Reclusland

I thanked him for what he had said and added that I was sorry that I had not done my work in the garden and that I would do it properly in the future.

He brushed aside my thanks and said that it was useless to be sorry. “Is too late for that now, and is also too late to do good work in the garden. In life never have second chance, only have one chance. You had one time to do good work in garden, for self; you not do, so now even if you work all your life, in this garden, cannot be same thing for you. But also important not be ’sorry’ about this; can waste all life feeling sorry. There is valuable thing sometimes, thing you call remorse. If man have real remorse for something he do that is not good, this can be valuable; but if only sorry and say will do same thing better in future is waste of time. This time is already gone forever, this part of your life is finished, you cannot live over again. Not important if you do good work in garden now, because will do for wrong reasons—to try to repair damage which cannot be repaired ever. This serious thing. But also very serious not to waste time feeling sorry or feeling regret, this only waste even more time. Must learn in life, not to make such mistakes, and must understand that once make mistake is made forever.”

(again, from “My Journey With A Mystic”)

Further, he said that history had already proven to us that such tools as politics, religion, and any other organized movements which treated man “in the mass” and not as individual beings, were failures. That they would always be failures and that the separate, distinct growth of each individual in the world was the only possible solution.

(from Fritz Peters’ memoir “My Journey With A Mystic”)

“A core aspect of the mind can be defined as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”

(full transcript here)

One thing to note is that this definition means we must separate “mind” from “awareness”…

Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.   If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.   The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.

from Sentences on Conceptual Art
thanks Max!

“The problem is not enjoyment; the problem is attachment.”

“Logical. You’re just giving me a regular, intelligent answer,” Teddy said. “I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”

“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?” he asked. “You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.”

“The trouble is,” Teddy said, “most people don’t want to see things the way they are. They don’t even want to stop getting born and dying all the time. They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice.” He reflected, “I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,” he said. He shook his head.

(from “Teddy”)

“Anything you do for the sake of enlightenment takes you nearer. Anything you do without remembering enlightenment puts you off. But why complicate? Just know that you are above and beyond all things and thoughts. What you want to be, you are it already. Just keep it in mind.”

It is the race, the species that must go staggering on. Mordeen, our ugly little species, weak and ugly, torn with insanities, violent and quarrelsome, sensing evil—the only species that knows evil and practices it—the only one that senses cleanness and is dirty, that knows about cruelty and is unbearably cruel.

Look down. Here he lies sleeping, to teach me. Our dear race, born without courage but very brave, born with a flickering intelligence and yet with beauty in its hands. What animal has made beauty, created it, save only we? With all our horrors and our faults, somewhere in us there is a shining. That is the most important of all facts. There is a shining.

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself.  Stop it, and just DO!

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Man has received from heaven a nature innately good, to guide him in all his movements. By devotion to this divine spirit within himself, he attains an unsullied innocence that leads him to do right with instinctive sureness and without any ulterior thought of reward and personal advantage. This instinctive certainty brings about supreme success and “furthers through perseverance”. However, not everything instinctive is nature in this higher sense of the word, but only that which is right and in accord with the will of heaven. Without this quality of rightness, an unreflecting, instinctive way of acting brings only misfortune. Confucius says about this: “He who departs from innocence, what does he come to? Heaven’s will and blessing do not go with his deeds.”

- Wu Wang / Remaining Blameless

Man, Gurdjieff taught, is an undeveloped creation. He is not really man, considered as a cosmically unique being whose intelligence and power of action mirror the energies of the source of life itself. On the contrary, man as we encounter him is an automaton. His thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. He cannot do anything. In and around him, everything happens without the participation of his own authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive influence of culture and education, which engrave in them the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only an egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will.

from here

(emphasis mine, such a beautiful way of phrasing it)

No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, or briefer than the sum of time.

“…the words were unexpected drops of blood tainting this lovely scenery underneath so brilliant a November sky.”

(from “Spring Snow“)

“You sit around waiting for pearls when what you should actually be doing is not to be swine.”

(from here)

There is an entire dimension of Gurdjieff’s own life and words that is generally left untouched or unspoken in the presentation of the Teaching. For instance, Gurdjieff said: “You must pray with your whole presence and with all three centers concentrated on the same thing……From realizing the significance of your neighbor when your attention rests on him, that he will die, pity for him and compassion toward him will arise in you, and finally you will love him; also, by doing this constantly, real faith, conscious faith, will arise in some part of you and spread to other parts, and you will have the possibility of knowing real happiness.”

These words take us beyond the diagrams, the cosmology, the ribald behavior, to a man of authentic and deep spirituality. There are anecdotes from persons close to him, such as J.G. Bennett, that further confirm this fact: there was a side of Gurdjieff that was not known or shared with his students. This man took care of Russian refugees, assisted the local addicts and prostitutes in his Paris neighborhood, was related to the Russian Orthodox Church to such an extent that a priest was at his side when he died.

This was a man who valued real faith so greatly that he had no tolerance for superficial piety or social club religion. Therefore, he took an entirely different approach to share the Teaching, one especially suited to early twentieth century agnostics who were in search of something that could not be identified with external religion. In this way, he was able to reach people who would never have made their way into a transforming spirituality. He bypassed old associations made with the ideas of Christ which automatically cut the seeker off from the life-giving teaching behind the words.

Gurdjieff seems to have been a teacher who was (and still is) often thought of as either just crazy or more a scoundrel than a wise-man.  But as Theodore Nottingham points out in the above interview, there was quite a compassionate side to him, hidden under the masks he chose (for whatever reason) to wear.  This is the sense I get of him and his teachings, the more and more of them I read.

Its worth sticking through to the end of the second.  “All and Everything and No Thing”.  So easily said…

“The perceptual thresholds are levels where subtle or fast processes can be observed. Below the threshold the process is not observed, and above the threshold the process is observed. A tachistoscope or T-scope is an instrument that can present visual displays at rates of thousandths of a second. The T-scope has been used to determine what humans are capable of becoming aware of at the level prior to conscious attention. Brown’s experiments involved determining how slow objects needed to be flashed, before the subjects were able to perceive them as two separate events. The smallest gap of time between the two events an individual is capable of perceiving the change is that individual’s threshold. Just as IQ will vary among different people, perceptual thresholds vary. Scientists had concluded in 40 years of research before Brown’s work that a threshold for any particular person did not change in a lifetime.

However, Brown’s research produced a startling new finding. After 3-months of vipassana meditation his subjects had significantly lower perceptual thresholds. They were able to perceive much faster and subtler events than before the retreat. The changes were not small changes but big changes. Changes were frequently 100%,200%,500%. One friend of mine had an increase of 1,500%. The results of Brown’s researh give a scientific basis for understanding the results of meditation practice. By focusing the mind in a profound examination of the present moment, processes of the mind which were not accessible to normal consciousness become conscious. These processes are beyond the perceptual threshold of the normal person.”

From Bill Hamilton’s book “Saints and Psychopaths” (pgs 58~59)

(which is pretty much what I was trying to get at here)

“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

(via Ann Seeker)

We are told in our tradition that the Enlightened One taught his disciples using this word “zero,” and he said the zero condition is this perfect complete condition in which plus and minus are unifying with one another and then facing one another over and over again. Plus and minus unify and face, unify and face, but there is no will—it’s a totally will-less activity. Of course human beings have will, but this activity of plus and minus is will-less. The Enlightened One taught his disciples that the activity which forms the universe is always acting will-lessly, and even though it makes many universes and then contracts all of those universes down to the smallest point, there is always simply one singular, unique cosmos.

->

There are Four Changing Lines.
Read the Upper NON-changing Line
Hexagram Thirty-Six/Line Six:

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

(via I Ching Online, emphasis mine)

“Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really Void, but the realm of the real dharma.”

“It is said that someone who tries to meditate without a conceptual understanding of what he or she is doing is like a blind person trying to find the way in open country; such a person can only wander about, with no idea how to choose one direction over another.”

(from a, as far as I’m concerned, literally mindblowing article on Buddhism, psychology, and no-self)

“Bhikkhus, form is impermanent; that which is impermanent is suffering; that which is suffering is insubstantial (anatta); that which is insubstantial is not mine, I am not that, that is not my substance. Thus must this be viewed with perfect insight as it really is” (S. iii. 45).

(via Alex at OE)