15 November 1956
Paul Brunton:
Do your work in the world – perform your duty, but do not make your happiness depend entirely upon personal results or benefits resulting from your actions . . . The right attitude . . . is the attitude of agency of instrumentality rather than doership, the sense that (creation, and your part and its purpose in your creation) is doing all the work in you, is acting, speaking, and working through you. When you can contact the (creative intelligence) and permit it to operate freely through you, it will guide and guide rightly; it will help wisely; it will pacify, when personal feelings become angered. It may even lead you to desert some relative good for solid good . . . You realize when you are acting, it is simply Nature acting and finding force sending force forces through you. When you come to the realization that it is really Nature expressing itself through you, then you renounce your actions inwardly letting nature take care of the results you then reach the final stage when you can watch yourself playing its part in the work of the world without anticipation and without expectation. No more are you concerned with the future and its burdens. That concern’s Nature. Even when a man must take part in a war, fight, and slay (work in a competitive world) he fights and works impersonally, feeling neither hatred or ill will of any kind against the enemy; understanding that life no less demands good sense then it demands good will, and knowing that he is performing a duty ordained both by his destiny and by the social structure of which he performs his part in, or for his country.
The truth is you understand what really matters is to surrender one’s ego, personal successes, personal failures, with the knowledge that man did not create himself nor the environment in which he finds himself therefore praise or blame or take undue credit or blame for his personal actions. He acts, with full realization, he acts within the limits of his own creation, within the creation of Nature as a whole; within the framework of what has preceded him. I.e., the “self-made man” in business. Just as there is no “self-made man” in business there is no “self-made man in the world” – only a product of creation in Nature – and one does what is given one to do – not with the sense that “This, I alone all by myself, have done”. Because no single bit of creation has, “This or that, good or evil, all by itself has done.”
Instead, you work and do within the Nature which is in you, the course you must follow – and once this is understood completely, one is eased from the deadly burden of belief that man alone is responsible to himself alone – or that he is his own creator, or controller complete of his own destiny. My successes my failures my foolishnesses or wisdoms, as they appeared to the eyes of my fellow man, are not truly mine. They are the flow of life and Nature and creation through me as a vessel, a part of creation itself.
The terrible responsibility of self, when this is understood; the burden of carrying one’s own weight as though one created the world in all its myriad forms and requirements, is taken away. One just does one’s part as one understands it within one’s self without too much concern as to results. The results we have no particular measure for. Only Creation alone knows whether what we do is one thing or another.
Usually we are never conscious of the results of our actions and only occasionally do we get glimpses of the part we play in our walk through life.
Margaret Vincent, measured by Blanche’s precise world, can only have one label – “a misfit” or “a fool”. Yet there is more living in Margaret then Blanche could possibly comprehend.
Note: This entry in the notebook is actually dated 11/14/56 but was probably mid-dated at the time.
