210111 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

Everyone is drawn to those who keep to the one, 

For there lie rest and happiness and peace.

From The Daily Stoic: 

 

Place and environment are not the keys to serentiy. You do not have to seclude yourself to the mountaintop or the monastery to achieve peace. 

Master your focus to pinpoint those things within your control and those without and your judgment can be clear and untroubled. 

“For if a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and the acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful, and unstable.”—E PICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.1.12

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Hatred 

Inner feelings, the destructive doubts about ourselves and our potential, are more potent drivers of the hate harnessed by a Movement than any actual grievance done by the object of our hate. 

That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience. 

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. 

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.

(The True Believer, XIV-69)