an excerpt…
“You know by now it is no use accumulating more knowledge. It is really, particularly, what has made our living so complex. We have got a good deal of knowledge about a great many different things. We feel bound to follow a great many different interests. We have even found the most difficult knowledge to get. You hear about it and, to a certain extent, master it. It makes you proud of having the knowledge, but it doesn’t affect your weekly living.
We don’t want to be proud. We want to be happy. This means to do what I intend to do [or in general, ‘to do what one intends to do’]. The one thing that makes me unhappy is to do something I don’t intend to do. Then, to face it, you have to justify and rationalize, “Really it has worked out for the best.” In a way it is out of this that all the muddle and confusion has arisen.
The question really is how to introduce some element of the idea of will—of intention—into my life. You are right, I can’t control my attention. But, unless every day I can come to an experience of carrying out my intention, I shan’t be able to work with hope, because this knowledge [of coming to an experience of carrying out one’s intention] is knowledge about how to do, because work on being means work on doing. That is what it means to be a [hu]man—to be able to do.
So I come back to my experience again and again. What can be, for me, an act of will? It would have to be something very small because I can’t even control my attention. Maybe even to be able to not miss the meetings is something. Even those of us who have just started [the work] see how things get in the way. You have to give up some of your interests, even for one hour a week. Maybe just to do the work, the exercise that is given, is a sort of act or will. But, it doesn’t really satisfy me because I see I may sit down to do this work but I don’t really do it. I can’t control my attention. So what, for me, can be, within my possibility, an act of will?”
…from Lord John Pentland’s book, Exercises Within, collected and transcribed from his meetings with students. (p.50-51)
Posted by bell at December 27, 2006 07:57 PM | TrackBack