Reclusland

Finally finished reading William Segal’s “A Voice at the Borders of Silence” and wanted to give a sort of “best of” here.  The book is an amazing piece of art, collecting essays, stories, letters, and interviews, and I highly recommend it.  For those who missed my earlier post, William Segal was a student of Gurdjieff, Oespensky, as well as Zen Buddhism.  He was close with D. T. Suzuki, and visited many Zen temples throughout Japan.  Hence my interest in him.  I would say he leans more toward Gurdjieff than he does toward Zen, but it’s nice to see how both traditions reflect off each other in one person’s mind.

From a conversation with Marvin Barrett, a brief explanation of his take on what it means to be a “Spiritual Master”:
“I think a true master doesn’t care  about anything other than persistently relating to this mysterious energy which is always present.  He doesn’t care whether a formal training exists and whether he has it or not.  He’s only concerned with his own relationship to the highest.  There’s a freedom and an openness about him that in turn generates an energy which touches others.”

From a conversation with Peter Brook and Michel de Salzmann (son of one of Gurdjieff’s main pupils, Madame Jeanne de Salzmann), on how to learn to relate to that energy:
“I think it’s very difficult taking into consideration the stresses of human existence in the 1990′s.  The difficulties which the average person faces make it almost impossible to develop the sensitivity and awareness necessary to relate to this principle that we’ve been speaking about.  That’s why I think there is still a great popularity of feeling for Zen Buddhism.  There was a specific training.  But that training involved going into a monastery and spending a specific period of time developing one’s capacity to be here.  Gurdjieff’s system takes into account that we are limited in our possibility for practice.  Listening to this glass clink is a practice.  The conversation, the body itself, the moment to moment awareness, however one is able to follow that.  And so over a period of time, one indirectly comes to have this capacity, comes to have this acute awareness.  I speak of it as if it is something you can put in your hand.  I don’t mean it that way.”

From an interview with Ken Burns (who it seems was a student of Mr. Segal’s) as found in “The Man in the Marketplace”:
KB: “How do you practice as you walk down a city street, what do you do?”

WCS: “One doesn’t do anything.  One just strives to be open to what’s around.  To be open.  That means your in touch with the breathing, in touch with the body, in touch with the influx of impressions.  Most of the time we don’t avail ourselves of the wonderful array of impressions which come in through the vision, through hearing, through sensing.  All this is here as if the good Lord made us to take in very fine foods beside the food we eat and the air we breathe.  But sometimes, if I am so much in myself I cover up this gift, I am closed and I don’t receive what is rightfully the human due.

And from a little later in the same interview:
“Because again, it comes down to the fact that within each individual human being, there is this spark of the divine.  But we have been trained to ignore it.  We don’t know how to be in touch with it, except in special moments.  Now, when one is in the marketplace, one realizes that behind all the haggling and behind the bargaining and the shouting and the fuss, it gives the possibility of seeing the sacred in every human being and in ever piece of fruit and every shouting merchant.  So instead of being drained of energy, one is left open to receive and, in turn, this communicates in a strange way.  If you’re calm and blissful in the marketplace, wherever you go you spread harmony.  It really does work for people.”