210201 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

Knowing harmony is constancy. 

Knowing constancy is enlightenment. 

It is not wise to rush about. 

Trying to control the breath causes strain. 

If too much energy is used, exhaustion follows.

This is not the way of Tao.

Whatever is contrary to Tao will not last long.

From The Daily Stoic: 

 

“Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on—it isn’t manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real man doesn’t give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance— unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18.5b

Anger throws me off my game, interrupting my thoughts and my plans, weakening my ability to accomplish my goals. It is a mistake. 

But it is a mistake which can be conquered. 

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Leadership 

Movements cannot be created ex nihilo; conditions must be right. If the people still have hope, if their sense of familiarity with life is intact, they will prefer the comfort of the known. 

Only when they are profoundly dissatisfied, often through material or spiritual devastation, can The Leader enter stage and "save" them. 

The First World War and its aftermath readied the ground for the rise of the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements. Had the war been averted or postponed a decade or two, the fate of Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler would not have been different from that of the brilliant plotters and agitators of the nineteenth century who never succeeded... 

...

Even the nationalist leaders, who fared better than the revolutionists, did not succeed in making of nationalism the popular holy cause it has become since. Militant nationalism and militant revolutionism seem to be contemporaneous.

... 

It was only when disaster shook the country to its foundation and made autonomous individual lives untenable and meaningless that the leader came into his own.

(The True Believer, XIV-89)