A vast dry wasteland, nothing but scrub horizon to horizon, the sky distant above. Blue canvas, white smears, intentional perhaps, but only subjectively so. A wind arises, not a “languid” wind because “languid” implies sensuality. “Apathetic”, perhaps, but oilier than that. “Unctuous”, but less morally abhorrent. This very wind oozes out along the plane, picking up tumble weeds here, turning on itself in the sudden frenzy of whirling there. Grains of sand are blown about, scattered like refugees, so used to these sudden abductions that they are numb; empty husks in the hands of the careless wind. Above, the clouds stir restlessly, like a lover, horny but only in the half-dead way brought on by a hot summer morning spent over-long in bed.

I should not go back over and read this, because it does not matter what it says, it only says what it said when it was saying it, and now it is saying this, and now it is saying this and now it is saying this. To hold a concern what it was saying moments ago is to make this into something other than it is. This is a wet cough of a paragraph, that is all. A white space filled with phlegmy goo. Want to see? Well… I didn’t want to show it to you anyway. There should be an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence, but there’s not. Or, I should say, it might seem like there should be an exclamation point, but there shouldn’t. This is fun, this endless falling, flailing through the void that is a blank page. What does one think about when one feels the terror of falling, but at the same time, feels pretty sure that hitting bottom isn’t actually an option? How absurd the terror that simultaneously knows its existence and its own untruth. You have to feel sorry for it, in a way, even if only to avoid the social gaffe of laughing at its dilemma. Not a good habit to get into, laughing at the absurdity of terror.

So then terror is put soundly to bed, occasionally giving out cute little wheezings, but otherwise pretty much satisfied, a little smile on its face. Such a happy guy, you want to tousle its hair a bit. You refrain, but now what? At one point, perhaps boredom peeked in around the door, but boredom can only be a momentary companion at best, so long as one is aware of one’s constant falling. Perhaps the scenery doesn’t change, but you can’t claim to be bored by the constant wind whipping past your face and your limbs flailing about in all directions. So no, no boredom, unless you go back to sleep, and that’s not really an option, is it? What else is around then? Ah, I see. Pride. Pride rises like a sun within, warming seeds, bringing forth the first green shoots of future plans. I see, indeed. A precious thing, this pride, though impossible to trust, because while watching and watering those green shoots, it’s all too easy to slip into a dream about gardening, and then what? You forget you’re falling, that’s what, and forgetting your falling (even though you’re still falling) is cutting your self off from that vast void. “Only the doors to emptiness support the hive”.

But hey, look, I seem to be doing a bit of the old “holy fool” act here. Arid wasteland is turned into root-of-all-that-is. Or is it? Actually, no, you see, the wasteland’s not healed if the king’s just having pretty dreams. The dude needs to wake up and start fixing shit. Pride’s just the last (the last?) defense of good old Mara. If he can convince you you’ve won before you’ve actually won, you’ll spend all day polishing your trophy while the other racers decay around you.

Sadly, here is where the real world comes in. I’ve been distracted, you see, pulled away from the blankness. Maintenance, both physical and emotional, is requiring attention. But then, is there ever really anything else? What does it mean to be satisfied? How does satisfaction differ from death? Movement requires friction, and if all life is dukha, then what’s satisfaction? How to spend what is given to you when it is both priceless and worthless? But I wander into the dangerous shores of solipsistic speculation here, and while extreme close-ups of my bellybutton lint might hold some small possibly being of slight interest to perhaps one or maybe two people, but they don’t really help anyone much, do they?

I have a tendency, just like that wind, to either pick up tumble weeds and play with them idly, or turn inwards in a sudden frenzy of self-chasing (and what happens when you catch your self, that ever-fading echo of after-image?). Meanwhile, the sands of my emotional life are thrown hither and thither, numb by the tireless movement of it all. Perhaps they’d sprout, if they could just sit in one place long enough to get some light and perhaps put down some roots…

But then, are these more dream flowers, or are they the real thing? Now I’ve cast myself as Grail King it seems, but is it pride or masochism to take on the archetype of The Divine Sufferer? Or is it neither? God sends his son, ever minute of every day, to be crucified at the crossroads of the here and the now, and most people just sit and stare blankly: “Oh my, look at what their showing on the TV!”

If awareness voluntarily takes on form, why does it do so? It seems the best to consider this as done-for-the-purpose-of-healing, but that which is healed is only ever injured in the first place because of word-taking-flesh having seemingly gone awry. It’s as if we’re little psychic platelets, coming to patch a wound in the universe’s side, except that on coming out of the wound, we only make it wider when we harden into scab. It’s a gross picture, but there you have it. I can find no source this wound , it seems.

Still, I must do something, mustn’t I? Looking at things from the perspective of the wounded seems like it might be a good way to go about healing said wound, perhaps. After all, when “things-as-they-are are perfect only we don’t see it as such”, perhaps we are the one who’s wounded. What’s a God but a blown up picture of a man? It wasn’t Satan who rebelled from God, it was the ego, but the ego’s still God nonetheless, it just doesn’t know it. And the Garden of Eden, well, that’s going on every moment of every day. In everything we do there is the Garden and there is Good and there is Evil. And never the three shall meet (though is it three or only two? is it two, or only one?) Can the garden ever be truly left behind, or is it spread across the earth and we just do not see it? Bah. Hall of pretty mirrors. When will you reflect clearly? When I am both reflected and reflector, it is hard to get a complete picture, but when I am neither, how do I see?

So there you have it: there is no self. Buddha was right. Then again, such philosophies can create a false sense of doneness and this scares me more than anything else. And all this here? Simple more grass in the hole. I look around, I check my downloads, I pull out my storage cases. Having doesn’t mean understanding, and understanding doesn’t mean being able to recall, and being able to recall doesn’t mean skillfully using. Why not just jump to that last step, since there is no guarantee any one of these will lead to the next? Oh, because you might hurt yourself (or someone else)? Hmm… Good point. Can that, then, be avoided through the means of utter sincerity?

I wish to do more descriptions but find myself at a loss. Trees, this time perhaps. More fitting for my surroundings anyway. Fronds on trees. Bark puckered by the moisture, flowering. Moss abounding everywhere, its softness joyfully greeting your touch. Or maybe better vice-versa: your touch joyfully greeting its softness. Everything is wet here, everything drips, everything gleams. Everything is ALIVE. You feel like a bubble full of noxious gas in a children’s softly scented daycare. Afraid to let go the horrors you cling to inside, but longing for your deep tortured-bits to be touched by that humming song of life-full-ness.

And they tell me I have to de-humidify the building! Bah! Let me live in the mould and the mildew. Let the ferns and moss sprout on every wall, give me the trees beneath my feet, the rain in my hair, and the world as my room. But leave me a small dry corner in which to start a fire, yeah? Cause there’s no reason to make it one or the other. Is it two or is it three? Or is it one-with-two-faces-which-we-confuse-as-three? Or does it need to be anything at all? Perhaps it doesn’t, but try to tell yourself that when it’s cold and there’s a hole in your wall that the whole damp forest spills through, and you’re too afraid it’d be another social gaffe if you brought out the matches so you sit shivering.

This is fun. I like this. I hope to do more of this, yes, much more, and maybe at some point the whole thing will spontaneously burst into form, noise into signal, or better yet, noise into symphony. Yes. Let us keep our fingers crossed, and our rabbit’s feet fondled, eh? First-planted-seeds seem to grow the quickest around here, but, as always, there is the question of maintenance. Work is needed, struggle. If it were effortless, you’d be always satisfied, and if always satisfied, there’d be no friction, and if you were frictionless you’d be dead. What joy is there in death? But then, what joy in endless trips to the dungeon just to enjoy the light on your face when you finally remember how to get out? None, to my mind, and besides, you only forgot the way out in the first place because it’s no fun to trying to escape a dungeon when you already know all the exits. Bah! Another stupid game.

But then, what to do if it’s the only game in town? Go to a new town? Now there’s a step into the unknown. I’ve heard it said that there are only ever two real stories: A stranger enters town. Or someone leaves town. And yet here we are making a heads-or-tails decision out of a single coin again. We’ve escaped from the dungeon game into an exact and identical copy of the same thing. New towns might hold new games, but learning a new game means you’ve just built another dungeon around yourself. It’s not “the only game in town” it’s town-as-game, civilization-as-sideshow, but when the genii’s out the bottle how can it possibly be pushed back in? How can we convince it to stop distracting us?

The only way out is through, the only way forward is to pick up our tools where they were left (by ourselves? by others? it doesn’t matter) and carry on. The work continues, and we are only given the instructions as we need them. The blueprint’s too big to carry, so we get a page at a time and even that gets taken away when we get confused and start endlessly building door-frame after door-frame, instead of putting in a hallway. But they let us go on, regardless. After all, it’s our house we’re building. We have to live in it. There ain’t no one else ready to do the building, and it’s a sunuvabitch to train a new work-crew.

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.

2) We are so angered by the presence of a barrier in our life that we refuse to let it go, once we have climbed over it.  We must work to accept the thing we once fought against, for without accepting the fact of its existence, we do not feel safe letting it go.  After all, if we let it go, wouldn’t we just come upon it again?

3) Our very inability to accept the barrier, coupled with our desire to be rid of it, ties us to it deeply, in places we cannot bring ourselves to look.  In this case, the repetitive nature of the barrier, the fact that it comes up again and again in our lives, shows that this barrier is actually a friend, albeit one wearing the mask of an enemy.  It has come to show us just how deeply we have allowed this thing we dub “enemy” to sink its claws into us.

4) Coming to a bar across our path, we may eventually leap over it, but afterwards, we often rest the back of our knees against it, like a child hiding his unwanted diner underneath his chair.  We can end up carrying many heavy barriers behind our knees this way, and not even know they are there.  And then we wonder why they keep showing up in our lives.

5) All too readily, this leads to the loathing of the barrier, and sadly, this loathing is nothing more than another layer of pearlescent moulding we excrete, tying ourselves more tightly to this barrier that is enemy-friend.  We cannot bring ourselves to trust a reality in which such a barrier is allowed to exist.  And yet, our very inability to accept the barrier’s existence is what brings it back again and again.  Because despite our unwillingness to accept it, it does exist, otherwise, we would not be blocked in the first place.

6) If we cannot accept the existence of this truly existing thing, then the only thing we seem to be able to do is keep it around and willfully blind ourselves to it, hoping to ensure that it can never take us by surprise.  And so, it is obvious to see why it does take us by surprise, every single time.

7) Thus does clinging spring from hatred, desire from dislike.  Thus does the wheel spin without traction, bringing us the same challenges, over and over again, dressed in slightly different costumes. Can we ever break free of such things?  How could we, when we have built up such a pattern of willful ignorance to the very existence of the roots that give rise to these things.  Still, it could be possible, yes?  I do not presume to answer this, but I leave it up to you, who wish to, to try to see that weight they carry, and in seeing it truly, drop it without hesitation.

However, as much as I like Merton’s idea of surrender to a higher power, it brought about a conflict in me when I first read it.  My teacher in the ways of the shaman, Malidoma Some, often points out that Spirit doesn’t like it when we approach It as one with an attitude of groveling, one who is somehow in deficit, with an attitude of “please sir (or mam, if you prefer), if it’s not too much trouble, could you please perhaps take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and possibly help me with this one small little request I have, please, I’m sorry, please please please?”.  He points out that, when confronted with such a request, Spirit will just ignore you, because Spirit prefers to deal with people who show competence and strength.  This too has felt intuitively true to me.

And this leaves me rather at an impasse.  Does the divine want our submission, our recognition that it is higher and that next to it we are as nothing, or does the divine want us to show it our strength and competence?  It seemed both couldn’t be true at the same time.  Was it simply a problem of mixing traditions?  Perhaps, but this really didn’t feel correct either.  I wasn’t mixing traditions so much as I was trying to understand the underlying truth that both traditions point to, and if there’s something wrong with that, kill me now, because that’s all my life is about, really.

While out for a jog a little later,  I was ruminating on Malidoma’s insistence that we not appear weak before Spirit, and I kept pondering the idea of what it means to be strong.  And then I remembered the Tarot:

The Strength card shows a lion, docilely allowing it’s mouth to be opened by a woman.  And this picture from a friend’s Facebook feed points to the same idea:

This is how it came to me to be understood. We are full formed beings, and it is our job in this life to integrate and re-member the different parts of our body/heart/mind/soul/spirit/whatever.  And we are to grow strong in this manner. But in the end, these things are all, and have always been, part of the Oneness of the Whole.  As we integrate ourselves, we integrate aspects of the Whole, and then we have to sacrifice this whole self to the Whole Self, allowing the Reality of the Divine (or the Divinity of Reality) to flow through us, offering up all in strength, humility, and modesty to that higher power that needs our strength to be strong in this world.

God
dissolved
my mind – my separation.
I cannot describe my intimacy with Him.
How dependent is your body’s life on water and food and air?
I said to God, “ I will always be unless you cease to Be,”
And my Beloved replied, “And I
would cease to Be
if you
died.”
-Teresa Of Avila

This love sacrifices all souls, however wise, however “awakened”
Cuts off their heads without a sword, hangs them without a scaffold.
We are the guests of the one who devours his guests
The friends of the one who slaughters his friends….
Although by his gaze he brings death to so many lovers
Let yourself be killed by him: is he not the water of life?
Never, ever, grow bitter: he is the friend and kills gently.
Keep your heart noble, for this most noble love
Kills only kings near God and men free from passion.
We are like the night, earth’s shadow.
He is the Sun: He splits open the night with a sword soaked in dawn….
-Rumi

Except the thing is, it’s not really a sacrifice, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the Truth of the Way things already Are.  And this process of building and dissolving, building and dissolving, goes on and on, possibly without end, until we die and are forced to admit that same very Truth.  And even then, we don’t have to if we don’t want to.

“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!

Gurdjieff would have said yes; BUT in his system, the ability to “will” or “to do” was something only possible for a very realized being, impossible for most of us standard grade three-centered-beings.  The Buddha (and please do correct me if you think I’m wrong on any of this) would have said no; no-self + dukkha + impermanence leaves little ground for a “will” to take root.  Christians have the whole “thy will be done” thing.  And Hindus, I believe, are sort of all over the map about that, depending on which school of Hindu thought one subscribes to.

Since there is no unity among the great religions and traditions, we standard level folk can’t point any fingers and say “well, everyone says it’s like that, so it must be so.  And it’s more fun that way I think (which might be why they’ve done us the favor of disagreeing).  However, while appreciating the fun that comes along with any good mystery, I also kind of have my own opinion on the matter, one that was recalled to mind recently by the quote on “animals” from Herbert and Daumal.

To whit: “free will” takes as its base the idea that we can do what we want.  Yet this doesn’t take into account that we do not choose our desires.  That is, discovering that we desire a certain outcome, we cannot then choose to change desires and begin to desire a totally different outcome.  We can choose to act on one or another of our many desires, and we can choose the degree of free rein we allow them, but this is not the same as choosing what it is that we will. Given that we cannot choose to will, I do not see how we can actually claim to have anything a personal will.  If anything, we are engaged in a supremely difficult balancing act of different desires while things change around us at a rapid, rapid pace.  Not a good basis for saying that we control our own fates.

For me, this pretty much wraps up the whole “free will vs. determination” thing, in a fairly logical manner, without resorting to any sort of dogmatism.  Total free will is impossible, but, at the same time, it does not follow that everything is already 100% determined.  It’s a false argument.  Stuff just comes up, be it “external” stuff or “internal” stuff, and all we can do is choose when and how they react with each other.  There is choice in that, and some room to exercise a bit of will power, but only within limited options.  And chances are, we are much more limited by the options than we care to admit.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

So yeah, that’s my thoughts on the matter.  However, I do think there’s a good chance I’m missing something in the argument.  Does it hold weight?  Is it water-tight?  Since I personally quite like the whole explanation, it says to me that I need an outside opinion on that matter.  So, what do you say, oh wise and learned readership?  Am I missing any logical circuits there?  Anything unnoticed dimensions that make the whole thing much more ambiguous than what I’ve laid out above?  I’d actually like to see this picked apart here, so please, do me the favor of doing so.

A man, wandering late at night through a dark wood, came upon a large house.  Inside the house, there appeared to be a great celebration going on.  Lights, music, cheering; the man could smell food cooking and hoped to soon be inside, enjoying himself with all the other guests.  For with such a grand party, how could they turn away one lonely traveler?  The man searched around and around the house, looking for a way into the house.

On his third trip around, he finally noticed a small door, at the back of the house, away from the lights and sounds of the party.  This, it seemed, was the only way into the festivities.  He stepped up to the door, knocked once, sharply, and stepped back to await for the door to be opened for him.  He dusted off his clothes and rana  hand through his hair, hoping to make a good appearance.  Minutes passed, but no one came to the door.

He stepped back up to the door, knocked again, louder this time, and stood there waiting, looking up at the window over the door.  Still, no answer.  Desperate to find a place to rest his feet, fill his stomach, and converse with other human beings (for he had been alone in the woods a long time), the man turned his attention back to the door and began knocking and knocking and knocking.

Eventually, just has he was beginning to grow tired and his hands to sore, a light went on in a second story window above the door.  Revived by the hope that someone might hear him, the man renewed his pounding.  Still, though he hammered with all his might, no one came to the door, nor even to the lighted window on the second story.

A long time after that, when his hands were numb with the repeated efforts of banging on the door, he heard a faint noise in the hallway behind the door.  He grew frantic and began to bang and knock and hammer for all he was worth.  The muffled sound continued from behind the door, but still, no one opened it to let him in.

He pounded and pounded, until his hands were raw, and the door was stained with his blood.  At this point, he was so tired and hungry that all he knew was the knocking, the continual knocking against the door, and that he must keep it up at all costs, until the door was opened and he was allowed into the house.  At that point, he heard the rattle of the lock being turned back and saw the door knob jiggle back and forth.  A voice was speaking on the other side, but the man could not make out the words.  He fell to his knees in front of the door, begging, pleading to be let in.  But to no avail.

At last, the man gave up.  Cursing the house and its happy occupants, he turned around and began to walk back into the dark woods.   And just as he was about to step outside the warm glow of the light from the second story window, the door slowly creaked outwards and the master of the house stood in the doorway, a lighted candle in his hand.

“Good sir!” he cried. “I must apologize, for all your troubles, but I could never have hoped to open the door with you standing so close.  And even if I could, with all your knocking and pounding, I did not know what manner of guest you were.  Now I can clearly see you are a poor traveler in need of shelter.  Please, come and join our celebration, we have more than enough to provide for one more.  And we must bandage those wounds on your hands as well!”

So the man entered the house at last, had his wounds bandaged, and joined the party.  However, he did not make the best party guest, at least, not at first.  He could not easily shake the foul mood of being locked outside the house for so long, his hands were bandaged, and the other guests were startled by his tendency to knock repeatedly on any wooden surface within his reach.

The resolution and strength with which these journeys were undertaken, given how little they had to go on once above the clouds, never ceased to amaze me. And still, they went, smiling, into that unmarked expanse of blue, over the cloud-hidden mountains, and, when they were lucky, landed safely at their destinations only to fly out again soon after.

Saint-Exupery’s narrative wanders in and out multiple stories, creating an abstract collage of beerhall-tales, bonhomie, and bona-fide wisdom. Yet he maintains his golden thread of wonder throughout, building to a pensive but hopeful climax with a call for the rebirth of the Spirit of Greatness in man, for “Only the Spirit, breathing on the clay, can create Man”.

Ah, just go read it it already; I’m done trying to sell you on it. And come back over the next several posts for several tasty excerpts.

Foam on an ocean of sky

My head opens wide

Whence Atlantis? And why Atlantis?
Too much said already; the dryness comes.
Descend, oh seeker! Lower yourself into the watery depths.
Soak, become muddied, deluded, diluted. Disillusioned.

In the bamboo forests of the mind, peppered with blind ninjas,
Thoughts crash and slash each other, when by random chance they meet.
Such a war of double speak. Can you contain these multitudes?

More importantly, should you?

I feel the desert returning; the jungle people are growing tired.
The sea people are laughing as they ride the tides away.
The desert people sit, staring dully at the whispering sands around their feet.

Is this, then, to be the source? The chrysalis and the butterfly?
Perhaps we are better off without such dusty butterflies…

But if not this, not now, not here…
Then what, when, where?

It is not as if it can’t happen. But will it ever happen?

To retain our relevance, we must grow within and out of.

Have we not learned by now, how birth is a bloody, horrible struggle?

Labor pains, and in the seventies, the water broke.
More blood, more struggle…
Now we must push! And breathe!

Let them tell you it can’t be done. Let them tell you it is not worth the struggle.
Let them continue to stare at the dust, these desert people.
We will reclaim our jungle. And if it is not to be reclaimed, we will build it anew.

The kingdom of heaven is inside you and all around you.
Why will you not-see-it?

During a sesshin (in the Mountains and Rivers Order, at least), the resident teachers or senior students will give a talk each day, around mid-afternoon, between lunch and dinner, in the middle of the day’s longest period of meditation.   At the most recent sesshin I attended, Ryushin Sensei, Abbot of the monastery, gave two linked talks, both about the first Chinese Zen master, Boddhidharma’s student Hui K’o.  For those unfamiliar with Zen lore, Hui K’o was reputed to have studied all the different traditions of his time and still felt his understanding was incomplete.  Then, in a dream, he was told to go to Shaolin (yes, that Shaolin) in search of a teacher who had come from India to spread “Chan” (the Chinese name for Zen). He came to the temple at Shaolin and found Bodhidharma seated in meditation, facing a wall. He asked to be taught by Bodhidharma and was completely ignored.

Undaunted, he stood outside in the snow all night, refusing to be turned away. The next morning when Bodhidharma saw him still standing in the cold, he asked Hui K’o what he wanted. Again, Hui K’o asked to be taught, and again Bodhidharma turned him away. So Hui K’o took out a sharp sword, cut of his left arm, and presented it to Bodhidharma as an offering of his sincerity. Bodhidharma, as Ryushin put it, shrugged, and said “I guess you’ll do…”

Although a harsh story, one has to keep in mind that this is a bit of a legend, and as such, should be taken as being “more true than it is real”, in a Joseph Campbell kind of way. Hui K’o, it was later pointed out, would become Bodhidharma’s only enlightened heir.  Towards the end of his life, he gave up teaching at Shaolin entirely and retired in anonymity to a nearby city, where he taught and worked as a toilet cleaner. Supposedly, he loved cleaning toilets. Later, he ran afoul of a more prominent teacher on the local scene, and was ordered to be put to death, to which he went calmly. (Night)shades of Socrates…..

In any case, the point at hand was how we cling to things, to ideas, self-images, and how acting as if these things are really our self is what makes us suffer. An example was given of an (unnamed) student who had lost their black-berry, and how the loss of that black-berry caused so much stress because of how much identity had been placed into it.  This was not meant as a condemnation, more as an example of the way the mind works.

And yet, even if, like Hui K’o we were to lose something much more intimately connected to us, like an arm, we continue on, still a whole being, while the arm lays there, dripping blood on the carpet, yet clearly not a part of us any more. How much less should a blackberry or a self-concept be clung to as a form of identity, when we can clearly let it go much more easily than we can an arm, and still remain what we are: a complete being.

Also up for discussion in a different talk (given by Shugen Sensei of the Temple here in Brooklyn) were some writings of Dogen’s, where he says to “sit in zazen, and when a self-concept arises, enter into it, with eyes sharp and ears sharp.” This interested me, as the basic instructions we receive in Zazen are to focus on the breath, and, when a thought rises, to see it and let it go, bringing our focus back on the breath. This something I’ve been struggling with for a few years, despite my feeling of having been helped immensely by my practice, I’m still not quite sure I’m doing it right.

Dogen’s advice seemed to imply a deeper level for me in the practice. I am not just a self watching my thoughts arise, I am an awareness, watching for self-concepts to arise/solidify. Entering into them with/as awareness, “eyes sharp and ears sharp”, I watch them, investigate what they are, and then, low-and-behold, they simply fade away. This felt much more effective to me than simply watching the thoughts arise and pass away (which so far has felt more like flipping the channel but remaining parked in front of the TV).

So, having come to this conclusion from the talk, I wanted to immediately sit and begin put my insight-into-practice into practice. But no, sadly, after the talks, we go for walking meditation outside, up and down the mountain.  After all the sitting, its a great way to get the blood flowing again, so I didn’t in any way begrudge it. But the whole time spent walking, Ryushin’s talk and the investigation of the self-concepts turned around in my mind.

Then, coming down from the mountain, back to the monastery, we were walking through the parking area when I looked down and saw a snakeskin on the ground. And it hit me. All ideas of self, all concepts we hold on to about who we are, are really just sensations that have arisen inside of us, in response to something that was occurring in the moment.  We have taken these things to be “what we are” when they are really just a form that “what we are” has taken on in response to the moment. Like a snake, we need to let these self concepts pull away, or else we will constatly be snagging them on things as we go along. This causes suffering, and we were better off just letting them go and moving on. Nothing to hold on to here folks, move along….

Or to be a bit more pithy about it, it’s the skin that gets stuck, not the snake.

So, big insight there. Very happily I bring it back into the zendo to sit, and it slowly begins to occur to me that a large part of my self-concept is that of “someone with a spiritual practice”, “someone who wants to be enlightened”. And has been pointed out to me on tumblr “By definition you can’t get what you want.” Because in order to want something, you must necessarily be defining yourself as someone who doesn’t have it.  A self definition you clearly must give up, if you ever want to experience having anything.

Anyway, we could argue semantics about that little insight for weeks, I’m sure, but that’s what struck me, and it’s really made me re-examine my practice and my motives behind it (an ongoing theme for me, it seems).

At the end of a sesshin, back in the old days, you would have something called Sozan, where you would go before your teacher and present a summary of your experience over that sesshin. Maizumi Roshi, the teacher of Daido Roshi (Daido Roshi being the founder of the MRO), changed that when he started holding sesshins in LA. It became “Open Sozan” where, during a period of meditation, anyone in the group could speak out about their experience, sharing with their fellow practitioners. Which is nice, because this is the first time the silence is lifted the entire week, outside of speaking with the teacher during face-to-face dokusan during meditation.

So, during open Sozan, I told my little story of the snakeskin, not in so many words as I have here, more a quickly spouted, rather emotional bit a speech. I was happy with how it turned out then, and I’m pretty happy with how its turned out here as well. And with that, this sesshin story is pretty much over.

Oh, except for one last thing. Later that morning, after Open Sozan, I went out to the parking area to check on the snakeskin. It took me a while to find it again, but when I did, I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t a snakeskin after all. It was, in fact, an entire snake…

He is talking about an awareness of a “movement of energy” that takes place before our “our inner activities” take form. These activities or functions are our thoughts, desires, judgments, self-will, etc. These are functions that take on forms and we perceive them. But prior to the taking of form, there is a movement of energy and this can be perceived as well. He says, “This is the Life of our life, that which is a source for particular undertakings of functional life. Perception thus takes note of how percipient energy enters life on our ordinary level, how it animates forms of life, and how it remains distinct from these forms.”

The idea that there is an action of energy already in motion that our conscious mind responds too, which we experience as making a decision ties in with some of the early stages of Buddhist Vipassana meditation, as outlined in Practical Insight Meditation by Mahasi Sayadaw:

With further progress in meditation, the conscious state of an intention is evident before a bodily movement occurs.  The meditator  first notices that intention.  Though also at the start of his practice, he does notice “intending, intending” (for instance, to bend an arm), he cannot notice that state of consciousness directly.  Now, at this more advanced stage, he clearly notices the consciousness consisting of the intention to bend.  So he notices first the conscious state of an intention to make a bodily movement; then he notices the particular bodily movement.

Which to me is basically saying that though we think the body is moving because we are thinking about moving and moving the body, there is a subtle mistake here in that first the intention to move arises on its own, in response to conditions, and then our body moves accordingly.  I’m slowly reading through this book, though not very quickly as I’m trying to assimilate each stage before moving on to the next one.  As my meditation practice lately has been slacking, I can’t say I’ve made much progress.  Plus, the Burmese Vipassana seems to be at odds with my Zazen, so I’m still working out how to proceed there.  But the book does come highly recommended, so if anyone is interested in starting a meditation practice, I’d offer it as a clear and easy-to-read guide to Vipassana.

Anyway, the really interesting thing happened when Max posted a comment today linking back to an old post at Tim Boucher’s blog, where Tim discusses Aldous Huxley’s take on the brain as behaving as a sort of reductive-valve:

Henri Bergson has suggested that one of the main functions of the brain and nervous system is to eliminate activity and awareness, rather than produce it.

(tie that in with my last post on Dr Dan Siegal’s definition of mind…)  Tim goes on to say:

Huxley explains that our mind has powers of perception and concentration that we cannot even begin to imagine. But our main business is to survive at all costs. To make survival possible, all of our mind’s capabilities must be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain.

Some researchers are studying this effect. They believe that this reducing-valve effect may be very similar to the jamming equipment used to block out offensive radio broadcasts. The brain constantly produces a kind of static, cutting down our perception and reducing our mental activity.

This static can actually be seen. When you close your eyes, you see all sorts of random pictures flashing through your mind. It is impossible to concentrate on any one of them for more than an instant, and each image is obscured by a host of others superimposed over it.

That static is what is toned down through meditation.  See Kenneth Folk’s handy little flash graphic here.

and then Tim goes on to say:

Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” talks about a “reducing” valve in the brain that limits the amount of sensory stimulus that brain allows to be processed. This reducing value, in part, may be the thalamus. In schizophrenia, that reducing valve is more open than it should be; thus a person with schizophrenia receives too much stimulus and their brain has a hard time interpreting the inputted sensory stimulus. This may result in the positive symptoms (hallucinations and psychoses) we see in schizophrenia. When sensory overload occurs, some brain functions may shut down resulting in the negative symptoms (poverty of speech, withdrawl).

So if anything, following this breadcrumb trail of information that seems to have been thrown my way today, it seems that the experience of schizophrenia might be fairly likened to being enlightened too early, to having the connection to Mind-At-Large opened before we’re ready to handle the loads on information that pours at/through us.   I can see this creating a sort of feedback loop, where the mental program of consciousness, our sense of self determination that somehow seems to float above what’s actually going on inside our brain (as shown by the Mahasi Sayadaw quote above) is pushed away from the center of existence where it usually rests, resulting both in the positive and negative symptoms mentioned above.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m getting at here, but it all seems to point to something.  I do know one thing though: it’s not really about schizophrenia.

One other thing this brings to mind is this short little movie (which won a shit-ton of awards).  Watch it, it’s heartwrenchingly beautiful:

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.

I’d originally found this film over at Imagining the 10th Dimension, where Rob had posted it a few weeks after he made his own post about schizophrenia and the effect of time on the brain (except remember, this isn’t actually about schizophrenia).  From Rob’s post, where he is quoting a New Scientist magazine article:

Schizophrenia certainly seems to affect people’s perception of time. If someone with schizophrenia is shown a flash of light and a sound separated by 1/10th of a second, they typically have trouble discerning which came first. Such people also estimate the passing of time less accurately than most others. Now a flurry of studies has shown that if you upset the internal clocks of healthy people, you can create some of the symptoms and delusions associated with schizophrenia.

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane’s response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players’ performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects’ strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That’s uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Rob goes on to explain his opinion on the subject:

Fascinating! I found this particularly interesting to think about within the context of recent studies that show people can form their decisions to do one thing or another well before they are consciously aware of their decision: in Is Creativity a Quantum Process we briefly looked at some articles (like this one from the Wall Street Journal) discussing the recently published work of psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya of London’s Goldsmith College. Amazingly, Dr. Bhattacharya’s brainwave monitoring experiments revealed evidence that people can have arrived at a solution to a problem as much as 8 seconds before their conscious minds become aware of it!

There have been arguments proposing that results such as these demonstrate that our free will is an illusion, because the neuro-chemical activity that forms our decisions may be some inevitable “behind the scenes” process which we interpret as our free will by the time we consciously feel ourselves choosing (and persons familiar with this project will know that I strongly disagree with any conclusions that free will doesn’t exist).

I tend to agree with Rob on this, that just because our free will might not be quick and immediate as we think it is, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Its just that our consciousness is not exactly in touch with the core process at work in our being.  Becoming aware of these process, it seems would both destroy the feeling that we were somehow separate from them, but also give our free will a better, more holistic expression.

Our brain is a perfectly reflecting gem, and its always perfectly reflecting.  We just have to clear out the conscious static (caused by our mind’s very real and correct desire to survive) so as to get in touch with that place inside our self where the truth of what is, is focused.  Zap, moon in a dew drop indeed.

The outer “I” is aware of possibilities, but loses touch with the real.

Oh, this fourth dimensional existence!

What can we do but partake in the active while keeping within the passive?

From this then, perhaps the fruit will come forth,

and then can the fattened calf be killed for the feast.

The basic stance most reviewers seem to have taken on it is that this a story about  “civilized” man reconnecting with the natural world.  The corporation/marines attempts at rape and pillage are foiled by one of their own who “went native”.  And yes, there is a racial/colonial subtext going on here as well, but really, just a more divisive take on the same idea.  Ran Prieur wrote up a pretty thorough debunking of the whole “White Messiah” aspect of the movie, which I suggest reading if you’re interested in exploring that aspect of it.  For the sake of the argument I’m making here though, I just want to focus on the soldiers representing a technological, rationalistic society and the Na’vi representing the natural world (or perhaps “representing being in touch with the natural world” is more precise).

This seems to be the main dichotomy of the movie, the core conflict with which Cameron engages the audience and attempts to get his message across.  Not a very complex message, it seems, and certainly one we’ve all come across before elsewhere.  After Titanic (and despite its success), Cameron was not a director I expected to really break any new mythological or memetic ground (whatever it we want to call the nourishment that a good story provides).

But then I remembered an article on a movie blog I read regularly, where Cameron was quoted as saying (in regards to Sigourney Weaver’s character):
“Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Here, Cameron seems to be exploring a dichotomy that’s the exact opposite of the first.  If this is the metaphor being explored here, then the Na’vi become characters in a video game, and, supported by the massive special effects, their world becomes one of those virtual reality playgrounds we were all promised way back in the 90′s.  The marines are only downloading themselves into the Na’vi bodies and exploring the digital world, which makes their rather obvious callousness toward the Na’vi people more easily understood.

(plus, where have I heard the phrase “NAVI” before…?)

Granted, this metaphor does seem to break down when we consider that mining a virtual world for resources seems at first rather unreasonable.  However, there is one thing that such a highly developed model of reality could offer that would make this virtual reality metaphor more believable:  What they have is information, the information created by an entire virtual world made to run as a model of our own, and the need to go into that world in order to collect it while the program is running.

The more I thought about these two opposing metaphors, the more I realized that though each seems to explain the movie well enough, it does so to an unsatisfying degree.  It’s already in the top 5 films ever made (or whatever, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and neither really seems to validate its popularity.  Movies don’t have this kind of effect on people unless there’s something really new at the heart of the story, a message that people didn’t know they needed to hear.

It wasn’t until I started overlapping these two metaphors that I really began to understand what I’ve come to think this movie is about (and why I want to go see it).  It is the equating of nature with a programmable environment.  And it is done in a metaphorical/mythological way that people can grasp on a subconscious level without needing to understand the specifics.  To be there to watch those two memes combine into one is something I do not want to miss.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is some sort of conspiracy enacted by Cameron (and/or some group of shadowy figures), rather that this could be seen as an important part of our global cultural story, something we had  a desperate need to to develop and digest at this point in our history.  Maybe if we can learn to stop seeing nature as an enemy, to befriend it, and to understand that we can control it and program it, we’ll stop needing to destroy it so much.  Cameron does much here to combat our instinctive pre-historic need to see nature as always “red of tooth and claw”, and I would guess that this is why the movie has proven to be so popular.  This, to my mind, makes it a story we all very much want and need to hear right now.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan said way back in 1970, the invention of the satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” We’re just finally catching up to this now, and I want to be there to watch as it happens.  Who knows where this is going to lead to as it unfolds; I just hope we still have a chance to make use of what learn here.

In it, Rob Bryanton discusses the “frame rate” of human consciousness.  He explains that it likely varies person-to-person but is “in that magic range somewhere between 20 and 40 cycles per second, (where) we do indeed seem to have just such an experience, where things start to blend together into a seamless stream.”

Go and read the article.  In fact, subscribe to the blog and check out the animation as well.  Rob’s work has done a lot to help create my current conceptual framework.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Where this leads me though, is back towards meditation and enlightenment, perennial topics at Reclusland.  Here’s a recent post over at dharmaoverground that gives a good explanation of where I’m coming from.

Jarrod posts:
“The guided portion (of the meditation) ended and I felt compelled to continue my sit, but started to just note sensations (rising, falling, sitting, etc.) Pretty quickly the noting went into auto-pilot and picked up pace significantly. I just let it go and tried not to get in the way. At the same time a distinct pulsing sound/sensation began that was acting like a metronome to the noting. The whole process fell into a nice rhythm with probably 2-3 pulses per second and 3-4 notes per pulse. Each breath was noted by “rise, rise, rise, rise” “fall, fall, fall, fall” in this distinct rhythm plus additional notes between the breaths.”

Then Jackson ellucidates:
It sounds as though your shift in to “auto-pilot” noting was a shift from 1st ñana (Mind & Body) to 2nd ñana (Cause & Effect). First, one comes to know directly that both physical and mental phenomena are “objects”. Then, one notices not only that intention precedes action (and that both arise on their own), but also that noticing occurs automatically as well, and only when there’s an object to notice. Things start to speed up, just as you described.

A more in depth analysis of the 1st and 2nd ñanas can, I’m sure, be found in Daniel Ingram’s book.  I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but it is online here for those who don’t mind reading the entire thing off a screen.

Anyway, the point being that somewhere along the meditative path, assuming that you are working with a practice of “noting” (that is, watching the rising and falling the breath in the abdomen, or naming/labeling  all sensations as they arise, or any other practice where the focus in on change, I believe), the process apparently speeds up, and the practitioner must let go and simply allow the rising and passing away of sensations as they occur on their own.  This seems to happen as we try to bring our focus onto more and more distinct “things”, deliberately creating “frames” within our experience, while at the same time, pulling our awareness back from the thing thus framed.  As Rene Daumal says in Le Contre-Ciel: “I am that which thinks, not that which is thought.”

And now back to the 10th Dimension post, where Rob says: “some humans operate at a more accelerated “frame rate” than others, and that our frames per second experience of time is directly related to our state of mind and our health.” This, to me, points to a connection between the Buddhist conception of equanimity and our ability to actively notice smaller and smaller “frames” of consciousness.  That what truly makes us unhappy are the things which we miss happening, things that fall between the cracks of our awareness.  Places where the radio station fuzzes out, and we miss a few bars of that song that’s always playing, regardless of whether we listen to it or not.

Neuroscientifically speaking, this is likely related to what is know as our “working memory”.  This is the sort term memory that we use while performing tasks such as remembering a telephone number or a series of words in a sentence, similar to the RAM memory of your computer:

“working memory is a chalkboard on which we rapidly scrawl and erase information…..When we hear the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a cluster of neurons fires during each word. When one cluster fires, it suppresses the others momentarily, preventing the sentence from coming out scrambled….As the neurons for “It,” “was,” “the,” and “best” fire in sequence, the brain creates pathways from one point, or brain state, to the next. The more powerfully each excited cluster can inhibit or suppress all others in the sequence from firing, the more solid these pathways….As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That is normally not biologically feasible. “Synapses can’t be stronger than that, the brain is a very complex biochemical machine.”…Mathematical models like these may seem removed from the gritty reality of gray matter and neural chemistry, but they provide a critical connection between what people actually experience and the hidden mechanisms inside the brain.”

Working memory is crucial for cognitive control of emotions: It allows us to consider information we have and reason quickly when deciding what to do as opposed to reacting automatically, without thinking, to something…mothers whose negativity was most strongly linked with their child’s challenging behaviors were those with the poorest working memory skills. The authors surmise that “for mothers with poorer working memory, their negativity is more reactive because they are less able to cognitively control their emotions and behaviors during their interactions with their children.”

Try not to get too caught up in the number 7 mentioned in that first link.  Instead, just keep in mind that the more things you hold in your working memory, the more those things must suppress the rest your mind in order to continue existing.  And the more suppression going on, the worse we are at controlling our emotions (and the further we drift from equanimity).

The practice of noting then, can be seen as a purposeful digitalization of something that is, at heart, an analogue process: the experience of being an awareness-within-reality.  The practitioner is attempting to break through the digitizing process, to fall-between-the-frames so to speak, and realize that, as Buddha said, “All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting.” thus coming into the direct experience of that which is non-digital, non-component.

Am I saying that we should all go watch high-frame-rate movies, and try to catch the individual frames?  Stare into the flickering light of the projector until we can catch the black space between the still images? No, not really.  That’s the wrong direction, entirely too mediated.  The point is not to train your mind with a movie camera and then to bring that trained mind back into real life with your newly developed “super powers”.  The point is that real life is already the ultimate tool for training your mind in this way.  You just have to pay close attention: closer, closer, fall between the cracks, identify as the space between the cracks, and bam! there it-you is-are.

But if you do want to watch a movie, here’s a good one. (I very much want to embed this, but it’s been disabled…)

I went to a screening of Lawrence of  Arabia a few months back.  Got to see a full color print in an actual theater (B.A.M. Rose Cinemas, for any fellow Brooklynite’s out there, which only heightened the experience of being back in an old-timey theater).   It’s an beautifully shot movie, all the more so because it was filmed in 1962..

The movie was full of great quotes too:

(context: Ali has just shot Lawrence’s guide at a deserted well in the middle of the desert)
Sherif Ali: Have you no fear, English?
T.E. Lawrence: My fear is my concern.

(context: Lawrence has just put out a match with his bare fingers)
William Potter: Ooh! It damn well ‘urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

I like these, not because it’s typical bad assery, but because in both scenes, the level of focus Peter O’Toole was able to portray as Lawrence is palpable.  His is scared, and it does hurt.  But he’s holding his focus while inside that, and it shows.

My favorite, though, was this one, where Lawrence breaks down and gives up on his winter campaign after being tortured (but not recognized) by a leader of the Turkish Army:

T.E. Lawrence: A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants!

He says this, and follows it with “and what decides what he wants? This!” and he points at his skin.  But to make this into a racial statement is to miss an opportunity for something much greater I think.  After all, what does decide what a man wants?  In all the talk of free will versus destiny that I’ve ever heard, no one’s ever brought up the fact that we do not seem to be free to choose what we want.  How can it be free will if there’s no conscious choice of desire?  Theoretically, for true free will, we would be able to pick a desire, and then allow it to begin to act on us, to move us to it’s music and make us dance as we want.  It should be a tool, not a drive to give into or to resist.  Show me someone able to do that, and I’ll believe in true free will.  : )

Anyway, long story short, it’s an awesome movie, go watch it.  It also made me really interested in T. E. Lawrence as well.  If this is what the movie business makes of his life, the real story must be a lot more interesting.  I’ve considered reading his massive autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph“ but it seems the best edition of it (closest to what he wanted it to be) was the 1922 unabridged Oxford text.  Which is conveniently both out of print and not for sale used. (If anyone has a copy they’re looking to get rid of, hit me up!)  I know I won’t read it twice, so I’d rather make sure it’s the right edition if I do read it.

That’s Lawerence, second from the right.
The guy in the front is Obi Won Kenobi Prince Faisal I of Iraq

So, to that end, a quick wrap up on my Ango Training experience.

- I’ve kept up the Chi Kung in the mornings, more regularly, I have to admit, than I’ve kept up my actual meditation practice. I feel I’ve reached a kind of plateau with this which I’m really happy with right now.  The quick energy boosts I used to get from running through the forms are no longer quite so strong, but my energy’s comfortably at a higher level more often, and I managed to fight off what I thought was going to be a rather nasty cold, while still managing some late nights, too much coffee, and too much wine over Thanksgiving.  It was rather strange to recognize all the symptoms that I usually take to mean the low energy and listless of a cold are about to sink in, only to find out that they simply never did.

- I also managed to keep up with the weekly yoga class, and I think that has benefited me as much, if not more, than the daily Chi Kung.  I was lucky enough to find a really wonderful teacher, who’s been teaching for quite a long time, and, well, I’m not sure what else to say on that, other than that I’m really grateful to have stumbled into the class.

- My meditation practice has deepened as well, I believe.  Although there were days where I didn’t sit, this is the most regular I’ve ever been in my practice, and I’m really starting to understand what it means to be with the breath.  It comes and it goes, but when I hit it just right, it’s pretty great.  I am somewhat aware that this is probably more a bliss/concentration state than anything else, but I don’t think it’s quite as cut and dry as that with Zazen.  Next big thing on my list is to wade into Danial Ingram’s “Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha,” so hopefully that’ll clear some stuff up for me.

- As for my writing project, I did manage to write every day of Ango up until the day before the art presentation, and I hand copied them out into a blank book.  I decided to call it “Liber Quintus Ignis” (or, “book of the fifth fire”) after a school of mysticism contemporary to the Buddha, that would sit inside a cross of four fires, and stare up at the sun until they went blind (the sun being the fifth fire).  This supposedly lead to enlightenment.  Clearly kind of a stupid practice, and I never actually stared at the sun, but I did manage to get some poetry out of it that I’m fairly happy with.  I’m considering what I want to do with it as far as publishing it, but I don’t think I’ll do it on this blog.  It wouldn’t really fit the content of what this blog has become I think.  Perhaps I’ll start another…  A happy side of effect of copying out 72 poems by hand while in a somewhat meditative state, over a period of several days, is that my hand writing (which has always been graciously described as chicken scratch) has improved greatly, particularly when I bring consciousness to the act of writing by hand.

- Finished all the reading I planned to and more, and I do recommend all the books I mentioned.   I think next time, I’ll need to make a bigger list, if I want it to sustain me through the whole period.  Also, I have a newfound respect for the depth of Dogen Zenji’s thought.   It is no wonder that Zen has lasted so long, coming from such a mind.

- I made it to the Reggie Ray retreat, and I highly recommend sitting with Reggie. His combination of mediation and somatic body work is great, and I think, pretty unique.  I got to learn a lot about the Vajrayana tradition (as taught by Chogyam Trungpa) as well.

- I did not make it to the Ken Cohen Chi Kung retreat, as I decided last minute to save the money and vacation days.  From what I’ve heard of Mr. Cohen, it would have been an a great retreat, but I still stick by my decision at this point.

- For my take on the Thich Nhat Hanh talk, see here.

All in all, it was a great experience.  What I took away from it the most was the amazing degree to which, when you take your practice seriously, it’ll lift your life up in ways you’d never imagine.  I’m definitely signing up again in the Spring!

In the meantime, my studies are bringing me into a more Gurdjieffian territory.  I’m researching some of his lesser known pupils, mainly William Segal (who was a student of both the Gurdjieff Work and Zen Buddhism) and Rene Daumal (a poet who died at the age of 36 after a lifelong search for truth).  It seems there’s some steps being taken to make “The Work” a little more well known, which is something I’m definitely in favor of.

I do plan on continuing to post here as well, but I’m also feeling some trepidation as well.  As much as I enjoy putting my thoughts out here for you all to read, I’m having some sense that maybe silence might be a better option for a while.  Or at least a limited silence.  I’ve noticed how quickly delusion can be expelled, and how that can change things on a pretty deep level, as far as what you consider important and unimportant (or worse, harmful).  As that Ajahn Chah quote I posted kind of hinted at, I’m not looking to be the guy who needs to know everything about the person who shot him with an arrow, before he pulls the arrow out.  “We must arrange our lives to support good practice”, and I don’t want this to come between me and my practice.  I want this to be one aspect of my practice.  Something I’ll have to keep working on, but don’t worry, I have no plans to shut things down here (didn’t I just mention something about starting another one of these? jeez…)

So stay tuned, kiddies.  It’s great having you all here.  A strong practice to all, and to all a good night.

However, like a lot of things that seem highly unlikely but still undergo the formality of actually occurring, there’s a different way to look at this that cuts like Occam’s Razor through the unlikeliness: Perhaps things are the way they are because there’s life here.  Perhaps it’s not that consciousness, at some point in the distant past, sprang out of matter.  Instead, perhaps matter exists because of consciousness.

Maybe, as reality came into being (however you want to explain that, be it “fiat lux!” or a BIG BANG), consciousness had to feel things out, had to reach out into the dark and wait until it could grab onto something solid.  In Zen, there’s a saying that enlightenment is like grouping behind you in the dark for a pillow.  I imagine the birth of the universe could have been something like that, a blind fumbling in the dark until suddenly, “ahah!”  consciousness touches space and space wobbles into a wave of energy and vacuum, which them complexifies into matter, then into life, and then into humanity.

A similar comparison would be the tuning of a musical instrument, trying to find the exact right pitch.  Once one string is tuned, you move onto the next one.  Perhaps the laws were kind of like that, with consciousness pushing further into space after each law dropped into place.

Alternatively, it could be said that the universe exists as a broad spectrum of possible laws, and that life only exists within the slices of the spectrum with the laws to support it.  Either way though, whether there’s only one storyline or a whole array of branches, it doesn’t matter because the end result’s the same here: life and the laws that support it are indivisible.  Whether universes exist where the physical laws make life impossible is kind of a moot point, I think, at least while we’re still alive.

The view that the reality exists the way it does because it springs out of consciousness (rather than consciousness springing out of matter at some point), is currently known as Biocentricism, which I first head about this over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension” (thanks Rob!).  Robert Lanza, who first proposed the theory, has 7 main priciples behind it:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Which (as wikipedia seems to suggest) is a bit close to solipsism.  But that’s only the case if:
1) Consciousness only exists inside human beings.
2) All human beings actually are conscious (and don’t just hover on the borderlands of consciousness).

If we don’t accept both those two premises, then those 7 principles deserve another reading…

The point here is that, as recent conversation on this blog have lead me to think, this same urge, this fumbling in the dark, might be what’s responsible for everything.  It’s something we’ve labeled as “evolution” and mistakenly described as the ability for a species to successfully exist and procreate.  There’s never been a “why” behind this.  Why procreate?  Simply to procreate?

Perhaps there’s more to it than this.  Perhaps consciousness is something that has existed all along, somehow apart from the material world, and that as it comes into the material world, it “evolves” the material world  to better allow for the further embodiment of consciousness within it.  When I said above that “consciousness touches space”, perhaps a better way of saying this would be that consciousness and space broke away from each other, so that one could observe the other.  And that since then, consciousness has been trying to build itself back into space, for the sake of interacting with it.

Anyway, what originally got me thinking about this was a comparison between the laws of the universe and karma.  Past behavior creates an inertia that allows for present existence.  Within the human mind, this works as memory, but within  the physical/animal world, it works as DNA.   In the physical/mineral world, it works as molecules/atoms.  Beyond that, it works as the laws of physics.  Each gets locked into place, simply because it has proven, so far, to be the best way for allowing consciousness to embody itself in matter.  And what we are to do every moment with our thoughts is to try to find a way to further combine the two within ourselves.

In a way, it’s like God split in two, and each half is seeking to combine with the other in such a way as to create little pockets of wholeness throughout, to experience wholeness within splitness.  Except that God never actually split, so this whole thing is really more of a game than anything else…

But that’s maybe a little too esoteric for my liking.  So instead, I’ll leave you with a song and a picture.  Because in the end, my attempt here is at a new kind of poetry, not a new kind science.

(cause we all shine on, all the time)

As pointed out this article in Wired UK (found via Klint Finley’s Mutate!),  Google recently unveiled that their NAdroid phones will use a new internet protocol known as DTN (delay tolerant networking, something created with the help of the JPL).  This is an alternative to the current TCP based internet that we all know, love, and run rampant on every day.  As the Wired UK article points out, Google was “eventually forced to acknowledge that TCP simply couldn’t cut the mustard, with massive delay and data loss caused by celestial motion rendering TCP useless.”

“There was a little problem called the speed of light,” joked a typically playful (Vint) Cerf, as he outlined the idea to the OpenMobileSummit conference in San Francisco. “When Earth and Mars are closest, we’re 35 million miles apart, and it’s a three and a half minute trip one way, seven minutes for a round trip. Then when we’re farthest apart, we’re 235 million miles – 20 minutes one way, 40 minutes round trip.“

So Google went looking for something that didn’t need a reliable connection.  DTN was just the thing, as it sets up to buffer (you know what that is if you’ve ever watched a video on the internet) all communications until a stable connection is established.  Basically, it’ll hold your email to Mars until it’s sure the Martians are able to pay attention.

Exciting stuff; the idea of a space based internet system is a good one.  Although the Wired article claims that “most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication”, not everyone thinks so.  In fact, DARPA is looking to build just such a (albeit groundbased) system for inter-satellite communication by 2012.  A recent (and lengthy) comments conversation with Reclusland regular Speedbird explores the topic from a slightly different angle.  If you want to read through the conversation, you can start here.

We (or at least I) tend to get a bit overly mystical when talking about this stuff, but that’s just a personal penchant for trying to clarify connecting patterns seen between the “post-information-scarcity” technology revolution we find ourselves in the midst of,  and older, mystical/numinous ways of seeing the world and our place in it.  There are too many parallels between the two for me to ignore them.  Maybe it’s just an attempt to see the dharma through the age of a new lens, but hey, I enjoy it.

Anyway, one conclusion drawn from that discussion, that’s relevant to this post, is the idea of a sort of global wi-fi/ubiquitous/ambient computer network.  Sure, anything like that seems to be too far away in the future to dream about, but technology has a funny way of evolving way quicker than our common sense expects it to.  This points to “a truly distributed field where all the computers can access all the other computers equally at all moments. Each computer would be a holographic representation of the entire internet, because the entire connected net of other computers would be accessible instantaneously from that one computer. The whole internet reflected in a dewdrop, so to speak.  Do that, make the computers something that can be carried on a person at all times, that can interact with each other wirelessly in real time regardless of distance, and make file exchange near-instantaneous, and bam, thats it.”

“It” being an idea that’s been bounced around a lot in the more fringe cultures in the past few decades.  Marshall McLuhan called it an “echoing land” or “global village”, when all of humanity would share enough of a common culture to have it’s subconscious aspects manifest more directly within it, as it did/does in smaller isolated tribes.  I like to think of this as something akin to the Australian Aborigines’ “Dream Time“.  Teilhard de Chardin called it the Noosphere.  I’ve also drawn parallels to the Age of Aquarius as well, where man pours water out over the world, water being a symbol for mind (And Aquarius supposedly rules electronics as well, for what that’s worth).

Basically, with such an easy and instantaneous way for people to interact and communicate, enough of the outside worries are taken care of that the inside can manifest itself more fully into the consciousness.  Sort of shot at a Mass-Maslow-self-actualization.  That’s the dream anyway.  And you know what Google says about dreams: “When a great dream shows up, grab it!”

He simply sits and slowly sips, waiting for you to join him.

Watch his movements, learn their meaning.  That is all.

When it is time, your thirst will move you.  And all life is thirst. How joyous!

But as I paid attention (and once the speakers got fixed) I could get into it a little deeper, and the depth of his wisdom began to became clear. He wasn’t mouthing platitudes, he was speaking from the truth that platitudes are trying to emulate.  As the Tao Te Ching says, “the greatest wisdom seems childish”.  The one that spoke to me the most was the phrase, “no mud, no lotus”.  That is, you can’t have enlightenment without suffering, and it’s out of the very mud of suffering that the lotus grows.

(TNH’s calligraphy, links to source)

I think the link between mud and suffering is fairly obvious, as I am sure we’re all very familiar with suffering.  But what’s the connection between the lotus and enlightenment?  The obvious answer is: it’s a flower!  It looks like an enlightened mind should look, opened to the world, it’s inner essence fully on display, living in immediacy with the world.

This is where we see Thich Nhat Hahn’s wisdom really begin to shine, in his ability to capture an entire teaching in a simple four word slogan.  He explains a little further in an interview:

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That’s why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…”

And yeah, that’s true enough.  That kind of mind state definitely feels like enlightenment, for sure.  But then, the is true of all flowers, not just the lotus.  Why not, “No Mud, No Flower”?  That would work well enough for that comparison, but actually, there’s a deeper metaphor at work here.  The idea of equating the lotus isn’t a TNH original.  It goes all the way back to the Buddha himself:

As a blue or white lotus is born in the water,
grows up and is unpolluted by the water,
so too has the perfected one grown up in the world,
has risen above the world
and stands unpolluted by it.
- samyutta nikaya 22 94

So why does the lotus remain unpolluted by the waters?  It’s not actually the lotus flower that does this, it’s the leaves.  And it’s due to something called the lotus effect (which has come up here before).   Basically, due to the unique structure of the lotus leaves, water beads up and runs right off of it.

It’s not the water that pollutes the leaves, instead it cleans them of debris.  Because there is no clinging between the water droplets and the leaf’s surface, the water washes over them with no hindrance, cleaning away any filth or pollution that might have settled.  Scientifically speaking, “due to their high surface tension water droplets tend to minimize their surface trying to achieve a spherical shape. On contact with a surface, adhesion forces result in wetting  of the surface: either complete or incomplete wetting may occur depending on the structure of the surface and the fluid tension of the droplet .  The cause of self-cleaning properties is the hydrophobic water-repellent double structure of the surface.”

This is the basis for the technology behind those stain resistant pants from a few years back:

And now, “a NASA team is developing a transparent coating that mimics the self-cleaning properties of the lotus plant to prevent dirt from sticking to the surfaces of spaceflight gear and bacteria from growing inside astronaut living quarters.“   Awesome.  Now you really can tell that person you’ve had your eye on that they’re wearing space pants…

Anyway, so what’s the whole thing all about?  Well, if you combine those two metaphors, what you have is something that starts out as a seed hidden under the mud (suffering), which begins to grow from that mud and eventually sprouts leaves.  Those leaves, if any mud happens to get on them, simply do not cling to it and the mud washes easily away.  And from that, the flower blooms.   All life is suffering, as the Buddha teaches, and so all life is the opportunity for enlightenment.

But no mud, no lotus.

Unfortunately, you now not only have to face those problems again, but you also have to dredge them up from the past (within yourself), in order to do so.  You have to take them out of the space that holds forgotten (or willfully ignored) things and make them real again.  The brain has a way of blinding itself to things that you do not allow yourself to see change, regardless of whether you do so because of their perceived goodness or their perceived badness, and this is something that must be overcome before you can even begin to tackle the “forgotten” problems themselves.

This isn’t Final Fantasy.  That you boss you couldn’t beat in that one castle isn’t just going to sit there waiting for you to level up and come back to kick his ass.  He’s going to move somewhere else, turn into something else, level up himself.  You may not even recognize him when you run across him again, but when the battle begins, you will feel a sense of deja vu…  Pay attention to that.

So yes, it’s quite the mess you’ve gotten yourself into, but on the one hand, this is good.  If you hadn’t failed the first time, you wouldn’t have left to attain those powers, and you are stronger for having made the journey.  Often, such journeys prove to be a bounty of helpful experiences, above and beyond whatever may have been attained at their culmination.  They are adventures in-and-of themselves, and no one ever said this was a purely linear storyline, especially not for us post-modern adventurers.

But on the other hand, if you only developed those powers to cover up your sense failure, then really, you have nothing.  If they were only a mask to cover your wound, rather than a bandage to help in its healing, you’re going to have to remove that mask and face the purification that has developed underneath (before you die).  In such a case, the foundations of your power are as quicksand, and your hard won treasure is nothing but faerie’s gold, fading into dew as soon as it hits the light of true day.  For power built upon ignorance must be given up before that ignorance can be pierced through and dissolved.  And who can give up both power and accept their ignorance?  It’s quite the pressure drop.  Be careful, you don’t want to get the bends…

Nevertheless, if you do wish to do such a thing, or if you find yourself in the midst of doing such a thing, or if you have come back from doing such a thing to find a smiling mask covering an ache in your chest that is getting worse by the day, remember one thing: all that you need is yourself, and you have that already.

That sidetrack you took, that break in the narrative structure, did nothing but give that self back more fully into your own hands.   And now you can turn that enhanced self awareness towards the pain, towards the problems that chased you away to begin with, and you can finally begin to heal that one true wound which we all carry within us, and which only a few of us seem to be able to ever bring to a successful conclusion.

May we all become one of those few…

(links to source)

Jul 02, 2009 – The mind is not a corrupt police department, it is more like an incorrectly connected machine.  Our parts just aren’t communicating.  To limit the function of the mind to only those functions it is capable of when fragmented in this manner is incorrect.  This is to consider a mind operating at 50% (for example) as  something broken-to-be-fixed, as opposed to seeing it as a still ongoing organic process of self correction.

The mind/body is built to house and develop spirit/self.  An incubator of sorts, it functions as a tuner/gatherer for consciousness/awareness.  It is through our becoming more and more conscious, through awareness becoming aware of itself through our own increase of awareness within our “self” , that creation can explore itself. And where the mind is incorrectly connected, awareness reaches and impasse, and awareness cannot join with awareness.

We are the budding fruit of a vast tree-of-all, and we collect awareness like sunlight.  Not collecting our awareness, but accepting awareness into ourselves, stop pretending we are not aware of what we actually are aware of.  Eating this awareness, almost, as a plant draws nourishment from the sun.  Perhaps this is similar to Gurdjieff’s ideas of eating impressions.  Again, this shows that we are not broken or evil, we just are not done developing awareness within ourselves, in a complete, contiguous whole-that-is-still-part-of-a-larger-whole.

Aug 11, 2009 – The building up and storing of knowledge limits this developing of awareness within the self.  By this, I mean knowledge about which we say “this is true, it is the way things are”. Such knowledge hems us in, limiting each new experience by forcing it to either relate to our previously accumulated knowledge or be discarded. The more knowledge we try to bring forward with us in this manner, the less new information we are able to absorb. Knowledge weighs us down, hardening our mind like death hardens the body. All knowledge is limited, and all knowledge therefore limits (the “larger you build the bonfire, the more darkness there is around it” metaphor).

We are trying to find completeness through amassing a definitive body of knowledge, but this will only end in failure.  Knowledge is really just stale information, when information should really be a temporary kind of thing.  Rather than eating and holding information as knowledge, we should digest it and let it pass away. By focusing on increasing our awareness rather than our knowledge, we can better reach into and unravel the details hidden within that very information.   Knowing it ahead of time does not matter at all, if we can truly see it when it happens.

But when caught, held on to, and built upon, layers and layers of knowledge rise up, a Tower of Babel. Even crabs and slugs abandon old shells. This is the source of the false sense of a separate ego. We think we are the information that we store as knowledge. Consumerism is merely a macro-level manifestation of this inner tendency. “More” and “more” and “more” and we’re never happy, because knowledge doesn’t equal happy. Paying attention to information as it becomes relatively important, and further refining of our ability to use that information (by increasing our awareness), while staying happily rooted in “none” all the while,  is much more satisfying.

Aug 13, 2009 – Thoughts do not create our reality, but they can help us to steer through it.  Added to this is the fact that, although “thoughts” < “beliefs”, the only difference there is in magnitude and concentration.  Thought/belief is a wedge, a rudder in the water of awareness as it passes around us.  The thoughts “I want that” is like putting a finger in the water.  The belief “I deserve that!” is like putting an oar in the water and paddling furiously (as long as you actually believe it and aren’t just thinking it).

Of course, to do this effectively, you have to be paying attention to the water.  Just as your rudder doesn’t make the side of the river come any closer to you, your thoughts do not make things happen.  But your thoughts can help you to steer through the myriad possibilities of what is happening, as long as you’re paying attention to them.

The problem is we haven’t figured out how to use thought properly yet.  We currently use thought to build this tower of knowledge, both about our self and about the world.  But this becomes the bushel basket over the lamp.

The alternative way of looking at this it to see all things as knowledge, all things, forms, sensations, thoughts, conceptions, as information.  It all is already, and you are already completely within-and-a-part-of-it.  The world is your external hardrive (or more correctly, you are it’s); there’s no separation there.  Feel this in your nervous system, it is jeweled mirror samadhi, it is the self as experienced through the knowing of the 1000 dharmas-things.

We need to be able to unify and integrate these two aspects, because really, there is no separation between the two.  Just as all magnets have both a north and a south pole, so too do we have both aspects withinour being.  Exist as the conduit between the two, the space where the two arrows meet.  That is your true self, your true identity.

- The book’s creation came from an intense period of self experimentation for Jung.  In September of 1913, Jung began having strange visions, slipping into apocalyptic day dreams in which death and destruction were sweeping throughout Europe.  Years later, some have suggested this was precognitive visions of the terror that was to descend upon Europe during World War I.  To Jung, it was simply the realization that his soul had gone astray.

- He began a series of what he called “active imaginations”, where he would sit and bring himself into a visionary, hypnagogic state, and record the dreams and visions he had during those moments in a series of black books, known, appropriately enough, as “The Black Books”.  In here are his famous VII Sermones ad Mortuos.  From these sermons, Jung would draw what he later understood to be his first mandala.  For any Thelemites in the audience, a note of interest here is that at the center of the mandala were the letters AA (A large “A “, with a smaller “A” underneath it, with the point of the smaller coming up to the crossbar of the larger), but a bit more on that to come later…

• (normally, I’d include pictures here, but since no photography was allowed you’ll have to rely on your own active imaginations, with my apologies.)

- From that group of Black Books, as well as some daily sketches he made while on Swiss military service in 1917, Jung began the serious undertaking of recording all these in chronological order in a vast red leather-bound volume with creme pages, which would eventually become his Liber Novus.  It was pointed out by Mr. Shamdasani that the proper way to experience the Red Book would be to read the text first, and then to examine the accompanying paintings afterwords, as that is the order in which they were created.

- Throughout the text, Jung will say things such as “25 days later, I had a vision…”.  To the best of his knowledge, Mr. Shamdasani claims that these dates are to be taken as literal and not part of the dream narrative.  This is according to the chronology of Jung’s notes in the Black Books.

- Apparently, each character in the book has both their own color ink, and their own decorative font, whenever they speak.

- Each vision has a double layer to its recounting: the Active Imagination is presented, and then an explanation follows it.  This was Jung’s attempt to create a comparative study of the individuation process, something like “dear friends, this is how it worked for me”.  He wanted to develop the psychology behind the mysticism, and he very much hoped to translate his mythic insights into a comprehensible science, something with which he strained at the edge of language and meaning to express.

• (And, I will point out, he was not made mad in trying to do so.  In the highly karmic realm of myth, this says a lot.)

- The book is broken up into three parts, conveniently named “Liber Primus”, “Liber Secundus”, and “Liber Tertius” (or something along those lines).  In “Primus”, Jung begins an attempt to make sense out of the visions, in “Secondus”, he completes the major part of his exploration, and in “Tertius“, the active imaginations and the explanations are presented more holistically as one thing.  Although Jung never finished his book, it has been said that his tower at Bollingen, which he built himself, acted as a sort of “Liber Quaternus”, a continuation and possibly a completion the themes laid out in the three books.

- Jung worked during a period of great mystical searching, (which I was happy to hear Mr. Shamdasani say is captured quite well in P. D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous“.  Anything Gurdjieffian will make me smile), as well as during a period of great artistic expression, but although Jung could very well have become either a mystic or an artist, he valued science above both.  He was a fan of neither mysticism nor modern art, and although he saw similarities to these in his Red Book work (which was perhaps why he never published it in his lifetime), he considered it mainly an attempt to make a science from his journeys into the mythic/symbolic realm.

- Jung understood that, throughout history,  man has always been embedded in a mythic system, and yet he felt that he himself had none.  This book was his attempt to rectify that situation.  For example, one piece that was displayed on the wall at the museum was of figure representing (or so the plaque said) Gilgamesh, who was found somewhere in the landscape of Jung’s unconscious, wandering around looking for Utnapishtim.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is the counterpart of Noah, someone who has survived the Great Flood and who has the God’s secret of immortality.  In Jung’s painting, the plaque went on to say, this giant, lost on his quest for immortality, is saddened to hear from Jung that the land he seeks has been destroyed.

• (This is my recollection of a plaque on the wall at a museum, not any notes I taken from the talk or the book itself, so please excuse an misinterpretation.  However, I feel this paints an accurately tragic picture of how Jung viewed the mythic state of modern man.  Those mythic drives are still present within us, but we have destroyed the lands within which lies their fulfillment, and so they must be built anew.)

- “Jung was aware of his ability to fructify the growth process (individuation) in others.”

- The Red Book was Jung’s attempt at the creation of a new Cosmology.  As stated above, this can be seen in his mandala based on his Seven Sermons.  The first version of this he created before ever knowing what a mandala was, and this was the one with the large and small “A”s.  The large “A” was said to stand for Anthropos, and the smaller “A” for the ‘soul of man’.  A later version of this mandala is found in the Red Book (and hey, online as well!) but does not use the double A.  Instead, at the center, there is a star.  The original sketch was apparently later given to a woman by the name of Alice Crowley (no relation, I’m sure).

• (Although I do not have much interest in Aleister Crowley‘s work myself, Crowley’s plunge into the Western Alchemical/Symbolic Tradition happened right around the same time as Jung’s, and so any similarities between their work are worth mentioning, I feel, if only because they were both exploring the same psychic terrain.)

- It was pointed out that in Eastern Mandalas, the center is almost always occupied by a Divinity or a Buddha, whereas in the west the center is often occupied by a man.

• (Which seems important to me, since in the west we have Jesus Christ elevated to an officially divine position, whereas in the east, Buddha, although often prayed to as a god, is officially considered to have been a human like you are I.  The fact that this contradicts what is found at the center of the mandala interests me greatly…)

- However, Jung never felt that the Red Book was complete.  The last complete painting in the book is of a yellow castle, which to Jung (although I don’t see it myself) had a “Chinese” feel to it.  In 1928, while working on this painting, Jung received the text of “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, by Richard Wilhelm, a friend who was asking Jung to write an introduction to his book.  In this Taoist alchemical text from centuries past, Jung found references to the motifs in his Yellow Castle painting.

- After this, he broke of his work on the Red Book, took it up again in 1959 only to stop in mid-sentence.  Although it was not shown at the talk nor in the show, there is apparently also one last, unfinished painting in the book, which was characterized in the talk as Jung opening again to the outer world, rather than opening to his own inner world.

- Mr Shamdasani, who has studied this book in it’s raw form more than anyone else probably ever will, says that he thinks it will take at least a year and half of study for anyone to truly understand what Jung has put into the Red Book.

- Jung was quoted as saying that “the painting of mandalas increases one’s devotion to life”, a particularly beautiful way of phrasing it, and with that, I will end my notes.

For me, what I found most interesting (and infuriating) is that it was left unresolved whether or not Jung ever completed his process of Individuation.  Although it in no way damages the man’s work nor his scholarship, it does leaves me with the feeling of coming to the end of a great movie only to have the DVD skip and freeze, just before the climatic scene.  Given Jung’s dislike of mysticism and his description of the individuation process as “not linear, but a circumambulation around the center, the self, an approach to it that is approximate”, it is conceivable that it was simply not within his worldview to accept any kind of union with the godhead/numinous/enlightenment/whatever.

One painting from the exhibition in particular seemed (to me) to back up this line of reasoning.  Again, I could not take pictures, so you will have to bear with me until my copy arrives.  Although I will not post any other pieces from the book out of respect for the copyright, I do hope that this one image will be allowed, simply for the sake of clarification. Anyway, the plaque next to the painting read as follows: “In 1950, Jung anonymously reproduced a painting identical to this in his paper ‘Concerning Mandala Symbolism’, adding the following comment: ‘The center is symbolized by a star.  This very common image is consistent  with the previous pictures, where the sun represents the center.  The sun, too, is a star, a radiant cell in the ocean of the sky.  The picture shows the self appearing as a star out of chaos.  The four-rayed structure is emphasized by the use of four colors.  This picture is significant in that it sets the structure of the self as a principle of order against chaos.”

Yet, as any good mystic tradition will tell you, this sense of the self as something set against that which surrounds it, is a false sense of self.  This is the self that must “go out”, in order to reach enlightenment, to truly unravel the mystery of life and death and to clarify the great matter once and for all.  While I do not want to imply that Jung never made it to this point, that he failed in his quest for Individuation, I do feel saddened that the center of “The Mandala of the Life of Carl Gustav Jung” is left with such an infuriatingly blank center.

(image of said mandala to come soon, hopefully…)

Lastly, as a sort of postscript, a brief note about Mr. Shamdasani himself (whose name, I’m sure, you have grown a bit tired of reading here).  It seems he was raised in the British boarding school system, and at some point in his youth, went on a trip to India in search of a guru.  He never found a guru, but while in India, a book of Jung’s “fell into his hands” (as it was put by Mr. Brauen).  And it was this was what he brought back with him from India and which will, I can only assume, maintain him throughout the rest of his life.

FOR AN EXPLANATION OF THE CROSSED OUT SECTIONS, SEE THE COMMENTS.

Buddha: “No, it cannot.”  For to speak of it thus makes one responsible for all the suffering that befalls them, and clearly this cannot be true.

NK: “Then can it be said that that one’s suffering is brought about through the actions of another?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For to speak of it thus removes all responsibility for one’s suffering from oneself, and inclines one towards lethargy and complaint.

NK: “Then can it be said that one’s suffering is brought about both through the actions of oneself and of others?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For to speak of it thus is to create a false dichotomy where in one falls into either one or the other of the two prior traps.

NK: “Then since one’s suffering is not brought about by either one’s own actions or the actions of others, can it be said that it is brought about by the whims of chance?”

B: “No, it cannot.”  For to speak of it thus means the suffering will be entirely ignored, as if it carried no message within it.

NK: “Well then, can suffering be said to be nonexistant?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For clearly suffering does exist.

NK: “Then, good Gotama, clearly you do not know suffering, nor do you see suffering.”

B: “This is not true. I have knowledge of suffering; I see suffering.”

NK: “Well my lord, can you please help to clarify the nature of suffering for me, and explain to me this knowledge that you have?”

B: “To say that suffering comes from within is to become a solipsist, as if the world depended entirely on oneself.  Yet to say that suffering comes from without leads to either depression or madness, as we then have no control over the fact that we suffer.  Instead, the Tathaagata teaches the middle way.  The cause of our suffering is our ignorance of the nature and dependent origin of that information which we perceive as causing our suffering.  If we could truly understand the actions that both brought this information into existence, and our own beliefs that cause us to label it as suffering, then we would be able to cut out the suffering at its root, and it would cease to exist entirely.”

An interpretation of the Acela Sutta (trans: here and here), come to after reading H. W. Schumann’s “The Historical Buddha”.