Reclusland

You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. (emphasis mine)

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.

The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.

So the pain body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.

If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

Many I’s is a term which indicates the different feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ in a person: I think, I want, I know best, I prefer, I am happy, I am hungry, I am tired, etc. These feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ usually have nothing in common with one another, and are present for short periods of time. They tie in directly with Gurdjieff’s claim that man has no unity in himself. This lack of unity results in wanting one thing now, and another, perhaps contradictory, thing later.

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

Remember the animals?

The seventh consciousness is called klesa mind.  It is a mind-consciousness (the sixth type of consciousness).  It is the ignorant moment of consciousness that immediately follows a sense consciousness, causing outer perceived and inner perceiving aspect to appear as separate entities.  The first moment of sense consciousness is free from this ignorance, but it is so swift, one is not aware of it and all one’s conceptual notions follow on the basis of the following moment, the klesa-mind.

For he who eats of the tree of the knowledge of good, appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the lord says and does in him.

(1) The view of meditation as disembodiment involves not only our idea that we meditate to remove ourselves from the dirt and detritus of our habitual mental states. More subtly, it is our mental image of an ideal, disembodied state that we (perhaps unconsciously) hold up before ourselves every time we sit down to practice. This may be based on a memory of a state experienced in our practice or with a respected teacher, or something we have read or heard. No matter what specific practice we may be using, this mental image, whether conscious or unconscious, is guiding and directing our meditation. It will limit how we are able to engage and how much we are able to experience, and it will restrict what we are able to see.

(2) Based on such a view, meditation too easily involves a perversion of the basic Buddhist practice of mindfulness. For example, we may “follow the breath” in such a way that we try to factor out everything else in our experience—the physical sensations, feelings, energy and emotions that are given in our physical being, the openendedness that true physicality entails. When problematic or confusing mental states arise, we may all to easily “go back to the breath” and thus avoid engaging these phenomena. In a similar manner, if we meditate with chants, mantras, or visualizations, we may use these as a way to distance ourselves from our more usual, problematic experience.

(3) The result of this kind of practice may be, in the short run, a state that is clean and clear, devoid of pain. While that may sound appealing, the long term result is not: our bodies are left untransformed and the givenness of our lives is left as it was, unredeemed. This is disastrous for the spiritual life for a very simple reason: the meditative path unfolds only to the extent that we engage in the transformation of our ordinary experience. Simply distancing ourselves from the pain of our experience and removing ourselves from it will produce no long-term results. We will be able to remain in a disembodied state for a certain period of time and then, when the energy of maintaining such a state runs out, we will fall back into our usual ignorance and neurotic patterns. Our response to this sad result may be that we begin to distrust meditation, our meditation teachers, and even the dharma itself.

“Quietism, while bearing a superficial resemblance to Christian contemplation, is actually its complete contradiction.  The contemplative empties himself of every created love in order to be filled with the love of God alone, and divests his mind from all created images and phantasms in order to receive the pure and simple light of God directly into the summit of his soul.  The quietist, on the other hand, pursuing a false sense of absolute “annihilation” of his own soul, seeks to empty himself of all love and all knowledge and remain inert in a kind of spiritual vacuum in which there is no motion, no thought, no apprehension, no act of love, no passive receptivity, but a mere blank without light or warmth or breath of interior life.  Thus the quietist imagines he is being passively moved by God.”

(from page 71 of this slim little volume)

“That Moses was given the Tablets of the Law on a mountain is significant: every mountain is that dreadful mountain of the Law, there move over it the thunder and the lightnings, there move on it the smoke and fire, there sounds from it the trumpet of the dreadful summons. The dread is that now is Now, that here is Here, that everything that is actually is, and everything is irrevocably moving”

- – -

“But what’s it all about?” I cry.
“If I could tell you, then it wouldn’t be a mystery,” says God. “Let it be enough that I ask for your help.”

- – -

“How startling are the secret colors that in time of peace are hidden beneath the skin.  We slaughter sheep and cattle and chickens as a matter of course; we are the vertical ones with the knives so we assume this as a right: we slit the throat, the heart pumps out its last bursts of blood into a basin, we open their bodies and lay hands on their varicolored mysteries of red and purple, blue and yellow inner parts.  But in time of war, each man is a cattle to his enemy and they struggle to see which one will be the slaughterer.  The stranger, the unknown to whom one must always offer hospitality, that sacred stranger has now become a murderer whom we must murder first.  How strange that this is not strange.”

—>

CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Twelve/Line Six

Nine at the top means:
The standstill comes to an end.
First standstill, then good fortune.

The standstill does not last forever. However, it does not cease of its own accord; the right man is needed to end it. This is the difference between a state of peace and a state of stagnation. Continuous effort is necessary to maintain peace: left to itself it would change into stagnation and disintegration. The time of disintegration, however, does not change back automatically to a condition of peace and prosperity; effort must be put forth in order to end it. This shows the creative attitude that man must take if the world is to be put in order.

From “Pilgermann“:

“Every action is under His control,” said Firouz.  “How can that be, really? Think of the dreadful things that are done in this world every day.”

“The child is under the control of the parents, is it not,” said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘ yet must the child creep on its hands and knees before it can walk, and when it first walks it can only go a step or two before it falls.”

“True, true,” said Farouz.  “That’s all we are: little children creeping on our hands and knees.  The parent, however, doesn’t punish the child for falling, while Allah the Watchful will surely punish the sinner, will he not?”

“The child who falls when learning to walk has not the choice,” said Bembel Rudzuk, ” but the sinner has.”

“Then what was the use use of bringing the child into it at all?” said Firouz.  “It’s a useless analogy, it’s no help whatever.”

“It’s a perfectly useful analogy, ” said Bembel Rudzuk: “the consequence of not being able to walk is to fall and the consequence of not being able to maintain moral balance is also to fall.  How could it be otherwise?”

“To be in a fallen state,” said Firouz, “that isn’t so dreadful; all sorts of fallen people ride about on good horses wearing fine clothes and who can tell the difference?  I’m thinking about later, I’m thinking about the Fire where one burns and burns and is given molten brass to drink.  Do you think that’s really how it is?”

“I think the Fire is in the soul of each of us,” said Bembel Rudzuk: “those of us consigned to the Fire burn every day and every night.”

“Everything is burning,” said the Buddha, “burning with the fire of passion, with the fired of hatred, with the fire of stupidity.” (Vin. 21)

From “Pilgermann“:

My being was grating on this day as the teeth grate on a stone in the bread.

Many, many Americans come to me and ask for an African initiation, but I tell them no, that they should look into their own lives and the place to look is your suffering.  I’ve come to realize that there is some close affinity between what I may call the organized, indigenous initiation, and the almost random, unpredictable chain of suffering and pain that befalls just about everybody, whether it is here or elsewhere.  What I learned from it is that the similarity between the two is in the pain and the suffering—it does indeed serve a purpose.

I would like to believe that a major illness has to have a purpose; it has to have a function; otherwise, it wouldn’t just come like that.  My sense is that in the absence of what I may call organized initiatory pathways, somehow the individual spirit is strong enough to invoke its own initiation!

“Soon, Gurdjieff gave the group a new series of exercises which required a complex and sustained inner attention beyond anything that had before been attempted.  He asked them to take a pledge before beginning each new exercise that ‘we would not use this for the self, but for all humanity’ – what Gurdjieff expressed as ‘good-wishing-for-all’.”

“For Kathryn, this opened up an entirely new perspective.  ‘This “good-wishing-for-all” vow,’ she said, ‘so deeply moving in intent, had a tremendous effect on me.  For the first time in my life, I felt that I was truly doing something for humanity as I strove to make my own molecule of it more perfect.  The meaning of this Work, which had first seemed quite egotistical and self-centered, suddenly blossomed out like a tree of life encompassing in its myriad branchings the entire human family…. It was my first experiencing of the Mystical Body of Christ, of which I knew nothing then.”

Another excerpt from William Patrick Patterson’s “Ladies of the Rope”.  Kathryn Hulme was another member of the Rope.  Included in the above idea can be seen Gandhi’s “We need to be the change we wish to see in the world” and Buckminster Fuller’s idea of synergy.  One can also see similarities here to the idea of the World House-Earth Body mentioned in the long Martin Prechtel quote from last week.

“It is a madness that will pass, only to be succeeded by another.  In the current of madness even Hitler isn’t to blame – he’s merely a tool of Nature: on the theory that Nature needs certain emanations and gets them – millions of human beings agonizing over war – all those vibrations filling the invisible universes… The wish to go on, the struggle not to fall back – all this makes a friction that produces combustion…and out of these energies springs a fire”

This is not meant to excuse the violence and loss of life Hitler caused, but is rather an attempt to make sense of the senseless truth of his existence and rise to power.  When read in conjunction with yesterday’s post from Martin Prechtel, perhaps something of the sense here can be understood.

Also, just for informational purposes, Margaret Anderson was a student of Gurdjieff, a member of a group of women student’s Gurdjieff worked with late in his life.  They were known as “The Rope” and much more can be read about them (and Mr. Gurdjieff himself, thanks to the wonderful notes they took during their meetings with him) in William Patrick Patterson’s “Ladies of the Rope”.  Margaret’s take on the meaning and purpose of the existence of war is a brief outline of the fuller view expressed in Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson“, in particular, chapter 43, entitled “Beelzebub’s Survey of the Process of the Periodic Reciprocal Destruction of Men, or Beelzebub’s Opinion of War”

“We knew, too, that the whole world was spiritually endangered.  Shamans knew this because we were shown during our training and initiation how the world is actually one big body.  The world is also a sacred building called The House of the World, and our own individual bodies are made like it and are also called House of the World.  Inside the other world of our bodies, everything that can be found in the outer world also exists.  When spirits see us, they see a beautiful house, a temple.  When we see them, we see the world.

<…>

When an individual falls ill, something in his World House-Earth Body is being attacked, gnawed away, eroded, shed, burnt, dismembered, or is beginning to fade because of neglect.  The shaman assesses the destruction and, after dealing with the cause, begins rebuilding the World House of that person’s body by remembering all its parts back to life – by making it echo off the Original Flowering Earth, what shamans call creation, the Big Earth House Temple.

<…>

The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay.  The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long.  Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed.  To do this, the villagers come together once a year at least, to work on putting back together somebody’s hut, talking, laughing, feasting, and helping wherever they can in a gradual, graceful way.  This way, each family’s place in the village is reestablished and remembered.

If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together.  Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed.  Smart people might be able to invent excuses to get together, but this is too abstract and hollow, and some contrivance insults the soul.  People have a genuine need to make things with their ingenuity and with their hands.

This coming together to gather water by hand, to do communal tasks gracefully – tasks that a machine could do in an instant anonymously – or to repair rickety houses ensures that the very smiley togetherness so missing in the pre-planned, alienated lives of modern civilization.  When a Tzutujil (Mayan) says he needs to be healed, he asks the shaman to chumij, or replaster, him.  When we begin to fade, the shaman plasters us with remembrance so that we can shine again.

Ironically, the great amounts of unnatural violence, senseless killing, and mechanized warfare that we see these days signals extreme fear in the face of natural death and decay.  These difficult conditions come about when a people are not truly at home.  Unable to re-create the House of the World as we shamans do, subscribers to modernity jettison all ideas of ritual life and feeding the spirits.  Instead they look for permanent solutions, such as nuclear bombs, war, concentration camps, laws, and ideals that must be upheld and defended.  All this activity is a search for  increased security to protect uninitiated people from what they perceive as a hostile universe.

<…>

Though the modern world can appear somewhat soulless and its people numbed and asleep, I discovered that deeply in the World House of their bodies live resourceful, intelligent, soulful refugees who, like myself, waited and wondered when they would ever be welcomed back home again.

When I divine the Earth Bodies of many people of today, their worlds look like a post-war country, bombed out, dry, flowerless, and tired.  That flat devastation wreaked upon these people’s Earth Body needs renewing.  Their World House needs reassembling, replastering; it has to be remembered back to life, so that the faraway native souls, their natural indigenous beings, can return to their homes.  Maybe this is why Chiviliu sent me away, to sing and speak these people’s lives back together.  After all, he said that the destruction was coming from them.  Our world was being killed by people whose naturalness had been disenfranchised long ago.”

“You can only hate yourself if you have some kind of stand point or some kind of idea about who you are supposed to be, and then who you are of course doesn’t measure up, so you hate that. You hate who you *actually* are, you hate your tenderness, you hate your light, you hate your darkness. So the more we let go of our story line, the less reference points we have to hate ourselves.” ~ Reggie Ray

Since one story is pretty obviously a bad thing, is it possible to live with multiple stories?  What would doing so do to our sense of identity?

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do.  How little they knew of what they created by their demands.  Leaders made mistakes.  And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward greater disasters.

—>

CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Fifty-Two/Line Three

Nine in the third place means:
Keeping his hips still.
Making his sacrum stiff.
Dangerous. The heart suffocates.

This refers to enforced quiet. The restless heart is to be subdued by forcible means. But fire when it is smothered changes into acrid smoke that suffocates as it spreads. Therefore, in exercises in meditation and concentration, one ought not to try to force results. Rather, calmness must develop naturally out of a state of inner composure. If one tries to induce calmness by means of artificial rigidity, meditation will lead to very unwholesome results.

From “Keys to a Great Poetic Game – #15”

“To the same light, perpetually active in its inaction, organic functions that contribute to the maintenance of the corporal form and those more subtly organized functions that constitute within the body, bodies of many particular desires are enfolded. Since I stop considering them as my nature or as my property, they tend immediately to reunite with nature which ceases, at the same instant, to be considered as something exterior. They now appear as animals which have been enclosed for a long time within the human skin and which, once freed, hasten to rejoin their own packs.”

“So who asks: What am I?”

“Dangerous question.  Asking it put her in a universe where nothing was quite human.  Nothing matched the undefined thing she sought.  All around her, clowns, wild animals and puppets reacted to the pull of hidden strings.  She sensed the strings that jerked her into action.”

<…>

“Strings. What came with the egg?  We speak glibly of ‘the mind at its beginning’. But what was I before the pressures of living shaped me?”

“You know our future, why won’t you share it?” Moneo was close to hysteria…refusing anything his immediate senses did not repot.

Leto turned to glare at the Majordomo, a gaze so obviously filled with pent-up emotions that Moneo recoiled from it.

“Take charge of your own existence, Moneo!”

Moneo took a deep, trembling breath.  “Lord, I meant no offense.  I sought only…”

“Look upward Moneo!”

Involuntarily, Moneo obeyed, peering into the cloudless sky where morning light was increasing. “What is it, Lord?”

“There’s no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo.  Only an open sky full of changes.  Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change.  Does that tell you nothing?”

The more he remembered consciously, the more his abilities were blocked.  He was forced to pause, breathing deeply in the attempt to center himself, to back to the natural ways of his past.

Most civilization is based on cowardice.  It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice.  You water down the standards which would lead to bravery.  You restrain the will.  You regulate the appetites.  You fence in the horizons.  You make a law for every movement.  You deny the existence of chaos.  You teach even the children to breath slowly.  You tame.

(Note, however, that he says “Most civilizations”.  Cowardice is not being pointed to as endemic in civilization, just the easiest way to it.

“Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.”

Moneo opened his mouth but closed it without speaking.

“Small children know,” Leto said.  “It’s only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.  Moneo! Uncover yourself!”

“Lord, I cannot!”  The words were torn from Moneo.  He trembled with anguish.  ” I do not have your powers, your knowledge of…”

“Enough!”

Moneo fell silent.  His body shook.

Leto spoke soothingly to him.  “It’s alright Moneo.  I asked too much of you and I can see your fatigue.”

Civilizations collapse when their powers outrun their religions!

First-hand access to human mistakes was his greatest strength now.  Knowledge of mistakes taught him long-term consequences.  He had to be constantly aware of consequences.  If consequences were lost or concealed, lessons were lost.

Do you know what guerrilla often say?  They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow.  The fools merely fail to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay.  The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures.  You can see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies – in any system which creates and maintains  dependencies.  Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

(and so once the coup is achieved, the parasite turns into an near-exact copy of its prey, as that is the only world it ever took the time to embody.  See also this)

If the demands of your flesh are for maturity, but something holds you in adolescence, quite nasty behavior develops…. All of us try to evolve, but if something blocks us, we can transfer our potential into pain – seeking it or giving it.  Adolescents are particularly vulnerable.

The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not stimulate or delude.  I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only an analogy.  I desire no results.  I merely permit this field which has no goals or desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements.  In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all.  It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe.

“I have deliberately ignored the admonition of Mohammed and Moses.  Even you know it Moneo!”

It was an accusation.  Moneo started to nod, then shook his head from side to side.  He wondered if he dared renew his retreat.  Moneo knew from long experience that lectures in this tenor did not long continue without the coming of the Worm.

“What admonition might that be?” Leto asked.  There was a mocking lightness in his voice.

Moneo allowed himself a faint shrug.

Abruptly, Leto’s voice filled the chamber with a rumbling baritone, an ancient voice, which spoke across the centuries: “You are servants unto God, not servants unto servants!”

Moneo wrung his hands and cried out: “I serve you, Lord!”

“Moneo, Moneo,” Leto said, his voice low and resonant, “a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right.  The right is known because it endures.“