"I never thought of that!"
How unintended consequences wreak havoc on our expectations concerning the connection between intention and responsibility.
I've been looking for ways to illuminate the space hidden behind our expectation that the only way to be responsible is to plan and then act out our intentions. Everyone I know, including myself, has had a hard time dealing with the vertiginous leap away from our habitual sense of cause and effect, planning and implementation, desire and control; any of the ways we customarily respond to the gap between what we find and what we would like to see. Yet all of the results of my research and meditation lead to this conclusion:
If control is an illusion and intention is an expectation of control then action without intention is NOT a step away from effectiveness, but the path towards merging our actions with conditions as they exist.
It appears that this is the discipline that leads us to Emergence, to Action that Emerges from Conditions Mediated by Mind and not just as a reflection of our conditioning.
If there is a change we can make that grows out of what we have, a change, the desire for a change, that is not simply a wish to jump out of our skins or to force our perceptions to match our expectations while maintaining a blind obstinacy to the disjunctions this uncovers, then this appears to be the way to get there. More precisely, to BE there.
Action without intention, or the suspension of striving is not non-action. It is not "passivity." It does not preclude any particular path of action at all. What it does require is a profound shift in attitude.
This chafes many people who see themselves as "practical." My answer to them is the "equation" highlighted above. It is an E=MC² for Emergence. Follow it along, prove or disprove its statements, and arrive at a result. This isn't "mystical." It's eminently practical. It is a path, the only one I've found, that leads beyond futility. That it requires an "internal" adjustment instead of pushing for redoubled efforts to gain an external result is a sign that it is a way out of the futile, deeply-rutted, and dead-end path of intention and the striving after control.
Looking at a rusted and frozen gyroscope for the first time, it would be almost impossible to deduce that it was an instrument that maintains balance. A spooled-up gyroscope insists on what it is with every attempt to move it or change its direction. The same is true here. The attitude of action without striving or intention is hard to fathom from outside, but if it has spooled-up and its dynamic properties have been unleashed, it cannot be mistaken for anything else. It is fundamentally a way to spin-up into a dynamic relationship with the actual in which equilibrium is maintained by the dynamics of our perspective. It is a direct coupling of strength with balance.
Let's look at these two terms. Strength differs from power. Power is an accumulation of force that is directed by intention at conditions seen as problematical with the end of winning control. Strength is an ability, not a repository. It is the capacity to withstand as well as project force. It's relationship to the world is conservative in the sense that it maintains balance first and foremost before any other action. Balance is not stasis. It is not a static state, but a dynamic condition. It is a prerequisite to wielding a force – Archimedes and his lever – and it is a prerequisite to the clarity of perception we need to make judgements on how force should be used.
A dynamic that maintains the connection between strength and balance acts like a gyroscope in that its actions are self-correcting and don't require an outside "control." This is what makes it reliable. It's what makes our physical skeletal-muscular-nervous system's balance reliable. There is no "I" that "oversees" its operation. We simply trust it. We can develop our capacity and increase our trust, or we can abuse it and lose trust, but we cannot control it.
This attitude of clarity towards the relationship between intention and responsibility is no more a filter to what our ultimate actions might be than a gyroscopic guidance system is to a craft's navigation. It doesn't tell us what we should do, it only provides us with a stable platform from which judgements can be made with the benefits of the clarity its "balance" has given us. This seems like an abdication of control, but only if we insist that the possibility of control is real. Try to control a gyroscope, say by holding its rotor firmly in hand, and it will not work. Set it spinning, let it go, and there it is!
The world does not require a formulation of the properties of gravity to work, erosion, the flight of birds, the pounce of a Tiger, all just use gravity. We do too, unless we are outside the comfort zones of our conditioning. Then we gain comfort from Newton's Law. The same is true here. The reality behind this principle just is. But for many of us its delineation is a comfort as we turn away from conditioning that has proven untrustworthy. In the end, practice establishes, or restores, an innate trust in our relationship to the actuality of existence in this particular and we don't need postulates to maintain it.
Take this, as strange as it may seem, as a rationalist, even scientific approach to finding a path out of the dead-end of rationalist, scientific conditioning. I'm not by nature "mystical." I have glimpses into a world that is unbounded by categories and analyses, but my habits are definitely constrained by expectations of such "answers." I need help developing my trust in what Krishnamurti and Bohm call Mind, in developing habits that promote Being instead of Striving. In the end, or more precisely in a mode of being that does not recognize means and ends as valid justifications, there is no longer the need for these "explanations." But to get there from this particular place we find ourselves, this process seems helpful.