What drives man? If it were only the prim­al instincts, he would be no dif­fer­ent from the creatures of prim­al instinct, the anim­als. And this is not demean­ing, but simply means that a man so motiv­ated lives togeth­er with nature, is part of nature, and ful­fils the func­tions that belong to this plane of exist­ence.

One such func­tion is hoard­ing, which, at bot­tom, is driv­en by the fear of los­ing exist­ence. The man who lives in dread hoards the neces­sit­ies of life, and with them tries to lull the ter­ror of passing away. The secur­ity of a live­li­hood and the insec­ur­ity of exist­ence – what a con­tra­dic­tion! A hero, how­ever, gath­ers vir­tues instead of prac­tising the vir­tue of hoard­ing, and so he becomes brave. Who­ever only hoards eas­ily turns bour­geois, and with knick-knacks set out on lace doil­ies in a dis­play cab­in­et he tries to pro­tect him­self, indeed to jus­ti­fy his exist­ence. Yet the things people usu­ally long for are not ends but means. The dis­play cab­in­et is only a sham abund­ance. True abund­ance, on the other hand, is a cos­mic prin­ciple, and so the ser­vice of abund­ance stands in har­mony with the law of the uni­verse. Besides, one must become not rich but con­tent: this is the true inner, spir­itu­al abund­ance. Accord­ing to Tagore, our call­ing is not acquis­i­tion but exist­ence.

Anoth­er motiv­at­ing factor is free­dom. Cap­tiv­ity is gen­er­ally regarded as some­thing to be rejec­ted, and man is ready to fight for free­dom as a prin­ciple. Free­dom, too, is a world-shap­ing factor, a prin­ciple, and hon­our­ing, approach­ing and serving it is an import­ant task in life. And this is the meth­od by which free­dom is also con­ferred on man. And again: instead of outer free­dom one should strive for inner inde­pend­ence; this is true free­dom, which, then, does not depend on con­di­tions. Cap­tiv­ity can there­fore offer a splen­did oppor­tun­ity to exam­ine free­dom and to live it.

When a man loses everything, he lives through it as a tragedy, but if he man­ages to turn his feel­ings round, he may exper­i­ence a won­der­ful sense of free­dom. The loss of attach­ments hurts, but it is pre­cisely through this that he can come to feel free­dom. It is this feel­ing that must be seized and sus­tained, even when the objects later return.

Hap­pi­ness – how madly does desire drive man in pur­suit of it?! To increase hap­pi­ness and to avoid suf­fer­ing is per­haps a legit­im­ate striv­ing, and yet most often it is our hap­pi­ness that is lost, and our tri­als that mul­tiply.

Either the bridge burns behind you, or the far shore beck­ons. One driv­ing force of motiv­a­tion, then, is flee­ing from some­thing; the other, striv­ing towards some­thing – when the goals to be reached drive man far bey­ond his sup­posed, even his actu­al, lim­its. Accord­ing to the wise, one must go to the utmost lim­its, but it is not mar­tyrs that are needed. In striv­ing, too, one must find the optim­um that neither over­strains nor slack­ens before its time.

For the game of life – now a com­edy, now a tragedy – to be played out well, it is worth agree­ing on the rules of the game. Much is pos­sible, but not everything is per­mit­ted. Cer­tain pat­terns of beha­viour may be well known, yet they do not appear among the rules of the game. Past a cer­tain point there is no turn­ing back. If you have set off, why would you turn back? The fault is never in our sur­round­ings, in the world, in the other per­son, but in our reac­tions to impulses. In an emer­gency, of course, it is hard to react with delib­er­a­tion, but aware­ness helps here too, and it is often the calmer one who wins.

A life of too much, mean­ing­less work wears out the body, while one that demands too little effort con­sumes the soul. Our live­li­hood is what we receive, and our life is what we give. On the level of prin­ciples it is easi­er to accept the state of the world and the beha­viour of people, though this does not mean that one has to agree with them. On the plane of prac­tic­al exper­i­ence, how­ever, it is immensely hard to agree with stu­pid­ity, lack of vis­ion, viol­ence or evil. In man there lives unrest; among the prin­ciples, peace.