210122 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

Movement overcomes cold. 

Stillness overcomes heat. 

Stillness and tranquillity restore order in the universe.

From The Daily Stoic: 

 

Keep a journal. Look back on my day and examine what I did right and where I failed. Look at everything in light of "How did I become a better person / better Stoic / more virtuous / less base this day? 

“I will keep constant watch over myself and— most usefully— will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil— that none of us looks back upon our own lives . We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.”—Seneca, Moral Letters, 83.2

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Imitation 

If I want to help someone escape a Movement — or see that I do not join one or, worse, am in one and am too deluded or unimaginative enough to realize it — I must help them find a sense of self. I must help them become more than, in Hoffer's delightful turn of phrase, an "undifferentiated adult." 

Mere rejection of the self, even when not accompanied by a search for a new identity, can lead to increased imitativeness. The rejected self ceases to assert its claim to distinctness, and there is nothing to resist the propensity to copy. The situation is not unlike that observed in children and undifferentiated adults where the lack of a distinct individuality leaves the mind without guards against the intrusion of influences from without.

(The True Believer, XIV-79)