Longing to ‘be somebody’ and define or fulfil oneself is a barricade to wisdom and virtue. This is why the lives of many philosophers belie their words. Schopenhauer was full of talk about the illusion of the self with its petty wants, yet he lived the petty and selfish life of a bourgeois political reactionary; something of a hedonistic survivalist.

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It seems like sometimes theres a point where striving harder – at least in the conventional sense, involving your will – doesn’t help you get where you want to go.

There’s this little quip that goes something like:

Q- Well, so what am I supposed to do now?
A- You do not do.

More eloquently stated:
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

“A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.”

The stereotypical image of a buddhist monk comes to mind, but do you think there are people who fit the above criteria?