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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
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- Sunday, October 28, 2007
- Angkor
Wednesday, October 24, 2007The fifth division Hallelujah!
The business portion of my trip to Asia is now officially over, excepting one final dinner appointment. From here it is on to Bangkok, and from there, where --Insh’Allah--my lovely wife will meet me, we fly to Cambodia, where we will be seeing Angkor Wat. Stay tuned for what should be some extremely cool photos. Finally, today, we get back to the Society of Akhldanns. We are going to briefly examine the fifth division, which corresponds to the number seven in the multiplications on the enneagram, or, the throat chakra. This one, my friends, is one of the easier ones. Gurdjieff's alter ego Beelzebub tells us: "The members of the fifth group were called 'Akhldann-harnosovors,' which meant that they were occupied with the study of the branch of knowledge that combined the two contemporary terrestrial sciences called by your favorites 'chemistry' and 'physics.' " Let's begin by understanding that when we hear about this location, we cannot take the term "throat" too literally. The throat encompasses a complex area including the medulla oblongata, and does not actually have so much to do with the esophagus. It seems rather likely, here, that Gurdjieff is pointing us in the direction of studying the exchange of substances. It's not insignificant that in the yoga schools (see Paramahansa Yogananda's work) the medulla oblongata is considered to be the chief accumulator for astral energies. More importantly, perhaps, we know that Gurdjieff said many specific things about the ingestion of air, which in its most immediate physical sense begins in the center of the head in this location. So the location is what we might call a "metaphysically loaded" one. What do you think? Might we consider studying our experience of air as it enters our nostrils (Dogen mentions nostrils a lot, see yesterday's post) in a more than theoretical manner? Being present to the arrival of air at the back of the nostrils is the beginning of the study of inner chemistry -- or at least, one of the potential beginnings. The powerful and intimate neurological connections between the sinuses and the membranes lining the nose--our sense of smell-- with the limbic system are a medically verified fact. The bottom line is that the entire system of the emotional center is stimulated by the arrival of air if it is received with a conscious intention. This is why it is possible for scents to trigger huge floods of emotion and long forgotten memories. When Rumi speaks of the smell of musk, and Dogen speaks of the scent of plum blossoms, they point us in the direction of an incredibly delicate sensibility, a direction which leads us towards the taste of our lives, ...the very fragrance of our being itself. We can undertake a great deal of personal work in terms of placing the attention at the back of the nostrils as we breathe in. The Zen exercise "piercing the nostrils" is all about this kind of work. We need to understand how to penetrate the experience of the arrival of air, as it carries higher substances into us. In penetrating the experience with the attention, we "pierce" the nostrils: they become permeable to something new and quite different. Here we find a path leading directly to the practical study of personal inner chemistry, a path which does not lie in the realm of Gurdjieff's complex theories, but rather in the experience itself. A place where we might, if we are lucky, catch an echo of the moaning of dragons. I am going to refrain from describing any of the exercises one might undertake here in any specific detail. The reader needs to examine this question quite directly in their own meditation and in their daily, ordinary practice. The potential for discovery lies within the discoverer, not within the technique or the instruction. Only an effort at consciousness itself can touch something conscious. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Sunday, October 28, 2007what can help?
We are playing a little catch-up here. Neal arrived in Bangkok Thursday night (well, actually, it was Friday morning very early) and we spent the last two days touring around Bangkok. Today we got to Cambodia, and went out on one of the many lakes in the immediate vicinity. This evening over dinner, we began to talk about what it is we think can help people in their work.
What is it that can help us? What is it that can help other people? A number of things got discussed. One thing that I certainly think can help each individual in their own work is to discover their own authority. Having an authority in ordinary life is different than discovering an inner authority. The inner authority grows out of a new kind of connection between the centers. It leads us in the direction of what would be real self-confidence, that is, something that springs from the organism and not from the psychology of our life. Another thing we talked about was the idea about making the work organic. In taking it into the organism and truly seeing that the centers are not connected, truly seeing the parts and sensing what a real connection might mean. A third thing that was discussed was the issue of keeping it personal. The sharing of our work in the most real and open-hearted manner possible between people is essential to our growth and the growth of those around us. These seem to be pretty simple things. They certainly can't be compared to the massive scale of Buddhism we have experienced over the past few days, and which is about to become ever more massive as we tour through Angkor. I think perhaps this is part of the difficulty. Religious ideas, work ideas, ideas in general become this gargantuan edifice, overwhelming in scale, that looms over everything that we think we are and everything we think we are doing. The ideas themselves eventually cause us to forget that the work itself is not just about the ideas. The work is about something much more direct. The ideas are not enough anymore a certain point. A good friend of mine from Arkansas sent me a quote from Madame de Salzmann today which I received courtesy of that miraculous little device, my Blackberry. The quote was taken from Ravi Ravindra's "Heart Without Measure"-- a book I heartily recommend for those of you who have not read it yet -- and it was to the same effect. Eventually the ideas are not enough. We have to truly see that we are not connected inside. Of course, that is just the beginning. Ultimately, we must go much deeper. But that is where we start. By the way--- given our trip to Angkor, it’s quite possible I will wait to wrap up the last two divisions of the Society of Akhldanns until next week, and instead report on impressions from here in Cambodia. We’ll see… May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Angkor
Sorry… due to internet issues at our last hotel, I have not been posting as frequently as usual. There's going to be some catch-up. For the past four days we’ve been immersed in the magnificent but fragmentary remnants of an ancient culture. What is left, mostly, is the stone temples. And what is left of them reveals a record of many things. First of all, a rich and complex Hindu mythology, often containing complex symbolic representations of work with higher energy in the body. We may discuss more of that in future blogs. The symbolism of nagas, the churning of the waters to obtain the elixir of immortality, the headdresses on the angels—many of them point to hidden understandings, which relate directly to the opening of the inner flowers. Second of all, an enormously powerful tradition of Buddhism, which supplanted Hinduism during successive regimes, only to be overthrown again and yet again. This turnover in religions wasn’t peaceful—and it left Buddhist iconography repeatedly subject to vandalism, so that what we see here is countless niches where there should have been Buddhas—but there aren’t. There are a lot of blank spaces where there ought to be Buddhas. …I suppose this is oddly appropriate, in a way. And third, a record of unparalleled criminal violence, celebrated in one bas relief after another—often in the service of religion which preaches non-violence—well, at least the Buddhists certainly do. The Angkor region temples are for the most part on a massive, near-unimaginable scale. At the height of the middle ages in Europe, this culture was vaster and more powerful than anything the egocentric European regimes could have dreamed of. All of it, (much like regimes in Europe at the time) saw itself primarily in the service of religion. There was little or no separation between the powers of Church and state, and everything that was done was (supposedly) done to the greater glory of God. This greater glory invariably involved a lot of killing people to make sure they worshipped God in just the right way. …It always does, doesn’t it? Apparently—as today—no one seemed to see the contradiction. It was what was perceived that dominated the cultural exchange. Not what is inherent. As it happens, I wrote notes to myself about this particular distinction over a week ago, planning to write about it, and it is just now that it finally crops up. Yesterday, our guide, Han, mentioned the five precepts of Buddhism, which include most of the usual proscriptions: one should not lie, kill, steal, and so on. While we were paddling around in the hotel pool at lunchtime between ruins, I mentioned to Neal that the difficulty with all of these rules that religions make up is that they are resident in the mind. They become lists that people memorize, that is, theories that they very very very earnestly subscribe to. Their practice—the way they actually live--comes from what is perceived, that is, what the society at large around the individual feeds them. Practice, if it is real, needs to be in inherent, not perceived. That is to say, the motivation, the impulse, that leads a person to not lie, kill, cheat, steal, or so on has to spring directly from the heart of the individual. It has to spring directly from their organic experience of their life and how they are living within it. Not from a perceived set of rules that is implanted in them from outside. I have a hard time keeping all these lists of rules straight. They are a waste of time. Our practice of compassion and right life needs to spring directly from the immediate sense of our being, not from lists we memorize. If we act from within the moment, and we are honest and compassionate about that in an organic sense -- that is to say, from a connection between the parts and a sense of the body -- then we cannot lie, kill, cheat, or steal. We may think about it, but we are too smart to let what we think run our lives. And what we are is smart in a new kind of way that springs from the organism’s wholeness, not from lists that we read to ourselves from the libraries of our psychology. Tomorrow, if I write a blog -- it's going to be a long day, maybe I will, maybe not -- it will be about nagas, or serpents, and their symbolism. At least very one good friend who intermittently reads this blog is something of an expert on yoga teachings and Hindu symbolism, and he may have some very cool auxiliary things to tell us about that, should he be willing to leave a comment. Let's hope he does. In the meantime, I am going to offer you my own take on the Naga as it is symbolized in Cambodian art. It's going to be fun. Be there or be square. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.
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