Yeats, a vision, Rumi, a corpse, and ambition

"The loss of control over thought comes toward the end;" declares Yeats, "first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation..."(A Vision, p 268)

To revel in the revelation, is to find peace in the capitulation of all undertakings, all talents, all goals, all dreams. It is to recognize that these are at times better fulfilled in their abdication, than in their completion.

Rumi blends the complementary traits of incomprehension and apathy into one of his poems, stating: "When intelligence leaves its castle/ and walks through your lane,/ it doesn't know where or who it is./ It sits on the ground and wobbles."

In the absence of understanding, and in the absence of desire to participate in the absence of wonder, nothing can be done. Nothing need be done. You want nothing to be done. You just 'are'. You exist! That is enough. That is plenty. That is too much. Who could believe it?

Yeats relates another similar finding, stating, "The mind deprived of its obstacle can create no more and nothing is left but... unrelated facts and aimless mind, the burning out that awaits all voluntary effort." (A Vision, p189)

Now we can perhaps see why it is necessary to be apathetic, for, after all, the word 'apathetic' is (despite our active culture's spurious intent to evolve this word into a pejorative) the opposite of 'pathetic'; to be a-pathetic is to realize the pitiful rewardlessness of man's ideas and creations which lead us only further and further away from our true, free, miraculous selves.^{^[7]}

This is a realization (i.e. that we must be dis-passionate to that which takes us away from ourselves) and an actualization which few people have the level of indifference required to bring to its full potential. Just as it is said that the most difficult posture to bring to perfection in Hatha Yoga is the 'Corpse pose', and that is because it is the only position in which one must do ...nothing!

It is only after we realize 'nothing can be done'- that all our actions are futile, that we have beaten our heads relentlessly upon the wrong walls, that we are salmon who have fought their way up the wrong river, and have not the strength to return to the sea- only then shall we become the 'nothing' and 'nobody' enough to receive the benefits of perfect apathy; if, epistemologically, we have given up 'reason', so as to embrace the unreasonable, then we must also take the ontological leap of giving up ‘the reason’ we do things so as to purposely dwell in the perilous region of purposelessness.

[7] It is for this reason that the prefix of ‘ambi-tion’ denotes a bifurcation, or ‘twoness’, which implies that a person with ambition is pulled in two opposite directions: the natural, internal pull, and the unnatural, worldly, external pull. It is this latter pull which separates us from ‘the peace which passeth all understanding’, for, as it is said, ‘no man can serve two masters’ (i.e. the internal universe, or the external universe). Either we serve the still point within ourselves, or the ever-changing phantasmagoria without. The choice is ours. But since 'the kingdom of heaven lies within', it is simply common sense to reverse our vision from the dancing show, and return to the still projector.