July 25, 2024
Principle 7. Immediate Action. Fifth 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: Equilibrium
This Time: Taking Stock
Can daily life be transformed into a profound meditation, and path of awakening, and liberation?
Sometimes meditation requires you sit down and close your eyes — but that’s less than half the story.
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 it in the past, present and future. To help gain some new perspectives we will also played the games of Find It! Ask About It, Name It, and Explain It!
This week we will spend a little time to take stock of how things are going in our journey towards greater lucidity and internal unity (agreement with ourselves).
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, and experiences with this principle.
Every now and then we have the opportunity to add a fifth week to our month of meditations. This provides us with an opportunity to reflect on our direction - where we are coming from, and where we are heading.
Last week we considered how our reveries and day dreams drove our actions. In The Internal Landscape Silo takes a broader look at this question and describes how sometimes we are drawn to situations that reflect our internal states, or moods. How, for example, feeling isolated or abandoned I might be drawn to external places that resonate with those states. It’s as if we sought to find the reflection of our internal states mirrored in out external situations. But, he notes, that at other times exactly the opposite occurs and we try and flee those states by finding the opposite in the world - feeling lonely or alienated I might seek to surround myself with people, or with things, as if annulling my internal state with its opposite in the world around me.
He then says:
XII. Compensation, Reflection, and the Future
1. Hunger dreams of satiety, the imprisoned yearn for freedom, pain longs for pleasure, and pleasure wearies of itself. Could it be that life is nothing more than action and reaction?
2. If life is but pursuit of security for those who fear the future, self-affirmation for the disoriented, the desire for revenge for those frustrated with the past—what liberty, what responsibility, what commitment can be held aloft as an unvanquished banner?
3. And if life is but a mirror that reflects a landscape, how will it ever change that which it reflects?
4. Between the cold mechanics of pendulums and the phantasmal optics of mirrors, what do you affirm that you can affirm without denying? What do you affirm without regressing or with more than arithmetic repetition?
5. If you affirm that which searches for itself and whose nature is to transform itself, that which is never complete in itself and whose essence opens to the future, then you love the reality you build. This, then, is your life: the reality that you build!
6. And there will be action and reaction, as there will be reflection and accident. But if you have opened the future, there will be nothing that can detain you.
7. May life speak through your mouth, and may it say, “There is nothing that can detain me!”
8. Oh useless and wicked prophecy that proclaims the end of the world. I affirm that the human being shall not only continue to live but shall grow without limit. And I say, moreover, that the deniers of life wish to steal all hope—that beating heart of human action.
9. In the darkest moments, may your future joy remind you of these words: “Life searches for growth, not for the compensation of nothingness!”
In the previous weeks we also tried to understand the principle through examining our goals, projects, aims, desires, in the various ambits of our lives: work, family, spiritual growth, etc. This week we might ask ourselves about where we stand in those important projects. In other words, take some time and consider your internal growth in relation to life’s difficulties…
That can be hard to do for a number of reasons. On one hand, both the circumstances I’m in and my sense of myself seem so variable. One thing that might help is to compare how I respond now to particular challenges, to how I did in the past. For example, certain situations might upset me, but in the past I would have responded blaming others, or lashing out at them.
On the other, I might find myself wondering about what internal growth means, at least what it means to me. 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?
You might try writing down the characteristics you most admired in others, how you imagine your internal guide, how you would describe your 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 aspired to kindness. That also has changed.
It’s an important theme. Interestingly when Silo proposed this kind of monthly reflection he did so in a context where he stressed that one is trying to live according to the declaration we make in the Ceremony of Recognition. As a reminder here’s the central part of that experience:
The pain and suffering that we human beings experience will recede if good knowledge advances, not knowledge at the service of selfishness and oppression.
Good knowledge leads to justice.
Good knowledge leads to reconciliation.
Good knowledge also leads to deciphering the sacred in the depths of the consciousness.
We consider the human being to be the highest value, above money, the State, religion, social systems and models.
We stand for freedom of thought.
We champion equal rights and equal opportunities for all human beings.
We recognize and encourage diversity in customs and cultures.
We oppose all discrimination.
We consider as sacred just resistance against all forms of violence—physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual, psychological, and moral.
Moreover, just as no one has the right to discriminate against others because of their religion or their non-religiousness, we affirm our right to proclaim our spirituality and our belief in immortality and the sacred.
Our spirituality is not the spirituality of superstition; it is not the spirituality of intolerance; it is not the spirituality of dogma; it is not the spirituality of religious violence. It is the spirituality that has awakened from its deep sleep to nurture human beings in their best aspirations.
We want to give coherence to our lives, to bring into agreement what we think, what we feel, and what we do.
We want to overcome bad conscience by recognizing our failures.
We aspire to persuade and to reconcile.
We make a commitment to increasingly fulfill the rule that reminds us to “treat others as we want to be treated.”
We will begin a new life. We will search within ourselves for the signs of the sacred, and we will carry our message to others.
Today, we begin to renew our lives. We will begin by seeking mental peace and the Force that gives us joy and conviction. Afterwards, we will go to the people closest to us and share with them everything great and good that has happened to us.
Peace, Force, and Joy.
Worth Repeating:
We all understand that there is a way to move through the world, without fleeing or enchainment to ends. But can we make it the centre of our way of life?
I Was Thinking:
I want to overcome contradiction because I don’t want to be at war with myself, I want a life where I can tap into the vital energy I need to face life’s daily challenges, and where I face the uncertain future joyously. In other words what I seek is to make the phrase Peace, Force and Joy, into more than a slogan.
Coming Up:
Next week we’ll begin with principle 8, Comprehended Action. It says:
“You Will Make Your Conflicts Disappear When You Understand Them In Their Ultimate Root, Not When You Want To Resolve Them.”
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.
You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting.
We hope you can join us.
Note:
These notes have been posted on Facebook and sent to our email list, and, on my website www.dzuckerbrot.com
Don’t forget:
In some moment of the day or night inhale a breath of air and imagine that you carry this air to your heart. Then, ask with strength for yourself and for your loved ones. Ask with strength to move away from all that brings you contradiction; ask for your life to have unity. Don't take a lot of time with this brief prayer, this brief asking, because it is enough that you interrupt for one brief moment what is happening in your life for this contact with your interior to give clarity to your feelings and your ideas.
Silo_ La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005
Be Like Houdini. Liberate Yourself!
