TOW: The Chariot of the mind

In Plato's Phaedrus, he talks about one of my favourite philosophical myths, the Allegory of The Chariot of the Soul. 

The soul is like a chariot being driven by two horses.  The first horse is a noble, wonderful horse of the best breed.  It does exactly as the master asks.  The second horse however, is like a horse that has never been broken in.  It bucks and tries to go where it wants, and is wild.  The soul has a goal in mind towards higher enlightenment and it traverses a long journey to get there.  We are often slowed down and frustrated not by the first, but the second horse.

The allegory of course, is one of the human mind/soul.  We often know what we want, but we are frustrated by our lower desires which take over now and again and take control of our lives.  We feel like we're getting near the top, near the best of what we can accomplish every day, only to tumble down the mountainside the next day all the way to the bottom, and it's like we have the build up the discipline all over again.

When I read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was actually a very intricate story that extrapolated on the Chariot Allegory.  Our minds are directed towards thoughts, while it is distracted by certain kinds of feelings.  It's our choice to accept those feelings into our lives.  If we let a wild and desirous part of ourselves take over, we often end up unhappy.  But the funny thing is, when we exercise even the smallest bit of emotional control, we often are able to turn bad situations into better ones, and sadness into a positive outlook. 

The key to happiness is not being lucky in life, having everything you want, or being successful, but counting yourself as successful, feeling like every day alive is a good day, and knowing that having everything isn't everything.  And we can only feel that way when either a) everything is going right for us, or when b) we direct our minds and desires to positive things, and not to negative things.  We are, to a certain extent, our thoughts and our feelings.  When we give our desires the reins, we often end us places we don't want to be.  Our feelings should never be the centre of our lives.  Our feelings contribute to who we are, but if we let them have control, we often feel helpless in the face of normal life situations.  The only real victims in life are the people who are victims of their own emotional states.  (Speaking from experience of myself, here.)


I think this week I have spent a lot of time feeling happy, and really good, and it's because I've been working hard, and things have been going well as a result of that work.  Hopefully, my hard work will pay off.  Even if it doesn't (at least in a financial sense) it will pay off in a life value sense, which was always worth more, anyways.