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This episode we discuss championing the journey of the individual by first embracing the flaws and imperfections of our lives. Includes turning the pain of our past into something beautiful that contributes to the development of our character as well as discovering how to lift the limits of our identity that were the basis of much of our pain in the first place.
You are here because you believe that it is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.
You want to conquer your goals without sacrificing your well-being, while also enjoying the things that matter most -- like spending time with people you love and pursuing your interests without guilt.
The Zen Stoic Path will guide you along the path to unshakable inner peace. You’ll be ready to conquer any challenge life throws your way -- while being peacefully present to each moment.
This unique approach blends the timeless wisdom of Zen Buddhism and Stoic philosophies--while integrating modern techniques of emotional mastery.
As you embark upon this journey with us, you can apply thousands of years of lessons...to improve your life today.
If you’re ready to:
Walk the path of your highest contribution so you genuinely feel fulfilled
Make decisions with precision and confidence, without wavering
Have time to relax or pursue your creative gifts...guilt-free
Be fully present with the ones you love, so your connections continually grow
The Zen Stoic Podcast will give you the power to use your emotions as a compass to guide you to supreme liberation. Nearly 100,000 listeners have benefited from this wisdom, and you can too.
Create unshakeable inner peace with the Zen Stoic Path today.
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Zen Stoic path. We are in our new studio, finally doing this podcast via video. So I'm super excited. This is the first episode, and I'm going to be going into a few different topics today. The content is going to take a bit of a longer form rather than the old way where we're just doing, you know, these short bursts of episodes.
But this time we're going to really go deep into the future. Aspects of Zen Stoicism and then let you know how it's going to progress throughout the month of February. So without further ado, let's get into it. So I wanted to start this particular episode with a story that happened over Thanksgiving when my family was visiting me.
And this story is something that happened with my grandmother. Her and I were having a conversation and he, she had some difficulties, um, back home with some other family members, you know, a little bit of family drama, nothing new. All right. Everybody has it. And while we were talking about it, we were, she was venting to me about the situation.
We were [00:01:00] beginning to discuss what exactly was going on with. And she was telling me how with the person she was in conflict with, she didn't feel like it was fixable. She felt like there were things that were said that couldn't be unset and therefore the relationship had been tarnished and wasn't going to be able to be.
Now listening as an outsider, it didn't really seem like it was that big of a deal. But I remember listening to her really hearing what she was saying and empathizing with the situation that she had brought up to me. And it reminded me of something because she had actually said. This, this phrase, and this is what kind of brought this up.
And this is actually has created the theme for the episode. So she said this, she said, even if we could fix it, it would be like repairing a broken glass where you could still see the cracks. And it just would never be the same again. And it reminded me of something called kintsugi can Sue you for those of you who are not familiar with it is the Japanese art of repairing [00:02:00] pottery with gold lining.
And this is a practice that started in ancient Japan, where one of the shoguns had broken his favorite T-ball and he was devastated by this. So he wanted to actually have it repaired. So what he did is he sent the T-ball to China to have it repaired as that was something that was offered. Now, when he had sent the table, they had sent it back to.
With staples, literally bringing the cracks together and it looked ridiculous. Like he, first of all, he was never going to use this in front of anybody, let alone, he wasn't going to use this for himself. Cause it just looked like shit with all these staples and a table. But he also thought to himself, there has to be a better way.
So he gave the table to one of his craftsmen and told him, he said, I need you to fix this and then you need to make it. Right. I can't have this thing with staples all. So after a while of going through and making these repairs, what he ended up doing is he made the repairs, but he didn't just glue it [00:03:00] together.
He didn't just put an adhesive. He actually put gold powder into the adhesive and repaired the table that way. So when the table came back, The table had all the cracks from before, from where it had been broken, except these cracks were lined with gold rather than just being transparent, cracks or stapled together, which obviously looked ridiculous.
And when he brought it to the emperor, the emperor, and when he brought it to the Shogun to show him. Very very pleased with it. He was inspired. He loved it. And this became this new art form, this new art form of actually repairing things and consuming the really interesting thing about it is that what it does is it doesn't try to hide the flaws of things, but instead it embraces them.
So going back to the story with my grandmother, while her and I were talking, I remember I Googled consumer and like, while she was talking to me and you know, I did let her know ahead of time. I didn't just rudely like grab my phone and start. Googling, but I told her, I'm like, Hey, I need to show you something.
And so [00:04:00] I pulled out my phone, I Googled consu. Cause I knew about this practice and I, it had been something that had always resonated with me. So when I pulled it up, I showed her this picture. I said, well, before I showed her the picture, I basically said to her, I said, you can look at it like that. You can look at it as seeing these cracks as something painful or something that you don't want to be looking at, or that you want to avoid, or that you you're ashamed of.
Instead, you could see it like this. And I turned the phone around and I showed her this picture with this teapot, with the gold cracks. And there was this moment that she just, everything changed in her face. She just stopped preventing. She stopped the, the, the melodramatic state that she was in and she started crying.
But you know, these were tears of joy because she had. Breakthrough and where she realized that it didn't have to be something that wasn't repairable. In fact, maybe. Just maybe she could embrace these cracks embrace [00:05:00] where there was damage done. And instead, turn this into something beautiful. So reminded me of this.
And it was something that was a moment I was able to share with my grandmother, where it felt like time stopped. It felt like we had this moment of clarity, this moment of realization together. And we had this really awesome memory that was formed out of this conversation. I wanted to bring it to the podcast today because consu is something that, you know, has been.
Done to obviously make broken pottery look beautiful, but at the same time, it's a philosophy that we can carry with us into our lives without having to. You know, shame ourselves for the vulnerabilities that we have or the flaws or the regrets of our past. We can always repair them or reframe the way that we think about them by lining them with gold.
So to speak. There is a concept here that I always talk about with my clients, especially when I'm doing something like what I like to call the liberation session, which is a session where a client and I sit down for eight hours and go into. You know, active imagination, meditative [00:06:00] state, where I'm having a dialogue with them and they're in this meditative state and what we're doing in that position, or what we're doing in that particular exercise of that session is we're going through this process where essentially we are in the now obviously we're not time traveling, but we are in the now.
What I explained to the client is that now is the convergence point where anything can change. You can either make a decision to change your future, or you can make a decision to rewrite the way that you see the past. You'd see it from a different vantage point or see it from a different perspective.
And right now is where you can define the past the past. Doesn't define who you are today. The regrets, the poor decisions, the things that you look back and you cringe at yourself for these are not the things that define you today, or determine where you're going. It is now where you're able to actually have that convergence point, that moment, where you can choose to make the decision in a different direction.
And so I explained this to my clients in, with a metaphor that was actually [00:07:00] used by the philosopher, Alan Watts, where he talked about how. You can look at yourself as a ship going through the ocean or going through the sea. And as the ship goes through behind the ship, there are going to be weeks that the ship is leaving in, in the past.
But the wakes of the ship have no bearing on where that ship is going. It's not going to tell you where this ship is going to go or what direction it's even headed in. All it can tell you is where the ship has been. And after enough time, those wakes disappear into the vast ocean, just like our past seems to.
And the way that we remember it is not always accurate. So sometimes we distort our own memories of the past and by distorting them, we end up living in the present now and determining what our future could be based on these distorted memories. And the distortion comes from having an emotional charge or an emotional attachment to these memories.
Now where this comes back to consu is that we can. I have this perspective where we look back on these memories, we look back on these [00:08:00] flaws of our past or the bad decisions or the moments that were uncomfortable or unpleasant, and we can embrace them. We can actually use them as something that makes our lives beautiful, something that makes our character beautiful by showing and embracing where we've been hurt, where we've had our suffering in the past, because like this.
The ship doesn't, you know, decide where it's going to go. Based on the wakes of the past, it decides where it's going to go right now, where it's at. It can choose to change directions at any point in time. So it would be ridiculous to think that the wakes of the ship or telling you where it's going and bringing it back to what Alan Watts would say.
It's like saying the tail wags the dog. It doesn't make any sense, right. To say that the dog is wagging the tail. So what this is to say is that you can choose to define your past via your present. The present defines the past the past. Doesn't define the present or define where the future is. So, what we can do to start is look at our past [00:09:00] and look at it with an open heart, look at it in a way that allows us to see it as something beautiful, something to be grateful for and to learn from it.
The thing is when we look at things and we feel bad about them, we feel uncomfortable about what has happened. The problem with that is that. It puts us into a disempowered state where we have this negative emotional charge or this charge of unpleasant emotions and being that we have that charge of unpleasant emotion.
It will cause us to create that distortion. So what we can do instead is learn from it or choose to see it in different perspective by looking back and maybe asking ourselves, well, what did I learn there? What did that moment have to teach me? Or a question that I really like to use is what was the gift there?
Now that question is especially powerful because what it does is it has a presupposed balloon. Loaded into the question, which is that there is a gift here. There is something that you can find here. And when I think about the gift that [00:10:00] exists within these memories or within these, you know, bad times, so to speak the gift there is what that gold lining is going to be made of.
Right. If you can look back on the past and look back on a decision that used to cause you suffering and instead see it in a way that creates a gift for your life now and in the field. That is like repairing the cracks with gold. And that is what allows us to embrace our past, to embrace the imperfections of life.
And instead turn them into something that actually brings character to our lives. Now, Ken Sugi, the interesting thing about it is that the literal translation means to repair with gold. And when you repair with gold, what we're doing is we're shining light on the things that are. Would typically be considered flaws.
And instead of looking at them as flaws, we can look at them as gifts. We can look at them as memories that have made us who we are that have given us a sense of character. And this comes from the Japanese philosophy of [00:11:00] what is called wabi-sabi. Now wabi-sabi is broken down into two parts. So Sabi is we're going to start with Sabi.
Cause Sabi is about having a quality of life. Uh, having a quality of loneliness or said differently, a kind of reclusiveness or almost this isolation, which kind of sounds a little bit disheartening when you think about it in isolation, but wabi-sabi is a really interesting way of looking at it. So Sabi being the.
And has this quality of loneliness, this quality of privacy and reclusiveness. What it's saying in that regard is that the human experience is a really interesting one. Being that we are around billions of people. We're sharing this planet with billions and not just humans, but we're sharing it with other life forms.
We're sharing it with animals, plants. In that we still have our own very individual subjective experience. So the quality of, of [00:12:00] life is that we are experiencing this through our own perception. I'm not seeing myself through your eyes right now. I'm seeing this camera. I'm seeing this studio through my eyes and you're watching me through your eyes.
So we're having our own individual perspective, our own subjective experience of this reality that we seem to share. Sabi is basically pointing to that. It's pointing to this individual reality where it's just you seeing through your own perception, experiencing your own memories, your own unique perspective.
Now Wabi is this quality of unpretentiousness of embracing imperfection. So wabi-sabi is embracing the imperfection of the individual experience. It is realizing that in this individual experience, you are not. It is realizing I'll put it this way. The individual experience is one that when we think about it from a stoic view, it is a fragile and very temporary [00:13:00] experience.
When we talk about the whole concept of memento Mori, which we've mentioned on several podcasts episodes in the past, this is the quality of realizing that we are mortal, that we are going to die one day. And it's important for us to meditate on that mortality in order to put things into perspective.
Now, bringing this back to wabi-sabi. It is the embrace of the individual, very temporary, very fragile experience, right? As human beings, things that we love, people that we love, even ourselves can be gone in a flash, right. From one moment to the next, it can be all taken away. And oftentimes we forget this when we start getting involved into trivial matters.
When we start getting wrapped up. In our past, let's say right we're instead of repairing it with gold, we're thinking back on why it was so horrible and why it made us, you know, or blaming it for why it's making our suffering what it is today. But instead we can look at the fragility of life. We can look at the temporary nature of life, its [00:14:00] transience as something that actually gives it meaning.
And when I think of wabi-sabi, I think of this, this whole idea of people will often disenchant themselves. Create a disillusionment of life by asking questions like, well, if life is just going to end, then what's the point. If none of this, none of what I do today is going to matter in a hundred years or a million years or whatever, weird frame of reference somebody wants to give it, then what does it matter?
And it's very like to that. I always counter it with the question is a song pointless, just because the song ends and the answer's no. In fact, the song actually has meaning because it ends because it's in this temporary few minutes, like a, you know, a few minutes of a window that you're actually able to listen to what the artist has composed you don't see.
I mean, I'm sure some people do it because you see these, these videos on YouTube and [00:15:00] whatnot. But if you like, if you really love a song it's much more pleasant and enjoyable to listen to just the song, then the 10 hours. On YouTube, right. That doesn't really have a lot of meaning. And that gets old really quickly.
So when we think about the temporary nature of our lives, the imperfections of what life is, and the fact that it ends eventually the fact that it's fragile, that it can be dashed at any moment. And we think about this subjective experience where sometimes we do really feel alone in what we're experiencing.
When we think about all. Part of what gives it meaning and part of what makes it beautiful is the very fact that it is temporary, that it is imperfect. So when you're living a lifestyle, Wabi Sabi, this whole idea is that you are embracing the imperfection and actually not looking down upon the imperfection, but instead of looking down upon the imperfection and.
Allowing it to make you miserable or allowing it to cause suffering and nihilism, instead of allowing it to do that, what you're [00:16:00] doing with it is looking at it and saying, okay, because this is temporary, this is why it's beautiful. This is why I have so much to be grateful for. This is why I really want to appreciate this and live.
In a way that puts my best foot forward and brings the most meaning and enjoyment into my life. And that is using wabi-sabi as a philosophy for life. And as a way of looking again at your past, so that you can use consumer to look at your past experiences and repair them and line them with gold, rather than simply look at them as something that you can write.
And a lot of people, they try to hide their flaws. They try to, uh, you know, look and look at the flaws of others as way of diverging attention away from themselves. Or they try and repair it in a way where they're they're hiding or they put a big elaborate thing covering up their, you know, their vulnerabilities.
And that's not the way to live because in that way, what we're ended up when we ended up doing is we end up hiding [00:17:00] ourselves from the world. We ended up losing ourselves in an attendant. To hide what we have felt shame over. And instead of feeling shame, what we could do is we can choose to learn from it and ask us, ask ourselves, what is the gift here?
What is the gift in this experience of my past? Or if my present and how can I use it now? And in the future to carry myself forward into my life in a way that I will. You know, find meaningful in a way that I could be proud of the person that I am in a way that I could look at the entirety of my life and embrace, you know, who I've created myself to beat.
Now, one of the reasons that these philosophies are really important, right? This idea of lining your flaws with gold and embracing your vulnerabilities as well as embracing a lifestyle of wabi-sabi where you are embracing the imperfection. You're embracing the humble parts of your life. The things that are not quite what is trendy or what is widely acceptable is because in this way, [00:18:00] we choose to live as the warrior in the garden.
Now, for those of you who haven't heard that story yet, that is a lot of what Zen Stoicism is based on is based on this story of the warrior and the garden, um, to which I'm going to share this with you now. So the warrior and the guard. Is a story where a master and his student are discussing. Training and martial arts.
Now specifically, they're the masters training his student for battle, and he's training him in the art of the sword. And while he's training him, he's also telling him that he should be living a life that is peaceful, that is tranquil, that he should enjoy the beauty of the world to enjoy. Little moments with his family, with his loved ones, with his friends and the student is confused by this.
He says, master you're training me on how to fight. You're training me on how to succeed in battle. And yet you're also telling me to live a life of peace. How do you reconcile these two? And the master [00:19:00] looks at him and he says, because it's better to live as a warrior in a garden rather than a gardener.
And this particular notion is a lot of what Zen Stoicism is based on. Now, the thing is, when you think about this idea, many people, they will hear the warrior in the garden, and a lot of people will be drawn to the warrior part. The part that sounds cool, the part that makes you sound tough, and this is something actually that I used to look at it as I always would leave out the second part, which is the.
Now the garden is the part of it, where the garden represents your ideals in life. The warrior represents you and the training of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, to be able to weather the inevitable storms of life. The thing is. One thing that we all have in common is despite that we have these individual subjective experiences, we all have to carry the [00:20:00] existential burden of life as Jordan Peterson would say, and this is something that is incredibly daunting to us all because a lot of the time.
Still don't understand why we're here. We still don't understand what we're doing here or what our life is supposed to be. And at times we think we know, we think we have some certainty over, but then at other times it seems to weigh down on us at an incredibly heavy way and the way to combat that. Is to build ourselves up into a person that we would be proud of a person that can handle these things, a person who is credible, who is pursuing a life of meaning.
And that is what it means to be the warrior in the war, in the garden. Phrasing that warrior is you training yourself to be prepared for the inevitable battles and storms of life. Whereas the garden represents your ideals. It represents the beauty in your life. The things that you love, the things that you cherish, whether that's the people that you love in your life, it could be your hobbies and [00:21:00] passions.
It could be your work. It could be everything that you surround yourself with. You could look at the garden as the physical manifestation of your ideals, the things that you bring into. Into your life as your surrounding environment. And that surrounding environment is a reflection of your internal world.
So as the war in the garden, we train ourselves for the inevitable battles and storms while also being able to enjoy life as it is to really take in all these experiences, to be grateful for them to see the beauty in these experiences and to not let ourselves become jaded. By the very fact that life can be.
Sad or dismal things sometimes, right? There's the temporary nature of life things. And that it is impermanent. It is fragile. Like we are not invincible. We can be hurt. We can be broken physically, sometimes, mentally and emotionally. We can feel broken. The idea of being the warrior. Is to build a system of thinking and being [00:22:00] where you're not only intelligent, but also emotionally fit to deal with these things.
And the whole idea of Zen Stoicism. The whole reason why it came to be is for myself in once upon a time feeling like the gardener and the war feeling unprepared for the inevitable storms that life had brought me. It began with my mother when she passed away, when I was seven years old. And we've talked about this in other episodes in the podcast, but if this is the first time that you're listening to this, this was my first experience of being the gardener in the war.
Right. I was in my garden, so to speak my proverbial garden, where everything was beautiful, everything was nice. Um, there was not a care in the world and I had an amazing mother, an amazing. Everything I could want as a kid, I had a really nice childhood, you know, growing up, but when she passed away, I suddenly learned very quickly in a very real way that life wasn't [00:23:00] fair that there were going to be these injustices.
Not only that life wasn't fair, but that it was fragile, right. Even a person as strong as my mom, as healthy as my mom was able to get sick. Uh, you know, in these circumstances, despite doing the right things. Also the impermanence of her life being that one moment I had her in my life. And the next moment I did, so I found myself as this gardener at war, and I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know how to handle myself in this particular situation. And I remember suffering and being in misery with myself internally. Right. It didn't really always show this outside. I wasn't really like. Sad or depressed kid or anything like that. But internally it seemed like a world of darkness all the time, because I felt like life wasn't fair.
I felt like this was happening to me. And the thing that began to change it is referencing something that I was saying before, which is asking myself the question, well, what was the gift [00:24:00] here? What was the gift here? And seeing that as a gift, and that began to turn my mind around. But the experience itself is what caused me to want to train myself.
Physically mentally, emotionally to be the strongest version of who I could be to be a person who's capable person who is articulate of explaining their emotions and understanding them and being able to deal with them, not just push them down because for years I'd pushed them down, I'd stuffed them down.
And when you do that, you know, in our war, in the garden metaphor, it's basically like you're taking garbage and burying it in your. I eventually, that's going to have an adverse effect on the flowers and the plants and the fruit trees and whatever you have planted in there. So the whole idea here was that I was stuffing down my emotions.
I didn't know how to handle them. I felt like a very. I felt completely vulnerable by this experience. And it shaped the way that I started to live my life. So I remember, you know, I got into training, martial arts, and I still do to this day to train myself physically for any [00:25:00] inevitable battles that could come out.
But I also began reading a lot. I'm always listening to a book or reading a book and learning about myself and reflecting on myself and also reflecting upon my emotions because what this does is it trains the warrior within to be able to weather those storms, to be able to engage in those battles without just falling flat and crumbling under life's tough toughest circumstances.
So that is the part that had inspired me to be that warrior. But at the same time, what I needed to realize is that I didn't want to be the warrior in a desert or in a barren land. Part of sustaining that ability to keep going to eat training, to keep holding or to keep being able to bear the existential burden is also having ideals or compelling, um, visions for what you want to experience in life.
Things that really mean something to you and having a compelling vision is key because the warrior with nothing to fight for, with nothing to protect [00:26:00] simply begins to lose themselves in that there, there is no purpose there. What you do is you build your garden, you build your ideals with this, and you, you do so by thinking to yourself, what is most important to me in life?
What do I care about most? Who do I love most? Who do I want to be spending my time with? And what do I want to be doing? And in that you begin to build that garden. You begin to build that sense of ideals, that environment, while also knowing at the same time that at any moment in life, that can all be taken away.
And that is where we utilize. The stoic notion of memento, Mori, the stoic practice of memento, Mori, where we think to ourselves, this can all be taken. So this is what gives this beauty. This is what gives this ultimate meaning is because something isn't really meaningful unless it's lost, would be significant to you.
If it's lost would be, you know, just something that you could brush off. It's not very meaningful. Now that's not to say that this is a negative or a bad thing, but this is to say that. [00:27:00] If you regard it as truly meaningful, it's important to remember that at any moment, it can be lost. And the way that you train yourself to be able to deal with that loss is by consistently.
Training your character training that warrior within examining your character, reflecting back on your decisions, your intentions, uh, why you're doing certain things and allowing yourself to learn because in this individual experience, it can be very difficult to learn from it all the time. Because again, in the, in the subjective individual view that you go with, It feels sometimes like everything is happening to us and our emotions can catch us.
Even though I practice this every single day, my emotions still grab a hold of me. My emotions will still take me down these weird paths that I need to explore and reflect upon so that I don't get caught up in them so that they don't destroy me. And thankfully, I've built this system of thinking through Zen Stoicism, where I'm able to actually deal with that.[00:28:00]
So the thing that also helps to deal with that is understanding. Okay. Viewing yourself, not with a locked or limited identity. And this idea of limited identity would be the very thing that would basically take the warrior out. If your identity is limited, it makes it very difficult for yourself to be that war in the garden because you start to be triggered and.
Destroyed by very minute things that violate the narrative of yourself. So this idea of limited identity actually comes from a Yogi named , who I'm a big fan of and sod. Go-to, we'll talk about this idea of limited identity as being the root of all of our human conflict and the fact that. We think of ourselves as a single thing, right?
If you attach a label to yourself and you identify with it, this could be anything right. Your label could be. I view myself as this political [00:29:00] affiliation, or I view myself as a. Eh, an angry person or a depressed person or an emotional person. And when you throw these labels upon yourself and you begin to identify with them, what you end up doing simultaneously is by identifying with a specific thing you simultaneously.
A lot of other things, a lot of other things that, uh, allow your being to be expansive in your experience of life. So if I, for instance, if I view myself on one side of an argument and let's say, I view myself as a liberal or conservative, then automatically the other side, I'm viewing as wrong. I'm viewing it as against my identity and to be a good liberal or conservative.
I now have to hold opinions against the opposing party or the opposing viewpoint. And by doing so now I've limited myself and I begin to close myself off. I begin to lose myself because I'm attaching to [00:30:00] something that is not myself. And this particular lesson is something that I learned from not just with the idea of limited identity by.
There is a Zen concept that was talked about by Tik non hon, where he talks about how teaching is like a raft. Teaching is like a raft that brings you from one side of the river to the other. Once you get to the other side of the river, you don't carry the raft on your head. I'll explain this in a better way.
You, he explained how the teaching or the method is more like a finger pointing at the moon. So this metaphor of the way that it breaks down is that the finger pointing at the moon, we could see. This is the identity, right? In this particular case, the identity points at the moon and the moon represents the truth or the actual experience that you're trying to point to.
If you get attached to the identity and then you start to concentrate on the finger, you forget about the moon entirely. We don't want to mistake the [00:31:00] finger pointing at the moon for being the moon itself. So. If we're locking onto an identity, because we believe that it gives us meaning we believe that we're championing something good yet we're at the same time we're losing ourselves.
Then what we're doing is we're forgetting about the truth. We're forgetting about our direct experience. And instead of we just start to serve the thing that's pointing at it, we get lost in the method rather than actually embracing the truth and the direct experience that life is and the truth and direct experience of who we are.
We are much more than anything that we could identify with and having a total view of life or an integral view of life. As we like to say with that, when it comes to Zen Stoicism. Being able to realize that you're not just your emotions, you are not your past, you're not your political ideologies or even your religious ideologies.
You're so much more than that. Sure. These things may be a part of you and they may be important to you. And that is completely fine, but [00:32:00] they do not define the entire person that you are or could be. So by getting locked on these things, we severely limit ourselves to the experience of. Our self-realization as well as the experience of the deepest meaning that we could attain in our lives.
Right. We, we stunt our growth towards our full potential when we limit ourselves. So when we go into this idea of limited identity, limited identity is at the root of our problems because by seeing ourselves as limited, what we end up doing is we end. Resisting other people's subjective experience and not realizing that everybody is having their own unique experience.
And that just because someone does something doesn't mean that it's per, it's a personal attack towards us, just because it falls outside of the limitations of our identity and the limitations of our narrative of ourselves. So we want to not allow ourselves to get stuck in this style of thinking, because by doing so, it cuts us [00:33:00] off from connecting with others.
You know, just through these last two years with this pandemic, I've heard so many stories about people not talking to family members, because they disagreed on certain issues. People no longer allowing themselves to have certain friends because their friends believe something different than they did.
And in that people have lost their ability to see the moon. And they started focusing on the finger that points. And having those limited identities have wiped out relationships, marriages, families, friendships, and this is all because of limited identity of seeing yourself as. In a box and only having to agree with what is contained within that box.
And that could be detrimental for us. So instead of having that limited identity, one exercise that I really love is that something that comes from Marcus Aurelius, which is called taking the view from above now, when Marcus really is talks about [00:34:00] this in meditations. And for those of you don't know, Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius is one of the most prominent stoic philosophers who was a Roman emperor, meaning that at the time.
He was the most powerful man in the world. And somehow some way did not allow himself to get corrupted by that level of. Because he used stoicism, he practice stoicism to consistently examine his character to consistently make sure that he was living a life that he believed was in the direction of a virtuous life, a meaningful life.
And he used philosophy as his way of character examination so that he wasn't getting lost in the power. He wasn't getting lost in the abundance of choice that he had. Now. He had this exercise that he would do where he called it, taking the view from above. And taking the view from above was basically Marcus Aurelius, imagining himself viewing, not just himself through his own experience, but having an objective view of himself [00:35:00] kind of like zooming out and then seeing, not just himself, but the community that he was in, seeing all the nature within it, the animals.
People the merchants in the shop and the market, the, the soldiers training, you know, babies being born, seeing all of this and taking in this expansive view and realize. That he is part of all of this he's part of nature and it is not separate from him. So as human beings, we are made for each other, we are made to cooperate and we are not separate from one another.
And Marcus release would use this exercise called taking the view from above to expand his identity. Not. Uh, you know, from, I am the Roman emperor and I get to the side, but that I am a human. I am a man. I, and I choose to be a good man. I choose to be someone who is connected with the people around me because in this realization and in his reflections, Marcus release would consistently come back to this theme of as human beings.
Our nature is cooperative. Our nature is [00:36:00] to come together. So by taking this perspective consistently, and by always examining and reflecting on his character, Marcus Aurelius was a seeker of wisdom. And as a seeker of wisdom, what he was doing is, was he was building a universal. He was not locking himself into a specific way of thinking, just because he was the Roman emperor because he had this power and he had this status in life, but he used philosophy as Seneca would say to scrape off of his fault rather than to rail against the faults of others.
And with limited identity, it's really easy for us to criticize others. It's really easy for us to use our intelligence and our intellect to cut others out and to judge other people based on. What they might be going through, not realizing that as human beings, we all go through something similar. And it reminds that this whole idea reminds me of this.
One of my coaches, one time made this distinction to me, where he said it's really important [00:37:00] to distinguish the difference between aloneness and loneliness and loneliness happens when we have limited ideas. Because loneliness is viewing your subjective experience and thinking to yourself, I am the only one who feels this way.
I'm the only one going through this. No one understands. And it's starting to attach the experiences that you're having, the emotions that you're having to your actual identity, to how you view yourself. Whereas a loneliness can sometimes be just a state of affairs, a literal observation of your circumstances, where you are actually just alone in the room that you're in on the path that you're walking in, the endeavor that you're going.
But at the same time, it's to remember that there are other people. On this path, there are other people having their own very unique, novel, subjective experiences. And to realize that even if those novel subjective experiences are completely different from ours, [00:38:00] the fact that we're having unique novel and subjective experiences is one of the things that connects us, that we all have that subjective experience, where we're able to realize that, Hey, maybe mine is novel and you know, And that's beautiful because that makes me who I am.
That's part of the thing that I'm going to embrace in life, but other people are also having this. So yes, sometimes when we're walking our path in life, we are alone. We are alone in the VI, the specifics that we're experiencing, but we're not alone in the fact that we all have these types of subjective experience.
And when you are seeking knowledge, when you're seeking wisdom, when you're seeking a life that you're using philosophy to examine your character, to become that warrior in the garden, there will be times where this path can be lonesome or you will be alone because it's very much like there are a lot of people in life that they'd rather not think about what they're going through.
They'd rather not examine their character. And they'd rather [00:39:00] just view it from the egoic lens of. My perception, my specific individual experience, my ego is me and everything that happens is personal to me. And that's just the way that it is. And that can be a severely limited view and in doing so, it's almost like having a path that is.
Well paved where you don't have to think you don't have to do anything. You just kind of walk the path and things are simple and easy. Never reflect back on your character. You never practice any self-awareness and it's a comfortable way of existing, except for when you have the rude awakenings or the inevitable storms that come through life.
But then there's the path of the seeker of wisdom, the philosopher, where you're using philosophy to help you scrape off all the parts of yourself that are. You're using philosophy to examine your character, to reflect upon your decisions upon your intentions. And this can be more like taking the path that is not paved, [00:40:00] taking the path that is rugged and filled with foliage.
Maybe it's up a mountain, maybe it's Rocky. And sometimes when you're on that path and you look around, sometimes you might see other seekers of wisdom on this path, you know, far off in the distance, coming up the mountain. And other times you might be there completely by yourself. And that is that experience of aloneness.
But what's important to remember is that, that aloneness, that unique experience brings us back to the fact that because you're having this experience because it's temporary because it is alone, this is part of what makes it meaningful. This is what part of this is part of what makes it unique and beautiful because at the end of the day, what defines.
And what validates you is not the fact that you are doing specific endeavors in life, not the fact that you have, and you have accumulated certain things in your life. It is the fact that you are here. It is the message of you. The very fact that you're here in life is all the validation that you need.
And sometimes [00:41:00] that can feel like you're alone, but you do not have to feel lonely because it's important to remember that as human beings, we're all going through it. And sometimes. The most important thing that we can do for ourselves and for others is to empathize with the experience of others. To remember that we're not alone in this, remember that other people feel this way, that this is unique to the human experience.
And that is what it is to be a seeker of wisdom. That is what it is to practice philosophy is to allow that philosophy to help you cut off the limitations of your identity, and to also bring you back into a state where you remember. You are part of this human experience. You are universal. You're not limited in your identity.
And this is a lot to take in some times because going into the existential burden that life can bring some times we go to Buddhism's four noble truths and the first noble truth is the truth of [00:42:00] unsatisfactoriness or as some have translated it before the truth of. Uh, suffering is not necessarily the most accurate translation, but it is the truth of life being unsatisfactories that we at times will have insoluble problems.
Things that we believe are problems, but things that we just cannot seem to solve in our lives. And the, the states of being that caused us to be are the state of unsatisfactoriness or insoluble problem. The state of impermanence and the state of what is called non-self now non-self is a state that we want to be able to achieve something that's discussed in Zen as very likened to what we were discussing before with that universal identity, with not attaching to any specific identity to define yourself by doing so there are certain problems that will come.
That suddenly they become problems to you because they are going against your identity or they violate the identity or they're in conflict with the identity. [00:43:00] The idea of permanence or impermanence rather is a state that is important to realize, because a lot of the SA the suffering that we experienced in that first noble truth is because we try to make permanent that, which is not permanent and Zen.
When you think about Zen, it can be summed up in a single phrase. Everything changes. And while that seems very simplistic, the suffering happens because we don't realize that sometimes not everything needs to be solved sometimes. And we don't realize that nothing is permanent. And the other thing that we don't realize is that we are not a specific identity or something that we can attach to.
This is a mate. Thing that we have in our society. Um, it's worth explaining the viewpoint that Zen Stoicism holds on the ego. Right? A lot of people have brought this concept up through years, especially comes [00:44:00] up now where sometimes one way to insult somebody or to discredit somebody as to say that this person has a big ego.
And when we think about the egoic view, we'll explain the definition like this. The ego is the measuring device. Of the subjective individual experience. It is not the individual experience itself, but it's how we measure the quality of it. And it's how we make distinguishing or a distinction between our experience and another's experience.
It's how we know when we are drinking a glass of water that we bring the glass of water up to our own mouths, rather than someone else's. So the ego is not the individual experience, but it is how we identify it and measure it. It's how we point to it. So just like the finger pointing at the moon, the experience of.
Is pure consciousness and awareness. Whereas the ego is the thing pointing to the individual subjective consciousness and awareness that's happening right now in this moment. So in order to create non-self, it is important to understand that is important to step back [00:45:00] from the ego, to be able to not have a limited or a restricted identity and to begin to have a universal identity.
So using the view from above is one way of doing this and in order to. Move through this without getting attached to things is to also realize that life is impermanent and that impermanence is part of what makes it beautiful. So that's the first noble truth. Is that the truth of suffering or the truth?
The truth of unsatisfactoriness the second noble truth is that the root of suffering is, is that the root of suffering. And that there's a few different translations for this, but the root of self. Is attachment or said differently. It is clinging. And it's usually clinging to one of these three things too.
It's clinging to a problem that can't be solved or it's clinging to some it's clinging to permanence and trying to make something permanent when it's not. So it's attaching to it, or it's clinging to identity. It's clinging to a state of you or an idea of you that isn't. [00:46:00] And that's part of why we use philosophies to scrape off the stuff that isn't use scrape off the stuff that you've maybe have been identifying with, but doesn't actually define who you are.
So that is the second noble truth is that the root of all suffering the root of unsatisfactoriness is clinging to these things. The third noble truth is that is the truth of. Now Nirvana, people will hear that and they think, oh, that means enlightenment or something. And yes, Nirvana is that state of enlightenment that people talk about.
But what Nirvana really means, and what is translated as is to blow out, to literally exhale and to let go. So when we let go of that, which we clean to of that, which we identify with and we let it go and we let it just pass through us. That is when we begin to fall into this state of total presence here.
And that is what in Zen, they call Satori this idea of sudden enlightenment. When you just let go of something, you have a moment that breaks all of these [00:47:00] attachments that breaks the clinging to the impermanent that breaks the cleaning to the insoluble problems. And that briefs the clinging to the limitations that you have maybe assumed over your identity.
And the fourth noble truth is the path to the end of suffering or the path to the end of unsatisfactoriness, which is the eight fold path. Now in Buddhism, they call it the eightfold path. We have a Zen Stoic version. And in the next episode of the Zen Stoic path, we're going to be discussing and breaking down our translation of the eightfold path.
One that we brought into the modern age with modern examples, and we're going to be discussing what that means. And the eightfold path is a method of liberation. It's a way of liberation that when the Buddha created the eightfold path, He created it, not to be followed necessarily sequentially, but to be these aspects of life that we can incorporate at any moment that we are able to tap into no matter what's going on.
So we're going to be getting into that in the next episode, a full [00:48:00] path breaks down into three aggregates. The first aggregate is the aggregate of wisdom or understand. Second aggregate is the aggregate of conduct or morality. And the third aggregate is the aggregate of meditation or concentration. And so these are just different translations that have come up.
But in the next few, in the next three episodes, we're going to be going through each of those and breaking them down piece by piece. So the next episode of the Zen Stoic path, we're going to be going into the aggregate of wisdom and understanding and how to have an integral. As well as integral intentions, or we'll be breaking down the four intentions and the four delusions of Zen Stoicism.
So hope you enjoyed this episode. This is our very first episode in our new studio on video, or maybe you're listening to the audio, but definitely make sure that you subscribe. If this resonated with you. If you enjoyed this episode and please feel free to send us any questions to my email, Victor at Zen Stoic dot com, we're going to be having other platforms up soon for you to be able to talk with us and interact with us.
I hope you enjoyed and we'll see you on the next one.[00:49:00]