The following is taken from an anonymous internet user.
How is the Victory to be won in this jihād? Our self, in its ignorance of and opposition to its immortal Self, is the enemy to be convinced. The Way is one of intellectual preparation, sacrifice, and contemplation, always presuming at the same time a guidance by forerunners. In other words, there is both a theory and a corresponding way of living which cannot be divided if either is to be effective. The intellectual preparation is philosophical, as “philosophy” was understood by the ancients. The proper object of this philosophy is stated in the words of the Delphic Oracle, “Know thy Self” (γνῶθι σεαθτόν). That means also, of course, to distinguish Self from what is not-Self, the primary form of ignorance being a confusion of Self with what is not-Self.
The battle will have been won, in the Indian sense and Christian wording, when we can say with St. Paul, “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:20); when, that is to say, “I” am dead, and there is none to depart, when body and soul disintegrate, but the immanent God. Philosophy is, then, the art of dying. “The true philosophers are practitioners of dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men … and being always very eager to release the Soul, the release and separation of the soul from the body is their main care” (Phaedo 67de). Hence the injunction “Die before you die” (Mathnawī vi.723 ff., and Angelus Silesius, iv.77). For we must be “born again”; and a birth not preceded by a death is inconceivable (Phaedo 77c; BG ii.27, etc.). This dying is to self. It is a matter both of a will, and of a method.
As regards the will, an intellectual preparation is all-important—intellige ut credas; and here we revert to our psychology. The whole force of this science is directed towards a destructive analysis of the animistic delusion that this man, So-and-so, who speaks of himself as “I,” is an entity at all. The situation is nowhere better or more briefly stated than by Plutarch when he says, “Nobody remains one person, or is one person” (Moralia 392d). The argument can be followed in the European tradition from Heracleitus onwards: our “life” is a succession of instants of consciousness, every one different from the last and from the next, and it is altogether illogical to say of anything that never stops to be, that it “is”; a thing can only be, if it never changes (Symposium 207d, Phaedo 78d ff., etc.). Our existence is not a being, but a becoming. The systematic demonstration is typically Buddhist: the personality is analyzed, generally as a composite of body, feeling, cognition, complexes, and discriminating awareness, and it is shown successively that each of these factors of the so-called “self” is inconstant, and that neither of any one nor of all together can it be said that “that is my Self” The traditional psychology is not “in search of a soul,” but a demonstration of the unreality of all that “soul,” “self” and “I” ordinarily mean. We cannot, indeed, know what we are, but we can become what we are by knowing what we are not; for what we are is the immanent God, and he himself cannot know what he is, because he is not any what, nor ever became anyone. Our end will have been attained when we are no longer anyone. That must not, of course, be confused with an annihilation; the end of all becoming is in being, or rather, the source of being, richer than any being. “The word ‘I,’ ego, is proper to none but God in his sameness” (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 261). The notion of an ego of “ours” is an infatuation or opination (abhimāna, οἴησις, οἴημα) based on sensitive experience (MU vi.10; Philo, ut infra); as we have seen, it has no rational foundation—“Our senses, through ignorance of reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, actually is” (Plutarch, Moralia 392d). And since the notion that “I am the doer” (ahaṁkāra, karto’ham iti) is both the primary form of our ignorance and the cause of all suffering felt or inflicted, the whole complex of “I and mine” (ahaṁ ca mama ca) and the notion of an “I” that can survive the dissolution of the psycho-physical vehicle, are under constant attack. To think that it is our own mind that works is a “pierced and cloven doctrine”; nothing is more shameful than to suppose that “I think” or that “I perceive” (Philo, Legum allegoriae i.47, ii.68, iii.33). To infer from the accidents of my existence that “I am” (upādāya asmi) is ridiculous, because of the inconstancy of all experience (S iii.105). “Were it not for the shackle, who would say ‘I am I’?” (Mathnawī i.2449); Εἴθε, ὦ τέκνον, καὶ σὺ σεαυτὸν διεξεληλύθεις (Hermes, Lib. xiii.4). There can be no greater sorrow that the truly wise man can feel than to reflect that “he” still is “someone” (Cloud of Unknowning, ch. 44).
To have felt this sorrow (a very different thing from wishing one had never been born, or from any thought of suicide) completes the intellectual preparation. The time has come for action. Once convinced that the Ego is “not my Self” we shall be ready to look for our Self, and to make the sacrifices that the quest demands. We cannot take up the operation in its ritual aspect here (except, in passing, to stress the value of ritual), but only in its application to daily life, every part of which can be transformed and transsubstantiated. Assuming that we are now “true philosophers,” we shall inevitably begin to make a practice of dying. In other words, we shall mortify our tastes, “using the powers of the soul in our outward man no more than the five senses really need it” (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 488); becoming less and less sentimental (“sticky”), and ever more and more fastidious; detaching ourselves from one thing after another. We shall feed the sensitive powers chiefly on those foods that nourish the Inner Man; a process of “reducing” strictly analogous to the reduction of fleshly obesity, since in this philosophy it is precisely “weight” that drags our Self down, a notion that survives in the use of the word “gross” = sensual. Whoever would s’eternar, transumanar, must be “light-hearted”.
At the same time, if we are to act in agreement with our altered thinking (Laws 803c), our whole activity must be purified of all self-reference. We must—like Christ—“do nothing of ourselves”; must act without any personal motive, selfish or unselfish. For this is more than any simple “altruism,” and harder; in Plato’s phrasing, we are to become God’s “toys” and “instruments,” unmoved by any inclinations of our own, whether to evil or good. This is the Chinese Wu Wei, “do nothing, and all things will be done.” That “inaction” is often, and often willfully, misunderstood by a generation whose only conception of leisure is that of a “leisure state” of idleness. The renunciation of works (saṁnyāsa karmānām, BG v.1), however, bears no such connotation; it means their assignment to another than ourselves (brahmaṇy ādhāya karmāṇi, BG v.10, cf. JUB i.5.1–3); the harnessed man should think, “I am doing nothing,” whatever it is that he may be doing (BG v.8). This “abandonment” and “yoking” (yoga) are one and the same, and neither is a doing nothing, but much rather “skillful operation” (BG vi.2, ii.50). “‘Inaction’ is not attained by undertaking nothing” (BG iii.4): almost in these very words Philo says that “Moses does not give the name of ‘rest’ (ἀνάπαυσις) to a merely doing nothing (ἀπραξία, De cherubim 87),” and he adds, “The cause of all things is naturally active. … God’s ‘rest’ is [not a doing nothing, but] rather a working with absolute ease, without toil or suffering. … A being free from weakness, even though he be making everything [as Viśvakarman], will never cease through all eternity to be ‘at rest.’”
So the injunction not to cease from working is categorical, and according to vocation. In the case of the soldier, he is told, “Surrendering all works to Me, do thou fight” (BG iii.20); and more generally, “Even as the ignorant are busy because of their attachment to activity, so also should the Comprehensor work, but without attachment, with a view to the guarding of the world (loka-saṁgraha, BG iii.25).” This is, precisely, the doctrine of guardianship enunciated in the Seventh Book of the Republic: the philosopher who has made the steep ascent and seen the light, though he may naturally wish to stand aloof, will not be governed by his inclinations, but will return to the Cave “to care for and to guard the other citizens,” so that the city may be governed by “waking minds” and that those may hold office who are least eager to do so (Republic 519d ff.). This κατάβασις corresponds to the Indian avataraṇa and avasthāna of the All-worker, who is in the world but not of it. In Kṛṣna’s words, “There is nothing in this whole universe that I needs must do, nothing attainable that I have not attained, nevertheless I am in act, for were I not, these worlds would be unsettled and I should be an agent of confusion of functions and a slayer of my children” (BG iii.23, 24). We must not confuse this point of view with that of the philanthropist or “servant of society”; the Comprehensor is a servant of God, not of society. He is naturally impartial, not an adherent of any party or interest, and is never the passive subject of righteous indignation; knowing Who he is, he loves no one but himSelf, the Self of all others, none of whom he loves or hates as they are in themselves. It is not what he does, whatever it may be, but his presence—even in a monastery, which is as much a proper part of an ordered world as any farm or factory—that “cares for and protects” the other citizens.
The true ascetic (saṁnyāsī), then, is, as the words ἀσκητής and its Skr. equivalent śramaṇa alike imply, a “worker” but, unlike the ignorant laborer, one who “takes no thought for the morrow” (Matt. 6:34); “thy concern is with the action only [that it be correct], not with its fruits” (BG ii.47). Thus the traditional psychology, however practical, is anything but pragmatic; the judgment is not of ends, but of the means. The results are beyond our control and therefore no responsibility of ours. One result, however, and that the best, follows inevitably on the use of the right means, and that is the worker’s own perfecting. Man perfects himself by his devotion to his own tasks, determined by his own nature (BG xviii.45, 47): and this is also Justice, τὸ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν, κατὰ φύσιν (Plato, Republic 433). At the same time, “mentally renouncing all his activities, the ruling Body-dweller [Inner Man], rests happily in the nine-doored city of the body, neither acting nor compelling action” (BG v.13). In other words, “You must know that the outer man’s employment can be such that all the time the Inner Man remains unaffected and unmoved” (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 489).
Such are the immediate fruits of the traditional psychology, understood and practiced. But at the same time that such a man is freed from the domination of his hopes and fears - and this is what it means to be the “master of one’s fate” - he is becoming Who he is; and when he departs, and a successor takes his place, which is provided for in traditional societies by the inheritance and formal transmission of the ministerial functions, then, “having done what there was to be done,” the psycho-physical personality will fall like a ripe fruit from the branch, to enter into other combinations, and this self’s other and immortal Self will have been set free. And these are the two ends that the traditional psychology proposes for whoever will put its doctrine into practice: to be at peace with oneself whatever one may be doing, and to become the Spectator of all time and of all things.