From: Erin (macavity11@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 02 2005 - 16:02:29 BST
Actually when I first read this thread the first thing that popped to mind was Pirsig
answer of "do nothing" to his own question of "what should I do" he
talked about. I brought it up a long time ago...maybe later I will go search for that
quote..it has been a long time since I saw it. But it did interest me at
what he meant by do nothing........ I posted this 1/7/03 because it reminded me of it. I
think exploring "do nothing" should be very interesting.
Phil Simmons-- Learning to Fall
>>
>> "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 that's
>> 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."
Paul Turner <paul@turnerbc.co.uk> wrote:Scott, MSH,
>Scott:
>If we actually did do nothing, things would not stay just the way they are.
>That is the message of the Tao Te Ching. The road to hell is paved with
>good
>intentions, etc.
>Scott:
>The problem is that you do not seem to realize that you are part of the
>problem. As am I, and as are we all. But -- or so I flatter myself in so
>thinking -- to recognize that one is part of the problem is the first step
>in ceasing to be so.
>
>msh 08-01-05:
>Ok. Then what's the second step?
>
>See, this is the kind of one-hand-clapping nonsense that leads to the
>religion of do nothing and things will get better. I guess it works
>great if you're in the boot with the iron heel, or if the heel comes
>down in someone else's neighborhood. Now, imagine yourself beneath
>the heel, then lecture us about what we should do.
Paul: As I understand it, Mark, Scott has misinterpreted the term - wu wei
- or at least, hasn't elaborated on what he means by do-nothing. The Taoist
wu wei principle refers to behaviour motivated by a sense of oneself as
connected to everything else i.e. not motivated by a sense of fundamental
separateness or by the selfish ego. It is operating with a sense of dharma,
which, of course, is what Pirsig identifies with Quality in ZMM. When one
is working with Quality instead of against it, activity can seem effortless,
which is what wu-wei is perhaps better translated as meaning. It is nothing
to do with apathy or mere passivity.
Regards
Paul
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