December 21, 2023
Principle 12. Accumulating Actions. Week 4
“Contradictory and unifying acts accumulate within you. If you repeat your acts of internal unity, then nothing can detain you.”
Last Time: Inside and Outside
This time: Changing Your Destiny
This Week:
Since this is the fourth week devoted to considering this principle as is our custom we will focus on the future. We’ll try to understand how this principle applies to things that haven’t happened yet, but which we see or imagine taking shape. And we’ll consider how things might change if we find ways to apply the principle of accumulating action in an appropriate fashion.
Feel welcome to join us in our weekly meetings. They provide all of us with an opportunity to compare our observations about the principles, share our discoveries, and explore questions.
If you are unable to join us you might find it worthwhile to find, or create, situations where you can engage others in conversation about these themes.
A proposal for this week:
Looking toward the future, how I imagine, hope, or fear it will be, I take a moment to focus on discovering at least one situation where my old habits, and accumulated actions could once again lock me into self-defeating, or otherwise undesirable patterns.
I will next consider at least one situation where my previous coherent actions could help me repeat that unitive pattern — producing a situation where my feelings, thoughts, and actions are all in agreement, and working together.
All of this is apparently about my internal unity. However, it is interesting to note that when such behaviours are meant to end in others, and to treat others as you wish to be treated, the feeling of internal unity takes on an additional dimension and is accompanied by the certainty that I want to repeat such actions.
Do you recall that old Sage Laozi’s verses where he places this question of “accumulation” in the context of “caring for others and serving heaven”?
Caring for others and serving heaven depends on repeated accumulation.
With virtue accumulated all obstacles can be overcome.
Having overcome all obstacles there are no limits.
Knowing the absence of limits, one is fit to rule.
This is like a plant that has deep roots and a firm stalk.
The way of long life and eternal vision.
Dao De Jing LIX
Is it too much to say that this “mental direction”, of acting to maximize coherent actions, might in fact be more important than the specific actions, or even the specific outcomes?
How To:
It is easy to put off these mediations for a more suitable moment when I have more time or a more ideal environment, free of distractions or potential disturbances. As I’ve previously mentioned a few times, it’s my experience that these kinds of daily meditations seem to benefit from being very brief. That seems to help them stay as focused, as possible. I mention it again because I’ve found it a useful approach and one that many seem to find counter intuitive.
Try it and tell me how it works for you.
Personal Reflections:
Here’s a few thoughts related to this month’s principle. I hope you find them of some use in your own reflections.
The Principle of Accumulated Action highlights the consequence of storing up unifying, as opposed to contradictory actions. In the lines below Silo points out some registers that can help us distinguish contradictions from, difficulties, unpleasantness, challenges, etc which can be useful, at least, as incentives to change. After a few brief comments on the registers that characterize contradictory actions, he points out something of the nature, or mechanism, of the accumulation itself.
The following numbered lines are excerpted from chapter IX of Silo’s work The Internal Landscape and follow the numbering used there.
12. I believe you will know how to distinguish a difficulty, which is welcome for you can leap over it, from a contradiction, that lonely labyrinth that has no exit.
20. You must be very clear about this: You are not at war with yourself. Rather, you must begin treating yourself like an old friend with whom you must now reconcile, for ignorance and life itself have driven you apart.
26. You may agree with me or not, but in any case I will affirm that this is the only way forward: If you want to grow, you will help those around you to grow.
Remember:
I can see that repeating certain actions formed habits of behaviour that helped bring me to my present situation. In turn these habits make certain future actions more likely. This is true whether these are acts that produce internal unity (i.e. agreement with myself) or contradiction (internal conflict). In either case repetition facilitates a mental direction and forms habitual ways of facing life.
Worth Repeating:
Do not let a great joy pass without giving thanks internally.
Do not let a great sadness pass without calling into your interior for the joy that you have saved there.
Silo_ The Path
The seasons change, and we continue on our wild ride around the sun…
