We have been running around far too much. It’s all right; we’ve been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good things.

But as Aristotle pointed out long ago – and this is one of the good things about Aristotle.

He said ‘the goal of action is contemplation.’ In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what’s it all about?

Especially when people are busy because they think they’re going somewhere, that they’re going to get something and attain something.

There’s quite a good deal of point to action if you know you’re not going anywhere. If you act like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then you’re really not going anywhere, you’re just doing pure action.

But if you act with a thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at someplace where everything will be alright.

Then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call ‘samsara’, the round, or rat-race of birth and death, because you think you’re going to go somewhere.

You’re already there.

And it is only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he doesn’t act frantically with the thought that he’s going to get somewhere.

He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see, where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a destination, but because the walking itself is great.

The walking itself is the meditation.

But the point is that one can not act creatively, except on the basis of stillness. Of having a mind that is capable from time to time of stopping thinking.