Principle 4 Proportion – Week 3 – 2023
April 13, 2023
Principle 4. Proportion. Third Week.
Things Are Well When They Move Together Not In Isolation.
Last time: Proportion, Harmony, Equilibrium
This time: The Gift
Our next meeting will be a chance for an interchange about your thoughts, insights, examples and questions about this month’s principle and related matters.
You’ll receive a reminder the day before the meeting. We hope you can join us.
This Week:
In the last two weeks, we have looked at the overall structure of this month’s principle, as well as how it might have applied in the past.
This week we will look at how I might apply it to the here and now.
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 musings about, and experiences with, this principle.
These last weeks I had been concerned with my activities, and the people and events around me.
This week I’m going to focus on the more internal aspect of all that: what does it mean to have my thinking, feeling and actions move together.
This is of course a major theme in Silo’s teaching. When my thoughts, feelings and actions correspond, when they are coherent, when I am in agreement with myself, I register that as internal unity. When they head in different directions, when they are incoherent, when I am fighting with myself, I register that as a contradiction.
Sometimes though I act contrary to what I really want, or before I’ve thought things through. Sometimes I feel things deeply but think something very different, or perhaps I simply don’t act paralyzed by fear or inhibition.
Sometimes I think I should do one thing, but feel I should do something else, and end up doing something else entirely.
When these things move together, I feel well.
That register of internal unity is our touchstone. It is the meaning and goal of the principles of valid action.
On May 7, 2005, at La Reja Park of Study and Reflection in Argentina Silo spoke of this and gave us a deceptively simple gift. I think you will find it very worthwhile to read it in full. But here is a part of it:
…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.
To move away from contradiction is the same as to overcome hatred, resentment, and the desire for revenge. To move away from contradiction is to cultivate the desire to reconcile with others and with oneself. To move away from contradiction is to forgive and to make amends twice-over for every wrong that you have inflicted on others.
This is the appropriate attitude to cultivate. Then, in the measure that time passes you will understand that what is most important is achieving a life of internal unity. This will bear fruit when what you think, feel, and do go in the same direction. Life grows thanks to its internal unity and it disintegrates because of contradiction. It happens, then, that what you do does not simply remain inside of you, but also reaches others…
Coming up:
Next week we’ll consider pending situations and explore how applying, or ignoring this Principle of Proportion in the future might impact our lives and those around us.
Worth Repeating:
…May our lives grow, surpassing pain and suffering. May our lives advance making the lives of others advance.
Silo, La Reja 2005
A Game
We can observe that the name of this principle is given as ‘the principle of proportion’. That is no doubt an important clue as to its application. We see that reflected in Silo’s comments about the principle being about acting proportionally in accord with our priorities. I’ve already proposed a reflection on a particular aspect of the principle emphasizing the balance between parts which I named the principle of harmony. Let me propose a different perspective on the principle.
I’ll call this the Principle of Team Work. When we speak of things working together we are not speaking of things being homogenous, or uniform. Rather it’s like the relation between members of a sport team, since I’m in Canada writing this let’s make this a hockey team. Each one has certain functions in the game and the common objective is approached by how well they fill those functions. Whether that objective is winning the game, enjoying the best, most skillful play they can, or whatever.
Can you rephrase the principle? What would you call it?