The great laws…
People’s thinking and understanding are regrettably distorted, leaving them blind to many fundamental connections. Take looking after your health, for example, once again. Here, too, success will elude us unless we accept certain higher, universal laws and begin to understand that there are no shortcuts (easy solutions) to achieving certain things. There are laws we simply have to acknowledge and take into account. Unfortunately, too many people believe, and are brought up to believe, that money rules over everything and can even change the laws of nature. It cannot! The Buddhist principle “you reap what you sow,” for example, is one of those cosmic laws we simply have to accept. People who disregard it may want something, but ultimately they will not get what they want if they fail to take this principle into account. In other words, your results reflect what you put in: using your WILL to acquire and apply knowledge, and making physical efforts too. Yet time and again, people base their attitudes on the distorted laws of consumer society instead. Of course they do: that is how we have been guided, taught and raised. We forget that this is a human-made system that only works up to a certain “depth.” All too often, you can see that this very idea that “money can buy anything” has so thoroughly brainwashed even seemingly intelligent people that…
When you order a training or nutrition plan, for example, the money you spend seems, by earthly rules, to represent a substantial contribution on your part: having paid, you are entitled to the result you want. Yet by the laws of the universe, simply paying for a plan means you have not contributed or given even the slightest thing toward what you actually want.
Money buys you a training program and some very general recommendations, but the money you pay will never make you follow those recommendations or put the plan you ordered into practice, let alone do so effectively. Unfortunately, in practice, people often do operate on the principle of “I pay money, I get a product” or “I pay money, I get a result.” The knowledge a plan provides only produces results if you have the WILL to follow the instructions you have bought consistently, taking all the relevant factors into account. Under no other circumstances will it do so. To receive, you must give. To get results, what you must give is dedication and effort rather than money. Indeed, for many people today, HEALTH itself is something that comes in capsules at the pharmacy, something you can supposedly buy.
There is also a lack of WILL to acquire knowledge, delve deeper and think…
Strange as it may seem, both in my work and online I often encounter the attitude that results are only possible if someone else works with me. Someone absolutely has to work with me, but “I don’t have to work on myself.” Take healthy eating and body weight again. I have always firmly believed that everyone is literally born with at least a vague, genetically inherited sense of how to eat healthily or, for example, how to lose weight. A rational adult only needs to consult a few books, magazines or websites to clarify that vague sense, and the theoretical knowledge is there. Or, as I have sometimes said, half-jokingly, to “utterly confused” people seeking advice: “This isn’t rocket science. Live and act in precisely the opposite way to the lifestyle that made you gain weight, and you will see results.” A joke, perhaps, but it is not actually wrong. Everyone has some capacity for analytical thought, memory and experience. “How did I gain weight? How did I end up like this?” In fact, people often spell out the cause themselves in conversation. “I’ve been eating out a lot, eating a lot of junk food, being less active lately, and so on.” Reverse exactly what you have been doing! Start moving more, be selective about what you eat, eat less and party less often. For decades now, we have been told that root vegetables are healthy, while pizza, Coca-cola, frankfurters, fatty foods and beer are not. In today’s information age, it is impossible not to have heard what is healthy and what is not. It is impossible to be unaware that physical activity means health, while constant sitting and overeating mean disease and death. Information about health and healthy living comes at us from every direction.
A lack of WILL leaves you open to manipulation and enslavement…
In reality, the issue has long been something else entirely. As the philosopher of history Einar Laigna says in his reflections, quoting the philosophers of ancient Greece, “People possess reason and knowledge, but lack the WILL to put that sound knowledge into practice.”
In philosophy, the problem of WILL has been central to the study and description of human beings. You have to understand that without WILL, the knowledge provided by any plan is of no use. And WILL can only be trained and developed gradually. You cannot buy it at “Selver” or in an online shop (fortunately), no matter how much money you spend. It has also been said that you are your own worst enemy. I would add that this is especially true of someone who LACKS WILL or WILLPOWER. A person who LACKS WILL is driven by comfort, pleasure, superficiality, addictions, emotions and primal urges. These traits and forces are not directly controlled by reason and can do particular harm when knowledge is lacking and WILL is insufficient. Modern people have been tamed and trained by the market economy and its merchants to surrender to desires, cravings and pleasures. It is a closed circle, a system of systems. First, people are made dependent on their cravings; then that dependence is turned into a source of profit, or they are sold treatment to alleviate the damage caused by excessive indulgence. Comfort, pleasure, craving, addiction and disease are the foundations of sales. It is very simple: first we give people too much to eat and drink, and they develop health problems, diabetes and so on. But that state of affairs is, in turn, extremely favorable and pleasing to pharmaceutical manufacturers. From one chain to the next.
Virtues such as wisdom, moderation and fortitude may already be present, but without WILL, these values cannot guide our actions. We are slaves to comfort, passions and pleasures that actually make us unhappier, not happier. Buddhism takes a very clear position on this: the more wants (desires and cravings) we have, the more we actually suffer. It follows that the less you have and the less you can manage with, the easier life becomes. You have more time to look inward, but also to discover the world around you. The less you want and own, the more content you are. The freer and more independent we become. As Arthur Schopenhauer put it: “Pleasures do not make life worth living.”
None of this is really news to anyone who thinks, because anyone who looks around can see that we live in an age when money is made (and fortunes built) on the stupidity and lack of WILL of the masses. The greater the LACK OF WILLPOWER, the more life revolves solely around comfort and pleasure, and the easier it is to sell people even the most trivial things. Take those very training programs, for instance. The information is available everywhere—just pick it up! I can even see a connection: the less willpower someone has, the more things you can sell them, and the more “pointless” those things can be. Toenail-clipping services, food delivery, apology services, and so on and on and on, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of products without which life would still go on, though it would probably be even happier with those things in our possession. Of course, not everything can be dismissed as trivial, but the line between the sensible and the pointless is razor-thin, and it haunts us all. Let us learn to ask ourselves and tell the difference: “Do I really need this, or have I simply given in to temptation and taken the path of least resistance?”
KNOWLEDGE→WILL→ACTION→RESULT…
Unfortunately, people do not understand that the less willpower they have, the unhappier they ultimately are. Constantly striving ONLY for comfort, focusing on pleasure and pursuing nothing but feeling good may seem like good and worthwhile things at first, but they also erode our WILL—the very character trait we need to make the program we have paid for work. Knowledge can be acquired in various ways, but WILL can be developed by working through difficult and uncomfortable situations. WILL develops only through practice. The wisdom written into a program or an article is of no use on its own if you lack the WILL to put it into practice. We can draw a parallel with a country. We may have all the laws a country needs to function, but if those laws are not observed, obeyed or implemented, they are utterly useless. The state neither fulfills its purpose nor functions effectively. Sometimes I get the impression that many people who “order programs” are, without even realizing it themselves, trying to buy not so much knowledge as the WILL and initiative to say, “Now I have a program, and now I really have to start making a proper effort.”
So the less able we are to use WILL to put reason and knowledge into practice, the easier it is to manipulate us and make us dependent. It is a form of enslavement. The more unrestrained desires we have, the more mindlessly we consume. Pointless consumption that has become synonymous with waste and has long since exceeded all reasonable limits. Moderation, however, is the enemy of “salespeople,” because a well-developed sense of moderation teaches us to set limits on every pleasure. Strong WILLPOWER is generally rather unfavorable to capitalism and the market economy, because it means rationality, going without and moderation.
In this respect, I admire my father, who will often stride purposefully through a large shopping center, past thousands of products and dozens of tempting “yellow labels,” head straight for the item he came to buy, purchase only that one product he needs, and walk back out of the store with his head held high…
LET US BUILD OUR KNOWLEDGE AND STRENGTHEN OUR WILL!
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and work out! ArtGym
