|
1. Do not do to other people what you do not wish done to you. That is the beginning and the foundation of ethical behavior: the rest must be learned forthwith.
2. Know yourself. Accept yourself. Love yourself. You cannot truly know anyone else unless you know yourself. You cannot truly accept the world and the other people in it unless you accept yourself. You cannot truly love another person unless you love yourself.
3. Accept the teaching of others. Seek out the wisdom of your predecessors and your elders. Shun ignorance. Understand the finiteness of knowledge (remember there are things you know, things you don't know, and things you don't know that you don't know). Think about what you learn, analyze it, question it, then do it again. Learn all you can, and at the end, think for yourself.
4. Seek balance. Strive for harmony. Master your passions before they master you. Don't shun passion, don't avoid the intensity of emotion, don't deny or sublimate. Be aware. Recognize. Channel what is not useful: rage, hate, jealousy, greed, envy. Take their strength and use it for other things. Learn to focus and expand what is useful: love, joy, contentment, compassion, lovingkindness, loyalty, honesty.
5. Seek to preserve the integrity of your self. Strive to change those things which need changing, but understand that you must accept the things beyond your control. Make peace with the notion that the world goes according to its fashion, and neither can nature be altered nor can people be changed from without. Know what is and is not your problem to worry about, and be punctilious about not adopting those problems which do not belong to you.
__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
|