Know Thyself V: Know the Costs

31 March 2021

In the Bhagavad-Gita, a young man, Arjuna, is encouraged to step up to his inherited role of leadership.  If he assumes that role—the role destiny has chosen for him—he will go to war against his own kith and kin.  And he knows, through a prophetic, mentoring god, that some of his own relatives will be killed.  But he assumes his role because he eventually understands it to be the will of the Atman, the creator of the universe. 

This has bothered me since I read it in a class on Indian Philosophy.  The obvious factors that distance Arjuna’s troubles from our own are time, destiny, and gods.  We, the evidence-based sophisticates of the early 21^st-century, have cast such inherited learnings onto the rubbish pile of historical ignorance.  But that story still has traction. 

While the Bhagavad-Gita is a mythologized 2,400-year-old epic, it still carries truth.  People have different inclinations and aptitudes.  For example, I am not suited to sales work.  I am not well-suited to many forms of group work.  Yet I love dissecting ideas, understanding people, and reading about how others have understood life and their own lives.  If, when I was a teenager, destiny—in the form of parents, teachers, and guidance counsellors—had pushed me toward group-based political activity, I would have been a loudly unhappy camper.  That unhappiness would have arisen from the fact that I was fighting my own nature. 

You have a nature—a way of being and a set of inclinations and aptitudes that are yours.  In this fifth consecutive blog, on Aristotle’s explanation of the Delphic inscription, Know Thyself, the goal is to understand the cost to self and others of pursuing one’s desires.  The reason I am unable to forget Arjuna, is that the Bhagavad-Gita is saying the same thing as Aristotle: Be.  You.  (Everyone else is taken, anyway!)  And while we can joke about it, there is probably no more difficult task than to hear and heed the calling of your own identity. 

It has been argued by Brinkmann (2017) and others that the wrong way to do this is by looking inward.  Aristotle agreed.  Human beings—well-spirited human beings—learn who they are by first interacting with the world and second, reflecting on those interactions.  I did not learn about my love of therapeutic work by looking inward.  I learned of it first by reading, writing, watching TV (In Treatment) and movies about shrinks and then asking myself why I found those so exciting.  Extrospection—looking outward and doing—and then introspection—looking inward and reflecting on those doings and responses.

Most people with addictive histories already feel horribly about the cost to others of pursuing their desire for intoxication (Cf. blog, 3 March 2021).  But, what if your journey through intoxication was your way forward?  Perhaps the learning that happens in sobriety and recovery was only available to you by going through and not around addiction.  And this also calls up ideas discussed in earlier blogs.

Amor Fati, loving one’s fate (4 November 2020) is radical acceptance of a world unfolding around you with or without your assent.  As the Stoics emphasized, the key to a well-spirited life is knowing what you can control and what you cannot.  And then letting go of the latter.  SMART Recovery concretizes that in an easy-to-remember image: if something is not in your hula-hoop, it ain’t yours to control.  (Google tells me the average hula hoop is 40” or just over 1m in diameter.) 

The alternate approach is looking at what we actively bring into our hula-hoops.  Every problem, every perceived gift, every idea that we accept into our mental space must be permitted in by us.  We are inviting these things to occupy our mental real estate.  Aristotle (and Arjuna) are trying to tell us to play the tape forward—think very carefully about what suits your unique nature and the path that nature is pursuing.  Nothing is free.

Dan Chalykoff provides one-to-one counselling concerning life direction, addiction, and change. Since 2017 he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery: danchalykoff@hotmail.com