2 cents,
I don't like the word "busy". It implies "rush" to me.
I prefer plain old "being" ... which comes in
different forms for different people. He refers to
doing nothing with idleness. No. Doing nothing is
doing nothing. "Idle" is a subjective term used by A
to describe B who is not doing what A believes ought
to be done.
André
BTW: There is no devil ... just some half-baked
anthropomorphisation of really bad quality.
--- enoonan <enoonan@kent.edu> wrote: > 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."
>
>
>
> MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
> Mail Archive -
> http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
> MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
>
> To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the
> instructions at:
> http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:15 BST