July 6, 2023
Principle 7. Immediate Action. Second Week.
If you pursue an end, you enchain yourself. If everything you do is realized as an end in itself, you liberate yourself.
Last time: A New Way of Doing
This time: Enchainment, Liberation, and an Animation.
Here’s a few things to consider this week.
Besides the opportunity to participate in the weekly experiences, our next meeting will be a chance for an interchange about your thoughts, insights, examples, and questions.
This Week:
Last week we concentrated on the general structure and scope of this principle. This week we’ll consider how we applied, or could have applied, this principle in the past.
In these reflections it may be useful to recall the following guidelines.
Indeed, it is advisable that you clarify — in your past and present situations — the contradictory acts that truly imprison you. To recognize them, you can rely on the suffering that is accompanied by internal violence and the feeling of having betrayed yourself. Such actions give clear signals.
I am not saying that you must mortify yourself in exhaustively recounting the past and present. I am simply recommending that you consider all those things that changed your course in an unfortunate direction and that keep you tightly bound. Do not fool yourself yet again by telling yourself that these problems have been “overcome.” Nothing is overcome or sufficiently understood that has not been weighed against a new force that compensates and surpasses that influence.
The Internal Landscape IX:22,23
General Considerations and Personal Reflections:
Here are some personal reflections, though very much rooted in the discussions in last week’s meeting. I offer them in the spirit of dialogue and exchange, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about, and experiences with, this principle.
Throughout our lives we move, driven by our needs, and desires, our hopes and fears. All of this of course, within the changing constraints (pleasant, or unpleasant) of our given situations. Through the days we overcome difficulties, obtain our objectives, or fail in those attempts. Win, loose, draw. But imagine if daily life could be something very different. Not better, certainly not worse, but something else altogether, another kind of existence.
In the same chapter of The Internal Landscape as we quoted above, Silo points out that many of actions of are life, some of which we like, and some of which we don’t, are not the point of life. He says that these actions are the scaffolding, not the building we are constructing. It seems that we most often take the scaffolding as primary and not the construction itself. As Karina and others noted in our last meeting, society, morality, economy, all seem to push us to make (and believe in) that error. This of course has far ranging consequences for us individually and collectively.
In that same meeting Peter used the story of the milkmaid to illustrate a related perspective. He suggested that when we should have that ends “copresent” we instead made them the focus (“presence”). Then the steps we have to take recede into the copresence. Perhaps, as Flavio had it, diminishing our pleasure in the moment, and certainly leaving us, like the poor milkmaid, prey to accidents and missteps.
In that discussion Roberto touched on the collective aspect. His comments were about aspiring to a future where it was normal to value the way we do things rather than obtaining, or not obtaining objects.
And all that seems to me to point to another possibility. I might apply a principle on occasion, to this or that specific situation but what if we actually incorporate this principle into the heart of how we live. That could open up a very different way of being, the Emerald Path where, as the Inner Look proposes: the worldly is not opposed to the eternal.
All this points to the possibility of transforming our daily life into a profound meditation, and path of awakening, and liberation.
No doubt the simplicity of daily action, of doing with and among things, is shaken to its core by this change in perspective.
Now For Something Completely Different
Here’s that animation (courtesy of Rafael Edwards). If you haven’t seen it before I hope you enjoy it. If you have seen it before, you might take a moment to enjoy it again.
Consider:
“A new life is not based on destroying previous “sins” but on recognizing them, in such a way that it will be clear from now on just how inopportune such errors are. “
Inner Look IX:18
Worth Repeating:
The Principle of Immediate Action reminds us that we should learn to benefit from all the intermediate steps or situations that lead to our goals.
Coming Up:
Next week we’ll continue with principle 7 but we will focus our reflections on our present moment. We will try to find examples that illuminate how the principle impacts the situations we are living through.
