Idle Hands Are…

…THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP

My mom used to say this all the time. It’s a common saying. I often wonder what it means? 

idle hands are the devil's workshop
The Dalai Lama Lays Out The Pattern

“Idle hands,” why did they say it like that?  They could’ve said, doing nothing is the devil’s workshop.  I think it’s more than that.  You create with your hands.  If you follow the hands up the arms they lead to your heart.  We create using our hands.

Consciousness is always creating.  It doesn’t stop.  It never sleeps.  God never stops creating.  So if you stop creating, then you get bored.  Yogi Bhajan has a saying: “after achievement comes boredom.”  It took me a minute to understand that.  To me, that means that you get excited about a project and you put all your creativity into a focus in order to achieve something.  Once you achieve it, it’s done.  Then we get bored.  It’s a polarity. The opposite of achievement is boredom. Often we think with achievement, the finish line means it’ll stop and then you can rest on your laurels.  But you can’t. It doesn’t work that way.  

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” is to remind you that this is the hero’s journey.  If you choose that.  It’s always your choice.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create some legacy that outlives you on the earth.  

Remember you can use your creativity to create or destroy.  Do you know that?  Destruction is also a creative act.  Usually when we’re bored we want to destroy things.  When you’re idle for too long, the subconscious mind can feed you all the garbage of your karma. Boredom is dissatisfaction with your creativity because for some reason you and your mind have allowed the creative spirit to stop flowing… and that’s it.

Create something and share it with the world. Find a field of action, something that you can come back to again and again.  This will burn out the pain by opening the flow of your spirit regularly.  And don’t get caught in putting a price tag on it. Not everything you do has to bring money directly. Carl Jung, the famous psychologist used to like to build these mini granite houses. He would do it to create a flow in his mind. These miniature houses had great detail. Once he was done he would destroy them.

The Dalai Lama holds a celebration each year called The Kalachakra Empowerment. They create a big mandala from colored sand and at the end they destroy it. It’s supposed to represent the fluid impermanence of life.

Remember, Energy always moves.  So should you too. You can rest, that’s part of the game, but don’t stop creating from the heart.