Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Being, dwelling in life

"In conclusion, to go deep into the mountains to consider the Buddha's truth may be easy, [but] to build stupas and to build Buddhas is very difficult."

I picked this quote specifically because of its reference to building things. I am on this tack because, last night, as I was sitting in my group, towards the end of the exchange an observation occurred to me.

The question that was active in me at the time was the question of inhabiting my life. Those of you more familiar with the postings in this blog have heard this expression from me before. We need to learn to inhabit our lives more fully. That is to say, we need to be more invested in our lives, more fully clothed in the act of living. That is an effort that needs to be made through the connection between mind and body and not just the mind alone.

In connection to this idea, it struck me that we all usually see it from this perspective:

Being constructs life.

Being, the whole experience of our existence itself, is essentially seen as a tool that is used by us to construct a livelihood, a family, a set of relationships with other people, and the many material things that surround us.

In presuming this, we make the very mistake that Gurdjieff warned us about, because man cannot "do," and yet the entire act of believing that we use Being to construct life is nothing more than a thinly disguised attempt to do.

We think we are building stupas and building Buddhas. We all labor, like Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, under the illusion that our Being is constantly constructing our life, under the illusion that what we do is what causes events to happen and circumstances to arise. If we are looking for a locus to our egoism, it lies here.

Last night, in my pondering, I considered the alternative, which involves an inversion of perspective.

Being dwells within life.

Life does not need to be constructed by us; it arrives on our doorstep already in existence. This immediate truth is the immediate truth that Dogen keeps referring us back to. We dwell within this condition called life which is, for all intents and purposes, pre-existing: it needs no construction. Our idea that we are somehow making our life as we go along is, as Solomon claimed in Ecclesiastes, sheer vanity, but the idea is so powerful that it has us completely hypnotized, to the last man. It's only when something truly unexpected (and often horrible) happens that we see that our idea we were controlling everything was truly foolish and stupid. As the man said, "to build stupas and to build Buddhas is very difficult."

Nicholas Taleb discusses this in somewhat different terms in his book "The Black Swan," where he points out that we simply don't know what will happen, and routinely forecast events (circumstances, lifetimes) even though our margin of potential error in what he calls "Extremistan" is close to 100% at all times.

So the question for us when we confront the question of what it means to Be becomes a question of what it means to dwell within our life, to inhabit our life, to wear the clothing of our life, which is already cut and sewn up for us by forces much greater than us.

Our job is to learn how to live within the inherent uncertainty of, well,

everything.

This all leads us back to the idea that we need to become much more receptive to our life, to be informed by it. That is, to allow life to form us inwardly by receiving it with discrimination instead of resistance. To live within the conditions, not judgmentally, not passively, but interactively.

And that thought leads me to another subject I pondered last night, which is the ubiquitous presence of fear, which--although I am still pondering this-- probably arises organically simply because of the inherent uncertainty of everything.

Some parts of the organism just don't want to tolerate this fact.

I think, however, that we have pondered this enough for one day. I'm afraid we will have to talk about fear tomorrow, or--at any event--

sometime in that definitely uncertain future.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water, within organically acceptable margins of error.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Wholeness

In regard to this question of the connections between centers, and the receptivity and functionality of our inner flowers, I see that it is a complex system. The energy channels in the body are as subtle and intricate as our biology itself. It is a network that spans worlds as well as cells, since it is designed to connect levels.

The simple fact, I see, is that the network is not always available in equal measure. There are several reasons for this.

One reason is because of the invariably limited resources we have. Our inner chemistry is not perpetually stocked with the necessary substances: they are not "easy" to manufacture, and we inadvertently squander so much of them.

Another is the astral, or planetary, conditions around us at any given moment: we cannot reasonably hope to prevail against the tidal forces that drive life on earth; the best we can do is learn to swim with them. The consonance that Dogen calls us to seek between ourselves and nature--as symbolized in Zen by rocks, trees, mountains, tiles and mirrors--is, among other things, his way of asking us to fine-tune our relationship to the natural forces we ourselves actually arise from.

I need to keep reminding myself of this, because there is a part of me that expects- or perhaps even demands- that "everything" always be available, and that my inner connections be forever good, or better, or even best. Of course there is a positive side to this type of striving--after all, it is an aspect of keeping my wish alive-- but when I expect too much--which is to say, more than what can actually be available-- I run the risk of signing on to a culture of perpetual deficiency, where I am not good enough, my efforts aren't good enough, and my experiences aren't good enough. All of which adds up to what one might call inner considering about one's work.

I think a very great deal of that goes on in all of us, but isn't talked about too often. Worth keeping an eye on, that question.

That being said, what has interested me of late is the meaning of what Gurdjieff called impartiality-- the question of how to become more whole.

All of it leads to a moment when the potential of wholeness emerges. In studying the relationship between our various inner parts, eventually all the flowers need to become one flower. In learning to breathe in through our individual flowers, we also need to learn how to feed the whole garden. In the inner sense, all flowers are parts of this one flower; if we can get a taste of that, more may be possible.

There is a teaching contained within this idea that relates to the essentially fractal nature of the enneagram. When I was in Cambodia last month, I saw how cleverly the architects who built the Hindu temples at Banteay Srei and other places depicted the sacred fractal nature of relationship within the universe. The towers of the temples at Banteay Srei have multiple levels that climb towards heaven, depicting the ray of creation as it flows downwards.

And on every level, at every corner, there are miniature versions of the selfsame tower.

The message is clear: big temples are made of little temples, which are made of littler temples still.

We get so involved with the individual little temples (ideas, interests, parts) that we forget they are all part of one big temple. In the same way, our little inner "I's" forget they are part of a bigger single "I," a greater Being.

If we remember ourselves, perhaps we get a taste of that greater Being. The Self that has been forgotten is unknown, in large part, because it is greater than the Self that seeks to know. We speak here not just of inexperience but of differences of scale, and the inevitable deficiencies of vision caused by our habit of cheerfully squatting within little temples.

...And that Being, that Greater Self? Well, even that I is part of a still larger "I." So it's quite possible self remembering is necessary at every level of the universe, in order for the fractured nature of awareness to reconnect itself.

These are some of the external associations, from which very beautiful cloth indeed can be embroidered. The greater question, for me, is how to actively sense and see within myself how every flower is a part of one flower--how every center connects to form a greater whole which, in the Gurdjieffian cosmological model, we refer to as the enneagram.

And in particular how I might be able to experience that by the supremely difficult practice of throwing the associative assumptions away.

I continue to find, in my inner research, that touching and tasting these realities depends on the most intimate possible kind of contact with the breathing. A kind of contact that has nothing to do with manipulative practices. Instead it relies almost exclusively on the cultivation of a new and deeper type of awareness.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.