Gravitating

Self-knowledge reveals to the Soul [psychê/ emotions, feelings and thinking faculty] that its natural motion is not in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a centre, the point to which it owes its origin. If the Soul knows this it will move around that centre from which it came, it will cling to it, commune with it, and indeed all soul should, but only divine souls do. This is the secret of their divinity, for Divinity consists in being attached to the centre. One who withdraws from it, becomes an ordinary man or an animal (Plotinus, Ennead VI, 9).

Do we want to be truly human? What is that essential “centre of gravity”? How to find it? What role should it play in our daily life?

So distracted we tend to be in ordinary life, that we miss a whole flow of inner wealth that answers many unsolved questions. When one turns the attention towards the own body, perception and inner space during the day, one notices that the body has unnecessary tensions, the heart is sometimes contracted, filled with anxiety and negativity, while the mind tends to have aversion towards physical discomfort, unpleasant circumstances of life, certain manifestations of other people, and so on. Yet, all that, as a whole, seems to be part of a movement, a longing for something that is rarely found because the monkey mind is not patient enough to watch in silence, it simply jumps from one object to another, saturated with noises.

Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or by chance and that it depends upon material causes, are far more removed from the divine and from the notion of The One.  It is not such people as these that we address, but such as those who admit the existence of a world other than the corporeal and at least acknowledge the existence of the Soul [psychê, as source of the body].  These people should apply themselves to the study of the Soul, learning among other things that it proceeds from the Intelligence [the self-contemplation of the Noûs or Higher Mind] and attains virtue by participating in the reason  [lógos] that proceeds from the Intelligence.  Next, they must realize that the Intelligence is different from our faculty of reasoning [ordinary thinking], that reasoning implies, as it were, separate steps and movements.  They must see that knowledge consists in the manifestation of the rational forms [Eide, Ideas] that exist in the Soul and come to the Soul from the Intelligence, the source of knowledge.  After one has seen the Intelligence, (...) one must think of it as a quiet, unwavering movement, embracing all things and being all things (...) the intelligible realm, is near The One (...)  It is nevertheless not the Supreme because it is neither one nor simple. (Ennead VI, 9. Note: the highlighting and the parenthesis are ours).

This text of Plotinus might seem a confusing manifestation of “rationalistic mysticism”, but it really grasps details that may shed light upon the wealth of our inner world. We rarely question our “values”, “thoughts” and “feelings”, wondering where they come from. Some have even come to believe that subtle Ideas such as "Vitality", “Light”, “Being”, “Beauty”, “Justice”, “Oneness” are but a conceptual product of the brain, when the truth is that they are real qualities that inherently belong to a more subtle level from which both the inner serenity, conscious love, the psyche and the body emerge, from where everything flows, since the last Big Bang. 
Yet, as Plotinus points out, the Light-Intelligence, is in no way the One towards which all things gravitate, even though some dual traditions seem to believe so. "The Supreme Good, The One beyond oneness”, “The Pathless Path”, is still the greatest accomplishment, or rather, the greatest and most mysterious non-accomplishment. But let´s leave that to ponder, for a future post on Non-Duality. Until the next time, eyes back to the body and psyche together.

(Anyone interested in juicy texts of Plotinus may find them in the compilation The Essential Plotinus, with translation by Elmer O´Brien)

Embracing delusion

            Embrace your demons (Tibetan saying)

            For humans, mêtis (watchful intelligence) grows in relation to what is present (Empedocles, fr.106 D-K)

Whoever deceives is more just than whoever does not deceive and whoever is deceived is wiser than whoever is not deceived (Gorgias, fr.82 B 23 D-K) 

Deception, to these people [Parmenides, Empedocles, Gorgias], is wisdom’s ornament and truth’s halo. Nobody, however foolish or wise, has the slightest chance of escaping it. For according to this tradition there is no ascending to the truth. There is only a descending, a constant bending to embrace illusion as well as truth through learning the justice of deceiving and –behind even that– the wisdom of being deceived (Peter Kingsley, Reality, p.494)

We’ve come to exist in a culture which not only moves away from its spiritual roots, but tries to scape from reality at any expense, even when we pursue “spiritual ideals”, trying to be free of anxiety and distress by achieving an “imagined desirable something” which is somewhere else but here and now. 

All dualistic views insist on searching something better by overcoming or disolving delusions. Western science and academic philosophy are a clear example, struggling in  endless conceptual debates and fragmenting things into smaller and smaller bits to be more precise and predictive. 

But let’s leave kids play. After all, isn’t deception an essential part of our life and Reality as a whole? 

This may lead us to think: “how boring and disappointing can life be sometimes; how tricky, painful and overwhelming are some emotions and desires; that can´t be part of the Truth". Then we would be missing those perceptions are just another trick of our dull mind. A hidden vanity moves us to define a dead box we take for true life. Meanwhile, our five senses remain as mere flower buds –as Empedocles put it–, disconnected from the common sense that links them all.

By fortune life shatters our fixed views into pieces, for we are not meant to feed the appearances, but only let them be and play their divine role, just as in the tale, when Buddha did not succumb to the tricks of Mara, the Tempter, and came to recognize him as his own reflection, finding rest, at last; or Jesus, who listened to the Devil but did not follow his three temptations. 

Reality or Truth is not the opposite of delusion. And delusion is only an aspect of it. All we perceive through the body are but shadows that can never be separated from the Vast Mind that never changes and gave them birth.

That is precisely the reason why our falls and deceptions are bells tolling for us. 

Spontaneous Watcher

Are we raising a generation of men and women who do not aware that the mind has the power to separate from itself and be free of the adictions and the habits and the conditioning and the automatic thinking that goes on in so much of our lives? 

This is a question professor Jacob Needleman raised in one of his presentations of the book Why Can´t We Be Good?, with regard to a very important psychological constatation that we may describe as follows: in a class of philosophy he had given his students the task of trying to constate “I am angry”, without judging, everytime they got angry. The next day he asked for feedback, and only two students had remembered the task. One of them had interpreted it wrongly, while the other, a young Oriental lady, grasped something and described it quite well:

She had gone to a Dry Cleaners shop to pick up some clothes, and asked if these were ready. “No, they are not ready”, replied the clerk angrily. This unkind reply made her react inwardly with anger too, since she had been told the clothes would be ready for that day. But at that moment she “saw herself in that angry state” and thought “oh, this must be what the teacher was talking about”. A closer attention  made her realize that the very act of "seeing herself angry" had “taken some poison out of it”, as she put it; in other words, the anger was no longer controlling her inner world and she left the shop in an unsual state of inner freedom. 

Now, this is surely a state recognized by people who are consciously involved in a process self-discovery. And despite it is quite revealing, showing our "identification with our daily delusions", it also has an elusive quality; the act of consciousness itself is so subtle that it can never become a “ruled practice” or a “habit”, and when we try to make it so, we lose the point and get caught up in a new identification. Why is that? Is it due to believing that the person we believe we are can become conscious just by itself? Is it because we think consciousness is something we can possess in the same way we have shoes? What is that tendency to control even what can make us free? What can make us more spontaneous?

Part of the answer probably lies in all these questions themselves, but the issue seems to go deeper than that. Echoing Empedocles, our being is the seed of a Tree which is meant to grow and extend its roots and branches to depths of reality that embrace everything, and so long as we experience from the level of our foggy mind, no tree will flourish. Water of Awareness is still required to help the seed grow.

Link to the above mentioned presentation of Dr.Needleman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcpQr9ohaww)

Death as Master

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy [love of Wisdom] are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. (Socrates, in Phaedo, 64e, by Platon)

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life –and only then will I be free to become myself. (Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time)

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrasment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart (...) No one wants to die. Even people who wants to go to heaven, don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is as it should be, because death is the best single invention of life; it's a life change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you [speaking to young students], but some day, not to long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. your time is limited. So, don't waste it living someone else's life, don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other's people thinking; don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They surely already know what you truly want to become. Everything is secondary. (Steve Jobs, Stanford Speech, 2005)

We have to try to live our lives so that we could say any day: "Today I can die and not be sorry about anything" [...] Try to imagine yourself relatively clearly the last hour of life on earth. Write a kind of script of this last hour, as if it were the script of a film. Ask yourself: Is this how I want to dispose my life? If you are not satisfied with the answer, rewrite the script until you like it. [...] To understand the real possibilities of this world, it is necessary to find what we can reach in this world that will be very useful in the Real World. (from The Last Hour, a talk by G.I.Gurdjieff)

Every one of those unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be congnizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of those upon which his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence, and also that tendency to hate others which flows from it. (All & Everything, G.I.Gurdjieff)

These words need no explanation. Yet, the shocking realization of our physical finitude usually brings two different attitudes:

When one makes an effort to overcome the inertia of semi-consciousness by struggling to remember and feel the inevitability of death, this generates a "psychological stop", a vital reset from which pure actions –not mere reactions– can take place, as if we were given a new chance to pass page and start writing on a white paper, so that our life gets closer to the transparency and perfection of Being.

However, it's also very shocking to realize how many people adopt a rather different attitude. As soon as they become more or less aware of the fact they are going to die, they  get caught up in the irrational fear and start thinking in all the possible ways to satisfy the greatest number of trifling whims, following the maxim "eat and have fun because  tomorrow we will die". 

This last attitude seems to be related to a state of "inner emptiness", "sadness" and "disappointment" that all humans experience every time we "decide" to shut the door that leads to the immediacy and openness that now reveals who and what we are. 

From this viewpoint, human death points to our true potential and Essence, suggesting the possibilities "to be" and the possibilities of "not to be". 

Why is a crisis necessary?

No living being in existence, therefore, will be able to experience anything without having experienced its opposite beforehand. (LB 1, 35)

If it were not for pain, no individual would be sustained in an eternal existence; no living being would ever be brought back from the wrong road, but would continue on it, which again would be the same as an eternal silence, for without pain, no contrast to life, and without contrast, no manifestation, no roads towards perfection, no evolution, no experience of existence, but a universal equilibrium preventing any form of movement. An eternal death would be the master of life. But thanks to pain, the opposite is a fact. Life is the master of death, and pain, a divine blessing. Pain shows the way to God, to Truth and to Life. (LB 1, 86)

This "struggle for existence", or this ever-lasting effort by the individual to overcome and control unpleasant forms of energy in nature, is recognized under the concept of "evolution". (LB 1, 5)

When will no more veils surround the truth?

And here the answer will be:

"When the individuals' sense perception is so far davanced in its development that they are capable of experiencing as a realistic fact that `everything is very good´". (LB 1, 28)

People will then discover that much of what they previously thought the work of the Devil was, in fact, the work of God. (LB 1, 26)

These are excerpts from The Third Testament- Livets Bog 1, the magnum opus of a rather unknown Danish visionary called Martinus (1890-1981). They are availabe for free in  several languages at http://www.martinus.dk.

He was one of the few who became aware of the global crisis when nobody talked about it, being a process that started to take place decades ago and not recently, as some may believe. 

The world is in crisis because we, single persons, are in crisis, not only economically, but psychologically and spiritually. The states of unrest, discomfort, confusion and even certain diseases, are a "taste of non aligment with ourselves, our source, the Truth". 

This is how we are invited to look for the way back and wonder: what does it mean to be aligned with ourselves and the Kosmos?  how can we be aligned?

Such is the essence of our search in life, where the negative side also plays a divine role. 

The Nature of the Mind

A story tells that Siddharta the Buddha was once walking across Nature with his close disciple Govinda, and then he asked:

–Would you please take this bowl and fill it with water from the stream we left behind a while ago.

–Of course, master. I´ll bring the water for you.

Govinda then goes to the stream and just when he's kneeling down to pick  up the water, a man crosses the stream with his oxen and the water gets mudded. 
The disciple, disappointed, goes back to the Buddha.

–Sorry, but the water is now mudded.

–I see –said the Buddha thoughtful, and knowing the stream was connected to a large lake behind the mountains, he adds, with an insistent tone:

–But Govinda, I´m very thirsty. So, please, go back to the stream and try to get clean water.

Govinda obeyed willingly, although confused about his master's insistence. 

When he arrived, the water of the stream was still dark. So, he just sat on the shore and waited wondering about a possible solution. Then, as he was observing the stream attentively, he started noticing how the water became clearer and clearer, since all the sediments and leaves sank back again to the bottom.

This realization generated an "illumination" in Govinda's heart, who understood the lesson of the Buddha, and remembered what the master once had said:

"The Nature of the Mind is always present, pure and crystalline, but its surface gets mudded with thoughts and emotions from time to time, until these dissipate again".

Contemplation in Art

 It's not difficult to tell the difference between a music performance or composition that came out of the silent heart and one which is the result of a calculative mind enmeshed with "external products" such as notes in a paper, fashion ideas, the desire to please others... 

Not many artists and composers have the courage to recognize that the greatest art works are not "created" by them, but rather woven from another level of reality which is beyond the "ordinary self". The artist is a mere vessel, whereas the Deep creates by using whatever is available, which can be the attitude and technique of the person.  But it seems one has to become "actively receptive" to pick up higher influences.

We don't do anything, but without us, nothing can be done (Jeanne De Salzmann)

It's worth mentioning a remark by Mozart, who said his music turned up "fully made" in his head before it was actualized on instruments or written on a paper. 

Where do the receptivity and creative action take place?

There is a "flowing and spacious silence" that cannot be expressed, only experienced within. In it and from it, all seems to fit, and we feel effortlessly at ease, perhaps being what we're meant to be.

At the same time, because of our unbalanced condition, finding this silence within is both a higher demand and a challenge. Hence the importance of finding openeness. 

Let's listen now to an inspired and free interpretation of the 2nd movement of Mozart's 12th Sonata (KV 332), performed by Friedrich Gulda.  His words at the end are good to ponder.