Confucianism-Great Learning part 6
Stage 4: Balanced Heart
True-desire, like an anchor, pins our heart close to the center. Without it, every foggy twists and turns will misguide us for a detour. 1 of these turns is rage.
While the benefits of balanced heart is enormous, they do not engage us as well as anger. It’s no surprise then that both sales and social media uses agitation to draw engagement.
True-desire helps us in 2 ways. First, as mentioned previously, a prerequisite to true-desire is adrenaline management. Second, having a strong and clear goal protect us from distractions cause by anger.
That is the transition between true-desire and balanced-heart, but what challenges lies ahead or how can we achieve a balanced-heart? The new challenge is to forget your true-desire, or all forms of desire. How can that be? A balanced heart require one to be in the now. When your mind constantly think about your desire, you are in the future.
Imagine the above illustration but from a top down view. The true-desire rope acts as a radius that forms a circle with a boat inside, balanced-heart is the center, you are the boat, and true-desire is the radius that keeps your boat within the circle. But when you are in, your goal is to forget that, and reach the middle, a balanced heart. To get there, you need more tools.
Mastered-body happens with those with balanced heart. Body with rage, will not result in balance, with fear, will not result in balance, with desire for amusement, will not result in balance, with worry, will not result in balance. Heart not at presence, look but don’t see, hear but not listen, eat but don’t know the flavor. This is what it means mastered body happens at balanced-heart.
Meditation
Meditation is a very powerful tool, but it takes training. Try stop thinking what you are thinking now. Hard, isn’t it? The good news is that like our muscle, practice makes it better, but you have to be consistent. Start from 5 minutes and gradually increase to 30. You will catch momentum once benefits start to kick in.
Confucianism presuppose that human nature is good, if we can empty our mind we can naturally flow or gravitate towards a balanced heart.
Many other great Confucius scholars also debated on this subject for centuries, but I think the conclusion is similar. To name one, Wang Yang Ming, a latter Confucius superstar, propose that selfishness is the biggest obstacles from balance heart. I think they are just different angles of looking at the same thing. For example, anger only exists if you have a strong sense of self, but more on this subject later.
Conclusion
True-desire prevents us from wrong paths, but it doesn’t help us to the right direction either. To find balanced-heart, we need meditation.
This concludes the internal practice of Confucianism, and we are moving forward to the external in the next blog to talk about family. For those who do not wish to engage in politics and organizational work, this is enough for you to live a very successful life. Hence the saying, half Lun Yu can rule the world. Lun Yu is a practical dialog version of Confucianism that I will start after concluding Great Learning. Honestly, I think this saying is a little cheating because 1st half of Confucius teaching is the heaviest lift. If you can guide people to positive without naiveness, bitterness, and selfishness you are the very rare manager that Warren Buffett is breaking neck to find.
