Zen, Yoga, Gurdjieff- perspectives on inner work

Humility and Compassion

2012-01-29T22:03:00.000-05:00

Mankind, on the whole, is terribly impressed with itself and with the disasters it brings upon itself.

We believe in our own agency—we believe in our ability to do, and even worse, we also believe we have an ability to undo.

By and large, expressed from what one might call a Judeo-Christian Buddhist point of view, what we believe we lack, that would fix everything, is compassion.

There is this general belief out there—well meant, I think, sincere and even heartfelt—that this is what we need to acquire. People need to be more compassionate, act more compassionately, understand from a compassionate point of view, etc. The Dali Lama preaches compassion in the latest issue of Shambhala Sun. Mother Teresa preached it.

Get in line. It's the easy answer; anyone can sign on and sound good. Hurrah! Look! There is a way for us to fix things...!

It is far more difficult to say anything true, anything that might skip over the soundbites and get to the root of the matter. Yet the root of the matter does not lie in any ability to lift ourselves up through our own agency, our compassionate deeds—it lies in seeing how far down we have fallen.

Mankind does not understand compassion. This is where the problem begins. Compassion operates on a horizontal scale. It is the bars of the crucifix, the tree limb on which Christ was hung. It can only operate horizontally, because it implies a congruent emotional state—one that exerts its force across this level, not up towards God. Think it over: how could we be compassionate towards God?

It's good that compassion operates horizontally: it's a necessary force, and everything in the world would definitely be worse without it. The difficulty comes because it can't operate horizontally, not in the least, unless it is in proper relationship with a vertical force. And it is exactly this lack that prevents real compassion from emerging, except and unless men are under terrible duress—such as war, when remarkable things become possible because a powerful shock has been applied. In such conditions, a man sees what he is—he sees how tiny he is—and a new influence from a higher level arrives, an influence that has a different kind of force, a force representing something higher than man.

That vertical force bestows humility. If a man does not acquire humility first; if he does not submit, if he does not see his place and acknowledge what he is, his compassion cannot be fixed in place. It's merely propped up on the powerful tree trunk of his ego and wobbles up and down. It isn't informed with the energy that is necessary to be compassionate, because it emanates from— and goes out to— the horizontal level only. The higher influence it needs in order to stabilize it is not there.

This is why mechanical compassion, learned compassion, philosophized, theorized, educated, taught, or accidentally acquired compassion is forever spinning its wheels in this world of violence and disbelief. Only an intelligent, an inwardly formed, a conscious compassion can do any real work. And that never arises unless it is first inwardly formed by humility. Without humility, compassion remains a creature of the ego. A man cannot open his heart without humility; and compassion without an open heart, well, there is nothing real there.

Even Christ had to submit with humility when he said, in the garden of Gethsemane, “Thy will be done.” The only reason his compassion for mankind was perfect was because he had perfected his humility.

The relationship between vertical and horizontal, and the need for the vertical to inform the horizontal, as represented on the cross, is largely forgotten in this belief of ours that we are powerful agents. We are not powerful agents: the whole point of humility is to realize this, to see it.

Humility isn't born in public. You don't see it on soapboxes. It doesn't issue proclamations. This is the most private and intimate matter of a man's soul and any sacred grace he may be touched by. It is a silent force; it can't be employed for anything except the act of kneeling in prayer. And it must completely penetrate a man and replace everything that he has in him if he has a real wish to discover anything that can actually act with integrity on this level. If he does, it will act through him, not of him.

Humility, like sorrow, is not a concept. It is a substance. Until a man or woman receives it as a substance in the body in the same way that one receives the body and blood of Christ in communion, he or she knows nothing of humility— except that the word exists, and has accepted definitions.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be compassionate.

It does mean we first need to work for a much deeper understanding of ourselves and see what we are before we make that effort. If the effort comes from a place that has not submitted, it is a vain effort, that is, one we try to make belong to ourselves.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

A Balanced Work

2012-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

There are times when the master buries the bone deep.

There are other times when he implies he has buried the bone deep, causing all of his pupils to race around furiously digging holes, when actually, he left the bone right on the kitchen table.

One of the most essential principles in the Gurdjieff system is that an inner work must be a balanced work. Not only did he refer to his organization as the "Institute for Harmonious Development," he repeatedly emphasized the need for three centered work, a work in which all of the centers were balanced. And his protégés—most notably Jeanne de Salzmann—spoke about the need to balance inner work many times. For example, de Salzmann speaks in The Reality Of Being of getting the three centers to work at the same speed—something they don't do under ordinary circumstances, as Gurdjieff explained to Ouspensky in In Search Of The Miraculous.

Let's pause here for a moment and examine all of this information in the context of what Gurdjieff told Ouspensky about the wrong location of the second shock in the enneagram. The shock, he said, lawfully comes between the notes “Si” and “Do.” The diagram, however, "wrongly" locates it between "Sol" and "La."

Aside from his cryptic remarks about the fact that the wrong location indicated the type of work that was necessary for the second shock, Gurdjieff never elaborated on this. Longtime readers of my material may recall that in the past, I've offered a few possibilities for what he meant by that remark.

Today, I'm going to offer what is perhaps a simpler and more obvious one.

Before you read any further, please take a look at the following diagram of what the enneagram looks like when you locate the shock in the correct place.

Let's take a brief excursion into what symbols are for. Symbols are meant to represent abstractions of principles; they are not literal, but, literally, figurative interpretations of ideas. Symbols commonly undergo manipulation in order to more effectively express ideas that cannot be expressed literally.

The simplest possible explanation of what Gurdjieff was trying to get Ouspensky to understand when he talked about the shock being located in the "wrong" place on the diagram is that the type of work that is necessary to pass from "Si" to "Do" is a balanced work. The placement of the shock, in other words, creates a symmetrical and balanced diagram that properly represents the law of three functioning in a balanced way, instead of indicating one-sided or lopsided development of centers.

One sees the symbol is worthless if you draw it literally. It isn't even a symbol anymore: it's a mish-mosh which conveys gibberish instead of harmony. So there is no choice in the matter: in order to create an effective symbol of inner work that is harmoniously balanced, the shock must be located where it is. There are no special esoteric secrets connected to this; the esoteric secret is right here on the kitchen table, where no one notices it—exactly like every other real truth in life.

I suppose some may think it a bit sad to have to take this mysterious question and reduce it to such a simple point of view—especially those on an endless quest for secret magical knowledge— but it's actually not simple at all. The most essential problem we all have in our work is that we aren't well-balanced. We aren't harmonious. And we need to keep that question in front of us at all times.

Seeing our lack is, in part, observing that imbalance up close and first-hand.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Welcome To The Machine

2012-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00

What a better introduction to a post about man's mechanicality than the title of the famous Pink Floyd song?

Some may view the idea of man as a machine from a pessimistic point of view; that is definitely the spin that Ouspensky put on it when he reported on his discussions with Gurdjieff.

Nonetheless, what is often overlooked is that Gurdjieff clearly said the whole universe is a machine. Everything in it is a machine. The word itself means a construction, or contrivance, which denotes something invented skillfully, or created. So when Gurdjieff said that the universe is a machine—or that man is a machine—the actual meaning of the word (as opposed to our negative fantasies about it) simply means that man is a creation... it doesn't sound quite as exciting or alarming when you strip all of the nonsense that has been attached to it over the years away, does it?

The idea of “escaping” from our mechanical nature by becoming conscious seems specious to me. Think about it. Gurdjieff clearly said everyone is under laws and influences, and that a man can only choose which ones he is under, at best. There isn't any escape from the machine. The whole Dharma—the entire cosmos—is the machine, and we can't escape from it without leaving it. A difficult prospect, to say the least.

Just as this oft-discussed idea of the machine is, in fact, rather weakly understood, so is the idea of consciousness. Gurdjieff clearly told Ouspensky that there are different levels of consciousness. Inferences that there is only one level, or type, of “higher” consciousness are ridiculous. Consciousness inhabits a range of circumstances, all the way from the top to the bottom of the cosmos. This hardly needs explaining, yet the word is often used as though it were a two-dimensional entity.

One can, undoubtedly, become more or less conscious, but this is all within the context of the machine—within creation, which is what the “machine” is. Creation contains consciousness. It is not all apportioned equally, any more than matter is apportioned equally—look at all the empty space in the universe.

This is a rather long lead-in for a much more specific and interesting question. What we don't see is that our machine—a part of us that acts mechanically, that has an automatism in it—is absolutely essential. We need it. It actually forms a critical part of our inner being—it is closely linked to what supports, oddly enough, our essence.

Think of it this way: our mechanical part, including all our habits, is a part of the inner self. It may seem outward, because it manifests outwardly, but the origin of all mechanical behavior is from the deepest part of the innermost self. That part is not an artificial or unnecessary part; it is an integral part of what is needed for the interface with outer life. It performs many functions–such as braking a car before it's too late–that could never be done without it. So it is a part of our intimate self, not our constructed self.

I think we can probably agree that all the parts of intimate self are necessary. They simply need to be balanced. When the mechanical part of the intimate self dominates, we are creatures of habit and reaction. But the mechanical part is not the whole story of the inner self.

There can be no whole inner self (essence) without three parts to it, because it is under the law of three, like everything else. We could easily formulate the matter by understanding that the inner self has a conscious part, a mechanical part, and a reconciling part—the same affirming, denying, and reconciling forces found at all levels of the universe. Readers can put some thought into deciding exactly which role the mechanical unconscious parts might play. There are a number of intriguing possibilities.

In the same way, there is no outer self (personality) without three parts, and there is no reconciling self without these three parts either.

In a balanced inner work (see the next post, on Saturday), we mustn't aim to dominate our mechanical nature, and we certainly don't want to tyrannize it with "terrorist attacks" by what we think of, from our professedly unconscious state, as consciousness. (This is a colorful way of saying we don't want to force anything.) The mechanical nature needs to be integrated into a whole inner self.

In working on this, what is needed is a sympathy for, and understanding of, our mechanical nature. It isn't an enemy. It is there to support us. And it is there, whether we believe it or not, to support our efforts at consciousness, not undermine them. The difficulty is that because of its nature, it does not know how to do that. It is up to the other parts in us to develop an understanding of how to help it find its right place.

The culture of critique of mechanicality has, in my eyes, run its course. If we want to speak of a harmonious work, an integrated work, a work of understanding, we need to understand this idea quite differently than we do if we see it as an undermining factor to be expunged from our Being. And we do need to understand consciousness as an evolving and changing entity with many aspects, not some magnificent fixed state of enlightenment we are striving towards.

The conventional conception of machinery generally conveys something fixed and rigid; these properties can be useful, but in a changing environment, they quickly become outdated. That's why a technological society throws so many machines away. They don't know how to change.

If our ideas become fixed and rigid, they may suffer the same fate.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Reversed mythologies

2012-01-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

Image from the Metropolitan Museum collection, New York

Many traditions have myths about mazes, featuring innocents or heroes who trace their way to confront a diabolical threat of one kind or another. Luke Skywalker's encounter with his dark side in "Star Wars," which takes place in a swamp under the instruction of his colorful master Yoda is a diluted version of these myths.

The framework of this ubiquitous myth is inevitably subject to multiple interpretations, but the stories, taken as a whole, can be taken as representing a necessary relation between the inner self, the outer self, and the attention— a subject frequently addressed in the work of Jean de Salzmann, as reflected in The Reality Of Being.

The myths, over the course of time, have acquired an inversion that makes this aspect of them difficult to understand. The tricky part is that the maze does not represent our inner life–or our inner demons–as George Lucas used it in Star Wars. It represents outer life–the confusion of the phenomenal, and the many paths that it presents us with.

The innocent, or the hero, always starts from what is a "real" place–the real world, real life, the place where one lives. Because the myth is a myth that emanates from the inner soul and the higher part of man, in this case, the outer world of the myth is our noumenal world, the intangible world that has a relationship with higher principles or with God. And the exterior world is represented by the maze–a tremendously confusing place that has a beast living in it, a beast that wants to consume all that is good and all that is pure–children (Hansel and Gretel), virgins (Theseus and the Minotaur) and so on. Outer life, if we are taken by it ( a frequent theme in de Salzmann's teaching) will eat us, it will use us as food. This stands as a close analogy to Gurdjieff's idea of the moon using man as food.

So in this myth, positions are reversed: the outside is the inside, and the inside is the outside. It's counterintuitive– in these myths, the hero isn't actually going into a maze, he's going out into ordinary life. The witches and minotaurs are the lusts, confusions and desires of everyday existence and his relationship to them.

The hero–or the innocent–has no choice but to go into the maze–and in most cases, it is done with intention. This is certainly the case in hero (as opposed to innocent) myths. The relationship with the outer world of the maze, where everything is dangerous and confusing, is inevitable, because only by penetrating to the heart of that maze–reaching the place of origin that the danger resides in–can the innocent or the hero resolve the inherent conflict that consumes the good of the noumenal inner world.

Another way of putting it is that the outer world represents the essence in these myths, and the inner world the personality. This is how Gurdjieff might have seen it.

In any event, the essential point is that the hero in the myth has to mark his way, else he be lost. There must be a trail of stones, or a thread that is spooled out behind him, some form of marker–as he goes into the maze, because otherwise he will get lost. He has to maintain a connection with his inner self.

This connection represents the attention. Mindfulness in Buddhism serves exactly the same purpose–it is a thread that connects the inner life, intentionally devoted to a higher principle, and the outer life, which has many confusing paths, most of them dead ends, and the danger that must be conquered before the world can be made whole.

The task of the attention–represented by the thread–is to trace a path between the heart of the maze–the central “meaning” of ordinary life, the locus around which it turns–and the inner life. Once the heart of the maze is reached, connected all the way through the thread to the inner world (outside the maze) then the danger is vanquished–and the beast of outer life is no longer a threat, even though it still exists.

The question of standing between two worlds and this idea of a "thread" of attention that connects them is essential to understanding work. One need not have a cosmic, overarching attention–the attention of saints and gurus–to begin to inhabit ordinary life. One's inner thread of attention might be a very fine thread... maybe so small as to be nearly invisible... perhaps even completely invisible to others (readers may recall that in In Search Of The Miraculous, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that a man who had realized himself might appear to be even more mechanical than the men around him.)

It's cultivating this thread of attention, in the midst of ordinary life–in the midst of ordinary, unmanipulated personal manifestations–that makes a difference in understanding where we are and what we are. We hold on to the inner–gently, carefully, intelligently, intimately–and we engage in the outer, fully, honestly, according to conditions. And the thread of our attention helps us to navigate this maze, so that we remember who we are and where we are.

One further point that may be to interest of readers is that threads have a specific symbolism of their own. A thread is not a single whole thing–it is composed of thousands of tiny fibers, spun together. In other words, in this case, the thread of attention is spun out of many small impressions. It can't exist unless our countless intimate, attentive impressions are woven together within us to create a strong fiber.

Paramahansa Yogananda used to say that every man must cast himself in the role of the hero in his own life. The chief feature of a hero must be that he is mindful, that he is attentive. Heroic action, in the myth, doesn't necessarily consist of having a sword or killing monsters.

The heroic action begins in having the presence of mind to keep a threat of attention that connects us.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

To Stand Between

2012-01-22T06:36:00.000-05:00

One of the most ubiquitous themes in Jeanne de Salzmann's The Reality Of Being is the idea of standing between two worlds. This idea comes up over and over again, presented in multiple contexts. (Chapter 43 stands as one outstanding example of such material.)

Above all, it's quite important to see that there are two worlds. Our experience may seem seamless– or we may at least think it is seamless– but it is in fact divided between two natures. When discussing this matter, it's not uncommon to think of the two natures as a "higher" nature and a "lower" nature, or to think of it as the difference between personality and essence, as Gurdjieff might have put it.

In this realm where words become difficult to apply, it's just as accurate to understand this as being an inner nature and an outer nature which meet the world... and each other.

To see is not to use one part to see the other part. "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" is not to know about dogs and their nature, and it's not to know about Buddhas and their nature; we just see both dogs and Buddhas.

We are not in the business of using the inner nature to see the outer nature, or the outer nature to see the inner nature. What sees does not belong to the outer nature or the inner nature. It belongs to itself. In the same way, the inner nature belongs to the inner nature, and the outer nature belongs to the outer nature. They belong to themselves, not to each other, and although they come into relationship with one another through the part that sees, they must not be confused with one another. If three things blend harmoniously to become one thing, that one thing is different than the three things that engendered it.

Even if there is some understanding in us regarding the two natures, there is still plenty of room for confusion. We may think the inner nature is "better" than the outer nature. It isn't; it's just quite different. The outer nature is equally vital in creating Being. Because the inner nature has definite qualities bringing it into contact with higher energies, we romance it–or let it romance us–instead of understanding it in an objective relationship, which is what seeing consists of. All of the emphasis we see around us today on new age esoteric science, yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, etc. is part of that romancing. The inner search becomes a glamour, instead of a work in relationship that requires something more of us. The grooviness of it all, one might say, is just the enemy with a nice set of clothes on.

Even more, the belief arises that the inner nature should influence the outer nature, and even direct it. Well, that is like trying to use God as a fishing pole on Sunday afternoon. When we try to make the inner go out, or we try to make the outer go in, we always end up in a mess. We cannot do anything: and when we begin to intervene in this way, instead of investing our effort in seeing, in standing between, many things go wrong. There are results; they are not harmonious. We need to have two natures, and not try to make one nature become another. This is the difference between the red-bearded barbarian and the barbarian with the red beard.

When we speak of seeing our lack, it isn't necessarily a lack of inner Being or a lack of outer Being. Above all, it is a lack of seeing. When seeing is weak, the belief that I can do is strong.

If I see, I don't worry so much about this. I just see.

When I see moss, it's green. It looks like it is an outer event and condition; but it is an inner event, if the impression comes in rightly... so already, even with a simple activity like looking at moss, I'm probably confused about what is inner and what is outer. I need to be clear about the difference between the inner sensation and the inner life, and the outwardness that is inevitably and constantly required of me. I can't begin to stand between these two questions of manifestation and existence if I'm not aware of both of them at the same time.

Perhaps a strong impression arises in meditation that somehow the meditation is addressing this question. Overall, there is a belief that sitting a lot, meditating with vigor, immerses me in what is necessary. It's not so clearly seen that what this immerses me in is largely an inner impression, which, although it definitely needs a great deal of strengthening in most cases, is just one partial element in a system of three forces.

I don't ever begin to balance this question until I act in life, until the seed of that meditation dwells actively within at the same time that all of the ordinary– and, I would like to stress this, not manipulated– activities of life are carried on.

This is a tricky thing, because the habits of every form encourage people to enthusiastically manipulate behavior to conform. The next thing you know, everyone is walking around with some variety of sage-like exterior that has been pasted over an inner and outer being that haven't actually changed very much. It's consequently possible that there are more masks and lies at work behind the closed doors of the foundations, retreats, and ashrams than there are when two ordinary people sit down for couple coffee somewhere in a shop in, for example, Manhattan. Perhaps this is why Gurdjieff valued the obyvatel—the ordinary "good householder"—over those touting lofty aspirations.

It is impossible to stand between the inner and outer qualities we wish to nourish, to have any real sense of presence, and to see what we are if we keep dressing it up so that it will look good both to ourselves and others. If we wish to stand between and to see, we must see what we really are. This requires a willingness to relax the façades and just be freer and more natural.

In other words, to stand between involves being ourselves, being exactly what we are, and not presenting the "adjusted version" that makes us nicer, groovier, or more spiritually intelligent and magnificent. It's all right to relax within life, and to be there as it happens.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The Temptation of St. Us

2012-01-20T23:28:00.000-05:00

The Temptation of St. Antony

Martin Schongauer

As I mentioned recently on the Parabola Facebook page, it seems difficult to see how fantastic images of temptation like the one above emerge as visual understandings gleaned from the ascetic experiences of the Desert Fathers. Unless, that is, we understand them as chaotic and amusing abstractions of the terrible mess we are in, both inside and outside.

The most famous story of temptation from the Judeo-Christian tradition is, of course, the temptation of Christ in the Desert. Christ was tempted by Lucifer personally–this wasn't a job Satan felt comfortable delegating to the colorful pack of demons St. Anthony encountered. We can reasonably suspect that this specific encounter between what one might call the highest and lowest representatives of God lent a great deal of color to later Western visual traditions on this subject.

Temptation, however, isn't out there in the desert. Most of us are not, furthermore, likely to take off into the desert to find ourselves. (To be sure, there are those that do, but in modern society, this is overwhelmingly a matter of weekend trips.) Temptation is ubiquitous. We can find it–and it can find us–anywhere. The question of how to combat temptation–or desire–is one of the central questions of Hesychasm, a practice which has had more than a passing influence on Gurdjieff's work.

The subject of temptation is one of the central questions Christ gives us in the Lord's prayer. The word itself derives from the Latin temptare, to handle, test, or subject to trial.

Rather than the obvious meaning of "trial," the image of temptation as something that handles, or touches, us is for me perhaps the most apt metaphor, because temptation is something that arises in the most intimate part of human beings. It may appear to come from “out there–” arise from some external source or agency (usually, in religious practices, personified as a demon or the Devil) which we can blame for its existence. But that's not the case at all. Temptation belongs to us, it is in us, and we touch ourselves with it. The temptation to assign it to an outside agent is strong, because in doing so, we need not take responsibility. In a certain way, it's not our fault we are tempted. We are, one might argue, built that way. Man is made to fall from Grace, and return to it.

This leads me to a fundamental thought on the matter, and the central point of this essay: temptation, like practice, is intimate.

Resistance to temptation alone isn't enough; to "just say no" leads me to no real understanding of what is taking place in me. It's important I see I have a wish to avoid responsibilities; that I have a desire for desire. Another way of saying it is that I must begin to understand I have willful impulses that do not apply to any higher part. They aren't integrated into a whole understanding of what I am; I am locked in a struggle with them, but temptation is an inner struggle with myself, not between me and the suggestions of an external Devil.

This harkens back to earlier posts investigating the question of the devil as being ourselves. The image that comes to mind is that of the proper British schoolchildren, stranded on a desert island, who morph into pagans chanting “Kyrie Eleison” (Lord have Mercy) as they hunt down their fellow schoolmates to kill them in Peter Brook's famous film production of Lord Of The Flies.

Perhaps the greatest danger that religious fundamentalism, in all its Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim forms, poses to modern society–and to healthy inner work–is this consistent externalizing and blaming of a forceful weakness that originates in each of us, as was pointed out in the recent essay escape from conditions.

In the Lord's prayer, when we invoke the words, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, the trespasses may be seen as representing the debts and transgressions of temptation. We may conceive of “those” who tempt us– yet "they" are not other people, rather, parts of ourselves that lead us astray in every action, word, and circumstance. The prayer, in other words, indicates a need for us to forgive ourselves: a point that Sogyal Rinpoche made in the Tibetan book of Living and Dying.

To depict ourselves as innocent– or wishfully innocent– beings at the mercy of demonic outside agents is to cast ourselves in the role of victims. This is way too easy... it's far more difficult, I think, to see that we ourselves own every demon that torments us. We may think we understand this, but our understanding on the matter is largely intellectual, theoretical. Getting up close and personal with it is scary... remember the famous words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

There needs to be an intimate seeing of how every temptation that arises in us belongs to us: a colorful circus occupying much of our thoughts, our imagination, and coloring our ideas about life in general. Endlessly, we tempt ourselves.

The devil didn't make me do it.

In seeking an intimate practice that involves organic sense of self, we begin to touch questions like this more directly–in an inner sense, in places that can never be translated into essays or discussed in exchanges with other people.

Temptation is not alone within us in its intimacy. Each man and woman also has his or her own part that touches heaven; and although everything touches heaven, nothing ever touches heaven in exactly the same place as the rest of creation.

Part of the practice of intimacy is to become responsible for that contact; that particular most sacred contact which has been vouchsafed to us in our own intimate work.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

What are the Movements?

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Following immediately on the moment I wrote the previous essay, the question of the Gurdjieff Movements and their possible relationship to cosmological questions came up.

Over the years, I've heard many discussions about the Gurdjieff Movements and what they represent. Being married into the Movements end of the work, I've also had the privilege of hearing many movements teachers during off-the-record discussions about the Movements; in addition, I've been fortunate enough to take classes from some well-known and very experienced movements teachers.

The Movements are a sacred art form. What does that mean?

The words don't necessarily mean much to us anymore; although Gurdjieff described the idea theoretically in both Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson and his conversations with Ouspensky (see In Search Of The Miraculous) few, if any, sacred art forms actually exist anymore as living traditions in any society. We see faint reflections of them in some sculpture and painting; hear echoes in some music, especially sacred hymns; and there are, of course, sacred principles embodied in the rituals of a number of religions, although many of them are simply executed by rote nowadays.

A sacred art form serves, on a larger scale, the same purpose as the small objects on my desk: it recapitulates the entire action of the universe in an interactive, living form. It embodies material: the physical objects and human beings involved, the music being played. It moves through time. And, in the wholeness and entirety of its form, it creates a harmonious relationship between those material objects through time, the entire interaction and movement thus engendering a third force that binds matter and time together. As such, every Movement– it doesn't matter which Movement, they all do this– embodies the principles of the Universal Octave in a living, real-time form.

Movements, in other words, are each and every one of them a model of the universe.

Sacred Movements such as the ones Gurdjieff brought us reenact the continual interaction of quanta, atoms, and molecules; they breathe life into the relationship of material over time; they reveal the sacred and evolutionary nature of form by putting it in a context that demands of us that we immediately and deeply ponder the nature of life, death, and relationship.

It's no accident that so many of the Movements incorporate elements of the enneagram and the multiplications. Gurdjieff brought to us a form that allows a group of human beings to collectively experience the concrete expression of these laws, so that instead of remaining as theoretical or philosophical abstractions, they become proximate allegories– an expression in the immediate moment– of the forces that animate everything at all times.

It's tempting to see the Movements as "things" that exist separate from us: special activities living in a sacred, secret bubble, protected from the rest of the world, that confer magical principles. We don't see that they are, in essence, the immediate expression of life as it always is, wherever we are. A deep connection to sensation in the body will sometimes speak in that way to a man; but this is unusual. Our perception of the Sacred Movements as separate from our ordinary lives doesn't necessarily help us in attaining the kind of understanding they are there for in the first place.

Gurdjieff used to perform the Movements very publicly. It was a way of attracting people to the work. They could see there was something different about them; and indeed there is. Unfortunately, public performances of the Movements by Gurdjieff Foundation branches have all but ceased to exist over the last twenty or thirty years. The reasons for this are many; yet how can it possibly be right?

One might reasonably presume that Gurdjieff's behavior was to serve as a model for how we ought to handle things. We certainly take it that way when we see the examples he set us for how to work. Now, it is just the plain fact that he had a vigorous exoteric side to his work. He performed movements and music in public. He advertised them with flyers. He was, in other words, not someone hiding behind closed doors.

In a day and age when every work is opening its doors, and its so-called “secrets,” to the rest of humanity, intuiting that we are at a critical moment in the work of mankind and the planet, and sensing that those of us who do work need to share everything we can in these desperate times, do we really have a right to keep this work as secret as we do?

Perhaps the answer is yes; but perhaps it isn't. This matter may be a question of life and death not just for the work itself, but for humanity. Art, after all–and perhaps, above all, sacred art–is there to be shared. It is, in point of fact, an essential exoteric form of sharing. Art that is kept secret and not put in front of others so that they can learn from it isn't art at all. It becomes a form of selfishness, denying the impulse and intent that created it.

Hiding the Movements films in closets has not protected them, or the Movements. Anyone can see that they are all over the Internet, and that hundreds of defecting Movements teachers have continued to teach Movements without the Foundation's permission, all over the globe. The cat, in other words, is long out of the imaginary bag we are still stuffing it in.

Furthermore, hiding such material in closets is not laying our treasures up in heaven, where they need to be laid. I wonder- are we emulating the man who buried his coins in the field, afraid to invest them, and afraid to spend them on anything, thus earning the wrath of his master?

[Our archives are most certainly not located in heaven; I know this, because, at least in New York, I know where they are, and if that particular place is heaven, well then, hell must at the very least be a great deal more spacious; which is a good thing, judging from the number of candidates for it.]

In order to serve the exoteric branch of the work and strengthen it, it may be time for the Gurdjieff Work to release some of this Movements film material to the general public, so that they can see what real sacred art is, and know- at least in their heart of hearts– that not everything has been lost. Right now, the best of what we do is entombed; perhaps for the best of intentions, but I think this particular interment was unfortunately premature.

Even more to the point, it may be time to put on live public performances of the Movements again.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Stories of the whole earth

2012-01-17T06:15:00.000-05:00

Everyone has their own little habits, and one of mine is to collect natural history specimens and small, appealing objects– up to and including what are, more or less, ordinary stones and beach pebbles– which I select specifically because of their aesthetic qualities. Sometimes those qualities are subtle and not immediately apparent. It can take some time to penetrate past the surface of appearances and understand that a single fold in a carapace or the rounded curve of a piece of glacial debris may speak in a language I am not familiar with.

I arrange these in front of me on my desk, so that they are just under my gaze as I work on my computer. Each one of them ultimately serves as an object of contemplation of one kind or another, and I refer to them repeatedly throughout every day.

Each of the objects that I keep in front of me is, in its own way, a complete representation of the entire cosmos. They all represent objects, events, conditions, and circumstances; each one of them contains a conjunction of elements, formed over time, arranged through conditions, meeting in circumstances, to form objects. Every one of these objects contains all of the thoughts about the whole universe in it: the fact that the human mind is unable to encompass all of that information, that inwardly formed quality, at one time does not mean it is not there.

In a state of what is called “enlightenment”–which is what Buddhists would insist is only just the ordinary state that the mind always ought to inhabit, but doesn't–the mind could and would comprehend this. Bokusan says, "As one dharma is no other than myriad dharmas, whatever you realize embraces all the ten directions. In this way, to intuit... intimately" is essential." (Dogen's Genjo Koan: three commentaries, p. 54, Counterpoint-Berkeley 2011. The entire commentary in section 7, pp. 51-54, expounds on the subject of this essay.)

Perhaps my fascination with each object is that, unique as it is, it can't exist without any other objects or all other objects–it is in irrevocable relationship to them through the confluence of time, matter, and the reconciling force of love.

In some ways, each of these objects represents that reconciling force to me, since each one of them, whether it is man-made, naturally formed, or the product of evolutionary biology, expresses a perfection that is unique unto itself. Each of those perfections has a tale of billions of years behind it that includes the collapse of cosmic dust clouds, the formation of stars, the forging of elements, the creation of planets from those elements, and the re-arrangement of those elements into forms which go against the force of entropy to discover expressions that would remain unseen, unknown, and nonexistent but for the arising of consciousness to perceive them.

Consciousness arises specifically to perceive these things; it is not an accident. There is a need for all of these expressions of perfection to be perceived. In a subtle way, each one of them– every single thing, no matter how small– is both worthy of perception and has a wish to be perceived, just as the perceiver wishes to see. It is where the wish to see comes into conjunction with that which can be seen and wishes to be seen that the whole of the universe exists.

Without consciousness, you see, there is no universe–there is nothing. This is a philosophical conundrum that materialists generally fail to address, because reductionist materialism and atheism are fundamentally unable to come to grips with questions this subtle.

Small things in life are often dismissed. Few human beings look at an ancient seashell on a desk, scrutinize the many tiny marine worm holes in it, the rounded grains of quartz, and understand that the entire universe is unfolding itself in these apparently insignificant records. The original Zen schools in China understood this; perhaps this is why they held ordinary rounded stones from riverbeds in such high regard, putting them on pedestals as single objects for contemplation. We have few such parallels in the West. We have far more of an interest in coercing objects to do what we want them to than in appreciating them for what they are.

Scientists of the West do appreciate that the contemplation of any single object, rightly undertaken, can open a set of questions that unfold into every corner of the cosmos. Nonetheless, most of them have taken an unfortunately materialistic attitude towards this property; they fail to see that a sense of wonder is a sacred property, and that that sense of wonder itself is transcendental. Like religion, secularism brings a set of great strengths to the table that are offset by an equal number of weaknesses.

Our technology and reliance on consumer goods is progressively separating us from any understanding and contemplation of the natural world. We lose this sense at our great peril.

So the next time you pass something small and apparently insignificant, take a moment to stop and study it and ask yourself questions.

You may be surprised at where they take you.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Beelzebub's Tales: Cosmologies In Literature

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

This essay is part of a series of discussions on the exoteric nature and aim of the Gurdjieff work, and inner work in general. That portion of the work may seem unimportant to some; and indeed, it is often neglected, especially in the Gurdjieff work. However, the old saying, “weak in life–weak in the work” indicates that a strong exoteric practice is in fact essential– a fact often lost on those who sink into themselves into a rapture of contact with the divine. It might even be argued that understanding this point of work is in fact essential to everything that both Gurdjieff and Jeanne de Salzmann were trying to teach.

Readers encountering the following material should consequently understand that this is not about the esoteric sides of the book, Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, which are vitally important and, for the greater part, not subject to verbal redaction. The book is, however, one of the most important and powerful faces put on the exoteric side of the Gurdjieff work, and a failure to both understand and value that side of its nature is a profound disservice to the effort at large.

My daughter Rebecca is a PhD candidate in English literature at Brown University. One of her associates is also in the PhD program, and a Milton scholar. Over the last few weeks, the three of us discussed the subject of major works in the Western literary canon containing complete cosmologies. We were speaking specifically of works of fictional literature, not treatises or philosophical discourses.

The list of works in this category is surprisingly short. What we were able to come up with as definitively belonging were Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. There may be other works of this nature, particularly in the modern world of science fiction, but they are inherently disqualified, since inventive cosmology is a prerequisite of science fiction, and is rarely– if ever– based on any presumed connection to actual reality.

Given that caveat, we discussed the inclusion of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, but more or less disqualified it, because this is essentially a mythological reconfiguration of the story of Christianity, not a revelation related to the structural nature of the universe. In addition,

The only other work that comes to mind is a recent one- Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality and other books in the series.

Very few authors, in other words, have had the audacity or the vision to present a complete cosmology of the kind that Gurdjieff advances in Beelzebub. Thus, although the work does not stand alone literature, it finds itself in relatively rarefied company.

I've pointed out before that Beelzebub's Tales is not, in fact, a unique and completely unclassifiable piece of literature, but, reasonably considered, firmly planted (and planted very early) in the genre of magical realism. The character of Beelzebub uses one of the typical devices of this genre: a protagonist who lives far longer than ordinary humans. What sets this particular work apart from other magical realism is its comprehensive focus on cosmology; one, furthermore, deeply tied into religious traditions from all parts of the world. It is, in other words, magical realism with an open stated aim and purpose, rather than just a work of fantasy for entertainment. It certainly careens in and out of didactic territory; nonetheless, any cosmological expose does so.

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson bears more kinship to Dante's Divine Comedy and A Separate Reality than it does to Paradise Lost, because both Dante, Gurdjieff, and Castaneda employ the device of first-person narrative, presenting the reader with an unmediated, self-aware narrator. Milton, on the other hand, presents us with a third-person narrative more on the order of an imaginative and theatrical recapitulation of Christian doctrine, cast in a mythological atmosphere.

Both Gurdjieff, Dante, and Castaneda, on the other hand, present structural cosmologies with an intimate critique of contemporary human behavior. Their protagonist's intersections and interactions with our own world engender more immediate, practical, and powerful metaphors.

This is not to lessen the enormous achievement Milton sets before us, but rather to highlight the differences between the texts. The purpose here is not, in any event, to justify or evaluate Milton or Dante's place in the canon of Western literature, but merely to point out that Gurdjieff and Castaneda rightly earn a place beside these two giants with their work.

Although Castaneda's books certainly contain a legitimate literary cosmology, and present many fascinating ideas, they seem to me to lack the essential mythological core underlying the other three works. One's concern would center around the feeling that these books are more a form of pop art–works of popular culture, cast in the new age mold–than they are serious, world-class literature. On the other hand, being a product of their own time, perhaps this is an entirely appropriate guise for them to assume. Only the test of time will tell.

In the meantime, it seems apparent that the literary world has not properly or appropriately evaluated Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson in the context of Milton and Dante, even though this subject seems to have the potential for more than a few PhD theses.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

What is the inner life?

2012-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00

Maybe I am clueless–in fact, it's certain that I am clueless, in many situations–but it never occurred to me, in the past series of posts, that any confusion would arise between what inner and outer Being might consist of, or that questions might arise as to whether we do in fact have an inner and an outer Being.

The idea of the inner self is, after all, so ubiquitous in religion and esoteric practice that one assumes most of us are familiar with what that is; or at least have an idea that the concept is valid. Yet I discovered that friends and acquaintances were asking me what the inner self is, or even unable to say whether they thought they had one or not. This includes people who have spent the majority of an adult lifetime in an inner work.

Do we distinguish between our inner and outer work? Do we have a clear understanding of the idea that both exist?

When I speak of intimate practice, as I often do, I speak of a part within that is quite different than this part that runs life. It is a part that does not fare well, as Ravi Ravindra once said, "under the cold light of analysis." It is that part that can't be expressed in words.

The intimate practice is the silent part of the self that receives. It is the part that is fed most by impressions; it is an inwardly formed vibration that fills the body. It is definitely connected to the organic sense of being; all of the work we do with sensation, which is voluntary from the exoteric side of our work, eventually feeds and, with work, awakens this esoteric side of sensation, which then becomes voluntary from the esoteric side. The inner self, in other words, with enough food, awakens to reciprocally participate in action of the whole.

This part is sacred and intimate, and reaches towards the higher, pressing against the cloud of unknowing. It is active and sensate; it does not think in the way we think, it does not know in the way we know, it does not act in the way we act. Nevertheless, it is the same as us: it is us.

This part does think, it does act, it does know. But it is quite different than that outward part which is so easily consumed by the events in external life. It is not strong: we have been feeding our outer life for many years without attending to it properly. But it is there, a friend or lover that always waits for us, no matter how thick and uncomprehending we are, no matter how unfaithful we are.

This is a side of ourselves that we, perhaps, do not know or rarely see; nonetheless, it is that most vital part that prays in secret and is rewarded in secret. It is what writes the poetry, sings the hymns, and mediates the remorse of conscience. iI there is an inner heaven to lay our treasures up in, it is here. If there is anything that crafts a higher relationship in man, it is here. When there is exquisite joy, it is here. When there is exquisite sorrow, it is also here. Every real pearl encountered in a lifetime is found on this string, and this string alone.

If we don't know this part, it doesn't make us inadequate, insufficient, or inferior. It simply means that more effort is needed on our part. And this exoteric part of us–this outer part, which so clearly and definitely wishes to contact something higher–well, this is the part we have that can do the work to try and help us connect to this inner understanding and this inner experience. The experience is real and true; anyone who works can eventually come to this. It is said that we can come to this Way through five things: trust, certainty, patience, resolution, and veracity. (Ibn 'Arabi, Sufis of Andalusia, p. 23, Suhail Academy, Lahore 1985.)

The part that sees is not the same as our inner self or our outer self. This may not seem easy to understand, or be clear to us, unless we already understand a clear distinction between the inner and the outer parts; nonetheless, as has been indicated in earlier essays on these questions, it is definitely a different element in the tripartite composition of our inner life... one perhaps directly related to Gurdjieff's "deputy steward." Jeanne de Salzmann makes this abundantly clear in her repeated references to the need to stand between the inner and the outer in our work. This place between two worlds is occupied by an awareness different than the awareness of the one world, and equally different than the awareness of the other. That awareness is part of what helps to, as is mentioned in Views From The Real World, "separate oneself from oneself." This standing between two worlds also occupies a significant meaning relative to the work outlined by the author of the Cloud Of Unknowing.

The simplest way to explain this is to refer readers to page 1091 of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, in which he clearly indicates that man has three brains ("center of gravity localizations.") We can readily liken the inner, outer, and seeing manifestations of a man to this system of three minds, in which the harmonious interaction of the three leads to a fourth, "real," or transcendent mind, which according to the Law of Emergence has properties that manifest on a level higher than any of the three brains or minds can when acting independently.

Human beings readily exercise the exoteric part of their being. That's where most everyone is stuck. Monastics and contemplatives exercise the esoteric part of their being, sometimes at the expense of the exoteric. Take note, for example, the following quote:

"In making bread, water represents the active force, flour the passive force, and fire the neutralizing force. Bread is the independent result, the fourth element arising from the action of these three forces. Each of the three forces is necessary for the bread to be made; if one of them is missing there will not be bread... Once made, bread has a fate of its own."

"What is difficult to understand is the nature of the river we spoke of earlier and the possibility of leaving it so that crystallization can take place. As you are now, you cannot do it; nor do you see the unfortunate consequences of not understanding this idea. It was precisely this lack of understanding that caused an asceticism to arise in many monasteries, where the monks too often exhausted themselves instead of developing.” - G. I. Gurdjieff, from "Gurdjieff: A Master In Life, Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch, p. 56-57, Dolmen Meadows Editions 2006.

Until the distinction between an intimate inner and active outer nature is clear, it remains as a vitally important point of our work.

In working, do not neglect this intimate action.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The question of outer action

2012-01-13T00:00:00.001-05:00

It is sometimes said that every religion or work has three natures: an outer nature, an intermediary nature, and an inner nature.

When Gurdjieff described these three natures to Ouspensky, he called them the exoteric, mesoteric, and esoteric circles of a work.

While I was pondering this question this morning, it occurred to me that there are parallels in Buddhism–and in Christianity–that may help inform us on the structural nature of the question. The Buddhists have a well-known saying: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sanga." The Christians refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Either way, there is the idea of a Trinity of investment: the inhabitation of three different aspects.

The inhabitation of three different aspects is a union of three different aspects. In the case of the Buddhists, the Buddha is an intercessor or–an intermediary–between the community (Sangha) and the absolute (the Dharma.) I believe we might agree that the concept of Christianity is not that different. Christ is the intercessor between the community of the Holy Spirit, and the Absolute, that is, God the Father. In each case, it is recognized that the full inhabitation and relationship of all three forces is necessary, and that a personified, objective, or intimate, intercessor or or agent is necessary. (I use the words personified, objective, and intimate because they each have a different nature, and all of them are true unto themselves, within context.)

Exoteric action is the action of the community. We can call it the Sangha; we can call it the Holy Spirit. Both are valid. In each case, there is an external action, an action of relationship in community, which we must inhabit in our spiritual work. In a certain not so abstract sense, this is actually is the locus of work for any Fourth Way work, that is, work in life. So we cannot ignore the community.

Mesoteric action is the action of the individual and the intercessor. An agency of help from a higher level that helps us see becomes an active force in the intersection of exoteric action and esoteric action. We are called to stand between two worlds: and we call on the example, or help of, the Buddha or Christ to support us in this work. It's another facet, another aspect, of the Lord have Mercy prayer. It is also the very work that Jeanne de Salzmann calls us to in The Reality Of Being. We are asked to stand between two worlds, to help join the inner and the outer, which need to be in relationship. This relationship cannot arise without the intercession of a third force– and we become personally responsible for the action of that third force. The two worlds cannot join and create a whole without our action. So we have to exert action in three directions: we are required to exert exoteric action, in the community; we are required to exert mesoteric action, which joins the community to the higher; and we are required to exert esoteric action, which is a deep inner personal effort to come into relationship with the highest possible principle.

Esoteric action is an action directed towards the higher. Of course this is essential, but it is powerless without the other two elements. It might as well be locked up in a cave. And this is hardly where it wants to be. The esoteric has every wish to come into a full relationship with the exoteric, but it can't do so without the action of the mesoteric- that is, our own effort.

I took up this line of questioning specifically because my question to myself this morning was exactly what the nature of the exoteric work the Gurdjieff work ought to be engaged in is. It strikes me that Christians and Buddhists both have a strong sense of what exoteric work in their community, in relationship to other communities, consists of. The exoteric face of a work may not be where the romance lies, but it is what confers cultural strength, and without cultural strength, a work dies.

We must ask ourselves whether there hasn't been a gradual weaking of vision in terms of the understanding of exoteric action on the part of the Gurdjieff work over the last thirty or forty years. Gurdjieff himself had a strong understanding of it, but corresponding shocks to maintain that didn't arise, even though shocks that preserved and grew the esoteric end of the work were consistent and powerful.

Consequently, while a deep understanding of the aim of esoteric work and what it means to the individual has grown considerably over the years inside the Gurdjieff community, there has been an overall lack of concerted attention to exoteric work, and there is consequent confusion about what it should mean and what it might consist of.

The work has deep esoteric aims related to higher levels; that is one thing. But, as the essay on escape from conditions points out, this does not issue an excuse from action in the ordinary world. We need to ask ourselves what our action here, in the ordinary world, on a horizontal level, ought to be. How do we put our community in relationship with the spiritual community at large? This needs to be understood from several points of view, not just the point of view of responsibility, but also the point of view of aim. What is the exoteric aim of the work? And if we don't quite know— well, isn't it our responsibility to form one?

Or should we just wrap ourselves in warm blankets and sit together quietly?

One exoteric aim of the work might be to help other paths see how we are all joined together. (And that is, indeed, the heart of the effort undertaken by Parabola magazine for over three decades now.) We are uniquely positioned at the heart of a higher understanding that emanated from what Gurdjieff called influences "C.” At this level of understanding, we're told, all religious efforts are one effort. A compassionate and intelligent exoteric action on the part of the Gurdjieff work could be to make every effort to help all works see one another as one. Of course it's a lofty goal, and an unattainable aim; yet every step in that direction intelligibly serves, and service must be one of the chief considerations in undertaking a legitimate exoteric work.

Because of its comprehensive nature, and its sensitivity to the question of wholeness and partiality, we're in a unique position to use our skills and insights in service to the religious community at large in this manner. There is no need to "sell" the Fourth Way or act as a recruitment center; instead, using our own efforts to understand in light of Mr. Gurdjieff's teachings and system, we may be able to help others in their own search, by connecting it to everyone else's. We may, with the tools and insights we've been given, be able to help put the humpty-dumpty of mankind's religious practice back together again.

Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson is, at least in some measure, a step in that direction; and since Mr. Gurdjieff clearly intended this book to be a serious part of the exoteric, public face of his work, part of his exoteric aim for this work must have leaned in that direction.

The ideas in the Gurdjieff work are like ligaments. Do we each personally represent agents and forces that can help those ligaments do their job to reconnect the spiritual parts of the body of humanity?

It's worth considering.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Next essay: Jan. 14: What is the inner life?

The Look From Above

2012-01-11T00:00:00.001-05:00

Dish with floral designs on an olive background

Iran, Safavid period (1501-1722)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The question of exoteric, mesoteric, and esoteric work is intimately tied into the Law of Three and the Way that it acts. Before readers continue with this essay, they ought to take a look at the following diagram of the relationships between esoteric, exoteric, and mesoteric forces.

The critical point of this diagram is that in it, the mesoteric force– the force which stands between and acts as the reconciling factor between the inner and the outer worlds– is found at the note "do."

To stand between– to see, which is the paramount activity which both Gurdjieff and Jeanne de Salzmann called us to– is to occupy this note, this vibration from a higher level, which both begins and ends the octave. Seeing, even on this level, is already at the same note of identity, the beginning, as the energy from the higher level that opens the initial impulse of the octave. (Readers will recall that Gurdjieff specifically told Ouspensky that every note in an octave is the "do" for an octave below it. See the diagram of the fractal enneagram.)

So when we engage in the act of seeing, even in an ordinary way and on our own level–that is to say, without any pretentious ideas that we're doing something special from a higher level, or experiencing the “look from above” that de Salzmann speaks of in The Reality of Being–we are already engaged in an activity connected, through relationship of vibration, to the entire Ray of Creation–since each note in the Ray of Creation is the "do" for an entire octave of its own.

And the consistent resonance of "do" reaches upwards and downwards through the entire structure.

Astute readers will immediately see echoes here of the many different traditions that do not inherently distinguish between the identity of man or his consciousness and God; the insistence among Zen Buddhists that there can be no essential difference, real or imagined, between enlightenment and non-enlightenment; and so on. The point is that whether or not we are conscious of it, we are (as Dogen repeatedly points out) already representatives of enlightenment— or, put otherwise, share an identity with God.

All of that sounds very nice, but, I'm sure you are thinking, we don't make very good Gods. Look at what a mess we're in.

And that's quite true. The question we face here is our need to strengthen the reconciling force, rather than focusing on our outwardness or our inwardness. That is done by seeing: an intentional act of attention, or mindfulness. Such action is essential in practices ranging from Christianity (such as the philokalia) to Buddhism. And to engage in this action in ordinary life, at an ordinary level, already creates a consonance of harmony between the parts that can help to receive echoes of the higher "do" that engendered the octave in the first place.

A harmonious blending of the inner and the outer by an awareness that participates creates a whole entity that becomes more open to influences of a higher level. This awareness, or mindfulness, is the essential third element; and the law of three is the engine that turns the wheel of the Dharma, providing the shocks that allow the octave to develop.

This means that even the most ordinary activity, with mindfulness, helps our work. It also means that, whether we are aware of it or not, our action and our being is fundamentally inspired by the divine and is always reaching back towards it, no matter how lowly or confused our action is. (This is a point I think Brother Lawrence might be quite in agreement with.) Hence discounting our ordinary action would be a terrible mistake. We need it– it needs us– and the divine influence needs it as well. In reality, there is no way to look down on the ordinary except through hubris.

Withdrawing from a strong, practical exoteric action– trying to eliminate the ego, rather than help it be what it is and help our work– weakens the interaction. One needs a robust and well formed outer life for inner work to become whole. Hence Gurdjieff's absolutely right emphasis on conscious egoism.

To be sure, the tendency is to emphasize too much one or the other. It's the balance that counts–and seeing, self-remembering, helps to naturally establish that balance. Without it, the inner and outer qualities of a man remain locked in a struggle that may cost one— or both of them— their lives.

In the same way that this is true for an individual, it is also true for esoteric works. Esoteric works that lean too hard on the inner nature of work, neglecting outer responsibility– which must always manifest as a form of service– inevitably weaken and fall down, because the part that is supposed to be active, conscious, and seeing, has no strong exoteric material to put demands on it and balance the esoteric portion of the work.

Work, in other words, whether for an individual or a community, must be balanced between these three forces. If one loses any one of the threads here, many things suddenly become quite impossible, no matter how sincere the work is, and no matter how good the intentions are.

Subsequent essays over the next week will be exploring the possible natures and meanings of exoteric work for specific aspects of the Gurdjieff practice. Readers must keep in mind that these are not conclusions: they are questions, suggestions, explorations. What follows, is, in other words, a work in progress for the community.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Briar Patches

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

Parabola recently published a link to Bob Thurman and the Dalai Lama's discourse on the Kalachakra on the Parabola Facebook page.

A few of the comments in it are worth examining relative to my recent essays on the law of three and the nature of time.

Thurman remarks (see 2:40 onwards) that time is, in the Kalachakra, viewed as infinitely compassionate. Gurdjieff, on the other hand, characterizes time as the “Merciless Heropass”– not a compassionate force at all, but, instead, an objective one.

The difference is interesting, given that some of Gurdjieff's cosmology appears to be derived from Tibetan sources. For example, one distinct connection between the Kalachakra and the Gurdjieff work is that, in the tradition, the Kalachakra originated as a work in life (see the “history and origin” section in this Wikipedia link.) The Kalachakra tantra, furthermore, emphasizes the similarities and correspondence between human beings and the cosmos–yet another striking point of similarity to Gurdjieff's cosmology as he expounded it to Ouspensky in In Search Of The Miraculous. Finally, we might consider Thurman's remarks about time as a machine (3:50) whose ultimate action is to liberate Beings from suffering. If we are going to characterize the universe and the flow of time as a machine, I believe we can agree this at least presents a more optimistic point of view than Ouspensky did in his treatment of the same subject.

How could these exalted sources possibly get it wrong- or, to put it more bluntly, how dare a slug like me exercise so much chutzpah as to suggest the Dalai Lama and Thurman are mistaken?

Well then, dear readers. Put your incredulity aside for just a moment and allow me to try and explain. While most of what they say about compassionate practice and a positive view of time is quite wonderful, understanding this question without understanding it from the point of view of the law of three and the universal octave may cause us to fall into the briar patch.

The Dalai Lama is entirely correct in referring to a universal force of compassion; nonetheless, Thurman ascribes this force to the action of time, instead of understanding the action of time as the formation of intelligence, which informs, but does not create, compassion. Compassion belongs to Love, which stands at the apex of the triangle in the law of three and is the reconciling force between matter and time.

Time is indeed a devourer, but this is not a negative characteristic, as suggested in the video. Nor is it a characteristic that needs to be "overcome." It is merely an existing characteristic, assuming- like Love and Matter- positive, negative, and reconciling roles by turn, in relationship to conditions. (In the action of the law of three, these three characteristics are not fixed, but fluid. Love, Time, and Matter each represent what Gurdjieff would have called "completed triads," that is, each one by itself is a harmonious blend of positive, negative, and reconciling elements. Each one has the capacity to express one of those three qualities in active manifestation, as necessary and appropriate in relationship to the actively expressed character of its partner elements in the triad.)

Manifestation and dissolution (form and non-form) are both real, and inescapable, as expounded in Dogen's Great Practice, found in the Shobogenzo. The action of going beyond– an essential Buddhist understanding– is where the question of compassion enters, as it balances the universal forces of creation and destruction.

What can we learn from this?

The law of three never excludes. It always integrates. Hence, every force is folded in to an action in relationship. There is no need to understand time as positive or negative; it is included in the whole of the force needed to turn the wheel of Dharma. It cannot act, however, without relationship to both matter (material reality) and compassion, or love.

Understanding time as a being food of the universe, in the Gurdjieffian tradition, helps us to understand that awareness outside of time is not intelligent. Information–that which is inwardly formed–cannot act or produce a result in relationship without time. One might say, in some senses, that the wisdom, or intelligence, needed to inform compassion is discovered and developed within the properties of time. It's equally true that the power of expression is embodied in material reality. In other words, the shocks in the universal octave describe and embody the three main paths Gurdjieff laid out as the foundations of yoga– the Way of the Fakir, the Way of the Monk, and the Way of the Yogi.

Combining all three Ways into a “Fourth Way” gives us the path of the whole dharma– and Gurdjieff's law of three is the engine that turns the wheel of dharma.

While I liked the video and its overwhelmingly positive message (it's a little difficult to take a position against world peace, try though we may) its overwhelming emphasis on the "total positivity of time" raises some questions for me. To indicate that the ultimate action of time is to liberate beings into their "highest bliss" or their own “deepest reality” may be true- readers must decide for themselves- yet we might consider resisting the temptation to label this as “positive,” since it implies a polarity, an inherent duality, rather than an absolute objectivity, which– like the Dharma– encompasses everything, all Truth.

Here, I think, the message departs from both the deepest and most esoteric Buddhist doctrine, as well as Gurdjieff's vision of the universe. To say that everything is working towards a final “positive” outcome, rather than an outcome which is simply whole, appears to be a message designed more for its populist appeal than an objective vision of transcendence. Transcendence, after all, goes beyond positives and negatives–one of the main points of Zen Buddhist discourse, as expounded by Dogen and one, I believe, that even Tibetan Buddhists may agree on.

And we cannot come to grips with Gurdjieff's ideas about the Sorrow of His Endlessness if everything is ultimately going to turn out, as he would say, “roses, just roses.”

Don't get me wrong. I am all for a universe of loving compassion, and positive outcomes. These constructs are, however, inventions of the conceptual mind. In the end, what we seek is a mystery, and that mystery transcends the limitations of our ordinary understanding.

My overall concern here is that presenting Buddhist practice, one of the most deeply esoteric and richest traditions in the world, as some kind of fairytale where “everything comes out all right in the end” may play well to audiences, but has the unfortunate potential to sell both the practice, and its meaning, short.

Buddhist philosophy and practice– like the Gurdjieff work– is not merely a facile means of ensuring a final positive result.

Its aim is to help us see Truth.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Escape From Conditions

2012-01-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

Today, a comment on the Parabola Facebook page about war criminals had me pondering questions of ethics, and the thought occurred to me that we are all war criminals.

This may seem like a ridiculous proposition to readers; nonetheless, if you follow my line of reasoning, I believe you will understand the proposition.

My family moved to Hamburg, Germany when I was seven years old. The first week I was there, I met a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her arm who had come out of the concentration camps. Wide-eyed and innocent as I was, she was wise enough to compassionately explain to me why she had this tattoo. The explanation boggled my young mind. And at nine years old, my parents took me to see Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died; this provided a permanent shock which cannot be described in ordinary words.

In summary, the question of man's inhumanity and our collective moral imperatives has been a living one for me since I was a very young person.

We begin this line of questioning with the question of whether or not there are war criminals. If there is no right or wrong, there cannot be any war criminals– everyone does exactly as they please, and all things are equal.

If there are war criminals, however, right and wrong indubitably exist. (See the post on intuition and conscience–link below.)

Let us presume there are war criminals. We will now examine this question from the point of view of the Holocaust.

Once we agree right and wrong action exist, let us propose, for example, that it is wrong to exterminate innocent Jews in gas chambers. It is, in fact, so wrong that one must stop this by any means possible. Eventually it becomes clear- as it unfortunately did- that merely discussing the matter over a cup of tea will not stop it. Only applying extreme physical force will work.

At this moment in time, a man who fights–who kills other men–to prevent this misdeed is not taking a wrong action. So he's not a war criminal. He fights on the side of the right. And the man who refuses to fight is in the wrong on one of two counts: either he is passively refusing to stop the crime, thus becoming complicit in the mass death of Jews, or he is outsourcing the fighting to others, thus becoming complicit in both their death and the death of the Jews, which, one might conceivably argue, is even more criminal.

In other words, to take no action whatsoever and still end up on the side of the “right”– attempting to escape conditions– is essentially impossible. This is the point that Krishna tried to impress upon Arjuna at the beginning of the Bhagavad-Gita; so it is an ancient question. It raises deep questions about the legitimacy of absolute pacifism from any moral point of view: and to propose or presume the possibility of an absolutely pacifistic planet is an absurdity. Conditions are not so, and they will not be. To presume otherwise is naïve at best, no matter how many arguments get thrown at it.

In our own society– and traditionally, throughout history– if a man kills to prevent other men from doing wrong, suddenly, he is issued an official excuse – and, even more, he becomes a hero. Yet he has still killed.

So apparently, there is an escape from the conditions of the morality of killing, because there are other conditions. Here discrimination pits one condition against another and excuses one evil because it was necessary. Examining this case, we see that even from the most ordinary point of view, that of the human moral imperative of right and wrong, redemption is possible: that there are transcendental conditions, that is, conditions that allow escape from other conditions. In other words, even in a polarized world "limited" by the dualistic ideas of right and wrong, higher and lower principles must exist.

Gurdjieff pointed out that we live in a universe of laws, and that a man is always under some law. It is up to a man to understand this and decide which laws he chooses to be under. There is no absolute escape from conditions. Pacifists, in other words, want to escape from conditions, but they can't. All of humanity–being born into this essential condition, which does as a matter of objective fact contain violence and inhumanity– is already complicit. We begin that way. The action of discrimination must become our guide; and we cannot deny at least the possibility of redemption under conditions of this kind.

This is, at least in part, the reason that Europe abolished the death penalty; an action the United States, due to its punitive moral attitude, has not seen fit to agree on. (Ironically, authorities generally agree that the traditional Tibetan legal system in place at the time the British originally invaded Tibet was rife with extreme punishments and human rights abuses, suggesting that we have sold ourselves a romanticized, Shangri-La version of what the actual conditions in Tibet's religious society were, up until the West and the Chinese began to interfere with them.)

I pointed out in an earlier post that the question of intuition and conscience comes into play here. We cannot control conditions; we can only become responsible to them. Responsibility is a complex question, not easily answered with reflexive emotional responses, which are partial. The reason that Gurdjieff used the analogy of a horse, carriage, and driver (concepts he took directly from an ancient yoga Sutra) for the being of man is because the horse isn't that smart. It's a horse. It is tremendously powerful and can run in any direction with great force, but it lacks intelligence. It is up to the driver to provide the intelligence needed to direct the horse properly. So knee-jerk reactions to the idea that so and so is a war criminal may be appealing, but they fail to examine the fundamental premise. One has to think about these things; thinking, however, is difficult and may lead one to painful realizations that don't fit with one's opinions. Hence, we usually avoid doing it.

This brings to mind a comment that Krishnamurti made at a meeting in Holland in the 1960's. One man maintained that the Nazis were more responsible than others for the crimes that had been committed. Krishnamurti admonished the man by saying that we are all personally responsible.

Each of us, individually, he said, is responsible for the conditions. Not some other person.

One response we can choose to make in response to conditions is compassionate action– something that the Dalai Lama would surely endorse. (Highly recommended reading: Tattoos on the Heart, by Gregory Boyle, featured in an earlier issue of Parabola.)

So how can one escape from conditions? Transcendence– the action of the higher, third force, a reconciling factor, the Buddhist action of going beyond– is always an action from a higher level. We cannot escape from the conditions of contradiction on this level. Something else is necessary. A divine influence, which has a property often referred to as Mercy, must enter into the action of this level in order to reconcile. At the moment of death– the moment of surrender to the higher, which is the required second shock in the octave– Gurdjieff's prayer is “Lord have Mercy.” This is the action that Christ took on the cross when he forgave the criminal being crucified next to him.

In other words, by Christ's example, even as we ourselves are crucified– brutally nailed to the horizontal action of this level– we can choose to discriminate by taking a compassionate action that shows mercy.

Students of the Gurdjieff system interested in the enneagram might here take note of the fact that the second conscious shock is located in the "wrong" place on the enneagram. This shock is actually supposed to be located between the numbers eight and nine–that is, between the notes "si" and "do."

The prayer of "Lord have mercy," in other words, must be invoked as man stands at the very threshold of the Lord– it is his last and most necessary prayer before his encounter with the Lord, that higher principle to which we must all answer in the end.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

A definite moment of intimate practice

2012-01-06T00:00:00.001-05:00

Some personal notes.

Epiphany is at hand; this is a definite moment of intimate practice.

Intimate practice cannot be put on the table and served. It does not fit in dishes, and is never seen in the grocery stores where we exchange goods and services. The truly esoteric aspect of work is the quiet work of the inner self. It remains ever hidden; as it gains intelligence, it conceals itself naturally.

To hide naturally is to understand. All of the outward self is naturally unhidden; this outwardness is in its nature and is entirely right. The open nature of outwardness is a true nature, just as the hidden nature of inwardness is a true nature. So we have these two natures, and they are both true natures. There is no need to judge them; we need only inhabit them.

To discriminate is to see the difference between what must be outward and what must be inward. Outwardness and inwardness belong together; each must know its own nature and be whole unto itself. Perhaps the great difficulty is that we are confused about this question. To be inward and to be intimate is to practice and to pray in secret. This practice and this prayer belong to the inner nature, and are a matter strictly between God and a single soul. The relationship of the soul to God is like the relationship of a wife to a husband, or a mother to her child. Nine tenths of it need not be explained; it knows itself and does not need the knowing of others.

We live in an age where the outward display of everything is routine and expected. Men have forgotten what inwardness is, and don't understand what it is, as the parables say, to drink wine instead of water. Nowadays, men drink water and declare what wonderful wine it is. We compare vintages.

But there is no wine here. There are many glasses, and bottles everywhere, but this wine does not come in glasses and in bottles. Today's glasses and bottles are filled with snake oil.

To be intimate is to be precise. It is to put one's attention on a single very fine point, perhaps something that is very nearly insignificant and cannot be seen at all by anyone else. It is at the heart of the body and the heart of the mind and the heart of the feelings; it is a single, small thing, like the eye of a needle. The soul is a thread that can pass through that eye, if enough love and attention is paid to it.

So there is this opportunity to be intimate and to be precise, but it can't be squandered. It mustn't be advised or advertised. It needs to take place as though one had one small grain of sand between the thumb and the forefinger; it is an act of love that is found only in the details, and not in the gross movements of life.

It is here–immediately here.

One practices as though one's hair is on fire without anyone else ever seeing it. Practice is like this; it is always within, never coming, and never going away. In the same way that the left hand and the right hand turn away from one another, so that one does not know what the other is doing, eyes look in two directions at the same time. Prayers live in the midst of sin; and hearts are open even though it looks like the doors of the house are closed, and no one is at home.

Men believe ten thousand things, yet nothing we believe is intimate. To understand one thing that is true is to become intimate. To have one thing that is intimate is already ten thousand things and more. There is no limit to intimacy; yet every object, event, condition, and circumstance is limited.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Time and Necessity

2012-01-04T00:00:00.001-05:00

On Jan 1, I went upstate and stood at my sister's grave.

Less than three months ago, she was still alive. Aside from my own premonitory dream, there were no indications that she was about to die.

Blending seamlessly with the experience of standing there, knowing that the elemental remains of her body were under the earth in front of me, were the results of my numerous recent contemplations about the nature of incarnation and time.

We learn from the story of Christ–and other divine parables– that divinity repeatedly incarnates itself and is made manifest in the midst of man and his affairs. It seems like a special occasion; furthermore, it often seems, the way the story is told, as though it is a favor being done for us.

In fact, the incarnation of divinity is a necessity. The Divine must manifest in the midst of material reality; if there are any cosmological lessons to be learned from the vast expanse we traverse when reading Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, it is that the higher must repeatedly descend for contact with the lower. Not only do all the messengers who visit Earth to try and straighten mankind's affairs out do this; Beelzebub himself recapitulates the process over and over again during the course of the book.

The nature of existence and the flow of time required the creation of material reality, and required the manifestation of the Divine within it. All of this because of the nature of Time. Time inexorably consumes everything; As Gurdjieff tells it, only by balancing the relationship between divinity and time with the material universe was it possible to preserve the nature of divinity itself.

The entire Passion of Christ, in which he ultimately- and unconditionally- accepts his fate in the garden of Gethsemane represents an acknowledgment of the inevitability of incarnation and all its consequences. God accepts his own suffering through expression and material reality in order to make the universe whole. In His effort to overcome the destructive nature of Time, all of God is repeatedly and forever given to us in this sacrificial act of embodiment and, afterwards, surrender.

In examining the history of known religious avatars over the last three thousand years, no other single act has ever more fully recapitulated the relationship between the divine and man, or completely illustrated the functional nature of the cosmos in relation to its ongoing creation and destruction, than Christ's sacrifice. The passion does not belong to Christianity alone: incarnation and surrender are at the heart of the universal order, and Christ's action, on an esoteric level, describes not just the parameters of Christianity, but also that of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and every other legitimate religious practice.

The Divine incarnates in order to know itself, integrating both the understanding and actual process of time into Its own nature. In the original nature of the universe, before the establishment of the cosmos, Divinity and Time were opposed to one another in separation. A third force became necessary. The universe as we know it is that third force; and in its entirety, it is the complete expression of the Divine, manifest.

Matter is the eternal incarnation and reincarnation of living truth. Here we come close to touching on one of the overarching meanings of the Dharma.

Is this all theoretical? I think not. Go stand at the grave of a loved one, sense yourself, and contemplate.

We are all immediate and perpetual participants in this process; it is not an abstraction, but the immediate expression of every moment of our own lives. Our sensory tools– the body, thought, emotions– are specifically designed to collectively sense the nature of this question and our relationship to the whole.

These questions stand close to the nature of being-foods and the universal octave. They are also directly related to the Buddhist investigation of form and non-form. In order to visually clarify the relationship between Gurdjieff's enneagram, form, non-form, and the Dharma, I have created the following diagram
(click the link) which is directly related to the diagram of being-foods in the universe.

As readers will see, the enneagram provides a useful visual reference for the nature of relationship in the central questions of form and its meaning. This graphic should put to rest, in some ways, many of the questions about whether there is– or isn't– a form in spiritual work. The question is much like the beginning of a Persian fairy tale: there is a form, and there isn't a form. Both of these things are true, and both are quite necessary.

But there is also something else.

We talk about Time, the Merciless Heropass, as though it were somewhere else, and us not already in it. We talk about the Divine as though it were something other than ourselves, and the universe as we encounter it.

Yet here we are, right now, in this very moment in the middle of everything– right at the heart of the action.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The Sacred Beginning

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-05:00

Bowl with Hare, Spain, 14th century

Metropolitan Museum

on loan from Hispanic society of America

Here we are, at the beginning of another year.

This morning, I was pondering the role of beginnings and the note "do" on the enneagram.

Beginnings may look quite ordinary to us. The first note in the octave looks like it's at a low level. We tend to get the impression that when we begin, we start at the "bottom" and work our way "up."

It isn't quite that way. Every beginning is a sacred beginning that emanates from a higher influence. Remember, the note “do” is located on the apex of the triangle representing the law of three. It's actually the highest influence that affects the entire existence and process of the octave. From that initial note, as the octave develops, the energy has to descend and incarnate itself before it can begin its journey back to the higher source it came from. The use of the terms up and down is relative; change in rates of vibration are omnidirectional. The enneagram is, in a certain way, a diagram of a cosmic electrical circuit. In the multiplications, we see a complex field of interaction where higher rates of vibration continually inform lower ones- and vice versa. Energy doesn't evolve in a linear fashion- 1,2,3,4,5,6,7- but in a much more complex one: 1,4,2,8,5,7.

The beginning of every moment, every object, event, circumstance, and condition, is a sacred moment. Reality always begins as it emanates from a higher source. The cyclical process whereby it recognizes itself and then returns itself to the source that it came from is not a journey from down here to up there. It is a journey through relationship in which all directions have a value and each one supports the others.

Our dualistic view of our own lives and relationships contradicts this truth. We don't see that every relationship and direction we engage in–or that engages us–is part of a mutually supportive whole, that in its collective nature expresses the Dharma. The whole point of Dogen's Genjo Koan is to express this wholeness of relationship, which is most certainly part of what we have forgotten when we say we do not remember ourselves.

In a certain sense, the beginning is the most sacred moment of all. If it is rightly recognized and valued, we start out by sensing the divine origin of every action. To truly be aware of this would create a fundamental inner transformation of attitude. That is, of course, an extraordinarily high aspiration which we can't speak of except theoretically.

Everything is under divine influence, higher influence, entering each octave of relationship from the highest possible point within that octave, and then returning to it. It is the iteration and expression of that energy as it develops that determines a man's right work and right action. When we consider this, we can perhaps begin to glean an understanding of Meister Eckhart's contention that all actions originate in God, serve God, and return to God. In the end, there is nothing but the Dharma–there is nothing but God. Every human being, in the course of all of their actions and their entire lives, is a steward of this sacred process that begins at the first note. Hence the overarching emphasis on service and stewardship that permeates the New Testament in the Christian Bible.

To live in the moment– presuming one had the faintest clue of what that means (and although we talk about it great deal, we do not have much of a taste of this) would be to eternally and consciously sense the sacred nature of Being.

It's a ridiculously tall order, I think you'll agree. Here we are, helpless little "slugs," as Hassein described us to his grandfather Beelzebub. Yet we have a wish to sense the sacred nature our existence and the sacred nature of every action. We're very fortunate slugs indeed to have this impulse.

Everything is sacred. Do we know the taste of that? These are not just words; and the inadequacy of words does not take anything away from the truth here. Man is created with an organic ability to know this, to know that he stands at the note “do” at every moment of his life. And to know that life emanates from its first to its last instant, in every expression and iteration, from a sacred source.

A right valuation of this could mean everything to our work. Doesn't the world look quite different if it is all precious, instead of something shrink wrapped and disposable, which is the way most of our culture presents everything to us?

Yes, a tall order indeed. Yet perhaps we could all join one another together this year in an effort to understand this forever arising, forever existing initial impulse and its sacred nature.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The three realms: Dogen's Genjo Koan and Gurdjieff's Law of Three

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Dogen's Genjo Koan, constituting his most essential expounding of the Dharma- opens with three sections:

"When all dharmas are Buddha dharma, there are delusion, realization, practice, birth and death, buddhas and sentient beings.

"When the myriad dharmas are without a self, there is no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.

"The Buddha way, basically, is leaping clear of abundance and lack; thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas. Yet in attachment blossoms just fall, and in aversion weeds just spread." (Dogen's Genjo Koan- Three commentaries, P.23, Counterpoint, Berkely, 2011.)

These three propositions accurately mirror Gurdjieff's Law of Three. Dogen's first paragraph describes Holy Affirming; the second, Holy Denying; and his third expounds the principle of Holy reconciling.

Interested readers who pick up a copy of the book will discover that much of Bokusan's commentary on the nature of Genjo Koan is closely related to this question. Genjo Koan, loosely interpreted, means "the hidden, whole action of impartiality." (See pages 13-14.) Bokusan's detailed iteration of syllabic meaning notwithstanding, the interpreted gist of the title is broadly consonant with Gurdjieff's "impartial being-mentation." And, indeed, a close reading of the text as Bokusan's commentary develops reveals just such a thrust.

In Dogen's Zen, the resolution of conceptual thought, and consequent duality, is attained through the action of third force, Gurdjieff's Holy Reconciling. This is "going beyond."

Bokusan comments: "Buddha dharma is like this. As being, non-being, form, and emptiness go beyond being and non-being, form and emptiness, there are distinctly being and non being, form and emptiness. Sentient beings, Buddhas, delusion and enlightenment are all like this... This is something that can only be understood by those who have departed from all views and attained true liberation. It cannot be seen with the eyes of those who are eager to be enlightened. Genjo Koan comes forth when this eagerness is removed. What happens in the place beyond being and non-being? Only after going beyond do the three realms come together and sentient beings come together. This is Genjo Koan.

To tell you the truth, even when we are deluded we are within the three realms. Even when we are enlightened we are within the three realms." (ibid, p.36.)

The three realms can be understood as three forces of Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, and Holy Reconciling. Only by the action of third force- going beyond- can the three realms be brought together within the manifestation of sentient (three brained) beings. Just like Gurdjieff, Dogen indicates that we are third force blind- we don't understand going beyond. This blindness towards third force is both a central tenet of Gurdjieff practice and an overarching theme in Buddhism.

Broadly speaking, the forces of cause and effect- a perennial question in Zen- can be understood as related to affirming and denying forces. Reconciliation comes through action- and that action can, perhaps, furthermore be broadly understood as understanding. Understanding- insight- is repeatedly presented in Zen practice as a transcendental action that resolves the paradox of causes and effects- which cannot be denied, but are not in fact separated. Readers who pick up a copy of the book will find that throughout the text, Bokusan's commentaries repeatedly bring up points that are very strongly consonant with comments and observations made by Jeanne de Salzmann in The Reality of Being.

This raises interesting questions about de Salzmann's trip to Japan with William Segal, her meetings with Suzuki and Nakagawa, and later consequences for the Gurdjieff work. Her insights- though undeniably and inseparably in a direct line that evolved from her work with Gurdjieff- unmistakably echo Zen insight and Zen practice, and her introduction of Zen-type sittings to the everyday practice in the Gurdjieff Foundation's work must have followed directly on her discovery of the similarities between Zen understanding and objective understanding, as taught and practiced by Gurdjieff himself.

De Salzmann, in other words, understood both aim and practice in Zen, and how closely related they were to Gurdjieff's own work and aims.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The Universal Octave

2011-12-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

In my general ponderings about the enneagram, essence, conscience, and related topics, this morning, my questions came around to an old subject–that is, being-foods in man and the universe.

Because, as Gurdjieff taught us, man is an accurate model of the universe in miniature, we can readily understand the idea that the universe has three being-foods, just as man does.

It's not difficult to relate man's three being foods to the law of three on the enneagram, and I have done so in this diagram. (click on the link.) Each type of food, having a different rate of vibration, is appropriate to a different center, whose rate of vibration is at a corresponding speed.

What we see is that each center has a food appropriate to its own work.

What makes the subject more interesting to me is what happens when we look at the same diagram as applied to the universe. Readers can see this diagram at the following link, which also allows you to interactively toggle back and forth between being-foods of man and being-foods of the universe.

Readers who have been following my recent musings will know of my essays about the connections between the creation and nature of material reality, the flow of time, and my consequent inferences about the relationship between the consciousness of man and the consciousness of God. Let's just say that these subjects are all intimately connected.

The bottom line here is that the universe, like human beings, feeds on the material around it, and is constructed of it. The law of Trogoautoegocrat– I eat myself– is wholly expressed in the enneagram.

Matter itself–elemental matter–is the first being-food of the universe, the material food of the universe, which represents the initial incarnation of the divine in the flow of material downwards through the rate of creation. It's easy to understand how this works: the physical body, or moving center, of the universe, the vehicle through which all of the universe is expressed, is composed of matter. Matter itself represents the Holy Denying force: energy, emitted from the wholeness of God, manifests itself as its own “I am–I wish to be”– a separate entity from God.

Time is the second being-food of the universe, playing the same role that air plays for man. Gurdjieff said to Ouspensky, " Time is breath– try to understand this.” (In Search Of The Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky, page 213, Paul H. Crompton Ltd. edition 2004.) Given that air is, in man, the "food" of intellectual center, let's take a shot at it, presuming that time plays a similar role in the universe.

The intelligence of the universe, its character and everything it knows, develops only through time. It is the progressive and interactive nature of relationship that creates meaning. The intellect of the universe, its ability to see, think, and understand itself, can only be developed by consuming the medium of time. Matter must surrender itself back into God through time: everything submits itself to time, creating its relationship to the second prayer, "Lord have Mercy." (See the diagram at this link for the position of the two prayers on the enneagram.)

The prayer "Lord have Mercy" is located on the diagram at the same place where Time, the Merciless Heropass, acts as the second shock in the universal octave. Time has no mercy... hence the prayer to the Lord to provide it.

The third being-food of the universe is Love. This force is at the highest rate of vibration, representing the point at which Divine Influence initiates and informs the entire octave of the universe. It corresponds to the food of impressions in man; and indeed, in the essay on the flow of time and its nature (see the above link) it turns out that the consumption of impressions is essential to the identity of Divinity, in its ongoing effort to know itself fully. This subject is treated in more detail in the essay on Chakras and the Enneagram.

Anyway, I thought readers would find this line of inquiry interesting. It's far from a complete work; nonetheless, the suggestions are provocative. I have added a complete page of diagrams of various kinds to my Doremishock website so that readers can browse through the iterations of the enneagrams I have created in my various essays without having to read all the ponderous material that accompanies them. (I have to confess that I myself find it painfully difficult to slog through endless pages of esoteric material– an exquisite irony, isn't it? ...Just looking at the pictures should provide an easy browsing experience that won't drive you completely nuts, and, in some cases, if you truly think about them, you will figure out much of what is said in the essays.)

In summing all of this up, it occurred to me that it's possible to distill Gurdjieff's approach into a very few concise words. The Work consists of the following efforts and responsibilities, each one related to its own position on the enneagram in the law of three:

Always Beginning (note "do")
Always Working (first conscious shock- conscious labor)
Always Giving Back (second conscious shock- intentional suffering)

These three principles, applied throughout the development of any object, event, condition, or circumstance, are what we might call right action.

There are some further important inferences to draw here from the nature of time, its position on the diagram, and the sorrow of His Endlessness, but they cannot be addressed in this essay, which has more than enough theory in it already.

On a more practical note, it's hardly a theoretical exercise to try and have a conscious impression of the digestion, breathing, and impressions (especially as they may arrive under the influence of forces above the top of the head.) We are always in the midst of taking in all three being-foods.

To be human– to be a man without quotation marks– is to sense this organically.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Essence, Intuition, and Conscience

2011-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

In the earlier post on conscience, I examined Gurdjieff's contention that conscience was the only undamaged part of man's psyche- an element, furthermore, that embodied attributes of the divine- and that it had submerged (like the continent of Atlantis) into his unconscious.

Conscience is a discriminatory mechanism which in ordinary life- as well as in his attitude towards higher influences- can allow a man to choose what the Buddhists would call "right action."

In late Middle English, the word intuition originally connoted a spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication; today, we use the word to indicate an instinctive understanding or action. Either way, we can understand intuition as being connected to our submerged conscience. I don't mean this by way of psychic activity, that is, the paranormal sensing of events (as in seeing the future, for example) but rather in the sense of knowing what is right.

Cosmologies without an inherent understanding of, and discrimination between, right and wrong are, in my eyes, next to worthless. The entire text of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is, by and large, an exhaustive discrimination between right and wrong practices within the sensory range, psychic, and social manifestations of mankind. There is a right and there is a wrong in Beelzebub's universe; having himself fallen afoul of the borders between right and wrong practice-which, by the way, are determined according to universal cosmological Laws-, he is banished to the solar system to reflect on his transgressions. In the course of things, he uncovers an opportunity to delve further into, perhaps, the same sort of questions that plagued his own misunderstandings, by examining mankind.

The general gist of the book is that humanity has, over the course of thousands of years, lost nearly all of its ability to practice such discrimination in a manner proper for three-brained beings. The one part of his psyche- conscience- that man is yet able to trust lies buried in him- hidden- not participating in his day- to- day life. According to Beelzebub, this part may, with effort, yet become reactivated in man, participating once again in his conscious Being.

Discrimination involves making choices. Every human being is inevitably, as a result of events, circumstances, objects, and relationships, required to make discriminating choices in life. These choices play a role as reconciling factors, mediating the opposing forces he or she encounters. And the whole point of life, according to Gurdjieff, is to learn how to make choices that embody the characteristics of responsible individuals. The five obligolnian strivings emphasize it; Gurdjieff's remarks to Ouspensky about the behavior of tramps and lunatics underscore it.

Conscience- and therefore intuition- play no small part in the awakening of such impulses. As Beelzebub says, per the understandings of the Society of Akhldanns, "Every deed of a man is good in the objective sense if it is doneaccording to his conscience, and every deed is bad if from it he laterexperiences remorse."

A right attention towards life is necessary; a clarity whereby one sees where one is. Following this, the action of an inner part must come into play. This part is closely connected to essence; essence, as the innermost part of man's psyche, and the one having an ability to make a more direct contact with higher influences, acts wholly in concert with conscience, which has (appropriately) secluded itself in close proximity to essence.

The association makes perfect sense; conscience being a divine impulse, it belongs most properly to that portion of the enneagram circumscribed by the law of three. I thus propose the following addition to yesterday's diagram, placing conscience in the center of the stable triangle described by essence. Conscience must be under divine influence; accordingly, I can't reasonably assign it any other position on the enneagram.

The salient point is that essence, conscience, and intuition have a close relationship to one another. Intuition, moreover, ought to be an essential and spiritual sense of what is right and wrong, not a moral one. Moral choices are only able to describe themselves within the horizontal action of the multiplications and the perimeter of the enneagram. Intuitive, or conscience-based choices, are always born from emanations that originate in higher influences. This is why the folkloric understanding of intuition and its value has always placed it higher on the scale of man's understanding than rational thought, which belongs to a different and subordinate sphere.

Freedom of action involves freedom from the centrifugal force of personality; a cessation of erratic rotation. That rotation must be balanced by the counterweight and shocks of essence. Anchored in an organic state of being, conscience can express itself through the absolute freedom of intuition, which in an unmediated state lacks the capacity for error. So in a sense, when we speak of "being free" and "inner freedom," we speak of being in touch with our native, informed (inwardly formed) intuition, which does not need the interference of the mind to understand or manifest right action.

This capacity, like Zen's "going beyond," transcends action of the conceptual mind and the dualistic formulations of enlightenment and delusion. The intuition of conscience is able to strike a single blow that penetrates to the heart of the matter. Meeting the moment, it knows at once what is needed.

Why do we need attention?

Solely to make it possible for this element of our psyche, acting through essence, to be allowed to discover its rightful expression.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

essence and influences

2011-12-26T00:00:00.000-05:00

In the last post, I introduced the idea that essence is more able to take in higher influences than personality. Today we'll examine that premise in more detail.

The enneagram is not only able, in one way or another, to define and describe all of Gurdjieff's ideas; it's often the best tool for the task. Referring to my simplified and somewhat conscise diagram of essence and personality, readers will see that essence is related to the law of three, and is connected to influences from a higher level, whereas personality belongs to the circular, or horizontal, rotation of the octave, and is consequently only able to act on this level. (The enneagram represents the intersection of two worlds, and the multiplications represent the movement of energy within a specific horizontal level. See chakras and the enneagram and centers of gravity and and conscious shocks for more detailed material on the subject.)

Essence, under the influence of a higher "do," is a stable entity- personality is not. Furthermore, essence itself arises in and carries the influences from the level above us. It is, in other words, directly connected to the idea of a "soul," and explains why all infants arrive on the planet with already defined characteristics, which have been instilled in it in its origins at the astral, or planetary, level. Those interested in the ideas surrounding reincarnation (which Gurdjieff disavowed in his writings, but- as I was once told by someone who knew & worked with him personally- actually affirmed in personal exchanges) may begin to intuit more about that question by studying this version of the diagram.

According to my interpretation, the diagram furthermore illustrates that the conscious shocks in man are connected with the action of essence, and that its role in the regulation and development of personality are absolutely... well, essential... if it is to develop a right relationship in its action. Personality, by its nature, has a great deal of centrifugal force, due to the rotating nature of its cycle around the perimeter of the octave. It thus tends to force life outward, away from being, by"throwing off"arriving impressions. Essence, on the other hand, has by its own inward nature an inherent ability to take impressions into a stable center. When Zen masters ask students to know something "in their hara," or gut, they are basically asking that impressions be taken in by essence, rather than toyed with by personality. Essence has a tactile organic quality and an ability to sense which is mostly lacking in personality.

We may hereby infer that conscious labor and intentional suffering are actions of essence, informed (inwardly formed) with the participation of influences from a higher level. No wonder Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that a man's essence must develop- without it, all inner work must inevitably stall.

The three being foods are also connected to the action of essence and the shocks. The first being-food is a physical representation of conscious labor, and the second being-food, air, is connected to the action of intentional suffering. The third being food of impressions is actually a link, in its entirety, to the level above us- which is why, in the right state, taking in very nearly any impression whatsoever, a man is able to sense the sacred nature of existence. The three being foods are, moreover, intimately connected to the action of essence in man, as this version of the enneagram makes clear. Awareness of one's self while one eats or breathes-both essential practices in many spiritual disciplines--are meant to help the development of a deeper connection to essence. Taking in the three being-foods consciously helps essence grow. Need we any clearer explanation of exactly why Gurdjieff wanted his pupils to prepare and eat their food with a right attention? Perhaps not. Let us not forget, furthermore, the central role the preparation and consumption of meals plays in Christ's teaching. There are no coincidences here.

Speaking in broader terms, mankind evolved on the planet specifically to take in impressions of the natural world. These feed both essence and personality in a specific way that ordinary, "manmade" impressions cannot. (Prominent biologists such as Edward O. Wilson have come to the exact same conclusions, albeit via a different route.) Mankind's longstanding and romantic infatuation with impressions of nature is the residual echo of a faint realization that such food is the most important food one can take in. Nonetheless, it does a man little or no good without the right corresponding development in all his parts.

A better connection between the centers can open the body, mind, and emotions to a more immediate and more deeply essential impression of nature. In moments such as this, personality takes a distinct back seat.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Next post, December 28: Essence, Intuition, and Conscience

Influences

2011-12-24T18:23:00.001-05:00

An influence is a force that "flows inwards." This relates to the idea, frequently discussed in this blog, that information means that which is inwardly formed.

All of the impressions we take in flow inwards into our bodies, creating an inner solar system- or, if you will, cosmos. So influences can mean, broadly speaking, impressions.

We have little understanding that anything is actually forming within us; because of our inherent abstraction from our organic nature, we don't see how the material that flows into us actually creates us. We somehow take it for granted that we have some kind of mastery over life and its influences, when in fact the exact opposite is true.

A man or woman can choose which influences he will come under. There are higher influences, and lower ones. We can generally see the quality of influences a man, or society, is under by the results. The cathedral at Chartres, for example, is a product of higher influences, as are Beethoven's symphonies, or Leonardo's art. Lower, or horizontal, influences (such as science, which is of extreme utility, but within the sense we're able to understand it, absolutely limited to the horizontal sphere) are unable to produce anything approaching great works of art, literature, or music. Atheism, for all its belligerent bluster, is fundamentally impotent in these areas because of its absolute denial of higher influences- a blind man that doesn't know he is blind. Or, perhaps, merely a bland man- one without any salt in him. The colossal oppressions, depressions, and serial failures of professedly atheist socities such as the Soviet Union underscores how utterly worthless enterprises lacking any higher influences are in the long run.

The most important higher influences within the range of man's world all emanate from the sun. Gurdjieff made it quite clear that sacred, or higher, emanations all operate according to harmonious, or musically consonant, principles as expressed in the law of octaves.

My good friend Richard Lloyd contacted me yesterday to advise me of the following remarkable video at the NASA SOHO site. (click the link.) Readers are encouraged to watch the video at least through the first 1:35, at which time they will see the most remarkable thing: an enneagram representing the way in which the internal musical vibrations of the sun interact. This image does not just "look like" an enneagram: it is an enneagram, albeit upside down. That is, a scientific analysis of the way internal waves propagate in the sun does indeed follow Gurdjieff's diagram. These waves produce "notes", or vibrations, that reverberate throughout the solar system.

Personality is very poor at taking in influences. Being outwardly formed and outwardly directed, operating on ego at the expense of essence, it has no weight or center of gravity to anchor it. Consequently it gets tossed about in every direction by outside forces. One might call it the source of what is "outformation:" a cacophony of facts, ideas, opinions and premises colliding in a bumper-car arena, where there is a great deal of exciting action, leading absolutely nowhere.

Soon the ride is over and we die.

Essence, on the other hand, is firmly anchored. If anything at all is inwardly formed, it is formed through, and in, essence. If we examine the enneagram on this point in some more detail, the relationship may become clearer. More on this in the next post.

In the meantime, on this eve of evenings, it is worth or while to consider what influences we are under. Christmas, and Christ himself, symbolize an opportunity for man to intentionally put himself under the highest possible influences, influences, moreover, with a reciprocal relationship to us. These solar influences harmoniously correspond to man's essential wish, and can help us to develop Being. Hence Gurdjieff's Christmas instructions to his pupils to seek Christ, and call Him to us. (See Frank Sinclair's "Without Benefit of Clergy" for a detailed recounting of that instruction.)

The direction Gurdjieff gave was one aimed at inward formation and the development of essence, under the influence of God.

No better aim exists.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

tomorrow's post: essence and influences

Not Holding On

2011-12-21T11:34:00.000-05:00

I recently acquired a new book on Dogen's Genjo Koan– “Three commentaries– including the essential 19th century commentary by Nishiari Bokusan.

Those interested in connections between the Gurdjieff teaching and Dogen's conception of Zen will find this fine book well worth reading. Bokusan's discourse on form and emptiness (pages 34-36) bears, in my eyes, a striking relationship to Jeanne de Salzmann's practice of standing between the inner and the outer– the positioning of the attention in an unattached manner.

Bokusan says, "To selflessly see the inside and outside of the world together as one is Genjo Koan. Here, there is no yardstick with which to measure delusion and enlightenment." (Dogen's Genjo Koan- three commentaries, p. 39, 2011, Counterpoint-Berkeley.)

It would be tempting to see the material in this book as theoretical, but it just simply isn't. In fact, Bokusan says, “Then what in the world is Genjo koan? First of all, you should get it right down in your hara. This cannot be done solely by thinking. On the other hand, you cannot grasp it without knowing the basic principle. So first I will explain it for the moment in an analytical fashion.” (ibid, p. 13.)

What Bokusan is saying here is that we have to know this material in our guts, organically. But we begin with the mind, because we must begin there.

What does all of this mean in simple, practical terms?

I want things to be like this, or like that. But things are not "like" anything. Things are just like themselves. Each event, condition, circumstance, and object has an essential nature that belongs exclusively to it, and is already whole.

My disjointed inner connections fail to perceive that: when the centers don't work together properly, each one divides the whole world into its own slice of pie. But the world is not a slice of pie; it is a whole pie, and no matter how many tiny slices of it you make, all of them are just pie.

There isn't any reason to hold on to life. It comes and it goes, and it is always here. Inhabiting life involves standing between Being and not Being. This is, in a way, one of the points of the first three brief paragraphs of the Genjo Koan.

I think I am going to get rid of something in order to become whole; get rid of my delusions, get rid of my personality, what have you. If I obtain a spiritual paring knife, and I peel off all the bad parts, there will be a pure and good "me" that emerges (if there's anything left.) This delusion arises naturally from an essential lack of love of Self and an essential dissatisfaction with Self; if I have no respect for Self, I have no respect for God. Whatever there is is already here. Respect that.

Existence and non-existence of this and that have nothing to do with the Buddha Dharma; it is not a question of existence or nonexistence, it is always a question of relationship. When I see material–for example, a ladle over the stove, or a flower–I think I am seeing a ladle or a flower, but I am seeing relationships. Ladles and flowers are complete expressions of relationship, and completely represent the arising and existence of relationship. Moreover, I am not seeing relationship; I am actually just relationship within relationship. There is no separation between relationship and relationship. We are all together here in a single complete expression of the Dharma.

The position I am in is constantly moving and requires constant examination. I don't come from anywhere, and I don't get anywhere; I am perpetually here, poised within this flow of events, yet in some peculiar way not connected to them in any immediate fashion. My manifestation has no material substance; it is not grounded. It is an abstraction. Why is this so? I need to keep asking myself that.

Gurdjieff made much of the difference between essence and personality. In his eyes, modern man was far too absorbed in personality; certainly, our media culture reinforces that impression. If we were going to simplify the question, we might say that personality is a product of the outer nature of man, and essence is a product of his inner nature.

Essence, unlike personality, has the capacity to be here now. It is not a quality of definition and division; it is a quality of sensation and substance. Essence knows that it is alive, and participating; it inhabits. Every time my own sense of essence begins to predominate, the sense of gravity within life increases. Here and now is a location to be inhabited, not a premise to theorize about.

We need both essence and personality; and we need a balance between them. Dogen's Buddha Dharma most certainly touches on the question of the balance between these two qualities, even if he uses a different language to express it.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

One condition

2011-12-16T07:10:00.001-05:00

Finding ourselves in the midst of life, in moments of greater lucidity, we see that there seem to be many conditions. The nature of life itself, which is much like a blossom with an endless series of unfolding petals, encourages us to believe this.

Really, there is only a single condition.

It's very difficult to see this. The nature of ego as we inhabit it naturally obscures it.

Because we have capabilities and are capable, we continually see ourselves as capable. We see ourselves as ones with power, ones who know something; teachers. Everyone falls into this trap as they live in the midst of their life.

The one condition that we fail to see is that we are all, perpetually, students. This single condition of life is here for us to become a student within it. There are no exceptions to this. Christ was a student; Mohammed was a student. Even the star pupils are students when they arrive in this condition of life. (Readers of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebubs Tales To His Grandson" will recall that every personal representative sent by His Endlessness to determine what was necessary for mankind first had to become a student of his conditions.)
The absolute condition of life itself, from its beginning to its end, is the teacher. Every condition, circumstance, human being, animal, and plant that we encounter is a part of the lesson.

Why is this?

We come here as individual, tiny, particulate representatives of the consciousness of God, which is eternally curious. God is unable to see His creation at the level we are able to see it. This is much like the case with cells; a cell in our bloodstream, for example, can see exactly what is needed within its own environment, but we are unable to. Yet the cell is undoubtedly a part of us, and is doing work on our behalf. It is studying its conditions at its own level, and perpetually learning to respond to them appropriately within its own conditions.

God's own search for awareness, a question treated elsewhere in this blog, causes us to become a living representative of his search.
Each one of us is hence a fragment of that Great Consciousness, seeking to educate itself about its own nature. The Great Nature of God understands that it needs to be educated. It understands that it is forever a student of itself; God is making an effort Himself to remember Himself, and we are the representatives of that effort.

This confers an enormous responsibility on us, because only a humility at the highest possible level will allow us to participate in this work. We are the receivers of God's lessons. In the religions, it is often said that God is teaching us through life; but what is actually happening on a metaphysical level is that God is teaching Himself. When a man truly realizes this, he "becomes" God... but perhaps, initially, only in the limited sense that he finally understands that he is an eternal student.

To become self-aware is to discover that we are part of the receiving nature of God. We are here to receive life; only in the measure to which we receive life openly and take it in deeply are we acting as the student we should be.

This life we receive is only for the edification of God. We do not live for ourselves; nor does life belong to us. Nor are we mere "representatives of" God; we are all, in our own microcosmic way, particles of God Himself seeking the truth of His own creation.

It's quite a different attitude to go through life and to suddenly see the process of impressions inverted in this way. Suddenly, I am not here to impart my wisdom to others; I am here only to witness, to hear their own wisdom. My question becomes a question of active attitude and active responsibility, not just a question of "what's going on here?" Curiosity, in other words, is not enough. Curiosity is a good beginning, but it is too idle to work. I need to see that. And above all, I need to constantly see the other as a teacher. Not just the other, but the totality of life, conditions, events, and circumstances.

The whole process of "listening,", which appears to have something to do with how I hear things, expands to become something much larger. It is a new kind of attention to life with a different attitude and understanding about exactly what is taking place, and it converts the process of ego, turns it upside down.

The ego generally points outward. Because of this – because it appears to be the local cause of our difficulties, spiritually speaking – we presume that we should become free of it. Actually, this cannot be the case, because it is generally impossible to become free of ego. What must change is our relationship to it. The ego must be turned around so that it points inward. This is probably one of the meanings that Gurdjieff had in mind when he referred to "conscious egoism."

An ego that points inwards towards the center of the soul begins to learn that it is a student. If I can see this for even one moment in my life, already, the entire question of life has completely changed.

That change cannot be intellectual. It must become organic.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Conscience

2011-12-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

Sphinx

Metropolitan Museum of Art collection

This morning, I was thinking about the idea of conscience, which Gurdjieff considered to be the only undamaged part of man's psyche.

The dictionary defines conscience as an inner feeling or voice which serves as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of behavior. Gurdjieff's understanding of the word does not appear to be that different, but a close examination of his treatment of the concept in Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson is well worthwhile.

The first place where we encounter the idea is on page 175, where he mentions that the priest Abdil– one of his early true friends on earth– did not have the property of conscience completely atrophied in him. The result, as Gurdjieff explains it, was that he was compassionate and sensitive to the beings around him.

We encounter the idea for the second time on page 184, where the awareness of conscience may allow men to observe the eighteenth commandment of our common creator: “love everything that breathes.”

Moving further into the text, on page 282, he mentions that the emblem of the Society of Akhldanns in the city of Samlios was a statue referred to as Conscience. Among its many unusual properties, its head, remarkably, was "in the form of the breasts of a virgin, meaning that "love" should predominate always and in everything during the inner and outer functionings evoked by one's consciousness..."

Lastly– at least for the purposes of this essay– the critical evaluation that the Very Saintly Ashieta Shiemash delivered under the title “The Terror of the Situation” definitively concluded that the only hope for correcting man's psychological aberrations was to allow the functioning of sacred conscience to pass from the subconscious, where some portion of it was still intact, into the functioning of man's ordinary consciousness.

I draw some distinct conclusions of my own from this very brief recap. (In point of fact, before writing this essay, I searched through the entire text of Beelzebub and extracted every significant explanation about the nature and action of conscience from the text–with some admittedly subjective editing, the document ran to over twenty pages long.)

From the beginning, we see that objective conscience, the only sacred feature still undamaged in man's psyche (submerged in the subconscious though it may be) is essentially connected to a quality of feeling that involves compassion. It is, also, inextricably intertwined with the idea that it evokes a feeling of what we might call objective love. The point is, once again, that love in one form or another is an essential quality in Gurdjieff's work. Far from failing to mention love, he links it directly to the only portion of man's being which might still function properly.

Man has, in other words, the potential to discover an objective love within him.

These statements in Beelzebub underscore the essential similarities between Gurdjieff's work, the Buddhist practice of compassion, and the Christian and Sufic understanding of love. Readers will recall that according to Gurdjieff, the Buddha himself introduced the idea of “intentional suffering,” an idea bearing more than a passing relationship to the question of remorse of conscience.

The connections between compassion, love, and conscience are, in my experience, rarely discussed in the Gurdjieff work, despite the fact that the essential nature of our inner work must inevitably be to awaken the roots of conscience and allow them to participate in our ordinary being. What else are we attempting, if not this? If we are not repeatedly and ever more deeply humbled by the action of conscience, we are not working– not in any sense. This is a question that every single human being in any spiritual work ought to be holding in front of them at every moment of their lives– and yet it is so easily dismissed.

There is no instant of such dismissal in which egoism has not triumphed over conscience.

This holds true more than anything for those in the Gurdjieff work, who profess to follow his ideas, and yet so often blithely ignore them in almost every routine action we undertake.

It's not that difficult to see when I lack. It is possible– in point of fact, if there is any real impulse to work, it is not even possible– it is probable.

One is left with the prospect that what is actually going on is that I do not want to see.

And this is why it was referred to as The Terror of the Situation.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Death and the Devil

2011-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of my father, taken at my sister's funeral.

Death is much on my mind lately. We are so asleep, we rarely remember that we are on a planet, with all of the extraordinary implications that carries. We certainly don't sense our own death: death is a theoretical prospect at best. Oh, we pretend we know death is always near us; but the fragility, the temporary nature, of life is almost invariably unseen.

I'm sick this weekend, which has presented an unpleasant struggle; in the few moments I've felt OK and my fever was down, I've had to run a few brief errands, because my wife Neal isn't at home this weekend. (Lucky me... or, as it happens, lucky her!) Just tonight I was standing in the driveway, in the first real chill air of the winter, looking up at Jupiter- which has been a prominent presence in the night sky of late- and thinking to myself that I won't be here on this planet forever, able to take in that impression.

I felt it in my body.

It gave the impression a weight and value, a taste- an inner sound- that it wouldn't have had without that pithy, organic realization. I'm not here forever.

Getting intimate with the devil can mean, among other things, getting intimate with death. The devil, they say, is in the details; the devil is in my flesh, my bones. These are the details for man. Maybe the "devil" actually is material reality itself: that is certainly the implication we encounter when we see Christ's temptation in the desert. Everything the devil offered him was of this earth, material. Our temptation arises from the carnal; and yet we do not know it well, this flesh of ours, although we are called to.

How often do I dare to truly sense what I am? Not with the mind–that's too easy. Thinkers think about what we are all the time. It is never enough. I mean to sense my existence with my feelings and my body, to truly sense the intensity of vibration that causes flesh, blood, bone and marrow to hang together. The encounter with sensation is, in some cases, an encounter with the presence of death itself. It is also, paradoxically, the encounter with the astral body. The actual sensation of self as a living thing is connected to the astral body, born of what Gurdjieff would have called Hanbledzoin. Sensation actually takes a certain kind of courage; I'd rather turn from it and sleep.

This sensation, as has been explained at length in other essays, is directly connected to breathing. It is almost pointless to engage in any kind of a "breathing exercise” (something astute followers of the Gurdjieff method will know he generally forbade) that does not begin with an understanding that the aim of being attentive to breath is to develop a permanent connection to sensation.

This is where mortality begins. It is also where the inner sense of gravity arises. In the last set of essays, I examined the question of the moon– which helps to anchor us– and the devil, which is the mortal and material expression of life which we must become intimate with in order to know anything about what we are.

Our anchor is not an intellectual premise, and our carnality is not an intellectual premise. Yet without a real inner work, we cannot encounter either one of these forces that regulate our inner solar system.

If these things are just ideas, there have not been enough shocks. Martin Benson points out, in the very fine book “Martin Benson speaks,” that a man cannot actually do anything without shocks. We need to be shocked. We need to be shattered. This is the only way that we may begin to let something new enter us that changes the dire situation we are in.

Benson says you can't go out and get shocks; life needs to deliver them. In my own experience, that's true. We are all far too comfortable, and it is only when we encounter the great shocks that something softens and real forces may begin to penetrate us.

Those are the moments when pondering becomes more than this armchair exercise of the mind, and begins to rest in the sensation of the flesh and the feeling of question, rather than the idea of question.

I'm accustomed to having my mind ask questions. I am good at it. I show off at it when I am around others. Yet the body can also ask questions, and the feeling can also ask questions. These are the questions that need to be brought into the moment, because the questions that the body and the feeling ask are not connected to all of these words, forms, ideas, and concepts.

They are not subject to argument.

In this era when investments go bad everywhere, the one investment that can be relied on is an investment in one's Being. To invest means to clothe, to be clothed in. So we need to invest in our carnality, and our feeling– our inner life, the sensation of ourselves. To be clothed in the sensation of self is the beginning of knowing that one lives, and that one will die. The only way I know that in my mind is as a theory.

This practice of sensing is the one way I know of to begin to understand this question differently.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The Devil Within Us

2011-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned last week, in Dante's Inferno, Dante and Virgil have to climb over the body of the Devil in order to enter Purgatory– the place where sins can be expiated.

Traditionally, the Devil represents not only sin, but materiality–that is to say carnal existence. This is because carnal existence and sin are, at least in Christian conception, inextricably intertwined.

The act of climbing over the Devil's body is, above all, an act of intimacy. The symbolic implication of Dante's vision is that before he can even begin to work to attain salvation, man must become directly intimate with his material nature, his carnal nature, his sinful nature.

The premise presents a striking contradiction to any routinely moralistic understanding. Dante's image– more than a little sophisticated for its era– eschews any predictable religious expectations of abstinence. Rather than avoiding our sinful nature, the inference is that we must be in close touch with it and see it.

Taking sin in the broader Augustinian context of everything we do–in St. Augustine's conception, our nature is inherently sinful, because of our separation from God–we must come into intimate contact with everything we do, with ourselves as we are, in the world, in order to begin to approach a place where the expiation of sin becomes possible. So above all, we have to be what we are, not create a construction of “goodness” in our behavior which will gain us merit. If we are bad, we have to be bad: but above all, however we are, we need to become aware of it, to see it. It is the awareness of our nature, regardless of its character, that earns us a place in purgatory.

And this is, in Gurdjieff's cosmology, a specific kind of awareness: not an intellectual awareness, but an awareness that in itself is intimate, comprised as it is of awareness in the body, awareness in the mind, and awareness in the emotions - what Gurdjieff referred to as “three centered being.”

Pondering the commingling of the soul with matter is an inevitability in religious cosmologies, which generally propose dualistic explanations: either Augustinian, i.e., tragic (as in the case of original sin) or Dionysian, ecstatic, when the incarnation of material existence is seen as a reason for sublime joy. Both of these theological propositions achieve their substantiality through their inherent partiality. (I rarely, if ever, touch on politics in these posts, but one might cogently argue that the tension between conservative and liberal forces in the world is essentially a product of the long-standing tension between competing Augustinian and Dionysian philosophies.)

In Gurdjieff's involutionary and evolutionary universe, incarnation is, conversely, an objective necessity. There is no overt need to reject it or affirm it; it is the inevitable consequence of creation, and must be interpreted not in terms of good or bad, but in terms of service. It is not, in other words, a matter of state requiring action, but of action as a consequence of state. One does not work to be good–or to be bad. One simply works in order to be. And Being does not emanate from duality, but can only be resolved through Trinity.

The ideas of good and evil are treated at some length in Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson. Gurdjieff's discourse (see pages 1034-1046) indicates that the original conception of good and evil was originally meant to describe the involutionary and evolutionary movement of energy–downwards through the ray of creation to the manifestation of “I am,” or, conscious separation from God (the prime source of arising), and back upwards towards the prime source through the action of surrender–“Lord have mercy.” Good and evil, in other words, originally had nothing to do with an external agency of better or worse moral nature that acts on man.

Man is, in this cosmology, entirely responsible for all of his action- an important point of the parable about Makary Kronbernkzion. “The Devil made me do it” is a worthless excuse, unless one admits that one is, himself, the Devil.

How often do we ascribe the blame for our emotional state to outside agencies? Based on my recent observations of myself, I would say, nearly always. There is the possibility for an inner action wherein the usual reaction of emotion is transcended by an action of feeling; yet this is rare.

Only an unrelenting inner contact with the truth of the situation might serve to convince me of the fact that I am like this. I have to climb over the body of my own inner Devil, come into contact with all of its parts, in order to know that I am indeed the Devil.

It would be terribly mistaken to interpret this as any kind of moral license. Climbing over the body of one's inner devil is an organic action of intimacy, not a psychological exercise or an excuse for licentious behavior. It involves coming directly to terms with the inescapable, carnal fact of one's organic existence– and is intimately tied to Gurdjieff's idea of a man needing to perpetually sense the inevitability of his own death.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Next post (12/11): Death and the Devil

Serving the moon

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

The place of the moon in Gurdjieffian cosmology and mythology cannot be underestimated. It plays a central role in the downfall of man's psyche.

Among the many hundreds of references to the moon in his various works, in 1924 in New York, Gurdjieff said the following:

"The moon is man's big enemy. We serve the moon. Last time you heard about kundabuffer. Kundabuffer is the moon's representative on earth. We are like the moon's sheep, which it cleans, feeds and shears, and keeps for its own purposes. But when it is hungry it kills a lot of them. All organic life works for the moon. Passive man serves involution; and active man, evolution. You must choose. In both cases we are slaves, but there is a principle: in one service you can hope for a career; in the other you receive much but without a career. In both cases we have a master. Inside us we also have a moon, a sun and so on. We are a whole system. If you know what your moon is and does, you can understand the cosmos."
(Views From The Real World, page 198, E. P. Dutton 1975)

It is of course impossible to boil even a fraction of what Gurdjieff said about the moon into a single essay. We can, however, investigate just a few points.

First of all, as was pointed out in a comment on this blog a week or two ago, the root Sanskrit word "Kunda" has direct associations with both the moon and with feminine nature, fecundity, receptivity. An organ– or action– that buffers this might be construed as something that blocks that which is received. In a general sense, it prevents insemination.

In order to understand Gurdjieff's comment more thoroughly, it's necessary to understand that in his ray of creation, both in evolutionary and evolutionary forces are at work. Energy descends from the sun, passes through the shock of organic life on earth, and moves on to the moon as the end of the involutionary process. This is the stage at which man “feeds” the moon in Gurdjieff's cosmology. A widespread assumption appears to be that this is the whole and the end of the matter.

What is overlooked is that inevitably, there must also be an evolutionary force that begins with the moon and moves upwards, back towards its original source; the ray of creation allows for no other possibility; the movement of evolutionary energy is directly incorporated into Gurdjieff's Enneagram, where the right side may be said to represent involution, and the left evolution.

Hence the comments about how an active man can serve evolution. You will notice that even in this case, a man is still a “slave;” and he still serves the moon, although in a different capacity than in the involutionary phase. An active man serves the moon in the evolutionary phase as the energy moves back towards the absolute.

This means that in the evolutionary phase of the solar system octave, man receives energy from the moon and passes it upwards, rather than feeding the moon with energy of his own. In other words, we might suggest that an active man is able to turn the moon not into an enemy, but a provider.

It is in understanding the entire circulation of the energy system that we begin to understand Gurdjieff's cosmology, not just an understanding about the downward movement of energy. Just as man receives energy from higher sources in order to do his inner work, so he can– and also must– receive energy from sources below him and pass them onwards in order to work.

Above all, we might say that organic life on earth in general, and man in particular, serve as stewards in the circulation of energy. Because the moon was created by accident, a great deal of extra energy needed to be sent to it to support it in its initial phases of development. This energy had to come from organic life on earth, particularly man; and because he was going to have to give all of what he was in his existence to an entity that was unable, at the time, to reciprocally feed him, it was a one-way exchange. This is why the organ kundabuffer was originally implanted in man; heavenly forces understood that beings forced, so to speak, to serve involuntarily in such an exchange would feel despair, and refuse to do the necessary work. The only way to get this horse to move forward was to put blinders on it.

In Beelzebub's Tales, Beelzebub explains that it is no longer necessary for man to serve the moon in the way that was needed when the organ kundabuffer was created. The removal of the organ kundabuffer made it possible for man once again to receive the beneficial and inseminating evolutionary emanations from the moon; in this way, it was possible for the law of reciprocal feeding to once again act normally on earth.

Of course, Beelzebub expounds ad infinitum about why this natural process continues to be frustrated, even up to the present day.

Misconceptions about the exact nature of man's relationship with the moon continue to confuse the issue. For example, we need the moon; without it, organic life on earth would not exist, a point made by biologists, who advise us that the stabilizing effect of the moon's gravity prevents fluctuations in the earth's rotation which would cause earth's climate to be unpredictable and erratic. The moon is, in other words, a vital "anchor" for life on earth.

Understanding the moon in the context of its anchoring role and the nature of the circulation of inner energy may help shed light on some of our lunar questions. In addition, readers who follow the link to descriptions of the Sanskrit meanings of the phonetic components of Kunda will find a rich source of associations which illustrate just how appropriate the word is to this question.

Perhaps it's peculiar that Gurdjieff referred to the moon as man's “big enemy.” In one sense, this is absolutely true; if a man is asleep, unconscious, the moon takes his energy and nothing more need be said about the matter.

However, as the passage from Views intimates, a man who makes a conscious effort to take his place in the ray of creation will discover that that energy consciously used to support the cosmos- whether inner or outer- is returned to him in a different way.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Next post (12/9): The Devil Within Us

On The Nature Of Truth

2011-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

Plate with Pseudo-Arabic inscriptions

Spain, 14th century

Metropolitan Musuem of Art (On loan from Hispanic Society of America, NY)

It's commonly agreed that a spiritual search is a search for Truth. The ragtag band of adventurers who set out through the remote parts of Asia to discover hidden esoteric knowledge in the late part of the nineteenth century, of which Gurdjieff was a member, referred to itself as the "Seekers of Truth."

Today I am going to introduce and discuss a fundamental concept in relationship to the nature of truth.

Everything is true, within the limits of its own range.

Those familiar with Gurdjieff's autobiography, “Meetings With Remarkable Men,” may remember the story of the Yezidi boy. Gurdjieff repeated this tale, which is actually a parable of sorts, because it bears on this particular question.

He reports as follows: "if a circle is drawn around a Yezidi, he cannot of his own volition escape from it. Within the circle he can move freely, and the larger the circle, the larger the space in which he can move, but get out of it he cannot. Some strange force, much more powerful than his normal strength, keeps him inside... if a Yezidi is forcibly dragged out of the circle, he immediately falls into the state called catalepsy..." (Meetings With Remarkable Men, p. 65, E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc., New York 1963.)

This isn't really a story about a primitive superstitious tribesman. It is a story about us, as we are, and the nature of identification– or, as the Buddhists might call it, attachment. It represents an inner action in man.

We are all victims of our own view about the truth. Truth exists in a continuum, which consists of all and everything– everything that is. There is no thing that is not true, as it arises and exists, within the limits of its own range. Falsehood itself is true within the range of its own falsehood. A lie lives within the truth of its own lie. There is, in other words, a totality of manifestation within which all that takes place is true. Delusional beliefs are absolutely true for those in the grip of delusion, and this is the story of the Yezidis.

I draw a circle around myself with the truths that I have, those that lie within my range of understanding. Anything that comes from outside that range, that circle, paralyzes me. I am asleep to it, catatonic, and unable to move once I come under its influence. My understanding and my ability to act lie only within the limited circle of "truth" which is drawn around me.

I identify with the beliefs that I have. I think that they "are" me... that my truths are true, and the truths of others are false. I'm not able to see that everything is true. So I react to the things I think are not true.

Even more to the point, perhaps, in the book, someone else draws the circle. So I am not even living within the circle of my own truth: I am living within the circle of what is circumscribed by external influences. If it were my own circle of truth, I might have some power over it; but it doesn't belong to me.

Within the horizontal range of manifestation, I am absolutely convinced that it's necessary for me to live within this circle in the sand and even defend it... at least I think it is. All of our culture and society is constructed on this idea. And it is indeed connected to the action of egoism, but not the action of conscious egoism, which is a healthy affirmation of Being. It is the action of what one might call negative egoism, denying egoism, which stakes its existence on the premise that there is only one circle.

Philosophies and religions draw larger circles, but they are still circles. Any astute student of these disciplines will notice that no matter how expansive a religious practice or philosophy becomes, it reaches a point where it breaks down and cannot explain one phenomenon or another. For example, the religious or moral principle that one must always unerringly tell the truth breaks down if you are a Dutch family during the second world war hiding Jews in your attic, and the Nazis come pounding on your door to ask you if you have any Jews up there... this is not in the least a hypothetical example. There are many situations like this in real life. A trip the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam can serve as a compelling reminder.

This principle of encirclement, which is in some ways an action that defines the ego, or the “I am” of any given system, can be seen acting on the level of solar systems and galaxies. Each one exists within the range of its own circle, and has its own complete truth within that range. So the phenomenon takes place on every level.

The action itself is both healthy and necessary, but a belief in the action as exclusive– which is how ego in human beings manifests– is pathological.

The idea of the Dharma as an all-encompassing, or transcendental, truth that is irrevocable and fundamental, superseding the act of encirclement– and thus, by definition, affirming what we might call “freedom,” or, inner action unconstrained by encirclement– is an idea common, in one way or another, to every religion. The idea, however, requires that we surrender our idea of the circle. As with the Yezidi tribesmen, our own idea of the circle is delusional–it is an artificial construct, a fantasy. Outsiders scratch their head in bafflement as to why the Yezidi can't break out of the circle, which is clearly an imaginary entity.

To remember that everything is true within the limits of its own range is actually an active stance that brings us to the threshold of compassion.

When we speak of self re-membering, we speak of reattaching the limbs of the self– putting its members back together. The self has limbs, arms and legs, which can allow it to move outside the circle, but they aren't connected. The self must recall that it has them, and know that there is a circle; furthermore, it must understand that the circle, although it is clearly there in the sand around it, is imaginary and limited.

The man who sees he stands within his own circle and is helpless invokes the prayer, “Lord have Mercy”–because, like the Yezidi, only the agency of an outside force which is able to see the circle can help him break free.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

The coral reef

2011-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

One hears a lot about “special conditions”–about how one needs to be in special conditions to do real spiritual work, how one has to be in a community, at a retreat, in the Dharma Hall meditating, what have you.

This idea is useful up to a point. Then it goes past the point and ultimately begins to miss it entirely.

Life itself is special conditions. It is, in fact, so special that it doesn't last forever. We die. So life is very special indeed.

Life is the condition in which we work. The community is everyone we know. The inner work is every relationship we engage in.

We might think of it like a coral reef. We are all organisms on a coral reef in this life; it is an incredibly varied place, with tens of thousands of different habitats, countless encounters, impressions flowing in like plankton on a current: rich food everywhere to feed on. The coral reef is complicated and complex and unpredictable. So much so that it can seem scary. There are sharks here; there are Moray eels and octopi.

So we take some special, wonderful fish out of a coral reef, grab a few sponges, some dead coral, and put it all in an aquarium of our own design. The aquarium is manageable! It's nice and quiet in here; a little air bubbles into the water, a fake plastic treasure chest opens and closes alluringly. There is a diver next to it in a little suit... mysterious, isn't he? Delicious food is sprinkled just within reach.

It looks like a real coral reef– and it is hypnotically interesting. But it is really just a beautiful trap from which it is nearly impossible to escape.

We can't allow our inner work to become an aquarium, yet this is what seems to happen. There is this conviction that inner work can be put in a bell jar, isolated from life, plunked down on a cushion in the meditation hall, and that this is where "it" really happens. That concept is utter nonsense.

Where it really happens is out here in the ordinary world, where a thousand uncomfortable situations rub up against me. This is where I need my attention. This is where I need my sensation. This is where I need to experience an emotional relationship. Yes, I need to work with others; but the "others" are not the special people that I selected– or that selected me– to work around me in the aquarium. The others aren't the members of the aquarium.

The others are every event, every other fish, every circumstance on the coral reef.

I have to believe in my own life and believe that it is real enough to find the value in it; not in the abstractions of a philosophy or the controlled conditions of a magical teaching. I need to live it and breathe it– I can't afford to turn it into a museum display or quotation society, where everything is taken out of context and printed up a nice little books to read and discuss. The ideas and the books are good; yet they are always out of context, because the only context they can ever exist within is the book. The ideas themselves were, before they got squashed between two covers on a series of thin little pages, living things out on the coral reef.

If I begin to mistake the things squashed onto the page as the actual organisms on the coral reef, well, one can see how delusional I am right away, can't one? Yet I like to live that way. Really, it's much easier than being on that damned reef.

So I think it's useful to do away with the idea of special conditions–do away with it, that is, by understanding that all of the conditions, every moment, are special; that every moment is a potential moment for relationship, and that the questions that need to be asked cannot be steered and mediated through committees in small rooms.

They need to be out there in the current, intelligent, sensitive, and moving constantly in order to feed on all the rich material that keeps sweeping past me.

To draw an analogy from less watery territory: any alcoholic could tell you, it's the easiest thing in the world to not drink when you're sitting in an AA meeting. But that isn't worth a damn. The place you have to not drink is outside the meeting. The meeting is just there to prepare you.

It's what happens in real life that matters.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Compassion

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rosette bearing the names and titles of the Shah Jahan

Folio of the Shah Jahan Album: India, Mughal, c. 1645

Metropolitan Museum of Art Islamic Collection

The word “compassion” means, originally, to “suffer with.”

To suffer means, among other things, to allow. The Latin root suggests it means to carry from underneath, or support. (sub- 'from below' + ferre 'to bear.)

So when we have compassion, it means to be with, to help support, to carry from below. In its context of allowing, it also implies a willingness to be with things as they are. It furthermore implies an emotional fortitude and an emotional endurance–compassion is not a practice for the weak.

We are all, collectively, weak, and yet we often speak of compassion.

We find ourselves scattered in our own weakness, and see that we are helpless. We go on to find ourselves together in weakness, and recognize that. Suffering together– bearing the weight of this life and the difficulty of it– we form a community which, if it is in good health, recognizes the need for mutual support... unfortunately, communities are not always healthy, and compassionate support is not always offered.

Compassion cannot be an outward quality first. And it can't be a materialistic quality, because just giving people things to help them– for example, offering people food, or water, or money when they need it– is not enough. In the concentration camp of Auschwitz during the Second World War, Viktor Frankl noted that there were cases he saw where people died not because they were starving, but of despair.

There has to be a wish; there has to be an emotional impulse from within that is stronger than external circumstances. This kind of wish is what kept people in the camps alive. That wish must be enduring; and weak people don't have enduring qualities. This is possibly why compassion fails in ordinary conditions; it's only in extraordinary conditions, extremes, where human beings are so utterly exposed to their weakness that they surrender and thereby discover real inner strength.

This may all sound like a Buddhist soliloquy; or, it may just sound like a rehash of all the old stories about compassion. But it is actually a question both of the cosmos and of individual life.

Scrolling back to the last post on this site, we can infer– and it is even possible, under the right conditions, to actually sense– that the universe was created in a compassionate act. This is, in fact, at the heart of Beelzebub's story about His Endlessness. The machine of the universe was created as a machine of feeling– an emotional bridge, a moving bridge– to reconcile what one might call God's thought, and the material of time, the contradictory affirming and denying principles of existence.

So the universe itself is love, it is compassion–it is a machine that supports from below. Every level is obliged to work to support the whole structure.

We are perhaps reminded of Dante's Divine Comedy, in which heaven is a divine structure, built on the support of the many levels moving upwards from Hell and through Purgatory. Dante cannot reach Purgatory before moving all the way through Hell, finally traversing the body of the Devil Himself, who is upside down, until he and Virgil emerge, metaphorically speaking, as pieces of excrement– nothingness, that which has been thrown away– in order to even begin the work of purgatory, a great purging of sin that may lead to heaven... if one's suffering is accepted.

We should note that, oddly, Gurdjieff indicated that Buddha did not say man should become free of suffering: he said that he should intentionally suffer. In other words, the inner work of suffering–and let us have no doubt, it is an inner work we speak of here– is a necessary work and a burden to be shouldered, not an event to escape from. This is the central theme of Dante's purgatory: a realm of intentional suffering, in which the sinners are grateful for the burdens they bear.

It is not abstract, because we find ourselves in this very moment at a point of emotional opening that is required in life. Our awareness– our consciousness– our feeling awareness must become awakened. We must see where we are, we must see our weakness, and we must acknowledge our nothingness– all absolute themes in Gurdjieff's teaching, and, furthermore, at the core practice for almost every major religion.

If I acknowledge my own helplessness, perhaps then I am moved to a compassionate attitude towards myself. This acknowledgment cannot be an intellectual acknowledgment. It must be an organic acknowledgment, one that penetrates to the marrow of the bones.

Acknowledging my weakness, suffering– allowing– my own weakness, I begin to understand that I am not in charge of anything, and that I don't control anything. The inflated balloon of the ego begins to sag rather quickly when this process takes place, turning into a sorry puddle of plastic. I may discover, when that happens, that there is actually very little else there, except the daily experience of life... which turns out to be deeper and more glorious than the colorful Thanksgiving day parade I have zealously been keeping inflated for most of my life.

Compassion that begins at home, in an inner work, is quite different than compassion that is outwardly directed. Tolerance and generosity towards the inevitable sin and the weakness of my own nature is a beginning. This doesn't mean that I excuse my iniquities; absolutely not. I participate with them: I'm not going to be able to change them much, I'm not strong. I suffer them. I see how I am.

I see. I see. I see.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Endlessness

2011-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00

While chatting about time (which is seemingly the subject of the week, or perhaps month, or even year) this evening, a delightful irony occurred to me.

I've spoken before about the fact that Gurdjieff's God was not a God of unlimited power. He has, for example, no absolute control over time. Yet, even though time brings an end to everything (a fact which Gurdjieff's name for it, the Merciless Heropass, alludes to) he chose to refer to God as His Endlessness throughout Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson. Not only did he do this, but he introduced a cosmology in which God creates the universe because time is eroding the substance of his place of existence. The obvious inference is that this could bring God to an end.

So here we have a God referred to as His Endlessness, confronted with an even greater force that appears to be able to bring about His Ending. This strikes me as an exquisite and intentional irony: and no accident on the part of Gurdjieff. The very foundation of his cosmology itself was deliberately planted in dualistic thinking on the grandest of all possible scales: endlessness, or infinity, and zero, or, the erosion and disappearance of everything that infinity relies on in order to manifest.

Trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of His Most Holy Eminence's absolute endlessness and the ultimate, Heropassian threat of nothingness, God is forced to create a universe: a third force that mediates between the two original opposing forces. The universe, moreover, is not just a static object: it is a series of events in motion, a relationship.

Or, if you will (and Gurdjieff also says this) a machine.

This relationship is, furthermore, a force based on awareness. The very act of awareness itself, the act of seeing, is already the whole force that sustains and extends the life of the universe. (Are we asked to subscribe to the anthropomorphic principal? Au contraire; because it isn't all about man. The very matter of the universe is a mediator of consciousness in and of itself; consciousness permeates it at every level.)

In other words, the universe is third force. Material reality and its expression of consciousness is third force. To say that mankind is “third force blind” is to say that man does not understand his relationship to material reality and his own expression of consciousness. Instead of living within, of inhabiting, his awareness, he stands outside of it, in a peculiar separation from his natural place and state.

Jeanne de Salzmann was famous for asking pupils to see their lack. In doing so, what does our existence consist of, and where is our attention located in it? We have thought: the intellect, the thinking center; and we have matter, the material world, the “body” of the universe. We are usually just stuck in our thoughts. Or, we are gratifying the pleasures of the flesh, and what needs to take place is stopped in our bodies. The mind and the body–thought and matter–do not come together. Even if they do, something is missing; there ought to be a glue that holds all of this together, but it's not there.

What is it?

The driver shows up and climbs onto his carriage; but there is no horse. It has wandered off. The driver, impressed with his carriage, doesn't spend much time thinking about the fact that it can't go anywhere without a horse. After all, it's one terrific carriage.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that what is lacking is feeling. The sensitivity of emotion that could connect our thinking process with the material of our aliveness is not present. We need to see our lack, to be in front of that question over and over again, and understand that the reconciling force–"the universe"–needs to be created in us.

It needs to be in movement.

It needs to be made of feeling.

In this way, we are responsible for the recapitulation, during our lifetime, of the entirety of Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson. It is not just an allegorical tale about the universe and earth; it is a mirror in which the life of a single man, from birth to death, is reflected.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Be the grass

2011-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00

This morning, I was pondering the role of time, and ended up reading part of Dogen's Uji, or, “existence–time.”

In the Tanahashi translation (Shambhala, 2011), we hear:

“Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses [all things] throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice."
"When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and beyond understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and beyond understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time there is. Grass being, form being, are both time. Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

Because Dogen routinely presents sophisticated ideas, and because his arguments appear to be dense and complex, one tends to be drawn towards an abstract, or intellectual, analysis.

Yet I think that the whole point of his arguments is to defeat such an approach. His ubiquitous, self-reflective dialectic isn't meant as a de facto call to complexity; rather, it is to point our own complexity out to us, calling our attention to the fact that we are perpetually trapped in dualistic complications. His words and statements, one after another, throughout his teaching, morph into koans. Each one tries to point beyond the dualism that we know, the affirming and denying, towards a third force–a force of reconciliation–that we are not sensitive to. Gurdjieff, one may recall, indicated that man is “third force blind.” We are unaware of this reconciling factor, which could otherwise make the world whole.

So there is nothing academic or intellectual about this passage. We are called, rather, to a sensitive and emotional moment: and in this translation, the point has been deftly realized by referring to grass. (The Nishijima & Cross translation,which has its own transcendental moments, does not quite rise to the occasion in the same way this time.) Associations are called forth: the green color of grass, the delicacy of grass, its tenderness, flexibility, suppleness. The way that grass cover surfaces gently, its movement in wind, the ability of grass to be composed of myriad forms (blades) and yet be one thing, acting together, seen together, experienced together.

Buried deep in this teaching- in all of Dogen's teachings- are body, blood, bones and marrow, not just of the intellect, but of an emotional opening.

We are called to a simple moment, a moment that has nothing to do with trying to figure things out. We are called to this immediate moment. We are called to a relationship with grass, to form- to a relationship with both our inability to understand form and the existence of form itself. Our awareness becomes a bridge in which we inhabit both the condition and our failure to understand the condition. ( I am reminded of my conversation with my daughter last night, in which she pointed out that for Kant, the sublime– the quality of spiritual purity or excellence–begins with our failure, our inability, to comprehend... "the study of this is the beginning of practice.")

We discover feeling.

An emotional opening to the quality of grass and the existence of form brings us to a moment where wholeness is possible. Nothing is left out of the present moment. We are called to understand– and do not understand– the present moment, at the same time. Our understanding lies– as the understanding of Socrates lay– in being neither wise with our wisdom, nor stupid with our stupidity, but being just as we are.

"The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless." (Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Apology, p. 9, Hamilton & Cairns, Princeton University Press, 1989)

Hence we discover blades of grass that gather themselves together in a landscape: Zen Masters, German philosophers, wise Greeks. All of them understanding that while we try, and while we fail, we still inhabit the wholeness of all the forms we know– and that this wholeness comprises an ineffable truth that cannot be denied.

Jeanne de Salzmann calls us back over and over to this act of seeing, this act of inhabiting the moment. Nothing is left out of the present moment. We do not need to change the present moment. The need is for the present moment to be seen.

It is not the present moment, its nature, or its content, that distracts us from experience and relationship; the present moment, its nature, and its contents are completely valid and true. They need not change; only our relationship to them must change.

Don't think about the grass... be the grass.

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Anniversaries

2011-11-25T07:02:00.001-05:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of this space.

Most of us are “out there” looking for something. For the greater part, humanity devotes its search to material rewards: money, sex, power, and so on. Yet there are those of us who don't feel that these things can ever fully satisfy a person; we go poking about in obscure places to try and understand obscure things.

One might say this blog is one of those obscure places, asking such questions. A waste of time, some would say; yet for those of us who understand such matters, it is the only way to spend time profitably.

This was a year that shook my own world down to the foundations; years like this are valuable, because once the earthquake is over, the landscape is reconfigured, and it is no longer possible to navigate based on previous assumptions. New questions arise; old ones, which may have been around so long they began to exert a hypnotic effect, drop off.

I see once again that I don't in the least know who I am, where I am, or what I am doing.

I remember that Dr. Welch had two favorite ways of opening meetings. One was to ask us, in his gravelly voice (weighted down with gravitas, yet invariably sensitive and gentle): “Why don't we work?” The other one was to ask us, “Why do we work?” ...He managed to do this without ever posing as though he knew the answer.

I used to live next to Calvary Cemetery in Queens, NY. For those of you who don't know the territory, it is a landscape in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth, punctuated with tens of thousands of tombstones.

As in all cemeteries, every one of those stones marks an ego. That's where all the egos end up: silent, in the earth, swallowed up and forgotten.

Think on this.

There is something more in life. There is the possibility of relationship. The possibility of a new relationship, something different than ego. We won't put a name on it. It doesn't matter what it is called, because it is actually nameless. It is a process, a living thing, born of the ability of the organism to receive.

A man has to have an aim. When the earth shakes and the buildings fall down; when the floodwaters roar in and suck everything away; when the only thing left is to breathe and know that we are alive, we are much closer to knowing what our aim might be. In any event, to a certainty, we are closer to knowing what it isn't. We must lose the world if we want to see the world.

Last night, after the Thanksgiving meal was over, and my family was in the kitchen washing the dishes, I went up the hill behind our house to check on the chickens and close up the coop for the night.

Pausing for a moment on the way back down, I stared out past branches, now bare of leaves in late November, and set my eyes to a sky yielding its last sunlight.

Night ever gives the land back to more distant stars, who will watch over it past the time of man. No matter how fallen we are, every soul knows this when it turns its eyes towards heaven.

Somehow, hovering in the air– which is just beginning to acquire the exhilarating, sharp edge of winter– I could sense the presence of my sister: a long way away, and moving outwards towards unknown destinations. She is not completely gone yet, but she is slowly saying goodbye– speaking not in words, but in the language of time and seasons.

I'm going to leave readers today with the text of the requiem I read at my sister's funeral a month ago.

Requiem for Sarah Hansen

In moments like this I seek explanations
But my explanations break down.

I try to philosophize
But my philosophies break down.

I try to rationalize
But my rationalizations break down.

The only thing that does not break down is love.

The love of parents and children is tested. The love of brothers and sisters is tested. And the love of mankind is tested. But although love is eternally tested, it never breaks. The love of God for His creation does not break. No matter how many times love is tested, I repeatedly come to moments where I see that although I am weak, and my own love is weak, love itself is not weak, and it does not break.

For years, almost every day, I’ve climbed the same hill alongside the Hudson River with my dog. Last saturday, the day after Sarah died, I was climbing the hill and realized that it was the first time in my life I had ever climbed the hill without my sister in the world.

That thought stopped me two thirds of the way up the hill, just as I cleared the treetops to a spot where the sun shone through, filtered through afternoon clouds. It filled the sky with what seemed like the radiance of the soul.

I stood in that light and looked into that light, which was a light of truth and a light of hope, and I called out to Sarah,

“You are loved.”

We all carry our stories of Sarah in us, whatever they are, countless stories. There are too many to tell. All these fragments of memory help to make the fabric of life real, but what makes the fabric whole is love.

Sarah loved and was loved, and we’re all here to testify to that love, which doesn’t die, but lives on in each passing moment.

There is that love in all of us; and there is also the perfect Love of God, accompanying every act and circumstance of creation- even the terrible ones which we don’t want, and can’t understand.

Where situations are impossible and words fail, love suffices.

With that love, I remember Sarah’s passion; the wild cards she played, and her effort to struggle through a lifetime of chronic pain, yet still raise a family and find time for work and joy. I remember her creativity. I remember her courage and her crazy, irreverant sense of humor. I remember the way she filled the whole room with her own unique energy of life.

How can we speak of a life like this?

Words aren't enough. But love is enough.

Love is the best we have. It is made of ten thousand impossible things, so it is stronger than the possible. It will always be the foundation on which every memory of Sarah rests.

There is no foundation greater than this; it is a good one, which time and death have no power over.

Sarah, we love you.

One last note to readers.

Those few who have followed this space for years will know that every year, on the anniversary, I change the sign off phrase for the blog.

For the last year, the sign off has been, “May our prayers be heard.” For the next year, I'm going to steal a phrase from Dogen, who sometimes ended his Dharma Hall discourses with the following phrase:

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

Gurdjieff and Buddhism

2011-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Some days ago, a passing visitor to this space intimated that Gurdjieff's teaching "had nothing to do with Buddhism." This astonishing remark made me wonder what the average person actually knows about the Gurdjieff teaching... next to nothing, it would seem.

Leaving aside the fact that nearly the entire contents of chapter 21 in his magnum opus, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, deals with the teachings of Buddha, and that one of the most important concepts in Gurdjieff's teaching– intentional suffering– was, according to him, originally introduced by Buddha, we find myriad connections between Gurdjieff and Buddhist practices.

One of the most important figures in Beelzebub's Tales is Ashieta Shiemash, a heavenly representative sent to Earth by His Endlesness. During Sheimash's era, mankind was introduced to the five obligolnian strivings. These tenets for sound living were meant to awaken the divine function of genuine Conscience.

The first obligolnian striving, “to have in one's ordinary being existence everything satisfying and really necessary for the planetary body” ( Page 352, Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, Second Edition) is very nearly identical to Buddha's advice in the sermon at Benares, "...to satisfy the necessities of life is not evil. To keep the body in good health is a duty, for otherwise we will not be able to trim the lamp of wisdom and keep our mind strong and clear.” (The wisdom of China and India, Lin Yutang, Random House, 1942, p. 360.)

The second, “To have a constant and unflagging instinctive need to perfect oneself in the sense of Being,” and the third, "the conscious striving to know ever more and more about the laws of world-creation and world maintenance," (ibid) clearly reflect the Buddhist adage to strive constantly to, as Dogen says, "clarify the matter."

The fourth, "from the beginning of one's existence the striving to pay as quickly as possible for one's arising and individuality, in order to be free to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our common father," could well be interpreted as a call to identify, take responsibility for, and alleviate all suffering, up to and including the suffering of God... a distinctly Buddhist proposition, if ever there was one.

The fifth striving, "... the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred 'Martfotai' that is, up to the degree of self individuality.” (ibid), is Gurdjieff's own version of the Bodhisattva vow.

Reading through the sermon at Benares, one cannot help but be struck furthermore by the continued emphasis on responsible living: the eightfold path consists of “right views; right aspirations; right speech; right behavior; right livelihood; right effort; right thoughts; and right contemplation.”

If this is not a recapitulation, in straightforward words, of the entire Gurdjieff practice, there is no practice.

These are just a few examples; more abound. One can consequently see that it is just as valid to call Gurdjieffian teaching and practice esoteric Buddhism as it is to call it esoteric Christianity.

These similarities were furthermore underscored by the open adoption of Zen Buddhist sitting practices through Jeanne de Salzmann, one of Gurdjieff's most important pupils and the head of the Gurdjieff Work after his death. In today's Gurdjieff practice, Zazen comfortably coexists and interacts with the Christian practice of the Hesychast's Lord have Mercy prayer.

It's fair enough to say, as Guirdjieff did, that all esoteric works are, at their heart, the same practice. Just as I pointed out that there is only one biology and one chemistry on the planet, so there is only one religion–one possible kind of connection with higher forces– that results from it.

Gurdjieff's Beelzebub masterfully presents this premise not only by parading a succession of enlightened individuals, both known and unknown, from every religion across the stage of its history, all of whom share the same aim, but also by allegorically outlining the scientific biochemical processes that link all of these practices together. If ever there was a single text pointing towards a way to reunite the world's disparate and dysfunctional religions, this is it.

The fact that it has languished nearly forgotten as an obscure footnote to the world's greatest literature is peculiar. The fact that Gurdjieff is not well known outside esoteric circles, and viewed by turns as an imposter, quack, con artist, heretic, or crank by various mainstream individuals and religious institutions, is equally peculiar.

Here is a man who heroically fused world religious practice and teaching into a single whole–reassembling thousands of years of material that had been abused, changed, manipulated, and misunderstood by generation after generation. His book is a book for our age and our times. His practice is a practice for our age and our times. It is entirely consistent with every major religion, because all of them lie at its heart.

And yes, it's Buddhist.

May our prayers be heard.

Why the universe was created

2011-11-20T18:08:00.001-05:00

I'm going to preface this post by warning readers that if they are not familiar with Gurdjieff's teachings, it probably won't make the least bit of sense to you. If not, move on for now (unless you enjoy being challenged); new posts with less specialized material will appear in a few days.

People who are intimately familiar with Gurdjieff's teaching are, however, likely to find this particular proposal to be of interest– so for those of you who are, read on.

It takes a lot of chutzpah (this is a Yiddish slang word meaning, more or less, unbridled arrogance) to say that one knows why the universe was created, but in this particular instance, according to Gurdjieffian cosmology, it appears there may be a very specific reason, and an exact explanation as to why it works that way.

Every reader who is familiar with Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson knows the story about why His Endlessness (aka God) created the universe. It was to counteract the flow of time, which Gurdjieff called the Merciless Heropass.

No complete explanation, however, was given as to exactly why the universe was capable of accomplishing such a feat, although (as you will see) it appears Gurdjieff unabashedly dangled the prospect in front of his readers. I am going to offer a suggestion based on some fairly obvious deductions.

The matter is elucidated by the known fact that taking in impressions more deeply slows the flow of time to the perceiver.

Long-time practitioners in the Gurdjieff Work have, in many cases, had their own practical experiences with this, and in any event the phenomenon is specifically remarked on in Views From The Real World.

From this point, we can rather easily extrapolate. But before we do so, allow me to remind readers of the principle, “as above–so below.” If this experience functions in this manner in human beings, since we are a model of the universe, so to speak, in miniature, we can reasonably presume that impressions have the same effect on God.

Gurdjieff referred to time as the "unique subjective." (see Beelzebub's tales, pgs. 118-124.) In saying so, he carried on in considerable detail to explain that the perception of time is unique to the observer, in other words, malleable depending on conditions. (This is, by the way, consistent with the Einsteinian view of the flow of time.) One ultimately wonders why he went to such lengths- somewhere around four pages- to make the point.

So here it is, hidden, as it were, in plain sight:

Because taking in impressions more deeply (i.e., consciously), and in greater quantity, slows the perception of the flow of time, we can understand that the universe was created, and functions as, the perceptive organ for God. It was created in order to change the flow of impressions into the Godhead and thus slow the action of time.

I will forward to you the suggestion that this is the specific action that the well-known trogoautoegocrat, or “law of reciprocal feeding,” cited by Beelzebub manifests.

Consciousness, in all its forms, acts as a sensory tool for His Endlessness to take in impressions, hence the understanding that we are all receivers. The more conscious impressions that God receives through His sensory organ (the universe), and the deeper the impressions are, the more time slows down.

This action effectively extends the life of His Endlessness and the place of His existence.

Hence the essential responsibility of all living organisms to improve their sensitivity and receive deeper impressions. They benefit not only themselves, but the livelihood of the universe and of God himself, when undertaking this work. This explains why the task of conscious beings is so essential, and why God needs man as much as man needs God.

Furthermore, nature is designed to extract the maximum number of impressions that it can- whether conscious or unconscious- as deeply as it can, in order to make sure that the uniquely perceived flow of time is slowed to the maximum extent possible. This is why Gurdjieff explained that what nature cannot get in terms of quality, it will extract in terms of quantity. The universe is furthermore constructed in levels so that both conscious and unconscious impressions can be extracted from every level, from the microcosmos to the macrocosmos.

The universe is, in other words, a tool designed for self observation, or, as Gurdjieff called it, self remembering– an activity that even God Himself is engaged in, through the instrument of his creation.

This particular suggestion offers a further explanation as to why so much emphasis is placed on the action of taking in impressions in Gurdjieff's Work: a unique feature not generally reproduced in other works, and certainly not explained elsewhere in anywhere near the detail that he explained it.

Seeing human beings–and all conscious organisms, human or otherwise–as particles in the body of God, sensory particles, as so many teachings do, fits rather neatly into this particular suggestion. The point is that the particles in the body of God have a function related to world creation and world maintenance, as Gurdjieff called it.

The third obligolnian striving, "the conscious striving to know ever more and more about the laws of world creation and world maintenance" (Beelzebub's tales: page 352, second edition) actually refers (among other things) specifically to this question. The striving consists of an effort to understand the role of the impressions, why we are created to take them in, and the action that they have both in a personal and a universal sense. Students of Gurdjieff's chemical factory (as found in Ouspensky's In Search Of The Miraculous) will notice that the taking in of impressions is capable of creating higher substances that reach all the way, so to speak, to God Himself. This, too, fits in rather neatly with the critical role impressions play in counteracting the Merciless Heropass.

I daresay a careful examination of this understanding may lead to explanations for other peculiar yet significant features in regard to this question of impressions, and their unique role in Gurdjieff's cosmology.

I leave it to readers to further ponder the matter, and see whether they think this particular point of view is correct.

May our prayers be heard.

nb.

This post is a reflection on Gurdjieff's myth of the creation of the universe, and is not meant to be a reflection by the author on current ideas in contemporary physics, which the reader should understand must inevitably differ from allegorical cosmologies and mythologies. Nor should the reader believe that the author by default subscribes to all of Gurdjieff's unique and unusual cosmological propositions-- although, in his opinion, they are certainly intriguing and most worthy of study.

In Beelzebub, Gurdjieff proposes a God with limitations, that is, a supreme deity nonetheless subject to the action of time, which is a separate entity. Readers will note this proposal differs substantially from most religious conceptions of God, which propose a transcendental Being, or absolute state of Truth, without such limitations.

What is perhaps Gurdjieff's most famous commentary on the matter can be found in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search Of The Miraculous, where the theological student comments that "even God cannot beat the ace of spades with a deuce." (Page 95, Paul Crompton Ltd. Edition, 2004.)

The Language Of Mindfulness

2011-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

Late 15th century calligraphic text, Poems of Sa'di and Hafiz

Metropolitan Museum of New York, Islamic wing

What does it mean to be mindful, to have a conscious practice?

I don't see that almost everything I do begins to fall into habit. Most of what I am consists of imitation and repetition. For example: I hear someone else say something intelligent about their spiritual practice, and the next thing you know, I am repeating the words that they used, and perhaps even the very things that they said. This problem is like an infectious disease; once the virus is in me, it multiplies and spreads both in myself, and to other people.

The next thing I know, everyone around me in my community is saying more or less the same things, using the same words.

In one way, this isn't a bad thing, because commonality helps to build community. But on the other hand, it makes everything too easy for me. I sound like I belong. I sound like I am working in the same way as others. I sound– horrors! –like I know what I am talking about. Others nod their heads in agreement when I use the right words and say the right things.

All of this is just a cleverer way of falling asleep. My language practice, like the rest of me, also needs to be conscious and sensitive. That is to say, I need to use my own words to describe my own experience–not just lean on the associations I encounter like a crutch. This requires a certain presence of Being. The thinking part needs to actively engage and precisely see what it is saying, at the same time that a sensation of the body is maintained. The feeling part needs to be used carefully gauge the relationship between the body and the mind, and intuit the intelligence that is necessary to, in the moment, say something that is both precise, accurate, and original.

Of course this is a quite difficult practice. How much easier it is to just say the right things and sound like other people!

I fall into habits so easily that I don't see they are habits. This is, in fact, the whole point of understanding my habits– that I am completely identified with them. I presume them to be creatures emanating from a source of awareness, when in fact, they aren't.

Once formed, habits deftly camouflage themselves as awareness practices. This is why I need to be on my toes– to practice as if my hair were on fire– in order to remain active. If my hair is on fire, I am dancing around, swatting at it, looking for water, rolling on the ground– in other words, I am not taking a single approach: I am in constant movement, attempting to extinguish the flames.

Mindfulness can extend, in its intricacy, to the immediate use of language within the moment. In order to do this it is necessary to observe exactly how I am– insofar as I can determine that– within a given moment, as I speak. If I keep a close attention to what I say, and I am in the middle of it as it is said, I am much less likely to lose track of what I am saying. This kind of precise insight does not need to be a technical exercise– it is on the order of what is absolutely necessary in life- that is, my response.
Michel de Salzmann mentions that “what really defines and shows us a man is his response.” (Two Essays," pg. 6, Michel de Salzmann, Morning Light Press, 2011.)

In general, I'm often lazy about the use of language. I frequently see myself adapting the language of others, using it in a mirroring process that helps form bonds with others, but otherwise demands very little of me. It's much easier to engage in this habit than to attempt to use language precisely and with an active intelligence. To do so is to engage in a practice of the mind much like the Gurdjieff movements: one must be in the moment, one must see the movement of the mind, one must participate. This participation in response– an active participation– is a measurement of how present we are.

It's useful to watch the use of language for other reasons. It can help me see what parts of me are active. For example, when I attend carefully to the language I'm using, I can sense it in my body; I can see whether it is habitually associative, whether it is emerging mostly from the emotional part, whether it is entirely in the head, while the there is a grounding element– a kind of inner gravity– that connects it to the body. All of this can be an interesting study, but it requires a close attention that is not at all necessary when I speak. Speaking comes out of my machine without prompting; it is easy, it is automatic, it is mechanical.

In fact, if I'm fortunate enough to have a bit of presence, I may be able to observe myself speaking and see that the process usually comes out of a part that is probably not much more intelligent than a computer. My habitual parts are quite able, and know how to respond to 99% of what takes place in life without any need for active participation. That other 1%–

that is where the rubber meets the pavement.

How can I use a more active intelligence to become more precise in my language, in the moment?

May our prayers be heard.

Chemistry

2011-11-16T20:39:00.001-05:00

Thirty years ago today, I got up in the morning and looked at myself in the mirror and realized that if I kept drinking the way I had been drinking, I would die young.

I saw death looking at me in the mirror that day. That's the only explanation. It was a clear and distinctive impression, and I can still remember it. I haven't had a drop of alcohol since that day.

I wanted to share that with readers, because we all need to know that death is inevitable, and that we need to be clear about this. The decisions we make in life should be directly related to that question.

One doesn't want to die having failed to live responsibly. To do so is, as Gurdjieff said, to “to die like a dog.”

I thought I'd write a few notes today about the role of the centers we don't talk about much– sex center and instinctive center. They are, after all, part of the “lower” complex of centers, and yet, when we speak of inner work, we speak of three centered work–intellect, emotion, moving center (i.e, the body.) The place where sex center and instinctive center fit in isn't immediately apparent– nor does anyone give instructions for how to work with them... well, it's true; there are instructions on how to work with sex center in some Tantric disciplines, but that is fairly obscure material for most people.

It's useful to understand that the three centers that man generally works in and lives in–intellect, emotional, and moving center– are, more or less, "sandwiched" between sex center and instinctive center. There is, in other words, a distinctive hierarchy. One could imagine them as a thread running down the center of the body. The exact locations of the energy and the way they work are not necessarily linear, but the analogy of the thread is roughly correct. (The precise analogy, one of circulation, is depicted in the enneagram.)

The ground floor in man is instinctive center. This center is what supports life; it regulates breathing and digestion, along with many other physical functions that man is unable to do anything with himself. We can't, for example, work at the molecular level to determine what nutrients need to be absorbed by the intestine. The instinctive center, however, can do that. Another good example is breathing. It's well known that Gurdjieff did not want his pupils doing breathing exercises. Once one interferes with the ordinary mechanical work of instinctive center, undoing the damage can be nearly impossible. It's not meant to be regulated; treated properly, it is self regulating and needs no special attention.

Because instinctive center occupies the lowest rung, it serves as a bridge between levels. It actually touches the microcosmic level beneath man and mediates its action in him.

Sex center is at the top of the arrangement; as Gurdjieff explained, it works with the highest “hydrogen” that man is capable of manufacturing on his own, that is, si 12. This higher substance makes it possible for sex center, under certain conditions, to touch another level– the higher centers– as it does for brief moments when human beings experience orgasm. Because of the powerful energy it works with, it is able to subordinate the work of all the other centers when it wishes to– this is why we often have very little control over our lusts and sexual desires.

In any event, sex center mediates the energy that serves as a bridge at the top end of the hierarchy. It "touches" the higher centers. Hence its connection to the third eye both in the yogic chakra systems, and on Gurdjieff's enneagram. That isn't to say that there aren't or can't be other energies involved here; as anyone who has studied Gurdjieff's chemical factory knows, there are two other octaves that can produce hydrogens at level 12, each of which can also serve as a bridge between levels.

In between these two centers, we find the mind, the emotion, and the body. All of these lie firmly within territory that can be influenced by our own action. Hence the emphasis on working with these three centers, rather than with all five. It isn't to say that the other two centers don't meaningfully participate; nonetheless, their participation lies, in some measure, beyond our grasp.

All of this might seem rather technical, but it's of interest if one is trying to sense the whole of one's Being. While we tend to concentrate on sensing thought, emotion, and sensation, the participation of both sexuality and instinct may be seen during anything more than a cursory examination. If all of the centers (the three centers we generally work with, that is) begin to work together more harmoniously, the action of the sexual center and the instinctive center become even more apparent, because a greater sensitivity to this type of experience exists. In general, without three centered work, instinctive center is completely ignored– it operates on cruise control– and sex center is experienced strictly in the form of intense and irrevocable identification.

So why all this talk about chemistry in spiritual work? I suppose maybe it's pretty boring stuff–and I will confess, if there was one subject I hated more than any other in high school, it was chemistry.

Man, without a doubt, is a chemical and electrical being. Every spiritual experience is mediated by these forces. We can talk all we like about many paths, but there is only one chemistry. The chemistry of spirituality, of enlightenment, is a fixed entity, not one that varies from human being to human being. There is absolutely no doubt that Gurdjieff got that right. The enlightenment of the Buddhists is the same enlightenment bestowed by Christ consciousness, the same rapture as the Sufi saints. There can be no difference, because there is no group of men that produces special chemicals outside the realm of what is possible in human biology.

Some may think that these ideas cheapen the spiritual quest; others might agree that it objectifies it. The good news is that one doesn't have to sit around titrating solutions in flasks and beakers in order to pursue a path. The chemistry of the human being is exquisitely attuned to respond to, and grow within, the conditions of life itself.

Lastly, a brief announcement: several interesting new releases by Morning Light Press, which can be reviewed and ordered by clicking the following link. Recommended.

Morning Light Press

May our prayers be heard.

Inexplicable

2011-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

Portrait of a dervish, Uzbekistan, 16th century

Islamic collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York

We live in a troubled world.

Over the last few years, it consistently occurs to me that we have become victims of the old Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times." Yet all of this trouble–if trouble it is, and from a certain point of view, it isn't–is created by man. Not a single other creature on the planet is even remotely aware of the “trouble” that mankind is in. Each one of them simply goes about its business.

We worry.

Today was a day where I didn't worry much. The larger events on the planet– currency crisis, environmental deterioration, absurd electioneering, war– seem oddly pointless. In the abstract, of course they affect everything I do, and certain parts of me consider this, ponder it, calculate. Nonetheless, there is very little I can do about them.

I can, however, attend to myself. Perhaps this sounds like an excessively passive approach; maybe I should get involved and occupy something. If I were younger, maybe I even would. Age, however, leads me to the perception that what I need to occupy is myself.

If I don't develop an intimate relationship with my Being, an active intelligence, an active interest, an active respect for myself and my life, nothing else will work well. This is something I can have an effect on– as opposed to the downward spiral of the planet, which is well beyond my control. Don't get me wrong–I try to save water, turn off lights, and recycle. That is, I do the little things. But I can't save the Euro.

As they say in Zen, life is a matter of getting the flesh, the blood, the bones, the marrow of practice. There is a need to get to the heart of things, and the merry-go-round of human affairs is not at the heart of things: it is an artifice, a distraction that drags us away from ourselves.

I take the famous dog Isabel for her usual walk along the Palisades this afternoon. The weather for the past week has been dry, and all of the leaves are finally coming off the trees. Miraculous! It is one of those perfect fall moments when crisp, dry leaves lie deep in the forests and across the paths. Ten thousand subtle shades of brown catch the afternoon sun and curl it up in pockets. It's unnaturally warm: mid-November, and I am walking in shirt sleeves.

The inevitable sense of love as a constant presence is with me. I can sense it hiding under the leaves, lurking in all the negative spaces created by geometry. There are moments when all of the matter around me sings of love the way bees in a hive point one another towards the best honey.

In the midst of this, an enormous sorrow penetrates everything. A unique and particular sorrow, related to the very act of Being itself.

Inexplicable.

Well, perhaps not so inexplicable.

Yesterday, my wife Neal and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see their new exhibit of Islamic art–which is, by the way, absolutely outstanding, and so extensive that it was seemingly impossible to see more than half of it in one day. While we were there, I encountered the portrait of a dervish with which I have headed this post.

The inscription at the bottom of the picture reads: “Why am I then obliged to heaven that it has given me a soul? For it has created within me a source of sorrows from which that soul suffers.”

For me, the question here is the difference between personalized sorrow, a temporal or horizontal anguish, such as that which I feel on the death of a loved one, and that transcendental sorrow which penetrates reality, descends from above, and suffuses the soul with both the bitterest love and the sweetest anguish at the same time.

We truly lie at the intersection of forces we do not understand. If the soul does have a purpose–if it carries an obligation to heaven, which is the question the dervish asks–the obligation must be to help bear this sorrow, to inhabit life and to help carry that burden, on behalf of everything that is.

It is hard to remember this in a world that specializes in setting up windmills to tilt at.

May our prayers be heard.

Tourism

2011-11-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

There are intimate relationships between practice in Zen Buddhism and the understandings we find in Jeanne de Salzmann's observations about the Gurdjieff work.

I'll examine one specific example today, because I feel it's striking.

First, from Dogen's Shobogenzo:

“To carry the self forward and illuminate myriads things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening."
(Treasury of the True Dharma eye, p. 29, Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo, as translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi, Shambhala, 2010)

Then, from, Jeanne de Salzmann:

"We do not see the simultaneous movements outward toward manifestation and inward toward a reality at the source, two kinds of vibrations. Always I nourish the feeling of my ordinary "I", clinging blindly to the first movement, the vibration that draws me outward. I am taken by my activity of the moment, and believe that in this vibration lies the affirmation of myself. In this identification I am lost in one or another part of myself, unconscious of the whole."

" I can come to [Presence] if I am actively passive, quiet enough for an energy of another quality to appear, to be contained in me. This is a state of deep letting go where the functions are maintained in passivity. I let my functions come into my presence. I do not go into them; they come into me. Only the attention is active, an attention coming from all the centers.”
(The Reality of Being, pages 81–82, Shambhala 2010.)

Admittedly, the passages from de Salzmann are far wordier, but at the same time they are (helpfully) more specific. They illuminate Dogen's meaning in a way that may not be immediately accessible to us.

Part of our difficulty in understanding Dogen's language is–first of all–that it's a translation. Second, lexicons of terminology and the associative meaning of words change over time. The substantial differences between one of the last major translations of the Shobogenzo (Nishijima and Cross) and this new one (Tanahashi), which were accomplished not too many years apart, underscores this issue.

Last but not least, all of us are accustomed to hearing the words of Buddhism quite habitually, so we come to them always with an ordinary, predetermined set of associations that is almost impossible to leave behind.

In some senses, an approach to understanding any esoteric literature involves not only leaving my associations with the words behind, but also developing a practical and physical relationship with what is being said. That, too, requires that I overcome the considerable obstacles that arise when such pursuits begin, in large part, as intellectual enterprises.

The habitual assumption that we understand the language of an esoteric practice is the reason that Gurdjieff, when he introduced a work that relied heavily on yoga teachings, completely eliminated the yoga terminology, substituting the word “centers” for chakras, and so on.

In any event, de Salzmann's description of us going outward is the same as Dogen's carrying the self forward. Using the self to go outward and illuminate the world (by rough analogy, the concept of employing the ego as an interpretive mechanism which tries to "grasp" reality) is Dogen's delusion. This is much the same action as Gurdjieff (and de Salzmann's ) identification. Both masters are indicating that when we become identified with the outward movement of the self, it attempts to seize the world and make it its own property.

I need to be careful not to understand this idea of going outward in a strictly psychological way. This action is an entire organic movement which must be physically sensed, intellectually sensed, and emotionally sensed, in the moment. (In other words, it must be seen.) The problem is not just a problem of the way that I think.

Here we come to what intrigued me when I read the passage from Dogen this morning. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.

When I read this passage, it immediately struck me that this was perhaps very nearly identical to de Salzmann's indication that I let my functions come into my presence.

Both of these texts indicate that the action of awakening is an action of receiving the world, not trying to go out and get it. In order to understand this, I must organically begin to sense the difference between outward and inward movement. To carry the self forward–to go outward–comes only from my personality, my ego. To allow myriad things to come forth–to allow my functions to come into my presence–to not go into them, but to let them come into me–this is the action I often refer to in this space as inhabiting my life. This is an action of essence, which has a completely different relationship to my life. Personality is a tourist. Essence is an inhabitant.

The tourist, arriving, feels the need to document everything, take photographs, buy souvenirs, attempts to own the space by seizing parts of it, claiming to understand it, trying to define it.

The inhabitant has no need for such activity: already inhabiting, the inhabitant is already there. There is no need to attempt to take and hold what surrounds the inhabitant, because it is already a part of her, and she of it.

In my eyes, there is a subtle relationship between these ideas and the ideas of God the Father and the Virgin Mary: Mary seen as the female principle, a vessel that receives the energy and expression-the activity-of the father, or inseminating agent. Of this, something new and quite extraordinary may be born. It might not be too bold to say that being born of the Holy Spirit begins with allowing my functions to come into my presence.

This is not different than allowing myriad things to come forth and illuminate the self.

May our prayers be heard.

Giving thanks

2011-11-10T23:59:00.000-05:00

What is it to give thanks for our existence? I mean, to really give thanks, intentionally, and with all three centers?

On page 728 of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, new edition, we encounter the following passage:

"Perhaps, my boy, you do not yet know anything about the 'holysacrament of the great Serooazar'?" Beelzebub asked his grandson.

Tothis question of Beelzebub, Hassein replied:

"No, dear Grandfather, I do not yet know the details of this; Ionly know that these dionosks are regarded among us on the planet Karatas asgreat, holy days and are called 'helping-God dionosks.' And I also know that at the end of thesegreat holy days, all our beings, 'actavas' and 'passavas,' begin to preparethemselves for the next ones; and that one 'loonia' before the beginning ofthis sacred mystery both old and young cease to introduce the 'firstbeing-food' into themselves and, through various sacred ceremonies, mentallygive thanks for their existence to our Common Creator."

Wandering about (and often lost) in the fascinating technical esoterica of Gurdjieffian lore, perhaps we forget how recognizably Christian, how fundamental and perhaps even "ordinary" many of the practices Gurdjieff called us to are.

To give thanks for my existence.

Unless I see the wholeness of life, the wholeness of how nature expresses itself in the three forces of thought, material, and emotion (see the previous post) I don't see why I should be thankful. When Dogen says, “We have obtained these bodies difficult to obtain, and encountered this dharma difficult to encounter. Therefore, let us practice as though our hair were on fire,” he is indicating just how precious and important this life itself is.

To practice as though my hair is on fire is to give thanks.

To see the wholeness of life is to understand that 100% of it, all of it, everything that is given, is a gift for my work. It isn't just something that happens. Life is sent through Love and in Love, and all of creation manifests within that Love to participate in community. I speak here not just of the community of human beings, but the community of matter–the community of the earth, the planet–the community of the solar system. The question of community expands, ultimately, to include everything there is.

The deepest sense of this life and its value–which is, at the objective level, absolute, not relative–cannot be understood without taking in impressions properly, taking them in deeply. Receiving life in a different way than I usually receive it.

Jeanne de Salzmann refers to this by saying that understanding is based on conscious impressions, and that “understanding is a precious treasure that must enter as a living element in my effort.”

(The Reality of Being, Shambala, 2010, pages 79–80.)

So if I have a real impression of my life, a true impression, I see that it is, in its entirety, a precious treasure. This essential sacredness must be sensed organically, in the deepest part of the being. The sense of this sacredness is connected to the action of what Gurdjieff called Hanbledzoin; this substance marries the thought to the feelings. Only if thought is connected to feeling can I begin to sense this. This is a substantive action, a material action, not a theoretical or mental action.

The action of giving thanks begins here. It begins immediately, in this life, with a sense of how complete and whole life is, with the sense that everything is bound together into one great expression, referred to as the Dharma by Buddhists. The Dharma is not just a mental conception. It is the entire field of energy–thought, sensed, spoken, felt– which I exist in, and which includes me.

Dogen liked to refer to his pupils as “Buddha ancestors.” Gurdjieff, perhaps more prosaically, called them his "adepts." Either way, the inference is that we are on a path towards understanding. This thing called understanding, which we hope to acquire on this path, is precious; that understanding is a treasure. It has an immeasurable value that cannot be extracted from the Dharma; it resides within it, and our only option is to surrender ourselves in that direction, to inhabit the Dharma itself, thereby participating in its truth.

Once I understand, I give thanks.

Even in the midst of grief, and fear, if there is any sense of wholeness in me, any appreciation of how completely extraordinary this life is, I still give thanks. In this way, every act of living becomes a prayer. Michel Conge touches on this fundamental principle in his fine book Inner Octaves (which is, unfortunately, not available in stores, a lamentable situation that definitely ought to be corrected.)

This is a question I can carry in myself in every moment of every day. Am I giving thanks? I give thanks by making a conscious effort–by trying to remain in touch with my wish, in touch with my sensation, my feeling, my thought.

Of course, I describe all these things as though they can be explained. The simple fact is that they cannot. It's possible to experience all of these actions, but reading about them–or writing them down in a diary–does not begin to approach what we are actually dealing with.

Because, after all, all of this in one way or another represents what life actually ought to be about and what life actually ought to be for, and all of us have strayed very far from that path.

May our prayers be heard.

Being Penetrated

2011-11-08T19:24:00.001-05:00

The nature of being on this level is such that I am thick.

Materiality as I experience it is coarse and crude. I may think it's quite refined; when I encounter great works of art or music, striking pieces of architecture, or the objectively beautiful impressions of nature, I see goodness. So within the range of its usual ability, my sensory experience conveys a certain kind of satisfaction.

Yet none of this is enough. This is not what I was born for. I live in a universe and a field of forces that I am generally unaware of. Coming in to contact with what Gurdjieff called "higher energies,” the influences of the sacred, a slow form of dissolving takes place.

What I am is more or less crystalline. My entire personality and all of the things that I think I am have crystallized and set into a rigid entity that I inhabit, thinking it is quite right. I don't know any differently.

It's only contact with an emotional force, a reconciling force that enters to influence the materiality I inhabit, that begins to help me intimate that this form, which seems to be so substantial, is actually empty. Paradoxically, I need to start to become empty to understand that where I am right now is the epitome of emptiness. What I "have" needs to dissolve.

This can only happen through the action of suffering. Not suffering in the sense of allowing bad things to happen to me, or admitting my iniquity, not in any literal sense. The suffering has to take another form.

That form is expressed within experience and presence. I need to be present to the experience. I need to inhabit my life. Impressions take on a different quality under such circumstances, but it is not the nature of that quality that matters. One might say that that quality was perfect, or sublime, or so on and so forth. Yet the quality of my impression, fine though it may be, is not necessarily the point. Every impression that is taken in more deeply has a finer quality to it. Yet it is the action that is important–the experience of the impressions as they enter. Not their definitions.

Impressions that enter me more deeply help to begin to dissolve what I ordinarily am. It is as though one were drinking a very fine medicinal beverage, one that slowly cleans out all of the garbage and nonsense acquired over a lifetime, replacing it with a certain kind of emptiness which has far more substance than what came before it.

This emptiness is an emptiness of quality that stands ready to receive what arrives. It doesn't make decisions in advance about how anything is going to be; it stands ready to allow what is to be what it is. It sidesteps the complications I create with my intellect. It makes an end run around the expectations I create.

Within this emptiness, this suspension of the world as I know it, lies an emotional quality that sustains. Without a sensitivity to that, and a willingness to allow that emotional quality to enter, nothing real can happen in me. The taking in of deeper impressions is, in fact, the arrival of an understanding relative to the nature of what life is.

The world has a clearly material quality expressed in terms of the objects that I encounter, and it has a clearly intellectual quality expressed in terms of the relationship between those objects–all of which are, as we know, subject to physical and chemical laws.

Generally speaking, I relate to the nature of life and to nature itself in a one centered manner; maybe I'm pounding nails into a board, interacting with the material quality. Maybe I'm thinking about the way physics works, interacting with the intellectual quality. Maybe I am even thinking about how physics affects the nail I am pounding, achieving a crude yet effective two-centered impression of my world.

What I do not see is that nature, as I encounter it, also has an emotional quality that binds all of the parts of material reality together. I can't be sure of why, but the fact is that man has generally lost the ability to sense this in any direct way, even though the organism is designed to receive vibrations of that kind. Of course, there is accrued emotional relationship to nature which, when it's there, consists mostly of association and enthusiasm; nonetheless, this is sediment. I say sediment, because it accretes in layers that appear to acquire significant meaning, but it might just as well be sentiment.

This emotional quality that exists within nature is the third force that binds reality together, acting between material and thought. It has more than a little bit to do with all of the discussions I have had in this space about the nature of Love; yet this force that ultimately creates reality is so sublime that it's probably better not to put a word on it at all.

This ineffable nature that binds thought and material together can enter the body. Not in any intellectual or sentimental way; no, it can enter the body in a way that dissolves what I am.

This three centered sensing alone, should I choose to become available to it and allow its action, can have a profound effect on my understanding.

May our prayers be heard.

Fear of the Self

2011-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Over the last two days, I've been contemplatingonce again relationship with the two chief prayers used by Gurdjieff, that is,"I am-l wish to be" and "Lord have mercy."

I had mentioned earlier that one of theesoteric meanings of the first of the

two prayers is to overcome the fear of theSelf.

Why do I fear myself? If I dig down deep intomyself, beyond the superficial

fears, horizontal fears, all of the ordinaryfears that drive my relationships with life, perhaps I can begin to see that atmy core I fear my own mortality, and I fear that I do not have Being. Because Imanifest in this clearly mortal body, my fundamental fear is that this is allmy Self is, that there is nothing more, and that it will end.

I have forgotten my Self. I am unable torealize that the Self is not the body.

Paradoxically, the full realization of thislies deep within the physical and

mortal practice of relaxation and sensation,yet I am unable to relax and sense in the comprehensive way that is necessary.(Only with help from a higher level can that take place.) Because I haveforgotten my Self, I no longer sense the sacred relationship that binds meeternally to those higher forces which create the universe. I live only withinthe constraints of my own fear, the fear of my death, the constant underlyingfear that I am not more than this lump of flesh.

The real manifestation of "I am" isan acknowledgment of my conditions,

including both mortality of the body and thenecessity of realizing that there is something more. This is why the words"I am" are followed by the words "I wish to be." The firstprayer has two actions; and the second action, the wish to be, represents areconciling force leading me towards a reconnection with the higher.

I was contemplating the parable of the prodigalson yesterday, and I realized that this parable may cast some light on thissituation. Let's forget for a moment about the indignant brother who stays homeand is a good boy; he seems important, but maybe he's not really the maincharacter.

The son who leaves home goes all the way awayfrom home; he immerses

himself in a life of the flesh, the horizontallife, a life where he has truly and

fully manifested on the lower level. Havingdone that, he turns around and

comes home. He has manifested "I am,"and in returning home, he manifests "I wish to be." Presentinghimself, he asks for mercy, and his father is generous. He has completed thecycle; and to the incredulity of the other son, who has stayed home, he isrewarded.

It isn't possible to understand the Self without fully leaving home.

I am manifested in the flesh, confronted by my own mortality, andever fearful.

My fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between my Selfand the

Lord causes me to fail to manifest fully in the first place; and inhaving failed

to live, to inhabit my life fully, that is, consciously and withattention, I

haven't even fulfilled the first condition that the prodigal sonfulfilled. He left

home; in fully leaving, he created the possibility of fully comingback. I haven't

even fully left home. This recalls Zen master Dogen's reference toBuddhist

monks as "leavers of home." It's a koan: I cannot comeback home unless I fully

leave it. My own wish cannot be fully manifest, and I cannot try toreturn home

honestly, if I don't fully leave home in the first place.

The fear of the self, this fundamental paranoia about my mortality,is what

keeps me here at home-in the comfort zone, asleep. As Christ pointedout, the

Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. Perhaps this is because hehas fully

accepted his mortality and the conditions he is within, and worksrelentlessly

and without rest to surrender himself fully and return home.

This question of overcoming the fear of the self is a deep one. If Iexamine my

manifestations of my life carefully, I see that it penetrates mostof what I do. A

great deal of my habitual inner dialogue consists of creatingvarious buffers and

defenses that prevent me from acknowledgment of where I actually am.A

complete abandonment of this nonsense would of course allow me thefreedom

to completely leave home; but that would be a huge step, one Icannot take so

easily. It is easy to theorize about it, but the organic necessityof freedom is

different than the mental picture of it.

And, of course, my forgetting of the self and its connection to thehigher

always brings me back to the fact that I don't trust.

This question of the two prayers and their relationship to oneanother bears a

great deal of fruit for me as I continue to consider them.

May our prayers be heard.

All Hallow's Eve

2011-10-31T21:06:00.003-04:00

Happy Halloween!

It may seem odd to some to treat on the subject of death during Halloween, so close on the heels of the death of my sister, but you would have to know her in order to know that she had an entirely wicked and profoundly irreverent sense of humor. If she knew I was posting to tell a ghost story tonight–a real ghost story–not something made up–she would probably love it. Even though the ghost story involves her.

This is an absolutely true story. I'm telling it not only because I think that it 's appropriate for All Hallow's Eve, but also because it raises some interesting questions about the nature of life and death, consciousness, time, and our perception of reality.

There's a man named Joe B. who was a very close friend of mine. He shared numerous personal characteristics with my sister. He died in a tragic car accident in 1999. By that time, I had been working with him for 10 years and had been to Thailand and China with him many dozens of times. We were very close, but the relationship was deeply conflicted, because he was both charismatic and seriously bipolar. Although I loved the man in many ways–he was one of those people who could complete a sentence for me, and vice versa–he was also very, very difficult.

In the first 3 months after he died, Joe kept coming back to me in dreams over and over again. In every dream, we were in Thailand--his absolute favorite place-- and it eventually became clear to me that he basically wanted us to keep being together there, in this place he loved. In other words, he didn't want to go: he was clinging, stuck to this moment in our lives, and in life.

The dreams eventually became disturbing, because he just wouldn't leave. I finally looked at him in a moment of lucid dreaming and told him, “Joe, you're dead. You just can't keep coming back like this. You have to move on." In that last dream, he nodded at me to acknowledge that he understood. He disappeared from my dreams then for about 6 months, and only came back one more time, very briefly, in a cameo appearance to let me know he was okay.

He had not come back for over 10 years.

A month ago, about a week before I went to China, Joe returned in a dream again. When he came back, I thought it was very odd, because he had definitely moved on, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why he would come back after 10 years of complete silence. I decided to ignore it as a fluke, some unfinished piece of business I was working out in my subconscious.

It wasn't that easy. Joe came back the next night again. That night, what was left over when I woke up was a sense of great love for him. I understood that even though we had terrible moments together, the overarching relationship was one of love. It was a good feeling to know that.

Okay, I thought, resolved.

Wrong.

He came back again, for the third night in a row, about 3 nights before I left on the trip.Enough was enough. I woke up that morning distinctly saying to myself, “Someone is going to die.” It was as though it was self evident, and I was dense not to have understood it before that. Joe had come to send me that message.

Well, I thought, perhaps one is just bound to imagine such things when a recurring dream like that arises. But I couldn't shake the impression, and of course I was worried it would be me. I have all these people to take care of, my children, wife, parents, and so on, I thought. Then I thought to myself stoically, “Well, I can't do anything about it if it's me.”

Then I started worrying that it was one of my children and I said, “dear God, please, don't take any of my children.”

Finally, I put it aside. I was superstitiously averse to telling my wife Neal-- or anyone else-- about it, because I felt that if I vocalized it, it would become real and gain power. Perhaps there's some irony in this, since it seems apparent in hindsight that it already had all the power it was going to have in the first place.

In any event, a day or two after my sister died, I suddenly realized that this was exactly what Joe had been trying to tell me. I feel quite certain that he came back to warn me.

Jeanne De Salzmann famously said, in a letter that she wrote after Mme. Ouspensky's death, "There is no death."

I've had ample evidence of that over the course of a lifetime, sometimes in most unpleasant ways that I wanted to have nothing whatsoever to do with. ( This post is hardly the only true ghost story I have--it's one of the least disturbing ones, in fact.) In other instances they have been nothing short of miraculous, blessings from above.

No matter how I try to process it, there is clearly a mystery to this question and a dimension that we can't possibly understand from this perspective.

In memory of all those who we love, and who are gone--

May our prayers be heard.

The Intimate Self

2011-10-24T14:55:00.005-04:00

On Friday afternoon, October 21, my sister Sarah died quite sudden of what we believe was an abdominal aneurysm. She was fifty-one years old.

I have just returned from China and am suffering from considerable jet lag. When my brother-in-law called me to give me the news, something in me refused to process it at first.

There isn't any way to philosophize about these things. We all go through the ordinary emotions of the telephone calls, the expressions of grief, the tears, and the incredulity. One never gets the life one wants; one gets the life one has.

One of the last things that Jeanne de Salzmann reportedly said before she died was, "Be there in relation to a force. Then it doesn't matter so much, what happens.”

This is our task in life. To be there in relation to a force. This force that wishes to reach us confers a transparency and a radiance that cannot be measured by life; instead, it takes the measurement. We can know something real if a higher vibration takes the measurement, instead of us trying to take the measurement of what we think is (or isn't) a higher vibration.

Having returned from my trip to this terrible shock, I have discovered great value in just climbing the hill with my dog, the famous dog Isabel. I go down to the park by the Hudson River in the morning. The air is cool. I put one foot in front of the other and climb up the hill until I am maybe a third, maybe halfway, up the hill. It's the north side of the Palisades, so it is a bit shady, even when the sun is bright, and there is a tumble down of broken rocks and green moss all over the side of the hill. At this time of year, leaves are beginning to fall. The colors in these leaves have been crafted by the singing of cicadas all summer long; only now do the subtleties of their slowly changing palette begin to reveal themselves.

There is a texture and a grain to everything. Reality itself has this texture, a fine, granular nature, as though all of it were made up of very tiny, very fine particles, all gathering together into these objects and circumstances, yet together expressing a specific single and singular energy, an energy that permeates everything and animates matter in general, transcending the coarseness of manifestation, and expressing a finer underlying unity.

All of that is apparent in the detail and movement of the colors, the textures, the hardness and softness of the rocks and mosses. All of this comes into the body as a comprehensive statement of Being.

It just is.

With or without grief, there is no need to take the measure of anything; everything is already measured. What is necessary is to receive life and accept the conditions that I find myself in. The loss of my sister is part of those conditions, and it needs to be included in this effort to receive the impressions of life in the deepest possible way.

This question of deepness–of letting life penetrate into the body, of allowing life itself to add to the gravity of the body– is critical. There needs to be a specific and tangible value to the experience of life. It must be organic, not mental. It needs to leave enough empty space for impressions to arrive more directly.

Walking up the same hillside with rocks and moss on it every day might seem monotonous. Yet there's a great deal there; everything, in fact, is right there. Life is right there. Breath is right there.

These qualities of life are essential. If I don't make an effort to experience my life in each moment, if I don't open my intimate Self in a sensitive way to the receiving of life, I do not honor my own life, and I don't honor the lives of those who I love.

One might say that it is this loving relationship with the intimate Self, and with the world in its immediate proximity, that creates all of the possibility for the love that is needed to support those around me. Even those who have died need support and love; there is a reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead that must be fed in the same way that any relationship needs food. This has been well understood since ancient times. Modern societies seem to be forgetting it.

There are mysteries here that cannot really be explained or perhaps even spoken of.

Where situations are impossible and words fail, Love suffices. Love is the best hope we have. It is made of ten thousand impossible things, so it is stronger than the possible.

It will always be the foundation on which life rests. There is no foundation greater than this; it is a good one, which time and death have no power over.

May our prayers be heard.

Review of The Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble CD

2011-10-21T15:34:00.002-04:00

The Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble/ Levon Eskenian
Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff, ECM records

Tina Pelikan of ECM records kindly sent me a copy of this CD to review in this space.

Let me begin by saying that this is a very fine effort indeed. Directed by Levon Eskenian, fourteen of Armenia's leading folk instrumentalists came together to produce this group of pieces, which–naturally–focuses on pieces from the Gurdjieff/De Hartmann oeuvre with "roots in the Armenian, Greek, Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian and Caucasian folk and spiritual music." Unsurprisingly, the instruments and performances bring the pieces back into that part of the world... with a vengeance. Played on these instruments, and in this manner, the music assumes an earthy organic nature that even Larry Rosenthal simply can't squeeze out of a piano.

Along the way, one is reminded how eerily a carefully applied vibrato can emulate a vocal performance; one gets to hear picks and fingernails skittering across strings like spiders, and human breathing modulating the sonorous notes of duduks and bluls. It's a pleasure to listen to this music brought back to the place it came from.

All in all, by reaching back into the past in such a comprehensive manner, this particular CD runs the risk of being– dare I say it?–New. You will not feel like you are hearing your father's Gurdjieff music here. It is not the same old, same old.

Delightfully, it turns out that when one is working with this material, there are several pieces where it becomes necessary to flail away vigorously on stringed instruments. When one is called to flail, nothing else will do. I was (on a definitely irreverent note) at one point reminded of Pete Townshend's performance on Pinball Wizard. This kind of playing invigorates the music in a way that is, once again, impossible on a piano–the instrument we almost always hear this music played on. And all of the performances are equally spirited, even when the spirit that animates them is introspective or contemplative.

Having spent what seems most of a lifetime sitting primly in absolutely still rooms in order to carefully and attentively listen to reverently formal performances of this music, squeezed into what amounts to a parlor format–even though, of course, the aim is much bigger than the aim of any parlor music–it was refreshing to hear it unbound, scratchy, breathy, searching for a voice that authentically conveys origins. The performances well exceed the boundaries of what we have come to expect from our indoctrination.

Paradoxically, this also becomes a question. Arguably, one of Gurdjieff's chief acts of genius in his collaboration with De Hartmann was to bring this improvisational Eastern sensibility to a Western instrument. It worked rather well–in fact, it worked wonderfully. Because of this, bringing the music back to its own folk-instrument roots actually obscures some of its unique and remarkable qualities. Because it is here performed on instruments that one more or less expects such music to be performed on (you will see what I mean when you buy it and listen to it, as you must) it is -weirdly- easier to dismiss it as something ordinary and predictable, at least judged within its own context. One does not fall into that trap when hearing it on a piano. I can't explain exactly why it works that way, except to say, that for me, it does. In that sense it actually put a greater demand on me to try and understand it from its purportedly sacred context. Once again, when we hear the Gurdjieff/De Hartmann music in this form, we're called to hear it anew.

An additional and admittedly more personal paradox layers itself on to this music. There is something anachronistic and inexplicable about a Western man who has grown up listening to rock music and who composes on computers with MIDI, samplers, and synthesizers immersing himself in a world of people twanging, banging, and puffing away on instruments that are slowly (and sadly) being eclipsed and forgotten. (If you don't believe me, spend a night in a boat on the Nile, eating dinner at midnight, and listen to what the bands are playing there. They aren't using ouds, bluls, and duduks to play their traditional music, they are using synthesizers and drum machines on amplified sound systems.)

The CD is, in other words, an excursion into a world that is being steadily lost to the relentless march of technology and the accelerating extermination of separated, unique world cultures.

I am not, however, a purist who believes that only acoustic music is “real,” and that the use of digital and electronic equipment is a Crime Against Nature. It seems fairly clear to me that Gurdjieff himself did not think this way either–else wise, why would he have owned so many tape recorders, which he so enthusiastically used to lay down an extensive repertoire of harmonium tracks? Like most men, he enjoyed using new technology... after all, he was only human.

Ultimately, I found myself wondering what the exact significance of this effort was apart from its lush ethnic sound and its ethno-historical value. This because, in a way, the whole point of what Gurdjieff did was to create a bridge between that world and where we are now–a bridge, so to speak, formed between the essence, in the form of folk origins, and personality, in the form of formal “classical” pieces played on the piano. In that sense his music legitimately represented the meeting of East and West.

In the end, I think the significance lies precisely in its re-invention of what we understand this music to be. Returning this music to its roots required considerable ingenuity in terms of both arrangement and appropriate instrumental interpretation. Mr. Eskenian and his artists with a doubt labored long and hard to produce a well-crafted work of integrity and value, yet they manage to make the result sound relaxed, informal, and effortless. The final transparency of the performances is refreshing.

Highly recommended.

An Inordinate Grace

2011-10-18T04:17:00.002-04:00

I expect everything that takes place in my life take place within an established order. After all, there is an order–we inhabit a universe full of laws, and I even presume to understand that. I interpret everything according to my current understanding of the order that I am in, or, at least, the order I can perceive.

What I don't see is that I am asking for a revolution.

I think that when I work, when I engage in what I call a "spiritual" practice, somehow it fits into what I know. Whatever comes, whatever happens, will be bartered, transformed, trimmed, clipped, wedged, and pigeonholed into where I already am. The idea that everything will somehow step directly outside itself–that is, that nothing will be the same, and that all of what I call order will come to a definite end, if any real transformation occurs–this is terrifying. It can't even be considered. It isn't even possible to consider it, because it lies out in what we call the unknown unknown.

I don't know what I don't know, and I can't even know that I don't know it.

For life to be truly experienced in a new way, an inordinate amount of Grace is necessary. This does not have anything to do with me, because Grace is a force that lies outside me and is not under my command. It is inordinate in two ways: first of all, if I am to receive life as life truly can be received, already, it is impossible for me to do this. Only the intervention of higher forces can mediate that experience. So it is inordinate in that it is in excess of anything I know; larger, more generous, on a scale that I know nothing about. In the second way, it is inordinate in the strictest sense of the word: it does not belong to the known order–it lies outside it.

We use the words "attention" and "prayer" as though they were different, but in many senses that is not the case. Attention is a form of prayer, and prayer is a form of attention. Both of these actions in me are necessary, but neither one is sufficient. Only Grace is sufficient, and I cannot know Grace. It can know me, but I cannot know it.

So I ask for a revolution that I don't know about and don't even really believe in. It isn't, after all, possible to believe in the unknown. One can only believe in the known. So the unknown cannot even be a belief of mine. If I believe it, it has already been reduced to the scope of my limited understanding and vision. Only when what arrives is both unknown and unbelievable will I know; and then the words will fail.

The demand is enormous. Grace does not arrive intending to take half measures, or settle for less than everything. Is it a demand I am familiar with; the kind of demand I would put on myself? Of course not. This demand puts me in the position of the lowest common denominator, and takes an eraser to the blackboard I scrawled my life on.

It is as though a man were asked to drink strong wine, never having had it before, and not knowing how difficult it is to drink wine that is so strong. Even with the first draught of the wine, he is overwhelmed. Perhaps, even though he has spent his life wishing for such strong wine, he suddenly sees that he knew nothing about it.

Someone must hold his head up to help him.

May our prayers be heard.

Street Level

2011-10-15T21:56:00.002-04:00

It occurred to me during the course of this trip that I am just over a month away from the 5th anniversary of the ZYG enterprise. Starting out as it did–a tiny effort, almost ridiculously small and insignificant in its scale, and as wrinkled and helpless as any infant when it emerged–it's surprising to me that I am still writing these essays. It turns out, more than anything else, that I write them to myself–to organize my impressions and thoughts about this effort we call inner work, to collect observations, to express experience. Undertaken publicly, however, the experience undergoes a transformation, because a general public who I do not know and will for the most part definitely never meet reads these essays and incorporates them into their own impressions of daily life.

It's important to remember that we are all down here at street level together. I don't know how you feel about it, but as I grow older, I increasingly see that every single human being I encounter becomes a teacher for me in one way or another–the ones I love, the ones I hate, the ones that have done good things for me, and the ones who have done things that objectively harmed me. If I have a real sense of my life, an organic sense of life, I see how everything I receive is food for growth. There is an attitude we can adopt where we constantly seek the value in what takes place, not the stories of personal adversity we often prefer to feed ourselves.

And there is a point of work where we begin to understand what is meant by the phrase, "above all, do no harm." So, as Zen master Dogen often used to say at the end of his Dharma hall discourses, "I respectfully ask you to take good care."

The other night, my wife and I were talking about the difference between the Gurdjieff work say, 20 years ago, and today. She mentioned that all the luminaries are dying. That is to say, almost all of the people who knew Gurdjieff personally are dead. (We are fortunate enough to know some very few who are still alive, but the number is tiny.) Most of the so-called "great leaders"–and some of them truly were great–are dead. Although there are people of enormous quality in this work today, and leading it–all of whom are, rightfully, owed deep respect for their effort, intelligence, and sensitivity (as well as their inevitable lack of those qualities, at times, a disease that affects all of us)–we do not, I think it would be agreed, have teachers of the caliber of Jeanne de Salzmann to sit in front of us and lead us. While those teachers can still send influences from other levels, this is rare and a quite different thing which can't be transmitted except to individuals.

This leaves us with an organization stripped of its charismatics, stripped of its visionaries, humbled to a fault, and forced to confront the realities of its own existence under the harsh conditions of present-day life. This is a good thing; the community becomes an organism that pulls together on its own and generates the value that was once left to individuals who shouldered a greater part of the burden for all of us. On the other hand, there is no lightning rod to gather around; we are left with the individual efforts of the community, and that alone.

In the same way that every age creates its own myth of a Golden age, every life creates its own myth of a golden life. There aren't any golden ages, and there are no golden lives; any reasonable student of history eventually reaches this conclusion. We have this age and these lives, and dreaming about alternatives is pointless. To get back to my original example, it's easy enough for anyone to see that efforts like my essays are, for all intents and purposes, trivial–and yet the effort of any single bacteria is trivial. I am nothing more than a bacteria–I may dream of glory, but there isn't really any glory available to bacteria. All of us are tiny creatures.

Glory does not belong to us.

This morning, while I was sitting, it occurred to me that it would be a big thing to just do the job of a bacteria. To not expect anything, to not aggrandize this life or its conditions or possibilities, but to just work. To just meet life as best possible, within the intimate, sensitive, carefully examined context of inner work, understanding that little or nothing may be possible, and, to steal a phrase, this may be as good as it gets.

Is it up to me to decide what would be good? Knowing my propensity for self will, if angels came down and put the kingdom of Heaven in front of me on a golden platter later today, I might well refuse it. That's how I am. It may be a unique condition, but I somehow doubt it. It strikes me that this condition is probably very close to where almost all of us are.

There's an Old Testament quality to this life. We are born into it, and we watch the mighty fall. It's a consistent theme in the Bible; readers of Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson will take note that it's a consistent theme in that book, too. We are all, together, participating right now in the end of an age of Empire, where the schemes of the rich and powerful to defraud the rest of us are being exposed, and it has become apparent that the emperor is naked.

It's all very amusing, in a certain perverse sense, to see this play out on the world stage. One is tempted to self righteously puff oneself up and say, "I told you so." What I don't stop to consider is that this passion play, this farce, is just a mirror of what goes on inside me. If I truly saw that, and truly understood, in anything more than the glimpses I get on a daily basis, how different everything would be.

The image came to me this morning of a man taking apart a temple, a pyramid, a magnificent structure reaching to the heavens–carefully, and with a quiet attention, taking one brick after another, walking down the temple stairs, and neatly stacking each brick on the ground.

In the process, as the Temple is taken down, an open space is cleared where it once stood.

Plants and flowers move in; then trees. Birds and insects come to live where the Temple stood; and instead of a powerful edifice of bare stone, a symbolic representation of some higher idea of life-- now the space is filled with much smaller things:

Rich new impressions of actual lives being lived.

May our prayers be heard.

A personal sense of gravity

2011-10-14T06:10:00.002-04:00

To inhabit the body, to have a true connection with the body, not just the idea of a connection with the body, one must have a personal sense of gravity.

This is not a condition I create or manufacture; not a condition I will. It is something that can be discovered: encountered unexpectedly, arriving without explanation. All true things arrive without explanation; they don't need explanations. So it is with gravity.

Gravity is, in general, understood as a theory, a force that affects objects and their relationships between one another. It's easily understood in terms of material action: fall down, and it hurts. A personal sense of gravity, however, arises from within the condition of life and is part of the condition of life. One could say that life itself is a form of gravity, since Being, if it manifests in any degree above the ordinary, has a force that attracts life itself. It does not attract events, circumstances, or objects; it attracts impressions. In this way, life attracts life, and makes itself more whole. Under ordinary circumstances, life has no force of attraction. It can't be seen. It isn't experienced. There is an intelligence that floats around here in me, but it isn't really a living intelligence. It is an abstraction. As with Plato's prisoners chained in a cave, I mistake the shadow for the substance, because I don't know any better. Equally, when I see an apple falling from a tree, I think that is gravity, because I don't know any better.

There is a difference between life as an idea or a series of perceived experiences, and life as a perceived and experienced force.

Life and gravity are closely related. This is not an Einsteinian phenomenon we speak of, at least not in the conventional sense. When life is lived, it has weight. Weight is sensible; it is tangible; it speaks for itself. It does not need to take a position because it is already in one. It doesn't need to have an opinion, because it is impartial: it contains its own wholeness, and there is an objectivity that does not get mixed with what Gurdjieff called inner considering. Weight does not have anything to consider. Gravity does not have anything to consider. These things are just facts when they manifest. Nothing needs to be added; nothing needs to be subtracted.

A connection with the body isn't thinking about the body, or having a sensation of thought. In some senses, speaking of the connection between these two centers is already misleading, because if the two centers are "connected," they interpenetrate one another and become a simultaneous expression. Although one could speak of distinction, there is no distinction; and in the same way, if one experiences what Gurdjieff called "three centered Being," already, it is a single whole thing, not a division between three different things. There are some subtle implications about the meaning of the holy Trinity here, but we will leave it be.

It has been said before in the Gurdjieff work that your level of Being attracts your life. It's important to understand that this is not about events, good or bad. Those who want to understand it from this point of view misunderstand the point of inner work in general. Inner work has little or nothing to do with improving external circumstances in one way or another to increase one's comfort. It may have that effect (or not) but that is beside the point. The point is the quality of Being.

What is my quality of Being? How do I stand inside myself in direct relationship to the force of life? By force of life, one means, the energy that arises.

Over the years in this notebook, a number of concepts have been developed that are in a language slightly different than the conventional language of the Gurdjieff work. This is not to say that the language, as it developed over the decades, is deficient, or inaccurate. It is just to say that individuals must find their own means of expression within the context of the forces we live in and work with. Anyone can repeat the words of others. What are my own words? It's important that this question be active, because to repeat the words of others too often opens one to the real danger of becoming hypnotized and believe that one is actually understanding something. There needs to be a constant striving to discover what the words are now. They may not be the same words that I have already heard from others.

In work like this, one just has to be honest and do one's best. Some things are going to be wrong. Some things will be said badly or not properly understood. I find this to be so in my own way inside myself every day. There is a requirement to re-examine the question over and over again, in each moment. To be baffled and uncertain is a good thing, because that is almost certainly a little bit closer to the truth. When Socrates said, in his apology, that he would rather be stupid in the way that he was stupid than smart in the way that others were smart, he wasn't kidding.

Some of the contexts and expressions I've developed, and which regular readers are probably familiar with, are the organic sense of being; a sense of intimacy; the need for generosity; and now, this idea of a personal sense of gravity. I'm distinctly reminded of the Zen masters, who refer to flesh, blood, bones, and marrow- an expression close to the heart of what I am examining here. In Zen, as in Christianity, references to the body and to blood are not casual metaphors, as so many assume them to be. They refer to the organism and its state, its physical expression of force in an inward sense.

All of these concepts and questions are linked. The organic sense of being includes an intimacy of attention and a personal sense of gravity. These forces may not manifest together at all times, but they often follow one another, and are brothers and sisters in experience.

Together, these experiences give birth to a sense of generosity, both towards our own Being, and that of other people.

May our prayers be heard.

Starting out lost

2011-10-11T19:14:00.001-04:00

Over the last few days, I've been pondering questions of Grace and error.

My separation from myself–the lack of connection between the parts–leads me immediately into error. The Masters referred to this sometimes as grave error, because it is error that has gravity, or weight. If the soul should (as the Egyptians thought) be like as a feather at death, then every sin weighs it down. Now, we don't like to talk about sin much in the Gurdjieff work, but Mr. Gurdjieff himself certainly spoke of it, so the idea cannot be walked away from so easily.

Error is everywhere. There's more truth in a single turn of the tide than in all mankind, and yet I think I turn the tides. Yes, this is a metaphor, but in seeing the outward illustration of truth, embodied in nature, even in every insect, how can I avoid seeing how different than that truth my inner state is? If I am truly seeing–if there is any effort in me–then the denial becomes at once apparent.

It is only through denial of how I am now that I arrive in error. If I wish to be–if I intend to exercise the necessary affirmation of Self which the Lord expects me to become responsible for–I must confront this denial.

All of my manifestations, born from sleep and the lack of attention, are already in error. I read about how Jeanne de Salzmann warned Bennett that those who over-exerted themselves had obtained "bad results," but I don't see how I am already in the middle of bad results. Denial is a powerful thing. Encouraged by the immediate presence of arrogance, which underlies everything, I think that I know. And the man who thinks he knows is already lost.

Even the immediate and undeniable presence of Grace–which is a presence that cannot be denied, seeing it as it comes from a higher influence–denial itself does not die. I reach a pivotal point in understanding my position when I see that even when the Lord sends support, I myself am unable. I still construe Grace as a force that will help me do what is necessary–I don't see that Grace is a separate force, having nothing to do with my doing or my ability, which is freely granted. Grace emanates directly from the Lord; it originates in unattachment and arrives in unattachment. Unable in the least to conceive of unattachment, it is already in my nature to seize this.

So even in the arrival of presence, I immediately fall into the grave error of believing that presence is mine, despite perfect proof to the contrary.

If this does not illustrate my lack of understanding, nothing will.

In my own pondering, I continue to deepen my question about the underlying feature of fear in me, a feature which seems to found the cornerstone of all my lack of Being. There is no trust in me. I think I trust, but everything I trust in is in the first place insufficient, and in the second place mistaken. Repeatedly, throughout the ages, all the Masters have insisted that trust must be placed in a new location, that a new kind of trust can arrive. These are excellent words, and men have listened to them for thousands of years, yet we all listen to them with parts that do not and cannot trust.

The irony is apparent.

I think we are all born with an instinct that believes we can carve a path to truth ourselves, and a machete to go with it. Faced with what looks like a thick underbrush of life, we stumble forward hacking a crude path all around us, looking for truth, not seeing that we already inhabit it in every moment. If I move from one blindness to the next, thinking I see, all I have to live within is my denial.

I think I am somewhere. Life has this way of insisting that there is a location of being already, that this, that, and the other thing is happening–my children, wife, job, intellectual and artistic achievements and so on–and that all of these things provide a location that I am in. It is a temporal location triangulated from the events, the circumstances, and the materials around me. Any inkling of a different kind of location–of a location comprehensive enough to contain an intuition of the Dharma, of truth–is absent. Drawing on my belief that all the treasure is on earth, I've always located myself on earth, relative to the treasure. My belief in this location is quite firm, despite all my protestations to the contrary.

It is much more helpful if I understand, every morning when I get up, that I am already lost. We have many parables in the Bible about lost sheep, and they seem to be children's tales, sweetened up with cloying pictures of Jesus dressed as a shepherd. But there is more direct truth in them, I think, than we understand. By more actively see what this idea of being lost means, it might provide a clearer point of understanding.

I have a search–everyone talks about spiritual work this way, about their search.

How often do I see that I am not already here, in a place that is known, a location that is desirable, just trying to acquire more, and see that I am actually starting out lost, and have nothing?

Those familiar with Gurdjieff's music may recall moments during performances where this understanding can be palpably sensed.

May our prayers be heard.

occupy lee

2011-10-08T18:51:00.002-04:00

I was exchanging e-mail with Tracy, one of my fellow Parabola editors, earlier today on the subject of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. I pointed out to her that, although I'm certainly sympathetic in many ways towards their movement (as vaguely defined as it is), the root causes of our current plight are extremely complex and confusing.

It's true that outward action is needed. Nonetheless, if my outward action does not spring from a prior inner action, an action that moves me in the direction of occupying the ground of my own Being, that action cannot be sincere. It has perhaps a sound emotive impulse, but it lacks intelligence and force, because it comes from what Gurdjieff would have called a formatory place–a churning sea of impressions based on opinions and superficiality. Granted, almost everything that happens in this world arises from just such a place–yet more is definitely possible in me, and if I continue to indulge myself in the reactions that usually rule my daily life, I am little more than a hamster running on a wheel in its cage.

This dilemma cannot be used as an excuse for inaction, but if action does not begin with the question "Love?"–as I pointed out in a post about a week ago–it cannot be real action.

And this word, "Love"–what does that mean? Some readers have cheerfully complained to me that I don't know what I'm talking about when I use the word. Well, we are not going to ban this word Love! Not in this blog, anyway. And since I must use it, I use it boldly.

Love is a universe unto itself. Let us say, to limit it for the time being to a tangible set of possibilities for examination (in reality, its meanings are limitless) that it refers to a universe of Attention, Intimacy, Compassion, Questioning, and Prayer.

We live in a world of corporations and acronyms. Things get reduced to soundbites, slogans are invented in order to encapsulate and convey ideas and principles. Should spiritual works succumb to the same apparently facile and simplistic techniques?

Maybe they aren't all bad. Maybe we should keep the acronym AICQP in mind.

Attention, Intimacy, Compassion, Questioning, Prayer. These are the elements I need to contain within my effort to remember myself, to occupy Lee. and if I don't occupy Lee, the "corporate forces"–the machine which runs my reactions and my generally opinionated attitude towards life–will continue to have ascendancy over me. It is a direct reflection of exactly what's happening in the world out there: of course it is, because what is happening in the world "out there" is in fact what is happening in the world in here. In other words, the problem isn't some external agent called "Wall Street"–the problem is an internal agent whose name is legion, that is, it is the name of every human being, because we are all "doing this" to each other together.

Why do I cite these 5 forces- Attention, Intimacy, Compassion, Questioning, Prayer–as essential? It sounds dangerously like I am trying to suggest that we should actually try something tangibly practical in the Gurdjieff Work, doesn't it?–Well, maybe we need to. This is supposed to be a work in life, not one that gives us permission to stand aloof from it, while we watch Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and everyone else out there make efforts that are somehow beneath us.

Let's take a look at it.

In action, I need to have the Attention of my intelligence–an Intimacy with my physical body–the Compassion of my heart–the affirming Question of "I am" (for us, "am I?")–and the surrendering Prayer of "Lord have Mercy"–all active within me, simultaneously and in the moment. An effort at three centered action must come first: not a strained effort, but a natural effort. Then, both the affirmation and the surrender of the self, which are not separate actions. They are two "higher" actions-shocks- that come together within each moment.

I know all of this sounds complicated and technical, but in the end, this so to speak "5 centered action" aspires towards action centered not in the gravity of my own confused and weak will, but in the Will of a higher principle. We can't do that- but we can aspire towards it.

Reading once again from a book I have quoted extensively in recent days– Early Fathers from the Philokalia, as translated by Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber & Faber 1954- we find St. Mark the Ascetic saying the following:

"So let us begin the work of prayer and, gradually making progress, we shall find that not only hope in God but also firm faith and unfeigned love, absence of rancor, love for one's brethren, self-mastery, patience, the innermost knowledge, deliverance from temptations, gifts of grace, heartfelt profession of faith and fervor and tears are given to the faithful through prayer. And not only these gifts alone, but also endurance of afflictions, a pure love of one's neighbor, knowledge of spiritual law, acquisition of God's righteousness, infusion of the Holy Spirit, the gift of spiritual treasures and all that God has promised to give the faithful here and in the future life– (all this they receive through prayer.) In short, it is impossible to reestablish the image of God in oneself other than by the divine grace and faith, granted to a man who with great humility remains with his mind in undistracted prayer." (page 74-75.)

To pray is to live.

Perhaps the greatest mistake humanity makes from moment to moment is believing, fervently and without doubt, that the inequalities, cruelties, and injustices that arise are caused by external agents. Collectively, we are the external agents, and without right inner action, no right outer action can ever be possible.

Does this set an impossibly high standard? How high the standard is isn't the point. It establishes the only standard. There is no alternative to right inner action. Action that begins anywhere else has already deviated from what is actually necessary.

Only the effort to occupy my own ground of Being and take it back from the Corporation in an inward sense can end up having any right effect on the outer world.

May our prayers be heard.

Opinions and conditions

2011-10-07T17:43:00.002-04:00

There's a difference between conditions and opinions about conditions.

For the greater part, I mistake opinions about conditions for actual conditions. This is a powerful habit; in addition, I blithely assume that one ought to have opinions about conditions. The greater part of intercourse between us–conversation, in all of its varieties–consists of opinions about conditions. This leads to an enormous amount of talking, but much of the talking is pointless.

Conditions are conditions. There is an objectivity within conditions that does not exist and can never exist in opinions. If I learn to be more still in myself, and I discover the consistent arising of opinions within me from this place of stillness, I begin to see that conditions are conditions and opinions are opinions. The distinction between the two will lead one who perceives it to have less interest in opinions. There isn't anything real about them; I race about having them ad infinitum, but in the end, they're empty. Subjectivity loses its glamour as one sees it more clearly.

What is it to perceive conditions?

There ought not to be a division between conditions and Being. To Be is to Be within conditions; they are simply facts. Some of us may recall the way that Mr. Gurdjieff assured his protégé Ouspensky that "there will be facts," as reported in In Search of the Miraculous.

Perhaps I take that to mean that somehow there is some higher truth that will magically appear at some point, some drawing back of the curtain to reveal reality. And perhaps, if I do take it that way, I am expecting a lot.

Trees are just trees, and rivers are just rivers. Facts are nothing more than what appears following the collapse of opinions, which strips reality down to just what is. What is, doesn't have any opinions, in the same way that starlings and frogs don't know there is a stock market. Things that are invented in my mind are in and of my mind; the objectivity that lies outside this realm of mine escapes me, maybe because I don't want to see it. So the idea that "there will be facts" may indicate simply that an objective state can arrive.

As I write this, I am looking out of a hotel room window on the 48th floor of a skyscraper in the middle of downtown Shanghai. The city is laid out below me. I have all kinds of opinions about cities; I have opinions about this one, about the things that are in it, the nature of the air pollution that I see over it right this moment, the architecture of the buildings, and so on.

Nonetheless, there are also facts. Here I am. There is this. We are together; I am in front of it, as much as it is in front of me. There is not as much separation as I would like to believe.

My instinct to separate arises from my paranoia; I feel that I need to be apart. It gives me an excuse to feel superior, different, above the rest. In other words, my opinions are an action designed specifically to bolster my ego. It's a subtle action, because denial is always at work here: my opinions present themselves as objective. It's built into the machine.

A massive amount of this goes on all day long. It's possible for a separation to take place between this activity and something that is more sensitive and more objective, and that is the only separation that is truly needed. The manufactured separation I engage in is a different matter entirely.

I often refer, in my writings, to the organic state of being. This is not a hypothesis or a direction; it is a statement that resides within the flesh, blood, bones, and marrow of Being. The statement is not complicated. Things are quite a bit simpler than my opinions make them.

Reading in the Philokalia the other day, I can across this passage from St. Antony the Great:

"All rational beings, whether they be men or women, have an organ of love, by which they can embrace both the divine and the human. Men of God love what is of God; men of the flesh love what is of the flesh. Men who love what is of God, purify their hearts from all impurities and the affairs of this transient world, hate the world and their own souls, and, bearing their cross, follow the Lord, doing His will in all things. Therefore, God comes to dwell in them and gives them joy in sweetness, which feeds their souls, nourishes them and makes them grow. Just as trees cannot grow, if they have no natural water, so too with the soul, unless it receives heavenly sweetness. Only those souls grow, which have received the Spirit and are watered by heavenly sweetness." (trans. Kadloubovsky & Palmer, Faber & Faber 1954, p. 47-48)

To modern ears, it's nearly certain that the phrase indicating men ought to "hate the world and their own souls" sounds overly harsh. However, it echoes a principal expounded by Mr. Gurdjieff: "like what it does not like." To "hate the world" is to abandon opinions. To "hate our own souls" is to abandon the ego ("my own soul" is not the essential soul God has given me–it is what I think I own, but do not.) The idea presented here is the idea of non attachment, non-identification. And to gain distance from opinion has little or nothing to do from dismissing opinion mentally, or having negative opinions about opinion itself.

To love what is of God is to gain such distance. In order to find a new path towards the heart of this question, I need to begin to recognize conditions as conditions. Already, here, a sweetness can arise–but not of me. Only through me.

This sweetness which Antony speaks of is not ephemeral or metaphorical. There is a true sweetness that can visit us, nourish us. It is indeed a sweetness born in Heaven.

There is a Light greater than the word light, and a Glory greater than the word glory.

May our prayers be heard.

On the question of higher hydrogens

2011-10-06T12:00:00.001-04:00

Readers who recall Gurdjieff's remarks to Ouspensky as recounted in In Search of the Miraculous will recall that he said the following:

“This means that to proceed with any further study we must find the exact purpose of each 'hydrogen,' that is to say, each 'hydrogen' must be defined chemically, psychologically, physiologically, and anatomically, in other words, it's functions, its place in the human organism, and, if possible the peculiar sensations connected with it must be defined."

--In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky, Paul H. Crompton Ltd. 2004, P. 191-192

To the best of my knowledge, no one out there has ever actually engaged in this activity: I've never seen much of anything written about it, and of the matter is rarely discussed in today's world, highly technical approaches to Gurdjieff's work having largely fallen out of favor. Nonetheless, it presents some interesting possibilities for discourse.

Most of the unusual language and specific concepts that Gurdjieff brought to his work represent higher experiences that are only produced by the presence of "hydrogens" which are not usually present in man. Some of the language that comes to mind are the following concepts:

conscious labor

intentional suffering

remorse of conscience

feeling

organic shame

the sorrow of His Endlessness

and so on. Each one of these experiences is an experience that, while it is expressed in our ordinary language, actually represents something quite different than ordinary experience, which can only be understood when it actually takes place in the organism, producing an organic result that is quite clearly of a different order than the usual organic results we use to navigate our way through life.

Each one of these particular experiences is associated with the action of a particular higher hydrogen.

When we consider the food of impressions–which is the only food that can make the production of these higher hydrogens possible–we barely stop to think about how we are actually taking impressions in. It is, in larger part, a theoretical prospect. The threads that connect the inner work all exist in us, so to speak, separately, as though they didn't need to be interwoven. That part that needs to have an attention–even a love for–how things are being taken in now is not only weak, it's dysfunctional.

The action of each of the special words that Gurdjieff chose in order to describe what are essentially religious experiences of a higher order is contingent on the way we feed ourselves, and nothing at all is possible if we don't handle that well. So this action of attending to the immediate prospect of life with an organic Love is an absolutely essential action, and the action of every other particular phrase or condition that relates to a higher principle working in the organism is dependent on how we conduct that.

One of the difficulties in discussing things like conscious labor, intentional suffering, and so one is that by using familiar words, immediately, and without any intention at all on my part, I assume I am able to “do” these things. Even if I intellectually protest that I don't think I can do such things, the whole organism is hardly signed on to that prospect. There is always a secret corner, hidden from the rest of me (but most especially everyone else!) in which I most certainly believe I can do such things. It doesn't matter how much I spout the party line at meetings or elsewhere: I'm lying. I think I can do things. I think I know what these words mean.

It is only when the light switch gets turned on, as the result of days or weeks or months of work, or of a particular moment of Grace, that an actual condition of conscious labor or remorse of conscience arises; then it becomes quite apparent that this is the action of a higher substance, and that "I" am not in charge of it.

We could generalize and say that Mr. Gurdjieff's remarks to Ouspensky on this matter, while they appear to be incredibly specific, are actually there just to indicate to us that we ought to study this question quite precisely, in order to understand that the process is physical and chemical, that it is not related to what we ordinarily understand, and that it is not under our control.

Learning to sense each of these particular sensations and emotional attitudes that arise from higher hydrogens may furthermore help us to remember them, and bring ourselves closer to an intimacy with ourselves that helps generate further possibilities.

All of these higher ' hydrogens' are without any doubt related to, if not identical with, hormones that medical science has identified and studied from a pharmacological point of view in the years since Gurdjieff first brought his work to the Western world. Substances that come to mind which are almost certainly in this category include serotonin, dopamine, and so on. Nicotine in particular is a specific analog to a higher hydrogen, underscoring the fact that many drugs people take emulate the action of these natural substances.

The difficulty, of course, is that taking drugs merely produces a result, not a state that lasts. It furthermore cripples the action of a person's internal chemistry by weakening it instead of helping it work to grow stronger and make what is needed.

If there is any transformation whatsoever available to human beings in the context of this work, it lies in this territory. A man or woman needs to understand how to taking impressions more sensitively, with all of his or her parts; to take them in with Love. He or she needs to understand that this task is actually far more important than making money or acquiring things, than looking good or having pleasurable experiences; and a loving attention needs to be paid to the parts that are doing this kind of work as it is under way.

May our prayers be heard.