Been there. Did that. Stopped doing.

I remember years ago seeing someone wearing a t-shirt, on which was printed something like “Been there. Did that. {something about getting drunk, and worse}. Went back to get this t-shirt.” The pointlessness and stupidity of it so caught my attention that I (half) remember it to this day. Well, at least it was memorable.

Sometimes, something I hear or read about, which is going on currently in the manifest world, reminds me of that t-shirt slogan. Mostly it’s not as harmless as a witless t-shirt inscription, but something either at the best egocentric, pointless, and at the worst some aspect of the madness and suffering, such as greed, violence and war, which currently characterises so much of what’s in the news.

Looking back on my own life, until a few years ago it was also so much doing – in the latter decades at least with a constructive intention towards life in general. In these last few years the will for doing things simply to experience something, or to achieve anything in an egoistic sense, has fallen away from me. The will to do something for personal gain – in particuar at the cost of other beings – evaporates as spiritual maturity advances. This is certainly the case for a sage – someone who knows that neither he nor anyone else is the doer of any action, that all action is the Divine happening through some mind-energy-body organism and not anything ‘done’ by anyone.

Compassion and Great Consciousness

I’m often confronted with the assumption that this (the non-doership) can’t be right, because then why should one do anything? With the implicit picture of such a person sitting around apathetically – possibly with a begging bowl. But it’s not like that: (1) Compassion, and simple pleasure and even fun, remain as motivations on the personal, organismic level. (2) Great Consciousness expresses itself through the individual, causing things to happen, but that individual does not suffer the illusion that she or he is doing them; rather, they happen through the individual. Such actions have their root, their cause, at a deeper level than that of small mind¹.

Make no mistake, Great Consciousness is not impotent! It is the shaper and mover of all existence, and with that of all action. So in a way, it’s more a question of being quiet and spacious enough inside to notice that. Here’s a little exercise to help you:

Let all answers be from Space

¹ Of course, ultimately our small minds are also products of Great Consciousness – albeit parts which are so encapsulated and busy telling themselves stories that they fail to notice the rest of Consciousness.