Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
Aristotle
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There’s some people in one’s life that you just don’t know what to do with. You don’t like them, somehow they are there, usually because they are friend with one of your friend and it’s as if you have to like them because some of our friends do...
Many spiritual teachings will go around saying that you have to be more patient, tolerant, that you have to forgive, that you have to keep an open mind and see their limits as signs of lack of love, that you have to understand that they act in such a way because they suffer and not because they want to attack.
And I can’t disagree with such a way of thinking the effects of sufferings... But why would this mean that we have to hang out with them? Just like some choose not to eat meat, like others choose to only drink milk from natural cows or like others choose not to live in the pollution of a city, can’t we choose not to be exposed to such a person? Can we still be coherent with profound spiritual values of respect of the natural diversity without loosing our inner unity?
I’m always faced with such dilemmas because I live in a time where competition and ambition seems so important while I perceive them as a root of confusion, evil, war and so on!
With detachment, it seems to be, everything is possible... In the Bhagavad-Gita (I won’t repeat the text but I do recommend the reading), Krishna teaches Arjuna how it is possible to kill without gaining negative karma, how it is possible to purify the chaos of egocentrism without falling in the trap of the ego itself! How to confront the ego without becoming it? Detachment is both an argument and an answer, although it is rarely perceived as such by the limited intellect. Because detachment can only be understood from above the concepts of the mind, the mind usually do not see it as a valid answer because the mind is lazy, it doesn’t want to try detachment, it wants some kind of a sentence that will proove him why he should decide detachment is better then something else but rarely considers trying it for itself and benefiting from the results!
And so the mind can only see evolution as either a battle to get rid of the obstacles, a battle of “solving problems” or as a battle to construct its cathedral, a battle of convincing others and itself (and such similar patterns of rhetoric).
And so the answer becomes self-evident. You don’t have to keep your enemy closer because you don’t have to be at war. You only have to experience peace to live peacefully and keeping those who want to fight you closer to you is actually the tactic the ego uses to keep you forever at war with yourself.