Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Eating life, one bite at a time

If it's difficult to understand that conceptually, it's even more difficult to experience it tangibly, that is, to have physical experiences of life that enter us deeply enough to see that they are actually food.

Nonetheless, the effects of the food of life are obvious enough. People who take in the wrong kind of impressions are often damaged by it. More often than not, the emotional state suffers- we become depressed or negative. This is one reason why it's important to practice some discrimination in life- that is, we should be a bit choosy about the kind of impressions we take in. And we should actually make an effort to take in right impressions.

Sometimes a few right impressions can make all the difference.

Last night I was exhausted and negative. I'd had a difficult day and I have been working a number of days straight through on top of jet lag and what have you. So we might say I was just about fed up with the flow of impressions- it was too relentless, for too many days in a row, without any down time. I was overstuffed and cranky. On top of all this I had to go into New York for my Gurdjieff group meeting and movements class. On the drive home I was inattentive and burnt out. The thought began to dawn on me that perhaps I'd skip, despite the fact that I had already missed two weeks of meetings in a row.

The day had started out with my movements shoes missing, which made me just a little nuts. I had to initiate a wild goose chase to buy shoes during my lunch hour. I was now racing home, crappy mood and all, hell bent for leather in order to re-engineer this marginal new footwear with suede and epoxy so that the satanically rubberized traction-rich soles wouldn't stick me to the floor of the movements hall like glue.

I came home to an equally crabby wife. I think the planets must have been out of kilter last night. We traded a few snarly words, I slugged down an espresso, climbed upstairs, slapped newly cut suede soles on the offending shoes, and let the glue set.

It was time to go in to the city, but by now I was just so damn tired I felt negative about the whole idea. When you're even feeling crappy about participating in your spiritual work you're hitting some kind of bottom for sure.

Something in me insisted on overcoming this.

I got in the car, dammit.

I grumbled into the city.

During the course of the evening, as I sat in my meeting and then went to the movements class, something changed in me. This was just the kind of food I needed. By the end of the evening the experience had soaked in like a drenching summer rain. Time itself opened up to leave room for the details.

By this morning I was positively reverberating with the impressions. The tone it struck inside me lasted all day long.

It was making the extra effort- the super-effort, as Mr. Gurdjieff might have put it- that I was able to become available. I offered myself to my life- and it offered something priceless back.

I'm grateful for this food of life. For the people, the work, the possibility of effort.

To all of you today-

Bon appétit.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Thursday morning, 6 a.m.

All of life finds itself in service. It's one of the conditions of existence. The chain is magnificent; suns serve to create elements. Elements serve to create planets (and more suns.) Planets serve to create life. Life serves...

what does life serve, anyway?

In order to approach this question I will be digressing in multiple directions. Apologies.

According to Gurdjieff, organic life serves an intermediary role in the life of planets. It helps to receive and then transubstantiate certain arcane energies in the service of planetary evolution.

This is pretty heady stuff. I used to really get into studying and analyzing the massive encyclopedia of ideas in the Gurdjieff work about these matters, and I still retain more than a fair amount of it. I also like to flatter myself by believing that I understand more than a good bit of this material.

Alas! My egoistical indulgences are in vain. The Gurdjieff work contains so many vital ideas, and the subjects that it touches on are so vast, that by the time one begins to understand any of it- that is to say, understands its context within a relationship of inner vibrations rather than just with the intellect alone- one realizes that one doesn't understand anything.

It gets worse. The things that can be understood turn out to be gloriously subtle and all but impervious to the reductionist battering of words. Leaving us all in a hell where what perhaps needs to be expressed the most cannot be touched by what we use the most to express things with.

Hence, we may presume, all the apocryphal tales about teachers teaching their work with their backs.

Or perhaps even their backsides. After all, much of what is taught to mankind is so obviously taught by asses.

As I get older, it becomes more and more difficult to expound on ideas. There is simply so much that needs to be said that can't be said effectively. On top of that, the tendency in the Gurdjieff work is, all too often, to cleave to the form and adopt an imitative tone drenched with the same Victorian overtones that colored the admittedly great works of Ouspensky and Nicoll. That doesn't work for me- I urgently feel we need something more tangible, more immediate.

I often think that as much as we may respect them, we cannot rely on the work of dead people to carry us forward. Hence this blog, which tries as much as possible to speak in my words, from my experience, about these matters in a contemporary manner that may somehow touch people from today's work in today's life, not from the work of yesteryear.

Probably it's arrogant. In addition, it's almost intimidating to go to the myriad other web sites and blogs which brilliantly recycle, reprocess, and regurgitate the Gurdjieff material in a thousand different ways more clever than anything I think I could ever come up with.

I think to myself, "Maybe I should be doing that." But I'm not.

OK, now I'm done digressing.

My morning impression of this idea of service is that we all have to serve something. In this life, in this moment, I am in service of forces greater than myself. We all are. If you want be strictly scientific about it, you could say we are in the service of evolution. Or, in other words, Great Nature, as Mr. Gurdjieff calls it.

Now, we can be in service involuntarily- out of fear, with the pressure of our animal needs driving us forward like lambs to the slaughter- or we can choose to be in service voluntarily, that is, with acceptance.

To serve as animals, as slaves to nature, the highest art we bring is patience. But patience needs exercise, and has its limits.

Acceptance has muscles that never lose their tone; it knows no boundaries.

Patience is a human virtue: a cautious, beautiful woman confined within the borders of the self.

Acceptance is a solar force: exploratory, expansive, fearless. It slays ego where it stands with a sword forged of compassion.

A friend of mine named Red Hawk who writes poems has a collection called "The Art of Dying." (He writes in a powerful, uncompromising voice- go buy it and you'll see what I mean.)

I think that acceptance is a big part of the art of dying- dying to myself in order to discover a willingness to just say "OK" to the conditions of my life-

instead of resisting it at every turn.