My Life - No Action

It is true that everything happens all by itself. We humans don't need to do anything. This does not mean we need to "do nothing" - that is doing something. I mean we simply need to step out of the picture and let things take their course - including ourselves.

This does not mean that we let ourselves indulge ourselves without restraint if we are so disposed to do so. Again such an attitude is firstly going to engage us in a struggle to get what we want and we end up slap bang in the middle of the picture lamenting losses and rejoicing gains once again. But secondly if we look closely at such a motive as selfish indulgence we are not really letting go and doing nothing at all - we are orientating the whole world around us and this implies "working" toward selfish goals. This is not letting things happen.

So their is effort required to "Stop Doing" and that effort is learning that really there is no doing.

A girl has contacted me. A girl I could like a very great deal. I could be in love. I could relive the world of "my muse". This is only possible because I have taken a very long time to clear my heart of my last love so that it is fresh and able to be filled agin by someone new. It is important to note however that this has happened all by itself - how can I control the arrival of people I have never met before? While sitting doing nothing the grass grows all by itself!

It is obvious really. My mother made the decision (consciously or otherwise) to have me. I had no say in this. I am male and 5'10'' etc I have no say in this. I have been born in England and educate in English etc. I had no say in this. I have food to eat which I have worked for, but being able to work for it and not living in a famine region is something I had no say in. Even if I decided to become a doctor and move to the place I wanted to be, and live with the people I wanted to be and have everything that I wanted - I had no say in what I wanted! I "chose" to be a doctor - did I? Why did I want to be a doctor and not a fireman? Did I chose that to?

Outside the wall of our garden lies a world more vast that we can even begin to comprehend that it is there. The sea into which all our actions are dissolved and out of which comes the very soil and water upon which we are grown. I experiened this first while walking to John O'Groats.

I accidentally ended up in this mansion gardens. Surrounded by geometric gravel paths, fountains and perfectly sculpted box hedges - like a mini Palace of Versailles - and in the middle loomed the Gothic ornate masionary of a mansion with long windows into which I could see the indulgent red upholstery and red leather furnatures and stained oak wood panelling and floor. In the drive I met the old owner and his 10 something girlfriend and managed to apologise and get directions to the road. After 3 week of living rough I cannot deny that this place seemed like a paradise.

About 40 minutes later I was clearing a hill that had been on the horizon and looking back I could see the huge expanse of the Scottish boaders streatching flat from the sea and the bay to the left across checkered fields as far as the horizon to the south and and west and above stretched the vast infinite blue sky smudged with whispy and aimless clouds floating free. Looking back to the bay I made out a tiny green spec that was the mansion and gardens and then I saw this: that what had been a paradise when looked at from the inside was really just a spec of the world and to accept that paradise as ones home was to accept a very small prison within an infinite world.

And so don't we all do this. We take ourselves as the limits of the world and seek to make paradise here. Yet we don't see how this desire makes prisoners of us all.

And I have been on the outside ever since. Yet now I am faced with love again I feel the need to climb inside the prison - for in there there is food and sustainance and out here things are cold and harsh.

I have been uinable to explain this until talking to a friend yesterday who reminded me of Christian's last words in Mutiny on the Bounty: We are free says the fellow mutineer as they relax on the islands. 'No we are prisoners but on the outside".

So I am emprisoned between two extremes: a prisoner on the inside surrounded by what "I" love and what "I" want and a prisoner on the outside where I am free from these things. Somewhere in between must lie the true freedom. So this means that Love and Not Love are neither the real prison walls - but something else, and this makes me free at least to love or not love - so which will it be?