This post continues a series drawn from Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, especially the chapter often called The Power of Being. If the previous piece, How to Stay Human When You’re Running Late, explored presence under pressure, this one looks at what happens when pressure dresses itself up as virtue. Specifically, the Western compulsion to fix, correct, intervene, and save the world while remaining profoundly unacquainted with our own interior weather.
A Confession Before We Begin
Let’s begin with a confession.
The West loves action. We adore motion with a moral narrative. We trust the person who is doing something far more than the person who is becoming something. If you are calm, quiet, or inwardly attentive while the world is burning, we assume you are either privileged, complicit, or dead inside.
This is how fixing became a god.
Not service.
Not love.
Fixing.
The Posture and Psychology of Fixing
Fixing has a posture. Chin slightly raised. Jaw set. Eyes scanning for error. It thrives on urgency and feeds on outrage. It requires an enemy, a problem, or at minimum a poorly phrased sentence on the internet.
Fixing reassures us that we are on the right side of history, which conveniently means we never have to examine the state of our own being.
Virgin Monk Boy translation: if your activism needs adrenaline to survive, it is not wisdom. It is a stimulant.
When Action Becomes a Spiritual Distraction
This is where the inner path throws a wrench into the whole enterprise. The contemplative traditions are deeply suspicious of action that does not arise from stillness. Not because action is bad, but because action without being is noisy, violent, and strangely ineffective.
The great illusion is that more effort equals more impact.
What actually changes the world is presence with density.
Coherence Beats Force
Take Mahatma Gandhi. The caricature says he defeated an empire by protest. The deeper truth is that he defeated an empire by coherence. His actions worked because they were not reactions. They arose from an interior alignment that could not be manipulated, provoked, or rushed.
When action came, it was precise, minimal, and devastatingly effective. He was not fixing Britain. He was embodying truth until the lie collapsed under its own weight.
The Slow Power of the Quakers
Or consider the Quakers. Their social reforms did not emerge from fury or ideology. They emerged from silence. From waiting. From a ruthless commitment to act only when action had ripened inwardly.
This is why their impact on abolition, prison reform, and peace movements far outstripped their numbers. They refused to substitute agitation for clarity.
Modern activism would find them unbearably slow.
Which is exactly the point.
Simone Weil and the Danger of Moral Superiority
And then there is Simone Weil, who may be the most uncomfortable cameo of all. Weil distrusted activism that allowed the activist to feel morally superior. She warned that attention, real attention, is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Not attention as performance, but attention as surrender. To see without immediately fixing. To witness suffering without needing to convert it into a personal identity project.
She understood something the West still resists: ungrounded compassion turns cruel.
Stillness Is Not Passivity
Here is the paradox that wrecks our favorite binaries. Stillness is not passivity. Inner equanimity is not disengagement. In fact, action that arises from inner stillness carries a different quality altogether.
It is not compulsive.
It is not self-referential.
It does not need applause, agreement, or even success.
It simply does what needs to be done.
Seeing Is Already an Action
This is what the contemplative traditions mean when they say that seeing is already an action. The moment you see clearly, without distortion, something shifts. You may still act. You may write the letter, march, vote, intervene, or protect.
But the action is no longer fueled by the need to be right or to discharge your own anxiety.
Ungrounded action, by contrast, always produces two byproducts: issues and self-importance.
Issues harden the heart.
Self-importance justifies harm.
Together, they guarantee that even your good deeds will carry a subtle violence.
Why Modern Activism Feels Exhausting
This is why so much modern activism feels exhausting rather than liberating. It multiplies noise without increasing wisdom. It generates heat without light. It treats the world like a machine with broken parts instead of a living field that responds to coherence.
Virgin Monk Boy observation: the universe does not respond to your outrage. It responds to your state.
The Line We Don’t Want to Hear
The spiritual traditions insist on something deeply offensive to the fix-it reflex.
You cannot heal what you are not willing to inhabit.
You cannot bring peace into a situation you are not carrying within yourself.
And you cannot shortcut being with behavior.
This does not mean withdrawing from the world. It means withdrawing your ego from the driver’s seat.
The Signature of Action Born from Being
Action born from being has a different signature. It is quieter. Often smaller. Sometimes invisible. It does not announce itself as moral. It does not need to convince everyone.
It tends to arrive late by activist standards and early by historical ones.
And yes, it may mean doing less.
Which terrifies a culture addicted to urgency.
The Sacred Roast (Delivered Gently)
The false god of fixing demands constant sacrifice. Your nervous system. Your relationships. Your joy. Your capacity to listen. It promises relevance and delivers burnout. It flatters you into believing that without your intervention, nothing good can happen.
Stillness tells a different story. It says that being itself is already at work. That reality does not need you frantic to be healed. That your task is not to save the world but to stop fragmenting it further with unexamined action.
So here is the sacred roast, gently delivered.
If your activism leaves you perpetually angry, you are not awake.
If your certainty is growing faster than your compassion, you are not helping.
If your sense of self depends on opposing someone else, you are worshiping the wrong god.
Where Real Power Actually Begins
Start where the real power is.
Not in fixing.
In seeing.
Not in reaction.
In presence.
Not in noise.
In being.
From there, act.
Or don’t.
Either way, the world will finally feel the difference.
Keep the Scrolls Unrolling
The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.
Share the Scrolls
Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.
Become a Supporting Member
Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.
Tip with a coffee
A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥
Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.
Follow (or troll) Virgin Monk Boy
Recommended Reading
(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)
"Pray with your ears."
In one half-day of silence at my cabin I feel I have “done” more meaningful work than all of the Christmas chaos. Both good but one much, much deeper and longer lasting. “the universe does not respond to your outrage. It responds to your state.” Great reminder.