Essays From The Master

Understand one’s desires and one will know what one is willing to do to obtain one’s goals. Know what one is willing to do and one will know what one is capable of. From desire arises the will and from the will, not the means or the circumstances, stems capability from which manifests result and response to it, the balance of the two being reality. In many forms of the Way, and many paths of those forms, one will find that one is taught that all suffering stems from desire and to that degree desire is negative or wrong. In the Komuso Ryu of Nin Do it is not desire that is wrong or negative, it is a tool, rather it is fixation on one’s desire or its result that can become negative leading to a wrong or hindering result. One needs desires or drives, such as hunger or sex and the like, in order to forge one’s will and it is the will that can transform what one has or the circumstances one is in into means to bring about one’s result or enforce one’s sense of reality. It is from knowing what one is capable of that one is able to judge one’s actual standards, morality and philosophy that one actually invests in versus those things that one might profess. To know the actual from the professed one can find ones means to be ruthless and thus align one’s self to the ruthlessness that drives the actual world. By being aware of where one’s nature does align with the nature of the world one can come to know where one differs from the world and thus where one has the space to cause change on the objective stage of the world.

One’s base drives are meant to lead to one’s survival and all desires beyond survival are echoes and elaborations of those drives and to accept this is a part of accepting one’s self. If one accepts one’s self then no desire of that self, from one’s base drives can be wrong, it is how those desires are expressed or sought that can be nonproductive or self-defeating. Survival should enable one to endure circumstance which should allow one to prevail and to so prevail should allow one to triumph and thus thrive. To thrive, per this understanding, is to transform the war of life in which the prize is freedom into the cultivation of life with the result being enlightenment balanced by sustainable vitality i.e. immortality in the flesh, in ideal terms. This understanding demands turning away from the world as a mirror of reflection and dealing with the world as it is with one’s desires in context pointing to the drives that they represent. So armed one must know one’s goals, one’s aims and the means one is willing to use which will reveal what one is not willing to do and thus one’s limits. To know one’s internally imposed limits will reveal to one, based on one’s goals et al, whether or not one should strive to adjust one’s limits or change one’s goals in order to be more in harmony with one’s inner self. One in harmony with the inner self will find that the world will conform to that self because one is not fighting the world but rather taking it as it comes without resistance, one is not contending yet one is prevailing. The individual in harmony with the inner self and not in contention with the world will find the flow from desire to result.

Turning from the world as a mirror of reflection means living the life one has in such a way that said life becomes the life one wills to life. If one desires food one must do what it takes to eat and if one desires to have a particular body type, shape or health state one must do what is required to make such so. Dealing with the world as it is to make the world as one wills is a means to banish unreasonable desires or goals in favor of what can be done with what one has which can lead to those things which seem unreasonable at first glance. It with this understanding that planning becomes the means to overcome fears and weaknesses that one may have by giving one the mental and emotive space to work in and through in order to do one’s will. To turn from the mirror is to accept what is and thus know what needs to change in order to obtain one’s desire or result.