At first glance the maxim Noth­ing in excess! is a call to fol­low the golden mean. Care must be taken, how­ever, that the golden mean never turns into mediocrity. The golden mean is not an aver­age, which might also be pic­tured as the mean of bad and good. Good and bad that barely depart from the aver­age yield the same aver­age as good and bad that depart from it widely; indeed, the res­ult can even be pro­duced with good and bad of ever-grow­ing amp­litude. In today's world, ever bet­ter and ever worse things are hap­pen­ing.

If we exam­ine human intel­li­gence, it may be that its aver­age has not changed for mil­len­nia, but this bal­ance comes about with a mass of mediocre people just as it does when we take into account those who depart widely from the aver­age, the much more stu­pid and the much cleverer. The over­whelm­ing major­ity of people per­form at about the aver­age, and the num­ber of those whose per­form­ance is excep­tion­ally low or excep­tion­ally high – wheth­er favour­able or devi­ant – is neg­li­gible.

Noth­ing in excess! (Meden agan) – one of the mot­toes of the Greek philo­soph­ers.

Strive for the right bal­ance: be brave without rash­ness, cau­tious but not timid, com­pas­sion­ate but not weak, just but not judge­ment­al, reti­cent but not mis­lead­ing, clev­er but not crafty, cour­teous without flat­tery, res­ol­ute but not stub­born, thought­ful but not hes­it­ant, patient but not care­less, friendly but not par­tial, aspir­ing without selfish­ness.

The true middle way is a golden pro­por­tion, like the golden sec­tion that marks both nature and the human body, and which can be dis­covered in the spir­al of a snail shell or a pine cone, in Bartók's music, or in the pro­por­tions of the human face and hand. Man is a small world, the world is a vast man, and their pro­por­tions hint at the par­al­lel between micro- and mac­ro­cosm.

At the end of his ascet­ic prac­tices, Buddha happened to over­hear a music teach­er's instruc­tion: ‘If the string is slack, it sounds out of tune; if you over­tight­en it, it snaps.’ The golden mean sig­ni­fies bal­ance, the safety that lies between the extremes. The middle is not the best, but nor is it the worst, and at the same time it is not a dull aver­age. Most people rate them­selves a little above aver­age, feel­ing, for example, that they are some­what bet­ter drivers than the aver­age. Yet not every­one can be bet­ter than aver­age. This mod­est sur­plus of self-con­fid­ence works with­in us as a sub­con­scious sur­viv­al strategy, and it seems to be needed for liv­ing through the struggles of worldly exist­ence.

This middle way also marks man's onto­lo­gic­al pos­i­tion: no longer a demon and not yet an angel, he walks some­where halfway between the two. The task of human life is to find har­mony between bod­ily needs and spir­itu­al ideals. It is a bal­ance, and the optim­um of every earthly sys­tem always coun­ter­bal­ances some­thing. The world works not at the max­im­um and not at the min­im­um, but at the optim­um. The optim­um is the least that ideal func­tion­ing requires.

If we exam­ine the pre­cept noth­ing in excess more closely, we find this hid­den mes­sage in it. The mater­i­al world is formed and moved by the inter­play of three forces – mass, energy and light. These three qual­it­ies can also be read in moral terms: mass is ignor­ance, that is, the loss of value; energy is pas­sion, that is, the con­sump­tion of value; while light is good­ness, that is, the increase of value. In terms of meas­ur­ab­il­ity, we may say that mass has the char­ac­ter of a min­im­um, energy of a max­im­um, while good­ness has that of an optim­um. Like­wise: ash – min­im­um, flame – max­im­um, embers – optim­um, or sor­row – min­im­um, pleas­ure – max­im­um, serenity – optim­um.

In this light, noth­ing is the neg­at­ing, void char­ac­ter of ignor­ance, and in excess the vehe­mence of pas­sion. So if pas­sion and ignor­ance can­cel each other out, what remains is the qual­ity of good­ness, whose nature is light; in other words, the pro­hib­i­tion is rather a call to prac­tise good­ness!