
We are playing a little catch-up here. Neal arrived in
What is it that can help us? What is it that can help other people?
We are playing a little catch-up here. Neal arrived in
What is it that can help us? What is it that can help other people?
Today I flew into Guangzhou. Got to the hotel rather late. Fortunately I have today's post prepared... tomorrow, that may be a wee bit more difficult to pull off.
On examination, for me, the most difficult division of the society of Akhldanns to interpret in the context of inner divisions of work according to “six flowers” is the third section. I called out this difficulty when I originally wrote the essay about the allegory. It deserves some further scrutiny.
"These conscious observations and impartial verifications at last convinced Belcultassi that in his common presence something was proceeding not as it should proceed according to sane being-logic.”
As with the first two centers, the only way to get a footing here is to make an effort towards investment of the attention within the flower of the solar plexus. We may not know quite what that will mean, or what it might bring.
Today we're going to continue to take a look at the allegory contained within Gurdjieff’s “Society of Akhldanns,” but let's start off with a quote from Dogen’s Shobogenzo, taken from the Nishijima and Cross translation, book 3, page 159, in the Chapter “meeting Buddha.”
I am offering this quote just to make the point that Dogen understood seeing to be a bodily experience--that is, it arises from the organism itself, and not the organism's psychology. This brings us back to yesterday's point that we are meant to use the direct and immediate sensory abilities of the organic inner tools we are given to understand our life and our experience, not the associative thoughts which we mistakenly believe lead to understanding.
...Well, no one said all of this was going to be easy or obvious. We now come to the second division of the society, which in our hypothesized system of allegory is associated with “2”, or, sex center.
In Gurdjieff’s chemical system, sex center is the seat of si 12, which is the highest “hydrogen” or higher substance automatically created by physical processes in man’s body. The passage suggests that sex center has a hitherto unexplored capacity to evaluate the quality of energy within all the other centers. So if we were to explore our overall inner structure from the perspective of the flower at the base of the spine, we might then explore our inner energies from the perspective of the sex center flower.
In undertaking a significant inner study, we must carefully and repeatedly examine the physical conditions within the sensation of the organism. Not the many associative thoughts that flow as an inevitable result of our existence.
The difficulty is that associative thought, which is essentially a mechanical part, can’t be eliminated from the picture. It continuously pollutes incoming impressions by establishing commentary, and thereby usurps the role of real thinking.
Trying to free ourselves of associative thought is futile; it’s going to be there, no matter what we do. The trick is to become less invested in it. And I think we all get much too caught up in the circular analysis of associative thought without even noticing that that is where we are stuck. We live on a merry-go-round of psychological conjecture. Associative thought, since it is the biggest feature in our landscape, attracts the most attention from us, and once we are caught in it, we end up studying it as though it were the only part of ourselves needing attention to.
All such activity is commentary.
We need observation instead of commentary. Facts instead of conjecture. And the facts need to be assembled from within the physical conditions we encounter in an inner sense.
Not the thoughts about them.
In this regard we can speak of the structural parts of emotional center taking in inner impressions.
This is quite different from the effort to be present within the context of impressions entering from outside. These are the two different sets, or classes, of impressions that we need to consider in regard to the question as a whole. (In order to understand this in more detail, it is necessary to read and study the commentary on the nature of the fifth stopinder in Chapter 39 of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson--"The Holy Planet Purgatory." I am intentionally going to avoid embarking on what would have to be a rather a byzantine technical explanation in this post.)
The inner study of the six flowers is a specific study of vibration arising within centers. There is no need, in this type of study, to assemble cosmologies or apply them. The point, rather, is to develop the sensitivity of the inner sensory tools which receive vibrations and learn more about how they correspond both to each other, and to outer conditions. This is about developing a relationship to a finer kind of inner energy. It is not about analyzing the relationship or explaining the relationship, it is about living within the relationship, investigating the relationship.
We don’t know what we will find here; it is a work in process, a demand that suspends belief, inviting verification in its place.
May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.
"La 6 is the highest matter produced by the organism from air, that is, from the second kind of food. This however is obtained only by making a conscious effort at the moment an impression is received.
Gurdjieff called "conscious labor" the act of bringing the attention to the point where impressions enter the body.
This statement cannot be properly understood from a literal point of view. Instead, we should ask ourselves, "where, exactly, do impressions enter the body?
This is precisely what people do not understand. Therefore their aim must be the development of the activity of the emotional center. The emotional center is an apparatus much more subtle than the intellectual center, particularly if we take into consideration the fact that in the whole of the intellectual center the only part that works is the formatory apparatus and that many things are quite inaccessible to the intellectual center. If anyone desires to know and to understand more than he actually knows and understands, he must remember that this new knowledge and this new understanding will come through the emotional center and not through the intellectual center."