Having quite a chuck of free time wherein to put pen to paper and discourse on this or that, on cabbages and kings as they say, I’ve opted to talk in a very basic issue, that of human happiness and what is consists of. For starters, one’s mind must be free, upright, undaunted and steadfast beyond the workings of fear, uncertainty and the multifarious traps of desire. A man must have at his command, or better yet must be accompanied by, a CONTINUAL CHEERFULNESS, a high happiness (which comes indeed from on high because he delights in what he has). If he attains to this primary condition, there will dawn on hum those invaluable blessing, the quiet of a mind that that’s at rest in a safe haven such as library or study, it’s high imaginings, its great and steady delight at expunging errors from his thought, and learning to discern the truth, its courtesy and its CHEERFULESS in all of which we rightfully take delight.
Buddha’s 8 “rights” or virtues have been around for such a long time we need not flog the Eightfold Path over much. Virtues is a lofty quality, sublime, royal, unconquerable, untiring. It can be met in the temple, the marketplace, the gambling dens, the barracks, manning the walls, covered with dust, the urban effluvia, sunburnt, horny-handed. You will find pleasure seeking out of sigh, seeking for shady nooks (KUBLING LUGAR).
The highest good in SUMMUM BONUM is immortal It knows no ending and does not admit either of satiety or regret. Simply because a right thinking mind never changes or becomes hateful to itself, nor do the best things ever undergo changes. But pleasure dies at the very moment when it charms us most. It has no great scope and therefore it soon cloys and wearies us and fades away as soon as its first impulse is over. Indeed, we cannot – and should not – depend on anything whose nature is to change.
The idiot (or “mentally challenged,” to be politically correct) can’t learn from experience at all because a NEW PROCESS, in his liquid brain, does not modify structure, while the fool uses what he has learned only INAPTLY and in frivolous fragments because his stretches of linked experiences are short and their connections insecure. But when the cerebral plasm is so fresh and well-disposed, and when the paths for neurotransmissions are clear, attention is consecutive and learning easy: a multitude of details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potential regard. By this means, we ought to obtain a strength and an ability which are in holistic unity. We shall desire from it that reason which never halts between two opinions and there is no dullness in its forming of perceptions, beliefs and convictions.
I have purposely gone into the neurology of the matter at hand to emphasize the underpinning of a mind in harmonized state with its many component parts. For this mind will then have nothing evil or hazardous remaining, nothing to shake it or make it stumble. It will do everything under the guidance of its own will, and nothing “out-of-the-blue” or unexpected will befall it, but whatever may be done by it will turn out well (“and all manner of things shall be well” in Dame Julian of Norwich’s words”, without the doer having recourse to understand devices.
We conclude from this that the highest good is SINGLENESS OF MIND, for where agreement and unity are, these virtue must be. It is the vices that are at war with each other.
