¶ … closely bound up with the thing which would be the hardest for me to internalize, namely that goodness is not related to obtaining some standard of morality (such as a total lack of anger or a perfect pacifism or an ideal altruism), but that it is bound up in abandoning one's self entirely to the pattern.
On the one hand, I am very drawn to the idea expressed in these words: "The sage is joyous because according to the nature of things before him he should be joyous, and he is angry because according to the nature of things before him he should be angry. Thus the joy and anger of the sage do not depend on his own mind but on things." This seems like the ultimately reasoned approach to life -- to react to circumstances as they demand, and as instinct and the pattern of one's self (as guided by actually inner belief) dictates. This seems far more reasoned than to try to force one's self to comply with an external stricture that dictates how one ought properly to feel or reacts. Yet this ideal leads quickly into an ideal which seems far more difficult for me and yet intimately linked with this concept, namely "The constant pattern of the sage is that his feelings are in accord with all creation, and yet he has no feeling of his own..."
I have great difficulty with the idea that someone should give up having feeling and partiality of one's own. It seems that the ideal person would be more likely to respond spontaneously with emotion of one's own -- for something of the value of being human seems to be lost if one loses one's uniqueness of response. Moreover, it seems to devalue and destroy the self to deny that one's spontaneous responses are also one's personal and "owned" responses, as it were. So, on this point I have some hesitation. The idea that "there is not a single thing in the world that should not have been there. We must not hate anything..." has such wisdom in it, and yet at the same time I suppose I fear that one would be subtly undermining one's humanity by attempting to sense the universal rather than the specific.
