Egyptian Yoga

Let's have a little fun!

"Yoga" (esoteric) schools in India were long established by the time of the Egyptian dynasties, and the Egyptians—who would have traded with India—were well-schooled in Yogic practices, of which they had their own recognizable versions.

One particular location well worth visiting in the Louvre is the crypt of Osiris, where you will see, among many other important cult objects, the sarcophagus of Imenemit (1069-664 BC), which contains on its back a map of the spinal column that likely conveys an Egyptian understanding of the yogic chakra system.

The image represents the spinal column, and is clearly divided into the traditional three vertical yogic channels of Ida, Pingala, and the central Sushumna. Circulation of inner yogic energy is shown through the downward-pointing fleur-de-lis motif, showing the descent of higher energy into the recipient:

This motif turns around and points upward in the Ida and Pingala  channels, showing the circulation of the energy back up towards the head:

Here’s the entire map of the energetic circulatory system:

The introduction of threefold energies shows a concept related to the holy trinity which well predates Christianity. The threefold energies are related to the energies in the spine, which also reflect a threefold nature:

The root chakra literally grows up from the earth in the form of two sets of plants. There’s a symbolic relationship between the plant’s leaves on the left (green) and right (red and dark blue) and the waves of energy in the central channel (spine.) The energy moves down through the spine in highly structured, organizied waves, roots itself (the green base) and then ascends separated into two distinct channels (left, green, right, red and blue.) The left one is “female,” green and watery (life giving) the right side “male,” dry and powerful, yielding seed (the pods at the tips of the inflorescences.) This is the inseminating force; yet note that the force at the very root is female (green.) We begin to see intimations of the color symbolism here that may be of further use in interpreting the symbolism. 

Green represents a feminine, or receiving, quality or attitude. It is passive and life-giving; wherever we see it, it represents the fecund influence of the divine. Of course that lies at the root of existence, at the very base of the column.

Blue represents the active or masculine force. 

Red represents prana, the divine energy itself.

The sex chakra has an animal nature, and is dramatically divided into a male and female force with distinctive differences by uniquely placing the body of the wolf crosswise behind the Sushumna channel. 

The solar plexus gives us two figures of nearly identical aspect. Each engages in a peculiar holding of the shoulder with one hand, while touching the energy flow of the spinal column with the other. The right hand and left hand are employed, emphasizing the left/right nature of energy flow in the Ida and Pingala channels. The raised hands indicate a gathering of energy from above; and the hands on the shoulders represent the incorporation of that spiritual energy into one’s own Being. The collective impression underscore’s the traditional role of the solar plexus as a nexus for the acquisition of spiritual power through the gathering of divine inner energies. The looped sashes indicate a concentration of that energy which is then brought down towards the ground—the intermediary action of the yogi in grounding their spiritual flow. The characters (here not animal or divine, but emphatically human—the only such characters in the diagram) are green: they’re receivers and collectors of the divine influence. Their elongated bodies symbolize the long distance they must reach above them in their effort to develop spiritual Being.

The next image represents the heart chakra, rendered here as a complex stack of compartments. It’s actually a recapitulation of the seven lower chakras, a sub-universe in miniature, with the entire spinal column below it serving as the root chakra.

The figures on the right and left are the secret, or brother and sister, chakras that lie on either side of the heart. Thoth is wisdom; Horus is the eye of the sun. Here their lower hands are at the level of the solar plexus, indicating mastery of that energy (power), and their other arms reach towards the third eye (wisdom.) The towels held at the level of the solar plexus on either side are the selfsame sashes seen at the level of the solar plexus; they are white, which represents purification. The heart is the domain of influences of the gods; Thoth and Horus preside. It’s a picture symbolic of aspirations.

Horus’ eye is red: he sees with divine energy. His body is green and thus, here, indicates the receptive principle. Thoth’s headdress is red: he is male, blue, and anointed with and protected by the signifying red of divine energy. Each of the two wears a white kilt, symbolizing purity of intent. They both have the heads of birds, signifying their role as mediators of higher energies.

The throat chakra is represented by two horses. The peculiar coiled tail assigns the symbol elemental qualities, that of breath and wind; the equipage on the face represents the powerful force of the horse, brought under control.

The Image of Horus appears at the top, representing the third eye, gateway to the seventh chakra. He represents a guardian, and the quality of silence.

The 7^th or crown chakra is on the head of the figure, encircling it.

Because of stylistic considerations particularly the requirement of keeping the headdress free of design (i.e., completely purified) the throat and third eye chakras were placed lower down on the body than their traditional and physically correct locations.

Here’s a recap:

Pay special attention to the detail lavished on the heart, which according to egyptian understanding is actually a miniature model of the entire chakra system as a whole, containing all of its elements in a single concentrated location. The stupa-like structure is an indicator of the seven different levels of development that the heart can undergo by itself.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The First Point of Being

Cunault

October 3. 

Some notes from recent experience. 

There is a force of goodness from God that perpetually flows into everything.

 When I come into relationship with myself, the first thing I come into relationship with is sensation; and the root of sensation is in this higher energy which is a force of goodness.

I am given goodness at all times, always and everywhere, and yet I forget it. If I’m in relationship with myself and my sensation of Being, I am instantly and deeply aware of this goodness, which comes before everything and is Truth. When Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life, he was actually referring to this initial goodness of God which is where everything around us begins, and is there even before we are there with it and for it.

 I say we are there for it because the entire first point of our Being is to serve this force of goodness. There’s no point in being politically correct or fashionable by saying that the force is just there, and that there's no quality or nature to it. Its entire and essential nature is goodness, because it emanates from the essential forces of God’s love and good. 

Love begets good; and so we are begotten of love. When we speak about the first point of Being we have to understand first that we are begotten of love; and our sensation of our Being immerses us from the start in this begetting.

 It’s quite possible to walk around in life with absolutely no understanding of this. Most of us do. We are not awakened to the nature of this first point of Being; we don’t sense God’s love as it flows into us, even though our organism was designed for this purpose. This leads us to believe in ourselves first, and the instant that we begin there, everything of God’s is lost.

You might ask why things of God can be lost; and that is a deep mystical question with no easy answer. Yet the sensation of my Being can bring me to an understanding — without words — in which I see the nature of this condition, regardless of the reasons for it. It is much more to see the nature of condition than it is to have an explanation for why it is so; the why of it is already explained by its nature itself. Either I lack the nature of God and Being or I have it. There is no middle ground here. The lack produces my selfishness; the having of it erases me.

In becoming nothing, I receive everything. This is a good place to begin. If I see the goodness, and I understand organically how I forget it and fail to live in relationship with it, then my awareness points me more clearly and more consistently towards that relationship so that I go back to it. I then continually make an intelligent and conscious effort within awareness of sensation, intelligence, and feeling to turn myself towards this first point of Being.

It is possible, within this condition, to sense the goodness of all things. It’s not too much to say that this changes everything; that the whole world is sacred, if I can only see it from within in this way. That changes my attitude; almost all of my evil and destructive impulses lose their power, even though they remain the same in every other way. Without their power, they become meaningless; their existence alone is not enough to give them influence over what takes place within.

One might say that their impulse, their influence, everything that gives them power, arises from this lack of an impression of the good. This is another secret of Christ’s saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is within. The Kingdom of Heaven, like Being, begins with the sensation of the good, because it is always within us. It’s called a kingdom because it is superior to the world: it is not made of the world, but the world is made of it. And it is called heaven because it is above us, that is, it is a higher and better influence than anything which we can make ourselves.
Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Lascaux to France!

It's my 64th birthday today.

On our recent trip to France, Neal and I went to Lascaux, where we took in the impression of Lascaux IV. On the way, of course, we drove through the small town of Montignac, where Gurdjieff  stopped before his visit to the caves—a visit during which he insisted that somehow the caves were painted ”after the fall of Atlantis,” as though he had some kind of insider information about this, a well-known habit of his. The fact that Bennett was willing to argue with him about it shows that Gurdjieff’s pupils were not all fawning believers who hung on his every word. (Far from it, in fact; C. S. Nott's A Pupil's Journal recounts similar stories from the Prieure.)

By now we’ve made enough advances in the science of paleontology to know some things that could not be known in Gurdjieff’s era. For instance, the paintings can now be confidently dated to be, as Bennett pointed out, 20,000 or more years old. Gurdjieff appears to have believed that Atlantis was flooded some 10,000 or so years ago, based strictly on the one apocryphal reference that Plato makes about the city (there are no other sources that discuss it anywhere in ancient classical literature.) Aside from underscoring Gurdjieff's debt to Platonic sources – despite his disparagement of Greek thinking in general, which has to be taken not with a grain, but with an entire celler of salt –it highlights the weird obsession that spiritualists have had with the mythical city ever since it entered the radar screen of modern awareness and was hyperinflated by Edgar Cayce.

To be sure, it's certain there were impressive, even spectacular, ancient civilizations we know nothing of. The Turkish site of Gobekli Tepe does more than just hint at the existence of them; it proves they arrived full-blown on the archaeological scene with no earlier presence to prepare us for them… was there an ”Atlantean” predecessor? 

There was definitely something.

What’s even more certain is that one can predict exactly where the evidence of that something lies, as this recent English marine archaeology discovery has proven. 

Sea levels have risen approximately 100 m since the last glacial maximum. What this means is that between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, all of the major cities in the world were at the mouths of rivers (as most of them still are today) at levels about 300 feet in elevation below present day locations. Despite the impressive ruins of, for example, ancient Egypt at the mouth of the Nile, these are just the locations that the cities moved to as the flooding began. The cities that preceded them lie under the many meters of alluvial deposits that invariably gather at the mouths of rivers. The inundation of “Atlantis,” in other words, was almost certainly a somewhat gradual one, although it is entirely possible that some significant portion of it took place in a very short time, as current global warming trends are beginning to suggest.

Nonetheless, we know so little (that is, absolutely nothing at all) about these civilizations and the purported city of Atlantis that for Gurdjieff to cite it as though he had some special authority on the matter is a bit specious, not only on the surface of things but also at their core.

He was, of course, a raconteur and impresario of the first order, and even here at the end of his life he clearly refused to abandon those roles, which he so dearly relished. They had served him well through the course of a lifetime; why give them up now?

His contention that the figures in the caves were emblems (i.e., heraldic devices, as opposed to symbols) of some kind or another is a different matter entirely. Anyone who visits the site – which is certainly a good enough replication of the original to give one a profound impression indeed—will at once see that the site had deep spiritual significance of one kind or another.

Whether the emblems mean what Gurdjieff said they meant is perhaps immaterial. They definitely meant something; and they were, furthermore, not individual works separated from one another, but part of an oeuvre, a spiritual language of an ancient nature that was carried forward durably through time over what looks to be a rather long period. There's a high degree of likelihood, furthermore, that the figures had some astronomical significance — evidence has been mounting that ancient cave paintings are often maps of constellations. That, combined with the fact that the works are very much on the ceilings of the caves, argues for not just a temporal, but also a spiritual, connection with the skies. And, given the action of higher energies flowing downward into mankind from solar sources and from the moon, which are the very real legacy of the ancient yogic cults, the connection with the skies is that much more evident and that much more important. Cave art was not just about bulls and cows and when they molt and mate according to the stars; that kind of knowledge was all too commonplace, with no need to paint it on cave ceilings. 

The art is, as Gurdjieff intuited, about the primeval power of man’s inner sensation of Being.

Considering the astonishing images at Lascaux, we have every reason to believe that the spiritual practices humanity engages in are as ancient as man's culture itself, and that we can indeed find important traces of all mankind's spiritual teachings in the earliest symbols he left behind. The idea that legitimate esoteric religious practices have undergone vast subjective changes over the last 5, 10, or even 15,000 years in the face of the objective truths which they investigate seems to me unlikely. A person who has been exposed to the deepest kind of religious impulses (the Divine inflow) will definitely understand this far better than those who discuss them as speculation. These sacred energies which engender and suffuse the human soul bring with them a consistent set of experiences and understandings that can be recognized in their symbolic content, no matter what age. 

There are, to be sure, subjective elements; every mystic, it seems, tends to make the mistake of interpreting these experiences a bit too narrowly through the lens of their own upbringing, society, culture, and the symbols that attend to them. Gurdjieff was no different; but the essence of his recognition was pure, even if his interpretation off-center. 

All that being said, there must have been something real to it; several days later, Neal and I found ourselves in the Louvre, where the horned-bull symbolism of Babylon, Egypt, and the classical ancient world is on display, seemingly, almost everywhere. I would, in fact, recommend that anyone putting together a trip itinerary to these locations follow up Lascaux IV with a trip to the ancient near East and Egyptian (Sully) wing in the Louvre, where you will feel the tangible remnants of these influences that have flowed down through time into us.

Then go see the rest of the museum!

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Intentional Suffering

Capital from  Eglise Notre-Dame, Cunault

The image shows asian influences. 

This isn't in the least unheard of in medieval art. The stone craftsman guilds were well educated and had long- established worldwide connections.

  Notes from Aug 17/18, part 9

Notably, Gurdjieff brought the concept of intentional suffering to spiritual work, explaining it as the original (and lost) teaching of the Buddha. Yet this idea, as well, has direct sources in the middle ages, as we discover in Hadewijch’s Letter # 2: Serve Nobly:

…if a man knew God's will—that misery is dear to him—he would gladly be, by his will, in the depths of hell; but he could never make progress or grow in a place where he could taste no pains… It is much better for you, if you wish to walk the way of Love, that you seek difficulty and that you suffer for the honor of Love, rather than wish to feel love. (P. 50)

 Readers familiar with Catherine of Siena will find references to intentional suffering in her writings, as well. 

 This idea of engaging in spiritual development through inner trial provoked by outer sufferings is not just a consistent trope of esoteric spiritualism; it's part of the classic myth of the hero, deeply embedded not just in Gurdjieff’s metaphysics but metaphysics in general, according to my examination of the enneagram interpreted through the Arabic system of the Names of God, or forces, that drive the universe. 

The manner in which Gurdjieff reinvented a new mythology for modern man is further examined in Novel, Myth, and Cosmos. The question remains as to why the man reinvented all of these rather ancient ideas in his ambitious Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. I believe the point is that he wanted us to encounter these ideas in an unrecognized form, so that they could better penetrate into our subconscious. In Gurdjieff’s assessment of man’s psychological barriers to inner development, he determined that our habit of encountering the familiar and instantly assuming we understand it was a profound obstacle to absorbing traditional teachings about inner growth.  On this note, we re-examine part of an earlier quote from the book:

“This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone… 

—Beelzebub’s Tales, First Edition, p 104.

 This one fragment of a sentence alone goes a very long way indeed towards explaining the reason we have the book in the first place.

We gain further clues to the way how our reflexive intellectual interpretations damage our ability to understand life in any direct way in Hadewijch’s  Letter Four, The Role of Reason, which could easily serve as a template for Gurdjieff’s ruminations on this subject. In particular, her comments on how human reliance on hope and charity are damaged by reason are strikingly reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s  myth about Ashiata Shiemash’s teachings, inscribed on a marble tablet that still survives:

Faith of consciousness is freedom

Faith of feeling is weakness

Faith of body is stupidity.

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response

Love of feeling evokes the opposite

Love of body depends only on type and polarity.

Hope of consciousness is strength

Hope of feeling is slavery

Hope of body is disease.

  While this does not exactly mirror Hadewijch’s comments in Letter Four, the piece – or a remnant oral tradition of it – could well have served as a template for Gurdjieff’s adages. Its emphasis on the great weakness of our material side and its fallibility has direct parallels to Hadewijch; and despite their brevity, her propositions of mankind’s naïveté in regard to these failings also bears comparison to Beelzebub’s Tales in its entirety.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Chakras and the Enneagram--now in paperback

Now available in paperback from Amazon.

This material, originally published in 2003, lays out the connections between Gurdjieff's enneagram and the yogic system of chakras. 

It is intended for reading in conjunction with the later work,  The Universal Enneagram.

Also available in paperback from Amazon.

The North Slope

 Eglise Notre-Dame, Cunault

Notes from Aug 17/18, part 8

Gathering together various threads of this discussion, we propose the following:

• Organic sensation arises from the concentration of finer substances within the human body (Gurdjieff)
• Said sensation constitutes an intelligence of its own (G.)
• This sensation, unattached to intellect, is objective (virtuous— Hadewijch)
• It has a grounding effect (H.)
• The combination of objective sensation and critical ( self-observing) intelligence opens a pathway to feeling (G.)
• Feeling is also an intelligence of its own (Organic feeling—G.)
• This feeling arises to balance the objective and subjective faculties (sensation and intelligence—G.)
• Said feeling is rooted in charity and love for the other—i.e., deeply organic (H.)

  I’ve attempted to outline the process of inner development as simply as possible here, drawing the connections between Hadewijch and Gurdjieff and attributing, quite roughly, each of the ideas to its source. It’s worth noting that the idea of charity, care and compassion towards the other, is exactly mirrored in Gurdjieff’s teaching as the practice of outer considering, which he considered essential. Given his definitions of inner and outer considering, it seems reasonably certain that these furthermore exactly mirror Swedenborg’s principles of selfishness and unselfishness. 

Gurdjieff's inner considering is above all essentially selfish. Examining this point makes the connections between Gurdjieff and Swedenborg’s cosmology clear; they emerge from the same root.

Yet this entire process, which would be easy to lay out on the enneagram as a circular process that begins in selfishness (the right side) and ends in the surrender of selfishness (the ascent on the left side) somehow encompasses, in its entirety, what Hadewijch refers to as love. She uses this word repeatedly throughout the course of all her texts; and it's distinct from what she calls “sweetness,” which is a benefit of Grace and can, according to her, be received either selfishly or unselfishly. This issue is easily discovered in any close reading of her material.

Hadewijch, like Gurdjieff, insists that great effort must be undertaken in order to avoid the selfish path:

To put it briefly, low-minded men are all those who are not enthralled by eternal Love and are not continually watchful in their hearts to content Love. (Letter 12, p. 70.) Compare "continually watchful" to Gurdjieff’s emphasis on self-observation.

In other words, God himself commands that we nevermore forget Love, either sleeping or waking, in any manner, with all that we are, with heart, with soul, with mind, with strength, and with our thoughts. (Letter 12, p. 73.)  Compare this to Gurdjieff’s adage to at all times, and in all places, remember yourself.

A friend and I frequently used to climb the Palisades in Tallman State Park at the entrance just off Ferdon Ave. in Piermont. It’s a short climb – probably no more than 300 feet up — on a very rough trail. We used to call it the North Face, because this section of the Palisades in the Sparkill Gap faces north. It is, of course, a reference to the traditional path of Everest – an ascent to the top of the world. In like kind, the left-hand side of the enneagram represents the North Face of spiritual work: a climb from the base camp of Being towards God. Rene Daumal equally likened such inner work to mountain climbing in his classic work, Mount Analogue.

Hadewijch offers equally intense descriptions  of the rigorous nature of this effort:

Oh! wisdom leads very deep into God! So there is no security of life here except in the deep wisdom that seeks to touch him. Alas! He is always untouched, and so deep to touch that he must be moved with compassion because so few men seek or long, with eagerness or by the force of ardent works, to touch him even slightly in his mystery: who he is, and how he works with love. (Letter 6, To Love Christ, p. 52.)

  Note her emphasis on the idea of no security in life – a theme to which she often returns, in which the idea of repose and comfort and a wish for ease of living yields obvious comparisons to Gurdjieff’s “Evil inner God of self-calming:”

“This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone… they themselves were personally to blame for it, and just on account of the abnormal conditions of external ordinary being-existence which they themselves have gradually established and which have gradually formed in their common presence just what has now become their inner ‘Evil-God’, called ‘Self-Calming’. 

—Beelzebub’s Tales, First Edition, pgs104-105. Also see pages 610, 624-25, 783. 

We must be continually aware that noble service and suffering in exile are proper to man's condition; such was the share of Jesus Christ when he lived on earth as Man. We do not find it written anywhere that Christ ever, in his entire life, had recourse to his Father or his omnipotent Nature to obtain joy and repose. He never gave himself any satisfaction, but continually undertook new labors from the beginning of his life to the end. He said this himself to a certain person who is still living, whom he also charged to live according to his example, and to whom he himself said that this was the true justice of Love: where Love is, there are always great labors and burdensome pains. (ibid, p. 58.)

  Although they lived at about the same time and attained spiritual maturity in the first half of the 13^th century, it’s impossible to imagine Hadewijch having had any contact with the supreme Sufi master Ibn Arabi. Yet look at how similar what they say is:

“Know that since God created human beings and brought them out of nothingness into existence, they have not stopped being travelers. They have no resting place… Every rational person must know that the journey is based upon toil and the hardships of life, on afflictions and tests and the acceptance of dangers and very great terrors. 

“It is not possible for the traveler to find in this journey unimpaired comfort, security, and bliss. For waters are variously flavored and weather changes, and the character of the people in every place where one stops differs from the character at the next. The traveler needs to learn what is useful from each situation. He is the companion of each one for a night or an hour, and then departs. How could ease reasonably expected by someone in this condition?

“We have not mentioned this to answer the people fond of comfort in this world, who strive for it and are devoted to the collection of worldly rubble. We do not occupy ourselves with or turn our attention to those engaged in this petty and contemptible activity… Masters… are scornful of this ambition because it is a waste of time and a loss of true rank and dissociates the realm with that which is unsuitable to it.

… So it would be better for you if, at the time of your contemplation, you were engaged in labor outwardly, and at the same time in the reception of knowledge from God inwardly. You would then increase virtue and beauty in your spiritual nature, which seeks its Lord through knowledge received from him through works and piety, and also in your personal nature, which seeks its paradise. .. So it is until the last breath, when you are separated from the world of obligation and the round of ascending paths and progressive development. And only then will you harvest the fruit which you have planted.

—Ibn ‘Arabi, Journey to the Lord of Power, Inner Traditions International, 1981, p. 27-29

Both of these 13^th-century spiritual authorities are highly significant predecessors in the line of spiritual teaching that Gurdjieff brought; and both of them indicate how much great effort needs to be made in the direction of surrender of selfishness. Indeed, if we substitute the word “selfishness” for “ego,” it immediately gives us a much clearer picture of what the essential problem ego in all its varieties consists of.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.