Saturday, January 20, 2024
To get at what’s essential – that’s tough in a world fraught with what’s nonessential. In the Tao Te Ching, the words Lao Tzu used for the inessential is The 10,000 things. He was writing this ancient text 2,500 years ago. In those days, 10,000 things was unfathomable. In today’s world, the nonessential amounts to The 1,000,000,000,000 things – that’s one trillion in digits.
J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the Harry Potter series was noted as saying that “Failure is stripping away the inessential.” I cannot tell you how much truth that contains until you have to figure it out for yourself. We are swept up by what is unimportant, and we’re losing precious time. The first place to “clean house” is the waste in the mind. The mind is directing all sorts of thoughts about nothing, creating all sorts of fear about nothing, and leading us into a frenzy of activity that amounts to nothing. We are all caught in a whirlwind of garbage.
What is essential is what is necessary. Can you define this for yourself? What does it take to give you peace of mind, contentment, and restfulness? For me, it takes a relaxed, submissive focused mind. It takes a mind that’s not agitated and worked up, but that is neutral – open, clear, and settled. It takes a body that is rested, strong, light, healthy, and limber. And it takes a loss of self in the union of time and space. What’s essential is hardly describable, yet worth the effort to understand. Stop being consumed in the inconsequential and be consumed in what’s significant – peace, equanimity, and faith. I can’t tell you where there is waste in your life, but you can. There is more than the one trillion things, but you have to strip away what’s inessential.