Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The upside-down man, and laws of accident

Yet here I am. And it seems (flying directly in the face of the anti-deterministic hypothesis I posed yesterday) that it couldn't be any other way- that that then was always destined to become this now--irrevocably, irretrievably, inevitably.

Summary: we don't know. We're upside down to begin with: tiny particles in an impossibly huge universe, collapsed even further into the tiny, frenetic singularities of our own egos, blind to nature, blind to consequence...

blind to ourselves.

So how could we possibly know where we're headed? We can't. The element of unpredictability--Gurdjieff would have called it the law of accident--that exists at the quantum level of the universe suggests that everything creates its possibilities through an inexactitude--a potential expressed by an unknowing quality of instability, the possibility that everything could veer off in a new direction at any moment.

Indeed, we find such "lawful inexactitudes" in the development of the rate of vibration built into the very fabric of Gurdjieff's enneagram, where "shocks" are needed to keep everything moving on a predictable course. Gurdjieff, in fact, advises us that these deviations were intentionally created and introduced into the fabric of our universe by God.

The perhaps inevitable conclusion: God wanted it to be possible for things to go "wrong."

We all assume--don't we?" that our idea of the predictable course, of orderly progressions, neatly arranged circumstances that flow from one another, is the most desirable. Never mind the fact that Gurdjieff told us that our "carriage" was designed to travel on rocky, lumpy, uneven--yes, unpredictable-- roads, and that it needed that in order to, as he said, "lubricate the joints." Nope. Never mind that. We're all in the paving business, aren't we, busily smoothing out the road, trying to make sure everything proceeds in absolute defiance--insofar as possible--of the law of accident, in defiance of natural unevenness, in defiance of the natural tendency towards and even the necessity of

...inexactitude.

What if the system does not just need the exactitudes--the potential for "correct" progression, the whole development of "completed" octaves, but also the inexactitudes? What if the law of accident--which Ouspensky so valiantly hoped to crawl out from under by developing-- is inescapable, because it is so fundamental to the universe that everything runs on it?

An uncomfortable question.

We might remind ourselves that in Beelzebub's recounting of our planetary history, even Archangels came under the law of accident and made mistakes. Smacking huge asteroids into planets--i.e., Earth-- where they should not have been smacked.

Oops.

They're on to something, of course, because that law is very important in every kind of evolution (including, we might even heretically surmise, spiritual evolution) but it's not the only law. Laws of physics and chemistry constrain the development of biological life so tightly that it's unlikely we could have ended up with anything other than what we see in front of us now.

Ever. Anywhere.

So there appears to be a balance of some kind struck between determinism and random accident. Both order and chaos are necessary. If we didn't have order, we wouldn't recognize chaos when we saw it, and vice versa. This holds true for our inner state. We need to experience dissipation in order to know what containment would be; we must sin, in order to "find the good path;" the fruit of our attentiveness would never arise from anywhere, were it not from the rich and fertile ground of our inattentiveness.

So we have to be upside down sometimes. Just not all the time.

Might as well accept it with grace, as the stars and moon and animals look on.

May your buds birth flowers, and your flowers bear fruit.

The gate of liberation

In Nishijima & Cross's translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo, book 3, page 71, Dogen quotes Zen master Seppo as saying:

"The whole earth is the gate of liberation, but people are not willing to enter even if they are dragged."

And Dogen continues: "So remember, even though the whole earth and the whole world is a gate, it is not left and entered easily, and the individuals who get out of it and get into it are not many. When people are dragged they do not get in and do not get out, and when people are not dragged they do not get in and do not get out. The progressive blunder and the passive falter. Going further, what can we say? If we take hold of the person and force it to leave or enter the gate, the gate becomes more and more distant. If we take hold of the gate and get it to enter the person, there are chances for departure and entry."

The quote goes on in a discussion of expedient methods and is well worth reading. However, today I thought I'd just briefly discuss this idea of the gate of liberation.

There is a gate within us. That is, there is an opening within us, a place where something can leave and something can enter.

Now, generally speaking we don't experience our inner state as having closed parts, open parts, apertures or walls. There is just this thing we call a "mind"- which, as Gurdjieff points out, is really just a formatory apparatus, or, a non-intelligent piece of machinery which we inhabit, identify with, and assign a static value to which we refer to as "I."

Except under unusual circumstances, we don't experience the inner state as arising from the unity of intelligence, emotion, and physical function, and we don't see that as we are, we inhabit a form of our own that, in our very unawareness itself, has constricted us. Implicit in our failure to notice walls is a failure to look for gates. If we do, we look for gates in the mind, which is exactly where the walls are.

If we even hear about gates, and then stare at walls for long enough, walls begin to look like gates; soon enough, we convince ourselves that they are gates. Still within the mind, we do not know the difference.

Then we come to the question of liberation. The inference is that there is a way to become free of this state. To walk out of where we are into a new place. On the other side of the gate is something else. It is not a place where we remain forever, perhaps: there is leaving and entering, so it is a flexible state, one that allows for us to keep a degree of freedom in regard to it: which is in itself a prerequisite of liberation.

In order to do this we need to take hold of the gate.

How can that happen? What is the gate? How do we take hold of the gate? How does it enter a person?

I'm sure there are many points of view on this subject. I can only speak from where I am myself, which is not, in its essence, philosophical.

Here is how I find it:

Within us, if we can find it, is a finer materiality that does not arise from the mind.

It is a vibration that gently feeds our Being, leading it in the direction of a more intimate relationship with life: a more sensitive one that includes both the inner and the outer states in a different form of encapsulation. It emerges from flowers, is fed by flowers, and feeds flowers. From it blossoms open, and the blossoms are blossoms of compassion and warmth.

This finer substance lies on the doorstep of the gate of liberation. Within us, discovered, it becomes the whole earth, because we see that there is no earth--no consciousness, no dwelling place where the nascent property called essence can arise and grow-- without it.

It takes time and effort to find this within ourselves. At first, like any wild and untamed animal it is shy and elusive, but with diligence we can befriend the Friend. It is this essential quality of befriending the Friend that Chogyam Trungpa calls us to when he speaks of the Open Way.

This morning, while walking the famous dog Isabel, I thought of it this way:

The outer world is the moon, the planetary body that creates the tidal forces that attract and repel us. As we inhabit it in identification--or attachment, as the Buddhists call it-- we lose ourselves to that gravity. Gurdjieff explained this property of man's existence as the tendency for him to feed the moon--something that was once necessary for the maintenance of the planet, but no longer required.

The inner world is the earth. We need to inherit the earth in order to reside within it, and resist the gravitational attractions that continually consume our inner life. Forming a relationship to the finer materiality within offers us this possibility.

And then, there is the sun...

Well, perhaps that is another subject for another post.

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