Principle 4 Proportion – Week 5 – 2023

April 27, 2023 

Principle 4. Proportion.  5th Week. 

Things Are Well When They Move Together Not In Isolation.

Last time: wishes and Projects. 

This Time: How am I doing?

Here’s some things to consider this week. Our next meeting will be a chance for an interchange about your thoughts, insights, examples and questions. 

Because I sent out my reflections for the first meeting in April early, I’m again sending out an additional one to round out the month.

You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting. We hope you can join us. 

This Week:

Over the last weeks we looked at the general structure of this month’s principle and tried to understand it in general terms. We also looked at how it applied in the past, the present, and the future. 

Every now and then we have the opportunity to add a fifth week to our month of meditations. This allows us to re-synch our meetings with the calendar week. It also gives us the opportunity to dig a little deeper into particular aspects of our common work. 

This week we are taking a break from our focus on “proportion” to focus on the question of how we are doing, and especially to consider our internal growth in relation to life’s difficulties.

General Considerations and Personal Reflections:

Here are some personal reflections. I offer them in the spirit of dialogue and exchange, and look forward to hearing your musings about, and experiences with, this principle.

As I started to consider how I might approach this question of my internal growth in relation to life’s difficulties I found myself wondering about what internal growth means, at least what it means to me. What is meant by that phrase? In what ways would I hope to grow? If I don’t want one aspect of or function to grow at the expense of the others, how might I ensure harmonious development?

Since I was sitting at my computer, I followed a similar proposal to what was suggested last week. I wrote down the characteristics I most admired in others, how I imagine my internal guide, how I would describe my ideal self. I thought about how I would have answered these questions when I was much younger. I realized how my aspirations in this regard had changed and yet there were qualities I hoped for then, and still hope for now — though perhaps I understand them differently. Of course, as a kid I liked the idea of being strong. I would still like to grow stronger than I am, but I don’t think for a moment that I see strength the way I did as a child, or even as a teenager. Perhaps when I was young, I liked the idea of being wise. I still aspire to grow in wisdom, but I doubt I understand wisdom in the same way today. On the other hand, when I was young I’m not sure I even aspired to kindness. That also has changed.

Worth Repeating:

Learn to resist the violence that is within you and outside of you. 

Learn to recognize the signs of the sacred within you and around you. 

Silo, The Path

Remember:
A valid action, is unitive, is aimed at improving the well-being of others and feels like something you want to repeat again and again. 

Coming up:

Next week: Principle 5, Acceptance. 

“If day and night, summer and winter are well with you, you have surpassed the contradictions.”

Remember:

Digging relentlessly into your own experience, consistently struggling to transform the principles into the coherent expressions of a particular mental direction — those are exactly the kinds of things that can convert platitudes into principles—even transform principles into a way of life, an unending and dynamic meditation. No shit.

Worth Repeating:

Here, the worldly is not opposed to the eternal.

The Inner Look 1:4 __ Silo

And an extra bit of fun:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-visual-history-of-the-human-pyramid