Daily Quote, Thursday March 26, 2009.
Hi everyone,
As the quote is arriving at erratic times now, and as I know most of you like to look at it in the morning, I decided to hold over yesterday's quote to this morning so that I can keep some consistency with the time I post it.
Robert
To awaken this energy, the mind must have no resistance.
Now, how do we awaken in ourselves an energy that has its own momentum, that is its own cause and effect, an energy that has no resistance and does not deteriorate? How does one come by it? The organized religions have advocated various methods, and by practicing a particular method one is supposed to get this energy. But methods do not give this energy. The practice of a method implies conformity, resistance, denial, acceptance, adjustment, so that whatever energy one has is merely wearing itself out. If you see the truth of this, you will never practice any method. That is one thing. Secondly, if energy has a motive, an end towards which it is going, that energy is self-destructive. And for most of us, energy does have a motive, does it not? We are moved by a desire to achieve, to become this or that, and therefore our energy defeats itself. Thirdly, energy is made feeble, petty, when it is conforming to the past - and this is perhaps our greatest difficulty. The past is no t only the many yesterdays but also every minute that is being accumulated, the memory of the thing that was over a second before. This accumulation in the mind is also destructive of energy.
So, to awaken this energy, the mind must have no resistance, no motive, no end in view, and it must not be caught in time as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Then energy is constantly renewing itself and therefore not degenerating. Such a mind is not committed, it is completely free, and it is only such a mind that can find the unnameable, that extraordinary something which is beyond words. The mind must free itself from the known to enter into the unknown.
Collected Works, Vol. XIII - 337
I was rereading the Bhagavad Gita this week and the thing that struck was that the reason that Arjuna lost sight of his dharma was his attachment to the past, and this is why he sat slumped in his chariot as the battle was about the start. He K puts it here, his energy was made feeble and petty.
ReplyDeleteTo be specific, he got lost in sentiment. The hard thing to grasp about fullfiling your dharma or acting appropriately in any situation - acting with a view to the totality of what is - is that there can be no sentiment, which is always of the past.
As our sentiment accumulates, so does our karma and this is what stops us from acting. Krishna's consel to Arjuna is to see that the doer is not the Real Self (which is also among lots of other names the Supreme Being), and that the way to see this, to have Divine eyes as he puts it in one of the translations, is to set aside the fruits of the action, in other words how it affects you personally, which is what causes sentiment.
So setting aside the fruits of one's actions is precisely what K is talking about here when he says that to awaken an energy that does not deteriorate we must have no resistance, no motive, no end in view.
Anything that is caught in time is so because we are attached to the fruits of our actions (or inactions) and so it cannot find the unnameable.
Although there are some similarities between K and the Gita, there are also some huge differences. the most important one is the idea of a Real Self or Supreme Being. K would say, I think, that this is still within the realm of thought and therefore of the past. It's just another word for God, which is also used freely in many translations of the Gita. So is it not a case of thought entertaining itself with thought, the thought of the self finding recognition in the image of a super self, to use one of K's terms? Isn't this merely another kind of sentiment?
I'm inclinded to agree with K and say that all that we have beyond thought is intelligence, which is really just thought that is not attached to what is thought, and why other than the fear of non-being, do we have the thought of a Supreme Being that is beyond that intelligence? That extraordinanry something as K terms it is just what is in front of us, the trees, the mountains, the sunset or the sky, once we stop trying to name and know it.
This is something that I have been thinking about, especially today, which is my mother's birthday. It seems to be very stressful and energy consuming, and I am always trying to figure out if what I'm doing would make my mother happy, or me happy, or is it just the image of what I think I need to be doing... Sentiment is a hard thing to get around because you think you will be failing somewhere.
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