Principle 12 Accumulating Actions – Week 4 – 2024

December 26, 2024 

Principle 12. Accumulating Actions. Week 4

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

Last Time: Inside and Outside.

This time: Changing Your Destiny.

This Week:

Since this is the fourth week devoted to considering this principle as is our custom we will focus on the future. We’ll try to understand how this principle applies to things that haven’t happened yet, but which we see or imagine taking shape. And we’ll consider how things might change if we find ways to apply the principle of accumulating action in an appropriate fashion. 

Looking toward the future, how I imagine, hope, or fear it will be, I take a moment to focus on discovering at least one situation where my old habits, and accumulated actions could once again lock me into self-defeating, or otherwise undesirable patterns. 

I will next consider at least one situation where my previous coherent actions could help me repeat that unitive pattern — producing a situation where my feelings, thoughts, and actions are all in agreement, and working together. 

 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.

How To:

It is easy to put off these mediations for a more suitable moment when I have more time or a more ideal environment, free of distractions or potential disturbances. As I’ve previously mentioned a few times, it’s my experience that these kinds of daily meditations seem to benefit from being very brief. That seems to help them stay as focused, as possible. I mention it again because I’ve found it a useful approach and one that many seem to find counter intuitive. 

Try it and tell me how it works for you.

Making the effort to look at the principles from these varying perspectives (past, present, future) is intended to help us find new insights into the principles, new understandings about them. Another tool we can use for that purpose are the games of the week. 

Feeling Playful?

Then this week we can play 

The Game of Explain It!

This week’s game is simple: explain your basic understanding of the principle. Maybe, you slip it into a conversation. Maybe, you announce your intention, e.g. “We are studying these principles of behaviour, let me tell you my take on one we have been discussing this week”. 

Of course, you might find it more interesting to engage another player (or players). So, if you can manage to talk to someone that’s great but if you can’t, maybe write down your understanding in an email and send it to me, or to another friend, or to yourself - or don’t ever send it.  The point is to put your thoughts, and intuitions into a form that is suitable for sharing.

Not having anyone at hand to play the game with might get you thinking about why that is. Perhaps, it is best seen as an opportunity to reflect on what that absence implies, and perhaps even take measures in enrich your social environment.

Another thing this game has in common with the game of Ask About It! is that it’s a game! In this game our interest is on engaging and communicating. Convincing, preening, recruiting, etc. are outside of the goals of the game. Rather, you are simply sharing your interpretation of something you find interesting.

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 Principle of Accumulated Action highlights the consequence of storing up unifying, as opposed to contradictory actions. In the lines below Silo points out some registers that can help us distinguish contradictions from, difficulties, unpleasantness, challenges, etc which can be useful, at least, as incentives to change. After a few brief comments on the registers that characterize contradictory actions, he points out something of the nature, or mechanism, of the accumulation itself. 

The following numbered lines are excerpted from chapter IX of Silo’s work The Internal Landscape and follow the numbering used there.

12. I believe you will know how to distinguish a difficulty, which is welcome for you can leap over it, from a contradiction, that lonely labyrinth that has no exit.

20. You must be very clear about this: You are not at war with yourself. Rather, you must begin treating yourself like an old friend with whom you must now reconcile, for ignorance and life itself have driven you apart.

26. You may agree with me or not, but in any case I will affirm that this is the only way forward: If you want to grow, you will help those around you to grow.

That last line reminds us that not all of this is simply about my internal unity. However, it is interesting to note that when such behaviours are meant to end in others, and to treat others as you wish to be treated, the feeling of internal unity takes on an additional dimension and is accompanied by the certainty that I want to repeat such actions. 

Do you recall that old Sage Laozi’s verses where he places this question of “accumulation” in the context of “caring for others and serving heaven”? 

Caring for others and serving heaven depends on repeated accumulation.

With virtue accumulated all obstacles can be overcome.

Having overcome all obstacles there are no limits.

Knowing the absence of limits, one is fit to rule.

This is like a plant that has deep roots and a firm stalk.

The way of long life and eternal vision.

Dao De Jing LIX

Is it too much to say that this growing “mental direction” of acting to maximize coherent actions, might in fact be more important than the specific actions, or even the specific outcomes?

Remember:

The repetition of certain actions accumulated a certain energy, formed habits of behaviour that helped bring me to my present situation. In turn this energy, or if you prefer these habits make certain future actions more likely. This is true whether these are acts that produce internal unity (i.e. agreement with myself) or contradiction (internal conflict). In either case repetition facilitates a mental direction and forms habitual ways of facing life.

Worth Repeating:

If you are not indifferent to the pain and suffering of others, in order to help them you must bring your thoughts, feelings, and actions into agreement.

Silo_ The Path

Coming Up:

Over the last three weeks we focused on the principle in general, its relation to past and present events. This week we consider it in relation to what we imagine the future to hold. Next week we begin a new cycle of reflection with Principle One, Adaptation.

Note:

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

The seasons change, and we continue on our wild rollercoaster ride around the sun…