MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS
Principle One
Accept everything just the way it is. (Miyamoto, Musashi)
There resides in man a spirit which wishes. We call it will, and it is the Yin to the ego’s Yang. Do not mistake the analogy for a cliché; it is meant in the deepest sense. Wish, will, desire—these drives direct the eye of consciousness in precisely the same way a queen applies soft power to direct the neck of her king. It is the interplay between these opposites, desire and ego-consciousness, which produces perception in the first place.
Our eyes do not see objects and derive forms from them. Plato was wrong, backward, even. For categorization and conception occur a priori: the needs of the will spring forth from the body and fill whichever fitting vessels are to be found in the environment. Forms, then, are our relationships with the things-themselves. They are projections and abstractions, not themselves in-themselves-things.
But what does the will care for that-which-is? Desire, like fire, does not discriminate. It seeks simultaneously consumption and expansion, devouring its own tail like the Ouroboros, archetype of primordial chaos, impenetrable depths, deep waters, black chasms, dark wood, and Nature herself, the feminine personification of the earth—the analogy to Yin was no cliché (I repeat for the reader only now persuaded).
And if desire is Yin, how ought Yang ego approach her?
To answer the prior question, we can contrast how not to approach and, from the error of two imbalanced extremes, find the mean, narrow Path as described by Aristotle and Confucius.
An excess of Yin is the suffering escaped by the likes of Jesus or the Buddha. The body is indeed base, bestial, even; and from our flesh emerge temptations which ever threaten to submerge our consciousness in hedonic pleasures. When this happens, we lose the Way, because we cannot aim for any one thing when the fire and light of ego are extinguished under the murky surface of the lake. Under numbing influence of drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, movies, or games, we become blind and stray in our darkness where the pitfalls, brambles, poison, and predators will prey upon us travelers at every step.
But an excess of Yang can lead to the same blindness—like the cataracted eyes of a senile old man. This is especially true of the ego, for where desire is drive, consciousness is the eye. Whatever it casts its light upon seems to shine like an idol of gold. Herein we heft Nietzsche’s hammer, lest we forget that the forms are not real, they are false ideals, false idols. And yet, the intellect is ever tempted to worship its ideas instead of that which the idea represents (read: re-present). We forge a god in our own image and use it to supplant the ineffable. We cut and cleave and hack our own path as if an arbitrary direction isn’t a road to nowhere.
Where, then, does the mean fall between these two? What does it mean to “Accept everything just the way it is”?
Given Musashi’s life, we can understand that he is not promoting renunciation, surrender, and passivity. He was a warrior, and his is a warrior’s philosophy. Therefore, when he says to “Accept,” he is instructing us not to deny that-which-is in favor of how we wish it was or think it ought to be. It’s an idea akin to Nietzsche’s embrace of Truth. Acceptance and affirmation of what really is requires courage and fortitude, for it will differ from both our desire and our conscious presuppositions. There is no fully satisfying both Yang and Yin. There is only finding a balance between them, like how a man and woman find balance in a marriage and in the raising of children. Literally and figuratively, life is celebrated in accordance with this, because life is also the life in which we exist; existence is reality; reality is Truth; truth is that-which-is, which comes in many names: God, the Tao, the objective.
Embrace yourself and your situation for what they are. Do not judge them for what they are not. Integrate your desires with what is attainable for your person, time, and place; let that possibility be your aim, and journey harmoniously with yourself along the Way.
Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.
