The two purposes of action

We act throughout our lives. If we are the selfish type, we act for ourselves. If we are the generous type, we act for the upliftment others. In either case, we believe that the purpose of action is for benefitting somebody or the other.

I have a slightly different take on this. It does not really matter what we do to the world. Action actually has two other purposes, which sometimes we miss altogether.

The first purpose is to hold up in front of our faces what is the mechanism of our mind, our decision points, our value systems. Since most of our actions are reactions, they reflect quite accurately our inner workings, provided we are humble enough to look inside and see them without defensiveness. This needs awareness of course. We should be able to look at our action and ask: Now what made me act like that?

Having done this, we need to recognise the second purpose of action, that is to modify or improve our inner working to make it more refined, benevolent, driven by good values and less compulsive. We do this through the deliberate actions of introspection, meditation, selfless charity and worship.

These two are the main purposes of action. What we really do to the world outside is relatively unimportant. As our mind becomes more evolved, our need for action itself reduces. Sages who do "nothing" have probably crossed the need for action. On the other hand, an unrefined mind cannot afford to be sitting without action, because then it would have stopped looking at the mirror and halted its own evolution.

We all need to be in action, for our own sake. What benefit we do to the world is incidental.

In pursuit of happiness

Can we ever reach good health? No we cannot, because health is our natural state. To be healthy, all we need to do is to keep away disease from happening and cure ir if it ever happens. Disease is a distortion of health.

Can we achieve happiness? Again we cannot, because happines is absence of unhappiness. Instead of trying to learn how to be happy, we need to learn how to avoid unhappiness from enveloping us and how to get out of its shadows if it does.

Gold Rush

Suppose I was on a riverbed in California in the 19th century, walking amongst the pebbles looking for gold nuggets. It's evening and the light is failing, but I have to carry on and maximise my riches. What would I do? Pick up pebble by pebble and examine them before throwing them back again, right?

Life is like that riverbed. Opportunities will seem to come up all the time, inviting our action or involvement, but we ignore most of them, especially if we are the low-energy type, saying "Oh, I will wait till I can see the glittery one, the gold nugget. That will be the right one for me. "But, really, how do we know it is not a gold nugget without picking it up, without addressing the opportunity to some extent before rejecting it?

It seems we choose our life path when we are born, having set out to experience some particular events for sure during this lifetime, mostly for self-growth (Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield talks about this with a fair bit of passion). Opportunities for the same, the gold nuggets, keep popping up, but are overwhelmed by the pebbles of ordinary living. That is why it is important that we taste as many opportunities as possible, whether they seem relevent or not, so that the gold nugget does not escape our scrutiny.

We need to get rich quick, right?

Being rich is a mug's game

We are all trained to become rich, to own more and more things, which, apart from status, will give us right of exclusive use of a service that the property represents.

But I tell you, it is a mug's game. Why not let someone else own the goods but let them be ever ready to provide the service to you.

How many mansions can you own? But if you are a person whose presence in a house makes the house-owner feel blessed, imagine how many mansions across the world you can live in.

That is how, I feel, spiritual leaders are far beyond personal wealth. They need not own a car, because hundreds of cars are at their disposal for their local travel.  They need not plan their next meal, because werever they are at meal time, there will be many who are keen to have them share their food.

Personal richness is very limiting. When the world opens its arms to you, everything becomes available without owning anything.

Muscles for the mind

 

We all are keen to do meditation. But is it that simple? This is what I read.

A person went to the gym for body building. The instructor asked him whether he had any physical problems. He said, not much, just some arthritis, a bit of asthma, ulcers and spondilosis. But he wanted to do weight training. The instructor told him, first cure your ills, make your body suitable for weight training and then come back.

Meditation is body building for the mind. We suffer from rigid attitudes, we start wheezing with anger at any provocation, our mind is full of bleeding ulcers from prejudices, and we are pains in the neck personified. Yet we think we can just plop down onto the ground, sit cross legged and experience a serene mind?

Read up Patanjali's Yogasutra, O aspirers to meditation, and first makes your mind fit to sit. Yama and Niyama are perhaps the toughest stages to cross.

The fertile field of uncertainty

In many discussions, I have heard concepts rejected, saying it is not scientific. Something being "scientific" seems to be the ultimate approval stamp on a phenomenon, that makes it worthy of discussion. 

Yet, what is a scientific phenomenon? One that has gone through the steps of hypothesis, data, formulation, validation and subsequently used for prediction. If it is not possible to carry out these steps, the phenomenon is not a scientific one. But I feel that putting a scientific framework in place is itself a marginal activity, because each of these steps are limited in scope.

Hypothesis is limited by human imagination.

Data is limited by instrumentation.

Formulation is limited by intelligence.

Validation is limited by choice of field.

Prediction is limited by boundary conditions.

As we filter out one phenomenon after another, we are left with a scant sample that can stand the test of this intellectual game. Yet when we are faced with any uncertain process, we call it unscientific and be done with it.

In that sense, Hiesenberg was perhaps the biggest iconoclast, because he knocked the validity of observation out of the window when he said that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be determined at the same time. This makes space itself uncertain. Holding the hand of Hiesenberg, scientists are now taking a few steps out of their small cottages of certainity and exploring the fertile fields of the uncertain.

After all, experience is a far stronger determinant of truth than experiment.

The preloaded paintbrush

Someone had said: Words are the biggest impediment to communication.

Words started out as convenience. Instead of saying a full sentence, saying one word would suffice. That word comes preloaded with a meaning.

Yet that preloading is a problem too. If I want to paint in pink and my brush is preloaded with green, the pink colouring gets distorted. If I say "kill" in the sense of "finalise" (an idea, say) and in the listener's mind "kill" means "terminate", that preloading corrupts the meaning I am trying to communicate. That is why, when we want to be abundantly clear, we need to use simpler and simpler words, words that are almost unitary in their application.

But even in this process of simplification sometimes we reach a dead end, where there is not a single word available that is capable of conveying what I want to convey right now, without any preloading whatever. Finding a word without any preloading is difficult because, after all, preloading IS the purpose of wordification. 

Sometimes when I look at a sky laden with monsoon clouds with white egrets flying across, that feeling is... indescribable. Words fail. When words fail, we succeed. We succeed in silently touching a level of thinking and feeling that is super-communication. We are silent not because we do not know words but because all the preloaded words that we know are insufficient to express this sensation. 

Then it is time to drop the brush and become the paint.