Principle 12 Accumulating Actions – Week 4 – 2025

December 25, 2025 

Principle 12. Accumulating Actions. Week 4

“Contradictory and unifying acts accumulate within you. If you repeat your acts of internal unity, then nothing can detain you.” 

Last Time: Inside and Outside.

This time: Changing Your Destiny.

This Week:

Since this is the fourth week devoted to considering this principle, we will as is our custom, focus on the future. We’ll try to understand how this principle applies to things that haven’t happened yet, but which we see or imagine taking shape. And we’ll consider how things might change if we find ways to apply the principle of accumulating action in an appropriate fashion. 

Looking toward the future, I consider how I imagine, or hope, or fear it will be, I take a moment to focus on discovering at least one situation where my old habits, and accumulated actions could once again lock me into self-defeating, or otherwise undesirable patterns. 

I will next consider at least one situation where my previous coherent actions could help me repeat that unitive pattern — producing a situation where my feelings, thoughts, and actions are all in agreement, and working together. 

 Importantly and often overlooked, this future that I imagine acts not only on how I feel my present situation, but it also changes how I recall the past, and how I imagined the future. In this way it even shapes my behaviour which in turn modifies my future and how I understand my past, and present. If that’s so then this present moment which seems so singular is like a complex braid of intertwining, multi-dimensional mutual influences.

How To:

It is easy to put off these mediations for a more suitable moment when I have more time or a more ideal environment, free of distractions or potential disturbances. As I’ve previously mentioned a few times, it’s my experience that these kinds of daily meditations seem to benefit from being very brief. I find it helps them stay as focused, as possible. I mention it again because I’ve found it a useful approach and one that many seem to find counter intuitive.  

Try it and tell me how it works for you.

 Making the effort to look at the principles from these varying perspectives (past, present, future) is intended to help us find new insights into the principles, new understandings about them. Another tool we can use for that purpose are the games of the week. 

Feeling Playful?

Then this week we can play 

The Game of Explain It!

This week’s game is simple: explain your basic understanding of the principle. Maybe, you slip it into a conversation. Maybe, you simply announce your intention, e.g. “We are studying these principles of behaviour, let me tell you my take on one we have been discussing this week”. 

Of course, it’s always best if you can engage another player (or players). So, if you can manage to talk to someone that’s great but if you can’t, maybe write down your understanding in an email and send it to me, or to another friend, or to yourself - or don’t ever send it.  The point is to put your thoughts, and intuitions into a form that is suitable for sharing.

Not having anyone at hand to play the game with might get you thinking about why that is. Perhaps, it is best seen as an opportunity to reflect on what that absence implies, and perhaps even take measures in enrich your social environment.

Another thing this game has in common with the game of Ask About It! is that it’s a game! In this game our interest is on engaging and communicating. Convincing, arguing, recruiting, etc. are all outside of the goals of the game. Rather, you are simply sharing your interpretation of something you find interesting.

Personal Reflections:

Here’s a few thoughts related to this month’s principle. I hope you find them of some use in your own reflections.  

The Principle of Accumulated Action highlights the consequence of storing up unifying, as opposed to contradictory actions. Last week we spoke of the importance Silo gave to learning to distinguish contradictions from other kinds of difficulties. He also encouraged us to learn to recognize the register of unitive and valid actions.

At the end of Chapter XIII of The Inner Look Silo follows up the conclusion of principle 12 “…you will be like a force of nature when it finds no resistance in its path” with a paragraph reiterating the importance of learning to distinguish contradictions from other problems:

You will be like a force of Nature when it finds no resistance in its path. Learn to distinguish what is a difficulty, a problem, an inconvenience, from what is a contradiction. While those may move you or spur you on, contradiction traps you in a closed circle with no way out.

Silo then goes on to give us some interesting and very useful advice:

Whenever you find great strength, joy, and kindness in your heart, or when you feel free and without contradictions, immediately be internally thankful. When you find yourself in opposite circumstances, ask with faith, and the gratitude you have accumulated will return to you transformed and amplified in benefit. 

Remember:

Is it too much to say that this growing “mental direction” of acting to maximize coherent actions, might in fact be more important than the specific actions, or even the specific outcomes?

Worth Repeating:

If you are not indifferent to the pain and suffering of others, in order to help them you must bring your thoughts, feelings, and actions into agreement.

Silo_ The Path

Coming Up:

 Next week we begin a new cycle of reflection with Principle One, Adaptation.

Note:

These notes have been sent to our email list, posted on Facebook and on my website  www.dzuckerbrot.com 

See You Next Year.