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Saturday, January 6, 2007
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Saturday, January 6, 2007Gone fishing
January's tired of wearing Cold thin garments made of ice Time to dress like April, Break out those fishing rods And trample barefoot towards the river. Astonishment ensues! We're more impressed with changes in the temperature
But death- That's a change of weather, too. Back to January Who forgot herself And thought she ruled the spring. Today, while walking Isabel, my wife and I were on double duty doing neighborhood cleanup, picking up roadside garbage. Lo and behold! As I lifted a scrap of flattened aluminum, what should I find but a salamander. A salamander in January, up and around, as frisky and alert as July itself. Wine-dark and delicate with moisture, with a graceful ripple of tiny ribs defining its sinuous body. This glorious little creature allowed me to hold it for a brief moment, eye to eye, before seeking mother earth in a lithe twist of fear. I haven't seen a salamander in the wild in years. I'm no longer at an age where I splash through streams turning over rocks and digging holes in rocky woodland- although, it occurs to me, perhaps I should be doing these things, regardless of age- just because I can. No matter. What is amazing is that the absolute last time of year anyone would tell you to go out looking for ambient salamanders in New York is January. They just don't come out at this time of year. Warm days, warm animals, warm hearts. It's gratitude for these small blessings that shapes a life.
The location of consciousness I like this picture of a bromeliad because it has these three little blossoms spiking up from the center that remind me of baby chicks with their mouths open, waiting to be fed.
Our ordinary consciousness is in its infancy, poorly fed, and consequently very localized, but through practice, at least some part of it (hopefully) learns to stay poised in its nest hoping for a decent worm or two. Gurdjieff mentioned to Ouspensky that man's development can in some ways be measured by just where his consciousness is located- for example, most of us have it in our heads, but some might have it lower down in their body, for example the chest or the solar plexus. Recently books have come to my attention which "advocate" what the best location for consciousness is, arguing that in Japan they value a consciousness that resides in the belly, not the head. Some people use expressions for this such as "being more grounded." It's true, there are such experiences, and they are good. But this does not mean that an experience of consciousness in the head is not good. That idea probably stems from the tendency we all have to devalue the familiar, and assign an artificially high value to the unfamiliar. In my book, any experience of consciousness is good relative to no experience of consciousness. If you find it in the head, be grateful! However there is a broader aspect to this question. There is a consciousness of the whole body. It is composed of the assembly of the awarenesses of all the inner centers- all seven of them. So to speak of any one(or two, or so on) centered consciousness as "good," or "bad-" or whatever, misses the point, because it tends to direct us towards yet another partial experience. Of course a new partial experience is very interesting simply because it's unfamiliar, but if we buy into it as the whole ball of wax we're still getting short changed, just in a new and more exciting way. Undertaking the development of a consciousness that penetrates the entire body is a different and more whole way to approach this question. This is an effort towards a balanced awareness. Gurdjieff's enneagram is a geometric picture of such an awareness. It is interactive, dynamic, and complete. As I have mentioned before, the material needed to feed the development of such an awareness is acquired through the long term study of conscious attention to breathing. Zazen is one vital tool in initiating such a study. We need to be working in the mud and roots, as Dogen puts it. More on that later. I'm going to be at a trade show overseas for the next few days so my entries may be somewhat abbreviated, but I'll do my best to keep the journal functioning. Wednesday, January 10, 2007Impressions and scale We're told in the Gurdjieff work that there are three kinds of being food: material food that we eat, air, and impressions. Each of the foods is necessary, but air and impressions are at higher rates of vibration- that is, air is a finer food than what we chew and swallow, and impressions are a finer food than air.
There is a major, lifelong work to be undertaken in understanding the matter of ingesting impressions. I won't get into that here. Suffice it to say that there are moments- rare, to be sure, but as real as the day is long- when we can experience the ingestion of impressions much more tangibly. In such moments, the physical impact of impressions is quite different and we can experience their materiality in a different way. When this happens our centers take impressions in more deeply. They reach parts of us that they usually can't connect with. Today I had such a moment at breakfast when I saw scale. For a brief moment I saw how absolutely tiny we are. In that moment I was observing myself observing the bustle of the buffet at the hotel we are staying at here in Germany. We're at a big trade fair and there is a terrific amount of loose, ambient energy. A lot of it is sex energy running, like an animal, wild and free, but there are finer energies present too. Huge gatherings like this attract such energy, and some of it is just up for grabs. Anyway there I was poised between healthy spoonfuls of pasty German Muesli- grains and oats with yoghurt- when all of the frenzied activity struck me as being on the level of bacteria. I often think about the world of bacteria -for example, the immense wars that are fought ought within our own bodies. A mere pimple represents heroic unseen battles fought between foreign microorganisms who invade our pores, and the macrophages (white blood cells) who, in their role as selfless warriors on behalf of the organism, slay them wholesale using a wicked array of molecular weapons. To us, the pimple is an annoying blemish. To that tiny world within us, it represents a killing field. Millions and even billions have fought and died on that swollen battlefield, and it is filled with the pain and anguish of that trial. As clumsy and insensitive as we are at this grossly larger level, we can still can feel that. Our whole body is like this. All our trillions of cells are continually engaged in hyperactive explosions of activity which we can't even see. If we sit in Zazen and meditate to the point of a supreme and infallible inner stillness, on the microscopic level our inner state is still one of unrelenting, urgent movement and exchange. Our immune system does not have time to sit Zazen. One moment of lapsed vigilance could spell a cold- or the flu- or cancer. Human activity looks way large to us. This morning, everyone I saw before me appeared to be big, doing big things, going about big lives. In fact my perception of myself is that way- I'm big and important. At the same time something came into me with the impression which measured it in a way I cannot fully explain and I saw that all of the activity was extremely small. There was a fleeting understanding that we are all bacteria- or perhaps even less. For a second humanity was in relationship to the planet in scale and it could be seen from within this level. This is perhaps the equivalent of a cell knowing how big it is and where it stands in relationship to us. The whole idea became- for a moment- more than an idea. It was physically tangible, more real- TRUE.
This raises many questions for me about what we are and how we live. In my more connected states, the entire collective, crazed enterprises of human life seems completely invalid to me. At least our immune system and bacteria seem to know what they are doing. I'm not sure we are even close to them in approaching that kind of understanding about ourselves and our place. In its delusions of grandeur, humanity forgets the humility appropriate to tiny creatures. The writer of Ecclesiastes offers us a powerful set arguments that all of man's ordinary activities add up to one thing: vanity. That is to say, everything comes from ego. Looking at my experience of my own inner United States of Reaction, I'd tend to agree. Ecclesiastes doesn't leave us groping. It concludes with the statement that only one task in life is truly important- to worship God. Making a more active effort to sense the scale of my life might help to remind me of that occasionally.
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