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Sunday, April 8, 2007

The Big View

I know it's the fashion today to speak of them as African-Americans, but I used the term black with the deepest respect. Black is a good thing. Let me explain this.

I took in this impression of the woman and her very beautiful son and daughter as human beings with black skin. They are different than me, and they seemed to have an essential beauty that was greater than anything I could understand. It struck me all at once how incredible these people are, how they exude a vitality and spirituality with a purity and an honesty that I don't seem to be able to achieve as a white person. The black races have been blessed in an excess measure with a heartfelt understanding of God that they bring to the rest of us as a gift. They have a spiritual genius that leaves me in awe.

They bring far more than this gift to us; they make us what we are. What is jazz, that most American of all musical forms, but a black invention? Where would baseball be without the great black players? What would America have been without the Civil War, the crucible that formed what we are today? In every instance, it is the blacks that have been at the center of the questions of our culture. They have brought us the questions, they have lived the questions: they have confronted all of us with who we are, what we want, and where we are going.

Along the way, they have paid a terrible price in blood. Great sacrifices like this always produce the great moments in cultures, and in this case it is no exception. These people, who were torn from the heart of their continent and brought here against their will, have informed us with their art, with their understanding of God, with their willingness to struggle in the face of adversity and stand up proudly to declare that they, too, have meaning, despite the fact that they do not look like we do. Their continued dignity in the face of inhuman abuse stands as a lesson in how to be for all of us.

And when I see them at worship- as I did this morning- I think that perhaps, in the end, for all our pompous bluster, our guns, our germs, our steel, like Gunga Din, they are made of a better stuff than we are.

Every minority informs the white Europeans in this way. As we encounter those who look different than us, we discover rich new ways of understanding ourselves as well as those around us. The blending of cultures, the exchange of different values in different peoples, brings us all to the ground floor of our humanity, where we have to confront our mortality and value each other.

White people practically invented the idea of seeing themselves as the center of the universe. We are stupid that way. Repeatedly, as the white man "settled" (destroyed) other societies, he bewildered the people he encountered with his arrogant ideas of entitlement and superiority.

Not only did he bewilder them; if they resisted, he killed them.

The problem echoes all the way down to modern times, when other equally misguided peoples become so desperate that they feel like they have to ram airliners into office buildings to make the point.

I think we can all agree there has to be a better way. But let us ask the question: how many airliners do we ram into ourselves?

The outward metaphor of accepting the other, finding a way to understand their humanity with a real and heartfelt compassion, has a parallel in our inner work. Those parts of us that seem to be most different than what we think we are may be the pivot around which our work turns. There are so many ways of working on this idea that I cannot even begin to speak of them here in the blog. It is simply something, like a sweet bonbon, that needs to be rolled around in the mouth and tasted for a while to appreciate its savor.

Every once in a while, in rare moments during a lifetime, we see a tiny glimpse of the truth, as I did this morning when I saw this woman and her children. We see that the other is our self, that we are all here together as one, and that only compassion and love can serve in the exchange between us.

As Christ taught us, we are all fallen beings who have forgotten this lesson. In his own day, he stretched himself out on a cross and died in the hopes that his sacrifice could serve as a reminder.

I can only hope that my compassion, my capacity for what Gurdjieff used to call outer considering, deepens. Instead of living through the mind, I hope that I will remember to live through the heart. Chinese Zen master Ta Hui said over and over again that what is sought cannot be grasped with the mind.

But if it comes to the heart, then we at least have a ghost of a chance.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water. And today, may the power of the Holy Spirit fill us all with the hope of a new life, a new compassion, a new understanding.

Monday, April 9, 2007

Gurdjieff, on the heart

Some of you are familiar with my essay on the meaning of the enneagram with relation to centers, or chakras. Bits and pieces of it have been introduced during the course of this blog. (Anyone who is specifically interested in getting the essay can contact me by leaving a comment and I will be glad to send it to them via e-mail. Be forewarned, it is not light reading.) In any event, what I am about to discuss will be more meaningful if you are familiar with the idea of the chakras and to the specific relationship between the notes on the enneagram and the physical centers of the human body.

I refer you now to page 795 in the new edition of "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson," from which the following quote is taken.

"On this piano, 'vibrations of extraneous origin' arise from different 'shocks,' 'noises, 'rustlings,' 'and for the most part from what are called,' aerial momentum vibrations,' which are generally formed in atmospheric space from the natural vibrations already present there."

Here Gurdjieff is likening the work of the human body to a piano. It is an instrument that works to create its music, its inner rate of vibration, from an aerial medium. In case we do not get the point that he is talking about the second being food, air, let's take a look at what he says just a bit later.

"Just as the first being the food cannot acquire its vivifying power until after its transformation into 'being-pentoehary,' so on this piano, the vibrations of the string do not acquire a corresponding vivifying power until they have been fused with the preceding vibrations, starting from the totality of the center of gravity vibrations of the tone 'sol.'"

He discusses the first being food here so that we will not miss the point- unusual, for a man who is known to have enjoyed burying bones so deep that the dogs cannot sniff them! We can only presume he was about to make a point he felt was rather important.

Just what is he getting at?

There are a number of important understandings contained in these few sentences. Gurdjieff is talking about and comparing work of the first being food -- what we eat -- with the work of the second being food -- what we breathe.

Both of them need to hit the point "5" on the enneagram in order to begin their most essential work. Until the work within the octave reaches this point, the food that has been ingested has not "acquired its vivifying power" -- it cannot help to enliven the organism.

So as in food we eat, the beginning of the "big" work- the work that enlivens- of air in the body begins with the tone 'Sol.'

If you refer to the essay on the enneagram, you will see that this note corresponds to the heart. So he is saying that the work of the upper story (857) with air begins with the heart. (Those of you attentive to details will have noted what it says in the upper right-hand corner of my blog.) So Gurdjieff tells us that, as my own studies have verified, the connection between breathing and work of taking material in through the heart is a vital one.

This underscores a certain kind of esoteric body work, as well as the central place of emotion as the fuel for spiritual work. And that, of course, is an idea that Gurdjieff drove home on more than one occasion.

What is even more interesting to me -- after all, those who, along with me, have studied this question of centers and their relationship to the enneagram will probably not find what I have just said all that surprising -- is the manner in which every tone must contain all of the vibrations of the tones that go before it in order to manifest itself fully. This is another piece of information that has so many avenues which can be explored that we cannot go into it in the blog. It points us towards the inner "string of pearls"- a series of notes that can be sounded within the organs of the body.

That contains within itself a beauty that can only be explored, and not contained.

One last note, if you will excuse the pun.

Last night I had a dream in which I was in a field with an essence-friend of mine from Arkansas. Mr. Gurdjieff was there, sitting a few yards from us in an overcoat. I suggested to my friend that we go and say hello to him. There was some hesitation on his part, but I felt that it would be perfectly okay. Mr. Gurdjieff got up and began to walk towards whatever work event it was that had been scheduled. I followed him, fully intending to say hello, but never quite caught up with him.

In recounting it, I see there is a poignancy to this dream.

It reminds me of Newton's comment: "if I have seen far, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

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