“Fear nothing, and have nothing to regret.”
Daisaku Ikeda
It is impossible to avoid decisions.
Doing nothing is a set of decisions. Being active is a set of decisions. Reacting to input from habit, or priming, is a set of decisions. Trying to be mentally active and sensitive to cultural and psychological realities is a set of decisions. Every individual gets to choose hundreds of times a day, if not thousands.
Which decisions will produce the most value?
The most important aspects of a value-producing, happy, life is the feeling of winning during life, and having won, at the end of it. How can that be done?
What if you looked at the aspects of life you can see, and stopped looking for solutions from where you can’t see?
What might be possible then?
You could look around and see that there is birth, in some form, or other, maturing, decline, and extinction. You could see that this happens to hummingbirds, monkeys, fish, humans, stars.
You could get the idea that endless transition is part and parcel of life. That life is a cycle whose overall beginning and end are guessed at, not seen. You could get the idea of impermanence can be a form of comfort. Many philosophies embrace this view.
You could appreciate what’s available, rather than resenting what isn’t.
Most people discover quickly that life is more fun with good relationships, and those are based on mutual benefit.
You could also notice that no moment is exactly like any other. There is no reason to compare lives. Each is unique, and part of the whole.
You could drop the expectation of permanence, and let go of its fears and regrets, you would notice, and come to know, that what you think, and do, makes a difference over time.
Once you accept that causes do produce effects, you could start to look around for ways to make better decisions about what causes to make.
Those causes are best decided when the mind and body are unified and there is no confusion that tangible, and intangible, are just different aspects of a unity.
Since you already appreciate that causes produce effects, life is tangible, and intangible, that though events keep changing, there seem to be parameters that remain steady, you can appreciate that these principles apply everywhere, and at all times.
Once the focus on those realities is your center, your life won’t be so bothered by stray puzzles about unanswerable questions. You can feel more comfortable, and your mind can use less energy on hopeless questions. It can help you better.
The next step would be to find a way to use the new insights to be efficient, and rationally compassionate. That could start the search for philosophies, psychologies, contemplations, concepts that have managed to condense your new insights into a formula that might be analogous in usefulness for all of life, the way Newton
Life is far more complex than gravity, yet the idea of condensing the undeniable truth of life into a formula is at least sixteen hundred years old. It was accomplished in China
It wasn’t until a Japanese monk named Nichiren, eight hundred years later, recognized the application to daily life by adding a word for dedication, focus.
What Nichiren accomplished is to collect all the efforts to improve life, by self-controlled methods, and make them suddenly successful the way a laser can be used to achieve great changes where only candles, or light bulbs, were available before.
Because the original formula was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, and then refined in thirteenth century Japan, the formula is pronounced in Japanese.
If you also thought that friends are more fun than enemies, you might also consider that interesting friends who are advancing their lives, are more fun than friends who are confused and frustrated. You might then decide to seek out interesting friends who know a method of creating self-directed victories, and use it.
They can be found at
http://www.sgi.org
Because SGI is world-wide, yet originates in Japan
Some of the translations still need to be polished in order to be appropriate to convey the intent of Nichiren, and his present-day chief interpreter, Daisaku Ikeda
