“Detachment from the Fruitlessness of our Failures” - ?
"The secret of meditation is affirming that you already are inner peace and perfect joy."
~ Abridged quotation from J. Donald Walters' Secrets of Meditation
***
"You are that which you are seeking."
~St. Francis of Assisi
Long story short: I agree. But speaking personally, getting there wasn’t easy – and staying there isn’t always easy. Here are some fair questions:
If you disagree with these quotes – why?
If you agree with them:
1. How do we reconcile a state of perfect or near perfect inner peace with our passion to do good in the world - that sense of urgency that accompanies our efforts to keep harm from coming to those we love and see their greater well being realized, whether in personal life or with respect to social justice issues and large scale suffering in the world?
2. What happens to inner peace and joy when we do our best in life but it doesn't work out – whether we try and fail to make a difference saving the dolphins, saving Tibet, saving the planet from global warming, or saving our own child from, say, dying of cancer? If there’s one thing harder than “detachment from the fruits of our labor,” that would be "detachment from the fruitlessness of our failures."
Thanks to Jan Lundy and Samantha Clark. My blog tour continues with stops Monday Sept. 21 at Awake is Good and Friday Sept. 25 at Day by Day Writer...
Posted by Paul at 1:44 PM Permalink
23 Comments:
~St. Francis of Assisi
Paul,
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us all.
I needed to read that today. I am going to ponder this and pray about it for the next few days.
~Kerry
"You are that which you are seeking."
I guess I disagree.
I do get the point, I think, but these statements sort of purposely counter-intuitive and paradoxical, I suppose in an effort to get a person to see things differently.
Good quotes. Something to chew on, for life. Thanks, Jan, and, St Francis of course.
Will continue on your blog tour on those dates.
We tend to become more what we imagine we are. I have heard of individuals who want to excel at something like golf, for instance, telling themselves they are already good at the game. It is about self-fulfilling prophecy.
How do we reconcile near perfect inner peace and joy with our passions and our sense of urgency? Must it be one or the other? Why can't it be a situation in which joy and peace dominate one's inner life without crowding out one's passions and sense of urgency? If our joy and peace are strong to begin with, they are not going to vanish when our efforts fail to produce fruit even though we are likely to be disappointed when we do fail. It won't be the end of the world for us as long as our inner joy and peace are strong to begin with. Can't that be good enough? Is perfect inner peace a true necessity anyway?
Sabotaging one's own well being is way easier than building it up, or as you say, "staying there isn't always easy".
But it's a choice, and no sane person would want to stay miserable in life, until he gets insane probably, and then, he might be perpetually happy, but in a different frame.
b)”You are that which you are seeking.” No. This is meaningless out of context. Iam seeking to be the Pope. Am I therefore the Pope?
But I’ll also comment on your further questions, if I may. Your questions 1 & 2 have the same answer. Our striving in the world necessarily affects our inner peace and joy. There is nothing to reconcile. One suffers and lives in joy, alternately. This is life on earth. It is ultimately foolish to seek peace and joy with conscious intent. They exist below that intent, in the mysterious realm we cannot analyse, as gifts bestowed by the universe, beyond our control.
The only task is to be fully what we are.
Caveat: I sometimes run across material in blog posts that states or implies that it’s ALL in our minds – that bad things only happen to people who don’t think positively enough, which is clearly unrealistic. Many factors obviously affect the quality - and, for that matter, the duration - of our lives beyond our own mental states.
“Must it be one or the other? Why can't it be a situation in which joy and peace dominate one's inner life without crowding out one's passions and sense of urgency?”
Seems that way to me too – that in fact both exist. As to the question of the necessity of perfect inner peace, it may be that a desire for something as close to perfect inner peace as possible – or perhaps, more accurately, to unassailable inner peace – is something that arises when a person’s losses become severe and numerous enough.
Tuti: “Sabotaging one's own well being is way easier than building it up.” Strange but certainly true in some sense, even though in the long run it’s also more painful.
Vincent – I think the statement that you already are inner peace and perfect joy is a contradiction that’s deliberate - to make the point that becoming more peaceful and joyful is a matter of becoming aware of something that you already are on some level. So meditation, to borrow from Freud, is something like “making the unconscious conscious.” Same applies to the other quote about already being what you’re seeking.
“It is ultimately foolish to seek peace and joy with conscious intent. They exist below that intent, in the mysterious realm we cannot analyse, as gifts bestowed by the universe, beyond our control.”
I agree that the ultimate sources of becoming a saner and more peaceful person are far more profound than thoughts and emotions that we're able to consciously manipulate. But that doesn’t make conscious striving necessarily foolish.
Of course, there are foolish ways to go about it - but there are also wise ways. For example, meditation is a disciplined approach to giving our minds a regular opportunity to receive those mysterious gifts. Or taking regular walks, running... giving ourselves opportunities to experience what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness."
I think that is accurate. We are paradoxically striving to get to the point where we are able to have the embodied realization that no striving is needed.
Heaven forbid! But it is true: we are forcing God! Meister Eckhart is revelant here:
"Do not imagine that God is like a carpenter who works or not, just as he pleases, suiting his own convenience. It is not so with God, for when he finds you ready he must act, and pour into you, just as when the air is clear and pure the sun must pour into it and may not hold back. Surely , it would be a very great defect in God if he did not do a great work, and anoint you with great good, once he found you empty and innocent."
And we do live by believing.
I like Eckhart too - not to be confused with Eckhart Tolle (same sp?), who I also like...
Vishesh – I wonder if beliefs might be a reflection of faith rather than faith’s foundation.
Yes to the wise passiveness. Yes to the anointing with great good of the empty and innocent.
But I still see the seeking as potentially foolish and dangerous - made even more dangerous with a guide.
We seek but we don't know what we are looking for, except deep down. At the surface level of consciousness, we are liable to misrepresent to ourselves the quest, so that our journey is a saga of painful mistakes.
Having written the previous paragraph, I see that "we" should be "I", and present tense should be past tense. For it describes my experience, and I hope no one else's.
What both these quotes say to me is this:
Stop searching outside yourself for peace or love or happiness or whatever quality of the spirit you think you want. It is already within you. It is your essence. You come from love and are made of love. It is only the ego/personality that convinces us that these things are outside of ourselves. Or that we must search to find them.
The ego, to me, is like a layer, a coating of delusion that overlays our true essence--our god-like nature. All we need to do is relax and accept that our love (or joy or peace) is there. Cultivate practices that peel away layers of the ego and allow the love (peace or joy) to rise up. Contemplative practices from any spiritual tradition do just this...
Simply put, we keep seeking God, but God is in each of us by our very nature, origin, and destiny. How can it be otherwise? God is already there....Relax, breathe, feel it and you will know this to be true. It is only the ego/mind which pulls us away from that knowing and experience with the voice of self-doubt...I am not good enough. I am not deserving. I am not holy.....(Such nonsense)
The water is part and parcel of the ocean. No separation exists. One cannot be without the other....
Enough preaching to the choir. May we all believe, breathe, and be well....
re "But I still see the seeking as potentially foolish and dangerous - made even more dangerous with a guide."
I agree completely. Thank you for sticking with your position.
Although we can usefully seek, the danger is that we might conceptualize what we think that we are seeking. Since it is actually something that cannot be conceptualized, we will not find it; we are looking in the wrong place. No matter where we look, it can't be found with that method of seeking.
Seeking, if done without a conceptualized goal, can bring me to the threshold. But the only vehicle that can take me over that threshold is pure grace.
There is no way for me to understand how to get across that threshold. If I think that there is a way that I can understand, I will never get across.
What I need to seek is the method of no seeking. Zhuangzi called this “wu dao”, “the method of having no method.
Proverbs 3:5 "Lean not on your own understanding."
ciao,
Raymond
Maybe something similar occurs with regard to pastoral counseling/mentorship.
Hmmm...but you cannot have faith in something, without believing in it...You cannot say I have faith in god, without believing god exists..
But if you intend to say that all of us have faith on something, whether we have had a reason to think about it or not, then belief would necessarily flow from the faith..this might be more in the case of religion..
kids are told about a "god" an omnipresent , a saviour etc...so the kid in question develops faith but has not answered the question if such a God exists or not...
Speaking for myself, I have faith in God (in some mystery which it is sometimes convenient to call God) without believing that God exists. So I can affirm that it is not impossible.
If I believe that God exists, I find myself irresistibly drawn to embrace some variety of religious belief; or else, in a manner of speaking, to invent my own religion. I don't find either of these necessary.
It is possible (I can say this because I do it) to pray for help in times of difficulty, and to give praise and thanks at other times, without addressing oneself to any deity or saint. If no god has revealed himself to me, I feel no obligation to invent him through the creativity of belief.
But the impulse to pray sprang in me spontaneously as I believe it may do in everyone.
"Speaking for myself, I have faith in God (in some mystery which it is sometimes convenient to call God) without believing that God exists. So I can affirm that it is not impossible."
I find this to be quite similar to
Marguerite Porete's "sans nul pourquoy" = "without a why." That was the basis of Marguerite Porete's apophatic spirituality. No theological or metaphysical truths were required. She simply surrendered to the experience of the moment.
ciao,
Raymond
You'd think that without beliefs she could have surrendered as easily to the fear of the moment and somehow wriggled out of being burnt at the stake as a heretic. They usually give you the chance.
But no, she was roasted. Will we ever know the truth of how it came to that?
I leave readers free to take that however they'd like. Some will think of the One as God or maybe a divine energy. Others will think of the One as all-being itself.
My focus in Original Faith is on what I feel are the most potentially constructive aspects of our actual lived experience and not doctrine.
/* But the impulse to pray sprang in me spontaneously as I believe it may do in everyone.*/
Yes absolutely and I agree with what you say...
Of course our life is trying to tell us something..we all have our own experiences and in my case I believe in GOD and have faith in it/her/him(or however you call God) as I am sure poems tell you. It is interesting though to really see if it draws me to embrace a religion(referring to Vincent's comment) mainly because Hinduism is not a religion(in the modern sense) in the first place. Hinduism interesting enough includes atheists and others whom other religions do not recognize. So in this context I still belong to hinduism(maybe everyone does)..
But in strict sense I might not adhere to what my parents believe in or others believe in. This comes out of trying to understand and question. My faith existed since I was a child but then faith becomes contingent on results and only with belief can we have a broader out look. Maybe when we just experience the movement, acceptance happens at the same time...
And the example..I haven't heard of that before..Paul you did tell me that there are things/people for which people give up their lives out of love...maybe faith is admiration and belief makes it more personal and we tend to start loving it..
It seems to me this idea would be invaluable for all religions to incorporate.
I notice you mention that Hinduism accepts atheists, which raises the question of just what the role of religious beliefs is in spiritual life – that would take at least a whole post though!
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