See No Evil, Hear No Evil, For Sure, Speak No Evil

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, For Sure, Speak No Evil: What’s going on here? HUH? Where are your thoughts going today, based on what happened to you personally in all of your yesterdays?

Meaning no disrespect to the Japanese pictorial maxim, the three wise monkeys that go by the names Mizaur, the see no evil monkey. Kikazaru, who hears no evil. And Iwazaru, who keeps his mouth shut and speaks no evil. I made the leap into a slightly more contemporary version. Thinking more about a good mind is a healthy mind. One that manages to avoid thoughts that betray happiness that attack us through our eyes and through our ears, which often leads us to say things that are unkind, and unflattering to ourselves and others.

Hidden to most, these three expressions may be interpreted as a code of conduct, a contemporary formula for sound thinking, every second your mind is busy gabbing with itself. This idle talk is influenced by you guested it, the act of seeing, hearing, and speaking ideas that most likely are not evil, but they can certainly be disruptive to the soundness of thoughts.

No matter how impractical a worldview of having malice toward none in this day and age, ain’t EaZY! Cleaning up our own thoughts and ideas invites a measure of inner peace.

No one can ever truly know what we think about. Possessing free will affords us the opportunity to make our thoughts positive and wholesome, if we make the heroic effort to do so. I’m thinking that the 17th-century carving in Japan depicting the three monkeys might be an excellent strategy to adopt. Wouldn’t it be nice if every day we managed to see no evil, hear no evil, and for sure speak no evil? Please let me know if you can pull this off for a week. I don’t know if I’ve managed to go more than two days myself. I watched the news!

“My eyes, my ears, and my mouth favored a good-hearted and benevolent self.”

Rod Jones Artist-Writer

Originally published at https://thoughtrow.com on June 17, 2023.