As I kept reading more and more sections of Epictetus I am starting to get the feeling that he is not as different as many of the rules of living I have learned before. For example if you can recall the teachings of Ishmael you can remember that he kept on saying that the human beings think they are eternally flawed. I found in this reading that Epictetus constantly mentions that what humans do is what is wrong. According to the Handbook Of Epictetus: "In the same way nothing bad by nature happens in the world" (Section 27). Epictetus completely agrees that human kind is eternally flawed because he is saying that all done by nature is correct, but what is done by humans represents all evil in the world. We are supposed to be the animals that have the biggest brains but certainly animals that are far way less developed than us happen to live with nature and not against it. I don't think that we are eternally flawed because we have big brains and have the ability to learn how to co-exist with the planet but apparently it is as if we didn't want to do this. Epictetus has really stressed the fact in many of his sections that everything but nature is what we can't determine and everything that means us having a choice to make is human. When he says that everything humans do is wrong then we can infer that he thinks that we can't make the correct decisions.
A lesson that really interested me was when Epictetus talked about hypocrites. In many teachings I have seen from many different teachers I have never seen a lesson target so directly the hypocrites. Epictetus says: "But we should have remembered how we feel when we hear the same thing about others" (Section 26). What Epictetus is trying to make us understand is that we should do our actions in accordance to what we say. If the dog of your friend dies and you say that it is okay and that he had to die, you must do the same when your dog dies. It is sometimes very easy to say things and never do them, but you are not being loyal to your word. I have seen this happen a lot in tournaments when a friend says that he will never again hit his racquet in the floor and in the next match he plays I see he bangs it. Talking of tennis there was another lesson that really can apply to any sport o thing you do. When you want to do something you have to very clearly understand what you have to do to get there and what will happen next. When the handbook said: "For each action, consider what leads up to it, and approach it in the light of that" (Section 29) I really felt connected with that lesson. I have always dreamed of becoming a very good tennis player. When I was little I expected to be the best one but I didn't train as much. I stopped for a while because I got bored and about two years ago I started to play again. I met this person who knew a lot about tennis and asked me what I wanted to be in tennis. When I answered him he asked me that if I wanted something I had to work enough to be able to get it. I suddenly realized I had to train a lot more and do everything with my goal in mind. This is a very valuable lesson because sometimes you expect things to be easy and let's face it, being the best at something is really hard. We sometimes forget that we have to do a lot of work in order to achieve our goals. This section really interested me because it reminded me of my goals and all the work I have to put into achieving them.
Try varying sentence length for emphasis.
ReplyDeletetrying to mean = to say