In the opening chapter of his book Meditations on the Peaks, the Sicilian philosopher Julius Evola writes:
In the modern world there are two factors that, more than any others, are responsible for hindering our realization of the spirituality that was known in the most ancient traditions: the first is the abstract character of our culture; the second is the glorification of a blind and frantic obsession with activity.
Later, Evola espouses his concerns about the pursuit of emotional responses, what we know today as 'adrenalin junkies', in the act of climbing mountains at the cost of the 'experience of the mountain':
This pursuit of radical sensations generates, especially in the United States, all kinds of extravagant and desperate feats.... these do not differ very much from other excitements or drugs, the employment of which suggests the absense rather than the presence of a true sense of personality, and also the need to be stunned rather than to possess oneself. Even the technical component in mountain climbing may degenerate; we often find climbers who are automatically inclined, out of habit, to engage in all kinds of ascents, including that of skyscrapers.
This all sounds a little familiar: red bull gives you wings and all that, jumping out of planes, bucket lists, nonsense living, and the frantic obsession with activity for the mere sake of convincing one's self that you're getting the most out of life. Nevertheless, as the inimitable Alan Watts writes in The Book: Life is not a bank to be robbed.
Life is not a quantity survey. Whether it be longevity of life or getting the most out of it, life (and, more significantly, living - life is a verb not a noun!), has never been about quantity, but rather quality. I have met people, real human beings, who, in their limited life-spans, and in coming to certain realizations attained through an attainment of a qualitative aspect to life, have lived more in their short full lives than the longest lifers the planet has to offer. I have seen children who have lived more in their first five years of life than withered old centenarians. It would appear that as long as people are embroiled within the arena of activity and acting (the word 'act' is related to the Greek agein from where we get agony, and the Middle Irish ag meaning battle) they will forever be too busy to contemplate the meaning and purpose of their living, and consequently be condemned to repeat themselves, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up and down a hill, ad nauseum and ad infinitum.
Our freedom, our very self, has been taken hostage by capitalism and a seductive quantitative economy that is always telling us to do more, to be more, to have more. The result is angst, agitation, over-crowding, noise, pollution, garbage, waste, illness and ignorance. All this has nothing to do with qualitative living. In his seminal text Small is Beautiful, a text that should be on the curriculum of any real school, the German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher makes the distinction between 'actively living' through independent and critical thinking and ‘being lived’ through obedience, acquiescence and kowtowing to a limited and self-destructive status quo.
The mere idea of ‘being more’ or ‘getting more out of life’ is entirely absurd. Either you are (you ‘be’) or you are not (you don’t be). The irony is as cutting as the obvious absurdity: that in ‘making’ a living, we have little time for living itself. The virtues of unemployment and being left to your own devices is given little credit in a society obsessed with work and money and endless unceasing activity. And yet, why is it that the most vacuous people I have met are the ones who have worked all their lives in some dead-end job (all jobs that do not have the self at its centre are dead-ends) that serves little purpose to their own being other than to finance their inane and frivolous purchases and to subsidize their own existential commodification? The ones who have had spaces in their living - spaces to breathe and to inquire - are the more interesting (inter + esse, between being) by far.
For those who work unquestioningly, the pearly gates to aim for, where that living and being will ultimately take place, is apparently at the point of 'retirement' (another absurd concept), but by then, one has been so exhausted and malnourished that to envisage any sort of qualitative living quickly disappears. But this is the fantasy that postponement breeds. It is a vicious, ever-decreasing circle, and one which eventually consumes the self whole.
The absence of this activity has the potential to lead to the ecstasy (ex + stasis, out of the static, beside the manufactured self), cleared of the interference.... pure and universal. It is a long road to be sure, of one's own work (the hero is the heretic, from the Greek haeresis 'he who chooses for himself'), of long hours of self-study, of self-education, of leading oneself out and in. But it is there, in this corona of breathing space around you, in these enchanted isles of 'unemployment', the ecstatic possibility of being. By activity, let me clarify, I mean that which is not spontaneous or in keeping with one's natural tendencies. The Taoists call it 'doing not doing' or wei wu wei: this occurs when one's self is in balance with one's surroundings and one's essence; one moves forth without even trying, without contriving, without any obligations or duties. Of course, there is still 'activity' but since it is spontaneous, and in tune with the Tao, it is effortless and therefore not deserving of the definition 'activity'. Within this 'doing not doing' there is a profound simplicity at work, one might even call it 'hardship', but it is this which furthers the self, and which derobes it of any artifice and delusion. Unemployment, far from being something negative then, is a virtuous 'act of being', which gradually strips the self of its constructs, by force if necessary. It is, along with 'poverty' and the nature of the self, one of the most misunderstood and maligned practices in the West. If one could see unemployment not as a curse but as a blessing, not as a slur but as an opportunity, one might begin to see it in the light of which I am speaking.
As we find our alignment with the Tao (as we realize our intrinsic religiousness) with the rhythms of the elements within and outside of our bodies – our actions are quite naturally of the highest benefit to all who we contact.
Our living is a sutra unto itself. One begins to live poetically. At this point, there is transcendence of all that has been forced upon us. We have become the embodiment of wu wei, without action; as well as of wu nien, without thinking, and wu hsin, without mind. We have realized our place within the web of inter-being, within the cosmos, and, knowing our connection to all-that-is, can offer only thoughts, words and actions that do no harm, and which are spontaneously virtuous.
The potential for this freedom is there in the midst of everyone, but as long as we work unquestioningly, unknowingly contributing to the world crises that further devour our selves, we will go nowhere other than stepping gaily towards the gallows. It doesn't help that the we are governed by this false sense of quantity, and of majority, (I had always thought it more than just a little queer that if 6 people were mad and voted yes, and the four who were sane voted no, then our government would be one of insanity and not of health). Since our very ways are infected with this dementia (the masses are asses), would it not follow that our governers too are demented? As Colin Wilson notes in The Outsider:
I have heard those in power defend the capitalist system as if their lives depended on it (and they do!), and yet their inarticulacy with respect to 'living' a life that is not predicated on exploitation and 'screwing everyone over' is astounding. In other words, all they know is the system into which they themselves have been institutionalised. The prisoner comes to love the prison, even to defend it.
And yet, if they could only take that step back (oh wad the power the giftie gie us...), and to become ecstatic, they might see the toxicity of what they are actually defending: a self-commodifying mechanism that turns process into product, and anima into the inanimate. Marx was well aware of this when he was writing Das Kapital, of the subordination of the living into the interests of production. Why does man then continue to do it, he asks himself. Because he has to live. But, as Marx was aware, there was the danger that he may actually sell himself as if he were one of the products he were producing.
The Lebanses poet Khalil Gibran would later poeticise this in The Prophet when he wrote:
If everyone were to stop working tomorrow, the world would not collapse in on itself as many would have you believe; rather, the self-destructive paradigm of the world would shake its head, open its eyes slowly, and wake itself up from a long and very deep sleep. Only then would it realize the madness that had consumed it.
The mere idea of ‘being more’ or ‘getting more out of life’ is entirely absurd. Either you are (you ‘be’) or you are not (you don’t be). The irony is as cutting as the obvious absurdity: that in ‘making’ a living, we have little time for living itself. The virtues of unemployment and being left to your own devices is given little credit in a society obsessed with work and money and endless unceasing activity. And yet, why is it that the most vacuous people I have met are the ones who have worked all their lives in some dead-end job (all jobs that do not have the self at its centre are dead-ends) that serves little purpose to their own being other than to finance their inane and frivolous purchases and to subsidize their own existential commodification? The ones who have had spaces in their living - spaces to breathe and to inquire - are the more interesting (inter + esse, between being) by far.
For those who work unquestioningly, the pearly gates to aim for, where that living and being will ultimately take place, is apparently at the point of 'retirement' (another absurd concept), but by then, one has been so exhausted and malnourished that to envisage any sort of qualitative living quickly disappears. But this is the fantasy that postponement breeds. It is a vicious, ever-decreasing circle, and one which eventually consumes the self whole.
The absence of this activity has the potential to lead to the ecstasy (ex + stasis, out of the static, beside the manufactured self), cleared of the interference.... pure and universal. It is a long road to be sure, of one's own work (the hero is the heretic, from the Greek haeresis 'he who chooses for himself'), of long hours of self-study, of self-education, of leading oneself out and in. But it is there, in this corona of breathing space around you, in these enchanted isles of 'unemployment', the ecstatic possibility of being. By activity, let me clarify, I mean that which is not spontaneous or in keeping with one's natural tendencies. The Taoists call it 'doing not doing' or wei wu wei: this occurs when one's self is in balance with one's surroundings and one's essence; one moves forth without even trying, without contriving, without any obligations or duties. Of course, there is still 'activity' but since it is spontaneous, and in tune with the Tao, it is effortless and therefore not deserving of the definition 'activity'. Within this 'doing not doing' there is a profound simplicity at work, one might even call it 'hardship', but it is this which furthers the self, and which derobes it of any artifice and delusion. Unemployment, far from being something negative then, is a virtuous 'act of being', which gradually strips the self of its constructs, by force if necessary. It is, along with 'poverty' and the nature of the self, one of the most misunderstood and maligned practices in the West. If one could see unemployment not as a curse but as a blessing, not as a slur but as an opportunity, one might begin to see it in the light of which I am speaking.
As we find our alignment with the Tao (as we realize our intrinsic religiousness) with the rhythms of the elements within and outside of our bodies – our actions are quite naturally of the highest benefit to all who we contact.
Our living is a sutra unto itself. One begins to live poetically. At this point, there is transcendence of all that has been forced upon us. We have become the embodiment of wu wei, without action; as well as of wu nien, without thinking, and wu hsin, without mind. We have realized our place within the web of inter-being, within the cosmos, and, knowing our connection to all-that-is, can offer only thoughts, words and actions that do no harm, and which are spontaneously virtuous.
The potential for this freedom is there in the midst of everyone, but as long as we work unquestioningly, unknowingly contributing to the world crises that further devour our selves, we will go nowhere other than stepping gaily towards the gallows. It doesn't help that the we are governed by this false sense of quantity, and of majority, (I had always thought it more than just a little queer that if 6 people were mad and voted yes, and the four who were sane voted no, then our government would be one of insanity and not of health). Since our very ways are infected with this dementia (the masses are asses), would it not follow that our governers too are demented? As Colin Wilson notes in The Outsider:
For all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus...
I have heard those in power defend the capitalist system as if their lives depended on it (and they do!), and yet their inarticulacy with respect to 'living' a life that is not predicated on exploitation and 'screwing everyone over' is astounding. In other words, all they know is the system into which they themselves have been institutionalised. The prisoner comes to love the prison, even to defend it.
And yet, if they could only take that step back (oh wad the power the giftie gie us...), and to become ecstatic, they might see the toxicity of what they are actually defending: a self-commodifying mechanism that turns process into product, and anima into the inanimate. Marx was well aware of this when he was writing Das Kapital, of the subordination of the living into the interests of production. Why does man then continue to do it, he asks himself. Because he has to live. But, as Marx was aware, there was the danger that he may actually sell himself as if he were one of the products he were producing.
The seller of labor power and the owner of money meet in the market and enter into mutual relations as commodity owners having equal rights, distinguished only by this, that one of them is a buyer and the other a seller; so that they are equal persons in the eye of the law. Such a relation can persist only on the understanding that the owner of labor power sells that labor power for a definite time and no longer; for if he should sell it once and for all, he would sell himself, would change himself from a freeman into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. . . .
The Lebanses poet Khalil Gibran would later poeticise this in The Prophet when he wrote:
They think me mad for not selling my days for gold; and I think them mad for thinking my days have a price.
If everyone were to stop working tomorrow, the world would not collapse in on itself as many would have you believe; rather, the self-destructive paradigm of the world would shake its head, open its eyes slowly, and wake itself up from a long and very deep sleep. Only then would it realize the madness that had consumed it.
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