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In Reddit there is a thread where the guy shares that he ordered in his grocery pickup, eight bananas.
So they gave him eight bunches of bananas, and charged him for one single banana.
So he posts this on Reddit, and the people there went apeshit with ideas how to eat all the bananas, recipes galore. More comments than in any post I have seen before.
I bet people think of food now more often than they think about sex.
Tai, the author of the 67 steps warns people to ignore the advice: ‘do what you love and you’ll not work for a day in your life’. Do not try to do for a living what you love, what you lust after. Instead do what you like.
But he should have said the same thing about everything:
- food, definitely.
- Life partner? definitely.
Why? Because life is best when it is designed for the long haul. And ‘love’, ‘lust’ are like the raisins in it… a moment’s delight. Like a shooting star. Like an exception. Rare.
Eat the bread, rejoice for the rare raisins.
Nations are born stoic, die Epicurean…
Stoic is a temperament, an attitude, towards Life. The Stoics defined the goal in life as living in agreement with nature.
What are the 4 virtues of Stoicism?
wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.
- Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
- Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
- Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
- Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.
Similarly, the Stoics divide vice into foolishness, injustice, cowardice, intemperance.
If you want to destroy a person, a group, a company, a city, a society, start to introduce titillating, quick, passion, instant, into their worldview.
And watch the person, the group, etc. fall into disarray, competition, and decline.
One of the characters in a series I like to read has a slogan: ‘slow is smooth, smooth is fast‘.
Being reactive — in any way — is Epicurean… and is the beginning of the end.
You can only act fast if you didn’t take time to look. To evaluate. To consider. And to choose.
All your decisions were Epicurean…
What decisions?
Your rules where you said ‘I am never going to…‘ or ‘This is how to be‘, cutting off the alternative.
Decision means cutting away. As in killing. Suicide, genocide, infanticide, all have the same ‘caedere’ root… meaning cutting, killing.
Decisions are the sign of no wisdom. No courage. No moderation. And, of course, no justice either.
If you look at people, and use your imagination, you can have fun.
So dress all the people you can see in the news in armor holding a cutting weapon. And they you can see the truth.
You’ll see that all they do, all day, is cut, cut, slash slash.
Try to find any reason, wisdom, temperance, justice, whatever in them.
And it is not just the people on the other side of the divide. you too. Yours… too.
To you, maybe, the most visible part of this Epicurean way of being is how you love love love some food… Or some activity…or some idea
I am more exposed to your argumentative nature. How, at the drop of a hat you say ‘no’… and never look again.
Occasionally someone wakes up and sees what they are doing, how they are doing. Occasionally, I said.
Epicurean, although no one seems to say it, is bringing everything to begin and end with you. YOU will make all the decision. YOU know everything. No one should tell you what to do.
You are the judge… and judgment is killing. Killing off. The thing, the person, the idea.
The more stoic you can be, the more you are guidable to be the best you can be.
After all all it takes to become the best is to drop the ‘not you’ and be left with the you.
But if you fight the idea of dropping anything because it wasn’t your idea, then you can’t become better, let alone the best you can become.
We could say that the two selves battling it out inside you are the timeless = the stoic, and the Epicurean: the headstrong, the stubborn, the greedy, needy, stormy pretentious self.
No inner peace – no outer peace.
If you could hear the words the Epicurean self says, it would be something like this: I want it! I want it! I can’t live without it!
Interestingly, the desire number and the ambition number in the Starting Point Measurements correlate with these two selves, the Epicurean (the desire) and the Stoic (ambition). The more room the Stoic self has to express itself, the more willing you are to do the work towards what you want.
Another interesting correlation is between your cone of vision and the level of Epicureanism. Epicurianism makes the cone of vision narrow so it only includes you and your wants, your needs, your interests.
Same correlation with the about-me score: when you can only see anywhere what concerns you… and nothing further.
So if it doesn’t concern you, you can’t see it, you can’t hear it, so you can’t learn from it.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
And then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
~Martin Niemöller
In the Prison Break (67 steps) this becomes blatantly visible: you only hear what’s about you, what you have already heard, or what you can argue with. The rest… you cannot hear.
The behavior of boring a hole on your side of the boat
A group of people were travelling in a boat. One of them took a drill and began to drill a hole beneath himself.
His companions said to him: Why are you doing this? Replied the man: What concern is it of yours? Am I not drilling under my own place?
Said they to him: But you will flood the boat for us all!
You and your world feels different and separate, independent from the world at large… and that is the Epicurean.
Your happiness, your wealth, your self-righteousness comes at the expense of the whole…
So we can safely say that Stoic is ‘desire to receive for the sake of sharing‘, and Epicurean is ‘desire to receive for the self alone‘… the only evil there is.
So the question every one of my students asks at one time or another is:
So how do I hear, notice, and care about what I don’t care about?
Great question, even if it sounds weird… It does sound weird, doesn’t it?
We’ll use the Anna Karenina Principle…
We won’t add anything until we have removed something that doesn’t serve us.
Like what?! I hear you getting upset.
Like a self-concern. Like neediness. Wanting to win every step of the way… by being right.
Yesterday one of my students gave up resisting, for a moment… And her numbers re-arranged themselves.
This came on the heels of her finally accepting, begrudgingly, that when she doesn’t drink enough energized, coherent water, she is S.T.U.P.I.D.
So she started to drink her water. And SUDDENLY! She stopped sounding stupid, stopped being all the things she was before… and started to SEE.
There is a god! Halleluiah…
Now, is she going to continue being right? Hell yeah… But some of the things she is going to be right about are actually things that serve her, like making sure she drinks the water.
And that can make all the difference.
When people do the 67 steps, this is one of the things they get to practice, 67 times: giving up something so they can get something in return.
Brilliant.
There is at least one other person who is ready for that program, I can feel it in my old bones.
Are you the one who is ready?
