Did you miss the rest of the post? Maybe it was hard to read out of context
but the beginning part was describing why he thought it was difficult for
Americans to "do nothing". Idleness and evil were not HIS opinions of "the
art of doing nothing"----obviously?
>===== Original Message From moq_discuss@moq.org =====
>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."
>>
>>
>>
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>
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