Tag Archives: peace

Harmony and freedom

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To live in harmony with what actually is seems to me perfect freedom. All the we are, all that we can do, can ultimately be traced to antecedent causes; human bondage seems to consist in the attempt to fight that, or to ascribe it to some other cause. But what comes to be doesn’t seem to be, looked at sub specie aeternitatis, so much an iron necessitarianism as a supple flow – and to live in accord with it an easy, open response to its really becoming.

Freedom seems just to be acting in the openness of things’ true relations; just as in music the freedom to improvise truly means to play in accord with what the music itself wants to do, and so in the liberty that the ancient rules of harmony and scales, rhythm and chords actually allow us.

To act in true freedom feels quite close to non-action, really, though it is not doing nothing. There is a seamless flow in what comes to be that, taken as it comes to be, is without effort or anxiety. The merest space of time is open space; and in that instant, everything is possible, yet only what actually is.

Endings and beginnings

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So many blogs and newsletters across the internet at this time of year are looking back over the last 12 months, and on into the next 12, reflecting on the changes their writers have seen, and the things they expect to come. I don’t think I’d have much to add to this conversation per se. What interests me is the nature of endings and beginnings themselves, and whether they are what they usually seem to be.

So often we look at events as having discrete boundaries: they begin here, where there was nothing before, and they end there, leaving things different from how they had been. After the end of an event, there is a time when nothing is happening; and then, Boom! There’s another event just beginning out of the empty place that was waiting for it to begin.

If we sit still, though, and listen, what we find is that there is a ceaseless rippling of the bright water of the stream of coming-to-be. Sounds, and presence, and thoughts, and weight, without their own duration or dimensions. Where is the beginning of a wave, and its end? They are only arbitrary points on an oscilloscope trace: the wave waves. It has no beginning in reality, nor does it end. It waves.

Spinoza called these waves modes, and the stream substance: his one substance, God or nature (Deus sive natura) appearing in the modes of cats, or mountains, or people – rather as the Tao appears as “the ten thousand things” in the Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42). To see this, whole and undivided – as it is – is the end of fear, and the beginning of peace. May this peace be with you all, this coming year.