After a while, L had realised that the CHALLENGE was making him aware of the issue of choosing emptiness. The mind does not like emptiness, and accepting it takes effort. He had experimented with letting the mind be empty.
It was different from mindfulness or mindlessness, and took active intent to accomplish. As far as it related to art, it meant letting nature be how it is, and painting it, or letting music come into your mind and writing it down, or - if you were a writer - letting the characters in your novel come alive, and observing what they did rather than controlling them and making them do this or that.
N said that he did not tend to think in terms of good and bad, and he quite often would just do something. There were not many situations where he found that he thought that there was a divide between good and bad which he had to hold together in his consciousness at the same time, and then try and not be influenced, one way or another, by it. Decision making usually came more into his work life. He did find in his legal work, there were often situations where he was weighing things up, trying to see which course of action would be better for a client. Those were the times when he was really looking at things of this nature, and trying to get a kind of equilibrium.
For T, the experience of being in the position of going one way or the other about a decision, was like going through camouflage. She did not know where this decision was, because the continuously creative way she made decisions this way or that as she went through the day, she experienced was automatically creative and was unaware of the process of reaching them. To try and pause and stop and experience, was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. To actually not do what she had decided to do before the event she had found to be very difficult and only achieved it once. On this occasion she had managed to consciously and not automatically initiate a written communication but then not send it. Sending it would have been an habitual automatic behaviour and prolong an unhelpful dynamic between her and another person. 'Not sending' was 'holding the uncertainty' but it continued to provoke a sense of unease, different from the usual unease.
L thought this challenge was perfectly suited to N in the context of his work, because a lawyer is employed by one side, where two sides have a differing opinion on what should happen and what should be done.
Presumably there must be cases where either side might come to somebody like N, and the lawyer would serve whichever client came, so in that sense a lawyer might be dispassionate about the outcome, but do their best to serve one side or the other.
The famous statue of justice, blindfolded but holding scales, was a perfect description of what this challenge was about: to consider either possibility of decision, but be dispassionate about it. Of course in law a decision is eventually made, and somebody has to make a judgement. Actively living with the emptiness for a while of not making a decision is hard. Even the judge will wait for a while before deciding. It did strike L as being embodied in our legal system
Further contributions and responses to these contributions were made but nothing more pertained to contributions relevant to the challenge. This appears to reflect several difficulties; deciding on a task and remembering this through the month, keeping with the momentum achieved in the meeting and staying with the task over time through to the point of individual experience of the task, one person's distraction from the task leading to responses that create further distractions to the first distraction which all serve to blur the original task.
After this the reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
The spirit on the right constantly strives to make the man refrain from doing those actions which are in the domain of the opposite spirit, and, perforce, more of those in his own domain.
And the spirit on the left does the same, but vice versa.
In this strange teaching it was further said that these two ‘spirit-rivals’ are always combating each other, and that each strives with might and main that the man should do more of those actions which are in his domain.
T said the passage was suggesting the different sides have lives of their own. They were controlling the person. It was not thoughts from inside out, it was beings from outside in. L said that each was trying to stop the individual doing the things promoted by the other, so what was considered good? There must be some actions which are hard to determine. If he were an artist painting a tree, he did not see how that fitted into a context of good or bad, he would just be giving testimony of what the world was like. J said it was not good or bad. There was a decision with each colour put on the paper, with each brush stroke, it was the evaluative part which was slightly the red herring, but the question would be, in this context, whether to consider the brushstroke very carefully, or else to paint with a flow. There was something to be said for each in its own context.
In the charge of the spirits standing on duty on the right is just that place called Paradise.
It is a place of indescribable beauty and splendiferousness. In that Paradise are magnificent fruits in abundance and endless quantities of fragrant flowers, and enchanting sounds of cherubic songs and seraphic music constantly echo in the air...
In that Hell sounds constantly echo of fearful ‘cacophony’ and infuriated offensive ‘abuse.’
Everywhere there are instruments of every conceivable torture...
L thought his description of Hell was something that nobody would want. As for Heaven, he was not sure everybody would want that indefinitely. T said she thought Heaven was the lesser evil, if you had to make a choice between Heaven and Hell. K said that if you were predisposed to evil, and you got put into Heaven by mistake, it would be Hell. They were forces and there was a kind of balance. L said it was also this ideology of Heaven and Hell which had caused enormous problems in the world. N said that children who wrote with their left hand were at one time forced to write with their right hand, because this idea of left and right went right through Western culture for a long period. The Latin word sinister means left. A large part of our culture was prejudicial to the left as opposed to the right.
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Once a day, if you have a situation where you are weighing up whether to do one thing or another, where one may be good and another bad, adopt a neutral position - make no decision and see if it is possible to hold the uncertainty and not be bothered by it, keeping your equilibrium even though you are not sure.
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N said that he did not tend to think in terms of good and bad, and he quite often would just do something. There were not many situations where he found that he thought that there was a divide between good and bad which he had to hold together in his consciousness at the same time, and then try and not be influenced, one way or another, by it. Decision making usually came more into his work life. He did find in his legal work, there were often situations where he was weighing things up, trying to see which course of action would be better for a client. Those were the times when he was really looking at things of this nature, and trying to get a kind of equilibrium.
For T, the experience of being in the position of going one way or the other about a decision, was like going through camouflage. She did not know where this decision was, because the continuously creative way she made decisions this way or that as she went through the day, she experienced was automatically creative and was unaware of the process of reaching them. To try and pause and stop and experience, was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. To actually not do what she had decided to do before the event she had found to be very difficult and only achieved it once. On this occasion she had managed to consciously and not automatically initiate a written communication but then not send it. Sending it would have been an habitual automatic behaviour and prolong an unhelpful dynamic between her and another person. 'Not sending' was 'holding the uncertainty' but it continued to provoke a sense of unease, different from the usual unease.
Justitia Source: Wikipedia |
Further contributions and responses to these contributions were made but nothing more pertained to contributions relevant to the challenge. This appears to reflect several difficulties; deciding on a task and remembering this through the month, keeping with the momentum achieved in the meeting and staying with the task over time through to the point of individual experience of the task, one person's distraction from the task leading to responses that create further distractions to the first distraction which all serve to blur the original task.
After this the reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
The spirit on the right constantly strives to make the man refrain from doing those actions which are in the domain of the opposite spirit, and, perforce, more of those in his own domain.
And the spirit on the left does the same, but vice versa.
In this strange teaching it was further said that these two ‘spirit-rivals’ are always combating each other, and that each strives with might and main that the man should do more of those actions which are in his domain.
T said the passage was suggesting the different sides have lives of their own. They were controlling the person. It was not thoughts from inside out, it was beings from outside in. L said that each was trying to stop the individual doing the things promoted by the other, so what was considered good? There must be some actions which are hard to determine. If he were an artist painting a tree, he did not see how that fitted into a context of good or bad, he would just be giving testimony of what the world was like. J said it was not good or bad. There was a decision with each colour put on the paper, with each brush stroke, it was the evaluative part which was slightly the red herring, but the question would be, in this context, whether to consider the brushstroke very carefully, or else to paint with a flow. There was something to be said for each in its own context.
In the charge of the spirits standing on duty on the right is just that place called Paradise.
It is a place of indescribable beauty and splendiferousness. In that Paradise are magnificent fruits in abundance and endless quantities of fragrant flowers, and enchanting sounds of cherubic songs and seraphic music constantly echo in the air...
In that Hell sounds constantly echo of fearful ‘cacophony’ and infuriated offensive ‘abuse.’
Everywhere there are instruments of every conceivable torture...
L thought his description of Hell was something that nobody would want. As for Heaven, he was not sure everybody would want that indefinitely. T said she thought Heaven was the lesser evil, if you had to make a choice between Heaven and Hell. K said that if you were predisposed to evil, and you got put into Heaven by mistake, it would be Hell. They were forces and there was a kind of balance. L said it was also this ideology of Heaven and Hell which had caused enormous problems in the world. N said that children who wrote with their left hand were at one time forced to write with their right hand, because this idea of left and right went right through Western culture for a long period. The Latin word sinister means left. A large part of our culture was prejudicial to the left as opposed to the right.
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