On Strength

One beautiful morning a pupil came to his mentor and asked the most important question that would be the most important question anybody ever asked. Unfortunately, either the pupil failed to understand the answer, or the sensei failed to address the question properly, because this answer generated a slew of principles, values, and merchandizing for a whole lot of people without any of them even trying to understand it. The question was “What is strength?”

The average life consists of a sequence of thoughts governing our behavior, as well as a sequence of thoughts analyzing yourself and others. Based on the latter musings we base decisions about how we should proceed with the former. The most natural action of the mind is thought, so whenever the mind succumbs to weakness, it is thinking. Those thoughts, the thoughts of weakness, are not any different from other thoughts rushing through your head, so we do not recognize and destroy them before it is too late.

The main way people are weak is not physical, nor is it “not finishing what you started”, nor “not following your own principles”. Those are just after effects of principal rationalization. A person arrives at a conclusion about his or her own life. They make a decision, a resolution, something that is going to alter the course of history. However, the human mind is a tricky device capable of lying to itself. The same mechanism that allows us to decide something allows us to undecided anything, and on the surface, it looks like another decision, another valid thought.

The ability to separate decisions from ‘undecisions’ is strength, everything else a symptom.