Brahmin - the noble life

“Wanderers, there are these four brahmin truths that I have proclaimed, having realized them for myself with direct knowledge. What four?

(1) “Here, wanderers, a brahmin says thus: ‘All living beings are to be spared.’ Speaking thus, a brahmin speaks truth, not falsehood. He does not, on that account, misconceive himself as ‘an ascetic’ or as ‘a brahmin.’ He does not misconceive: ‘I am better’ or ‘I am equal’ or ‘I am worse.’* Rather, having directly known the truth in that, he is practicing simply out of sympathy and compassion for living beings.

(2) “Again, a brahmin says thus:  ‘All sensual pleasures are impermanent, suffering, 

and subject to change.’ Speaking thus, a brahmin speaks truth, not falsehood. He does not, on that account, misconceive himself as ‘an ascetic’ or as ‘a brahmin.’ He does not misconceive: ‘I am better’ or ‘I am equal’ or ‘I am worse.’* Rather, having directly known the truth in that, he is practicing simply for disenchantment with sensual pleasures, for their fading away and cessation.

(3) “Again, a brahmin says thus: ‘All states of existence are impermanent, suffering, and subject to change.’ Speaking thus, a brahmin speaks truth, not falsehood. He does not, on that account, misconceive himself as ‘an ascetic’ or as ‘a brahmin.’ He does not misconceive: ‘I am better’ or ‘I am equal’ or ‘I am worse.’* Rather, having directly known the truth in that, he is practicing simply for disenchantment with states of existence, for their fading away and cessation.

(4) “Again, wanderers, a brahmin says thus: ‘I am not anywhere the belonging of anyone, nor is there anywhere anything in any place that is mine.’ Speaking thus, a brahmin speaks truth, not falsehood. He does not, on that account, misconceive himself as ‘an ascetic’ or as ‘a brahmin.’ He does not misconceive: ‘I am better’ or ‘I am equal’ or ‘I am worse.’* Rather, having directly known the truth in that, he is practicing the path of nothingness. “These, wanderers, are the four brahmin truths that I have proclaimed, having realized them for myself with direct knowledge.” 

AN 185

“But brahmin, is it possible to set aside one of these two factors and still rightly describe someone as a brahmin?”

“No, Master Gotama. For wisdom is cleansed by ethics, and ethics are cleansed by wisdom. Ethics and wisdom always go together. An ethical person is wise, and a wise person ethical. And ethics and wisdom are said to be the best things in the world. It’s just like when you clean one hand with the other, or clean one foot with the other. In the same way, wisdom is cleansed by ethics, and ethics are cleansed by wisdom. Ethics and wisdom always go together. An ethical person is wise, and a wise person ethical. And ethics and wisdom are said to be the best things in the world.”

“That’s so true, brahmin, that’s so true! For wisdom is cleansed by ethics, and ethics are cleansed by wisdom. Ethics and wisdom always go together. An ethical person is wise, and a wise person ethical. And ethics and wisdom are said to be the best things in the world. It’s just like when you clean one hand with the other, or clean one foot with the other. In the same way, wisdom is cleansed by ethics, and ethics are cleansed by wisdom. Ethics and wisdom always go together. An ethical person is wise, and a wise person ethical. And ethics and wisdom are said to be the best things in the world. DN 4

Let’s internalize the aristocrat

For each separate thing, the dreamer should strive to feel the complete indifference which it, as a thing, arouses in him.

The ability to spontaneously abstract whatever is dreamable from each object or event, leaving all of its reality as dead matter in the Exterior World – that is what the wise man should strive for.

Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to raise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys and anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn’t interest him…

The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance, en grand seigneur, politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner – indifferent because it’s noble, and cold because it’s indifferent.

In order not to sink in our own estimation, all we have to do is quit having ambitions, passions, desires, hopes, whims or nervous disquiet. The key is to remember that we’re always in our own presence – we’re never so alone that we can feel at ease.

With this in mind, we will overcome having passions and ambitions, for these make us vulnerable; we won’t have desires or hopes, since desires and hopes are plebeian and inelegant; and we won’t have whims or be disquieted, because rash behaviour is unpleasant for others to witness, and agitated behaviour is always a vulgarity.

The aristocrat is the one who never forgets that he’s never alone; that’s why etiquette and decorum are the privilege of aristocracies. Let’s internalize the aristocrat. Let’s take him out of his gardens and drawing rooms and place him in our soul and in our consciousness of existing. Let’s always treat ourselves with etiquette and decorum, with studied and for-other-people gestures.

Each of us is an entire community, an entire neighbourhood of the great Mystery, an we should at least make sure that the life of our neighbourhood is distinctive and elegant, that the feasts of our sensations are genteel and restrained, and that the banquets of our thoughts are decorous and dignified. Since other souls may build poor and filthy neighbourhoods around us, we should clearly define where our own begins and ends, and from the façades of our feelings to the alcoves of our shyness, everything should be noble and serene, sculpted in sobriety, without ostentation.

We should try to find a serene way to realize each sensation. To reduce love to the shadow of a dream of love, a pale and tremulous interval between the crests of two tiny, moonlit waves. To turn desire into a useless and innocuous thing, a kind of knowing smile in our soul; to make it into something we never dream of achieving or even expressing. To lull hatred to sleep like a captive snake, and to tell fear to give up all its outer manifestations except for anguish in our eyes, or rather, in the eyes of our soul, for only this attitude can be considered aesthetic.

Pessoa Book of Disquiet

Nobility

For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man—not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. 

As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men—and of women—are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated,, monumentalised so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.»

Ortega y Gasset

But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality? 

The mass-man* would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently force him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts. Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline—the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us—by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. “To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law” (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary and anyone were to dispute them.’

* That man is intellectually of the mass who, in face of any problem, is satisfied with thinking the first thing he finds in his head. On the contrary, the excellent man is he who contemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.

Ortega y Gasset