“work cannot bring us liberation”
I found myself desiring and knowing less and less, until I could say in utter astonishment I Know Nothing, I Want Nothing.
Nisargadatta
We spend a lot of our time in school, working, and accumulating material goods—knowing, doing and having. Our worldview and identity are structured around these activities, but none of this creates a sustainable community.
“The sense of time creates stress, pressure, anxiety, fear, and endless disgruntlement in a myriad of ways. … Every human action is couched in an unspoken pressure cooker of time and the mind constantly calculates how much ‘time’ can be ‘spent’ at every activity. This results in panic, fear, or worry as well as guilt, shame and anger. ‘Too much time spent on this. Not enough spent on that. There are many things we would like to do but we don’t have enough time. Time will run out.’ Until the sensation of time stops, one does not have any possibility of knowing what real freedom or peace feels like.”[i]
We value the speed and ease of internet shopping, but jobs such as those at Instacart are based on the highest productivity in the shortest amount of time which inevitably creates anxiety and misery for the worker. “It is surely true that Instacart offers a valuable service—to those who are housebound, to single parents, to others paralyzingly constrained by time. But the Instacart worker himself barely has the luxury of looking up, because the orders he is fulfilling are all on his phone and the faster he completes them, the more orders he can fulfill.”[ii]
“Lao Tsu taught that all straining, all striving [reactions] are not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). But what does this mean? It means not to literally do nothing, but to discern and follow natural forces—to follow and shape the flow of events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things.”[iii]
When we say “do nothing” we aren’t talking about “the practical chores related to everyday life but the attainment of Simple Reality [Paradigm-A]. If our mind is focused on accomplishment which takes ‘time,’ and is focused on the future, then we cannot be in the present moment. Then our very existence has lost its significance since it has become a means to an end and that ‘end’ is never reached but is always ‘on its way.’ If our priorities involve the fruits of having, doing and knowing which are always to be harvested in the future, then the present … is not valued. We have given greater importance to what lies ahead in time, to the process of ‘becoming,’ rather than simply ‘being.’”[iv]
Insight # 96 comes to us from Clive Johnson a former college teacher and UPI reporter. In 1965 he joined the Ramakrishna Order of India as a novice. He now lives in a Monastery in the Santa Clara Mountains in Southern California.
“The scriptures [Vedanta] declare that immortality cannot be gained through work or progeny or riches, but by renunciation alone. Hence it is clear that work cannot bring us liberation. Certain knowledge of Reality is gained only through meditation upon right teaching, and not by sacred ablutions, or almsgiving, or by the practice of hundreds of breathing exercises.”[v]
Just to be clear, “renunciation” means to “renounce whatever binds us to ignorance and suffering … it is an act of liberation, not a punishment.”[vi]
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Additional Reading:
- Doing, Having and Knowing, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] Hawkins, David. The Eye of the I. Sedona, Arizona: Veritas Publishing, 2001, pp. 157-158.
[ii] Bellafante, Ginia. “The Invasion of the Ghost Shoppers.” The New York Times. February 2, 2020, p. 29.
[iii] Henry, Roy Charles. “Tao.” The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2. May 2018, p. 285.
[iv] Henry, Roy Charles. “Time.” Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community, 2015, p. 260.
[v] Johnson, Clive [ed.], Vedanta. An Anthology of Hindu Scripture, Commentary, and Poetry. New York: Bantam, 1971, p. 130.
[vi] O’Brien, Barbara. (2020, August 26). Impermanence in Buddhism (Anicca). Retrieved from https://www.learnreligions.com/impermanence-in-buddhism-449702
