What is your favourite colour: white, black, or grey?

While some of us choose between black and white, hence striving all their lives towards the extremes of self-denial or self-indulgence, others get satisfied with something in between. A grey area that Buddha called the Middle Way and that is represented by a life of moderation lived between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification.

In Buddhism, Nirvana can be attained by following the right actions revealed in the Noble Eightfold Path, together with abstinence from addictive sense-pleasures and self-mortification. I totally disagree!

First of all, by avoiding both these extremes, the individual cannot gain the necessary knowledge required to accept the Middle Way as the ideal path. Therefore the sensations of calm, insight, and enlightenment are false.

Second, the addiction of self-denial and self-indulgence are temporary. Soon enough the individual seeking the right path will get bored, feel incomplete, raise doubts, and certainly look for something different.

To sum up, the two extremes have to be practiced without fear of addiction. Following the Middle Path by practicing abstinence from extremes cannot be the solution. Only first hand experience can lead us to improve our human condition. It is not by reading the words of the Buddha that we can become enlightened, but by living as freely and with an open mind as he did (he was in fact the first one to experience both a luxurious life and exaggerated asceticism).

I don't believe a true seeker should worry about life-long addictions to indulgence of sense-pleasures nor to self-mortification, as he will eventually come to his senses and break free. Through the strenuous process of self-realizing that one form of extreme lifestyle is not 'right' the individual arguably escapes towards something drastically different, the other extreme that will eventually also prove to be inappropriate. It is my belief that the back and forth motion between opposites (i.e. black and white) eventually leads to a midpoint (i.e. grey).

I could elucidate this discussion with examples that concern matters of the heart (single vs. married), money (rich vs. poor), setting (megalopolis vs. wilderness), etc. but I’ll use weather instead. If we are born in a cold country that has just 2-3 months of summer, we will always look forward to the warm season and dream of a lifestyle that would allow us to travel to exotic countries or even better to spend six months of summer in the northern hemisphere and six in the southern, enjoying the sun all year round. However, give this lifestyle just a few years and we would surely enough begin to dislike the heat and miss the cold weather. But after having lived in a cold country for some time we would again yearn for the warmth, and so forth… Only with time we would eventually learn to appreciate the beauty of each season and perhaps come to realize that spring and autumn offer in fact the best weather conditions!