True Life

Do we ever stop to ponder on what Christmas time really means? In ancient times it was about a “higher birth”, the nurturing of an "inner infant" and its reality, which implies the connection with the Spirit, and with the Soul of a mythical Earth, a forgotten Paradise that has received many names and of which much has been written, despite its nature remains elusive, even when it looms shyly in our night dreams. But it always leaves an imprint in each one of our individual lives:

 Our authors [i.e Sohravardi] suggest that if the past were really what we believe it to be, that is, completed and closed, it would not be the grounds of such vehement discussions. They suggest that all our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, re-iterations of events still unconcluded. Each one of us, willy-nilly, is the initiator of events in Hûrqalyâ, whether they abort in its hell or bear fruit in its paradise. While we believe that we are looking at what is past and unchangeable, we are in fact consummating our own future. Our authors will show us how a whole region in Hûrqalyâ is peopled, post mortem, by our imperatives and wishes –that is to say, by that which directs our acts of understanding as well as our behavior. 

[...] 

Everything is strange, say our authors, when one sets foot on that Earth where the Impossible is in fact accomplished. For all our mental constructions, all our imperatives, all our wishes, even the love which is the most consubstantial with our being –all that would be nothing but metaphor without the interworld of  Hûrqalyâ, the world in which our symbols are, so to speak, taken literally. March 1960.

This is how the scholar Henry Corbin –expert in Islamic and Persian mysticism–, ended the Prologue of his work Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth; a wonderful research and delicious reading that intends to be simply a hint, not a map. It points to a dimension of life that surpasses all fictions, and yet is imaginal in nature, far more real than ordinary imagination, or as the wise men of the Renaissance said, imaginatio vera, true imagination. An inner faculty that is waiting to grow in us, for as we said in recent posts, we lost the connection with the Soul and the Spirit (Psyche and Pneuma). 
Henry Corbin says in the Prologue –following the tradition of the Persian philosopher and poet Sohravardi, which goes back to figures like Zoroaster and Empedocles–, that our perception has to go through a progressio harmonica, analogical to the process of listening to a single melody in two different octaves, one more subtle than the other. Not an intellectual activity, but “music in our being”.

The heart, the mind and the body need to be musically fed by the feeling of primordial archetypes. With a proper attunement, an echo may be heard within. Nobody can convince us then that this sensory reality we see is all there is, for reality is not in beliefs, not in vague perceptions, not in books. When the echo of reality reaches our heart, our actions and experiences, all the suffering and beauty we feel, appear immediatly on another level, a higher octave, since they´re not just ours; all we see is but a sacred manifestation of the True Life, even the non-sense, the rocks, the trees, the birds...everything is part of the History of the World Soul, and our role in it is really up to us. What place do we choose in it then? A laborious journey continues; there is still a Great Work to be done.

Inner Alignment

Image from http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/CarlsonR2.php

The Winter Solstice has arrived and this time it brings a curious  event that may perfectly be interpreted as a point of reference for the inner work. 
From an astronomical point of view, thirty six years are approximately the time our sun is taking to cross –not literally– the famous Dark Rift or central region of the Milky Way Galaxy  –an event that only happens every 26.000 years (a Great Platonic Year). Such a central bulge, visible to the naked eye on a non-contamined night sky, was venerated by many ancient cultures, for reasons we are not ready to understand fully yet. 
The galactic centre seems to be what the Hindu and Judeo-Christian traditions referred to as Throne of God, source of powerful influences that regulates the clock of Cosmic Eras, as the great Sage Swami Sri Yukteswar explained in his work The Holy Science. 

According to that Clock, our entire solar system already left a dark Cosmic Winter and is presently returning towards its star-counterpart, experiencing a Cosmic Autumn (Bronze Age for the Greeks). 
Interestingly enough, our sun has appeared to be aligned to the galactic centre for more than a decade now, and it will continue thus for several years. During the present Solstice the sun even dances in alignment with the "exact centre". Now, it should be noticed that the "factual, literal closest point" to the galactic centre wouldn´t be reached until several thousands of years in the future, when our star system meets its counterpart again, according to Yukteswar.
Right now we seem to be "in the middle of the road". And whether or not the present alignment implies some type of magnetic influence related to the Solar Cycle, it anticipates our essential Destiny. So, it may be seen as a reminder of our connection to the Source. And what a better way of doing it than by listening to our silent heart? 

In the Sufi Order Mevlevi, the dervishes swirl and swirl like galaxies, until a higher force takes control of their bodies and their consciousness merges with the "mysterious centre of gravity". 
Something similar happens by playing deep music and listening to it in a proper state of receptivity, as an act of prayer:

Associative Chains

 The following excerpt complements the previous one, being a concise summary of a curious psychological phenomenon, an essential root of the "mechanicalness" that severs the link with the unknown, generating thus the soul-less manifestations that predominate in modern times, both in art, personal relations and other social areas. Something to be observed in different situations of daily life:

Have you ever tried to watch yourself mentally when your attention has not been set on some definite problem for concentration? I suppose most of you are familiar with this, although perhaps only a few have systematically watched it in themselves. You are no doubt aware of the way we think by chance association, when our thought strings disconnected scenes and memories together, when everything that falls within the field of our consciousness, or merely touches it lightly, calls up these chance associations in our thought. The string of thoughts seems to go on uninterruptedly, weaving together fragments of representations of former perceptions, taken from different recordings in our memories. And these recordings turn and unwind while our thinking apparatus deftly weaves its threads of thought continuously from this material. The records of our feelings revolve in the same way—pleasant and unpleasant, joy and sorrow, laughter and irritation, pleasure and pain, sympathy and antipathy. You hear yourself praised and you are pleased; someone reproves you and your mood is spoiled. Something new captures your interest and instantly makes you forget what interested you just as much the moment before. Gradually your interest attaches you to the new thing to such an extent that you sink into it from head to foot; suddenly you do not possess it any more, you have disappeared, you are bound to and dissolved in this thing; in fact it possesses you, it has captivated you, and this infatuation, this capacity for being captivated is, under many different guises, a property of each one of us. This binds us and prevents our being free. By the same token it takes away our strength and our time, leaving us no possibility of being objective and free —two essential qualities for anyone who decides to follow the way of self-knowledge.  (Views From The Real World, G.I.Gurdjieff, Speaking about different subjects, Section II)

  After hearing this, one might feel inclined to think that the string of habitual associations (pleasure-displeasure, satisfaction-irritation...) is random or even unnecessary. But that wouldn´t be entirely right.

 First of all, the psychological and physical chains of associations are necessary for the flow of Life in general –even the DNA is an associative chain or sequence–. 
  Now, the "lack of attention to the senses" opens the door to associations that make us erratic and destructive. On the contrary, a proper focus cleans the brain and fosters harmonious associations that fill our being with clarity and serenity.

 Certainly, many inner associations are unnecessary, frantic and chaotic, as those promoted by an insane mass media through the bombardment of morbid TV News, commercials, movies, poisoned food and other products that generate addictions and low passions. All enough to see how deep is the pit many modern humans dig for themselves, "aimlessly".
 Surprisingly, the associative chaos is not completely chaotic, for there seems to be a "pattern in delusion"; otherwise nothing coherent could be known about it. In fact, ancient art mirrored this aspect in some way or another. We have for instance the image of the Milky Ocean being churned by two groups of deities that remain on opposite sides of the World Axis, pulling the Serpent, the Cosmic Energy that binds all opposites in chains, as Aphrodita did for the Greeks. 
There are also wise men who became experts in showing the Pillars of Delusion. The famoust example is Siddharta Gautama the Buddha and his teaching about the Four Noble Truths and the co-origination of the Twelve Causes of Existence, which we may examine some day. 

And as the Greeks said, "like attracts the like". All associations are chained by "affinity". Therefore, in the end we are probably responsible for them, since the decision to avoid feeding contaminated associations that lead to suffering and attachment is ours. On the contrary, pure associations can be fostered with attention, and these might even help us to be free. 
Isn´t all this the purpose of true art? Isn´t that the purpose of meditation and reflection? Isn´t the cultivation of "sanity amidst insanity" the most important task of modern humanity? 
Next time we will open a new window to discover if music can really help to bring creative associations and re-connect ourselves to something greater. 

Soul-less or not?

Anticipating a series of Christmas gifts, here comes a bitter shock that serves as a counter-point of the previous post on Neo-Platonic psychology, and it may help us avoid taking for granted "sublime ideas" when the inner house is still a zoo, a battlefield of World War I, or somehting worse...

You think that a "soul," and even a "spirit," is necessary to do what you do and live as you live. But perhaps it is enough to have a key for winding up the spring of your mechanism. Your daily portions of food help to wind you up and renew the purposeless antics of associations again and again. From this background separate thoughts are selected and you attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as valuable and as your own. We also pick out feelings and sensations, moods and experiences and out of all this we create the mirage of an inner life, call ourselves conscious and reasoning beings, talk about God, about eternity, about eternal life and other higher matters; we speak about everything imaginable, judge and discuss, define and evaluate, but we omit to speak about ourselves and about our own real objective value, for we are all convinced that if there is anything lacking in us, we can acquire it. 

If in what I have said I have succeeded even to a small extent in making clear in what chaos is the being we call man, you will be able to answer for yourselves the question of what he lacks and what he can obtain if he remains as he is, what of value he can add to the value he himself represents. 

I have already said that there are people who hunger and thirst for truth. If they examine the problems of life and are sincere with themselves, they soon become convinced that it is not possible to live as they have lived and to be what they have been until now; that a way out of this situation is essen- tial and that a man can develop his hidden capacities and powers only by cleaning his machine of the dirt that has clogged it in the course of his life. But in order to undertake this cleaning in a rational way, he has to see what needs to be cleaned, where and how; but to see this for himself is almost impossible. In order to see anything of this one has to look from the outside; and for this mutual help is necessary. (Views from the Real World, “G.I.Gurdjieff”, Speaking about different subjects, Section II)

 There seems to be some afinity between these ideas and what we heard from Plotinus in the last post. If we recall, the "ordinary man" he referred to moves away from an essential centre of gravity, and thus he is absorbed by blind impulses, becoming, as Gurdjieff described, an "animated automaton", a marionette moved by the caprices of a puppeteer rather than a man guided by Intelligence.

 Yet, Plotinus basically focused on metaphysics and the level of theoría, which in Greek means “divine contemplation”, from the verb theorein, to contemplate divinely –an activity that is probably too far from us. 

In contrast, Socrates and other teachers, including Gurdjieff, preferred to help seekers to unmask inner contradictions mercilessly, because that is the essential step, very little can be done. 

 Trasparency is usually indigestible when we take for granted things that are not given to us fully.  Even if we assume the presence of a “buried divine spark” that may explain the origin of consciousness, will and higher feelings like compassion, what kind of connection can we have with the Spirit or the Psyche if the gifts remain unattended or misused? 
One does not need a “divine intellect” to manifest negativity and self-indulge with fear like a savage. Animals can be very wild, but only because its natural for them. However, the "animated automatons" can be even wilder, as shown by the progressist butchery known as "advanced modern society", where even art, food and human relations have lost the soul. 

 In earlier times there existed the idea of “soul making”, which implies cleaning the inner world and consolidating the connection with the Higher. In this regard the Egyptian priests taught about joining the individual will-consciousness or Ka, with the volatile body of personal features and experiences, the Ba, in order to forge a strong vehicle that may travel safe across life and afterlife without being devoured by Nature, and thus let the spirit return to its home in the stars, and never be pulled back again into lower realms of suffering. 
Greeks and Christians inherited that doctrine as well, until it was forgotten and changed, as all things important. 
In any case, the point is that without a strong “bond”, the spark humans carry as a precious treasure, may just fly away and perhaps continue its journey in someone who has more respect for what really matters, or it will simply return to its Source. Does that makes sense?

 A crude and honest look to ourselves is necessary then. 

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.