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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Some thoughts on emotion

One of the things that strikes me about human nature is how volatile we all are emotionally. I run into this all day long, not only in myself, but in everyone else as well.

We literally live in a sea of both inner and outer emotion. It is easy to see the physical objects around us--but we quickly forget, because we are identified with it, that the emotional content of the world we inhabit is equally material. Emotions are as supple, changeable, and exotic as pigments in the skin of a cuttlefish: constantly changing, shimmering, adapting to the conditions around them, expressing things in a language all their own.

They are beautiful, alluring, and dangerous. It’s hard not to get caught up in the drama.

The emotional part in ourselves, which reacts very quickly indeed, is constantly taking the temperature of every event around us. We are so invested in us that we do not even know it’s happening. In order to have any awareness at all of it, we need to maintain some kind of a connection with the body. Otherwise the situation is hopeless.

The difficulty with the emotional part is that it is relatively imbalanced. As I put it to my wife when I first met her many years ago, we should not believe in our emotions. They lie to us constantly. Although they are powerful and quick, they lack rationality and frequently respond to situations in an inappropriate manner. This is true of almost every single human being; it is rare to meet people who are emotionally balanced in any meaningful sense.

I have a lot of strong reactions in the course of the day. It frequently surprises me, how absolutely physical, intense, and visceral they are. It is a real work to be present enough to have any degree of relationship with them. And it is only if I have a relationship with them that there is a chance of them not dictating the course of events.

This takes place, in my experience, in both an inner and an outer sense, because the emotional reactions dictate the way I exchange with other people, and they also determine the inner tone of my attitude towards my life. This means I need to take a careful measure of exactly what the value of various emotions is as they arise. Especially with negative emotions, when they come up, I need to examine them critically right away instead of signing on to them.

There are times when I just go ahead and sign onto them anyway after a brief period of examination. The reality is that I am negative; I have these parts and they have baaaaad attitudes. I am not some Christ-like guru filled with groovy love. In fact, people who behave in that way always leave me a little suspicious. It doesn’t seem real. If we want to experience who we are and know who we are, we have to experience and know the negative parts as well as the ones that are warm and loving.

Another way of looking at this is to say that we need to experience the full range of our emotional being in order to understand any of it. In self-knowing, we can’t just parse our emotional being out into the bits we like. It’s all or nothing.

It’s a good thing to perform an inner “stop” when we see ourselves having a strong emotional reaction. Before we take any rash steps, it’s a good thing to review the reaction and see if it is based on anything real. More often than not, in my own case, I discover that emotional reactions I am having don’t make any sense at all. They are suggesting that I do things that are fundamentally stupid.

Jails and graveyards are filled with people who listened to emotional ideas of that nature without exercising sufficient discrimination.

God willing, we will not end up among that number. But just the thought that we might avoid hurting another person by examining our emotional state a bit more closely makes the action worthwhile.

I believe that the phrase “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” from the Lord’s prayer relates to this kind of work. It encapsulates the idea that we are both unwitting victims and unwitting perpetrators in this exchange of emotional energy. The tendency is to see ourselves primarily as the victim; as we work on ourselves, we need to see our role as perpetrators as well, and become sensitive to the fact that all of us are in this mess together.

Forgiveness can go a long way towards straightening things out.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Roots of Being

In "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson," Gurdjieff speaks about how every three brained being -- that is, in our own case, man, -- is an exact reflection of the cosmos. I think that this idea extends to other creatures as well.

Plants in particular have several specific features that can help us to understand the nature of existence. Our own existence is built on the existence of plants; that is, without photosynthesis, the majority of large scale biological life on this planet would not be able to exist. (We will except life around sulfur vents, which is a subject all its own.) There could well be life, but it would probably consist largely of microorganisms -- and even those would probably, in some cases, be engaged in photosynthesis.

So this act of transmuting photons into stored energy, which is a kind of extraordinary alchemical magic, lays down the basis we all live off of.

Put in other terms: everything alive on this level feeds on light.

And since all complex matter in general is created by the actions of suns, with many of the heavier elements being created only in supernovas, we can say with some confidence that everything is actually made of light.

There is one lesson we learn from the nature of plants. But it is another feature which I'd like to examine today, and that is the nature of roots.

Plants draw nourishment from roots which extend downwards into a substrate below them. This is the flip side of their relationship to light. Without the roots, which hold them in place and collect the minerals and water they need for their work, the ability to come into relationship with this "higher substance"-- or rate of greater vibration-- we call "light" and engage in photosynthesis would not exist. So we see at once that in the universe, higher functions absolutely depend on lower ones. Put another way, in the creation and maintenance of reality, higher orders arise from and depend on lower orders. And all of it depends ultimately on light.

It's the roots that reach down into the lowest level that collect the information and provide the connection that allows the relationships with the higher functions to exist.

OK, you may be saying. Interesting, perhaps, but what does that mean to us in the context of a spiritual work?

In my experience, it is this question of growing roots into our being that is essential to our work. By this I mean physical roots that connect us to our body. I mean this in an absolutely concrete manner; I am not referring to an abstract analogy of some kind. In man, there should literally be roots that connect the consciousness to the body itself. These roots, of a very fine nature, extend throughout the body and enter into the cells. Generally speaking, however, human beings have completely lost the ability to sense them and kind of connection that they form. If a man wants to learn to draw a new and more solid kind of nourishment from his life, he must discover his roots. Not the roots of generations and countries and circumstances, but the biological roots, the subtle channels that connect him to his organic being.

I have pointed out before that the image of the Lotus as a symbol of enlightenment is not about the beautiful flower. It is about what is hidden, what is unseen; and what is unseen is the long stem that reaches down into the mud, and the firm roots that anchor the flower to the bottom of the pond, so that the disturbances of the wind and water do not disrupt the nature of the plant.

When Dogen speaks in "practice period" of reality being "to go into the mud and enter the weeds," he is pointing us in this direction. Reality begins at its roots, and an experience of reality cannot begin with angelic visions. It has to begin at the roots.

Mr. Gurdjieff once said that if consciousness develops it must not only develop in a direction that reaches upward--it must, at the same time and in equal measure, reach downwards, so that there is a wholeness.

So in seeking ourselves, if we seek first the relationship with this physical root of being, this organic sense of ourselves, this vibration and sensation from which consciousness itself actually arises, we acquire a new relationship to gravity. I do not speak of a relationship that lightens us and allows us to float around. I speak of a relationship that helps us become more aware of the fact that we live under these conditions, in this mortal flesh, standing on this planet, and that for us, this is all there is, and it is now.

Time and time again, if we turn to the lessons of biology, we discover that science and spiritual quest are joined at the hip. Even today, I was reading an article about dark matter and dark energy in which prominent physicists admitted that we don't know what these things are. Apparently they are absolutely necessary in order to explain things that we don't understand about the nature of the universe, but the words actually mean nothing. We do not know if there is "dark matter" or "dark energy" at all. The words are conveniences to indicate that there is something out there which we just don't know doodley-squat about.

The Zen of not knowing weds itself to the mysteries of physics. Dark matter? Dark energy? We might as well speak of God. We may even know a little bit more about God than we do about these two subjects.

Every word I write in this blog, no matter what it is, is also, in a certain sense, a convenience to indicate that we just don't know. We make efforts to know, but the nature of the universe itself is so mysterious that we cannot know, no matter how hard we try. We are all on a search to know, and that may be all that we do know.

Some few things I do understand. One of them: just as we have inner flowers, so also these roots dwell in us. I do not know what they are, where they come from, or what would make it easy to find them. All I know is that they are there, and they feed this thing called Being if we find them and come into a deeper relationship with them. The roots feed the flowers.

My wish for all of us is that we can awaken to a greater rootedness of being, based in the organism, that will lead us one step further down the path in the development of compassion both for ourselves and our fellow men.

blessings to all of you today.