increase rather than diminish their wealth. Obviously anyone who finds the full satisfaction of all his material desires well within his means can be said to be wealthy; it follows that, except by the truly poor, wealth can be achieved overnight by a change of mental attitude that will set bounds to desires. As Laotzu put it, "He who is contented always has enough."

Go For Broke and Die with Your Boots On

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 56-57:

Moore's health was quite good in 1946-47, but before that he had suffered a stroke and his doctor had advised that he should not become greatly excited or fatigued. Mrs. Moore enforced that prescription by not allowing Moore to have a philosophical discussion with anyone for longer than one hour and a half. Wittgenstein was extremely vexed by this regulation. He believed that Moore should not be supervised by his wife. He should discuss as long as he liked. If he became excited or tired and had a stroke and died — well, that would be a decent way to die: with his boots on. Wittgenstein felt that it was unseemly that Moore, with his great love for truth, should be forced to break off a discussion before it had reached its proper end. I think that Wittgenstein's reaction to this regulation was very characteristic of his outlook on life. A human being should do the thing for which he has a talent with all of his energy his life long, and should never relax this devotion to his job merely in order to prolong his existence. This platonistic attitude was manifested again two years later when Wittgenstein, feeling that he was losing his own talent, questioned whether he should continue to live. (Emphasis added)

Yes!  No wife, only fair Philosophia herself, should preside over and super-vise a philosophical discussion.  If an interlocutor should  expire in the heat of the dialectic, well then, that is a good way to quit the phenomenal sphere. 

Give In or Stand One’s Ground?

Should we give in to others or stand our ground? It depends on the circumstances. It is foolish to try to conciliate or accommodate someone who will be made worse by our conciliation, someone who will be emboldened in his wrongdoing. Conciliation in such a case becomes appeasement. There were bullies in the schoolyard who deserved and were improved by the punches we threw. Criminals, for a second example, must be opposed to the point of killing them if necessary. And the same goes for terrorists. Oppose them, and oppose them resolutely, even unto killing them en masse, but with detachment. We will recall that Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita enjoins the warrior to kill with detachment.

But in other cases one should give in and not insist, not even on one's rights. One should seize the opportunity for self-denial. Thereby one profits oneself and sets a good example for others. "The last shall be first and the first shall be last."

Who knows which case is which? The one with good judgment knows.

Seize and Squeeze

Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:

. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")

Now that is good writing.

Control Your Mind!

A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed of word and deed. Meditation, if nothing else, is a training in thought control. Daily meditation releases the mind's wonderful power of self-regulation.

The Problem of the Fugitive Thought: Write It Down Before It Escapes!

If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait.

Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you have to do is write it down. If you don't, you may be able to write only that an excellent thought has escaped.

"But there is more where that one came from." No doubt, but that very one may never return.

The problem arises in an acute form during the meditation hour. Properly installed on the black mat, one is installed in nondiscursivity. If philosophy is disciplined thinking, meditation is disciplined nonthinking. But then a thought, rich in content and fully formed, intrudes. You would honor it as you honor Athens. But it is the meditation hour: the time to attempt the flushing out of all thoughts without exception, the hour for rapt listening from within the depths of mental quiet. You are pulled between Athens and Benares. If you think one thought you will think two, ten, twenty and you will move farther and farther away from the thoughtless root of thinking. What to do?

If you arise from the mat to go to the desk you break the spell. But you don't want to ignore the thought. Truth must be chased down every avenue. Perhaps the solution is to keep a special notebook by the meditation mat. Write the thought down for later rumination, then get back to thougtlessness.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Such occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

Advice for Those in Despair

Theodor Haecker, Tag- und Nachtbuecher 1939-1945 (Haymon Verlag, 1989), p. 115, entry of 4 October 1940:

Ich habe einmal einem Verzweifelnden den Rat gegeben, zu tun, was ich selber in aehnlichen Zustaenden getan habe, in kurzen Fristen zu leben. Komm, sagte ich mir damals, eine Viertelstunde wirst du es ja noch aushalten koennen!

I once advised a person in despair to do what I myself have done in similar circumstances, namely, to live in short periods. I told myself at the time: surely you can hold out for another quarter of an hour! (tr. BV)

Long before I read this Haecker passage, I had a similar thought which I expressed in the following aphorism:

Can you get through the next hour? The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

Ambition and Age

Lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But here is an old man still driven by his old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature. Is he not a fool? For his old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age.

His upbringing was hard and his circumstances straitened. He early resolved to better himself economically, and he succeeded. Hard work and the old-time virtues brought him wealth. But having 'arrived,' he did not know what to do with his arrival except to keep on piling up loot. Loot, however, is but a means to end, and our old man's ends are, like he himself, coming to an end.

It is time for him to abandon ambition and fly into the arms of fair Philosophia, there to meditate on such truths as: One cannot tow a U-Haul with a hearse. But death, the muse of philosophy, will catch him long before it a-muses him. The Reaper's scythe will cut him down before it moves him to thought.

The Epicurean Cure

Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):

We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.

He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:

God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.

Continue reading “The Epicurean Cure”

Epictetus Advises Imelda Marcos

Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. E. Carter, XXXIX:

The body is to everyone the measure of the possessions proper for it, as the foot is of the shoe. If, therefore, you stop at this, you will keep the measure; but if you move beyond it, you must necessarily be carried forward, as down a precipice; as in the case of a shoe, if you go beyond its fitness to the foot, it comes first to be gilded, then purple, and then studded with jewels. For to that which once exceeds a due measure, there is no bound.

Indeed, as one may observe here.

A Method of Study

From a reader:

I have a few questions, they're very practical in nature. I was hoping if you could give me a brief outline of your method of study  and how  you read books? How do you keep track of such a vast amount of resources? I'm on information overload because, well, I'm a 21st century twenty-something who likes to read blogs, books etc.

Anyway, I enjoy your blog. Hope you can help! Thanks.

A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience.

Continue reading “A Method of Study”

Be Positive!

The Cloudview Trailhead is the one nearest to my house. It is a bit hard to get to as one must negotiate a number of turns. One fellow didn't like people driving onto his property in search of it so he posted a sign: Not the Trailhead! Some time ago I notice he had replaced his sign with a new one depicting an arrow that pointed in the trailhead's direction.

Therein lies a moral: how much better to be positive than negative! The first sign said where the trailhead is not. The second one did that too (by implication) but also pointed out where the trailhead is.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.