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- Monday, October 15, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007From the Bund This is what the view looked like this afternoon from the Bund in Shanghai.
Dramatic, eh? You have no idea how dramatic. The area that you are looking at is called Pudong. 20 years ago, all of this was squat buildings and farmland. No kidding. The people from the Shanghai Artex Corp. took me there in the late 1980s and bragged mightily about how the government was going to develop this land. At the time, all I could see was fields of yellow mustard. I can see them still, in this part of my immediate experience which we call "memory," and they look pretty good to me. I wonder, how much more of nature can we sterilize before it decides to return the favor? The answer may be closer than we think. If the weather keeps warming, and the ice over Greenland and Antarctica keeps melting, nothing anyone can do will prevent this from being underwater in a few hundred years. This may sound like idle musing that does not belong in a blog about spirituality, but nothing could be further from the truth. The nature of our Being cannot be separated from the nature of the planet, no matter how many buildings we erect and meadows we pave to contradict that fact. Jeanne DeSalzmann, as it happens, frequently said that we need to work so that "the planet will not go down." It's true, there is some disagreement within the Work as to exactly what she meant by that, but most of the people I know accept that there is a core of truth there. For myself, I can say for certain that planetary conditions affect my work. For example, through the years, I know that lunar phases have had a distinct effect on the availability of energy to work with. In addition, there are spring flows and fall flows of planetary energy that make it much more possible to work. Gurdjieff alluded to the distinct influence that solar and planetary influences have on our availability for work in his concept of "solioonensius," the period when emanations from the sun accelerate the possibilities for the beings which work under its influence. For that matter, the entire discussion of so called "astral" influences is simply a discussion of planetary influences, that is to say, influences from the level directly above us. Astral entities are entities which have crystallized on the level of the planet, i.e., they have become a part of the planet and will probably last as long as it does. You can find numerous oblique and even direct references to such entities in Castaneda's work, and it is a simple matter of fact that you cannot engage in the Gurdjieff work unless you are willing to sign on to the idea that we are in the Work in order to create an astral body. I have observed, over the years, a good deal of beating around the bush by people who don't seem to want to look this one right in the eyeball. One can, I suppose, engage in the Work without signing onto the concept, but by the time you throw the idea away, so much bathwater goes out that it's rather difficult to avoid including the baby in it. Encounters with angels are encounters with astral entities. Beings on this scale are terrifying to us; read the Bible, you'll notice that the immediate reaction every human being has to an angel is fear. Astral entities are aliens to us, and contact with one of them is an incredible shock. If you are looking for a phenomenon that will truly rock your world, try this one on for size... presuming, of course, you are able to attract attention on that level. You may not want to. The choice as to whether or not your life may truly change will no longer be up to you at that point. Well, most of us appear to prefer to avoid discussing these things. One man I know who I consider a good friend and a person who is, objectively, very intensely involved in his personal inner work feels we should never discuss these things. There is a neat irony there; he's a poet -- quite a good one as it happens -- and his fellow artist Rilke certainly discussed them. The summary point of this post is that we are not separated from nature. We are not separated from the planet. We are all a part of this enterprise. The fact that the species is treating the planet as though it were a disposable diaper extends from the external circumstances all the way into the depth of our Being itself. We must deepen the organic roots that connect us to the planet if we want to know anything real about the nature of our own being. The beauty of the work we do is that it does deepen these roots. It is in the discovery of the depth of sensation within the cells themselves that we uncover the pulse that connects us to the planet. As we continue to travel across the surface of this planet together, brothers and sisters, individually and collectively, within this moment, and within the next moment, --and within all the moments that we have together before we have used up all our allocated moment-- May each of us deepen the roots of the mind that extend into the body so that we may become more whole, discover more compassion, and open the heart. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. Monday, October 15, 2007Six Flowers, one world This morning in Shanghai, I began my day well before dawn, reading, as I often do, in Nishijima and Cross' translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo; chapter 59, Baike, or, "plum blossoms."
This afternoon I find myself back in beautiful Hangzhou, on the banks of West Lake. It’s a positively balmy autumn afternoon, boasting scattered clouds, softened golden sunlight, and a paradoxical hint not of winter’s pending exhalation, but the future inward breath of spring. Dogen often uses the image of plum blossoms to describe the work of the inner centers. Everything within perception arises from the energy within our centers; as Master Bodhidharma said, "the opening of flowers is the occurrence of the world." Dogen goes on to remark, "A moment in which flowers opening is the occurrence of the world, is spring having arrived. At this moment one flower is present as the opening of five petals. The time of this one flower is able to include three flowers, four flowers, and five flowers, it includes hundreds of flowers, thousands of flowers, myriads of flowers, and kotis of flowers; and it includes countless flowers." (Page 142.)
The difficulty is that associative thought, which is essentially a mechanical part, can’t be eliminated from the picture. It continuously pollutes incoming impressions by establishing commentary, and thereby usurps the role of real thinking. Trying to free ourselves of associative thought is futile; it’s going to be there, no matter what we do. The trick is to become less invested in it. And I think we all get much too caught up in the circular analysis of associative thought without even noticing that that is where we are stuck. We live on a merry-go-round of psychological conjecture. Associative thought, since it is the biggest feature in our landscape, attracts the most attention from us, and once we are caught in it, we end up studying it as though it were the only part of ourselves needing attention to. All such activity is commentary. We need observation instead of commentary. Facts instead of conjecture. And the facts need to be assembled from within the physical conditions we encounter in an inner sense. Not the thoughts about them. In this regard we can speak of the structural parts of emotional center taking in inner impressions. This is quite different from the effort to be present within the context of impressions entering from outside. These are the two different sets, or classes, of impressions that we need to consider in regard to the question as a whole. (In order to understand this in more detail, it is necessary to read and study the commentary on the nature of the fifth stopinder in Chapter 39 of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson--"The Holy Planet Purgatory." I am intentionally going to avoid embarking on what would have to be a rather a byzantine technical explanation in this post.) The inner study of the six flowers is a specific study of vibration arising within centers. There is no need, in this type of study, to assemble cosmologies or apply them. The point, rather, is to develop the sensitivity of the inner sensory tools which receive vibrations and learn more about how they correspond both to each other, and to outer conditions. This is about developing a relationship to a finer kind of inner energy. It is not about analyzing the relationship or explaining the relationship, it is about living within the relationship, investigating the relationship. We don’t know what we will find here; it is a work in process, a demand that suspends belief, inviting verification in its place. We do need, however, to become invested within the available energy of the body through our work of attention with the six flowers. this is the place where life is beautiful. May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.
the first division
After a truly extraordinary fish lunch at a rural mountain lake near Jiande, I’m on the long car ride north to Hangzhou. The sun is an intense orange ball to the west, nestled just above the mountains of Zhejiang province. About two days ago I promised to get back to examining the question of allegorical meaning of Gurdjieff’s “Society of Akhldanns” as presented in chapter 23 of “Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson.” My intention was to take a more detailed look at each of the divisions of the society in terms of their relationship to a more specific type of inner work. Gurdjieff tells us: "The word 'akhldann' then expressed the following concept: 'the striving to become aware of the sense and aim of the being of beings.'” Put another way, the aim of the society is to become aware of Being. So it was a society formed to study the nature of the self. It’s not much of a leap to suggest, as I have before, that Gurdjieff was allegorically proposing that we discover, or, if you will, form, such a “society” within ourselves. For indeed, without such an inner society, how can we hope to study the sense and aim of our existence? Furthermore, the “inner society” needs to undertake more specific investigations. And in order to do this it needs to be divided into parts. In my proposed allegory of the society, the tools we have “ready at hand” are the six separate parts of emotional center, as described in the lecture from the Neighborhood playhouse in New York, January 1923 (the subject of one of last week’s posts, & found in the last chapter of Beelzebub.) And as described in the allegory, the work they undertake is a work of “objective science.” So is there, perhaps, a new kind of path towards less subjectivity available within us: a path composed of organic tools, rather than psychological ones? In my earlier post on this subject, I touched on the manner in which the seven divisions of the society actively correspond to the six centers on the enneagram, plus “do,” as the seventh division. Today we will try to examine the "role of the first division" of the Society of Akhldanns in a bit more detail. Gurdjieff says: "The members of the first group of the Akhldann Society were called 'Akhldann-fokhsovors,' which meant that they studied the presence of their own planet and the reciprocal action of its separate parts.” I’ve recently been pondering and examining this first division in relationship to the base of the spine, which represents the originating root of man’s Being. In the yogic system of chakras, it is at the “bottom” of man’s structural nature, but in the far more balanced (and hence egalitarian) structure of the enneagram, we find it occupying numerical position “one.” If we investigate the energy at the base of the spine, and seek to find a specific relationship to it in the context of a presence within life, we may begin to see that our life itself arises from this point. Within the energy that arises here is contained an immediate potential for connection to all the other points, as the energy within it rises into the body. If we contact this energy, we may discover an inclusive wholeness that predicts the entire movement of the system. This is because in the lawful progression from “do” to re, the first note, we already find a complete definition of the system of the octave within the doubling of the rate of vibration. We find it metaphorically, yes, because (presuming we have studied it) we understand the metaphor of the system, but the potential to sense this instinctively within the experience of the energy itself is already there as well. This is the point nearest to the Urquelle, or original spring, from which the water of our life emerges. ...Why? Take a look at the diagram: it’s the closest note to the originating force of “do.” As such it has a life, an impetus, a purity, that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the octave develops: in a certain sense, deflection from the original purpose becomes more likely with every successive step in the (first) multiplication of 1,4,2,8,5,7. And this experience of “one” is not a metaphor for anything. More succinctly, if invested within, it eliminates the metaphors. The question here is how we can begin to sense the presence of this energy and use it for the study of our inner octave by allowing it to lead us to the study of the reciprocal action of our separate parts—which is all about the law of seven, or, the multiplications. This energy of “one” naturally seeks a lawful relationship to all the other centers in the body. So- we may ask ourselves, as we live and breathe— How do we find “one?” How can we recruit it into service in the study of Being? May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.
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