Principle 12 Accumulating Actions – Week 3 – 2023

December 14 2023 

Principle 12. Accumulating Actions. Week 3

“Contradictory and unifying acts accumulate within you. If you repeat your acts of internal unity, then nothing can detain you.”

Last Time: Words of Wisdom

This time: Memory, and Actions, The Internal and The External

This Week:

This week we’ll turn to considering this principle in relation to the present moment. 

Among other things, our weekly meetings give us an opportunity to compare notes, discoveries, questions, etc. about the principles. If you are unable to join us you might find it worthwhile to find, or create situations where you can engage others in conversation about these themes.

Personal Reflections:

Here’s a few thoughts related to this month’s principle. I hope you find them of some use in your own reflections.  

The first thing I’ll ask myself as I begin this week’s meditation on the principles seems like the obvious questions. But somehow I often overlook them.

What actions am I accumulating here and now? Is it contradiction or unity that is growing in me? How can I move further from the contradictions? How can I move closer to the source of that internal unity?

I was thinking about our conversations the last weeks about how it is that my actions accumulate within me. I understand that my actions accumulate in my memory, but that memory wasn’t something isolated. Memory is not a sack, or a collection of files where the past is preserved for future reference — certainly not something isolated and unchanging. 

Acting in a certain way produced results which were in principle, and to varying degrees, unitive, contradictory or neutral. These past actions and their results were recorded together in my memory. And they continued to act over me in the present, and also conditioned how I saw the future. But importantly and often overlooked this future that I imagine acts in turn, not only on how I feel my present situation, but changes how I recall the past, and how I imagined the future, and so shapes my behaviour, which in turn modifies my past, present, and future.  If that’s so then this present moment which seems so singular is like  a complex braid of intertwining, multi-dimensional mutual influences.

I could also see how that memory (something “internal”) was configuring my situation (something “external”). Is it too much to say that my present relations with others, my current situation, my reality are somehow a form of memory. That brings to mind Silo’s phrase from his 1990 talk about the book Contributions to Thought: “That world that I take as reality itself is in fact my own biography in action, and that action of transformation that I effect in and upon the world is my own transformation.”

Last week I quoted some phrases from Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (the Classic of the Way and its Virtue). This week I’d like to mention another of his verses this week. It contains a very well-known line from this extraordinary author. 

Here’s the first quotation. It’s just a few phrases from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching. To my ears it resonates with the lines about water from last week’s quote. This selection ends with a sentence that we have all heard in one or another variation. Perhaps you’ve heard it as “a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step”. In fact, we’ve heard versions it so often, or seen it on posters, or on so many Facebook postings, that it’s probable that familiarity has once again reduced words of wisdom to just more empty platitudes. 

 But in any case I think if we can open ears our ears a little we will recognize that it is potentially much more than a pithy banality.

“A tree as great as a man's embrace springs from a small shoot;

A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth;

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.”

And what if our destination is not a place, not a fixed and determined end but a direction. A movement toward internal unity. 

As Silo wrote in the chapter on the principles: 

I do not speak to you of liberty. I speak to you of liberation, of movement, of process. I do not speak to you of liberty as something static, but of liberating yourself step by step, as those who approach their city become liberated from the road already traveled. 

Silo_Inner Look XIII

It brings to mind a poem by a Spanish poet of the last century:

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship's wake on the sea.

-Antonio Machado

Coming Up:

This week we consider the principle in relation to future situations. Next week we’ll look at what it might mean for us in regards the future.

Remember:

Do not let a great joy pass without giving thanks internally. 

Do not let a great sadness pass without calling into your interior for the joy that you have saved there.

Silo_ The Path

Worth Repeating:

And what is the flavor of an act of unity? If you would recognize it, rely on that profound peace which, accompanied by a gentle joy, leads you into agreement with yourself. This act bears the sign of the most integral truth, for in it, thought, feeling, and action in the world are united in the most intimate friendship. Yes, valid action is unmistakable; you would affirm it a thousand times over should you live as many lives!

Silo_ The Internal Landscape X-IV

Note:

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Until next time…