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Monday, June 11, 2007

The arising of sensation

Sensation and attention have several things in common. First and foremost, we do not have them. That is to say, we do not have them in any significant sense relative to the way that Mr. Gurdjieff and Jeanne DeSalzmann used the terms. Secondly, we are relatively mistaken in our understanding of what they are. In order to understand them in any real sense, we must already have them, and instead, we all find ourselves working towards them.

And third, they arise from the same source.

There are many exercises that are meant to invoke sensation. There are many exercises to strengthen attention. All of them produce results if they are undertaken properly; there is little doubt of this. I think it is fair to say, however, that in most people's experience, the results are relatively temporary.

Example. One sits in meditation and develops a very good, deep relationship in the body. Or one is doing movements, and one develops a new and interesting kind of attention for a moment. But the minute the special conditions are over, it's gone. Not only is the relationship gone, but even the memory of it is gone. We keep climbing this hill over and over again and sliding back down.

In the case of sensation, which is where we will focus our discussion today, one can use the attention to "point" at various parts of the body and develop a deeper sensation of them. The attention can also be used to point at various parts of the body and relax them.

It is not my intention to dismiss such efforts. However, I wish to raise a larger question here, and examine the idea of unity in the process.

The reason that the sensation we achieve in exercises and effort is fugitive is because sensation does not arise from attention. Attention does not create it.

Discovering sensation in this manner is kind of like poking a hibernating animal with a stick. Sure, it stirs and wakes up for a minute. However, the conditions within its environment-- the temperature within its den, the amount of ambient daylight -- are such that it needs to remain lawfully asleep. It won't wake up until conditions are correct, and let's face it, a guy poking it with a stick is hardly the arrival of springtime.

So what is "springtime?"

If one develops a more permanent sensation of the body, it arises from unity. That is to say, once the partiality -- the separation -- of the inner state is sensed and known, and work is undertaken to correct that, parts become more unified. And it is in the integration of the inner parts, which must be carefully sensed and studied, that we discover a new quality which can lead not only to sensation, but to many other extraordinary things.

You may remember that in "Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson," Beelzebub says the following to Hassein:

"So in the meantime, exist as you exist. Only do not forget one thing: at your age, it is indispensable that every day when the sun rises, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your common presence." (Chapter 7, Becoming Aware of Genuine Being Duty.)

This serves as a direct instruction to undertake the work of enlisting our separate parts to create the kind of unity which has been discussed throughout this blog.

Working on the specific points of separation, and bringing them into relationship, causes a current to flow. The lawful order in which this current flows is described in Gurdjieff's enneagram and the multiplications that accompany it. It is from the flow of this current that the deeper sensation of the body which we seek arises.

Because of this, I am not certain that the exercises which point attention in the direction of sensation serve the purpose they are intended to. There is no doubt that those exercises took me to a certain point, but I never got past it. A revolution had to take place in order for that to happen. Once the revolution was over, I understood that I had been undertaking the effort backwards.

The whole point of studying the material separation, the physical partiality, of the inner state is to understand the machine and how to correct its relationship. The unfortunate consequence of Ouspensky and Nicoll's books-- which at the time they were written were terrific contributions to the Gurdjieff oeuvre-- is that much of the understanding of the work relates to the study of people's psychology -- especially if people glean the majority of their understanding of the work from the books. This is particularly, although not universally, true of people who have never actually studied in groups coming out of Gurdjieff's direct line of work. It is not possible to know how that work is actually conducted by reading the books.

It takes a different kind of animal to penetrate the animal.

This is why I continue to emphasize relationship to breathing, and, to all the other animal activities that we engage in -- eating, sleeping and waking up, eliminating -- as paths to understanding. The key to what we are does not lie outside our animal nature. It is contained within it. The vitality of the entire cosmos is expressed within the arising of organic life. If you want to feel the pulse of God, you need look no further than your own blood. We do not exist apart from our higher nature, or apart from nature itself, or even apart from God. We exist within these things. Our perception of separation is a delusion created by ego.

In the matter of the development of sensation, I believe it would be more practical to concentrate on the inner understanding of feeding the various parts the right food, and fostering their relationship with each other. If these tasks are undertaken in an effective manner, sensation will arise. It will be far less fugitive, because it will arise from a stable relationship that it can feed on and sustain itself from. Not from our erratic attention, which itself ultimately relies on the same relationships in order to manifest in any way other than temporarily.

It will wake up and live.

Now that's springtime.

One of the questions I was asked yesterday by a good friend was why we would do this.

I tried to explain, but probably did a clumsy job. The best I can do today is to say the following:

"We'll know why we want to be in Rome when we get there."

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

quotation marks, and negativity

The kind of energy that makes this possible isn't available all the time. Then again, nothing is possible all of the time, even though anything is possible some of the time, and everything is possible given enough time.

My mother always used to tell me, "make hay while the sun shines." According to reports, William Segal--whom I often saw, but, to my regret, never knew personally-- frequently told people, when they had to accomplish a task, to make do with what they had.

So the idea is to go with what's in the air. We have to build our temples and conduct our rites of prayer from what we have, not what we wish for.

How can I speak from within this connection? I mean, literally, speak, because as is so often the case, today I dictate this blog, so that the words spring directly from the act of speaking.

We are animals. I breathe. We breathe. Every single breath feeds every single cell. This is my condition. I am alive and made of flesh.

What is it, as Mr. Gurdjieff so often said, to be a man "without quotation marks?"

Quotation marks represent not the real thing, but a reference to it. Something someone else said; something someone else did, something that happened elsewhere, at another time.

A man with a quotation mark at the beginning and end of his existence does not live within the crevices in his cells. He does not walk on a planet, breathe a gaseous medium, absorb colors and sounds, taste food, touch hard and soft things. He thinks about these things. He analyzes them, classifies them, and defines them.

But he does not live within them according to the possibilities offered by his organism.

This organic sense of being is not an end in itself. It's just a beginning. What makes it valuable is that it raises so many questions about what we are.

Again and again, the more I practice, the deeper I dig, the more I see that we do not know anything about what we are or where we are. We are all a gargantuan mass of assumptions and associations. All of that has to be completely tossed out, thrown away, left behind in the immediate sense of being here, organically, in order for me to begin to see anything.

These are the moments when it becomes apparent that the entire intellectual and conceptual structure of the mind falls short of the mark.

On a day like today, I stop thinking. I just exist. Every event that arrives, arrives as it needs to arrive. Every response arises as it needs to arise. It's odd; everything that needs to be done is available in the doing. There is no need to worry about it. In business, a request is made, and even though the mind seems empty and stupid, the response is forever in the fingertips.

Where did it come from? I don't know. I do see that I spend an enormous amount of time packing myself with information, worrying in unnecessary ways, attempting to manage, when all of it is just right there.

When Mr. Gurdjieff spoke of tension, he spoke of tension in the body, which certainly takes a great deal away from us. But there is also a great deal of tension in the way that we think. It is only when we get rid of it that we discover how unnecessary it was in the first place.

..........

I am going to take a left hand turn and mentioned something that occurred to me over the past few days which relates to the discussion I have been conducting on the question of unity.

Mr. Gurdjieff told his followers that there was one thing man could "do." That one thing was to not express negative emotion.

That teaching is often understood to refer to the external expression of negative emotion. That is to say, he was indicating that we can avoid acting negative, speaking negatively, and so on.

Let's forward an alternative point of view on this question.

To "express" can also mean to squeeze the juice out of, to extract a substance.

At this stage in my study of negativity, which has been conducted intensively for a number of years, it occurs to me that the place where negativity is "expressed" is within us. When there is tension between centers, pressure arises. That pressure squeezes energy up out of the system into channels it does not belong in: it "expresses" negativity.

Once this imbalanced energy is present in us, it has nowhere to go but outward, where it quickly becomes destructive. This explains why negativity has great power: it comes directly from substances that could have been used otherwise.

From this we see that non-expression of negativity must begin in a much deeper place. Trying to "block" it at the point where it exits the body is much too late.

To not express negativity is to discover how to create inner conditions that prevent it from ever arising in the first place.

All of the discussions I have conducted about the Enneagram and the nature of the six inner flowers relate to this specific question. According to my investigations, it is only through the formation of a new and more complete inner relationship that we can begin to work on the question of not expressing negativity. And this is the one work which Mr. Gurdjieff said man could "do."

So in fact, man is capable of one extraordinarily important -- I daresay invaluable -- work which any man can undertake if he wishes to.

Negativity, however, is just so darned exciting and interesting that the idea of absolutely, positively getting rid of it doesn't seem to occur to us.

After all, if there is one thing we have proven over and over again for thousands of years, it is that mankind is utterly fascinated by destruction.

In this, I am no different than you are.

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