Keep Reading

We are born with a sacred task that calls out to us always. It calls out in expectation; “profound and childlike and unchanging”.¹ The task both requires you to have and to give access to conditions for attention.

Injustice obstructs attention and the person is forced to submerge themselves into the refuge of the collective. We must have access to the conditions to step away from the ‘we’ and embrace the ‘I’. The only thing in the world, says Weil, that can rob us of the power to say ‘I’ is extreme affliction.²

“For every person there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one’s time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence. At the same time the person needs warmth.”³

Simone Weil

What “correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.” Says Weil.⁴

When there is injustice there is a cry, arising “from the depths of a human heart” to say “why am I being hurt.”⁵ The cry is hindered by falsehood inherent in discourse and the seduction of finding an answer.

For some finding an answer is merely seductive and avoidance is a right to avoid suffering, to avoid effort at all costs, or to be selective with which obstacles we decide to embrace. For others answers are necessary; for the price of moral and spiritual numbness physical survival is bought.

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”⁶

Simone Weil

If an answer is sought and held as truth, it is static and shrouded in the tension it takes to protect it. If the answer is a dam, it is a force at odds with the natural course of water. It is a force that must hold fast the reservoir of the unknown lest we drown.

“Ignorance of the mind-body processes causes false view of a soul or a self, a person or a being, an ‘I’ or a ‘you’; this false view causes attachment to arise. It is because we do not rightly understand this duel process in its true nature that we consider it as a person or a being, a soul or a self.”⁷

The image created to put us at ease is in opposition to truth and derives duality and we are attached to it.

“The oppressed have an internalized image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”⁸

Paulo Freire

Attachment is static, it is born of fear and requires avoidance to be so. There is a deceptive inertia in the right to be free and it lies in the word right. To understand the mind-body processes is to pay attention to what is and reveal goodness. Where injustice impedes this we can find our sacred task.

“In those who have suffered too many blows … that place in the heart from which the infliction of evil evokes a cry of surprise may seem to be dead. But it is never quiet dead; it is simply unable to cry out any more. It has sunk into a state of dumb and ceaseless lamentation. And even in those who still have the power to cry out, the cry hardly every expresses itself, either, inwardly or outwardly, in coherent language.”⁹

Simone Weil

There are moments of attention for all of us and in these waking moments it is our duty and our splendor to cultivate freedom by following obstacles with care and attention, by witnessing goodness and nurturing gratitude. No matter how small the chance is, taking it is stoking an essential flame.

“This obligation has no foundation, but only a verification in the common consent accorded by the universal conscience. It finds expression in some of the oldest written texts which have come down to us. It is recognized by everybody without exception in every single case where it is not attacked as a result of interest or passion. And it is in relation to it that we measure our progress.”¹⁰

Simone Weil

We should project the light of our attention equally on both good and evil; when we do, the good gains the day. “There lies the essential grace. And it is the definition, the criterion of good.”¹¹

1. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
2. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
3. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
4. Weil, S. (2021). Need For Roots. S.L.: Penguin Books. ↩︎
5. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
6. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
7. Janakabhivamsa Sayadaw U (1995). Vipassana Meditation. ↩︎
8. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩︎
9. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
10. Weil, S. (2021). Need For Roots. S.L.: Penguin Books. ↩︎
11. Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎