They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold, and I deem them mad for thinking my days have a price.
Khalil Gibran
I began then in real earnest to simplify my life believing that if the present system is wrong one should live by it as little as possible. That is to say, one should conform little and reform much... It is noble to die for one's principles but it is much nobler to be able to live for them.
Dugald Semple
I began then in real earnest to simplify my life believing that if the present system is wrong one should live by it as little as possible. That is to say, one should conform little and reform much... It is noble to die for one's principles but it is much nobler to be able to live for them.
Dugald Semple
'It looks as if the modern addiction to labor is becoming an epidemic for humankind,' writes Raimond Panikkar in Invisible Harmony. 'You have to labor because apparently your naked existence has no value; therefore you must justify your life by its usefulness.'
We’re only just coming around to the idea that sacrificing 40 hours of your week might not be a wholly good thing for one’s health and one’s spiritual well-being. I quickly intuited from a very early age, partly thanks to my father's overwork, that to surrender forty hours of your living, breathing week (forty of your most awake hours) was the equivalent of surrendering 40% of your living breathing soul. I also intuited that to be 'useful' could be a dangerous thing.
As such I embarked on a philosophy of work (as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language) of 1 year on, 6 months off. I engaged in what could be termed ‘voluntary unemployment’ so that I might re-organise and process all that had gone before via some kind of artistic-aesthetic process. Without this processing (and defragmentation) I had felt in my first years of working that things just built up fragmentarily without necessarily being viewed wholistically, and thus capable of being understood as part of the larger picture. Work had thus become a matter of 'work' and of 'play'; furthermore, work had become a means to an end, and an end in itself.
The 'play' part involved in this work-play process encouraged not just the creative-aesthetic (spontaneous-explorative) but the contemplative also. This slow contempaltive nature, in a fast society which for Raimond Panikkar is thoroughly anti-contemplative, clarified the integral role of work within the grander encompassing role of being:
...the contemplative will have a totally different attitude to work. the primacy will not be given to work but to working, i.e., to the act itself (the finis operationis of the Scholastics) so that every work will have to yield its own justification, or rather its own meaning. If an act is not meaningful in itself, it will simply not be done.
That people have allowed their selves to be coerced into 'selling' their days is the reason why there is no play or spontaneity left (or when they argue there is, that it is so shrivelled and hi-jacked by the larger scheme of things that it really isn't play or spontaneity at all). This absence (ab + esse, [away] from being) of spontaneity (sua sponte, of one's own will) further allows the self and 'being' to be taken hostage by busyness and 'doing'.
At the entrance to the street next to me there is a sign stating:
Play Street 8am to Sunset Except for Access.
It might as well have been called Spontaneous Street - for play and spontaneity are inextricably bound.
'Being has an untapped reservoir', writes Panikkar, 'a dynamism, an inner side not illumined by self-knowledge, reflection, or the like. Spontaneity is located in this corner of each being - its own mystery. It is unthought, unpremeditated, free, even from the structures of thinking. Reality cannot be equated with the nature of consciousness'.
It is this sort of 'thinking' that led the Zen prelate Dogen to state: To know yourself is to forget yourself; to forget yourself is to be awakened by all things.
Play Street 8am to Sunset Except for Access.
It might as well have been called Spontaneous Street - for play and spontaneity are inextricably bound.
'Being has an untapped reservoir', writes Panikkar, 'a dynamism, an inner side not illumined by self-knowledge, reflection, or the like. Spontaneity is located in this corner of each being - its own mystery. It is unthought, unpremeditated, free, even from the structures of thinking. Reality cannot be equated with the nature of consciousness'.
It is this sort of 'thinking' that led the Zen prelate Dogen to state: To know yourself is to forget yourself; to forget yourself is to be awakened by all things.
The danger today in the rush and roar of the modern world that pays little heed to slowness and much to self-gratification, is that there is little opportunity for forgetting oneself, and thus to be awakened. In business, it is your duty 'to be aware of your work ', to be so utterly self-conscious that one is literally asleep to everything else. It also demands your best hours, those when, it could be said, you are most alive. Spontaneity and play are relegated to the back room of the brain until all you know is work; the result is that one becomes over-stressed, pressurized, and so tightly strung that it only becomes a matter of time before the tension dissipates through snapping. Further, when retirement comes, the empty undeveloped man deprived of his raison d'etre, lays down and dies. This arrested development, through an imbalance of work and play, was of great concern to the economist John Maynard Keynes who believed that sometime in the late 20th or early 21st century the 'economic problem' would be solved and thus effectively a lifelong retirement would be a reality for all.
In other words, man has imprisoned himself, corralled by the 'spur of economic necessity'. Lacking the necessary self-development and the capacity to sing one's song, when man stops working he necessarily stops living.
The act of play however, as Keynes himself extolled, is a spontaneous one, and, by extension, a meditative one. It allows a certain flexibility (of mind, of body), that facilitates a 'tensile integrity' to use an architectural term, which automatically and elastically returns a structure to its original shape after deformation. It is thus an essential feature in any 'work-structure' just as it is fundamental to any building that wishes to withstand high winds, earthquakes and remain at peace midst the storm. Without this 'play' of the structure, there is danger in moments of stress, of irreparable damage, if not of complete collapse.
In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (arguably the most intelligent of the disciples) true re-form (are we not all deformed structures?) lies not in outer conventions but in inner transformation, a transformation that relies on work, play, spontaneity and contemplation. The senses, according to the Gospel of Thomas, have been led astray by those wishing to appropriate them for their own ends (ring a bell?). The revival of the senses will revive our ability to bend and to play. This demands, however, that we open ourselves up to the unknown, to that which we have never done before or have simply forgotten; it demands our faith and trust... not in any Lord or God, but in the (imanantly divine) self. For many, it is a leap that is 'just not worth it'. But should we impose these deformed values upon the next generation? Should we not at least make them aware of the Faustian pact involved with an all work - no play ethos? And by 'play' I do not mean forced play - I mean spontaneous play, for the love of it, as an end in itself, and as a possible means.
The image in the Gospel of Thomas of men that have recovered their spontaneity of being (their 'play') is that of little children who 'know the place of life' - we're not talking juvenile ignorance or unruly behaviour, but the child who sees and feels all things afresh, as if for the very first time. Only those who have worked on their selves as 'the elect of the living father' will be 'acquainted with the kingdom'. As James Heisig writes in his scholarly essay The Recovery of the Senses, 'The secret teachings of the Gospel of Thomas are very much an open secret. The elite who understand it are not the hand-picked disciples of elder adepts, but those who have the courage to strip themselves down to their native childlikeness and discover the truth within themselves'. This work-play-spontaneity is essential for revival, for resuscitation... for resurrection of the hitherto expropriated self.
If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. To use the language of to-day - must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”?
In other words, man has imprisoned himself, corralled by the 'spur of economic necessity'. Lacking the necessary self-development and the capacity to sing one's song, when man stops working he necessarily stops living.
The act of play however, as Keynes himself extolled, is a spontaneous one, and, by extension, a meditative one. It allows a certain flexibility (of mind, of body), that facilitates a 'tensile integrity' to use an architectural term, which automatically and elastically returns a structure to its original shape after deformation. It is thus an essential feature in any 'work-structure' just as it is fundamental to any building that wishes to withstand high winds, earthquakes and remain at peace midst the storm. Without this 'play' of the structure, there is danger in moments of stress, of irreparable damage, if not of complete collapse.
'We shall endeavor to spread the bread thin on the butter... 3 hour shifts or a 15 hour week... For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us.' Keynes writes in one of his more lucid moments. In 1928.
In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (arguably the most intelligent of the disciples) true re-form (are we not all deformed structures?) lies not in outer conventions but in inner transformation, a transformation that relies on work, play, spontaneity and contemplation. The senses, according to the Gospel of Thomas, have been led astray by those wishing to appropriate them for their own ends (ring a bell?). The revival of the senses will revive our ability to bend and to play. This demands, however, that we open ourselves up to the unknown, to that which we have never done before or have simply forgotten; it demands our faith and trust... not in any Lord or God, but in the (imanantly divine) self. For many, it is a leap that is 'just not worth it'. But should we impose these deformed values upon the next generation? Should we not at least make them aware of the Faustian pact involved with an all work - no play ethos? And by 'play' I do not mean forced play - I mean spontaneous play, for the love of it, as an end in itself, and as a possible means.
The image in the Gospel of Thomas of men that have recovered their spontaneity of being (their 'play') is that of little children who 'know the place of life' - we're not talking juvenile ignorance or unruly behaviour, but the child who sees and feels all things afresh, as if for the very first time. Only those who have worked on their selves as 'the elect of the living father' will be 'acquainted with the kingdom'. As James Heisig writes in his scholarly essay The Recovery of the Senses, 'The secret teachings of the Gospel of Thomas are very much an open secret. The elite who understand it are not the hand-picked disciples of elder adepts, but those who have the courage to strip themselves down to their native childlikeness and discover the truth within themselves'. This work-play-spontaneity is essential for revival, for resuscitation... for resurrection of the hitherto expropriated self.
| We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. |
T.S Eliot, Little Gidding
[Friederich von Schiller in his 15th letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man to the patron Friedrich Christain, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenberg]
Middleton Street, Cessnock, G51.
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