Journey To The Center Of Our Ego, Part 5

Shawn Tedrow

In the previous posts, I laid an arching overview and foundation of my musings about the book, A Journey to the Center of the Earth. The following posts will consist of a few small nuggets that I am finding while dredging through this book. Who knows, maybe this is just fool’s gold that I am panning.

The story begins on May 24, 1863, with Professor Lidenbrock rushing home to begin examining his recent purchase of an original runic manuscript.

While skimming through this ancient writing, Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, discover a coded note, written in runic script. They translate it into Latin letters revealing a hidden message written in a bazaar code. Lidenbrock tries to decipher the code but he is met with meaningless puzzling words.

Professor Lidenbrock decides to lock everyone in the house and force himself and the others (Axel, and the maid, Martha) to go without food until he cracks the code.

Axel eventually discovers the answer while fanning himself with the text.

This is a wonderful picture of the two essential energies, human egoic effort, and grace, meeting together with unexpected synergies, which give rise to realization. Here we witness a principal law of spiritual-physics at work, with the action of doing, working in unison, with the inactiveness of non-doing.

Professor Lidenbrock represents the act of doing. He exhibits the spiritual commitment and the passion it takes to get results. He ambitiously decides to lock everyone in the room and go without food until realization is experienced. He said, “I will neither sleep nor eat until I have found it out”. That is real commitment! We all need that type of passionate drive in our spiritual life. It is no surprise that the title of the second chapter is, “A Mystery to be Solved at Any Cost.”

Axel represents the practice of non-doing. He effortlessly, cracks the code while laid-back relaxing, fanning himself with the text. Axel’s words describing his experience were:

I wanted air. Unconsciously I fanned myself with the bit of paper, the back and front of which successively came before my eyes. What was my surprise when, in one of those rapid revolutions, at the moment when the back was turned to me I thought I caught sight of the Latin words "craterem," "terrestre," and others. A sudden light burst in upon me; these hints alone gave me the first glimpse of the truth; I had discovered the key to the cipher.

One might conclude: why put forth the effort into what the Professor was doing, when realization took place through the no-efforts of Alex?

The answer is; Alex would have never been in the room fanning himself, without the determination and craze of the Professor being expressed through locking themselves in that room. The two diametrical opposite energies were working in concert with each other.

Many teachings try and eliminate spiritual hard work as if any effort at all, is THE problem, right from the get go. In other words, non-doing should be the first and only steps you should ever take. The moment you get involved with any doing, you are walking in egoic darkness!

I contend that this spiritual concept is a misunderstanding of the many collective ancient teachings. It is putting the cart before the horses. It is putting the Buddha under the Bodhi tree and circumventing all the needed experiential journeys that the Buddha went through to arrive at a state of alchemic receptibility. I call this thinking, New-Age lazy Tao teaching.

You would think that Alex would have embraced this New-Age lazy Tao teaching considering his personal experience, but he witnessed firsthand the benefits reaped from the fiery unrestrained efforts, that the Professor had sewn.

Later on in this story Alex says this:

My uncle's rage knew no bounds. Heaven never sends unmixed grief, and for Professor Lidenbrock, there was a satisfaction in store proportioned to his desperate anxieties.

In other words, the Professor was rewarded proportionally to his passionate efforts that he put into it.

The life of non-doing is realized through the efforts of doing. One might think, why not just jump straight into the passivity of non-doing, and bypass doing, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

It is through the chopping block of doing, where the doer eventually loses self’s efforts, and then the non-doing of Tao- nature, spontaneously arises.

Only Tao is authentic spontaneous non-doing. Our short-cut efforts of non-doing are from the ego. It is the ego artificially “acting” like the non-doing Tao.

You have heard it said, “practice non-doing”, but I say, “practice doing”, then the non-doing-Tao-expression, from the effortless fanning of Alex, will appear. When this occurs, you are sitting under the Bodhi tree with the Buddha.

You can check out Shawn's other musings here.