Notes from Joseph Azize

Jane Heap
Jane Heap / Notes, Jane Heap, anonymously edited by Annie-Lou Staveley and David Kherdian, 1983 and 2002, Two Rivers Press, Aurora, ISBN 089756023X
Overview
This is an edition of the notes Jane Heap prepared before delivering her talks to her pupils in the Gurdjieff ideas and methods. They are not ‘to introduce the ideas’, but ‘towards practical application of the ideas’. Her pupils had already learned the theoretical outlines, and were now participating in groups (the Gurdjieff schools generally organize pupils into ‘groups’ for collective study of the applied methods). The fact that these notes were not written for publication makes them more valuable, because we eavesdrop, as it were, on Jane thinking to herself about how she can address the practical needs of her pupils.
Gurdjieff’s ideas can only ever be superficially understood without an attempt to apply them to oneself. One finds in this volume, to an extraordinary degree, evidence of knowledge and practice united in work – which I would define as ‘informed action directed to a constructive aim’ (see George Adie p. 28). Although written as a number of chains of thought, not as one thematic exercise, the contents of this book are probably the greatest exposition of the ‘technique of techniques’ we will ever have.
Details
There is a table of contents, a two page introduction by Michael Currer-Briggs (whom Dr Lester, Jane’s pupil and physician, described to me as Jane’s ‘right hand man’), a large number of extracts from Jane’s private notes, with minimally intrusive editing by Mrs Staveley (one of Jane’s pupils, whom Jane effectively ‘graduated’ from her group before her death), and David Kherdian (Mrs Staveley’s pupil, and an acclaimed literary talent). Pages 87-95 comprise a collection of Jane’s aphorisms. The text is organized into readings of between one and ten pages, with italic sub-headings at various points. This is good, because the presentation is intense and compressed, so the sectioned layout assists the reader to select and study integrated units of related thoughts.
The volume is an attractive hard cover, with thick paper cover and plastic protection, approx. 6 ½ by 8 inches, with oil print on the endpapers. It comprises 95 pages printed on a slightly creamy, textured, top quality paper. The original 1983 edition was handset. Except, I think, that the first edition had leather trimmings, the 2002 edition is an exact facsimile reproduction of the first. Information about Jane, her style of teaching, and the publication of these notes and others, is found on the fly-leaves. The excellent choice of the paper, print and binding were the work of David Kherdian and his wife Nonny Hogrogian, a celebrated artist. However, the entire group at Two Rivers Farm were concerned in various aspects of its compilation and printing. To see and hold it, one feels that one is in the presence of a product of respect and careful attention, even down to the good use made of the fly-leaves.
Background
At the outset, I should observe that there is another book of Jane Heap’s notes, The Notes of Jane Heap, which, although also published by Two Rivers Press, was edited by Michael Currer-Briggs and others of Jane’s London pupils, not by Mrs Staveley. That is different from the book I am reviewing, although almost everything I say about the contents of this volume would apply to it, too. There is a significant overlap between the contents of the two books. The chief difference is that the ‘London notes’ lack even the subtle editing of this volume, and that, I think, is advantageous in that the notes are even more concise, but then, sometimes they’re almost impenetrable. That volume is a nice hard cover, but as an artefact, it is not in the same league as this masterpiece.
I have seen the typed transcript of all Jane’s notes, and it’s fairly apparent from their contents that some of them, especially the “Black Book”, can only have been meant for her own purposes, and not even in preparation for addressing her groups. But this book does not include those most private notes: this volume consists of notes which Jane wrote in longhand when preparing to give talks to her groups.
In August 1973, some nine years after Jane’s death, some of her pupils, having already provided Jeanne de Salzmann with a complete copy of the typed transcripts, met with her in Switzerland to discuss what use they might make of the material. And it is fortunate that they did, because Madame challenged them to produce their best. I do not just mean that she issued a challenge: anyone can do that. De Salzmann helped them probe deeply for their truest, best effort, as is apparent from the extracts below. It must have been an intense two days for these people. The notes of the meeting with Madame de Salzmann record her as saying on the first day:
This is something none of the other books have. There is plenty published about Ideas but not about How to work. Perhaps the thing to do is to prepare a small volume on this. Then Mme Salzmann will show it to the older ones – Tracol, Mme Lannes, Deselle – to see if it would help. We must be more DYNAMIC.
The capitals are as in the notes of that meeting, provided to me by the late Dr Lester. De Salzmann went on to say:
We must remember that what we do will be for the benefit of Jane – editing and shortening – and not hold back or hold on to the old memories because we were there – were taught by her. We must remember that the book will be read by people who never knew or saw Jane. For this reason we must remember that we have to insure that the book has IMPACT. (Jane’s sayings – need to be worked up and brought on).
I am not sure whether this last sentence represents de Salzmann’s aside, or was placed there by someone else. She made the point, which I feel the London notes bear out, that unedited, these notes incline towards being too dense. Thus, while I do not know if Madame ever gave approval of Mrs Staveley’s and Kherdian’s book prior to publication, it is that one which more closely accords with her advice:
As they are – Jane’s Notes – we would have to shorten them – edit them for reading. When they were given they were spoken – they were for that group to hear – for that moment – that meeting. They were spoken to be listened to. At a meeting – when spoken – the formulation does not matter so much because of the people there – they could be explained – elaborated – questions could be answered. But for reading by other people – people on their own – at home and not in meetings or groups – it would have to be different – and very carefully formulated – absolutely right.
One can sense the high demand which de Salzmann made, and the quality of thought which she brought (I am told she used to quote Gurdjieff as having said: “Very good is not good enough”). Other of de Salzmann’s comments, as recorded in these notes, illustrate the initial impulse which went into the production of this volume:
We must remember there is never enough MENACE in ourselves – never enough hard confrontation. If there is a true confrontation there is an agony – a horror – in that moment of balance. This way or that? Whichever way we go is an escape. We have to pay. If we give up then we are lost. … We meet someone – read a book – it arouses our interest – we feel that person has something. Even at a very early age that possibility of interest is there. This arousing of interest happens in our ordinary lives. We become aware that there is a hunger in us and because of that we follow that interest – we put our energy into that and no longer just as always before on everyday things. In doing that we put our energy onto a new and different level in ourselves.
We meet someone – like you met Jane – who has something different – that meeting raises your interest to this other level – it calls you to give your interest and energy in that direction. That person remains special for you – will always remain so – has become permanent. They have altered the direction of your life. Then later you will meet something else which will do the same and again raise you to another level. Gradually something becomes your own – what you have received is available to you. And you are in danger. There is a menace for you – a trap. You do not go on – you stay there. It has become too easy and you fall down and allow life to take you away. You do not stay there with that danger, that menace. You do not find your place. If you lose that position of danger it is hard to come back again.
Then there is TIME. Gurdjieff used to give work of a certain kind, for a time only. And just when people were getting used to that work – beginning to be able to do it – to find it easy, he would sweep it away – destroy it – because of that danger – the danger of it becoming too easy. Life changes – some of the things we still hear about – read about are now old fashioned. The time has gone for them, and this is inevitable and according to Law. There is a different way to call people to work now – a way that has to be used today. This we must always be searching for – and at the same time we must remain faithful to the Work – the Ideas – as we received them.
It is easy to make grand efforts – big efforts – to work extra hard on this or that, with terrific energy. This also can be an escape – can be a danger too. But if your work is related differently – if it is not just in one part – your mind or your feelings or your body – if everything in you is related and related to that danger – that menace – so that a true confrontation can take place – a confrontation that brings you up with a jerk – then that is different.
That, then, is how Jeanne de Salzmann came to be the godmother, as it were, of this volume. Now for the two other key players. Jane Heap and Annie-Lou Staveley were two of Gurdjieff’s most accomplished, and most faithful pupils. Unfortunately, there has not yet been any study of either of these most redoubtable persons which does them justice. Jane (1887-1964) was with Gurdjieff from about 1924, I believe, although at some point he sent her to London to commence her own groups. Initially, I understand, he asked her to join Ouspensky’s London group, but he refused to accept her. If I remember correctly, Moore says that his stated reason was that she was an ‘incorrigible lesbian’. Apart from wondering what a ‘corrigible lesbian’ would look like, and how Ouspensky would go about correcting one, I would need to see some evidence before I could believe that Ouspensky had made the comment: it seems an odd thing to say knowing that it could be reported, and that she had been a pupil of Gurdjieff’s.
The Contents
This book is direct and powerful to an extent I have never seen matched: “Only what we actually experience is valuable” [page 8]. As De Salzmann said, these notes tell how to apply the Gurdjieff method. They do not expound the ideas, but they operate from the ideas in such a way that certain important ones are highlighted; and when they are, their setting, which is a practical one, illuminates them in fresh ways. For example, she says that ‘I’ is a ‘power of emanation’ [12], and that it is a ‘potentiality of essence’ [13], and so opens a new perspective on these ideas. Then, the piece “I Am my Burden” draws on the Law of Seven, and yet develops it in a direction contemplated, but not executed, in Miraculous:
To finish everything you begin! We rarely finish anything completely – always something is lacking. How to see clearly in ourselves the cause of this! I may be unable to finish because I have decided but have not understood. … Or you may take the habit of finishing – but it will not give anything because the same habit may turn into something else. [3]
From these notes we can glimpse something of the teaching, and of the ‘technique of techniques’. I first heard this phrase from George Adie: both he and Helen Adie had been close to Jane, and they perhaps learned it from her. Mr Adie used it as a description of the Gurdjieff method, a technique which is not like any other we have known. It’s a technique which comes from a higher level, so that even in its form it is under fewer rules than our ordinary methods. The heart of this ‘technique of techniques’ is the preparation, and so, the preparation itself can also be called the ‘technique of techniques’. And yet, Jane says that “Every time I have to remind myself that it has to be the first time I ever tried the exercise” [16].
Can the use of a technique and the imperative to continually reinitiate fresh efforts be reconciled? They can be, and they often are, in practice. We see this even in the world where employing techniques in trades, arts and crafts, far from inhibiting freshness, makes it more possible. The great innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and J.S. Bach devoted great attention to the fine details of their arts. They can be reconciled in theory, too, because mastering the platform skills requires that the three platform functions (intellect, feeling and organic instinct) are trained, as a vine is trained to a trellis, and harmonized at least in respect of that art, which may explain why many people who master a craft, an art, a science or a skill, come to appreciate it with something in the direction of love.
The technique of techniques is under the laws of a higher world: it is based on the understanding of higher mind. In addition, the preparation is done in quiet, away from electro-magnetic fields, in the light and air of morning, which, as Gurdjieff said, possess special properties. Very few principles are required to do the preparation, either for the contemplative part, or to complete it by making a plan for the day or, in the evening, to review it and perhaps make a sketch for the following day.
Although the preparation is made in a special environment, with special knowledge, nonetheless its fruits must be expressed in this world: which means the formulation and the fixture of plan, and the wish and resolve to keep one’s word to oneself. So there is definition and decision, and it has to be that way. To refuse to use any technique is idiocy, a recipe for delusion. This is true whether we’re speaking of carpentry, gardening, painting, music, or inner development.
This point deserves emphasis: this book presents the authentic Gurdjieff teaching of the ‘preparation’ (not the ‘sitting’), thus Jane says “All depends on your preparation” [63] , but see also pp. 10 (mentioning divided attention), 14-16, 31, 34, 38, 46, 48-9, 52, 54, 63, 69 and 81. It helps that Jane refers both to the evening preparation and to the connection between the preparation and one’s plan for the day [pp. 14, 55 and 70]. The Adies brought all of these methods, and I have concluded that they are critical to any possibility of accelerated development. I would say that I proved this to myself, because after their deaths, I gradually let those good habits run down, but I’ve returned, thankfully, to them just in accordance with the principles they gave.
The preparation is a sort of bridge between worldly and spiritual life, what Mr Adie called ‘life under the sun’ and ‘life under the stars’. Both lives go together, as Jane said: “We transport into work what we are in life. If I behave like a pig in life, I behave in the work like a pig also …” [58]. Another practical concept uniting the two lives in practices is the teaching of the good householder, whom she says is “the man who neglects nothing. The man that is faithful and accurate in small things and, at the same time, remembers that he has another life to care for and who tries to relate them” [21, see also p. 15].
So, Jane points us to a unitive discipline [39], pursued for an aim [80]. To speak of discipline, today, invites resistance. Dr Lester often said that Jane understood the importance and lawfulness of resistance. He said, for example, that if someone in their craft shop The Rocking Horse was hammering an object which was not sufficiently steady, she would call out “Not enough denying force!”. The same wisdom inhabits this book: “The No is to make the Yes remembered. No and Yes have to become more inseparable – one without the other is not profitable. … Yes without No – the angel without the devil – is impotence. … If it were not so it would not lead you to something. It would be romance – fallacious.” [10-11]. Later, we find this powerful comment: “Gurdjieff says the word ‘passive’ meant something very strong and concrete” [66].
Negative emotions can be used: hence her succinct advice: “Look over the top of being negative” [26]. And not only negative emotions: Jane understood the value of fasting, [73], something which one can harmlessly experiment with by following the traditional fasts of the Eastern Christian Churches (modern Catholic practice is arguably better than nothing, but it does not compare to the Eastern traditions).
A special feature of this volume is that Jane preserves in an organic context many sayings of Gurdjieff, some of which would otherwise have been lost. Here is my list:
“Try to be responsible for what you have understood” [19]
“We are always making requirements” [24]
“To believe is to make sheep” [36]
“Revalue your values” [40]
“Everyone has a dog in himself” [41]
“Not even an apparatus in us for negative emotions – but they use every part of us”[42]
“Your work is cheap” [44]
“You are a very naive person” [46]
“A good egoist is something very big – a man who becomes concerned for his own reality, then begins to be concerned for the reality of others” [50]
“Try to do what you do – just what you do – but do it!” [58]
“Use little reminding factors” [59]
At the end of the volume, as noted, are her powerful aphorisms. An earlier draft of this review cited some, but there were so many I ached to include that it became unworkable. So I have, instead, selected lines from the other part of the text which strike me as profound with an almost unearthly profundity: “A picture formation in the mind is one of the foods for attention. Think what is meant by this food – food for voluntary attention” [53]; “What you have lived in dreams is etched in you …” [26], and with that, “As long as you accept to feed on deception you will not be given better food” [17].
There are so many such master-teachings that I cannot do them justice. I will give a subjective list of a few: see [44] for her comments on blood and instinct, [45] on worry, [76] on death, and pp. 19, 22-23, 28-29, 32-33, 50, 69, 71 and 76-77 for her comments on reality, unity aim and cause and control. It seems to me that she gives the clue to a theoretical understanding of reality and unreality in oneself. One of Jane’s famous sayings about death is here, too [76]. Dr Lester was there when a woman, in a state of mild anxiety, asked Jane what death was like. Jane replied: “Don’t worry. You won’t notice much difference.”
Finally, the Notes of Jane Heap ends with a few extracts about death and recurrence. And that is a good way to end. But this volume ends with something I think is even better: a chapter titled ‘Here – Now’ which seems to me to sum up the entire book in a tour de force. I will end with just one sentence from that chapter:
Do not fear – it is stupid. Quieten your emotions – this is the first step – then collect a little.

Gopi Krishna's Kundalini Experience

LIVING WITH KUNDALINI It is a grave error to suppose that the arousal of kundalini can be achieved with impunity by anyone who applies himself to the discipline. The popular idea that the practices result simply in the activation of a new force in the body is fallacious. Those who believe that the arousal and mastery of the force can be achieved by one's willful effort alone live in a paradise of fools. Properly speaking, the position has to be viewed the other way round. It is actually the pressure exerted by the slowly opening supersensory channel in the brain on one's mind which acts as the root of the religious impulse, driving one to seek expedients to satisfy the longing.
It is not a little more calmness or relaxed condition of the mind nor a little more creative ability nor a feeling of euphoria nor visionary experiences nor a little more efficiency in work that determines whether or not a transformation in consciousness has occurred in an individual. Rather, it is a complete metamorphosis of the personality that points to it.
The craziness of religious mania is similar to the eccentricity and madness of genius. Only the aberration takes a different form. It is only the highest luminaries, comparatively speaking, who have been free from it. Excessive penance, horrible self-mortification, utter seclusion, denial of love, renunciation of the world and family, abnormal ways of life and behavior, quaint appearance and dress are all part of this mania.
Unless the mind has been disciplined from an early age, a stimulated kundalini brings with it an irrepressible desire for the occult and the bizarre. It is incredible to what extent the victims of this desire can be duped by pseudo-Godmen, charlatans and impostors...In my own lifetime, one of these Godmen, residing in a village in Kashmir, used to urinate into a silver vessel in full view of the crowds that came to visit him and then sprinkled the liquid over the audience, both men and women. It is even said that his admirers held up their faces and uncovered their bosoms to receive the sanctifying drops.
The need for a highly balanced and regulated life, as a prerequisite for cosmic consciousness, was recognized in India from very early days. The emphasis of all great religions on a chaste, consecrated life stems from the same necessity.
The awakening may be gradual or sudden, varying in intensity and effect according to the development, constitution, and temperament of different individuals; but in most cases it results in a greater instability of the emotional nature and a greater liability to aberrant mental conditions in the subject, mainly resulting from tainted heredity, faulty modes of conduct, or immoderation in any shape or form.
It seemed as if I had abruptly precipitated myself from the steady rock of normality into a madly racing whirlpool of abnormal existence. The keen desire to sit and meditate, which had always been present during the preceding days, disappeared suddenly and was replaced by a feeling of horror of the supernatural. I wanted to fly from even the thought of it. At the same time I felt a sudden distaste for work and conversation, with the inevitable result that being left with nothing to keep myself engaged, time hung heavily on me, adding to the already distraught condition of my mind.
The nights were even more terrible. I could not bear to have a light in my room after I had retired to bed. The moment my head touched the pillow a large tongue of flame sped across the spine into the interior of my head. It appeared as if the stream of living light continuously rushing through the spinal cord into the cranium gathered greater speed and volume during the hours of darkness. Whenever I closed my eyes I found myself looking into a weird circle of light, in which luminous currents swirled and eddied, moving rapidly from side to side. The spectacle was fascinating but awful, invested with a supernatural awe which sometimes chilled the very marrow in my bones.
I seemed to have touched accidentally the lever of an unknown mechanism, hidden in the extremely intricate and yet unexplored nervous structure in the body, releasing a hitherto pent-up torrent which, impinging upon the auditory and optic regions, created the sensation of roaring sounds and weirdly moving lights, introducing an entirely new and unexpected feature into the normal working of the mind that gave to all my thoughts and actions the semblance of unreality and abnormality.
For weeks I had no respite. Each morning heralded for me a new kind of terror, a fresh complication in the already disordered system, a deeper fit of melancholy or more irritable condition of the mind which I had to restrain, to prevent it from completely overwhelming me, by keeping myself alert, usually after a completely sleepless night; and after withstanding patiently the tortures of the day, I had to prepare myself for even worse torment of the night.
A man cheerfully overcomes insurmountable difficulties and bravely faces overwhelming odds when he is confident of his mental and physical condition. I completely lost confidence in my own mind and body and lived like a haunted, terror-stricken stranger in my own flesh, constantly reminded of my precarious state. My consciousness was in such a state of unceasing flux that I was never certain how it would behave within the next few minutes. It rose and fell like a wave, raising me one moment out of the clutches of fear to dash me again the next into the depths of despair.
It seemed as if the stream of vitality rising into my brain through the spinal cord, connected mysteriously with the region near the base of the spine, was playing strange tricks with my imagination. Also I was unable to stop it or to resist its effect on my thoughts. Was I losing my mind? Were these the first indications of mental disorder? This thought constantly drove me to desperation. It was not so much the extremely weird nature of my mental condition as the fear of incipient madness or some grave disorder of the nervous system which filled me with growing dismay.
No one could even suspect what was happening to me inside. I knew that but a thin line now separated me from lunacy, and yet I gave no indication of my condition to anyone. I suffered unbearable torture in silence, weeping internally at the sad turn of events, blaming myself bitterly again and again for having delved into the supernatural without first acquiring a fuller knowledge of the subject and providing against the dangers and risks of the path.
I did not know then what I came to grasp later on--that an automatic mechanism, forced by the practice of meditation, had suddenly started to function with the object of reshaping my mind to make it fit for the expression of a more heightened and extended consciousness by means of biological processes as natural and as governed by inviolable laws as the evolution of species or the development and birth of a child.
Whenever my mind turned upon itself I always found myself staring with growing panic into the unearthly radiance that filled my head, swirling and eddying like a fearsome whirlpool; I even found its reflection in the pitch darkness of my room during the slowly dragging hours of the night. Not infrequently it assumed horrible shapes and postures, as if satanic faces were grinning and inhuman forms gesticulating at me in the darkness.
...There was a sound like a nerve thread snapping and instantaneously a silvery streak passed zigzag through the spinal cord, exactly like the sinuous movement of a white serpent in rapid flight, pouring an effulgent, cascading shower of brilliant vital energy into my brain, filling my head with a blissful luster in place of the flame that had been tormenting me for the last three hours. Completely taken by surprise at this sudden transformation of the fiery current darting across the entire network of my nerves only a moment before, and overjoyed at the cessation of pain, I remained absolutely quiet and motionless for some time, tasting the bliss of relief with a mind flooded with emotion, unable to believe I was really free of the horror. Tortured and exhausted almost to the point of collapse by the agony I had suffered during the terrible interval, I immediately fell asleep, bathed in light, and for the first time after weeks of anguish felt the sweet embrace of restful sleep.
In the case of a sudden, powerful arousal of the Serpent Power, the utmost care has to be taken of the following: (1) the state of mind, (2) the intake of food, and (3) erotic behavior. The will must have been already cultivated to exercise control over the now chaotic state of the mind. Like the pendulum of a clock, it oscillates between hope and fear, anxiety and assurance, joy and sorrow, for no apparent reason, as if pushed from this side to that and back again by an invisible force from within in a manner entirely unpredictable to the subject of the experience. If the will is not firm and lacks the strength to hold itself in check, the oscillations can lead to those irresponsible acts which are a characteristic of mental disorder.
There was no diminution in the vital radiation which, emanating from the seat of kundalini, sped across my nerves to every part of the body, filling my ears with strange sounds and my head with strange lights, but the current was now warm and pleasing instead of hot and burning, and it soothed and refreshed the tortured cells and tissues in a truly miraculous manner.
I was in an extraordinary state: a lustrous medium, intensely alive and acutely sentient, shining day and night, permeated my whole system, racing through every part of my body, perfectly at home and absolutely sure of its path. I often watched the marvelous play of this radiant force in utter bewilderment.
What made me hesitate in according publicity to it is the unique nature of the phenomenon; it neither falls in line with the known manifestations observed in mediums, nor does it seem similar in kind to the recorded experience of any known mystic or saint, Eastern or Western. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that, in its entire character, the phenomenon represents the attempt of a hitherto unrecognized vital force in the human body, releasable by voluntary efforts, to mold the available psychophysiological apparatus of an individual to such a condition as to make it responsive to states of consciousness not normally perceptible before.
I was now a spectator of a weird drama enacted in my own body in which an immensely active and powerful vital force, released all of a sudden by the power of meditation, was incessantly at work and, after having taken control of all the organs and the brain, was hammering and pounding them into a certain shape. I merely observed the weird performance, the lightning-like movements of the lustrous intelligent power commanding absolute knowledge of and dominance over the body.
I do not know how it happened that, even in that extremely abnormal state of my mind, needing constantly the application of new measures to adapt it to changing circumstances, I often hit upon the right procedure to deal with unexpected and difficult situations arising in my day-to-day contacts. If I had even so much as hinted to colleagues a word about my abnormality and the bizarre manifestations which were now a regular feature of my life, I might have been labeled a lunatic and treated accordingly.
To the frivolous inquiries directed to gathering more information about my experience, I usually turned a deaf ear, maintaining a reserve which has continued to this day. Failing to gain satisfaction for their curiosity and finding no remarkable change in me, the story of my spiritual adventure was treated as a myth, and to some I even became an object of ridicule for having mistaken a physical ailment for a divine dispensation.
From a unit of consciousness, dominated by the ego, to which I was habituated from childhood, I had expanded all at once into a glowing conscious circle, growing larger and larger, until a maximum was reached, the "I" remaining as it was, but instead of a confining unit, now itself encompassed by a shining conscious globe of vast dimensions...Speaking more precisely, there was ego consciousness as well as a vastly extended field of awareness, existing side by side, both distinct yet one.
An ordinary man in a humble walk of life, burdened with responsibilities, as I always have been and think myself to be, I never allowed any false idea about myself to take root in my mind after the new development. On the other hand, my absolute helplessness before the lately manifest power in me had the effect of humbling what little remnant of pride I still possessed.

Dream Records

1. Oct 3rd. Pet dog lost. In a building. Some kind of circus party were camped there. Found at the end.
2. oct 4th and 5th. Cant remember the dreams

Being Available

What am I working on now? Nothing I guess. I see myself sensing the body. And watching my breath. Then a certain staying during emotional upheaval.

I can see more and more clearly that there is another world under this veil. That keeps mysteriously operating behind the scenes. Where co-incidences are no so accidental. Signs are everywhere. One could even go schizophrenic imaging things, retro-fitting patterns to suit one's theories, phone calls from people one was thinking about, mails and phones not working when one is trying to reach someone. There is then this aspect of responding to them. Mostly by not trying anything.

This is truly that one learnt from this work period. A direction. To be available. That would be my new Aim. How does one be available? To what? And for what action?

Right now, how can I be available vis-a-vis the body? By just experiencing the sensation of its presence and weight on my being? By  traveling with the breath and following its course? By not giving into the  associative response of the body from deep rooted habits planted into it? By  emptying  my emotional  stress out of the body so its free of me and is back to being purely a planetary receptacle for the spirit? Then what does the body receive?

Or for the mind, does being available mean to just hear someone without comments, judgment and one;s own associative thoughts? To just receive the sounds and meanings like rain falling on leaves? I have sometimes experienced that when one does this, a deep insight emerges sometimes. As a fruit of the effort of being available.

And emotions ? How can one be available vis-a-vis emotions? they dont seem to need our permission to roam about wherever they wish in our presences. What is the practice of being available for emotions? Is it just being in a temple or participating in movements and music? Is there something in daily life? Is it about destroying any arising of sentimentality like weeds from a field of wheat?
How can i be available for higher emotions without creating an artificiality or process about it? How different is it from making the body or the mind available?

Baphomet or the Satan of the Misguided church

The goat on the frontispiece carries the sign of the pentagram on the forehead, with one point at the top, a symbol of light, his two hands forming the sign of hermetism, the one pointing up to the white moon of Chesed, the other pointing down to the black one of Geburah.
This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. His one arm is female, the other male like the ones of the androgyn of Khunrath, the attributes of which we had to unite with those of our goat because he is one and the same symbol.
The flame of intelligence shining between his horns is the magic light of the universal balance, the image of the soul elevated above matter, as the flame, whilst being tied to matter, shines above it.
The beast's head expresses the horror of the sinner, whose materially acting, solely responsible part has to bear the punishment exclusively; because the soul is insensitive according to its nature and can only suffer when it materializes.
The rod standing instead of genitals symbolizes eternal life, the body covered with scales the water, the semi-circle above it the atmosphere, the feathers following above the volatile.
Humanity is represented by the two breasts and the androgyn arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences."

The all seeing Eye

The Sun is the Male and the Moon is the Female and their offspring the All Seeing Eye.

The Witness appears when the male and the female energies are transformed into a higher dimension as per the Law of Three.

The Sphinx

And round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!"
Revelation 4:6-8

What is physiology of The Witnessing the I ?

(from Medha Journal)


Perception comes to us via the right brain as a whole and the left brain then, selects what it wants or needs.

The left brain has access only to the right brain;s global image, not to the world outside. What we call the "self" is the result of a delay mechanism in the brain itself passing from perception to translation, a virtual reality at best. This is the brain the West calls the rational brain, though it is aware only of a five per cent of the information available, and this is the brain that serves as foundation of all social sciences.

The Witness therefore is the Right brain looking at what the Left brain is picking and leaving. The Right brain therefore has to look inward against its default outwards direction.

Then its Right brain looking at Left brain. And the Left Brain looking at the Right Brain as it is its default mode.
Then there is a glimpse of infinity. Like two mirrors facing each other.

Tantra

First Breathing : Breathe in like sucking with a straw
Breathe out - relaxing with a moaning sound- Pulling up the perinium.

First : face to face breathing together
Then : Breathing on sides
Then : On top. alternating
Hold : Do the three bandas. Hold breath. Not let go. Or Bastrika.
Watch the movement of energy
Resume.

Sublimation Exercises - 6th Rite

Combined Kaya Kalpa with Tibetan 6th Rite

Did the Ashwini and then did the Tiebtan 6th rite. The key is to keep the focus on the agna chakra while pulling the energy up the spine. To do when im horny. It seems to work.

Dream

Life in its manifesting give clues by mirroring the Reality that we cannot access somehow.

So Nisarga says - When you dream, do the people in the dream know that you have dreamt them up? What will happen if they come to know ?

Nisarga says that one just needs to believe that one is not the personality. The witness is the proof of the Being. Over time, this belief will break the illusion. But it is important to believe deep within that this is true.

TRanscrips 1941-1946

"Instead of accumulating during one hour,one must try to keep constantly the organic sensation of the body.Sense one's body again,continually without interrupting life's ordinary occupations......the key to everything REMAIN APART
Our aim is to have constantly, a sensation of oneself, of one's individuality, this sensation cannot be expressed intellectually.because it is organic. It is something which makes you independent when you are with other people."

You dont work enuff. You let the dog yang you around. You forget your life is not for yourself. Merde. How do u expect to pay for your existence? Die like a cockroach? Death is round the corner. And ur wasting ur life.
Either do it or get out of the way!!!!!!!!!!

Body

The distance from the body seems lot more tangible. I am always confused if I should let things flow or keep experiencing these distances. Its amazing to sense ones body as a warm ball that one is hugging.
The work out is helping more and more in keeping a sensation of the body. Somewhere is the source of this all. Its not in my body but the route to there is thru it.

Advice from Eternal Now of the Awakening to Reality Blog

The Buddha taught: ""Furthermore, when going forward & returning, he makes himself fully alert; when looking toward & looking away... when bending & extending his limbs... when carrying his outer cloak, his upper robe & his bowl... when eating, drinking, chewing, & savoring... when urinating & defecating... when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, & remaining silent, he makes himself fully alert.

"In this way he remains focused internally on the body in & of itself, or focused externally... unsustained by anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on the body in & of itself."

(Mahasatipatthana Sutta)

Riddle of the Sphinx

There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first.

From Pentland - being simultaneously be aware of both forces

We don’t understand the importance of our attitude. My attitude at any point is like the sunken part of the iceberg. I start out from the conscious affirmative part which is like the tip. I’m quite surprised—and unprepared—to meet resistance from this unconscious part. Yet my attitude is largely governed by this resistance. You have to see the resistance. You have to be more aware of the wish to not work—at the same time as you are holding the wish to work.

What was implicit for me in these words was the simultaneous awareness of both these forces—the force of affirmation and the force of denial. It is the simultaneous holding within our awareness of both these two forces which draws us into the presence of the third force—the all-embracing force of reconciliation.

Quotes from the Teachers

There are two struggles—inner-world struggle and outer-world struggle, but never can these two make contact, to make data for the third world. Not even God gives this possibility for contact between inner- and outer-world struggles; not even your heredity. Only one thing—you must make intentional contact between outer-world struggle and inner-world struggle; only then can you make data for the Third World of Man, sometimes called World of the Soul.”

G. I. Gurdjieff

“Today we have nothing but the illusion of what we are. We think too highly of ourselves. We do not respect ourselves. In order to respect myself, I have to recognize a part in myself which is above the other parts, and my attitude toward this part should bear witness to the respect that I have for it. In this way I shall respect myself. And my relations with others will be governed by the same respect.”

Jeanne de Salzmann

“The point is, the head, which takes in ideas, and the feeling, which takes in scale, can never meet. Sensation is the relating element. How to feel what you think or to think what you feel is through sensation.”

John Pentland

“A teaching is a two-way channel linking Heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible; the ‘visible’ being everything in the universe revealed to us by our sense organs, and the ‘invisible’ being what other, more discerning, organs of perception enable us to perceive beyond the surface, which until then seemed to be the sole reality.”

Michel Conge

More than meets

Things we see seems to be a chemical reaction. A combination of light and the object with the eye being the "straw" and the "filter" thru which these impressions are brought to meet the chemicals of the brain to give rise to a new chemical which we call 'seeing the object'. The only thing that I can validate is the seeing.

Hence seeing what I am seeing can give a relative freedom from the sight and its identification.

The Melamati way of escaping the self deception of the ego

The main principle on which the Malâmatî Path is based requires that one always behold one's self as blameworthy. Rather than being an ethical postulate, this principle stems primarily from a psychological understanding of the nature of the self.
The 'self', or more accurately the 'lower self' (nafs), is understood by the Malâmatî mystics as being the tempting element(lower octave or descending current?) in the psyche, al-nafs al-ammâra bi'l-sû': 'the soul which prods one to evil' and in this capacity it functions as the agent provocateur of Satan, the lusts and all evil inclinations.

Yet it is also understood as the centre of ego consciousness.

Most mystical systems agree that the more one's energy is absorbed in satisfying and gratifying the requirements of the ego, the less energy can be put into the process of psychological and spiritual transformation.

However, by ascetic practices alone the humiliation and surrender of the nafs cannot be achieved.

On the contrary, the ascetic path often brings about an inflated hardening of the nafs.

Inflation and conceit derive from both one's self-appraisal (riyâ', 'ujb) as well as from external social feedback (shuhra, ri'âsa). [...]

The Malâmatiyya therefore taught that the only way to neutralize the nafs is to expose it to blame and humiliation in all circumstances and conditions. The blame and humiliation should be incurred from both external agents and from the malâmati himself.


Blame should be drawn upon one's self not only in accordance with what is considered blameworthy by social, religious and ethical standards, but also -- and first and foremost -- with disregard to what is accepted as praiseworthy by these standards

Morning insights

It appears that the seat of the "I" is the root cause of illusion for me. If the "I" is sensed as 'inside' the body ( and mental imagery) then there seems to be a sense of identification with the body and therefore personality.

Sensing of the "I" from outside the body as it felt today seems to be more 'freeing'.
The language of the mind seems imagery. It stores places, experiences in mental images. Therefore a space where mental imagery is absent feels like a 'truer' space. Something else then searches.

Sensation also has no imagery.

Mystic Poetry Excerpts

TS Eliot - 4 Quartets

Ist Quartet

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.



II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.



III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.



IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.



V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

2ns Quartet

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.



II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.



III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.



IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.



V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Occupying the seat of presence

Just ask yourself “Am I here?”
And then you answer with full intention and with the whole of yourself: “Yes, I am here.”
As you do so, be here, be the one who is saying this, thinking this. This is you, your True Self, sitting in the seat of presence.

Training of a novice in the Middle Path Sufi tradition

According to Hamdûn, on the other hand, spiritual practices were criticized and denounced in order to eliminate conceit and inflation. Abû 'Uthmân taught the middle path. He said:

Both ways are correct; each, however, in its right time. At the beginning of his novitiate we train the disciple in the path of practices and we encourage him to follow it and establish himself in it. However, when he is established and consistent in this path he becomes attached to it and dependent on it. Then we show him the shortcomings of this path of actions [or efforts] and our disregard for it, until he becomes aware of his helplessness, and sees how remote his efforts are from completion. Thus we make sure that first he becomes grounded in practices, yet does not (later on) fall into self-delusion. Otherwise, how can we show him the shortcomings of his practices if he has no practices? . . . Between the two this is the most balanced way.(42)

In response to a letter from Muhammad ibn al-Fadl al-Balkhî, a close companion of Abû 'Uthmân and another of the correspondents of Hakîm al-Tirmidhî mentioned above (also see below, section X), who asked him how one can perfect one's actions and states, Abû 'Uthmân wrote:

No action or state can become perfect unless God brings it about without any wish on the doer's part and without any awareness of the doing of the action, and without awareness of another's observation of the action.(43)

Melamet or Path of Blame

The Malāmiyya are a category of persons, who, in the mystical branch of Islam, sometimes known as Sufism, represent, according to prominent Sufis like Ibn al-'Arabi, the highest category of occulted or hidden Sufi Saint. [...] The legendary figure of the mysterious "Green One", al Khidr, is also often associated, as it is in the famous Qur'anic meeting with Prophet Moses, with those whose substance is concealed from men and who, in teaching Moses, breaks with conventional ways of acquiring true knowledge of God." [1]

"The Path of Blame (Melamet) is a hidden tradition within Sufism, which is, above all, a way of relating to our egos. It is a kind of spiritual warriorship, not a violent worship but a subtle and exquisite psychological warriorship. This kind of psychology is rarely encountered in any of the world's religious traditions.

The Melami path is a path of spiritual invisibility, a noninstitutional spirituality and yet a spirituality that involves brotherhood and sisterhood, close friendships, spiritual dialogue. Melamis wear no characteristic dress, do not identify themselves, and generally tend to keep their institutional profile virtually invisible.

The goal of the Melami path is to live a moral and sincere life for the sake of God alone and not to be concerned with appearances. The Melami does not wish to appear as a spiritual or pious person and regards any display of spirituality as a kind of hypocrisy. To be a hypocrite is to claim for oneself something that one does not possess. Since the human being is the extension of God's Compassion to the creation, there is nothing for us humans to call our own except our limitations. The Melami goes so far as to avoid and escape the praise and good opinion of people by making public or even exaggerating his own shortcomings, while keeping his superior qualities hidden, or attributing them to God. The Melami allows himself to appear as less than he is." [2]

"The main principle on which the Malâmatî Path is based requires that one always behold one's self as blameworthy. Rather than being an ethical postulate, this principle stems primarily from a psychological understanding of the nature of the self. The 'self', or more accurately the 'lower self' (nafs), is understood by the Malâmatî mystics as being the tempting element in the psyche, al-nafs al-ammâra bi'l-sû': 'the soul which prods one to evil' and in this capacity it functions as the agent provocateur of Satan, the lusts and all evil inclinations. Yet it is also understood as the centre of ego consciousness. Most mystical systems agree that the more one's energy is absorbed in satisfying and gratifying the requirements of the ego, the less energy can be put into the process of psychological and spiritual transformation. However, by ascetic practices alone the humiliation and surrender of the nafs cannot be achieved. On the contrary, the ascetic path often brings about an inflated hardening of the nafs. Inflation and conceit derive from both one's self-appraisal (riyâ', 'ujb) as well as from external social feedback (shuhra, ri'âsa). [...] The Malâmatiyya therefore taught that the only way to neutralize the nafs is to expose it to blame and humiliation in all circumstances and conditions. The blame and humiliation should be incurred from both external agents and from the malâmati himself. Blame should be drawn upon one's self not only in accordance with what is considered blameworthy by social, religious and ethical standards, but also -- and first and foremost -- with disregard to what is accepted as praiseworthy by these standards. Evidently, this lends the malâmatiyya a clear nonconformist character." [3]

Notes on Time

1. From La Open Hause

Thanks, Patricia. I am not familiar with Libet, although a quick google turned up his status as a neuroscientist.

Yes, he was involved in research into neural activity and sensation thresholds.

>I was simply conveying what was once explained to me, and later experienced in the briefest of moments, and that is that the "ordinary" senses, to avoid any issues of semantics, lag slighty behind any physical event. An analogy might be live television. We think it's live, in real time, but really it has the slightest time lag due to the transmission of the signal, yet it is certainly closer to real time than if we read about what we were watching later. So it is when we "sense" via the physical body. Ordinarily, there is the very slightest of time lags to sensing via the physical body. A higher body, which we all have a possibility of having, would have a more direct perception, one not dependent on the body. Nyland indicated there was this element of time to Work, and our experience of time changes as such. And, from our level, the level of ordinary existence, it is "iffy", even my description. Perhaps it might be wiser to ask, what is
our experience of time? And to explore it that way.

I had been thinking about this in context of the unconscious being real consciousness. Libet's work implies that unconscious neuronal processes precede and may cause "conscious" acts, which are then retrospectively *experienced* as having been *decided*.


James:
It very well may be that we also calibrate time by the perceived speed of events that are happening now. What happens at (what we perceive as) the same time gives us a lot of information about the world.

A very good area of inquirer and this is an area of study that is ripe for self observation in my opinion. Thanks, Patricia.

"... a flash presented during a slow-motion sequence of a movie is erroneously perceived as having a shorter duration than an identical flash presented during the same sequence at normal speed. The time-distortion illusion is only found when the future positions of objects in the movie are predictable by Newtonian dynamics. The illusion suggests that the speed of subjective time can be modulated by sensory feedback. That is, predictions about future positions of a moving object are compared against sensory feedback, and the difference can modulate the nervous system to speed or slow perceived time to match the physics of the sensory feedback. Thus, the brain may ease its task of consistent timekeeping by constantly calibrating its time estimation against physical laws in the outside world"

"The order of action and sensation is essential for determining causality. Accordingly, the nervous system must be able to recalibrate its expectations about the normal temporal relationship between action and sensation to overcome changing neural latencies. A novel illusion in this domain shows not only that the perceived time of a sensation can change but also that temporal order judgments of action and sensation can become reversed as a result of a normally adaptive recalibration process.

When a fixed delay is consistently injected between the participant's key press and a subsequent flash, adaptation to this delay induced a reversal of action and sensation: flashes appearing at delays shorter than the injected delay were perceived as occurring before the key press (Stetson et al., 2005Go). This illusion appears to reflect a recalibration of motor-sensory timing that results from a neural previous expectation that sensory consequences should follow motor acts with little delay."
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/45/10369

Joseph Naft Notes

COGNITIVE PRESENCE


Cognitive Presence
(Aspect 9 of 12 of the Path to Presence)
Cognitive presence means presence in our mind, in that part of us that cognizes or mentally registers perceptions and especially thoughts. We practice cognitive presence by putting our attention into our head and being there in our mind. Doing so attracts the sensitive energy of thought, the sensitive energy of cognition, into our mind. Just as the sensitive energy in our body enables us to be in contact with our body and its sensations, and the sensitive energy of emotion enables us to be in contact with our center of emotion and our emotions, so the sensitive energy of cognition enables us to be in contact with our mind and its contents.
But presence of mind means more than contact, because contact implies a division: something or someone who is in contact with something else, an observer and an observed. Body presence means inhabiting our body, being in our body, at one with it. Emotional presence means inhabiting our center of emotion, being in our chest and solar plexus region. And cognitive presence means inhabiting our mind, being in our mind, owning our mind. We are not standing back as an observer of our thoughts. We are right there in our mind — no division and no separation. But we are there intentionally and in sensitive awareness of our mind. Here I am in my head, in the place from which I cognize, know, think, and see.
This is a far cry from our typical mental state of being lost in thought, which operates on the automatic energy. In cognitive presence, such automatic associative thoughts may continue, but now you are present in them. The thought stream, whether associative or intentional, occurs within the mind you are occupying. Cognitive presence means being the one who is aware of and standing in the thought stream and, more generally, the one who is cognizing, knowing, and seeing.
The sensitive energy of cognition tends to raise the level our thoughts. Rather than arising by their typical automatic associations, our thoughts become more relevant to what we are doing, to our situation of the moment. We have less mental clamor and chaos. With cognitive presence we are more able to focus on a topic, more able to think clearly and logically, more able to see into the heart of matters. When automatic thoughts do arise, we are aware of them as thoughts and less likely to be swept away by them.
Cognitive presence is not about intentional thinking, but rather about intentional awareness in the context and contents of our mind. While this may include intentional thinking on a particular subject, it is not limited to that because you can be cognitively present in the absence of thoughts. You can be there, in your mind, knowing and cognizing without necessarily thinking.
The practice of cognitive presence works best when coupled with body or emotional presence. On its own, cognitive presence all-too-readily gets carried away in the stream of associative thoughts, opinions, daydreams, commentary, self-talk, attractions and repulsions. The sensitive energy of cognition thins out and scatters, leaving us adrift in our usual automatic mind. But when, along with cognitive presence, we simultaneously practice presence in our body or our center of emotion, we have a better chance at sustaining cognitive presence. Our body or emotional presence helps keep us from falling prey to the thought stream. Thoughts may come and go, but we stand anchored in body or heart and see our thoughts arising and passing. Here in mind and here in body, or here in mind and here in emotion, we are.
For this week, practice bringing your attention into your mind. Enter your mind. Inhabit it. Emerge from floating down your thought stream to anchor yourself in the present. Let the stream pass through you without passing with it. Become the context of your mind and aware of its contents. Be the one who cognizes, knows, thinks, and sees through your mind. Be the knowing, the cognizing, the seeing. Be your mind.



EMOTIONS

Emotions drive us, for better or for worse. Emotions can drive us to distraction or to contact, to violence or to friendship, to self-centeredness or to service. The remarkable range of emotions, from the petty to the sublime, imparts richness to our life. All emotions share the common feature that they can and often do affect our behavior, inner and outer, as well as the quality of our experience. Emotions define our motivations and impose them on us. As such, every spiritual path addresses how to work with emotions.
In the way of presence, we begin with practicing awareness of emotions as emotions. Lack of such awareness relegates us more firmly into the grip of destructive emotions. We react emotionally to some event and we are just lost in the emotion, carried away by it. Our emotion controls us, at least inwardly, even if we do not react outwardly. Maybe someone angers us in a conversation and perhaps we choose to suppress it and not say anything. Nevertheless, the anger may seethe within. We feel angry. We may even know that we are angry. Yet the key fact is that the anger is the center of our world at that moment. We have no inner context within which to see the anger as anger, as an emotional state that arose and will pass. We collapse into the anger and have no presence, as the soul blood of our inner energies burns up. And so it goes with much of our emotional life.
One help in recognizing our emotions as emotions consists of noticing how they affect our physical body. We may experience a change in our heart rate or breathing, tightness in our chest, certain facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, or postures. Each kind of emotion may have its own characteristic signature of physical effects. Stressful emotions also have more subtle effects on our physical health, effects not immediately noticeable. For now though, our practice is simply to see what we can see, to see our emotions in action, for example in our body.
Another help in recognizing emotions as emotions consists of noticing how they affect our thoughts. Repetitious and insistent patterns of thought can key us to their emotional driver. Thoughts can exhibit a tone that reflects the underlying emotion, just as our tone of voice often does. The tone of our inner thought-voice can manifest stressful or destructive emotions. So being aware of the qualities of our thoughts helps us recognize their emotional underpinnings.
Thankfully, the broad palette of our emotions is not all destructive. Far from it! Many emotions lift us up, both in the ordinary course of life and in our deepening spiritual practice. Awareness of emotions as emotions enables us to know which to nurture and which to let go. We allow and nurture the emotions that bring us closer to each other, to ourselves, to life, and to God. Much of our spiritual practice, such as meditation and prayer, nurtures those higher emotions.
We also allow the destructive emotions that create barriers, but we do not nurture them nor do we necessarily act from them. We allow, so as not to fight our emotions directly, which only energizes them. Any effort to suppress emotions backfires. Emotions are not illusory; they have a relative reality arising from causes within us. Suppressing emotions can, at best, only treat the symptoms, leaving their underlying causes untouched and ready to surface again and again. While we do not fight our destructive emotions, we also do not nurture them. We see and accept ourselves as we are, and our emotions they are, without layering on another level of emotional judgment and self-rejection. We see and accept and allow them to wane and disappear on their own. By opening our accepting and compassionate heart toward ourselves, including our destructive emotions, we heal their underlying causes.
Whether those causes lie in our personal history or elsewhere, they now take the shape of our identifications, our attachments, and our desires to have things be different than they are. We will address that in a later aspect of the path to presence.
For this week, please set yourself to notice your emotions as emotions, to realize in the midst of an emotion that it is an emotion that has you. If you watch television or movies you can see how the shows and commercials manipulate your emotions. If you drive, you can see how problems such as traffic and rude drivers activate your emotions. If you live with your family, you can see how the give-and-take of family life activates your emotions. In your favorite activities, in hearing a good joke, and in deep meditation, you can see and feel your joy.
Notice that this is not suggesting that we distance ourselves from our emotions. We feel and be in them, fully. We want to live fully, not impoverish our life by eliminating or stigmatizing our emotions. But we do want to heal the destructive and nurture the uplifting, without rejecting or even criticizing ourselves along the way. We open our heart and learn to love ourselves, emotions and all.

THOUGHTS

Thoughts carry power: the power to create and the power to destroy, the power to understand and control much of our world, the power to guide us toward inner freedom and the power to keep us inwardly enslaved. For these and other reasons, our civilization worships the power of thought. Consequently our education revolves around enriching the content and developing the process of thought.
But in all of that, we miss the fact that the power and quality of thought depends on the quality or level of energy fueling the thoughts. The energy most commonly giving substance to our thoughts is the automatic energy. Our endless stream of self-generating, associative thoughts runs on automatic, without any intentional direction. One thought triggers another related thought, which triggers a third related to the second. Soon our thoughts have no apparent relationship with the first thought. And then some sensory perception pops into our awareness, the sound of a word, a sight, a pain, and our thoughts abruptly fly off in another direction altogether. This semi-chaotic mind goes on all day, every day.
In itself, our automatic stream of associative thoughts does no harm and even brings value. For example, that ongoing commentary on our life provides some comfort, something familiar, a touchstone amid the constant changes of our external world. But this is where our relationship with our associative thoughts passes into trouble, where power of thought exceeds its proper place.
The first problem is the extent to which we live in our thoughts. We listen to and occasionally participate in this ongoing mental commentary. And rather than just being about our life, our thoughts become our life. We allow our attention to be swept away in the stream of associative thoughts, veiling us from the simple and ordinary perceptions of living. For example, we often do not fully see the people around us because we are too busily engaged in our thoughts. We get lost in conversations because our thoughts distract us from listening. We sometimes walk with little awareness of our surroundings or our body, because we are in our thoughts. The thought stream substitutes for a more complete life.
The second problem is the extent to which we live as our thoughts. Their very familiarity lulls us into assuming that, in some fundamental sense, we are our thoughts, that what our thoughts think is what we believe, and that we are, or rather I am, the thinker of these thoughts. But even a little observation of our mind shows that these ever-present associative thoughts are thinking themselves, constructing themselves out of the material of our memory of experiences, information, and habitual patterns, coupled with those current sensory stimuli that are strong enough to break through our perceptual filters.
Out of this emerges our personality, a complex but fairly static pattern of thoughts, attitudes, memories, and responses. And that’s who we believe we are. When a thought comes into our mind, though unbidden and by association, we nevertheless believe that is what we think and even that we are that thought. But we did not think that thought. It thought itself. Thoughts masquerade as us. The thought stream substitutes for us, allowing us to live primarily on autopilot with minimal participation in our life. The thought “I,” is not the I who we truly are. Live, in the moment, the challenge is to see our thoughts as just thoughts, and nothing more.
But if we are not our thoughts, not our emotions, not our personality, then who are we? The truest answer is that we are our will. And we shall explore that understanding in a later aspect of the path to presence.
For this week, notice your automatic, associative thoughts passing through your mind. The You who sees your thoughts is not just another thought, is not a function of your thoughts. Notice that your thoughts are not you, though they seduce you into believing that you are these self-generating thoughts chaining on in their own way. This is the ephemeral, insubstantial core on which our personality is based, the personality that we think we are, that substitutes for us. See your thoughts as just thoughTS.

HARMONIOUS

A stool, to be stable, requires at least three legs. So it is with presence. The act of simultaneously engaging all three presences of body, heart, and mind greatly multiplies our chances of maintaining our presence. The three interact and mutually support each other. When one of these presences weakens, the other two can reinvigorate it. With all three, we feel more solid; we stand firmly in the world of presence, of being here fully. So the first benefit of triune presence is the enhanced duration it enables.
Another major benefit lies in the breadth of triune presence. We become more fully human, anchored in our body with an alert, open, and adaptable mind and an appropriately sensitive heart. Our experience becomes more rounded, more balanced, and enriched. Clarity of mind is warmed by sensitivity of feeling, and both are grounded in the present moment of our body.
A third significant benefit is the intensity of triune presence, the vividness it brings to our experience. The three presences of body, heart, and mind combine to form a stronger presence than one or two could. One reason lies in the degree and quality of attention needed to enter and maintain such presence. In meeting the challenge of being in all three, we raise the level of our inner work for those moments. But there is also a feedback from our awakened body, heart, and mind that supports the intensity of triune presence.
So how do we actually practice triune presence? In recent weeks we have worked at body presence, emotional presence, and cognitive presence. Now we can work on putting it all together.
We begin the practice of triune presence during formal, sitting meditation. After thoroughly relaxing our body, mind, and heart, we turn to sensing our body. First we sense parts of it: arms, legs, torso, and head. Then we move into sensing the whole of our body and staying with that wholeness. Once we feel grounded in whole body sensation, in body presence, we add to it.
We put some extra attention into our center of emotion, into the general region of our chest and solar plexus. We are there in our center of emotion, even if there are no particular emotions at the time. We are there in readiness to feel, in readiness to be our emotion, in readiness to respond with feeling. We stay with both, with whole body sensing and with attention to our emotional center. After having settled ourselves in both emotional and body presence, we add to that.
We place some extra attention into our head, into our mind, to establish ourselves in cognitive presence. We are in our whole mind, not just in our thoughts. We are there in our knowing, seeing, thinking, cognizing part. And then we stay with all three: sensing our whole body, emotional presence, and cognitive presence. Toward the end of the meditation period, we let all that go and allow the effort and energy to soak into our being.
We also wish to live our ordinary daily life in full presence. So we can practice entering triune presence at any time during our day when we have enough spare attention for it. As with the sitting meditation version of this practice, we begin with sensing our body, the whole of it. Then we add emotional or cognitive presence. And finally we add the third. With practice, you may be able to come into all three at once. So when you find moments during your day that do not require your full attention to whatever you are doing, you can try entering triune presence and staying with it. Ultimately you may find that triune presence does not detract from your engagement in your life activity. On the contrary, triune presence may add to your attention, so that you can do whatever you are doing more fully. But, of course we maintain the caveat that critical situations (e.g., driving, chopping vegetables) deserve our full attention without inner efforts of presence.
For this week, practice triune presence. Even if you are only able to enter such presence for brief moments, those moments repeated offer a taste of new possibilities, a new way of living.

OCCUPYING THE PRESENCE

The stool of presence may be stable with its three legs of presence in body, presence in heart, and presence of mind, but that situation is not complete. The purpose of a stool is for someone to sit on it. That someone is You, your I, your I Am, the agent of your life, the one who is present in your body, heart, and mind. It would be more accurate to say that the stool is not one of presence, but rather a stool of awareness — unless there is someone sitting on it. There can be awareness of body, of heart, and of mind. But without You there as the one who is aware, the one who is present, it is simply like a robot with sensors.
The core of presence is the one who is present, the one who inhabits your body from within, the one who feels your emotions, the one who cognizes through your mind, the one who lives your life and does what you do. Ordinarily we take this one for granted. We assume that we are always here as the one who experiences and lives our life. But even a cursory investigation reveals that sensory awareness, thoughts, and actions typically go on by themselves without “You.” This is particularly obvious in our automatic thoughts, which think themselves by association, without us thinking them or directing them or even necessarily being aware of them. Such awareness often comes after the fact, when we notice that a whole train of thoughts has arisen on its own and passed through our mind.
So this final aspect of the Path to Presence involves the practice of being the one who experiences and lives our life, the practice of being here at home in our center. Be the one who sees through your eyes, the one who is aware of your thoughts, aware of your mind, aware of your center of emotion. Inhabit your body. Inhabit your feeling. In habit your mind. Claim it all as your own. Instead of letting so many of your words and actions happen on their own in a stimulus-response cycle and without your participation, say what you say and do what you do. Engage and be who you are.
The subtlety is that who we are, our I, is will. And will does not exist in the same way that material objects or even energies exist. Will cannot be touched or seen or weighed or experienced. Indeed, it is will that does the touching, the seeing, the weighing, and the experiencing. Just as our physical eye cannot see itself, will looks, but not back at itself. Will acts but is not acted upon. But we can enter our will, our I, by being it, by being the actor, the agent, the seer, the decider, the director of our attention.
There are two levels in this. At the level of the conscious energy, we can be our I directly. We have a sense of wholeness and agency, a sense that I am the agent of my life, that I am the decider, the chooser, the experiencer — here in this moment. We feel ourselves to be the one who is here. We will our self to be and we are. But … this is not our actual I. We could call this our True Self [1]. And we would do very well to live in our True Self, more and more.
To get a taste of this, just ask yourself “Am I here?” And then you answer with full intention and with the whole of yourself: “Yes, I am here.” As you do so, be here, be the one who is saying this, thinking this. This is you, your True Self, sitting in the seat of presence.
There is, however, a deeper level of I, one which we do not enter directly, but rather one to which we can open, one which we can allow to enter us. The difference between True Self and I is where it begins. With True Self, we may feel ourselves to be our own source, to be our own individual self, separate from other people, from other selves. The transition to I occurs when we, as our True Self, open inwardly to the source just behind our True Self. We open our very core to let our own higher will flow into and through us, as us. That is our I, but is not so separate from other I’s. We recognize our I as fully our own, as who we really are, yet also as not just our own, but as connected at its root, at our root, with something vastly greater than us.
For this week, practice being your True Self, and even opening to your I. Be the one who lives your life, who makes your choices, who does what you do, and who experiences your experience. Rather than leave the seat of presence empty, inhabit your own center and complete your presence

Root of Awareness?

"The root of the mystery of being lies at the root of the awareness which perceives the universe. Every human being is or can be aware that he is aware. When that self-awareness is traced to its inner source, then only can the identity of the individual with the universal be found, then only can the mystery of being be solved"

Excerpts from Gurdjieff key concepts : Spohia Wellbeloved:

1. Each moment of time has an infinite existence in eternity.
2. Gurdjieff said that each centre has its allotted time to run, but that time RUNS ONLY INTERNALLY AND IS MEASURED BY ASSOCIATIONS.

Movements - Quotes by Mme S

Behind the visible movement there is another movement, one which cannot be seen, which is very strong, on which the outer movement depends. If this inner movement were not so strong, the outer one would not have any action.

~ • ~
You must constantly divide your attention between something which is higher than yourself and your movement. You always lose yourself in one or the other. As soon as you stop making this effort, you become identified with the movement.

You must consider these Movements as a condition, an exceptional one given to you to work on your attention.

In so dividing your attention, you are filling the place that you can fill. One day you may be capable of more, but today, this is your place.

You do not realize enough that your attention is your only chance. Without it you can do nothing.

Usually you think about your movement, but you do not do it. You maintain your thought on the movement, and then when it is the time to do it you give up, and the movement is done, no matter how, without you.

~ • ~
The thought must have its own center of gravity; it cannot just be either here or there. We must find this center of gravity. It is the same for the body; if it is not centered, no movement will be possible. It is the same for the feeling.

These Movements are designed to enable us to pass from one center of gravity to another; it is the shift that creates the state. The gesture, the movement, is what is important, not the attitudes.