MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS IV.

Principle Four

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. (Miyamoto, Musashi)

There is no difference between self-consciousness and suffering. The more we are aware of ourselves, the more keenly we feel anxiety’s gnawing teeth, melancholy’s biting chill, and the unrelenting hunger pangs of unfulfilled desires. Fear of shame, embarrassment, injury, or death; guilt and depression; envy, jealousy, and hatred—these are all vomitus ruminations of ego-consciousness, cyclical self-digestions, self-consummation, atonement with and worship of the self: by this route do we become our own demiurge, our own jailer, and our own prisons built out of each our own subjective experience.

When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spake, “And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall,” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra) the severity and heaviness described therein is precisely what Musashi is warning against. Both men had arrived at the same observation, that we human beings are but a happenstance fragment of an infinite vastness. Our power, influence, and significance extend no further than the tips of our fingers. Our words and legacies are but memories, and even these will eventually be less than dust. We are not gods capable of shaping the universe in our image, and when we pretend that we are, like Icarus or the Tower of Babel, we are doomed to fall.

But if we can learn to laugh at ourselves, to accept our place in a world beyond our grasping, then perhaps we can appreciate the great fortune that is our opportunity to participate in something bigger than ourselves.

An axiom of faith is at hand: there is something going on that is significant beyond our understanding. If accepted—that is, if we reject the solipsistic position that we and our experiences are the only essence of existence—then at once the seeming insignificant roles we play become part of something great, maybe the greatest, most meaningful thing.

So, “think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world,” (Miyamoto) for, “not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!” (Nietzsche). It is not the world which is absurd, but us. We are not the philosopher kings, but the fools. The sooner we learn this, the sooner we can learn to serve the kingdom as a whole, and to do so joyously, dancing, light of sole.

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.…

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.

Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.—

Thus spake Zarathustra. (Nietzsche)

Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. translated by Thomas Common. The Modern Library.