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Thursday, February 15, 2007
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- Saturday, February 17, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007Communities
OK, so I'm weird. I don't find arthropods creepy. I tend to see almost all biological forms as beautiful, even dangerous poisonous ones. I've eaten scorpions in China and gotten up close and personal with tarantulas and big snakes. No problemo. Two nights ago, I had a dream where I was pulling creepy little things out of my orifices: centipedes, mites. The oddest thing about it was that it did not bother me. It seemed entirely natural that my body would be host to these other organisms. I woke up and processed that for a while. It didn't make sense. Why have a dream like that? Later in the day it struck me: the dream was true. We don't think about it much, but at any given moment our body is host to billions of other living organisms, including countless types of bacteria, nematodes (microscopic worms which are found by the trillions everywhere) and mites (you probably don't want to know this, but you have a mite living in the follicle at the base of every one of your eyelashes. Every single one of us has them. They are so ubiquitous that biologists think they may even be necessary for some reason we don't quite understand yet.) OK, now that I've finished totally grossing you out, let's go on. The interesting thing is that we are habitats for other creatures: we are their world, their planet. Wow, I thought. Amazing. This dream was telling me the truth in a very simple way. It was pointing me towards another important understanding about ourselves. There is a tremendous similarity between men and planets. Human beings have all the characteristics we associate with planets: There's wind, in the form of our breath. The wind exchanges substances, creating weather (evaporation and precipitation.) Our bodies are filled with oceans called blood that run in currents. We have a hot core, eruptive volcanoes that release heat (sweat), and an atmosphere composed of our outward manifestations. There's material falling in from outside the atmosphere- the impressions we take in. Our bodies are affected by and run on a complex set of electromagnetic relationships. This analogy refers us back once again to the idea of our inner solar system. From our level, we want to become like a solar system: we want to form an inner sun. However from the point of view of all the life forms that inhabit us we are a planet. Now recall what Gurdjieff said about planets wanting to become suns and perhaps you'll see a bit more about why this analogy is so utterly, incredibly appropriate. You may also recall how he urged us to think about the idea of worlds and exactly what it meant. Perhaps more important, when we understand ourselves as planets, we begin to see ourselves as the custodians of a community. We are composed of different communities: communities of cells, communities of organs, communities of biological organisms, symbiotes, parasites. You name it, it's all in there. So perhaps this idea of the micro cosmoses that make up our body can help us to make more of an effort to see ourselves within the context of the larger communities we inhabit. It's all part of that work we were made to engage in here in the middle kingdom: serving as a bridge between levels, connecting the bottom to the top. Saturday, February 17, 2007Ice crystals
There's a hard layer of icy snow over our stretch of the Hudson valley this weekend- flat, perfect, unforgiving. This morning my wife and I trudged across it with the famous dog Isabel, leaving barely a print on its surface. As we passed the crystalline block of lake ice you see above this text, I was reminded of the fact that the state of a matter is always a question of temperature. Under the right conditions, for example, silicon dioxide is a liquid- but we know it better as quartz. Solid, liquid, gas- three states. The universe began as a superheated gas- cooled to a liquid plasma- crystallized into planets. We're not that different. DNA- the very stuff that forms us- is a crystalline structure. The word crystal itself derives from the Greek "to freeze," or congeal. Crystals, however, don't just represent the end result of a loss of heat energy- they also represent its retention in a structured form. So crystallization is a way of preserving information. In separating themselves from their environment crystals preserve what they are, but it is at the expense of relationship and further change. You'll perhaps recall that I prefer to understand the word information as not meaning data, but rather that which is formed within us. So, as Gurdjieff mentioned, men crystallize as they acquire material. Wrong crystallization is a real danger- once something inner is formed and crystallizes, the only ways to re-form what results are to break it or melt it. Either way the process is painful. Does that sound kinda weird? People can crystallize? Think it over. One of the definitions of "crystallize" is to give a definite or concrete and permanent shape to. This idea isn't so foreign to our ordinary life. We all know that overcoming inner attitudes is incredibly difficult and usually involves a lot of pain and suffering. As we grow older, important parts of us get cold and hard. They become incredibly resistant to change, and to others, they stick out from the rest of our being just like the block of ice you see in the picture. In other words, those parts that solidify become prominent. In many cases we actually rely on them to "get the job done"- whatever the job of the moment seems to be. We all know how that is- no matter what comes up, whatever situation we confront, we may tend to repeatedly tackle it from the same part of ourselves. Even if it's apparent that part is inappropriate, or even dysfunctional. Psychologist call it "playing tapes." Those of you familiar with the Gurdjieff Work may see a similarity between this idea and the idea of "chief feature." No coincidences here. We fall in love with those parts of ourselves. They can even be (s0mewhat perversely perhaps) very attractive to others. Crystals are bright and clean and pure and glittering. The fact that they represent a frozen state where the possibilities of change are all but gone is lost on us. The beauty of these solid, no longer mutable masses hypnotizes everyone. Before you know it we're all polishing up our inner crystals and holding them up to the light, exclaiming to ourselves about how groovy they look. We forget that we are trapped in them. Smashing the crystal is one way of changing, but almost no one is able to do that to themselves. It takes a terrible shock to do that and the results are unpredictable. Take a look at what happened to Humpty Dumpty. Best not go that way if we can avoid it, huh? The good news is, there's fuel in us. We have also stored a great deal of material that can be burned to produce heat. This material exists in the form of the experiences we take in over a lifetime. Those experiences are laid down in us like layers of peat, or solid trunks and limbs of wood. So, in work, if we take that material of life, and we seek that spark of inner fire that God leaves forever burning in us, we can light a flame. With time we may be able to slowly melt that solid material in us. Become softer, more penetrable, bring ourselves to a state where a new chemistry can emerge. One that includes many important elements we left out of the original reaction. I sense we need our whole lives for that- all the parts of it, every moment we have ever experienced. It is the whole that contains what we need to re-form ourselves. How can I touch that wholeness of my life, of my being? It includes the past- the present- the future in ways I am unable to understand. There are moments when I brush up against that and sense the vast, mysterious nature of this thing called my life. Perhaps, as in AA, I just have to go forward, be open, and trust in the process. Download 1.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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