Wim, JB
Watching you discussing mysticism and social activism reminds me of this
chapter in this book I like called "the Art of Doing Nothing"
I don't want to rewrite the chapter but here are bits of pieces. (sorry is
stil long- I took out a lot I swear)
I find this consistent with what I take away from reading Pirsig.
Not sure if you agree.
Phil Simmons--
"Keeping busy for us is not just a practical matter but an ethical one. We
equate doing nothing with idleness, and we know idle hands do the devil's
work. The French who have added to the Ten Commandments an eleventh-- thou
shalt take six weeks of vacation every summer-- have an easier time with
leisure than we do. " (He then talks about the anxiety that goes along with
vacationing, the difficulty in leaving work behind, and the competitive streak
hard to let go when he gets a postcard from a friend on a "better vacation")
"Despite its repudiation by most religous thinkers today, Calvinism continues
to tap a deep current of the human psyche. We work in the hopeful if deluded
belief that we can control our fates, in this world or the next..
Sometimes of course our busyness has less to do with theology or dark
compulsion than with simple necessity....There is too much injustice, too much
need, too many openings for love, to justify our sitting idle. And on my
hopeful days, I like to think we work for sheer love of goodness and beauty."
"But we all know something's wrong when our working gets in the way of our
living, when doing leaves us disconnected from others and ourselves. There
are two kinds of busyness, one of quantity and one of quality. ......."
At times we glimpse the difficult truth in these lines form the Tao Te Ching:
" A truly good man does nothing
Yet leaves nothing undone
A foolish man is always doing
Yet much remains to be done"
Those who study creativity and genius find an essential trait is to focus on
the task at hand, "absorbedness". This is the sense I take the words "A truly
good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone."
"But what can that mean? How can a truly good man do nothing?
These questions bring us to the second kind of busyness which isn't much about
doing a lot as it is about having a busy mind. The art of doing nothing
involves more then sitting still...."
"Why do we do this to ourselves? A mischievous meditation teacher once told a
group not to worry about the busyness inside our heads "It's not such a big
deal. After all its just a question of how we spend our time every second for
the rest of our lives."
"I think if we are honest we can agree that our busyness is often a
distraction, a way of avoiding others, avoiding intimacy, avoiding
ourselves.""
"Our challenge is to do nothing in the midst of our doing, to let our actions
issue from a still center, to find within ourselves what T. S. Eliot called "
the still point of the turning world".
"Sanskrit scholar said that ideally our actions should accumalte NO karma.
Karma only accumulates when actions issue from some ego. The Hindu saint
like the Taoist sage like Jesus has burned his or her ego to ashes and thus
perfected the art of doing nothing"
"If we lose ourselves in busyness we may find ourselves sitting still. If we
lose ourselves in sitting still, we may ffind ourselves in the dance of
non-doing."
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