Focus

September 27, 2000

To begin each chapter of his book, WISDOM OF THE AGES, Wayne W. Dwyer uses a particular quotation, usually from an ancient source, several times from Hindu or Buddhist sources.

In his chapter, “Triumph”, Cicero is quoted on “The Six Mistakes of Man.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. – 43 B.C.) was Rome’s most famous orator. Dwyer points out, (p. 22) “[Cicero] was a brilliant orator, lawyer, statesman, writer, poet, critic, and philosopher who lived in the century before the birth of Christ and was momentously involved in all the conflicts between Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, and many of the other historical characters and events that make up ancient Roman history. He had a brilliant and long political career and was an established writer whose work was considered the most influential of its time. In those times, however, dissidents were not treated kindly. He was executed in 43 B.C.”

Cicero’s “Six Mistakes of Man:”

• The illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others.


• The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.


• Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.


• Refusing to set aside trivial preferences.


• Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and study.


• Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Wayne Dwyer goes on to elaborate and embellish each of Cicero’s points. Dwyer writes well in the genre of what we used to call “positive thinking.”

For me, however, Cicero has invited each of us to think out applications evolving from our own experience and knowledge. I decided to focus on one of his six precepts sequentially, one each day for six days. I am not aware of becoming any wiser, but, somehow, I have a deeper and more sensitive awareness that a good life must embrace warm relationships with all persons in our orbits and include ideas that are the pathways to meanings.

When you come across some ethical or aesthetic inspirational sentences, I suggest you focus on them, taking one a day for several days. Think about it daily; reflect on it before each meal; use it as a mantra as you lie down for the night’s sleep. You, too, may find it a rewarding experience.

Remember Helena’s soliloquy in ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL? Shakespeare provided a text for this musing:

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.”