Authority issues

So far, so good. I have made it to the airport in Seoul, and the internet is working.
As I got off the plane at about 3:40 a.m. local time, I noticed- having just woken up- that I was rather negative. I often notice this state first thing in the morning when the parts are not properly connected yet. This leads me to conclude that the first thing in the morning is not a good time to take a barometric reading of our emotional state; it isn't likely to be accurate, and we shouldn't let the first impressions of how we feel prejudice the possibilities of the day. Best sit back an hour or two and wait to see just exactly how it is once the centers get a better channel of communication up between them.

Now, on to today's subject matter.

The impressions of life are like a torrent of water rushing into our organism. As they arrive, they encounter the solid, stony resistance of our personality. Turbulence results; water needs to seek the lowest point, it has a wish to descend and to feed the ocean. The stone, however, stands in its way.

There is something miraculous about this exact set of conditions: under other circumstances, in other temperatures, water would be solid or stone might be molten. But here we are, in these exact conditions. We're in luck! Special things can happen.

Stone channels water; water erodes stone. Eventually the process of erosion produces soil.

Finer particles, imbued with the moisture, create new possibilities. A new factor- the vibrant green of organic life- emerges. Intimately assembled from the finest particles of both elements, water and earth, it breaths air and sustains itself on its own inner fires.

The water has to submit to the discipline of interaction with stone in order to reach its destination. In doing so, it alters it: the stone softens, the water informs it, even as the landscape guides it. In Lila, Robert Pirsig describes these forces as the static and dynamic forces of life.

We have to take in the impressions of our lives whether we want to or not. They arrive on the doorstep of consciousness relentlessly. The question is whether we take them in superficially, habitually, and let their seed fall on fallow ground, or whether we take them in more consciously, thereby creating new possibilities within ourselves.

Undertaking the effort of learning how to take in impressions with more attention—so that they fall deeper within the organism-involves discipline. The concept is common to just about every spiritual work on the planet. The question in front of me today is under what authority the discipline is understood to be.

The famous parable of the centurion (Matthew, 8:5) whose servant was healed by Christ underscores the idea that just an understanding of authority alone makes miraculous things possible for man. The palsied servant was not present, but because the legionnaire understood what authority meant, Christ healed him, commenting, "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."

In life, we encounter authority in many forms. One could discuss conventional authority at length, but today we’re going to stick to the question of what spiritual, or inner, authority a man agrees to submit to.

With extraordinarily few exceptions, every human being’s “original spiritual authorities” are their parents. Indeed, Gurdjieff advised his pupils that they should learn to properly honor their parents for this very reason.

Typically, when humans grow older, unless they are atheists or agnostics, they submit to the authority of a religion, the external structure. Within that context they may submit to a hierarchy of individuals, but the overarching principles are those of the church or temple itself.

Within more esoteric works, one initially agrees to submit to the discipline of a teacher. It’s usually considered a terrific thing to find a teacher because then one has guidance.

It strikes me, however, that all of these logical steps fall short of the mark. It’s all still an outsourcing of authority.

The discipline that a man or woman ultimately must learn to submit themselves to is their own discipline. We cannot assume responsibility for ourselves, for who and what we are, unless we agree with ourselves to undertake our own work.

We must make our own efforts, not the ones others suggest for us. It is just this effort to discover and submit to the higher inner authority that already lies within us that is necessary.

So why aren’t we willing to come to something more definite for ourselves in our own work?

There is a tendency for us to actively wish that everything within remains as amorphous and undefined as possible. It’s nice if the picture’s fuzzy. As long as we fail to focus the lens, we can imagine all kinds of fantastic imagery that is just… about… to… emerge and make for a very beautiful picture. Any minute now. Until that happens best keep the lens unfocused, because, well, it might just ruin everything.

I don’t think this works. The inner lens needs to become more focused, the picture needs to become clearer. We need for ourselves to make an effort to know what the image we are composing consists of.

So we have to learn to demand of ourselves that we sharpen our attention to inner study, that we redouble our efforts at seeing just exactly what it is that is going on inside us. If we are going to make any profit from living in the midst of this rushing waterfall of impressions—and in this we appear to have little or no choice, do we?—we need to keep our wits about us.

What do we ask of ourselves in this daily life? When we see our negativity, how do we meet it? What inner tasks do we set for ourselves? Under whose authority do we work?

Life flows inward.

If we truly have a wish to be, we must cultivate an inner discipline that helps us to be there as it arrives.

Stay tuned for more reports from China.

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

traveling

I'm on my way to Shanghai tonight. I did not have time to finish today's post, but, Insh'Allah, I plan to try and do so at the airport lounge in Korea.

Until then, my friends, plant trees, dig wells, and may God go with you all.

discipline

So far, so good. I have made it to the airport in Seoul, and the internet is working.

As I got off the plane at about 3:40 a.m. local time, I noticed- having just woken up- that I was rather negative. I often notice this state first thing in the morning when the parts are not properly connected yet. This leads me to conclude that the first thing in the morning is not a good time to take a barometric reading of our emotional state; it isn't likely to be accurate, and we shouldn't let the first impressions of how we feel prejudice the possibilities of the day. Best sit back an hour or two and wait to see just exactly how it is once the centers get a better channel of communication up between them.

Now, on to today's subject matter.

The impressions of life are like a torrent of water rushing into our organism. As they arrive, they encounter the solid, stony resistance of our personality. Turbulence results; water needs to seek the lowest point, it has a wish to descend and to feed the ocean. The stone, however, stands in its way.

There is something miraculous about this exact set of conditions: under other circumstances, in other temperatures, water would be solid or stone might be molten. But here we are, in these exact conditions. We're in luck! Special things can happen.

Stone channels water; water erodes stone. Eventually the process of erosion produces soil.

Finer particles, imbued with the moisture, create new possibilities. A new factor- the vibrant green of organic life- emerges. Intimately assembled from the finest particles of both elements, water and earth, it breaths air and sustains itself on its own inner fires.

The water has to submit to the discipline of interaction with stone in order to reach its destination. In doing so, it alters it: the stone softens, the water informs it, even as the landscape guides it. In Lila, Robert Pirsig describes these forces as the static and dynamic forces of life.

We have to take in the impressions of our lives whether we want to or not. They arrive on the doorstep of consciousness relentlessly. The question is whether we take them in superficially, habitually, and let their seed fall on fallow ground, or whether we take them in more consciously, thereby creating new possibilities within ourselves.

Undertaking the effort of learning how to take in impressions with more attention—so that they fall deeper within the organism-involves discipline. The concept is common to just about every spiritual work on the planet. The question ion front of me today is under what authority the discipline is understood to be.

The famous parable of the centurion (Matthew, 8:5) whose servant was healed by Christ underscores the idea that just an understanding of authority alone makes miraculous things possible for man. The palsied servant was not present, but because the legionnaire understood what authority meant, Christ healed him, commenting, "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."

In life, we encounter authority in many forms. One could discuss conventional authority at length, but today we’re going to stick to the question of what spiritual, or inner, authority a man agrees to submit to.

With extraordinarily few exceptions, every human being’s “original spiritual authorities” are their parents. Indeed, Gurdjieff advised his pupils that they should learn to properly honor their parents for this very reason.

Typically, when humans grow older, unless they are atheists or agnostics, they submit to the authority of a religion, the external structure. Within that context they may submit to a hierarchy of individuals, but the overarching principles are those of the church or temple itself.

Within more esoteric works, one initially agrees to submit to the discipline of a teacher. It’s usually considered a terrific thing to find a teacher because then one has guidance.

It strikes me, however, that all of these logical steps fall short of the mark. It’s all still an outsourcing of authority.

The discipline that a man or woman ultimately must learn to submit themselves to is their own discipline. We cannot assume responsibility for ourselves, for who and what we are, unless we agree with ourselves to undertake our own work.

We must make our own efforts, not the ones others suggest for us. It is just this effort to discover and submit to the higher inner authority that already lies within us that is necessary.

So why aren’t we willing to come to something more definite for ourselves in our own work?

There is a tendency for us to actively wish that everything within remains as amorphous and undefined as possible. It’s nice if the picture’s fuzzy. As long as we fail to focus the lens, we can imagine all kinds of fantastic imagery that is just… about… to… emerge and make for a very beautiful picture. Any minute now. Until that happens best keep the lens unfocused, because, well, it might just ruin everything.

I don’t think this works. The inner lens needs to become more focused, the picture needs to become clearer. We need for ourselves to make an effort to know what the image we are composing consists of.

So we have to learn to demand of ourselves that we sharpen our attention to inner study, that we redouble our efforts at seeing just exactly what it is that is going on inside us. If we are going to make any profit from living in the midst of this rushing waterfall of impressions—and in this we appear to have little or no choice, do we?—we need to keep our wits about us.

What do we ask of ourselves in this daily life? When we see our negativity, how do we meet it? What inner tasks do we set for ourselves? Under whose authority do we work?

Life flows inward.

If we truly have a wish to be, we must cultivate an inner discipline that helps us to be there as it arrives.

Stay tuned for more reports from China.

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

membership

In the Gurdjieff work, and in spiritual work in general, we may gradually begin to appreciate the idea that there needs to be a relationship between the "lower" and the "higher."

Put differently, there needs to be a point of contact established between levels, and the individual manifestation of human consciousness can help provide that point of contact. But how?

The outer form of any work becomes a strong attraction. When I first saw this, I was cynical about it; I have often observed that many people in the Gurdjieff work seemed determined to manifest as faux Sufis. Others don Zen Buddhist robes or Hindu attire, fill their house with paraphernalia from other cultures (I'm guilty myself) and so on. If we're not donning the garments of pious religious practices, we're donning the gay apparel of popular culture, piercing or tatooing our flesh in a desperate attempt to become a member of whatever the tribe du jour may be. Even atheism becomes a bauble to be worn as adornment.

Admittedly, my cynicism on this matter may be misplaced, but my observations, I think, aren't.

Everyone ends up in works, or religions, to some extent because of their outer form. Outer forms, like cells, create "receptive surfaces" to attract and bind members- or, in the case of cells, molecules. The tricky thing is that molecules that get bound firmly to the surface never penetrate to the inside of the cell.

And the inside of the cell is where all the action is.

Inside us is where all our work ultimately needs to take place. In addition, we have to find our Being within our life. That is, within our life as it is. Devoid of trappings or attachment to trappings, divorced from the superficial appearances of form, we have to learn to dwell within this exact life of our own, as it is.

If that life is being a rock and roll guitarist, or a business executive, or a registered nurse-- whatever it is, here in this modern world, that is what it needs to be. None of us need to adopt the styles, motifs, fashions, or habits of past or foreign cultures in order to be what we are.

So here we are, within what we are, as we are. It's this question of the organic experience of inhabiting our life that interests me: if we are here, within this body, within this life, breathing in and out, what else do we need?

Do we need to look like we "belong" to Buddhism, to Christianity, to America-- or to the Taliban? Is that where our inner identity comes from? Or do we all need to look like we belong to the human species?

We say we live in the "information age." What does that mean? What is the inner form? What is in-formation?

What we really need to become a member of is...

ourself.

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

Ordinary, energy, knowing

I recently became interested in the exact meaning of words we use in discussing inner work. My impression is that words get used a great deal without anyone carefully considering what the meaning of the words is. ...After I've heard particular words being slung about like hash on dinner plates long enough, well, being the cantankerously inquisitive person I am, I begin to wonder just what the hell it is we're all talking about.

Figuring this out requires attempting to think with some precision, rather than associatively. Let's expose my soft underbelly and see how I do.

Mr. Gurdjieff himself pointed out that an exact language was necessary, simply because different people often use the same word, and mean entirely different things. The specific example I recall here is the use of the word "world" (as expounded upon in P. D. Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous".)

Today let's consider a few other words.

We sometimes hear discussion about the "ordinary" self, "ordinary" life and the "higher" self. There are questions raised about how to value the "ordinary" self and how to value what is ordinary in general, as opposed to this effort to become real, to acquire being, which we all view as somehow being "special."

We will get back to that question of special. For now, let's ask, just what does "ordinary" mean?

The first definition given in the Oxford English dictionary for the word is "conformable to order or rule." Referring back to yesterday's blog, I think we can see that the entire universe and everything that exists falls under this definition. Therefore, everything that exists everywhere is in fact "ordinary." Interesting, when we consider it from that point of view, that we all seem, well, perpetually dissatisfied with the ordinary. The whole damn universe, apparently, is not good enough for us.

Other definitions for the word "ordinary" include regular, normal, customary, of the usual kind, not exceptional, not distinguished by rank.

Let's be clear: it appears that every other additional definition of "ordinary" involves subjective judgments and invokes an artificial relativism. I will leave you to ponder the implications of that on your own.

Now we come to the word "energy." I have heard this word used so many times in the Gurdjieff work that I feel it has been beaten to death. But what exactly do we mean by this word?

The dictionary describes energy as force or vigor, exercise of power, power actively and efficiently exerted, or, the ability to produce an effect.

I think, however, that the very best definition of energy --for our level, at least -- which I encountered in the OED is the one that is used in physics: the power of doing work possessed by a body or system of bodies.

Taking the two words together, we encounter the suggestion that the "ordinary" -- that which is conformable to order or rule-- has the ability to do work. That is, inherent within the manifestation of the material world is the possibility of effort. That would be true for every level. If energy passes from one level to another, it does so in the interests of making work possible.

In pondering this further, it occurred to me that ordinary is considered as an adjective, and energy is generally used as a noun. I am wondering if we have that backwards. After all, from the point of view of physics alone, I think most would agree that energy describes the properties of materiality, rather than materiality describing energy.

So everything is noun-ordinary, and everything is described by its relationship to the properties of its adjective-energy.

So. Is there a "higher" energy? What does that mean? If I experience a "higher" energy- let's be more specific, and call it a particular form of less familiar sensation--, is it really "higher?" We may call it higher energy for lack of a better term, but what is it, really?

Is it, perhaps, the material expression of compassion? And if it is lawful, emerges and manifests in an organized manner according to level, and penetrates all of reality, isn't it, in fact, not "higher" or "special," but-

ordinary?

Or should we, as Dogen seems to suggest, avoid pasting any names whatsoever on the un-nameable?

I wonder.

Now we come to the third word: to know. What does it mean to know?

Dictionary definitions include: to perceive directly, grasp with the mind with clarity or certainty, to regard as true beyond a doubt, to have a practical understanding of through experience, to be skilled in, and finally, to be fixed in the mind.

I would like to generalize and suggest that to know means "to become aware of." That which is unknown lies outside the sphere of consciousness; anything that enters the sphere of consciousness becomes known. To me this is a simpler and more understandable formulation.

Human beings, groups, and cultures consider themselves "special" if they think they know something that others do not know. This attitude is so ingrained in all of us that we don't even notice we have it. Nonetheless, even the most brilliant among us, who ought to know better, think that because they know some things, they know everything. In Plato's apology, Socrates bemoans this (in his world, quintessentially Athenian) habit. Or take, for example, Richard Dawkins, who based solely on his expertise in biology has decided he "knows" that God does not exist, and embarked on an evangelistic mission to sell this prospect to the rest of the intellectual world.

Don Quixote was being more realistic when he went up against the windmill.

Every single living organism is in the same boat on this question. Nothing is "special"-- everything is ordinary. Everything falls under the rule of law, and it is categorically impossible for any single point of consciousness to know anything more than what it knows from its own point.

True, within the context of expansion of awareness, more can be known, but compared to the total of what is knowable--which we can quantify, in our apparently infinite universe, to be equal to (or greater than) infinity-- it amounts to next to nothing. If we want reassurance on this point, we can take note of the fact that many of the higher beings in Beelzebub, despite their impressive levels of development, don't seem to know how to manage the mess here on earth. They misconstrue. They misjudge. They miscalculate. Put bluntly, they keep screwing up in major ways.

It seems that ignorance is endemic, no matter what level we find ourselves on. If that's not a humbling factor, I don't know what would be. This may well be one of the fundamental conditions that consciousness of all kinds will always have to suffer in, relative to its manifestation within the known universe. Knowingly or unknowingly, consciousness is forever pressed against the cloud of unknowing.

I think that we human beings all consistently fall victim to the last definition of the word to know: to be fixed in the mind. In man, the acquisition of knowledge has the unintended consequence of rigidity. To know is, all too often, to become enclosed in an exoskeleton.

This morning, while walking the famous dog Isabel, I formulated it thusly:

In order to know the unknown, we must un-know the known.

...Yes, you are probably thinking to yourself, "but these are all just word games."

You're correct. They are word games, but this is part of the way we work to understand. If we are going to slog words around, perhaps we should point the mind at them with some acuity and attempt to understand what we are actually saying. It is all too easy to say things that sound important-- any idiot can manage it. In fact, even parrots can be taught to utter profundities.

If we really wish to work, what is said must be examined more closely to see if it actually means anything. All too often, it turns out the Emperor of the Mind wears no clothes, and does no exercises.

Of course, there are alternatives to life in this lonely, lazy nudist colony of the intellect.
Another way of working is to discover how to ask questions without any words, and open our hearts to the possibility of responses that carry no name. We can attempt to keep the lips and tongue still, but become aware of the breath, which remains in movement.

In the end, the worst thing we can do, I think, is try to become special.

How can we avoid contaminating our wish to be with our wish to become something?

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

Conduct and observance

Today I find myself within that rare set of conditions that evokes unconditional gratitude. I am, in fact, not very interested in writing on theory--the prospect of using my lunch hour to reside as firmly as possible within the essence and receive the immediate blessings of this life is far more appealing. This morning, however, my reading and my sitting brought me to a specific question which I gave myself the task of presenting today in the blog.

As I attempt to examine this dilemma a bit less partially, I discover that just as there is nothing wrong with life, so there is also nothing wrong with theory. Life exists; theory exists. Both are true things. Should we use our ability to discriminate to complain about one or the other, to fault it?

I think not. Where is the gratitude in that?

If all of us give ourselves the task each day to have one sound, truly pondered thought about the nature of our existence in this cosmos, I believe it will benefit us. That is, in some senses, the whole point of this blog: to come to that effort, to offer it to others, to share, to support, to encourage. This costs me something, of course, beginning with my time, but if even one other person gains one single thing from it, then it is worth the price.

In Zen Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, chapter 30 is entitled "Gyoji," or, "Conduct and Observance."

This chapter appears to address the question of Zen practice within the context of the form, but I believe that it can be read in a manner that raises larger questions. (Like all of Dogen's work, the chapter is complex and demands a complete reading with a great deal of thought. In this blog, we can't even scratch the surface -- just about all we can do is acknowledge that there is one.)

I began to ask myself, what is conduct? What is observance?

Conduct in the context of practice is obedience. Obedience in the context of the natural universe is law. Here we see the moving center, or physical reality, of the Dharma, expressed within the principle of law.

Observance in the context of practice is attention, or intelligence. Intelligence in the context of the natural universe is consciousness. This is the thinking center of the Dharma.

So here we have two of the three great forces that run the machine of the universe: consciousness and law, or, put in other terms, intelligence and obedience.

The third great force, of course, is compassion, which gives birth to the binding materiality of love.

Master Dogen advises us thus. "Conduct and observance is not loved by worldly people, but it may be the real refuge of all human beings. Through the conduct and observance of the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, the Buddhas of the past, present, and future are realized. Sometimes the virtue of this conduct and observance is evident, so the will arises, and we practice it. " (Shobogenzo, Nishijima and cross, Dogen Sangha press, p. 110 vol.2.)

Referring back to yesterday's post, we are confronted by the tension between external conditions -- law -- and consciousness, which finds itself both in relationship to law, and under a demand that results from it.

There is a movement Gurdjieff brought with his work called "the trembling dervish. " This movement allegorically depicts a universe inexorably ruled by law, symbolized by two rows of men in a "vee" executing a powerful, determined series of movements.

In the center, between the rows, are two men. One man is upright, resolute, reading a text, and the other man dances in circles around him like a puppet. It is a picture of a universe of slaves and masters, or, conversely, the struggle between conscious and unconscious forces.

One of the messages embedded within this movement, I believe, is that we can't run and we can't hide; no matter what we do, in either an inner or outer sense, there is going to have to be a structure. The enneagram teaches us that even at higher levels, cosmological structure is inevitable. Any presumption of consciousness, of Being, in the complete absence of structure is sheer wishful thinking. By extrapolation, even if the nature of a structure is unknown to us at this level, we can still know that it exists.

Structure may be fundamental, but law needs no consciousness to operate, its function is rote and automatic. Consciousness finds itself at the mercy of law if it does not make efforts. but the effort at consciousness must be an inner one, in direct opposition to the action of law, which is an outer condition.

All of this leads me to ask what our relationship to outer conditions, to form, and to law is. Men speak of freedom as though freedom existed outside of this context. I do not believe there is any such freedom. Freedom only exists within the context of both consciousness and law, and it emerges from an understanding of the relationship between the two. One without the other is ultimately worthless.

Taken alone, we already know that no law is ever compassionate. Laws are relentlessly objective, but potentially worthless unless informed by intelligence. It's generally understood that the exercise of law without intelligence leads to abuse, because law by itself is unable to perceive. Reality, literature, drama, and world mythologies are all filled with situations where awful things take place because the principles of law are applied in the absence of perception.

I think we can agree that equally awful things happen when perception is applied in the absence of law. Intelligence with no law leads to anarchy or chaos. Here, movement is completely random. Law with no intelligence leads to death by stagnation. Here, there isn't any movement. Hence law must inform consciousness, and consciousness must inform law.

The only thing that can balance these two forces, which operate both on the universal scale and within the scale of human society, is an emotional force.

The emotional center of the Dharma, the emotional center of reality, is compassion. You may recall that Mr. Gurdjieff said no real work could ever take place in a man unless the emotional center began to awaken. If we examine his ideas in relationship to other teachings, I believe we begin to see that he was saying the same thing that the Buddhists say and that Jesus Christ said.

A man is nothing if he is without compassion.

It in is the discovery of this force, balanced between the possibilities of intelligence and the requirements of obedience, that something new can emerge in us. We cannot find it, however, unless we are willing to fully submit to the conditions of intelligence and obedience. I believe this is exactly what Master Dogen is getting at when he discusses conduct and observance.

Master Dogen also says, "The opening flowers and falling leaves of the present are just the realization of conduct and observance."

In an esoteric sense, we might conclude that the opening of our inner flowers and the participation of other inner organs ("falling leaves") follow upon both our understanding and practice of intelligence and obedience. Within the effort to understand the struggle between these two forces, we discover compassion.

Whew.

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

Exoskeletons and Endoskeletons

Today, once again, we are going, using lessons from nature, to examine the ideas of the Gurdjieff work, and esoteric spiritual work in general: this time, in comparison to more conventional religious practice.

So, here's the question: What exactly is the difference, if any, between a work such as the Fourth Way and what we might call "conventional" religion?

If we examine the way that organisms exist-- what their being is, so to speak, "mounted" on-- we see that all organisms have support structures called skeletons. Even cells themselves have skeletons. It is all but impossible to organize life at all without a structural support to mount it on.

In the macroscopic biological world, there are two major kinds of skeletons: exoskeletons and endoskeletons.

Arthropods in general, and insects in particular, have exoskeletons. These are hard support structures that form a shell around the insect, protecting it from the outside world and giving it a complete, if limited, structure within which to exist. Some arthropods such as crabs have evolved the ability to molt (shed) their exoskeletons and thus grow larger. Insects, however, do not retain an ability of this kind once they reach their adult form, even though they may shed exoskeletons during their larval stages and in metamorphosis. Exoskeletons are an "outside- in" arrangement. They are, in the most literal sense of the words, superficial and external: what you see on the surface is exactly what you get.

But make no mistake about it. Despite their limitations, exoskeletons appear around us in a wide range of alluring and fantastic shapes. Within their range, they are supremely adaptive. Every one is a remarkable marvel of natural engineering.

And, as anyone who studies arthropods will tell you, they are both extremely beautiful, and very, very cool.

Mammals, birds, fish and other organisms with spinal columns have endoskeletons. These are internal structures that support the life of the creature. They work, so to speak, from the inside out.

Unlike exoskeletons, they are hidden. Only in death is the extraordinary beauty, integrity, and value of the endoskeleton revealed to the world.

We can liken the function of conventional religion to an exoskeleton. It forms a structure around man, gives him a set of rules to live within, explains just about everything, and makes it clear what he is supposed to do.

In addition, almost every religion, as practiced by its adherents, forms a defensive system against the outside world. Perhaps the greatest difficulty with religion is that it functions in this exclusionary manner. It holds the stranger -- those who do not adhere to the religion -- at arm's length, often excluding him-even with the use of force. So religion creates a fixed location- a kind of virtual fortress- within which Being can exist, and it actively excludes the outside world.

There is a terrific power in this paradigm. Just as ants have strength disproportionate to their size, so do religions.

The Fourth Way is a bit different. It's religion, but it's religion turned upside down. In this type of work, the support structure for Being is formed within. It automatically presumes the necessity for a vulnerability that religion does not admit. In other words, it insists on exposing the organism -- the spiritual embryo -- to all the influences of the outside world, without attempting to discriminate one from the other.

In the case of religion, discrimination takes place as a result of the outer structure, the exoskeleton. In the case of the Fourth Way, and other esoteric works, discrimination becomes the personal responsibility of the individual, because his endoskeleton does not protect him from outside influences.

Religion has a way of outsourcing responsibility in this sense. Once you know the rules in a religion, you always know pretty much what you should do. In the Fourth Way, it is necessary to constantly question everything and re-examine one's position, because there is no protection available from an external support structure.

In a certain sense, one has, by agreeing to this type of work, agreed to expose oneself to all of one's own fears.

In the Fourth Way, we agree to attempt to become aware of our exoskeleton and gradually shed it as we attempt to replace it with a more sophisticated, and more flexible, inner structure.

In the action of shedding this external structure-often called "ego" or "personality"- we make an agreement to submit to conditions. We make an agreement to let the world in a new way.

We make an agreement that we don't know anything.

It is not safe. We only have our own faith to lead us forward in the assumption that the risk is worth it.

Let's be fair: both types of support structure are necessary under certain conditions, both for organisms, and for spiritual works. Each one is valid, and each one carries within it enormous potentials. Nature would not produce both exoskeletons and endoskeletons if they did not each confer specific advantages. Hence, Gurdjieff's admonition to respect all religions.

There is one last thing I would like us to look at today-attempting to see this from the point of view of evolution on a greater scale.

Mother nature did her first experiments with creatures that have exoskeletons many millions of years ago. During the Carboniferous period, insects were very much larger than they are today. Dragonflies had wingspans 3 feet across. Over the course of their evolution, colonial insects such as wasps, ants, and bees evolved extraordinarily complex social structures. (Ants are actually descended from wasps, but that is another question.)

Some of you will no doubt recall P. D. Ouspensky's observation that insects were a failed experiment in the Earth's effort to evolve higher forms of consciousness.

Why do you think that happened?

The reason that insects failed was because they lacked flexibility.

In the end, their social structures were just as stiff as their exoskeletons, utterly ruled by a rigid, mechanical set of habits. Studies of ants, for example, have shown that their individual behavioral capabilities are remarkably simple. To this day scientists marvel at how very complex behavioral responses emerge from a community of creatures with such a limited range of abilities. (This property is called emergence. Emergence is the "universal organizing principle" that produces consciousness itself.)

If a man cannot expand his horizons and improve his flexibility, he will ultimately achieve no more than an insect can achieve. The choice is up to us. We need to work together in community as human beings to break down these exoskeletons-- our belief systems, our egos and personalities-- that separate us, and nourish our endoskeletons, which is the only support structure worthy of being called a truly human support system. This is the effort of a man attempting to shed the exoskeleton of his quotation marks.

This question of a vulnerability and flexibility, which nature offers us so readily and so generously, is right in front of us at all times. It relates directly to the question of compassion.

The compassionate man, unlike an insect, lets the world into his heart and seeks a response using all of his parts. Of course it's dangerous; as we attempt to practice in this manner, we will get hurt again and again.

But what did Jesus Christ tell us about this? He advised us to turn the other cheek. We must keep trying to grow this inner structure that supports our lives, even if it means suffering in a way that we needn't tolerate when we rely on our shell.

If we want to grow an inner structure, we must offer ourselves to our lives instead of using our barriers to shut them out.

In this effort, we might perhaps try to understand both nature, and nurture, this way:

Always feed the hand that bites you.

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

within conditions

Damn.

How much time do I spend every day protecting myself from all that stuff out there?

Every single one of us, I think, inhabits a fortress of our own devising. We grow shells as hard and thick as we are able, and wear them so comfortably that we forget they exist. Turtles are unable to conceive of life without their shells: their entire way of being depends on the protective outer layer. In actual fact, the shell defines the turtle. Take it away, and it's not a turtle any more.

We're pretty much the same way. A man's Being is determined by how tough his protective layers are, and just how much of reality can seep in between the cracks. ...If you peeled off my protective layer, I'm not sure I'd be what we call a man any more. That might be a good thing... or not.

We don't know.

The one big difference between turtles and men is that in the man's case the "shell" of his personality prevents him from truly inhabiting his conditions, whereas in the turtle's case it facilitates it.

Just about everything the turtle's shell evolved to deal with is permanent: a product of the ecological niche it inhabits. We can't say that about man, however; our own conditions are constantly variable, and the shells we grow to protect our psyche don't expand our flexibility of response, they limit it. From both an evolutionary and a psychological/spiritual point of view, our own "shells" are counter-adaptive: that is, our closed mindset actually prevents us from responding appropriately to outer conditions. (Read, for example, Jared Diamond's book Collapse for insights into how oddly and obviously rigid mindsets probably limited and ultimately doomed some early Norse settlements.)

So why are we so devoted to the parts of ourselves that shut out reality? Probably because they are so familiar, so habitual, and feel soooo comfortable that we're ok with them- even when it becomes patehtically apparent that we're not in relationship with our lives. We'd rather have our shells than risk any pain. In a dog eat dog world, even stupid safety seems to be better than no safety.

OK, so much for the neat dissertation derived from the photograph (which was taken on the banks of the Hudson River at the mouth of the Sparkill at the last full moon in June, when the river's turtles emerge to lay their eggs.)

Getting past the theory, what's in it for us?

Toss the shell! Wherever we are, it's worth it to try to remember at that moment that we are within these conditions.

That's a tricky thing. After all, our inherent unconsciousness militates against an awareness of that kind. Only an alliance with the organism itself can help support a greater level of sensation of now.

And just what, you may ask, is that all about? What is an alliance with the organism?

It's all about seeking and sensing that inner gravity that our solar-system-in-formation produces. Grounding ourselves within the experience of this body, this moment.

In my own experience, we must perpetually seek the immediacy of the situation: sense our bodies, feel our emotions, think about where we are and what is taking place. If we get just a little bit closer to the body, we may begin to see how terribly automatic all our supposedly clever responses are: how reflexively our ego congratulates us for our insensitivity; how blind we are to the needs of others.

If we stick our necks out of the shells a little bit, well, yes, we still have shells--but we may gradually begin to realize that there's a whole world out there.

And within that world, everything arises within, and depends, on relationships--which flow inwards, like Alph the sacred river, into this vessel, into caverns measureless to man...

...the aim being, Insh'Allah, to make sure our own inner rivers will not reach sunless seas.

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

Atmosphere

We went up to Ithaca this weekend to see my daughter at Cornell. This morning I found myself awake at 6 a.m. in a very expensive but exceedingly modest motel room bed, staring up into the darkness and thinking about atmosphere.

All of you who are familiar with this blog will know that I often come back to the idea that everything we need to know regarding the possibilities of inner development can be gleaned from studying, and attempting to understand, nature. This is, I believe, why one of Gurdjieff's five "Oblogolnian strivings" was the study of the laws of world-creation and world-maintenance. Dogen is no different- he believes that every arising we encounter, no matter what it is, fully expresses the dharma--that is, all Truth is entire contained within and expressed by every element of nature.

Back to atmosphere.

We all form inner atmospheres as we grow older. This atmosphere is composed of "elements"- impressions- that have fallen into the gravity well of our being and remained, more or less, on the surface of our various "inner planets," or centers.

In the Gurdjieff work we call these collective "surface elements" of man's being personality.

Every planet in the actual (outer) solar system has a "personality." Jupiter, for example, acquired a dense atmosphere composed mostly of hydrogen. Mars has a thin atmosphere; earth a thicker one; and so on. In each case, what can take place on the surface of the planet- its ability to support organic life, for example--is determined by the atmosphere. So atmosphere determines the potential for growth.

In the same way, what we acquire and incorporate into our personality over the course of a lifetime helps to determine what can take place beneath the outer layers of our various inner atmospheres. Personality is just as much a part of the whole being as is essence, and ego--and, even more importantly, it becomes a vital determinant factor in regard to the question of what can come in. If personality forms one way, a man may be able to acquire much more new material than if it forms in another. We have all seen this. In a real sense it has something to do with the initial, or exoteric, and even the mesoteric question of being "open" or "closed."

Now, every center in man contributes to the assembly of what we call personality. Thus, every center's "atmosphere" plays a role in the overall composition of the system.

As we get older, the coating of personality over the centers and their parts becomes more dense. Eventually some of the material--impressions--we would like to take into our various inner planets begins to burn up as it enters the atmosphere.

The impressions urgently ought to be reaching deeper into the system, falling on and even penetrating the surface of the inner planets or centers, and contributing to their development by bringing vital new elements to them. Elements which would contribute to an inner alchemy that unites the planets around a "sun" and creates a complete inner solar system.

They don't.

The problem is that we haven't taken impressions in deep enough all along. They have consequently formed a thick "rejecting layer" around our inner parts.

Now, of course, all of this is analogy and there is a great deal of further conceptualization and pondering that could be done on this subject. All I am doing here is sketching the idea out so that readers can try to take it out into the world and examine it in real-life circumstances. In addition, it is probably best to try not to become quite too literal about it, because that would create a rigidity that might sabotage some of the potential intuitive insights available in this concept.

In the past I've referred to this chemical problem within us as the "rejecting part." I always assumed, upon observing it in myself, that the part in me that rejects things from outside--which is fear-based, no doubt, and probably regulated largely by chief feature-- is essentially psychological in nature. It is only recently that the question of what it means physically and what it means chemically have occurred to me.

So where does this take us?

Fear has a chemical and a physical basis related to the composition of our inner solar system.

We urgently need to allow things to enter us more deeply. What is it that prevents it? Can we have an effect on it?

I think we need to see our atmosphere a bit more clearly, and begin to take more responsibility for it.

May your inner leaves find good air to breathe.

Garuda in the flesh- method in silence

Over the past week, one of the symbolic images I have contemplated in a relationship to the nature of our organism is Garuda.

Garuda is the mount -- the vehicle-- of Vishnu, the supreme God, or absolute reality, of the Hindu religion. Looked at from another angle, he would be the means by which Vishnu descends to Earth. Garuda has huge wings, the fierce sharp beak of a raptor, and awesome talons. He is said to be so huge he can block out the sun, that is, obscure the light from above.

Another interesting note is that in the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that he is the son of Garuda.

In an esoteric sense, Garuda is the human being, that is, this fleshy organism we inhabit. Take a look at the potential comparisons.

First of all, the human body is a vehicle through which the higher can descend to this level, if inner connections are correct.

Secondly, this body is a hungry, fierce animal driven by passions. When I look at my own statue of Garuda, I always feel that it expresses something quite direct about the nature of the human being as an animal--"red in tooth and claw," as the saying goes. I am like this: Hungry, desirous, lustful.

And dangerous.

Thirdly, Krishna-- Christ-- tells us he is the son of Garuda. If we are willing to accept my interpretation of Garuda as the human being, we have a direct inference here that Krishna, like Christ, said he was the son of man.

It all makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it?

Our own incarnation in flesh confuses us. Of course it's true, we absolutely require this life within this organic body in order to learn what we are. It is, as Dogen says in the Shobogenzo, a tool of the Bodhi, that is, a tool of awakened consciousness. Nonetheless, we identify with the flesh. Separated from the unity from which we spring, we desperately attempt to reconnect ourselves by action through the vehicle, that is, the body, instead of understanding that the vehicle is meant only to take us towards our destination.

It is somewhat like this: we are all particles of consciousness that need to take a journey, get into the car, and then forget that there is a destination. The car is so fascinating that suddenly it is all about the car, rather than the journey. We get so wrapped up in our relationship with the vehicle that we forget it is supposed to take us somewhere. Our identification with it blocks out the sun: the light from above no longer reaches us.

And let's face it: it is a very exciting thing being a fierce, ravenous beast.

This is why I live my life interested in sex, money, and food, and why the strongest stimulus I know is fear. All of these things are products of my inner automotive industry, an industry dedicated to the wasteful consumption of resources, mostly in the interests of vanity. As Carlos Castaneda suggested in "The Art of Dreaming," I like it here so much, I forget why I came. The only way I can change this is if I change my perspective from a focus on destinations to a focus on journeys.

One of the reasons that Gurdjieff asked us to see and to understand that we were machines, I believe, was that he was hoping we would see we are in a vehicle. We all live within the body of Garuda: wings represent the extraordinary potential that we have in relationship to the higher: lithe limbs, fearsome beak and claws represent the lower nature that our inner potential must encounter, inhabit, and master in order to make the birth of something new possible.

What needs to be made whole in life is not our relationship with the body, and with each other's bodies, but rather a relationship with each other's Being, which is a product of consciousness, not flesh. Because our carnality is so compellingly obvious, we seek each other through the flesh, and we seek our lives through the flesh. But just imagine: living within this tiny little vehicle, sitting in one place, doing no travel, what happens?

No matter how much we stuff into the car, it is only just so big. It can't hold what we need; it was never built for that in the first place. The more and more stuff we pack into it, the less room we have to move around.

We end up fat, bored, cruel and unhappy.

This brings me back to yesterday's post in which I asked questions about compassion. Compassion is not an element of the flesh, but of the soul. Conscience, the Ursprung (this is a German word meaning "ultimate source") of compassion, is, according to Gurdjieff, the only undamaged part of man's Being.

Does all of this mean that we must surrender the passions of the flesh? Or are we meant to master them by embracing them and understanding them as a part of what we are?

Both paths exist within various traditions. For myself, I would say that I cannot know what I am through a denial of my lower nature. I am here in order, in part, to experience what this is. In other words, it is not the existence or lack of carnal passions that determines my level of being, but my relationship to them. They are here to help me.

This brings me to a final question about methods of working. In the Gurdjieff work, it is no secret that we often ask a group of people who are engaged in a task to, for example, refrain from speaking much.

I have pondered this. This exercise seems all wrong to me.

One can get any idiot-- even a dog-- to be quiet for a while. I think the whole point must be not to refrain from speaking, but to assign ourselves the task of speaking only when we are aware of ourselves. Our task should be to speak all we want, as long as we exercise awareness while speaking. This task, if put in front of all those who speak, would change everything considerably.

If such a task were taken properly, it would require much more of us. It reminds me of Dogen's adage, often encountered in the "Eihei Koroku,"

"I respectfully ask you to take good care."

We cannot observe our habits by refusing to engage in them. Rather, the point is to go ahead and engage in them-- but with a more conscious effort accompanying them.

After all, one can hardly find out what a radio sounds like by turning it off.

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

Childhood

This is a picture of Genevieve, who arrived on this planet--and in our house-- a few weeks ago. We took her mom in a few months before she was born because she was living at a women's shelter, and my wife and I felt that was Not the Greatest Place to Have a Baby.

Anyway, welcome, Genevieve. Much tree-planting and well-digging lies ahead of you.

Returning from my spiritual retreat, I find myself emerged in a rich ocean of new impressions, experiences, and understandings.

It will probably take some time to process all of this; today, I am going to try to avoid the temptation of reaching for what is most readily available, and instead enter into an attempt to discuss something I saw during meditation yesterday.

We are all within childhood on this planet. We do not understand it this way; we grow old, give birth to children, get white hair--in short, we believe we enter what we call adulthood.

Nonetheless, religious traditions continued to refer us back to the idea that we are children of something higher. Certainly this idea is embedded deeply in the Lord's prayer, since it begins with the words "our Father."

I don't think we understand this idea very deeply. Our experience of this life does not, somehow, affect us as a child's experience of life, even though I believe the potential to do so is always there. Children are soft and permeable; over the course of a lifetime, in all of us, something hardens, and we no longer receive our lives the way a child receives its life. We believe that we have grown up, and--generally speaking -- that our adulthood represents an achievement of some kind.

The whole point of being here is to receive our life, but we stop doing it. Instead of receiving it, we try to take it. We live entire lifetimes at this stage of grabbing and snatching at everything around us.

If we enter adulthood at all in this life, it is at the point of death. Even then, numerous traditions suggest that it takes many deaths to become an adult. So everything we attempt in this life, every step we take, every breath we breathe in, and every exchange we have with another person, no matter how much younger or older they are than us, is just a part of childhood.

We are all just children.

Perhaps part of self remembering is remembering that. For as long as we think we are grown up, as long as we presume an authority conferred upon us by experience and age, we indulge in the sin of arrogance.

Here's my sense of it:

If age brings anything real, the first thing it should bring is humility, as we see how small we are, how far short we fall of any real sense of Being and responsibility, and how much more effort it will take us in order to reach anything that could be called a "man" without the quotation marks.

Mr. Gurdjieff did his best to remind us of that over and over in his magnum opus,"Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson." He repeatedly explains to Hassein how severely the reason of man has deteriorated-- we have forgotten the source of our arising.

He points out that most people, at the end of their lives, reach a moment where they suddenly begin to see reality more clearly, but by then it is too late. It is as though our childhood is almost over-- and we abruptly realize it-- but it is too late to obtain the education we were supposed to have as children.

And no wonder -- why bother to obtain an education if you think you are already grown up? ...It reminds me of all the dreams I used to have where it was the end of the school year, exams were coming up, but I had failed to attend any of the classes. (This never actually happened to me, as I was a very diligent, if inexcusably rambunctious, student.)

If we look at the way we behave, the way we treat each other, don't we all still act like misbehaving children most of the time -- willful, disrespectful, grasping, impatient, cruel, unthinking? Aren't all the religions and disciplines on the planet actually systems to help us try and grow up?

I need to ponder this question more. I think if I saw, organically, within the depths of my being and with all of my parts that I am still, at the age of 51, in childhood, it would be a big understanding. It is one thing to grasp this intellectually. Grasping it emotionally and physically carries a demand that produces a remorse almost too great to bear. Perhaps that is why we all avoid this question so carefully.

I cannot resist adding one other observation which I had this morning in regard to the way we treat each other. It is not exactly on the subject of childhood, however, I think it relates.

I attempt to ask myself a real question, a living question -- am I compassionate? Do I have enough compassion?

What does compassion mean? If I don't act from love, what am I acting from? If every action I take is not informed by love, by a deep, respectful love of others, then where does it come from?
Do I want it to come from some other place?

...And isn't that a frightening thought?

The way this question presented itself in me this morning was in the following conceptualization:

Honor every effort in another as though everything in their effort came from your own wish.

I am glad to be back, even though leaving the retreat was difficult... God's blessings to every one of you.

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

symbiosis

Nature has a way of gathering things together.

Several billion years ago, it appears a group of prokaryotes (primitive cells) were colonized by proteobacteria. Each one of them apparently benefited from the relationship. We do not know exactly how this took place, but eventually the bacteria became so closely linked to the functions of the cells they lived in that they became a part of the cell, rather than a separate entity.

Biologists call these sections of the cell mitochondria. They have their own DNA, which is inherited only from the mother's gene line.

Mutually interdependent relationships of this kind abound on the planet. Sometimes, symbiotic relationships become so close that it is difficult to distinguish whether the two completely different organisms are actually a separate entity, or whether, because of their absolute dependence on each other, they should for all intents and purposes be considered a single creature. One good example are the various species of tropical rain forest ants that live in Acacia trees. The trees have hollow stems for the ants to live in, and produce sugars for the ants to eat. in exchange, the ants keep the tree almost entirely free of parasites. Take the ants away from the tree, and the tree cannot survive--insects eat it up just like that. Take the tree away from the ants, and the colony is helpless -- it expires.

The analogy consistently holds true on larger scales. For example, it is nearly impossible to entertain the idea of flowering plants without considering their pollinators, the majority of which are insects of one kind or another. The evolutionary paths of the bee and the sunflower diverged billions of years ago, but they are connected. Both carry DNA, and if it's inspected in enough detail, we'll be certain to find some strands that are all but identical. (Read Richard Dawkin's The Ancestor's tale. Despite his rigid defense of atheism, the book is of great value--proving even narrow-minded people aren't all bad.)

In another example, we could consider the symbiosis between fungi and blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, which give class to the entire and spectacular range of organisms called lichens, which specialize in inhabiting environments that are inimical to other life forms.

So why the biology lesson? It's simple enough. Everything on this planet -- in fact, everything everywhere -- is built on relationships. Everything needs everything else. It's all part of one single thing (Lovelock's "Gaia.")

This concept offers the possibility of investigating our understanding of consciousness and experience differently.

For example, I am staring at a mineral specimen on my desk right now. It consists of mica with plates of aquamarine beryl. This specimen is an absolute lawful result of the way our universe is arranged, just as I am.

Are we actually different entities? The response to that is not anywhere near so obvious as it appears to be.

If we shrank ourselves down to the atomic level, we would not see any clear-cut lines of demarcation between my body and the minerals. True, the density of the atoms would vary as one moved out of my body into the gaseous medium of the air, and back into the mineral specimen--but that's about it. From the atomic perspective, everything that arises exists within a kind of "quantum soup." It is indeed all part of one thing-- literally, an ocean of energy.

This concept probably bugs people who don't like all that "new age" energy stuff, but there it is, inescapable from the point of view of physics.

It is in the nature of our own consciousness, at this level, to perceive divisions, but perceived divisions are always a consequence of levels and of scale. We might have a bit more sympathy for both ourselves and everything around us if we realized that we are all part of one creation.

Everything depends on everything else for its arising and its existence. Mr. Gurdjieff attempted to refer to this by explaining it through the "law of reciprocal feeding," where everything feeds everything else.

We all search for meaning in life. Meaning is acquired only through relationship. As we live our lives, if we consistently investigate the meaning of relationship with in life, we find that all the food that creates what we are lies within this single vast sea of exchange.

I find that the deepest path to understanding what we are and what our place is lies in inhabiting the environment that we find ourselves within. By this, I mean attempting to stay connected to the organic sense of our own being, that is, the understanding that we inhabit these organs called bodies, and are in relationship with other organisms. In order to do that, it is necessary to develop a certain kind of new, and larger, connection to sensation.

It may not be everything, but it is a place to begin. Once we know, through sensation, that we inhabit this life, or we can begin to seek meaning within relationship.

We need each other, we need the struggle that arises between us. We need the effort that we make to overcome our differences. This is true in both an inner and an outer sense.

I'm off this weekend for a five day retreat. ZYG blog postings will resume next Thursday or thereabouts.

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

Dogen and Gurdjieff: More planetary allegories

This morning, as my wife Neal and I were walking the famous dog Isabel, we came across this spider web, suspended in mist and sunrise on the banks of the pond in Sparkill.

The mist was thick with sunshine; the water and light softened the iron girders of the bridge over the river, until the structure completely surrendered the impression of permanence. In that moment, the bridge became no more substantial than spider silk:

two structures made by animals...

both temporary.

Yesterday we touched on some of what Dogen covers in the Shobogenzo-- Book 2, chapter 28, --"Butsu Kojo No Ji"- "The Matter of the Ascendant State of Buddha."

Let's return to that text today to discuss another excerpt:

"Zen master Koso of Chimon-zan mountain on one occasion is asked by a monk, "What is the matter of the ascendant state of Buddha?" The Master says, "the head of the staff hoists up the sun and the moon."

To comment: "The staff being inextricably bound to the sun and the moon is the matter of the ascendant state of Buddha. When we learn the sun and moon in practice as a staff, the whole cosmos fades away: this is the matter of the ascendant state of Buddha. It is not that the sun and moon are a staff. The [concreteness of the] head of the staff is the whole staff." (Shobogenzo, Nishijima and Cross translation, Dogen Sangha press, Book 2, P.97.)

Is all of this chapter just an excursion into theory? Or might this be a reference to a more specific kind of inner work, regarding the formation of an inner solar system?

Let's take a look at that in the context of the diagram that relates the centers to the ray of creation.

If you click on the link and refer to the diagram, you will see that the moon represents the root chakra, or, position one on the enneagram. This is the location at the base of the spine in man- note "re."

The Sun corresponds to the heart, or position five in the enneagram -- the note "sol." In the physical arrangement of man's organism, that point lies in the center of the spine. This point is the esoteric heart.

The top of the spine--located approximately in the area of the medulla oblongata-- corresponds to the note la, or the throat chakra. These are the three centers which are specifically located within the spine-1, 5, 7 on the enneagram- all the odd numbers of the multiplications.

If we choose to view it from Dogen's perspective, this last center is the "head of the staff." It hoists up the sun and the moon- that is, the top of the spine connects the sun and the moon to the position of what would be called "all suns" in the ray of creation.

So--perhaps Dogen is intimating a work of connecting top, bottom, and center of the spine with each other. Is he furthermore suggesting that the action of air, a material that enters at that position of throat, is the critical factor that binds the action together?

In my opinion, we can be reasonably certain Dogen is speaking of the actual practice of forming a connection within the spine here. First of all, he says it is a practice, and second of all, using the staff as a symbol leads us almost inevitably to the possibility that he is speaking of the spine. In fact, if you read Dogen with this in mind, you will see that there is a great deal said about staffs in his exposition of Buddhism. Much of it invites inferences of this kind if one is willing to begin from the presumption that he is not talking about a set of theoretical dogmas, or a walking stick.

"The concreteness of the head of the staff is the whole staff." Let's pause to digest that, and consider the possibility that it is a careful, intentional attention to breathing- the deliberate ingestion of prana--that helps form a more whole connection within the centers aligned along the spine. Measure this, if you will, in relationship to Gurdjieff's explanation of the role of air in the chemical factory.

Once again, we discover potentially intimate connections between Gurdjieff's teachings of men as creatures engaged in the act of creating an inner solar system, the yoga practices of working with energy in the spine--which are a largely unpublished, but definite, aspect of the Gurdjieff work-- and Dogen's discussions of suns and planets, staffs, and practice.

I'll be the first to confess, there's a lot going on here. There are those who would argue one can read anything one wants to into texts as complex as the Shobogenzo or Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub."

It is in the multiple points of contact, however, that a dog begins to sniff the bone, and we may begin to discern a weave that does more than just woof.

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

senses and consciousness

In "Butsu Kojo No Ji" - the "Matter of the Ascendant State of Buddha"--Dogen comments, among other things, about the existence and utility of the "six senses" and the "seven consciousnesses."

Of course Buddhist philosophy has technically straightforward explanations of what these terms mean. It's tempting to view this with amusement, since most of what Dogen says about Buddhism consists of statements about how we don't actually know what anything means.

And of course he's right about that. We all make up stories. They sound good, but every time they slap up against reality, there is a large crashing sound and Humpty Dumpty falls to the ground.

I now proceed, with an appropriately joyful amusement, to make up yet another story.

In this particular story, the "six senses" does not just refer to the standard taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. In fact the translators/authors (formidable scholars, to be sure!) who were interpreting the six senses as ordinary senses had to cheat and add one -- I forget now just which one, and the book is at home, not in front of me here at work --in order to make the numbers come out right.

...It may have been money, since that seems to be the "sensory tool" human beings most often use to measure things.

Anyway, the reason that the numbers were not coming out right is because the six senses are not, in any sense, the ordinary senses. In their esoteric meaning, these senses relate to the six centers belonging to the realm of man's work, that is, the iterations of 142857. AKA the six inner flowers, or chakras.

Each one of these inner organs is in fact a sensory tool, a part used to perceive. We learned of this idea yesterday when we reviewed Gurdjieff's allegory of the Society of Akhldanns. Each inner flower represents an entity which has the specific task of feeding itself with understandings based on study of the inner condition. So there are your six senses for you.

All of these sensory organs need to work together for the whole picture to be seen. Hence the needful "divisions" of the Society of Akhldanns, and the completed Octave in the form of the enneagram.

Dogen's mention of the seven states of consciousness brings us to another question. The six inner flowers each have a consciousness of their own. That is to say, each center is an entity unto itself, or, as Mr. Gurdjieff would explain it, a "mind."

In fact, a man has six separated minds that join together in a single system within his body.

The seventh "mind," which man comes into contact with at the top of his head, or seventh chakra, is the entry point of a higher mind. That seventh, "final" consciousness feeds the material in to this level which is necessary for the conscious shocks that allow the complete functioning of the octave.

Viewing this from within the context of Gurdjieff's system, man numbers one through six relate to degrees or types of work with the six inner flowers that are available to man within the confines of his own being on this level.

Man number seven, who is the "pinnacle" of Mr. Gurdjieff's system, stands apart from men numbers one through six, because he has opened the gate to something much larger than anything Man number one through six can imagine. He is able to acquire all the material he needs to ensure the complete functioning of his Being.

All of this information is, I am sure, annoyingly theoretical to many people. What good does it do us? Spiritual seekers all pretend to agree that we should not work for results, but let's admit it -- everyone wants results. The only people who stop working for results are the ones that have them.

To those naysayers who eschew work on theory, I submit as follows.

Schools would not study theory if it was a waste of time. Mr. Gurdjieff, as it happens, mentioned that the way of the Yogi -- also known as Dhjana Yoga, or intellectual yoga -- was the most powerful of the three traditional ways, because a man who mastered that yoga would know everything he had to do to correct his deficiencies in the other two ways. (Dhjana yoga, when it crossed the Himalayas to China, became "Ch'an" Buddhism, and in the name morphed into "Zen" when it reached Japan.)

So using the mind to attempt to understand is not an idle or aimless task... as Mr. Gurdjieff pointed out, The Society of Akhldanns understood that man must "meditate unceasingly on questions not concerned with the manifestations required for ordinary being-existence." (Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson," P. 284, Arkana edition)

Where does the practical meet the theoretical?

We have to look inside ourselves carefully and try to discover what inner sensory tools we have. This is what sitting Zazen is all about- a detailed study of the inner organism, how it senses, the way in which it is connected.

Those who embark on this journey will discover that that investigation cannot be conducted with the mind alone. It leads us down pathways we did not know exist, to continents so deeply submerged that we did not suspect their presence. One hardly needs to refer the reader back to Mr. Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub" for more on that particular metaphor.

What are the six senses? What are the seven consciousnesses? Does life give birth to them, or do they give birth to life?

In the darkness --

in the early hours of the morning, when time is measured only by the haunting song of the woodland thrush--

I ponder these questions.

Since, like everyone else, I have to make up a story, it might as well be this one.

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

The society of Akhldanns, viewed as inner allegory

In Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson," the story of the Society of Akhldanns is related in Chapter 23. There is an interesting allegorical meaning buried in the divisions of the society into different sections which we will explore together.

As I read this particular passage, it occurred to me that there was a potential correspondence between the seven divisions of the society and the seven centers, or chakras. (Those of you who are unfamiliar with my explorations of this particular subject are invited to read essay on the enneagram. It will be helpful in following the line of reasoning... among other things, the assignations of numbers and chakras won't make much sense if you haven't read the other piece.)

It's possible to interpret the divisions of the society of Akhldanns as an allegory depicting the work of the six centers whose effort falls into the multiplications (142857) --plus the seventh center, or seventh chakra, = note "Do."

The allegory appears to impart specific information about the type of investigative work each center is capable of engaging in.

Let's go through the quote section by section. I will offer a very brief commentary on each section. There is a lot of material here, and it could take years of study to truly understand what Mr. Gurdjieff is getting at, so bear with me and keep an open mind.

...All the quotes are taken from the first English edition of Beelzebub. In the new edition, this section is found beginning on page 273, through 275.

"The learned members of this first and perhaps last great terrestrial learned society were then divided into seven independent groups, or as it is otherwise said, 'sections', and each of these groups or sections received its definite designation.

"The members of the first group of the society Akhaldan were called 'Akhaldanfokhsovors', which meant that the beings belonging to that section studied the presence of their own planet as well as the reciprocal action of its separate parts."

According to my own interpretation of the enneagram, this first division would correspond to the number 1, or what is called the root chakra in traditional yoga. Hence, might we infer that a certain type of connection to the base of the spine is essential to beginning a study of our own planet and its activity?

"The members of the second section were called 'Akhaldanstrassovors' and this meant that the beings belonging to that section studied what are called the radiations of all the other planets of their solar system and the reciprocal action of these radiations."

This second division would correspond to the number 2, or sex center. Sex center produces the highest energy in man under ordinary conditions. What productive use might this energy be turned to if it were not abused? Is Mr. Gurdjieff hinting at a type of inner work we are unfamiliar with here? The allusion to the "planets of their solar system," when understood in the context of our own inner work, underscores the fact that we are all engaged in the formation of an inner solar system.

"The members of the third section were called "Akhaldanmetrosovors', which meant beings occupied with the study of that branch of knowledge similar to that branch of our general knowledge we call 'Silkoornano', and which partly corresponded to what your contemporary favorites call 'mathematics'."

The third division corresponds to the number four, or the solar plexus. I think it's fairly obvious, we can't infer that the solar plexus does algebra for us... except for those people who happen to have a good gut feeling for math. Nonetheless, mathematics is a precise and objective system, and a person whose reason resides within a system of this nature cannot reach incorrect conclusions, because they are strictly dictated by law. We could infer that a residence within the solar plexus -- which is a condition highly prized in Zen and in the Gurdjieff work -- offers a man the possibility to be more grounded and work from a more objective part of himself.

"The members of the fourth group were called 'Akhaldanpsychosovors', and by this name they then defined those members of the society Akhaldan who made their observations of the perceptions, experiencings, and manifestations of beings like themselves and verified their observations by statistics."

This division would correspond to the number five, or the heart. The description of the group's work seems to suggest both compassion and objectivity.

"The members of the fifth group were called 'Akhaldanharnosovors', which meant that they were occupied with the study of that branch of knowledge which combined those two branches of contemporary science there which your favorites call 'chemistry' and 'physics'."

Division number seven, or, the throat. Those of you familiar with with my other work on the subject will notice that this is the center that deals with the ingestion of air, which plays an absolutely central role in Mr. Gurdjieff's chemical factory. Coincidence? Seems doubtful.

"The members belonging to the sixth section were called 'Akhaldanmistessovors', that is to say, beings who studied every kind of fact arising outside of themselves, those actualized consciously from without and also those arising spontaneously, and which of them, and in what cases, are erroneously perceived by beings."

This is division number eight, represented by the third eye in the system of Chakras. To me, it's interesting that this division of the society is engaged in investigating how things are perceived or seen.

"And as regards the members of the seventh and last group, they were called 'Akhaldangezpoodjnisovors'; these members of the society Akhaldan devoted themselves to the study of those manifestations in the presences of the three-brained beings of their planet which proceeded in them not in consequence of various functionings issuing from different kinds of qualities of impulses engendered owing to data already present in them, but from cosmic actions coming from outside and not depending on them themselves."

Bingo!

This last passage more or less proved the point, at least to my own satisfaction ...when I began to read this section, it immediately dawned on me that Mr. Gurdjieff had buried an allegory about the chakras in the story of the society's divisions, and I skipped ahead to the description of this last division. I fully expected it to have something to do with influences coming from above-- that is, higher influences-- as the seventh chakra plays that role in my interpretation of the enneagram.

Lo and behold! It does. If that is a coincidence, I'll eat my hat.

Mr. Gurdjieff did not just give us a diagram with the enneagram. We now know that he also passed on descriptions of the specific work of each inner center.

This idea may serve some of us in future investigations of the organization of our inner solar systems.

Let us hope and wish, in any event, that it becomes more than just another interesting intellectual excursion.

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