The Middle Way
As human beings, we divide everything in our experience into understandable categories. This is done in order to organize our perception of living experience. The result of this continuous assigning of values is a perception of certain things being more important than others, certain ideas, beliefs, pursuits and ambitions being better than others. Once this perception gets rooted in us, our lives become narrowed down.
In some sense, a monk born and raised in a monastery is in the same boat as a city dweller bereft of anything in the name of spirituality, as both are missing an entire aspect of life. The monk may wonder how life in the city would be, while the city dweller might fantasize about a life of extreme spirituality. But if both were to live the other extreme, there would be no need for fantasy. Their being would be a little more complete. Then the choice to be a monk, city dweller or anything else will be more rooted in their knowing, rather than a fictitious and ever-changing idea of good or bad. Even the revered Gautam Buddha lived a life of a prince before becoming an ascetic. King Ashoka lived a life of extreme violence, cruelty, torture and tyrannical power before renouncing his life and ideals and turning towards spirituality and religion. The world may call them good or bad, divine or diabolical, but their lives were fuller than how it would have been if they remained on one end. Thus, there was not much room for fantasy, lamentation or regret.
It is impossible to experience all facets of being human in one limited lifespan. Even if one tries to not live with any particular preference towards anything, it won't be long before their appetites, predispositions, environmental factors, unconscious impulses and other involuntary factors cause their life to narrow itself down. Then there is the fact that trying to live a life without any value judgements in itself is loyalty to an idea. But holding on to any idea, belief, or anything for an extended period of time limits one's life and contributes to narrowing it down even more than what it condenses to without any such effort.
Life can be good or bad, or it can be full. One can be made to believe that a life that they consider as good is actually bad and vice versa, since this perception is based on ideas and thought-processes picked up along the way that we seldom question as time passes, being applied in a haphazard, arbitrary hierarchical manner. But one cannot take away fullness, since it is based on experience rather than ideas. For a lot of people, a certain idea, thought or philosophy is worth dying for, and imagining oneself as someone without that idea/belief becomes impossible. For them, these structures of understanding become self-fulfilling prophecies without them even knowing it.
