In tranquility lies strength… An old proverb. In the peace of mind lies the power: Do not act according to reason. Do not think that you have to react to a material cause with a material effect. Not acting in trust. Accept. Let it happen. Allow the equilibrium to come about – of its own accord and in peace.
The top manager’s thoughts when he reads this can easily be guessed. He, as the high priest of the cult of the bellicose money and ego god, has evil thoughts at the thought that he would agree to the above words. He sees then before his mental eye, how his employees dance then on the nose around him. How they deceive and cheat him. How they plunder his company, starting with the pens and the coffee packets from the corridor kitchens. How his confidants try to steal his position. How the competition uses his soul-satisfying inaction to destroy him. To eat him up! – And he sits cross-legged with his eyes closed and his hands on his knees – perhaps still without shoes and on socks – on the top of his mahogany desk on the 48th floor of his temple, humming to himself like a moronic child, while his world around him goes up in flames and falls into ruins.
– – And he is right with this idea. That’s exactly what will happen in the case when he goes into peace of mind…. inevitably… Because in peace of mind lies the key to balance. Soul rest is not able to sustain things born of restlessness, indeed, which feed on restlessness and can exist only through it. If I go into soul rest, then everything that is based on the excess of restlessness of our mind falls into ruins. Inevitably. My own external restlessness is then no longer available in unhealthy excess as a nurturing and exploitable source for sustaining the restless states around me. Balance begins to set in.
So far so good, you might think. Eliminating excess and imbalance sounds reasonable at first. Our problem is only the size and quantity of what will then go. It is the magnitude of the change that we then face as a result. The manager sees the loss to be feared perfectly clearly, and there is basically no difference between him and the other people in his society as to the extent of the loss: since almost everything in our world is created, nourished and sustained by the restlessness of the mind, in order to create equilibrium, a tremendous amount of our old familiar world must fall into ruins. It must be so because the constructed world needs almost all of our capacity of power to exist in a reasonably stable way. The world of the mind cannot spare any of our power of restlessness. On the contrary, it actually needs more and more of it.
It is as if we are standing in a vault, supporting the only supporting pillar with all our strength. We are paralyzed because we cannot move. We have to stand and support. You can’t wipe the sweat from your brow. You cannot step from one foot to the other to give yourself relaxation. Your existence is solely to maintain the dark vault by supporting the only pillar. Needs that concern you are not allowed. The vault imposes the rules on you. Keep them or everything will go to ruins. The whole dark vault world paralyzing you would collapse.
We say to ourselves, „Well, it’s nice and dry in here. Maybe a little cold, but still nice and dry. Nobody can deny that. The little bit of support. Everything has its price. Nothing comes for free. We’re complaining at a high level – That’s what you hear from responsible people.“ Just the thought of wiping our eyes makes the vault groan and creak ominously. „Oh, then rather not. It was just a silly thought! Everything is in order! Goes already.“ But if I then carry out this thought – because I consciously decide that I don‚t want to go on like this, or alone, because I have to wipe my eyes and can’t help it because my limits have been exceeded – then there’s a huge crash and you think the end of the world is near; you raise your hands above your head to protect yourself from the debris. The vault collapses. It may hurt us in its last desperate rage towards the apostate. Perhaps it will also slay us. I will not deny that. But maybe the debris will spare us and it will go surprisingly smoothly for us.
And then it’s gone. A wide plain opens up around us. The light that our eyes have had to do without for so long blinds us. Our vision is blurred because we are not used to the brightness or the wide view. We turn around and almost stumble in the process. That’s how much we were stuck in the rigid position. So little balance has remained for us. For the first time in decades, we can see what’s behind us. We straighten up. For the first time after many years of paralysis and service to the merciless, all demanding vault, we feel again what the movement of our muscles and bones feels like.
What remains of the vault is the floor. We are still standing on the solid ground. But now it serves us. It carries us. And we can walk on it. We can use it for us to walk on the wide plain and to warm ourselves in its light. Matter is now in its place. It has not been condemned or eradicated from the world. The excess has only disappeared. Balance has come into being. Everything has now its task in the right measure. Maybe it rains once in a while and while we get wet we realize how refreshing it can be, when we know that afterwards the warm sun will shine again.
Ultimately, it is up to us whether we allow the vault of material excess to grow so large that its collapse seems so threatening. If we kept it at the size and massiveness of a straw hut, how easy it would be for us to simply leave our place and let it collapse. To free ourselves and use only the floor. To let it serve us.
Maybe we are even deluding ourselves and we are not supporting a threatening and fragile vault at all. Perhaps it is our fear of the vastness and the unknown new that creates the impression in us that a catastrophe is imminent if we would only serve ourselves – our wholeness – for once. Perhaps we could just let go and realize that the pillar was not a pillar at all that we were supporting, but that it was a rope that we were frantically holding on to all the time. The vault would turn out to be a black silken dome that – now free and released – would move away in the wind almost silently, with only a soft fluttering into the high air, never to be seen again. Smaller and smaller, until it would have disappeared as a dot in the distant blue sky. We would look after her in disbelief and blinking, like an old, blurred dream from days long past. Our astonished gaze would turn to our empty hands, which now felt so unfamiliar. So – free. So – empty.
We would then have used all our strength only to prevent the dome from escaping all these years. We would have used our strength ourselves and brought about our paralysis ourselves. We would have lied to ourselves by reinterpreting the sensation of the pull, of wanting to escape, into the feeling of threatening pressure and collapse.
If it were so, then we would have to ask again, „Who is this ‚we‘ that makes us live this illusion? Are we ‚we‘? Is our mind ‚we‘? Who is it, should it be, that keeps us paralyzed with false threats and the ensuing fear?“