Principle 8 Comprehended Action – Week 4 – 2022

 August 18, 2022 

“You Will Make Your Conflicts Disappear When You Understand Them In Their Ultimate Root, Not When You Want To Resolve Them”

Here’s some 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. 

You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting. We hope you can join us. 

As always: if you no longer wish to receive these mailings or if you know people who would like to be included in them just let me know.

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. 

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.

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.

Here’s another take on the principle from Mani.

We began this week with another story, one about a poor shepherd and their blanket. They discovered that discovery that problem (being cold at night) wasn’t that the blanket had changed. Rather the cause of the problem was that the shepherd 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 about the state of the world, among other things,  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 while it 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:

2. 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”.