From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 18:08:23 GMT
Hi Mari,
this is the post that i was looking for:
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."
>>
>>
>>
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