Principle 12 Accumulating Actions – Week 2 – 2024

December 12, 2024 

Principle 12. Accumulating Actions. Week 2

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

Last Time: From Tiny Acorns

This time: Words of Wisdom From the Ancient Child

This Week:

This week we’ll turn to considering how we applied, or could have applied, this idea in the past. Can I notice how even small steps accumulated and formed a direction in my life? For example, can I recognize how developing a new or a different habit changed, or could have changed a later outcome? 

To help gain some new perspectives we will also play  

The Game of the Week.

Ask About It!

The basic idea is simple: turn to someone and ask them what they understand this principle to mean.  Asking them may involve the difficult task of taking a little risk and overcoming any initial self-censorship. But, why the hesitation and inhibitions? You’re only asking someone’s opinion. 

Try it out. Simply ask a friend, your neighbour, family member, or some stranger on the street. The point is to solicit their opinion, and then the hard part. You need to listen — whatever they say whether you find it: brilliant, silly, or misguided — try to hear and understand them.

As Simple as Possible, But No Simpler:

We’ve previously talked about simple, brief, but regular meditation. We can see that proposal in light of this principle. Everyone has their own way of approaching these principles. These short works accumulate, without forcing, or unnecessary tension. That accumulation of action (simple meditations in this case) produces effects of growing potency. 

So, I for one will again try to, more or less methodically, approach these reflections. This time, I will spend some time focusing on at least one situation in the past where I allowed small failures to accumulate and demoralize me. Then I will, just as briefly, consider at least one past situation where I can see that my small efforts added up (for example in learning a skill), resulting in my being able to do something larger.

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.  Please consider sharing your ideas with us at our meeting this Wednesday.

In previous discussions of this principal questions have been raised about how actions are accumulated. And certainly, when it comes to this principle we have many illustrative examples, anecdotes, and parables, aphorisms, etc. Here’s some further thoughts. 

It’s not surprising for the future to seem dark in these unsettling and turbulent times. That’s not news, nor is the fact that many of us feel we have no way to impact the destructive direction of the events unfolding all around us. Even on the smaller scale of my own life, and my immediate world it sometimes seems difficult to make positive changes. 

Considering all this I find myself returning to the image of a drop of water. That weak, tiny thing doesn’t amount to much in isolation. But, over time many such drops can wear away at even the strongest rock. In this way the relentless drips of water produce what is at first the slightest of grooves, but which eventually might become a great canyon. 

As that famous verse from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

(Laozi’s Dao de jing) has it:

Chapter 78

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.

Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;

It has no equal.

The weak can overcome the strong;

The supple can overcome the stiff.

Under heaven everyone knows this,

Yet no one puts it into practice.

Or for a more contemporary take:

“…The question remains then: “what’s to be done?” On a political level I’ve got no clue. However, personally I think the first step is to end the violence and discrimination in myself, and to work for peace in my world, i.e the concrete world I inhabit, that of my friends, family, co-workers, etc. That includes speaking up against intolerance, and hate but mostly means dealing with my own fears and seeing how they distort my vision, ideas and behaviour. I believe it’s necessary to cultivate peace in ourselves, and the world around us. Just as it is necessary to find the vital force to embrace life, and the joy that comes with having an open future. From my perspective that is not an alternative to, or the result of not finding, a political answer — rather it is the only real way forward”. As was said long ago:

Only inner faith and inner meditation can end the violence in you, in others, and in the world around you. 

All the other doors are false and do not lead away from this violence.

This world is on the verge of exploding with no way to end the violence! Do not choose

false doors.

— Silo, The Healing of Suffering

Remember:

 Among the final remarks in the chapter on The Principles in the Inner Look, Silo says that if you repeat acts of internal unity…

You will be like a force of Nature when it finds no resistance in its path. Learn to distinguish a difficulty, a problem, an obstacle, from a contradiction. While those may move you or spur you on, contradiction traps you in a closed circle with no way out.

Inner Look XIII

Worth Repeating:

A life begins when unifying actions start to multiply, so that by their virtue they compensate and finally favorably overbalance the previous relationship of forces.

Internal Landscape IX:18,19 _Silo

Coming Up:

Next week we’ll consider principle twelve in relation to our situation in the present moment.

Note:

Illustration thanks to Rafael Edwards.

These notes have been sent to our email list, posted on Facebook and on my website  www.dzuckerbrot.com