Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same

Filed under Articles on 29. April 2007 » Comments

In the world of form there is pleasure and there is pain. Everything in the world is subject to polarities, and so we could say that all things already contain their opposite; you cannot have good without bad, and every high has a corresponding low. In the very nature of gaining something lies the possibility of losing it, and we know this intuitively. And so if we look closer, we see that pleasure and pain are really one and the same: they are the two polarities of suffering

Doing in the spirit of non-action

Filed under Notes on 23. February 2007 » Comments [4]

Usually when thinking of non-action, we associate it with simply not doing anything. Sitting around and not lifting a finger. But this is not necessarily so, as I’ve just discovered. Non-action can in fact contain plenty of action, strange as it may seem, and the understanding of this hit me when I read the following verses from the Bhagavad Gita:

The man who has seen the truth
thinks, “I am not the doer”
at all times — when he sees, hears, touches,
when he smells, eats, walks, sleeps, breathes.
...
Calmly renouncing all actions,
the embodied Self dwells at ease
as lord of the nine-gated city,
not acting, not causing action.

It does not create the means
of action, or the action itself,
or the union of result and action:
all these arise from Nature.

The essence of non-action is simply to allow action to flow through you, not attempting to control it yourself. Which means that instead of action arising from conceptual thinking, it comes out of being itself. Clear, appropriate, and free of ego.

Normal action is usually tainted with all sorts of evaluations, conscious and unconscious, and tends to be in service of the conceptual sense of self. Which means that action more often than not carries some kind of agenda, a self-serving motivation that is there to some extent whether obvious or not. And what’s more, action that comes out of the ego identified state of mind is always seen as a mere means to an end. Nothing is enjoyed as an end in itself, because there is always something more important in the future.

When action arises out of intuition, directly from the flow of life itself, it is imbued with a sense of quality and care. Even the smallest of actions. You begin to move with lightness and grace, and every action that is allowed to flow through you is then in the service of being.

Non-action is then not defined by the lack of action, but rather the motivating force behind it. Although it will probably be the case that with non-action, life on the external level will slow down. It is able to move quickly when needed, but when you have gotten to a point where intuition initiates most of your actions your life will take form in a much slower rhythm than is the norm for action arising out of the normal state of consciousness. Life becomes effortless, playful, slower, and whatever action you take will be much more effective than otherwise.

In a way, we could say that when you embrace non-action, you will never have to do anything ever again. Everything that needs doing will be done through you, and you then become the observer of what happens. I recommend taking a walk to witness how this works — as you are walking along, notice how your legs are simply moving by themselves. You are not making decisions through conceptual thinking to move one foot in front of the other: it just happens. And you can then be an observer of it (with the emphasis on it; it breathes, it moves, it takes action).

So relax, switch to the autopilot of divinity and know that you will never need to do anything ever again.