Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

Precept 4:
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of
the world
“There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you
when you take nothing personally.” ― Miguel Ruiz
Monk:
On the BBC Television show 
Time Team
, a group of archeologists go
around the United Kingdom digging up history. A short while ago I
saw an episode about the Salisbury Cathedral, a place where I had
recently visited during a trip to England. While I had no Idea that they
had been there at that point, I walked where the cameramen had
walked, where the archeologists had excavated. They were digging
up a small personal chapel that Bishop Beauchamp had built
adjacent to the larger cathedral. The little chapel, now gone, had
been built by Beauchamp and he and a few of his close friends had
been buried there. Even though I’d stood at the site I had no idea
that the chapel had even existed until I saw the TV show, but here’s
the really interesting part: While the archeologists were trying to
locate the bishop’s friend’s bodies, they serendipitously uncovered a
building foundation that predated not only the Bishop’s chapel but
also the cathedral itself. Underneath that they discovered an older
burial ground that no one suspected was there.
To tease this out; I stood on a lawn, which once held a private chapel
I didn’t know existed for a prominent Bishop I had never heard of.
The private chapel was built on an older foundation from a project
that was lost to time. Further, bones were discovered of people who
were buried in the chapel that had no documentation. One might

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make a calculated guess of who they once were, but all records had
been lost to antiquity. That’s nothing new. Let’s face it, history runs
deep; and it has no need for your name. The world does not think of
you, or me, or any of us truly. You may think of the world, but there is
no reciprocity. In fact I’d go so far as to say that thinking deeply of
yourself is a waste of time. Eventually, no matter how rich, famous,
or important we are in life, we all move from being remembered to
being forgotten in death.
Thinking deeply of yourself not only wastes your time, it also makes
your ego hard to be around. Everybody has an ego, of course, and
that ego is needed to survive. If you didn’t have an ego you would
die simply because you would take no action to sustain yourself. On
the other end of the spectrum is the ego that enters the room twenty
minutes before the person arrives. Neither of these egos is very
successful over time. Putting your focus on the world, on the other
hand, is a way to engage creation in a manner that is far more
productive.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “If it bleeds it leads.” When we listen to
the nightly news, the focus is about manipulating our emotions the
majority of the time. News agencies often have entertaining products
because they focus on ratings, since that’s how they sell their
advertising to fund their operations, but the news becomes valuable
to us directly when it speaks to a true threat or opportunity, often a
natural disaster, election, or local issue that we need to know about
personally. The rest of the time, most of the time really, the news
becomes little more than an ego stroke. With these new broadcasts
emotions are elicited—simple, direct, easy-to-understand emotions
that grab and keep a viewer’s attention. This combination allows for
a quick validation of our emotions, and the emotions are further
validated by jumping to swift conclusions about what we’ve seen and
heard. We think, “That is bad,” or we reflect “That was really nice.”
We have seen something, judged it, and are validated emotionally in
the clarity of our choice. A simple, direct formula.

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The challenge in all this is that watching and coming to a conclusion
based on an emotional response can, more often than not, result in
failure. In sports it would be called “losing your head.” The emotions
have taken over; they are in control which means that you are not.
This is what happens when you think too much of yourself. Whether
it is the news validating your emotional decision, or the (often) ill-
conceived advice from a fellow sports enthusiast, or simply the day
to day-to-day emotions that come with your family or occupation,
losing your head is not a good thing. The root cause of most of this
dysfunction comes from thinking too much of yourself while not
taking the world seriously enough. The world you and I all too often
live in is constructed around the wrong object, our ego.
The caution that we should think lightly of ourselves is actually very
close to what many religions teach in that we should place others’
needs ahead of our own. It’s a tried and true axiom that comes not
only from religions, but also from a master swordsman. Interesting,
huh? When you get such divergent origins of the same idea, it is
worth review and study. Ultimately, you and I will not be remembered
just like that anonymous skeleton buried under a chapel that no
longer exists in an island country on a river delta. But, seeing the
world deeply and your life lightly is a formula that brings clear insight
and a unique beauty to the dance while we are here. That’s what this
precept is about.