Activity

[Guest guest]

Well, it seems it’s time to move from words to actions. (:

Or rather from writing about words, to writing about actions because verbalization is in essence a form of activity and there is no such thing as a truly passive word.

Let’s make a radical, maybe shocking statement to get the ball rolling: all actions are hindrances. Good, bad or indifferent all activities stand in the way of deep rest and silence.

 

Lets look at Eightfold Noble Path in this light and see how it’s nothing but a gradual quelling of activities.

 

1) Right views. When we hold right views the activity of uncertainty is quelled.

2) Right Aspirations. With these, seeking for what is wrong stops.

3) Right speech. With this, all other speech stops.

4) Right conduct. With this, all wrongful activities are abandoned

5) Right livelihood. When we give up amassing wealth, much less activity is needed.

6) Right endeavor. Pacifying the mind, we sit quietly.

7) Right mindfulness. The right mind is a quiet, alert mind.

8) Right contemplation. Here ends all activities of body and mind. Only deep rest, silence and intense alertness remains.

 

View in this way, it’s easy to see how the path is not a way of acquisition, but of denudation. Activity is what creates the illusion of a false self, the appearance that we are something tangible, when only the ineffable truly is. Even the intension to attain the ineffable must be given up; even the intension to rest mustn’t be there.

 

To clearly see how activity is not what we are, is not what we seek, and will always stand in the way could be all that is required for that deep rest and silence to be there. In that complete silence, a fearsome alertness is present- an alertness, which burns all that we are not.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that from then on all activity will cease, activity will go on, but there will be no doer, and actions will be seen for what they really are. All our actions, good, bad, or indifferent amount to nothing- like running in a dream.