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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Chalk is cheap

He had many highly effective classroom practices designed to keep bored students awake. Some of them involved beaning people with flying pieces of chalk, or speaking for quite some time in a monotone before suddenly and instantly raising his voice to a rebel yell, delivering a shock that hit hung-over, hormone addled teenage bodies like a bucket of ice water.

Another thing Mad Mac would routinely do was to literally go berserk, scrawling equations on the chalk board at breakneck speed. As the sprints escalated, he often began to run past the end of the board itself and extend the numerical madness onto the classroom walls. He would carry on like this, seemingly unstoppable, until the chalk board was entirely full.

Then he would pause for effect, scrutinize us intensely from behind the bottle-thick lenses of his bible-black, 50's mad scientist eyewear and ask us,

"What comes next?"

At that, he would spin around on his heel like a possessed dervish and attack the blackboard with an eraser until, in just a few seconds, it was completely blank.

Then he would pause again, before delivering the next revelation in a samurai slash of chalk, spitting out one mathematical banzai after another like a certified psychopath.

This erasure tactic was a great way of preparing us all for some new and quite astonishing revelation. More often than not, in moments like this, the concept that was introduced changed everything we had already learned: recast it in a new light, thrust it into an unknown context we had never encountered before.

Our memory of this life so far is like a blackboard that is filled with countless hieroglyphic scrawls. Our personality perpetually--tyrannically-- recalls all that has gone before us, and filters impressions of everything that arrives through this.

Nothing we encounter ever assumes its own color; in passing through the filter, it picks up all the colors the filter already has in it, and it arrives wherever it is going within our body or our psyche permanently changed so that it fits the configuration we have assigned, rather than a configuration appropriate to where it began.

As I grow older, I become increasingly convinced that we need to erase the blackboard. Turn around, look behind us, and in one encompassing gesture, erase everything.

Everything.

What could happen then?

Something may arrive that has its own color. The color green, for example. Or any old color you please, just so long as we understand-- we don't know this color,

it is new.

Every single association and emotion I have that I bring to a particular situation assigns characteristics to it that it does not actually have. Erasing the blackboard might give me a chance to reinvent everything that already exists within me. If the blackboard has been erased, the possibility of discovering a new formula, a bigger, more comprehensive formula that includes all the previous formulas within it suddenly exists.

Right now that formula is unknown, unsuspected. There is no way to know the new formula now because the blackboard is full, and the presumption is that everything on the blackboard is complete as it stands.

It's an act of faith to do this. An empty blackboard is frightening; hell, everything I ever knew is up on that damn blackboard.

Have at it, my friends. Chalk is cheap.

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

Friday, June 29, 2007

Belief and Faith

These two words crop up all the time when discussing spiritual work. Some of us may recall that Ouspensky said he left Gurdjieff because Gurdjieff's work became too religious for him; Ouspensky wanted science, he wanted verifiable, quantifiable work, and Gurdjieff told him some things simply had to be taken on faith.

I constantly encounter people who ask me what I believe. Then, on the other hand, there are the priests, the evangelists who ask me if I have faith.

So, what is the difference between belief and faith?

I will try to state it quite simply. Keep in mind that what I am about to say is a whole teaching in itself that takes a great deal of time to understand.

To believe is to want to understand without work; to have faith is to be willing to work without understanding.

We are back to the question of the free lunch which we examined a few days back. Belief is a free lunch; you can believe in any old thing you want to, because it is very easy to believe. All you need to do is take a group of facts, make up a story about them, and presto! You can believe anything you want to. Belief is available by the cartload at Barnes & Noble. Just pick a book, any book. Even if it's fiction, it will tell you what to believe.

Even this blog.

Belief is the easy way out in life; it requires nothing more of a man than the surrender of his judgment. Once that is done, any action is justified, so long as it fits into the beliefs. Belief refuses to ask the tough questions. It is a creature of the personality, formed by the most superficial parts we have, and used as a weapon to prevent anything new from entering. The stronger the belief, the more powerful the defenses. Every single one of us can see this in action in us if we are willing to look closely enough.

The mechanism works in the following manner: personality uses belief as an immune system to protect itself. New material, fresh impressions of the world that ought to be feeding the essence, are either parasitized by personality to bolster itself or-- if they appear to be too threatening and cannot be assimilated into the belief mechanism-- are attacked and destroyed. It would be bad enough if this just functioned on a psychological level, but it usually translates into direct action in the real world, where personality becomes so invested in its own survival that it uses actual physical violence to preserve itself, projected through the mechanism of belief. This is precisely where terrorism and war originates.

It's no wonder that belief is on the ascendancy on this planet. Even in the most traditional and conservative cultures, the idea of making sure everything is as easy as pie is the disease du jour. And belief is the easiest thing in the world. As Gurdjieff pointed out to Ouspensky, men believe they can do things, they believe that they have free will, that they are conscious, and so on. Because they believe this, they need make no effort to acquire any of these qualities.

Faith is a different question. Faith does not presume to understand; its premise is that we do not understand everything up front, we cannot understand everything up front, and that something is required of us if we wish to gain understanding. Faith involves taking a risk; it involves betting the farm.

Sometimes, we hear talk of "blind faith." but faith is never blind; faith has eyes that, in seeing , know their limitations.

The eyes of belief are drunk on their own power. The eyes of faith dwell within the cold sobriety of unknowing. They take measurements, acknowledge mystery, are willing to make an effort. They know that nothing real can ever be acquired without work, and they know that what we work for can never be known until it has been paid for.

When we have faith, we are willing to do the work without the presumption of reward. we work because we can work. We seek because we can seek. We make efforts because we can make efforts. It reminds me of Suzuki Roshi's comments, in "Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness," that we sit just because we sit. That is what we do. We don't know why we sit, or where sitting will lead us.

We just sit.

One of the chief diseases that belief causes is the belief that we are special. That is what belief is all about. Faith seeks union; belief divides and separates.

This reminds me of Gurdjieff's remark that our aim should be to become "a man without quotation marks." The chief characteristic of quotation marks is that they separate text from the body of a document-- the text becomes special. To be without quotation marks is to lose the imaginary separation that we create with our belief. To lose the idea that we are special and different, to just become very simple and ordinary.

Being ordinary is much more difficult than it appears. And certainly, in our world of personality and ego, no one strives to be ordinary.

The idea does not even exist, does it?

Maybe we need to learn to distinguish between believing what something is, and understanding that something is.

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

Reflecting

In his Shobogenzo, in the chapter "The Dignified Behavior of Acting Buddha," Dogen remarks, "The 'mindfulness' of the common man and the mindfulness of the Buddhas are far apart: never liken them." (from the translation by Nishijima and Cross, Dogen Sangha Press.)

This morning, I remarked to my wife as we were walking along the Hudson on this beautiful July morning that this suggests everything we may think of as practice of mindfulness is not actually such practice. After all, all of our understanding of practice comes from what we are -- common men.

I have spent a lifetime being exposed to various spiritual ideas, practices, and disciplines. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what this might mean. There are dividers, who suggest that their own way and only their own way is correct, and there are uniters, who suggest that every way is correct. But no one actually knows what they are doing. We are all just making up a story that seems to suit the present moment.

Something entirely new needs to happen, doesn't it? This mindfulness, this attentiveness, this discipline and this effort is just preparation. When something truly new happens, it is a revolution.

As Dogen says only a few paragraphs after his comment on mindfulness, "In the heavens above, (the state of acting Buddha) teaches gods; and in the human worlds, it teaches human beings. It has the virtue of flowers opening, and it has the virtue of the occurrence of the world, without any gap between them at all. For this reason, it is far transcendent over self and others and it has independent excellence in going and coming."

If we acquire the virtue of flowers opening, perhaps we can begin to see that every assumption is incorrect. This opening of flowers is the dissolution of the ego into something more refined that is at the same time both more and less specific.

So if the practice that we think is practice is not practice at all, what is it good for? It is good for the effort itself. We could examine this question in the light of the very effort of this blog, which is after all composed of words and ideas.

What good does it do to write words?

What good does it do to read them?

In the formal lineages of the Gurdjieff work I participate in, this is often seen as intellectual work, and in our work the word "intellectual" has acquired a meaning somewhat equivalent to the word "shit." To say that something is "intellectual" is to dismiss it as worthless. In their unparalleled zeal to pursue three centered being, many of my fellow Gurdjieffians seem to feel that the intellect is the very best kind of doormat to wipe the crap off their feet on.

In other words, it turns out they actually believe in two centered being, which is loving and powerful, but-- we must suspect-- willfully stupid.

I say this only because I have repeatedly seen so many avoid the effort of using the thinking part. After all, to truly think requires a lot of work. It is not so easy. Gurdjieff left us many difficult ideas, modern-day koans, which have to be struggled with in order to understand how we don't understand.

Nowadays, many sincere friends of mine in the work approach complex ideas like the Enneagram and the chemical factory by allowing their eyes to glaze over. They proceed to claim no one can understand these things, it's too difficult, not their kind of thing, not their way of working, "too one-centered", etc.

Perhaps the most classic defensive position is to assert that we shouldn't try to understand these ideas because that would be "explaining" (another Gurdjieffian code word for "shit.")

Having successfully ducked the tedious responsibility of thinking, our membership then reinvests themselves in a formatory kind of chit chat consisting of sanctioned words, phrases, and methods of exchange which are eminently safe and reassure everyone that things are taking place in just the right kind of way to encourage a slow, steady march towards consciousness.

It's quite true that it's no better to invest oneself in an overly identified way with the complexity of the intellectual ideas. However, as a very good friend of my and I have discussed recently, the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater becomes too great.

Our minds are lazy. They want to believe. We need the effort and stimulation of ideas. We need to work on them every day.

This blog, which is now topping out at probably 100,000 words of commentary, represents a significant amount of work with ideas.

Readers can read these ideas and either accept or reject them at their leisure; it is inevitable that they will do so. Every encounter with this blog, and similar efforts like it, will result in subjective reactions on the part of the one who encounters it. That is lawful and acceptable. I have even had at least one reader cheerfully advise me that all of my material is "new age" and comes from "influences one," which is a Gurdjieffian codeword for "superficial bullshit."

It took me a little while to digest that one.

Let's be honest about it: the whole enterprise is not about whether the words are right or wrong, whether we can grasp anything with the mind, whether we will discover truth or falsehood.

The enterprise is about the effort.

If there is mindfulness, it lies in the effort; if there is action, it lies in the effort; if there is value, meaning, significance, life, it lies in the effort. The effort itself is where we find life.

Let's take an example from one of my favorite sources, biology.

If we truly learn to pay attention to our breathing and form a relationship to it which is more organic, we may begin to see that breathing itself, which we absolutely take for granted, actually represents an enormous effort on the part of the organism, which it undertakes on its own, without regard for whether "we" like it or don't like it.

This body is a factory that is working relentlessly to support the enterprise of our consciousness.

Do we know this? Do we understand it?

Now that's effort.

May your lungs breathe air.