It seems that Life entails doing things. I don't think it matters what we do, we just seek to be doing things. Even people with money enough not to work will try and find ways to do things, even if it is only parlour games and activities of light amusement. I am entertained looking at teh world around me and trying to explain it, I keep this blog, I do reading and lot of instinctive thinking: yet what is in common is that I am always trying to do things. Even my search to do less (since doing things I have seen before is the cause of most of our problems today) has ended up in an active search and so is doing something.
What is the root of "doing" - that seems to lie at the root of Life itself. It seems to be perhaps more than just part of our economic paradigm, tho I know of tribes in other paradigms where they would rather go hungry than do anything. They have the lowest working hours of any primate at just 2.5 hours a day.
Worth looking at the "optimum" hours of work. After a while we make more work for ourselves by working. For example with everyone in the construction industry for example there is more competition, pulling down otherwise fine building, and negotiation and selling to be done than if just a few people worked in it. Certainly the rise in marketing is an excellent example of where people work to get other people to buy things they would never have bought otherwise, do they need to work more to pay for them and the wheel turns a little faster - but for no other reason that we were trying to do more!
I meditation doing something? What is actually doing "nothing"? If we don't know what doing nothing is like, then do we really know what doing something is like?
=== Update 27/1/2011
I must never forget what the Master of Fo Guang Shan temple says: pure action is compassion. It is the corollary of: pure mind is wisdom. These are the two parts of enlightenment; there is not one without the other.
This morning I also saw a parallel between inaction and the problem of singularities in physics. Models are excellent until they crunch into a singularity which squeezes all the information out and the compass fails. The Big Bang is one such famous singularity. Once the Universe is compressed into an infinitely small point the theory becomes useless. Just as f(x) = x/2x is a straight line for its entire length at y=0.5 with the momentary exception of x=0 where we can assume it has a value of y=0.5 but can't define it as such. If we did say that 0/(2*0) = 0.5 then do we say that 0/(4*0) = 0.25. Yet the denominator of both are the same 2*0 = 4*0 so we have an inconsistency so we can't decide what the value is.
This same problem occurred to me when we "think" and model action. It is fine to muse on the motivations of people in history or in law courts and even our motivations as we struggle to understand who we are, but that thinking runs into a singularity in the present as we cannot predict what we will do Now. It is undefined. This is the origin of the concept of freedom which Existentialists amongst others find so terrifying; the staggering vastness of the possibilities that face us now make most shy into inaction. This Hamlet mentality troubled with contradictions and resolutions (myself as well) led Sartre to dump essence all together and start with existence. Don't decide between "possible" worlds of whether or not to marry the girl, he said to a hesitating student, make the future... let history write the essence in books afterwards. I've never been so sure; that seems to me simply follow social pressure or ones desires without questioning type of behaviour: carpe diem. If I have learned one thing from my walking it is that the two most crucial stages of a long walk of many hundreds of miles are the first and last few hours. Errors you make at the start are the most costly, travelling large distances in the right direction is then very easy, what then poses a problem is the small scale again where we try to locate a specific place. I imagine the same with Life. If we head off in the wrong direction we will waste a very long time getting it right. But then what is the right direction? That is the whole question since the dawn of antiquity! If there is no right direction then there can't be a wrong direction and then it doesn't matter what we do... this is blatantly not our experience as we discover regrets and disappointments in Life. But what then "ought" we do, or have done to live better Life? I am wondering here if even "doing" is the right way to look at this. What if I really did nothing for my whole life ... and I'm half way through having done nothing. I have to respond to an old friend of Facebook sometime soon explaining my life. I have to honest I have done nothing: no career, family, property, responsibilities, titles, achievements, even wonderful experiences: the lack of all this bumph just says simple peace and happiness to me. Yet this seems fine to me, just sounds a bit boring in the retelling, so am I so wrong?
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