Start at page 70 for reformat of pictures

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

letting the bird go

Of course, this practice is fraught with all kinds of symbolism, for any culture. Today I'm just going to discuss its relationship to relationship.

When we work to form an inner union, there is a temptation, the moment anything coalesces, to do two things. One is to grab it; the other is to push it farther.

Of course there are whole practices that center around the idea of "storming the gates of heaven." Physical or Hatha Yoga has a wide range of exercises designed to capture, store, and manipulate energy. I can't comment in any great depth on these practices, because I don't engage in them, even though some people have showed some of them to me and I have seen some of the more exotic ones performed by yogis in documentaries.

Have they produced an endless range of enlightened masters? Perhaps you can seek answers for that question for yourself. Such work is not my way.

I have found it useful to take the advice of my teacher, who said to me a number of years ago in no uncertain terms, "don't force it." If we refer ourselves back to the nooks and crannies of Gurdjieff literature, J. G. Bennett himself confessed in his book, "Idiots in Paris" that his intense practices alarmed Jeanne DeSalzmann. She repeatedly warned him that people working under Gurdjieff in other groups who had attempted the same things obtained "bad results."

Based on my own experience, I'm not sure any of us ought to risk finding out what "bad results" might mean. There is no doubt that when things really change in a human being, that is, when changes begin to become physical in an inner sense, instead of just changes in ideas or mental states, they cannot be undone. Gurdjieff made this quite clear to Ouspensky in "In Search of the Miraculous."

So we want to be quite careful how we work. As Dogen often said to his followers, "I respectfully ask you to take good care."

When something real it is brought into relationship within us, in that first moment where it is recognized, it can be a good thing to just let it go. It does not, after all ever actually disappear, just because it leaves our immediate line of sight. Once a relationship is formed, once it remembers itself, it is able to do work on its own of a kind that we are unable to supervise. This could be one esoteric meaning of separating the coarse from the fine. We (as we are) are what is coarse; the new relationship that forms is what is fine.

And, after all, perhaps we can admit to ourselves --we cannot separate the coarse from the fine. This is a type of work with which we are for the most part unfamiliar. In the lessons of alchemy, it is said that the gold will attract the gold; and it is certainly not the lead--what we are, as we are now-- that transforms itself into gold.

Another agent is at work there, wouldn't you agree?

It is a good thing, I suggest, to treat the beginnings of a more coherent inner union like a delicate animal-- a bird which we have encountered in the wild and been fortunate enough to capture and hold in our hands for just one moment. Long enough to appreciate the extraordinary beauty invested in this creature.

In that moment, if we are within attention to the moment, we may recognize that this beauty needs to be free, that if we try to restrain it, we will almost certainly crush it.

We open our hands and let the bird go. In that moment, we reach a relationship with the bird -- and everything it represents --which is far more important than the one that wants to hold and keep the bird.

So for me, this metaphor of letting the bird go extends deep inside, to the precious places we discover which cannot be touched with rough hands.

May your trees bear fruit, your wells yield water, and your birds fly free.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Cows and kittens

It is not in the nature of the universe for things to be different. Things are as they are. They are always exactly as they are. They always will be exactly as they are.

This state of "exactly as they are" follows precisely and irrevocably from everything that has already taken place, beginning at the quantum level, and extending up to the level of galactic interactions. An inexorable force consisting of an (for all practical purposes) infinite number of already completed events stands behind each and every moment.

It is an illusion, a vanity, to believe that anything can be different. In any given moment, if we abandon the imagination, we may begin to see that things are exactly this way now.

It is useless to wish that they can be any different than this. The only thing that can be different in a moment is our relationship to it.

I'm sure some readers will find this assessment pessimistic, and argue that this eradicates the concept of freedom of choice, free will, and all those other supposedly "free" things that we so fervently believe we have or can get.

In the popular imagination, "freedom" is a supposedly inalienable right of man. We talk incessantly about freedom of every imaginable kind: political "freedom," sexual "freedom," spiritual "freedom." Men have relentlessly killed each other in the millions for thousands of years in order to obtain this thing we call freedom.

Way to go, guys.

Freedom of what? Freedom from what? "Freedom" is an imaginary object, a psychological chimera; it constantly changes its nature, depending on the experience of the subject.

Let's just examine this exact moment here in front of us. For me, it is this moment as I write: for you, it is this moment as you read. They are two different moments, but it is all part of the same moment.

Can this particular moment really be different than it is?

Are we "free?" If so, how?

It is just as it is, isn't it? For it to be different, something would have had to be different before this, and it is too late to make that happen. This is worth pondering; there is an implication within this that our entire perception of reality is erroneous, based on the idea that we have a choice about what we confront in life.

There is no choice. We always confront exactly what we confront, not what we want to confront. No bargains with reality can be made. (Read Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical thinking" for some thoughtful, well considered pondering on this subject.)

In this universe of absolute physical and chemical laws, every moment is born directly from the foundation of every moment that preceded it. To argue that what takes place within any given moment could be different than just exactly what takes place--or, even more amusingly, that human beings can somehow control it- would be to argue that cows can give birth to kittens.

The only thing that we can do with this moment that might actually make this particular moment different is that we can attempt to inhabit it.

That term carries within it the implication of various degrees, various potential " levels of consciousness," as Gurdjieff would put it, but that is the only thing that could be different. No matter where we are and what happens, what comes at us and enters us is what comes at us and enters us.

This effort to inhabit life is the place where real freedom-- inner freedom-- might lie, but it is a freedom that is practiced in a special way. It can only be discovered in the context of obedience, because the point of space and time which our consciousness inhabits and experiences exists only within the context of universal law.

Every creature, every organism, every event, is bound firmly into the matrix of this reality that is experienced. Each conscious creature, organism, and circumstance is an expression of intelligence.

Taken together, everything that arises in every moment, taken in its sum totality, is the expression of the single Universal Intelligence.

Christians call it God; Dogen would call it the Buddha Dharma; Rumi, in his simple and disarming way, just referred to it as the Lover.

So there we have it. Freedom through relationship: born of intelligence, practiced through obedience.

May your cows give milk, and your kittens take naps.