1 result for (book:tsm AND heading:"chapter thirteen" AND stemmed:demand)
[... 43 paragraphs ...]
“That is indeed your interpretation,” Seth said, “and this is because you set demands. Now I ask you, how far do you think a flower would get if in the morning it turned its face toward the sky and said, ‘I demand the sun. And now I need rain. So I demand it. And I demand bees to come and take my pollen. I demand, therefore, that the sun shall shine for a certain number of hours, and that the rain shall pour for a certain number of hours . . . and that the bees come— bees A, B, C, D, and E, for I shall accept no other bees to come. I demand that discipline operate, and that the soil shall follow my command. But I do not allow the soil any spontaneity of its own. And I do not allow the sun any spontaneity of its own. And I do not agree that the sun knows what it is doing. I demand that all these things follow my ideas of discipline’?
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Again, Seth stared at “the Dean,” but now he spoke to the others in the group. “In the spontaneous working of your nervous system, what do we find? We see here the head of ‘the Dean’ that rests upon his shoulders, and the intellect that demands discipline. And yet all of this rests upon the spontaneous workings of the inner self, and the nervous system of which the intellect knows little. And without that spontaneous discipline, there would be no ego to sit upon the shoulders and demand discipline. . . . Now that I have proven how jovial I am, you may all take a break.”
[... 32 paragraphs ...]
“You have not accepted life on life’s terms,” he said. “You are demanding that it behave in certain ways and take courses that you have consciously decided upon. You are refusing to accept life gladly, as its own reason and cause within you.
[... 32 paragraphs ...]