Hi Rainbow – (“Rainbows bring the promise that the troubles of today will surely come to pass, hold strong in your faith and vision and the rainbow will bring fresh beginnings and new prosperity” – what lead you to choosing the name?)

Thought you might find the following interesting. Its about how creating intentions can work against us. The trick it seems is learning to ‘Do by not Doing’

The moment you set your foot on the path of liberation, you are apt to find that all your karmic creditors will come to your door. And that’s why it’s often said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga suddenly get sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead and all kind of ghastly things happen. That’s because they served notice that they were going to do this […] Even if you serve notice privately on yourself that suddenly you’re going to drop it all, already the Devil knows–because who do you think the Devil is? ( We are our own devil  – So we work for that which no work is required) – Alan Watts

The following is the full explanation by Alan

“It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means ‘action’ or ‘doing’ in Sanskrit, so that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, ‘it is your own doing.’

In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma. Nishkama means ‘without passion’ or ‘without attachment,’ and karma means ‘action.’ So, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the ’round,’ and keeps you being reincarnated.

Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment. In other words, a person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to be ‘cleared up’ if you’re just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things.

The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn’t let the devil know, because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you’re going to escape from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too much, and you make a New Year’s resolution that during this coming year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drink-less days. That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won’t be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, ‘Just today I’m not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we’ll go back.’ Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, ‘Oh, just another day, let’s try, that’s all.’ And the next day, you say, ‘Oh, one more day won’t make much difference.’ So, you only do it for the moment, and you don’t let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day.

Of course, there’s something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying ‘Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth’ is just this. That is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel’s book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying ‘Now.’

There’s a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously – this means you escape karma and the devil.

So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation of being the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students.

If some teacher or some guru says, ‘Really, this isn’t difficult at all – it’s perfectly easy,’ some people will say, ‘Oh, he’s not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult.’ When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that’s very weird and rigid, people think, ‘Now there is the thing. That man means business.’ So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students, whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that’s the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that’s what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle.

So, the question naturally arises, ‘Isn’t it cheating?’ When, in any game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. ‘You beat me by means that weren’t fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you’re not playing fair.’ So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the latter are faster.

This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, ‘The difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witted people.’ In other words, can you find a way that sees into your own nature – that sees into the Tao immediately.” ~Alan Watts..