Manipura – The City of Gems

"Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun,
Shine on you crazy diamond."
                               -Pink Floyd, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

            (Nabhi) Manipura means literally “(naval) city of jems” and speaks to the tremendous wealth and power of this chakra.  It is situated in our navel center, the belly, home of the famous “core” that we always hear about in yoga and various other forms of exercise like Pilates.  The core isn’t one muscle, but rather a whole group of muscles that function as a sort of center of gravity for the rest of the body.  In hatha yoga, we tend to stretch outwards in most poses, the limbs reaching out infinitely, and the spine always lengthening.  The core provides the balancing act for this, literally and figuratively.  It pulls everything in to center, creating a sort of dynamic tension with the outward reaching limbs.  The core holds us up, orienting everything around that center of the body.  It allows for balance and movement, and is crucial for things like arm-balances and inversions.  Any fireman will tell you that carrying an unconscious person is much more difficult than a conscious person.  An unconscious person feels “heavy” because the weight is evenly distributed throughout the whole body.  A conscious person’s core is working, whether they are aware of it or not, pulling the limbs in to center, shifting their weight, etc.  It’s like the difference between trying to lift a 100 pound bag of bird seed and a 100 pound iron weight.  The weight is the same, but its concentration at a center (rather than shifting seed) makes for a very difficult experience in lifting it. 

            Just as the whole body orients itself to the core, we have a psychological factor that does the same job.  We locate this factor in the same physical area – the gut.  When we say “he’s got guts” or “she’s got a real fire in her belly”, we’re referring to this psychological quality of course, not the core.  We clearly identify the gut with courage, with fire, and with ambition, just based on those two simple images.  But what we’re really saying might be phrased as “he has a strong sense of his personal power which is able to carry him over any difficulty” (courage) and “she has a strong sense that she has the power to realize her ambitions” (fire the belly).  This is ultimately about our personal sense of self, of individual power and destiny – in a word, the ego.

            Now, in yoga the ego has a pretty bad rap.  Delve into the literature, especially the more New Agey kind, and you’ll read all about “transcending the ego” “realizing the illusion that is the ego” or the “limiting nature of the ego.”  I’m not saying that all of these are bad or wrong – I’ll say things far from it when we get into the higher chakras – but that they are incomplete.  We need the ego, just like we need the core.  The ego relates all of our experiences back to itself, organizing, translating, and importantly, assimilating.  We are constantly trying to incorporate our experiences into our sense of self, digesting them, so to speak.  When we have a regular psychological diet, we tend to have a rather stable (or even stagnant) ego; we ‘eat’ to maintain the status quo, or more negatively to expand the ego like a widening waist-line, perhaps overcompensating or protecting a ‘weak’ or ‘powerless’ core.  When we vary our diet, we may find nutrients our standard psychological diet neglected, like when we try yoga for the first time, but we may also find ourselves with a bit of spiritual indigestion.  Experiences come along that conflict with our notions of the way the world works, the projected order of our lives, and we may even find some ideas that we have a hard time “stomaching.”  We can’t figure out how to relate these things to the ego, and it gives us problems.  What happens then is psychologically called repression – if psychic fact or datum cannot be “me”, then is must be “not me”.  It then either sits below the surface, or is more often projected onto others.  

            Jung called this the “Shadow”, the bastard home of all those things that we reject (or vomit up, to continue the analogy).  I should also note that I connect the Manipura chakra to the Sun (this is not the only attribution, nor is it the traditional one), the classic Jungian symbol of the ego, our conscious identity.  The ego, relating everything to itself, creates a whole ordering scheme for the world.  The things that fit the scheme are excellent and put in their place, and the rest… well.  It becomes trivialized, or even violently rejected.  We might call experiences that don’t fit the scheme (especially those that show the ego as not the only or most important part of the whole person) are rejected as “irrational, silly, pointless, childish, pipe-dreams, dangerous, heretical, insensitive, over-sensitive, reactionary, radical,” just to list a few words commonly used to reject and ridicule.  An ex-initiate of a particularly literalist and seriously dysfunctional esoteric order called “The Hermetic Order of the Morning Star International” (or HOMSI, which may have been renamed by now – I can’t be bothered to keep track of esoteric politics) once told me that a common catch-phrase to explain away the many scandals associated with the leaders of this order was “the greater the light, the deeper the darkness.”  Clearly, this is a rather ridiculous platitude and excuse for bad behavior, but it is an excellent example of the ego in action.  Magic and mysticism can often be used for massive ego expansion, and I should note that the Golden Dawn tradition in all of its various manifestations tends towards a solar emphasis.  When we shine the bright light of the sun on the world, things are ‘illuminated’ indeed, and sight allows us to clearly distinguish objects in experience.  Bright sunlight also creates deep shadows that conceal and hide.  When we identify exclusively with the solar ego, we drive much that is important but which we have difficulty identifying with (or, ‘stomaching’) deeply into the Shadow.  Therein, we see it only in others whom we can then more easily hate, just as it seems that every magical order of the above type seems convinced that every rival order is full of black magicians (or every fundamentalist community sees ‘satanists’ or ‘witches’ under every rock).  In light of my previous post it may also be useful for me to note that HOMSI apparently (most of this is rumor, but from a few independent sources) had a universally Christian leadership, and despite their public claims, restricted the advancement of neopagans (a rather large group in the order) and Thelemites, aka, polytheists.  Christianity, ultimately a solar manifestation (despite its 4^th chakra origins – more on that later), privileges unity above multiplicity.  In Christianity, even the Trinity is really just One.  Polytheism is the way of the 2^nd chakra, the darkly lit world of many stars, and it looks like solar-Christian HOMSI just couldn’t stomach it.  Balance is crucial in dealing with the ego.  When the sun is too bright, we can’t see the stars, but when it’s just starlight all the time, we can’t see anything clearly.

           

            Manipura consciousness is greatly concerned with authority, hierarchy, and order.  A central image is that of the King and Kingdom – everything is fine when every subject does its job.  The serfs farm, the nobles fight and politic, the church ministers, and the king rules, directly and through his governors.  When some free-thinker comes along and refuses to submit, that free-thinker is soon a head shorter.  If it doesn’t fit the hierarchy, it is treason, heresy, or any other label you’d like, and must be annihilated.  Society, like our own egos, is conceived as fragile, and we must constantly be on the look out for that which threatens to send everything back into the chaos from whence it came.  Only the 4^th-chakra Enlightenment, with its notion of individual rights (where each is ultimately a King unto himself, within a society of Kings), do we have free enquiry without fear of persecution, and as recent politics has shown (stem-cell research is a good example), we’re not yet completely safe.  Why not?  Well, because our 4^th chakra democracy contains people who see the world through all of the lower chakras.  Those of the 1^st and the 3^rd warn us of dangerous ideas threatening society, of the Others, and tell us to “take it back” as local tea-party politician Greg Ball exhorts.  We may profitably ask what he wants to take back from whom. 

            This “King Consciousness” is extremely evident in religious thought, especially that which comes out of “kingly” civilizations, most especially the Roman Empire and Middle Ages.  Neoplatonism (and its close follower Hermeticism) originated at the end of the Roman Era and gave us notions like 7 heavens, choirs of angels like the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, etc, as well as an inverted hierarchy for the demonic realm.  Ultimately, I believe that most of this stuff originated with personal, one might say Gnostic, experiences.  However, in order to ‘digest’ these often strange and inexplicable experiences, people organized them in a very 3^rd chakra way.  They looked without and saw that, at the time, the best, safest and most bountiful civilizations were characterized by a strong central government by one-man and his capable governors, along with the rest of the Imperial hierarchy.  Areas where that influence was not evident, as in the history before its ascent, were dark, barbaric, chaotic and primitive.  To them, as Maximus says in Gladiator, “Rome is the light.”  Affix to this admiration for the power of the Empire a similar appreciation of Plato, and you get Neoplatonism.  Plato said that the gross things of this world are but shadows to the perfections of the Ideas on another ‘plane’ that the objects here just emulate.  The Neoplatonists saw even in the corruption of the late empire, a divine blueprint of the harmony of the universe which on another plane took the form of God’s own hierarchy.  Natural phenomena were explained by the notion that spiritual beings were everywhere, ordering creation according to divine will, like the emperor’s soldiers or tax-collectors.  Further, to get over certain logical problems with that arrangement, they postulated numerous worlds, dimensions, levels, etc, that acted as planes upon which the various levels of intermediaries could act our their duties, just like the empire had the Capitol, as well as regional seats for the Governors.  This is projected outwards into the heaven in astrology as well, where the planets are said to rule certain signs, and govern certain things about our lives. 

            Ultimately, I regard all of this as a beautiful creative act of imagining that created space for the possibility of interaction with these various things - of gnosis, in other words.  That said, I regard the experience as of something real – that there’s something there (wherever there may prove to be) that can be experienced.  When we look at the angels and spirits of neoplatonism and magic, we might be tempted to call the whole affair “silly” or “irrational” and push it into the shadows.  Ultimately, we need these imaginings, to keep a conscious idea of these events and experiences, to make some kind of personal sense out of them, however untrue the imaginings may be as accurate descriptors.  They may well even limit the collection of future data – and here is what the mystics warned us of.  If we regard angels as silly, we’ll never see them.  This is not to say that there are angels, just that we won’t see them, objectively real or not.

            The King easily becomes the Tyrant, and this is a serious problem.  The Manipura chakra is the center of order, yes, but also of witch-hunts, as I previously implied.  The first chakra tells us to trust authority, and that authority is found in the 3^rd.  We trust that someone will fix things, often the President, our own democratic King.  1^st chakra loyalty tries to get us to overlook their faults, perhaps explaining their darkness as a by-product of their incredible light.  This is certainly the logic that keeps dictators in power.  Yes, President Mubarak is terrible and violated human rights with impunity, but he keeps the terrorists (read: Shadow) out.  Yes, President Bush violated the law, international and domestic in his persecution of the Enemy, but he’s our president, and we have to stand by him. 

            I think most of the readers of this blog have a problem with authority.  Many yogis and most of my friends distrust the government almost as much as they distrust Wall St (another excellent example of the selfish part of the 3^rd chakra).  Where does this distrust come from?  Ironically, I think it is from well-balanced and strong Manipura Chakras.  If we had weak 3^rd chakras, we’d be looking for authority outside of ourselves to tell us what to do.  We see that occasionally in the yoga world as those who never get out from under the shadow of the great guru, or who idolize the celebrity yogis like Rodney Yee or Cyndi Lee, who often display merit largely physically or through a good business acumen rather than real knowledge.  The 3^rd chakra, being about status, our own place in the hierarchy, locates us above or below others.  We are submissive to our betters and dominant to our underlings. It cuts your very own place in the tribe and greater world.  We all break away from our parents at puberty, and this is necessary – how far is the question.  When we have a weak 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves low down in that hierarchy.  When we have a strong 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves quite high.  To have a problem with authority, to me, means regarding your own authority as preeminent.  

            To see the world through the 3^rd chakra as a primary lens is to see hierarchy everywhere, and to be hyper-aware of one’s place in it, ie, to be ‘status-conscious’.  Our goal in the chakra system is to progressively awaken, balance, and transcend each chakra and all that it represents.  To transcend the bottom three, the physical triad if you like (as they regard all things as objects in some sense), we need a strong impulse.  We need drive, a strong sense of self-confidence, a belief in our own ability to succeed, and the courage to accept the possibility that spiritual growth and mystic experience is not just the purview of clerics, saints, or gurus, but our own natural-born right.  We need a fire in the belly.  Only with that fire can we evaporate the moisture of our imagination, sending it upwards to the airy world of the 4^th chakra (which is quite dry without it).  Only with that fire can we burn through the 1^st ‘knot’ that is said separate the bottom 3 chakras from the 4^th, keeping us from higher truths.  When we confidently step out of the 3^rd chakra we become aware that the hierarchy is all an illusion, that we are all Kings (or have the potential to be), and that each of us has a unique authority over our own lives. 

            As an addendum, I’d like to draw your attention to an intriguing article in the NY Times by Stanley Fish.  This piece contains some really interesting stuff, but ultimately I look at it as containing interesting chakra insights (particularly of the 3^rd and 4^th).  I don’t agree with all of it, especially his conclusion, but I’ll leave it to your own ingenuity to see what I mean.

Books, Bibliophiles and Sacred Scripture

Books and Western Civilization go hand-in-hand.  Ever since Julius Caesar (maybe) invented the codex, aka the book as we know it, we as a civilization have been in love.  This is not to say that books were not important elsewhere (that would just be silly), but I would argue that books have taken on an out-sized role in European culture that has shaped our thought in subtle ways.  I want to use India as my counter-example, as it’s the non-Western region I know the most about, and because of certain similarities of thought.  I would love to hear from anyone who knows something about the Arabic or East Asian traditions on this topic.

            You may be familiar with the idea of an oral tradition and its importance in transferring culture.  When I think of oral tradition in the West, I think of Homer, whose works were recited often only in part by traveling bards, creating varied stories that changed over time.  The philosophers of old, too, relied primarily on oral teachings, such as the lectures of the Athenian Academy, or of those numerous philosophers who didn’t do much writing, but did a lot of influential teaching.  Socrates is the clearest example of this.  Those works which were committed to the page often had an oral quality, from Plato’s dialogues, the speeches of Epictetus (written down by a loyal student who made a big deal about trying to preserve his rhetorical style) and numerous others.

            Thinking of Indian culture, we can see very similar documents.  The Bhagavad Gita is meant to be sung, the Upanishads are often in dialogue form, and the entire Sutra tradition (including Patanjali’s famous work) is structured for maximum ease of memorization.  Traditional Indian teaching relies heavily on memorization of texts, key points, and even grammatical rules, even to this day.  This is Swami’s style, and I struggle with it, and he knows that I have no intention of methodically memorizing texts.  It is however extremely impressive when he rattles off quote after quote in perfect Sanskrit. 

            While in India oral culture has been essentially unbroken, European oral culture essentially died out during the Dark Ages, as barbarians wrecked the Roman Empire, and learned men wilted from lack of patronage and cloistered themselves in monasteries.  Here the book became increasingly important, and as Europe slowly picked itself up and began to rediscover its heritage, the cultural transmission was entirely through the medium of the book.  The Greeks and Romans  were reintroduced to the West by trade with the Arabic world through Spain, as well by the flight of scholars from (and the pillage of) Constantinople, the last vestige of Rome.  These and other rediscovered books contained secrets and mysteries that it seemed no man knew, and they, rather than other men, became the symbol of knowledge.  This plays out in myths through the such icons as the cursed book, the Grimoire, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and movies like the underrated “9^th Gate”.  These represent the power of the book to unleash strange and powerful ideas that have the potential to upset the preconceptions of the reader or even the very order of the world.  The stark division between the literate and illiterate in medieval Europe must have exacerbated this.  In largely illiterate societies, writing has often been associated with magic.  In ancient Egypt writing very nearly was magic, and the history of talismans shows the power that strange images and scribbles had upon the imagination.  Consulting books and gleaning strange knowledge by merely glancing at obscure and mysterious symbols must have seemed akin to divination at some level, and indeed, there is even a sub-field of divination – bibliomancy – based on this idea. 

            A natural result of this is the desire to write a great book one’s self.  We hear about the quest for the “Great American Novel” or more previously a single unified Metaphysics, such as was attempted by Spinoza, Descartes, and others.  An interesting effect of the myth of the book is that, with the printing press, this tradition flooded our culture with books, new and old.  I leave it to the historians of science to determine the impact of this on the European scientific revolution, but we can assume a major influence.  An increasingly literate culture, with ever-increasing access to information clearly paved the way for the modern age.  As an aside, consider the fact that more new books were printed last year than existed in the Great Library of Alexandria by its final year.

            There is also a question of authority to consider.  It is the habit of every culture to mythologize and give sacred meaning to the past.  Anything that is old becomes hallowed eventually, whether as museum pieces or immutable and infallible authorities of traditional culture.  The Guru in India certainly fills this role.  The guru is the repository of (often memorized, and thereby monopolized) knowledge passed down from hallowed antiquity, and therefore he is worshiped nearly (or actually) as a god.  In Europe, it is often the book that is so exalted.  The literal adherence to the authority of the Bible, considered literally as "the word of God" even today, speaks to this, but it is not the only example, even if it is the most important.  For centuries, the works of Aristotle and Plato, not to mention the more esoteric Corpus Hermeticum, were considered almost infallible in the same way as the Indian guru.  The academic tradition (now on the decline, for better or worse) of education by the “Great Books” is another, if later, manifestation of the same instinct.

            Strangely, it was the Tea Party movement that inspired this post.  I was reading some ridiculous op-ed piece on Fox News (I like to keep tabs on ‘The Enemy’) and I was struck by the sheer fetishism demonstrated towards the U.S. Constitution.  The founders, because they’re long dead, are hallowed into Saints, and their main document is near worshiped by the modern conservative movement.  Despite the fact that it’s needed to be amended 27 times, it is considered almost infallible to the “strict constitutionalist” type. 

            You can probably guess my feelings on all this. While I myself am something of a bibliophile (I have a library that I’m proud of and a bookshelf of antique or rare books), I clearly don’t approve of traditions of infallibility regarding any text, ancient or modern.  But I’m not really trying to make an argument against such silliness here, which would likely just be me preaching to the choir.  Instead, I want to pose some questions.  Conservatism, narrow-mindedness, and literalist interpretations appear all over the world, in as many different forms as there are cultures (or people).  That said, how much of an influence has the European book tradition had on the particular manifestation of conservatism that we see in this country today?  Has our bibliophile cultural inheritance had a part to play in emphasizing the infallibility of texts such as the Bible of the U.S. Constitution? 

           

Virtue, East and West

“Of that unique man

Whose name is not to come from the lips of the wicked.

Theirs is not the right to praise him-

Him who first revealed clearly

By word and by deed

That he who is virtuous is happy.

Alas, not one of us can equal him.”  Aristotle, Fragment 623.

            Much of what is best (to my limited knowledge) of ancient Greek thought is summarized by the above.  Aristotle is specifically referring to his teacher, Plato, and credits him with an important idea, that virtue and happiness are of the same nature. 

This emphasis is also central to the yoga school, whose Yoga Sutras and Bhagavad Gita, two central texts, were written around the same time as the flowering of Greek Thought (around 200BCE).  Virtue and the development of character are central to philosophies both East and West. 

            So what then is virtue anyway?  Typically we think of it as moral excellence, and I in the past have considered it in my relativistic way as the conformity to social standards of behavior and moral values. But let’s consider the word itself.  Our word virtue comes from the Latin word virtūs, meaning manliness, excellence, or worth, as well as moral virtue in general.  Virtūs comes from Vir, the word for man, or true man, husband, or soldier.  Similarly we get words like virile (from virīlis; of a man, manly, bold or firm) and vigor (from vigor, physical or mental energy).  Another related word to consider is vīres, a plural form of the word vīs or vim, meaning strength, control, force, power, resources, value, or meaning.  On the whole, we get an idea of the original meaning of Virtue (at least as the Romans understood it) as great strength and control, as befits a “true man”, ie. a responsible citizen and exemplar of the human race. 

            Interestingly in Sanskrit, we have a similar word, वीर, vīra, which means man, but especially a brave or eminent man, in a word, a hero.  For those of you who are wondering, yes this is the origin of the sanskrit names for vīrāsana (hero’s pose), and vīrabhadrāsana (warrior pose).  From this root, numerous derivatives come, including a word given an important place in the Yoga Sutras, vīrya, meaning strength in a very similar way to the Latin vigor.  As I was writing this, I found an even more interesting connection with the Latin, वीरत्व vīratva, meaning manliness.  Keep in mind that in Latin, the letters v and w are essentially the same (and related to the letter u), and in Sanskrit the letter व can be pronounced either as v or w.  So we can prounce that last word as “veeratwa” which is not particularly far from our word virtue. 

            The Greek word for Virtue is Arete, and means more specifically excellence.  Having never studied Greek, I must rely on Wikipedia, which tells me that Arete would be attributed to excellence in everything, ie, an excellent stove, an excellent car, etc.  The Latin equivillents would only be attributed to a human being.

            It should be clear from the above that our understanding of virtue has changed over time.  Certainly the influence from Christianity cannot be ignored.  Plato’s four cardinal virtues as listed in the Republic are Wisdom, Courage or Fortitude, Temperence, and Justice.  Wisdom is sometimes translated as prudence, which is this sense means the same thing: the ability to judge good actions from bad.  Christianity, while accepting these virtues (allegorial forms of which appear in many churches, stained glass works, and other forms of Christian art), added to them, and due to the Church’s all-pervasive influence in the Middle Ages, thereby substantially changed the way we think of virtue.  

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”  Corinthians 13:12-13

            Even here, these virtues are connected to manliness, at least in its sense of adulthood.  I should also note for completeness that the Greek word used here for love, agape, is sometimes given as charity (you may be more familiar with Faith, Hope and Charity from the King James Version), as agape represents the kind of impersonal “brotherly” love existing between all men everywhere.  Charity is clearly a natural extension of this. 
            I’m not judging Christianity’s influence on virtue one way or another (at least not right now), as certainly I can’t find fault with faith, hope or love.  I am pointing out the distinction, as we moderns naturally tend to associate virtue with these ideas, and that is not necessarily the way the word was understood by the Stoics and their contemporaries.  That said, what did the Stoics think about Virtue?
            To Epictetus, a Greek Stoic teaching in the 2^nd Century C.E., like many of the other Greek and Roman Philosophers, the question of Virtue rests primarily with the first of Plato’s four cardinal virtues – wisdom.  Wisdom is the ability to make accurate judgments concerning right and wrong, and it naturally follows that this must be present for the other virtues to exist.  What is the faculty which makes these distinctions?  Stoicism agrees with the Socratics in this absolutely: wisdom is a product of a well-developed reason. 
From this an old debate emerges:  Is it possibly to teach virtue?  The Stoics, like the Socratics, would argue that as virtue (read: wisdom) is a product of reason, it can be taught by means of reason.  By education and cultivation of the intellect, wisdom arises, and as Aristotle pointed out to us at the outset of this post, thereby arises true happiness.  (This interesting op-ed piece by Stanley Fish is an interesting read in this connection.) 
            In the Stoicism of Epictetus, this virtue (wisdom) takes the form of distinguishing between Externals and Internals, or those things we can control, and those we cannot.  As I cannot explain it better than Epictetus, I’ll let him speak for himself:

“We are responsible for some things, while there are others for which we cannot be held responsible.  The former include our judgment, our impulse, our desire, aversion, and our mental faculties in general; the latter include the body, material possessions, our reputation, status – in a word, anything not in our power to control.  The former are naturally free, unconstrained and unimpeded, while the latter are frail, inferior, subject to restraint – and none of our affair.” – Enchiridion (The Manual), 1-2.  (Italics added)

           The development of virtue then, according to Epictetus, is really about the development of those things we can control, in other words, our judgment (wisdom), the mind, and our values. This virtue of wisdom has an important equivalent in yoga, which is called in Sanskrit विवेक viveka, discrimination.  What exactly is discriminated is very different; it is the Self, or immortal, changeless soul (or in a Vedantic gloss, Consciousness itself), discriminated from the world of manifest existance, which includes not only Epictetus’ list of externals, but also the entirety of the list of externals, with a possible, but extremely debatable exception of Judgement (without veering TOO far off course, judgement is associated with the idea of the Buddhi, or highest part of the mind, which is said to be material, but exceedingly subtle.  The problem is whether or not the Self, being changeless and complete in its own nature, has agency.  Hence the debate.) Like Stoicism, the yoga philosophy encourages a renunciation of those things which we cannot control, although in yoga this is because these things (the world) distract us from the realization of the Self, while in Stoicism it is due to the inevitability of dissappointment, trouble and unhappiness which comes from giving valuing externals.

           In Stoicism, virtue is close to its Latin meaning of manliness, strength and control. These faculties are normally directed outward (used for the control of nature, of other people through government, commerce, and physical coersion, of material goods and pleasures, etc) become inwardly directed, and concern themselves primarily with Self-Control.  From this sense of self control come the other virtues; Temperence (a man in control of his desire does not go to excess), Justice (a man uninterested in externals is not personally concerned, ie selfishly concerned about another man’s business, and therefore is able to be just in all his dealings – he has no hidden agenda), and Fortitude.  For this last, I turn to Epictetus once again:

“It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.  Death, for example, is nothing frightening, otherwise it would have frightened Socrates.  But the judgement that death is frightening – now, that is something to be afraid of.  So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves – that is, our judgements – accountable.  An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his misfortune.  To blame oneself is proof of progress.  But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.” - Enchiridion (The Manual), 5.

          This matches our modern idea of what it means to be stoic – one who is apparently indifferent to pleasure or pain, which is really the outward impression of someone who is self-controlled and who has renounced the externals.  This may be even taken negatively, as in a person who appears to be unfeeling or unemotional to the extreme, but this is all still on the surface.  If a person gets into a car accident, totaling their vehicle, because another driver wasn’t looking where they were going, the expected reaction is anger towards the other driver.  In fact, if I were the other driver, I’d expect to see anger expressed by the driver of the car I hit.  Now, if I hit a Stoic, someone who viewed their car as an external, and was not particularly concerned about having it totaled, or even the brief inconvenience of a jolt to the body (or injury for that matter, as the body is external), then clearly there would be no anger.  I as the other driver would probably be a little confused by the other guy lack of passion. 

           It’s a sad fact that we come to expect that everyone around us will immediately react to and express emotional impulses full-throatedly, with a big dramatic display.  When someone reacts dispassionately, due to either the yogic pratice of vairagya, non-attachment (to externals), or the Stoic equivalent, everyone around them is often a little thrown off.  I’ve found that sometimes just reacting dispassionately is enough to actually nip a big dramatic display in the bud, and may even stop a fight.  That, of course, is assuming that there isn’t someone present who considers manliness in its lowest form, macho posturing, to be virtue.  In this case, a person who is used to defining all impressions as either “safe” or “threatening” will interpret their confusion and my own lack of a response as a threat, and get angry themselves.  Similarly, others might feel anger for you, rather than at you, almost as if they were trying to teach you how to play their social game.

            Plato defined man as the “reasonable animal” and reason is essentially the capacity for mental reflection.  Turning our strength and power to control from its natural outward focus inwards by reflection seems to me to be the difference between the virtue of an animal and that of a “real man.”  Machismo, and any other expression ruled by pure emotion, is therefore the reaction of not a man, but of an animal in the body of a man.  The philosophers of Greece and Rome, along with those of India hold that the happiness possible for this animal man is inherently unstable, as it is bound to externals, while only in reasonable man is a higher, more firmly grounded happiness (or absolute happiness, ie, Liberation), possible.  You take their stuff, they suffer.  You make them late, they suffer.  You say you don’t like them, they suffer.  All because they’ve chosen to base their happiness on things outside themselves.  We might call this person dependent, much as we would call a child (“put away childish things…”).  You might not be wrong to call that person a slave.  A person who is a slave to passion or objects lacks the power of discrimination between what is good for us, and what is bad for us, or at least the strength or inclination to change one’s habitual responses.  As the Bhagavad Gita says: “Men of demonic nature do not have the discriminative understanding of what should be done and what should be avoided.” (BG 16.7)   Here demonic is used much as I mean animal above.  We must remember that most depictions of demons, East or West, are really nothing more than a hybrid human with various animal traits: horns, tails, large jaws, hooves, etc.

            Stoicism teaches that once we differentiate between those things which we can control, and those we cannot, we must purify our natural tendency for desire (attachment) and aversion, so that we only desire those things which are good and are only averse to those things that are bad for us.  This duality of attachment and aversion plays a prominent place in both Stoicism and Yoga, and that’ll be the next topic I chew on.

            It might be a good idea to mention here that I recognize how hard it is to live up to such ideas of virtue and self-control.  I struggle with it every day, and I feel that I’m far from successful.  After all, I’m not only up against my own animal instincts, but the habits of years.  Even the desire to cultivate virtue comes rather late to me, and those who’ve known me for years may be surprised that I’ve started now.  Still, it seems to me a worthy endeavor, and what success I have had in the practice of non-attachment has shown me a peace and happiness that was not possible only a few years ago.  As they say, the proof is in the pudding.  You’ve got to taste it to know for sure.