Right Standpoint
The ordering of life.
- Live in accordance with Nature and Spirit.
- Not to be swamped by the external trivialities of life.
- Avoid all that brings unrest and haste into life.
- To hurry over nothing, but also not to be indolent.
- Look on life as a means for working towards higher development and behave accordingly.
Right Opinion
- Pay attention to your ideas.
- Think only significant thoughts.
- Separate in your thoughts
- the essential from the nonessential
- the eternal from the transitory
- truth from mere opinion.
Right Listening
In listening to the talk of your fellow-men,
- Become quite still inwardly
- Forego all assent
- Still more all unfavorable judgments (criticism, rejection), even in your thoughts and feelings
Right Talking
Only what has sense and meaning should come from your lips. All talking for the sake of talking – to kill time – is in this sense harmful.
- Avoid the usual kind of conversation, a disjointed medley of remarks.
This does not mean shutting yourself off from intercourse with your fellows; it is precisely then that talk should gradually be led to significance. - Adopt a thoughtful attitude to every speech and answer, taking all aspects into account.
- Never talk without cause – be gladly silent.
- Do not talk too much or too little.
- First listen quietly; then reflect on what has been said.
Right Judgement
Determine on even the most insignificant matter only after fully reasoned deliberation. All unthinking behavior, all meaningless actions, should be kept far away from the soul. You should always have well-weighed reasons for everything.
Don’t do anything for which there is no significant reason.
Once you are convinced of the rightness of a decision, hold fast to it, with inner steadfastness.
Right Judgement having been formed independently of sympathies and antipathies.
Right External Action
External Actions should not be disturbing for your fellow-men.
Where an occasion calls for action out of your inner being, deliberate carefully how you can best meet the occasion – for the good of the whole, the lasting happiness of man, the eternal.
Where you do things of your own accord, out of your own initiative: Consider most thoroughly beforehand the effect of your actions.
TO LET ALL THE FOREGOING EXERCISES BECOME A HABIT
Human Endeavor. Take care to do nothing that lies beyond your powers – but also, leave nothing undone which lies within them.
Look beyond the everyday, the momentary, and to set yourself aims and ideals connected with the highest duties of a human being. For instance, in the sense of the prescribed exercises, to Develop yourself so that afterwards you may be able all the more to help and advise one’s fellow-men – though perhaps not in the immediate future.
Right Memory
Learn as much as possible from life.
Nothing goes by without giving you a chance to gain experiences that are useful for life.
If you have done something wrongly or imperfectly, that becomes a motive for doing it rightly or more perfectly, later on.
You can learn from everyone – even from children if one is attentive.
If you see others doing something, you observe them with the like end in view (yet not coldly or heartlessly).
Do nothing without looking back to past experiences which can be of assistance in your decisions and achievements.
Remember what has been learnt from experiences
Right Examination
To turn your gaze inwards from time to time, even if only for five minutes daily at the same time. In so doing you should:
- Sink down into oneself
- Carefully take counsel with oneself
- Run through in thought one’s knowledge – or lack of it
- Labour to discover the essential, the enduring
- Think over the contents and true purpose of life
- Aim at goals in accord with it
For instance, virtues to be acquired. - Test and form one’s principles of life
- Weigh up one’s duties
- Feel genuinely pained by one’s own errors and imperfections.
- Strive always towards the highest standards.
Not to fall into the mistake of thinking that having done something well is good enough.