MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS X.
Principle Ten
Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love. (Miyamoto, Musashi)
Life is like an endless journey through impenetrable forests, endless deserts, and pitch-black caverns. The promised land lies beyond, and only one’s circuitous and perilous progress toward that place makes the trek meaningful, perhaps beautiful, or at least bearable. This simile and metaphor describes harmonious accordance with the Way. When one has a Road to follow, or a Great Coursing river, he can be content in his faith that his direction is forward. Thereby does the journey become the promised destination.
But as said, the journey is long. It is easy to become lost, to stray from the Path. Even if the Way shines like golden brick pavement among grass and gravel, one often requires a guide that he not be tempted to try shortcuts or abandon the adventure all together. Even then, not all guides are created equal. Many are bandits who lead their marks to shadowy groves or other out-of-the-way places where they can waylay and take from their victims every hopeful shred. Many more are no less vicious in their haplessness. They are those fickle souls who abandon their companions at the first sight of trouble. They never intended to commit to the quest, only to use someone else to stave off their loneliness.
This second type indicts feeling of lust and love. The former’s guilt will seem obvious to the modern westerner, even as indulgent as he likely has become—or perhaps because of his hedonism he will have personal knowledge of the danger of pursuing lust. She is the hottest flame, but she is also the quickest to splutter out. She is the will-o’-the-wisp, the mermaid and the siren, the temptress witch infamous for luring young, desperate, and naïve, men into her clutches before revealing her true nature. Then either she vanishes, leaving him to his doom, or else he flees her ugliness and, lost, becomes equally doomed.
What might give the modern man more pause is the second proscription, “Do not let yourself be guided by ... love.” Love, in the culture of modern man, is positioned as the positive manifestation of merely lustful or carnal feelings. At times, love is lauded even louder and higher. Some go so far as to say God is love or that life is a dichotomy between love and fear. Why, then, does Musashi warn against allowing oneself to be guided by love?
Because love is desire.
As benevolent a want as love is, it is nonetheless an expression of the individual will. Like all other desires, emotions, and motivations, it belongs to the subjective experience and is therefore not necessarily in accordance with the Way. That is not to say that love is antithetical to the Way. On the contrary, love often seems necessary to achieve harmony with oneself, others, and reality itself. However, in these cases, love is always subservient to that-which-is outside the subjective experience of he who loves. A common expression capturing this is, “Love it for what it is, not what you hoped.”
To “love a thing for what it is” means surrendering a lesser love for something which is greater. True, a new love is born from this transmutation, but that thing for which the transvaluation is made is not an experience or feeling, it is the source from which all experience and feeling are made possible. It is the Tao, the Way, God, the ineffable—whatever the preferred name, it is the ultimate guide, for it is the Path itself.
Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.
