Simplicity

It seems to be that those truly spiritual figures down through history have always lived rather simply, and they advocated a simple way of life because that allows what they stand for to come out, and it isn’t distracted by a lot of the complexities of life.


Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our theme for today is simplicity, and I suppose the theme has a lot to do with a better way of approaching life. I remember reading Henry David Thoreau and reading excerpts from Walden Pond, and one of the statements that he made stays with me. The essence of that statement had to do with when I reach the end of my life I don’t want to look back and come to the conclusion that I have not really, truly lived, and I think that has a lot to do with what Alice Bailey says, too. Alice Bailey is the founder of the Lucis Trust organization, and she wrote twenty-four volumes of literature and all of the dialogue that you hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, as does this thought: “Simplicity is the way of soul growth. Be simple.” How can we become simple? 

Sarah: When we talk about simplicity as the way of soul growth, we’re talking about the marshaling of one’s forces and the directing of one’s energies in a unified way. It’s the opposite of the complex living that characterizes so much of society today, where people have more than they can possibly handle in terms of commitments, obligations, interests and activities. I think a lot of people sense that it’s just getting kind of crazy. Not only is it kind of crazy, it also shuts out the quiet still voice of the soul. There are a lot of descriptions of this inner voice that express its simplicity. It’s still, it’s quiet, it’s a single note, you could say; it’s lost in today’s world. When we are told to be simple, we’re asked to pare down our life—as Thoreau said so beautifully—to the essentials. Figure out what you really value, what’s really important to you, and let go of all the rest. 

Dale: Being simple can be a consciously chosen way of life. Just as you said, pare it down to the essentials. This is one who is able to ignore and detach from all those complexities that make up one’s life. 

Sarah: Well, certainly the religious orders have always understood this, not only  Christianity but many faiths. When one joins a religious order, one undergoes voluntarily to live a simple life. The monastery or the convent or the lamasery or whatever, requires that people dress simply, eat simply, use their time in simple ways. We don’t have to go that far, I don’t think, to cultivate this simplicity. But it is a kind of a touchstone that we can measure our lives against. 

Robert: Well, “simple minded” certainly may have a negative connotation to it, but when you really think of it, some of the greatest spiritual figures were very simple in their approach to life. Can you tell us something about that approach to life which some of the greatest spiritual figures have? Was it often simple, so to speak? 

Sarah: I think the kind of simplicity that is being described there is the lack of complexity of psychological temperament, for one thing. In fact, when you think about it, a psychological complex is a problem, an obsession or the focusing of energies, sometimes in a submerged, unconscious way, a fixation on something. When you have a complex, psychologically you have a problem. The simple psychological state is one that’s unified. The person is not complicated. They are not fragmented in their mental and psychological makeup. They are who they appear to be. There’s no delineation between the real inner person and what is displayed outwardly, they are free of hypocrisy, free of dissembling. They are pure in that sense and simple and open. An example might be someone like the Dalai Lama. I think he’s probably someone who’s quite uncomplicated and yet very deep, obviously, in the spiritual awareness that he has, but there’s a lack of many different sides to his psychological makeup that makes him healthy and whole. 

Dale: Certainly. Great spiritual figures, for example the Buddha and the Christ, of course, and many of the old Christian Mystics and perhaps even Gandhi. Could you say Gandhi advocated this kind of thing? 

Sarah: He certainly advocated simplicity, wearing just a loincloth and weaving, and a vegetarian diet. 

Dale: Yes, so it seems to be that those truly spiritual figures down through history have always lived rather simply and they advocated a simple way of life, because that allows what they stand for to come out, and it isn’t distracted by a lot of the complexities of life. 

Sarah: But I suppose what’s even more important than one’s physical circumstances about the way we live our lives is the simplicity that we’re supposed to cultivate mentally. We’re told in the writings of Alice Bailey to think with simplicity, cultivate simplicity of thought, and remember that bewilderment and worry about conditions and people and the general puzzled, suspicious, wondering attitude towards life indicates a lot of mental activity, but not much real spiritual understanding. On the level of the soul things are very clear, very defined and founded on a few essential principles. It’s said that “The simplicity of the soul opens the way into Shamballa”, into the way where the Will of God is known: “the simplicity of the soul.” Our innermost being is not overly complicated, not given to anxiety, not wondering or bewildered or torn between this and that. It knows who it is. It’s love and it’s light and it’s spiritual will; those three things make up our true essential being. Everything else that we’ve added on, layer upon layer, is like the husks that disguise the corn, and they all have to be stripped away when one develops spiritually. This is part of the process of spiritual development, and it’s why it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a long time to peel away all those layers of the complexity of the many different selves that we’ve cultivated over the aeons, to find out who we really are. 

Robert: How can one live simply in this increasingly complex world? I think that would be something I’d like to know about. 

Sarah: Well, to begin with, I came across a quote the other day that indicates this is not a new desire, this urge to live a simplified life in an increasingly complicated world. I found a quote from a Japanese poet back in the 1600s who was complaining that “the ancient simplicity is gone, that the people today are satisfied with nothing but finery.” (laughter) 

Robert: Oh boy! He didn’t know what complex was. He should have waited around a few hundred years. 

Sarah: He’d probably be appalled today. Then there were the Spartans of ancient Greece, who cultivated the simplicity that led to denial of a lot of the physical comforts of life; I’m certainly not advocating that. I think the modern world has brought a lot of blessings in terms of physical comfort, which frees us to enjoy the more abstract areas of life and takes our attention off the physical plane survival. But the complexity of modern living that I think disturbs so many of us is that there’s no stillness, there’s no silence, there’s no time to really get in touch with one’s inner inclinations and orientation. The computer, the media, everything is speaking to us. 

Dale: Yes, and I think one of the first things that one can do is try to develop simplicity in one’s thinking. Develop simplicity in your thought life, which will eventually lead to a simplicity in the outer life. If you’re thinking more simply about simple ways of living and thinking and believing, then this eventually begins to modify your outer existence. 

Sarah: So, are you saying don’t be suspicious, don’t worry, don’t….? 

Dale: Yes, it involves concentration, perhaps more one-pointed thinking, developing a sense of purpose and direction in your life and letting go of non-essentials, conserving your energy and reducing the busyness of thought. As you begin to do this and develop in your inner thought life, you’re developing a new pattern of living, a new pattern of thinking, and this eventually works out in the way you want to shape your outer physical world. 

Sarah: So, no more multitasking. (laughter) 

Dale: Absolutely not! (laughter) You can’t drive and talk on the phone at the same time.  

Sarah: I see people do that and put on their makeup while they drive! There are other techniques that can come in: using one’s time in ways that don’t leave one constantly feeling rushed and frenzied. I think a lot of people don’t realize that that’s not necessary to enjoy life, that you can pare down your interests and your free time to a few things that give you pleasure and creative development, without trying to do everything. I was reading a letter from a student in our school the other day. She was having a hard time continuing in our school of spiritual training. She wanted to keep on with the work, but she also wanted to learn Italian. She wanted to learn to play the clarinet. She wanted to follow through on a couple of creative projects that had been on the back burner. She was working in a new job and she wanted to take a yoga class or something. Well, clearly, the woman has to learn to make choices. You can’t do everything, and yet I think the cry today is “you can have it all!” No. Only if you’re satisfied with a very poor effort at everything. Then you can try to have it all, but why would you want to? 

Dale: I think another way of bringing simplicity into your life is to study the examples of simplicity, and I’m thinking of examples of beauty. Beauty is very much related to simplicity. Beauty comes through simplicity, especially in the arts and in design work. The Japanese are very creative at this. They’ve done haiku poetry and their design of the flowers and that sort of thing. Their whole way of life is more geared towards the beauty that comes through simplicity. If you can bring more of that into your life, then you see how simplicity can be applied in a very creative way. 

Sarah: I suppose behind this sense of increasing complexity in the world is something that’s happening on an evolutionary level that’s probably ultimately good. I think that humanity is learning to handle energy in a new way, that the communications era indicates that we are being forced to learn to handle more and more knowledge, more and more light. Look at how the media, the Internet, the computer have just expanded our awareness, not only of the planet, but of our fellow human beings in an incredible way, and that’s wonderful. But it shouldn’t negate the essential simplicity by which we live our own lives. Somehow there has to be an incorporation of greater spiritual light in the sense of understanding and knowledge without making the personal life so fragmented and so disrupted. Another phenomenon that’s underway is the growing urbanization of the world, and I think again, humanity is responding to this evolutionary impulse that is bringing people in many parts of the world from the countryside, with its more simplified way of living, toward the great urban centres. Poverty is driving them toward urban centres and they leave their rural, pastoral way of life and have to adapt to an urban, complex way of living. There are a lot of problems in this and there’s a lot culturally that’s probably being lost, but perhaps ultimately there’s some evolutionary impulse behind it that will work out for the better. I don’t know. I’m just raising it as a possibility to keep in mind so that we don’t just bemoan the past. 

Dale: It’s interesting you mentioned about the urbanization. That’s true, there are more pouring into the cities and the cities are growing, but I think also there is the reversal of that. Once they’ve lived in the cities and they’re fed up with all the complexities and the difficulties of living in an urban setting, there’s a big tendency to want to go back to the land, to move out into the countryside for the sake of the children or whatever, so you also see that movement. Of course, they want to take all of their creature comforts with them, they don’t want to go back to the old simple life as it really was. Back in the 1960s, they tried that with the development of the communes and back to the ashrams and communal living, which was kind of a fad at the moment. So, I think you have both the rushing into the urban areas and a lot of people trying to leave it. 

Robert:  I couldn’t help but think of Krishnamurti before when you were speaking about the spiritual greats and their approach to life and insisting on simplifying life. I remember something I was reading from Krishnamurti — I mean volumes have been written about what happiness is — yet I’m reading his literature not too long ago and he comes out with the statement: “Happiness is something to do, something to love and something to hope for.” It was so simple, but when I thought about it, it made a lot of sense to me. Why is simplicity necessary for the spiritual life? 

Sarah: Well, as I said before, the writings of Alice Bailey say the simplicity of the soul opens the way to Shambala. Another term for spiritual development is initiation and initiation is simplification, we’re told. People might think that spiritual development, spiritual growth, or initiation would lead to greater and greater complexity, but in fact the opposite is true. Simplification in the sense that, as it’s said in a very esoteric writing, “The solar Angel collects himself and scatters not his force.” In other words, the soul on its own plane scatters not its force. It knows what its purpose is. It knows what its mission is, and it organizes its energies and does not just scatter them freely. That gives us a sense of how initiation is simplification. One of the problems of the modern world, I think, is that we mistake complexity for profundity, when in fact simplicity can be deeply profound. 

Dale: Right. Here again I go back to the illustration of the arts. I think some of the most profound artistic expressions are found in simple lines or in music, the simple melody, the simple harmonies and of course in the simple designs of certain buildings; that sort of thing. 

Sarah: Again, it’s an awareness of the principles of the essentials that makes that art so compelling. It’s not wasting its energy in a lot of different directions; it has a few essential principles that it wants to express—whether it’s a visual design or a piece of music—and it orients everything toward that, and so should we live our lives in a way that concentrates our energies and our time to what our real goals are instead of trying to just divert ourselves. Maybe that’s what lies behind a lot of the complexity of modern life. It’s a diversion from facing who we really are. 

Dale: I think that’s one of the values of studying the Ageless Wisdom, which is what the essentials of the Alice Bailey teachings are. In the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom, you find this great simplicity in the broad outline. It does have complexity if you look at the details, but the simplicity of, say, the Great Invocation which outlines the blueprint of the plan. Just those three energies, the light and love and the will to good, are a very simple outline of a very complex plan that’s working out in the world, and it’s all laid out in this Great Invocation which you sound at the end of each program. So, if you listen to those words and the simplicity to see how the Ageless Wisdom can bring through this tremendous body of teaching that is very simple and beautiful in the way it’s laid out, but also it’s very complex when you look at the details. 

Sarah: Well, you can get lost in the details, but what you said reminds me of that saying that God is a geometrician, meaning that the essential dimensions of God’s plan for the world can be expressed in geometrical forms, which are inherently simple and clear cut. I think it’s this awareness again of basic principles that organizes all the energies in a unified way: that’s simplicity. Every year at Thanksgiving—this country which has this great love of material wealth—we sing, in the Shaker folk song, that “it’s a gift to be simple, it’s a gift to be free.” Behind our gratitude for life should be a cultivation of simplicity. 

Robert: Well, I guess to reach the highest potential of the self, which is soul growth, simplicity is absolutely necessary then. That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with the world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words. 

Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation

(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.) 

(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod) 

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