This impeccability in action is part of the Solomonic wisdom too. With timing and intention as our allies, we can build action strategies on the knowledge that love and wisdom are dynamic turning point processes. This lets us develop skills for engagement with life that make us suprisingly (even magically) effective in the world.
(Ecc. 9:13-15)
But we can only do certain things at certain times and not at others.
The sensibility that "there is a time for every purpose" is a core Solomonic concept. When we have the capacity to "surf" the swells of the temporal world in all their variety we are empowered.
(Ecc. 3:1-8)
By living and loving with attention to the basic mystery of timing, we are coming to understand meaningful coincidence, synchronicity, in a Jungian fashion, but with navigable nodes and nexus points in time that can be invoked, induced consciously, manifested with properly timed intentions seeded into crucial turning points at the right moments. But not always, not reliably so, because dukkha is here too. By seeking to penetrate the mysteries of timing by close attention to the flow -- by bearing witness to synchronicity -- we learn to live in such a way as to pare ourselves down to an ego that doesn't make hard claims or seek entitlements or dominate the action with quirks of personality. We attain a "least operable self," but a self nonetheless, still effective, capable of choice, skillful in means, but not bound to false illusions.
The Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth century founder of Hasidism, was also deeply involved with this approach. Subtle timing enters into almost every tale told about him -- and the timing, when taken up with proper intention, created great and seemingly magical effects from small and even trivial actions. A typical tale follows:
(In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov)
Time is of the essence in this story. From the moment the arrendator's son is placed in jail and he seeks out the Besht, days and hours are passing. He finally catches up with the Besht at a specific moment in a specific place. This is what the Besht has to deal with. Why not earlier or later? Why not somewhere else? The Besht's schedule, already dominated by synchronistic occurrences, made it so. The Besht says follow me home and we'll do something, but before he gets home he learns or surmises that the son is in prison and recognizes that the crucial turning is near. Despite his own request, he doesn't wait until he gets home. He immerses himself in the river. He clears his head, changes his consciousness, allows him to focus his intention. He tells the man to go to the master's house. This involves returning to the village from which he fled and showing up in front of the master's window. The master sees him and is thrown into a fright. Why frightened? Because he thinks, would he have come back unless he had some magic with which to threaten him? So the son is released, the debt canceled. The Besht gets wagon load of chickens and flour into the bargain. What exactly did the Besht do? Nothing much. He listened to a story. He took a dip in the river. He said go to the master's house right now. No instructions as to what to say when he got there were needed. The timing of the surprise was the effective element. The Besht surmised the master's frame of mind and did the least he needed to do to secure the result he intended.
The Besht's character is drawn in angular fashion in these tales; he is brief, laconic, he doesn't waste words, he doesn't explain himself. He's not grandiloquent or mysterious. He stays out of the limelight. By not being full of himself he flows with the time. The wonders he seems to accomplish, properly interpreted, are not outside the pale of plausibility -- they come from his human heartedness.
To know and then do what the time demands requires a self-effacing attitude -- an illusionless stance -- it requires getting out of one's own way. And a yet it is a stance in which a sharpened, reduced self is brightly present. It has to choose among alternatives, to choose quickly, almost spontaneously, flowing with the needs, intensely involved with those needs, involved with community, involved with the signal events, involved but always "waiting for ripeness," (as Valentine Smith the wisdom figure in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land repeatedly declares.)
But the limiting case of pure selflessness can never be reached. If you reached it, if you more or less served as a channel that passed intentions from the world to the world, you would be selfless in those moments, but in being so you would have lost your freedom, your creative spark. You would pass on what came to you along the causal chain, to which you would be attuned and ready to respond. But in such a world there could be no human freedom, because if it is possible to frame intentions at all, they couldn't be selfless. If you could frame selfless intentions there would be no freedom -- and without freedom it makes no sense to talk about intention.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)