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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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- Thursday, October 11, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007The Lamb of God In Christianity, we have the saying, "the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world."
Of course this phrase refers to Christ. It also seems to me to imply a certain emotional quality that we can acquire in an inner sense. This quality offers us a purity of motive and a lack of presumption in the way in which we meet life. But it is a tangible physical quality, not just an attitude or a set of ideas. It is a softening of the experience of the entire inner and outer state. I am bringing this question of psychology up again because I am almost finished reading Trungpa's "cutting through spiritual materialism." I think the book is a terrific piece of work, but once again, like many other teachings we can read about, in the end it comes across as a set of ideas, not physical practices. And I am quite certain that we can cram ourselves utterly full of ideas without really much of anything changing, except our ideas about things. Where is the physical practice? The actual inner state needs to change, and this can only be accomplished through effort with attention within life. Just doing it in meditation will never be enough. We have to be willing to meet ordinary life with a tangible quality of being that is softer and more receptive, a quality that does not reject our life so readily. Above all it is the blood of the lamb that takes away sin. One hears talk of being washed in the blood of the Lamb; a powerful image, difficult to understand. My own take on it today is as follows: What cleanses us of our identification, our attachment, is to be immersed and bathed in the most essential part of our lives, in this sacred, coursing, energetic power of our very identity itself. We must become alive within the blood. This brings me back to the idea of intentional suffering, which I have pondered for many years. This idea of intentional suffering was the second of the two intentional efforts of Being that Gurdjieff said we need to make in order to prepare ourselves for what he termed the second conscious shock. I don't think that Gurdjieff's literature offers any specific instruction on exactly what this means, aside from the idea that it consists of not expressing negative emotion. Personally I think there are practices much deeper than that implied here, ones that cannot be touched with the tongue so easily--and that is exactly what we need to do, acquire their taste. In considering the idea from the point of view of today's physical and emotional state -- intellectually, I seem to be more passive today--I find intentional suffering consists of allowing life's energy to enter me. This is a tricky thing; what does that mean, to let life's energy enter me? As I go through my day, I see that there is constant resistance to accepting the condition of the body, the condition of the emotional reaction. The resistance often consists of a lack of will to bring myself to where I am. Jeanne DeSalzmann frequently spoke of this particular question; it is peppered throughout the personal documents she left, as well as the records of her talks. As she put it, we don't want to be here. We don't want to allow life to enter us. It is actually rather difficult work, and we are essentially lazy in this regard. It's much easier to fall back on our habits and coast. To be bathed in the blood of the Lamb, to be fully immersed within life, invested within the self within life, would be a big thing. We need help with that. The connection that Gurdjieff proposed we establish with our emotional being was a step in the direction of awakening ourselves to our Master's voice, so that we can hear His instruction and began to live again in a direction that is born in gratitude and thirsts for Grace. The next post , Insh’Allah, will be another in my series of postings from the business class lounge at the airport in Seoul. Cannot absolutely guarantee it, but I will do my best. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Thursday, October 11, 2007Daily bread, and the four personalities of man Here I am again, in the business class lounge of Korean Airlines international Airport in Seoul. Posting a blog entry from this location has become almost a tradition; a peculiar one, to be sure, but we have to take traditions as they come.
Due to the miraculous capabilities of VOIP, I just spent 20 minutes talking to my wife, mostly about questions raised by the passage from the last chapter in "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" which I cited in my posting two days ago. When we speak of what is referred to as "daily bread" in the Lord's prayer, we might consider it from four separate points of view, every one of which corresponds to a particular personality of man. A man takes in many kinds of food every day. He ought to become more aware of each kind of food, and have a respect for it that leads him to seek it in an appropriate manner and at an appropriate time. The first type of food is the food that feeds the organism (the "third personality" mentioned in the lecture.) This is the food that we chew and eat, the chemical substances that are transubstantiated within us to construct this organism we inhabit. Let's pause for a minute right now to sense ourself and consider that this entire thing we call a body arises as if from nothingness from the countless trillions of atomic and molecular elements that we ingest over the course of a lifetime. I did this the other night, lying on my bed, and was for a moment completely astonished. This ongoing creation of the body is an act of magic, born of energies we do not understand and mediated by forces that are cosmological in nature. Our presumption that our body (or anything else, for that matter) "belongs" to us seems absurd in the face of this mystery, doesn't it? The second kind of food which we discussed two days ago is the food contained within air, which contains much subtler substances than we generally sense or get involved with. The third kind of food is the overall food of impressions, the totality of sensory impressions that are received from all of the organic tools designed to receive them. These are the only three specific foods that Gurdjieff mentions. I think, however, that we might conceive of the totality of the experience of life as a fourth food. Admittedly, this is hardly doctrinaire, and may be stretching it. Nonetheless, when we consider the blending of the three foods within us, they are supposed to form a fourth totality, the fourth personality, the real "I" or real mind of man. The formation of that "I" or Being is supposed, ultimately, to feed our Work, which in its overall aim and effect needs to be greater than just the act of Being itself. It's quite important for us to try and give ourselves a little special food in every area in each day. For example, we might want to eat something that we take particular pleasure in -- just a little bit of it -- and pay a precise attention to that pleasure with a real sensation of gratitude. My original teacher and group leader gave me that task when we were first working together, at the time when I was first getting sober. It is only now, 25 years later, that I appreciate how subtle this very simple task is. The second thing we can do is pay specific attention to the breath in the manner that was discussed two days ago. This practice can be extended to a much broader set of exercises which I have not published. Realistically speaking, most of it can only be offered in person. The third thing we can do is try to discover the fundamental organic reservoir of gratitude within us, and receive all the other impressions of our life from the point of view of acceptance and openness, invested as deeply as possible within the practice of what Gurdjieff called "outer considering," which in other practices is called compassion. And the fourth task that we can give ourselves in feeding ourselves is to meet these three foods within our life, pondering the meaning of their blending, and seeking to understand what the wholeness of life is as all three of these foods support us in our effort. So when we say, in the Lord's prayer, "give us this day our daily bread," we are actually asking for support in the undertaking of the task that has the deepest roots, the strongest trunk, the broadest canopy within life. It is no one small thing, even though it is always composed of the small things. In fact, it is everything. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Download 1.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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