May 25, 2023
Principle 5. Acceptance. Fourth Week.
If day and night, summer and winter are well with you, you have surpassed the contradictions.
Last time: Inner War — Inner Peace
This Time: The Illusion That Things Don’t Change
This Week:
Over the last three weeks we considered the principle in general terms, as well as seeing how it related to past and present situations, and/or alternatively to our relations with ourselves, and our relations with our immediate environment. This week we turn to the potential impact of this principle on what we imagine the future has in store, or if you prefer on our relations with the wider world.
And hopefully we will consider, at least for a moment, how we can turn the principles into a dynamic and permanent meditation. That is to say, into a practice applicable at every moment of our lives. In that way we go on shaping a style of, or way of, engaging with life.
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.
In previous weeks I’ve focused on the meaning of day and night, and the other pairs of opposites as just that, opposites. We’ve also looked at the meaning of contradiction and what it means to overcome it. So far during my attempts at these weekly meditations my thoughts have drifted quite far a field — as they tend to. Continuing further along this path it seemed to me that besides being opposites, day and night, the seasons, etc are, each one, also moments in a cycle (for example, the Earth’s rotation on its axis, or moments in the orbit around the sun). And I realized that one of the very basic illusions that condition my thinking is, what Silo sometimes called “static naturalism”. That is the belief that what is at this moment always has been, and always will be (it’s static), and that’s how things are (naturally).
Those who understand the “I” as the central illusion of consciousness might consider static naturalism to be the equivalent of that illusion on a social level (or vice versa).
The point is that things do change. Even today, when the world has changed/is changing right under your eyes many people still cling to the idea that “it’s always been like this”. And in a sense that’s true, but as others have said, there is a constant but that constant is change itself.
At our last meeting Roberto pointed out that the examples in this principle seems to focus on cyclical phenomena, day and night, the seasons. Everything is in movement. And from where we sit that movement often seems like a series of cycles. Empires rise and fall. Civilizations are born and die. Day follows night and night is followed by day. The Winter comes and goes making room for summer once again. No wonder some people explained the underlying reality of the world as obeying a law of cycle.
This is now clearer than ever: who — just a few years ago would have thought that the system could so quickly find itself in its current situation of disintegration on all fronts (except the technological)? Or that we’d again have a war in Europe. Now of course everyone can see how long-standing internal divisions have widened into chasms threatening global stability. Who would have predicted what would happen when a global pandemic struck? Well a number of experts did of course, but static naturalism made their informed observations seem unbelievable to most everyone else.
Do these enormous instabilities herald the end of a world, or the beginning of a new one? Today, we all are beginning to understand the fragility the system in the face of what is in fact a relatively minor pandemic (imagine if it were as deadly as ebola or smallpox and as contagious as measles).
This principle brings me to consider that perhaps this moment that I embrace or reject, celebrate or loath, is a really moment in a larger dance where what was wet becomes dry and what is dry becomes wet, the old fades and the new arises, the decay of death makes the ground fertile for new life.
In fragment DK22B60 of his (fragmentary) writings our old friend Heraclitus is recorded as saying: The road up is the road down.
Have you driven the highway between Chile and Punta de Vacas?
Remember:
Sometimes meditation require you sit down and close your eyes but that’s less than half the story.
Daily life makes your meditation possible. This is where you gain the raw material that nourishes your reflections just as it is the testing ground where you prove the results of your “internal” discoveries. And perhaps it can be more if we can experience that there is no difference between transcendental and worldly reality.
Worth Repeating:
“All worlds you aspire to, all justice you demand, all love you search for, all human beings you would follow or destroy are also within you. Everything that changes within you will change your direction in the landscape you inhabit.”
The Internal Landscape, chapter four_ Silo
Coming up:
Next week we’ll turn to Principle 6, also known as the principle of solidarity.
