As long as we perceive our world and things happening around us with our five senses in a dualistic way, i.e. in terms of love and hatred, pleasure and displeasure, delight and disgust, virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, attraction and repulsion, good and bad, right and wrong, right and left, high and low, front and behind, etc., we are at the mercy of our feelings and reactions mirroring our perception. We feel down when frustrated and high when uplifted, with the heads and hearts sinking deep or soaring high. Only rare specimens among us who have
reached the root and summit of the middle way are immune to the ups and downs of human dramas. Emerson must have been one of those happy souls, judging from what he said.
This thought came to me this evening as it struck me that both Serge and I had experienced two extreme feelings in our respective undertakings. Serge went on working on a song he almost finished yesterday but would not yieal a happy marriage of melody and words, and me trying to ‘own’ the domain name for my translation website, still not available after I bought it three days ago. Till the early evening, we were not our usual happy souls (though we did our routine works in an undisturbed state of mind). Then I suddenly gave up the idea of struggling through the jungle of parameters and trying to get help from the reluctant Google and eNom service desks, and went to Go Daddy and bought a domain for Serge’s music website which I was going to set up anyway. An hour later, not only did I own the domain name but also started to write the welcome page on my Weebly surface. This one hour Go Daddy experience with its easy-to-handle mechanism and instant assistance was enough to offset my three days’ frustration with eNom, leaving quite an amount of credit on my feeling-good account. And lo, Serge emerged from his micro-studio like Moses from Mount Sinai with a solemnly enlightened face declaring, “I have a song.” As coincidence will have it, he had a sudden rush of inspiration which led him to hurriedly knock down his three days’ struggling with a song resistant to rhyming und to create a totally different song in his usual method of a simultaneous birth of melody and words.
This cold-and-hot parallel experience of ours with a double happy end made me think of a cool-and-warm version of the same experience. If we had remained cool throughout those less satisfactory events, we would not have been engaged in a frustrating struggle, but a serene confrontation, and not in a fountain of joy, but a stream of enjoyment. I think that’s the way of Purusha Marga, the middle way leading to the summit as expressed in Emerson’s aphorism. I am not sure whether Emerson really 'dwelled' on that summit, but he clearly showed the culmination of the way leading from the dualistic "cold and hot" to the monistic "neither cold nor hot" via the "cool and warm" held in equipoise.
reached the root and summit of the middle way are immune to the ups and downs of human dramas. Emerson must have been one of those happy souls, judging from what he said.
This thought came to me this evening as it struck me that both Serge and I had experienced two extreme feelings in our respective undertakings. Serge went on working on a song he almost finished yesterday but would not yieal a happy marriage of melody and words, and me trying to ‘own’ the domain name for my translation website, still not available after I bought it three days ago. Till the early evening, we were not our usual happy souls (though we did our routine works in an undisturbed state of mind). Then I suddenly gave up the idea of struggling through the jungle of parameters and trying to get help from the reluctant Google and eNom service desks, and went to Go Daddy and bought a domain for Serge’s music website which I was going to set up anyway. An hour later, not only did I own the domain name but also started to write the welcome page on my Weebly surface. This one hour Go Daddy experience with its easy-to-handle mechanism and instant assistance was enough to offset my three days’ frustration with eNom, leaving quite an amount of credit on my feeling-good account. And lo, Serge emerged from his micro-studio like Moses from Mount Sinai with a solemnly enlightened face declaring, “I have a song.” As coincidence will have it, he had a sudden rush of inspiration which led him to hurriedly knock down his three days’ struggling with a song resistant to rhyming und to create a totally different song in his usual method of a simultaneous birth of melody and words.
This cold-and-hot parallel experience of ours with a double happy end made me think of a cool-and-warm version of the same experience. If we had remained cool throughout those less satisfactory events, we would not have been engaged in a frustrating struggle, but a serene confrontation, and not in a fountain of joy, but a stream of enjoyment. I think that’s the way of Purusha Marga, the middle way leading to the summit as expressed in Emerson’s aphorism. I am not sure whether Emerson really 'dwelled' on that summit, but he clearly showed the culmination of the way leading from the dualistic "cold and hot" to the monistic "neither cold nor hot" via the "cool and warm" held in equipoise.
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