BlissQuest: The Alchemy of Action

Painting by Marcy Hall

Listening to right now: Some Bollywood. Here is one of my all time favorite scenes.

Today's Bliss Formula: Learning that there are people out there who are what they claim to be. In particular, the Kundalini yoga community is filled with loving people at the ready to aid in whatever way they can. I thank them.

Age does not confer wisdom. From the moment I met my partner, I knew she was one of those rare wise-ones. Everyone who meets her feels the same way. When I met her 14 years ago, she was only twenty-three.

No, you can be 80 and still have not made the leap to wisdom. So what really does it? What separates the wise from the ill- or even well-informed?

Wisdom, I think, is about knowing and then acting. You live what you know to be true. That is wise. You do not just store information in your brain to share with others. It affects your everyday actions.

So I came up with a brief way to remind myself of that:

Action is the alchemy by which knowledge becomes wisdom.

Thanks to the internet there is more than enough information out there. In seconds, you can have an answer to an inquiry that three decades ago could have taken weeks to discover. Yet, I do not feel surrounded by the wise.

Because an acting individual is an all too rare individual.

I think people do not have the tools with which to act on knowledge.

Or they go into a sort of information overload and wonder what meaning their personal actions could possibly have in the larger picture.

But it is only personal action that matters. Be the change, said Gandhi. (For more on that, go here.)

So what are the tools?

In every situation, they are different. And if you listen, really listen to the communication that is constantly coming at us from the larger universe, as Erich Schiffmann puts it in the quote yesterday, then you will know what to do.

All of the answers reside within you.

The first question might be "why am I not listening?"

Fear. It is almost always out of fear that we do not listen and then act. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change.

For instance, most of us know and believe that the earth is in trouble. But how many of us actually change our lives, "inconvenience" ourselves? And I'm not talking about using cloth bags at the grocery store. But we are more than glad to sit around talking about the problem, pointing fingers in blame, even running around like a Chicken Little.

Another example. There are people who know and believe that they are not meant for the 9 to 5 world of cubicles and the materialism they are perhaps using to compensate for their anger or sadness at that fact. They know they are meant to be creative humans, co-creating a better world. But it's scary to be so very different from everyone around you. So they stay right where they are, imagining a retirement that might never come.

Again. There are people who long to be writers or painters, but out of a fear of failure, they won't pick up a pen or a brush, blaming all the busyness -- for which they are ultimately responsible.

There are people who feel "empty," are depressed, long for some sort of relationship with the divine, but it is easier to ignore it or to take pills (and yes sometimes, but rarely, that is actually necessary). What would their friends think if they started to go to Church? Or they are just too lethargic to institute their own practice of daily yoga or prayer. Or they don't feel results immediately and so give up -- they have so much to do; how can they fit one more thing? And yet, it is possibly the most important thing of all.

And there is no such thing as "no time" -- you are in charge of your choices. And if your choices don't match your priorities, that is your fault, no one else's.

That is how simple (and yet difficult, yes) the "action" can be: picking up a pen, saying no to the cubicle, getting rid of one of your two or three cars, trying a new church, meditating for ten minutes in the morning.

And one action, I promise you, will lead to another.

What action scares you? What action are you avoiding? What kind of fear are you letting rule your life?