Many is the story of the road to virtue, to redemption, to perfection, to peace. Not so, my story. For my story is to virtue and back. To understand what virtue is, that is critical to the undertaking.
Even today it is unclear to me now, what I think I experienced first hand. I am studying to see if I can understand it again. Perhaps I will never get there again, but I would like to tell what it is, I would like to know what it is, for having it without knowing how to control it means losing it.
Virtue is about something different than peace. It is not pacifism. Action and perhaps even violence has a place in virtue. Balance does not. Balance means taking two things and weighing one against the other. Virtue means finding the right place and defending it against all comers. It is the place where the wants of the heart live. It is where the reality that you want to pick and the right thing to do come together. Virtue doesn't mean that no one gets hurt, the virtuous person need not be a person of peace. but a person who is virtuous person is a person who is true to himself, he has an internal peace.
At the point at which virtue is found you tap into the power in the universe. I do not believe in this and this lack of belief is the first thing that undermined my virtue. But looking back I can see its effect, I can see where in a state of chaos and calamity, i was able to reach somewhere invisible and find not only what I needed, but what was right for me. This power seems like such a fictional thing but I have touched it. When people of virtue talk about it, i laughed and I still laugh at their naivete but I held the power in my own hands and it is hard for me to deny it.
The person who is virtuous need not be inactive. For when one has access to the power of universe it makes no sense not to act because whatever needs to be accomplished can be accomplished. This is about virtue and that and once one has lived in such a state where there is perfect harmony and perfect love it's a very hard place to leave, but it is also a hard place to please, virtue is jealous and doesn't abide by the unvirtuous. You miss it when it is gone, is leaves a hole in your soul, a hole you can cover up with the results of virtue for a while, wealth and lover, but those are tenuous, tied to the virtue itself.
To leave is hard and painful. And yet for no better reason and to pursue avarice and responsibilities I left the place of perfect grace and became what I am now. Haunted by the memory, knowing what it feels like to be virtuous.
And what are the results of leaving virtue? It means traveling to a place where everything you possessed, the power, the freedom evaporates. It means giving up perfection for what is nothing.
So I went to a place of virtue only because I gave up everything for being lost and reached out only for what was important because it was everything that was left to me. Everything was lost? More than that, even the future was lost to me. Not only the present, but everything. In this place where there was nothing left of me or what I thought was important, there was nothing left for me but to either give up, surrender or find the things that were of true value to me.
And how, I ask you, how can anyone sane or rational who has finally figured out what is important what really matters to him or her walk away from it. How can one abandon virtue?
It was a trip to virtue that was painful, where life lost its meaning. And if it hurts you to think of me leaving virtue, well it was no easy task for me to find it. It required that I lose everything that I lose all of my worldly possessions I lose my sense of well-being and I lose whatever little bit of love and affection which I had.
But what I got in his place worth so much more the wisdom alone would have been worth the price of admission. The well of knowledge alone or at least the chance of drinking from the well, perhaps if I had remained alone would have been a king's ransom. But above even that was that I found love and companionship, and in a state of virtue I found that this was worth more than everything else combined.
Giving that up is not just a hurt, but a lifetime of emptiness. The love, perhaps was part of the problem, being worth even more than the state of virtue which I had achieved. perhaps I turned my back on the virtue for the more valuable power that I found between two people. An virtue is jealous, it is vigilant of its power. The power available to the virtuous corrupts, that is where the responsibilities that are perceived, outweigh true responsibility to the self into the community as a whole love even is a corrupting influence because the love is so powerful it's a love that you can find perfect, the false sense of power, the false sense of responsibilities and values can take over and unbalance things and perhaps that is what happened to me. The love is pure, but the desire to hold it is not. The desire to put yourself above the love and to try to control the responsibilities put yourself above the path of doing the right thing.
**
.
Fear, greed, jealousy (especially the kind where you compare yourself to others), the desire to use the power and not to do the right thing oblivious to the power, those things kills virtue. Fear of loving money, fear of losing love, fear of losing security. When I had lost everything I lost fear and accepted virtue in its place. When the power of virtue and acting with the power it gave me set me free, the fear cam back.
The fear killed the power, the greed killed the power, the fear and the avarice killed the love. No, the love did not die, it merely was buried, a hidden treasure buried under misplaced greed, selfishness and fear. Unable to be rescued for the only way to dig it out was to get back to a state where the other things were put in their place, which is no place at all.
And I found myself far from the state where I was at one with my goals, in tune with my beliefs which to large extent requires a willingness to abandon self for something bigger, and so my journey was one from fear to fearlessness and back again. A place where the world was a sanctuary, a garden of Eden to one where the world was a place that held nothing but peril and heartbreak.
Yeas indeed, it makes very little sense to know what virtue is and then to turn your back on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment