Edward’s Diary Entry 14 - Virtues

And so we come back to the “Virtues” and look at them. A virtue in today’s world is a nebulous concept like “moral excellence”, “positive trait” or “spiritual quality”. I liked “inner strength” better because it coincided with ancient wisdom. Decartes  went for “correct reasoning”, Kant opined “thoughts, words and deeds according to principle”, and modern psychology says “virtues are the good emotions”, so recently a virtue is not even a quality, it’s an “emotion”, that is, an energy charge in the nervous system, perhaps derived from millions of years of blind “evolution”, which explains nothing. This is not saying what a virtue is; it only describes the resultant emotional charge of whatever this quality may be. The charge is the power, the energy. Where does the power come from? From the bowels of the earth? No. From outer space? Don’t think so. From the sun? Most likely. From nothingness? Is it an invention of the human mind only? Consciousness perceives the resultant force, but where does the force come from? So let’s go back to the original meaning of a virtue being an “endowment”, taking Virtues as being “A Powerful Gift” of the Universe to man, part of his essential nature, but sheathed in ignorance, which must be removed for essential virtue to shine forth, thus the emphasis in the 26 Virtues of the Bhagavad Gita of the 4 basic Virtues, 2 of which have a positive approach, and 2 a negative approach, i.e. removing vice. And in the remaining 22 there are 4 negative perspectives for removal as well. The etymology of “virtue” goes back to Latin “virtutem”, from “vir”, man, and this exactly coincides with Sanskrit “virah” related to “man”, a “hero” and “strength and power”. This is probably why Goethe said “A man (vir) must strive to become what he IS (Virtuous).” I had no idea what the virtues were at first. So after the first month of putting my plan in action, I decided to apply the teaching “Take out each Virtue in turn and practise it”. But how on earth to do that?