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Today's
Meditation:
In
so few words, Thomas has given us two very difficult
concepts to consider. Is mastering ourselves
("self-conquest") really a matter of
surrendering ourselves to life? Evidence seems to
say that it is, that the truly successful people in the
world, the truly happy people in the world, are those who
are able to learn to go with the flow instead of fighting
the current, who are able to accept life as it is without
trying constantly to change it in ways that they see as
important. We can't control the world, so we might
as well accept it and deal with it on its terms.
Secondly,
he claims that we don't possess ourselves. We
haven't become ourselves, but we continue to be someone
other than ourselves. And until we become ourselves,
how can we give that up?
His
logic is difficult to accept, for it says that first of
all, we must become ourselves. That will take effort
and time and introspection and insight. And once we
become ourselves, we must surrender that self if we're
going to be masters of our own destinies, if we're to
become the beings we were meant to be. So we go
through all the work to become ourselves only to give it
up.
But
life is about seeming contradictions, isn't it? Life
isn't about easy answers without risk or failure or
trials. While it seems contradictory to say that
self-conquest actually is self-surrender, it also seems
contradictory that we make anti-venoms from the actual
venom from a snake or insect. Life's seeming
contradictions are often its greatest and most beautiful
rules, and the fact that we have to find ourselves in
order to give up ourselves is very ironic, but very
real. Our greatest triumph would be to trust life
completely with our destinies, but we can't reach that
point at all if we don't even know who we are.
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