Resist Without Resistance

Aesop, Franz Hartmann, William Quan Judge · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages assembling three sources on one idea, each clearly marked: a fable from Aesop's Fables: A New Revised Version from Original Sources (1884), a single line from Franz Hartmann's With the Adepts, and a set of extracts from W.Q. Judge's Letters That Have Helped Me on how to cope with bad karma.

The fable states the problem. A very large oak, uprooted by the wind and thrown across a stream, falls among some reeds and wonders aloud how they, being light and weak, are not entirely crushed by such strong winds; they reply that he fights and contends with the wind and is destroyed, while they bend before the least breath of air and therefore remain unbroken. Hartmann supplies the objection in one line — that one element necessary for the development of strength is resistance — so that the file is not simply recommending passivity. Judge's extracts work out the difference. In a time of upturning the wise man waits, bending himself like the reed so that the blast may blow over his head. The phrase the file is named for is then put as a question — do you know what it is to resist without resistance? — and answered in terms of expenditure: too great an outlay of strength or fortitude is not wise, because whoever fights is drawn into the swirl of events and thoughts instead of leaning back on the great ocean of the Self which is never moved. The practical counsel that follows is about other people's quarrels rather than one's own. No one should be carrying information to another, since it fans a flame; better to retire into one's own silence and leave all others in the hands of karma, which takes care of its own; better still to have no side at all, since by not looking too closely at another's errors one leaves room for the whole thing to be cleared away. The plan of quiet passive resistance, or of lying under the wind, is commended as the right response to all attacks.

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