9781945186240

9. Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all
that protects your mind from false perceptions—false to your nature, and
that of all rational beings. It’s what makes thoughtfulness possible, and
affection for other people, and submission to the divine.
10. Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it:
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already,
or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of
the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed
from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of
themselves and those long dead.
11. To the stand-bys above, add this one: always to define whatever it is
we perceive—to trace its outline—so we can see what it really is: its
substance. Stripped bare. As a whole. Unmodified. And to call it by its
name—the thing itself and its components, to which it will eventually
return. Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for
logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us. To look at it
in such a way that we understand what need it fulfills, and in what kind of
world. And its value to that world as a whole and to man in particular—as a
citizen of that higher city, of which all other cities are mere households.
What is it—this thing that now forces itself on my notice? What is it
made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I need
to bring to bear on it—tranquillity, courage, honesty, trustworthiness,
straightforwardness, independence or what?
So in each case you need to say: “This is due to God.” Or: “This is due
to the interweavings and intertwinings of fate, to coincidence or chance.”
Or: “This is due to a human being. Someone of the same race, the same
birth, the same society, but who doesn’t know what nature requires of him.
But I do. And so I’ll treat them as the law that binds us—the law of nature
—requires. With kindness and with justice.
And in inconsequential things? I’ll do my best to treat them as they
deserve.”
12. If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and
patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside
you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment—