August 17, 2023
Principle 8. Comprehended Action. Week 4
You Will Make Your Conflicts Disappear When You Understand Them In Their Ultimate Root, Not When You Want To Resolve Them
Last time: Phantoms and Laughs
This time: Outgrowing old beliefs and ideas
This seems a good opportunity to emphasize once again that the Principles present a kind of system — or tapestry if you prefer. To understand them I have to consider each one in the light of the others. In applying them— more than attempting to find a tactic for a particular problem — I am trying to weave together a way of facing life, a general direction, or style of life.
What is important about the principles? It wouldn’t matter if there were three or 15. It doesn’t matter exactly how they are phrased. They were not engraved tablets of stone; they are not cosmic laws. What’s valuable about them is that they point you back to your registers of unity and contradiction. As Silo asks us:
The point then is this: will those principles of valid action that allow every human being to live in internal unity be fixed images that have to be obeyed, or will they correspond to what one experiences when they are rejected or fulfilled?
Internal Landscape X:9 __Silo
This Week:
Previously we concentrated on the general structure and scope of this principle. We then turned to how we applied, or could have applied, this principle in the past. Finally last week we considered the present. This week we try to relate it to the future and pending situations.
If I can see conflicts emerging on the horizon, can I also see the root of their arising? Can I through that comprehension avoid those future conflicts? What circumstances seem to make that possible? What are the conflicts that I seem to fall into again and again?
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 thoughts about, and experiences with, this principle.
We began this week with another story, one about a poor shepherd and their blanket. The shepherd discovered that discovery that problem (being cold at night) wasn’t that the blanket had changed. Rather the cause of the problem was that they had grown, and so the blanket could no longer cover them.
In our reflections of the future and this principle it seems fitting to turn to a larger example. Here’s a short video where Silo’s proposes a surprising answer to questions about the roots of our current global anxieties. In these two clips from an extended conversation, he affirms that that the chaotic moment we are living through is a result of us outgrowing old beliefs, and ideologies (social systems, ideas, and institutions). He seems to affirm that, while its hard to discern that’s a good, or at least inevitable, sign of real growth for the human being.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7vUypdShkQ
Worth Repeating:
The path of learning is a path of action and not just contemplation.
Remember:
There is no learning, however small, that you achieve through contemplation alone. You learn because you do something with that which you contemplate. And the more you do the more you learn, for as you go forward your vision continues to change.
The Internal Landscape Chapter VI__ Silo
Coming up:
Next week we’ll begin our considerations of principle 9 (the principle of liberty). It says: “When You Harm Others You Remain Enchained, But If You Do Not Harm Anyone You May Freely Do Whatever You Want”.
Note:
The story of the monkey and the fish was from Mani in Berlin.
These notes have been posted on Facebook and sent to our email list, and, on my website www.dzuckerbrot.com
To be continued…
