Principle 7 Immediate Action – Week 3 – 2023

July 13, 2023 

Principle 7. Immediate Action. Third 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:  Enchainment, Liberation, Four Principles 

This Time: Equilibrium

Here’s a few 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. 

Can daily life be transformed into a profound meditation, and path of awakening, and liberation?

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. This week we consider its present applications.

What am I currently pursuing? What objects, outcomes, or relationships do I pursue in my various environments? In my work, in relation to my friends, family, etc? How does that pursuit enchain me? What are the things I do that I could attend to instead.

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.

Attention! Attention!

In our last meeting someone brought up the relation between this principle and attention (what is now popularly referred to as mindfulness), or “being in theme” (being present), i.e. if you are walking, walk. If you are laughing laugh. If you are eating, eat, and so on. As a slightly irreverent version has it: 

“never whistle while you’re pissing (just piss)”.

There are other principles that first come to my mind when I think of balance, or equilibrium. But in thinking about the aspect of this principle that has to do with “being in one’s’centre”, that is neither self-absorbed, and lost in the contents of my head, nor lost in the objects and my activities in the world, I realized how “attention” and equilibrium could be two ways of looking at the same thing.

This becomes clearer when I try to pay attention. “Try” being the operative word. If you’ve done this experiment (of trying to simply pay attention) than I suppose that, like me, you quickly discovered that normally you don’t pay attention. Worse than that, if you are honest and persistent, you may have found —like I did— that you can’t! At least not for more than moments, and it takes a very long time and very consistent work to get any better at it. On the other hand, with some careful and sustained work we can manage to gain clear registers of  these varied but persistent states of inattention. 

One might object; of course I pay attention! How else could I do my job, or even cross a busy street. But in those situations I pay attention automatically (and still only briefly). It’s as if the attention is called out of me by the stimuli. It’s a very different proposition than when I try to reverse all that, i.e. rather than the stimuli reaching me, I want to go out toward the stimuli. Not because these demand my attention but because I wish simply to be attentive — to be present if you prefer. 

Personally, I prefer, following Silo, to speak of “being in my centre” i.e. neither lost in myself or in the world. It avoids certain unfortunate associations with the term attention (more about that another time).

Sleep and Awakening.

I think that it’s only with such attempts, and then only gradually, that this idea expressed in Chapter 6 of the Inner Look really starts to make sense: “Only rarely do I perceive reality in a new way, and it is then that I realize that what I normally see resembles sleep or semi-sleep”.

That verse concludes: “There is a real way of being awake, and it has led me to meditate profoundly on all that has been said so far. It has, moreover, opened the door for me to discover the meaning to all that exists.”

Consider:

Learn to recognize the signs of the sacred within you and around you. 

Silo, The Path

Worth Repeating:

The Principle of Immediate Action reminds us that we should learn to benefit from all the intermediate steps or situations that lead to our goals. 

Coming Up:

Next week we’ll continue with principle 7 but we will focus our reflections on our present moment. We will try to find examples that illuminate how the principle impacts the situations we are living through.