Touch Wood and Water

Posted on September 23, 2015 by janeadamsart

Gayatri Devi

Let us form a vessel …? In the Gayatri Mantra, the brilliance of enlightenment is perceived in the air between the trouble and grief and terrors and tension and pollution in the world. Give room: the pain of life as it is. Do not inflate pain into personal woe, which shuts the room and makes it noisy.

om bhur bhuva ha svaha
tat savitur varen y am
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yonah prachaha dayat

Through the coming, going and the balance of the essential nature
which illumines existence, is the adorable One.
May all perceive through subtle intellect
the brilliance of enlightenment.

Translation by Deva Premal

Near my mother’s house, there is a steep hillside into a bouncy valley. A direct perception opened: walk down into my face – a Quantock bowl of fields and villages … or as in the drawing above, the Welsh coast near Strumble head. Inclusively, my hips and feet flow soft with gravity, the descent, receiving the earth, the dance, the touching.

Grief stings my heart – my mother’s sister died at 93, and the dog in London is gone – the field broke apart to enter the valley I am. I am free. The fields, the undulant hills and trees are my facial features; I have no other. The steep lane and wide encircling landscape arouse my philosophy, my space of being … beyond speech.

red campion

I discover an identical resonance in the Gayatri mantra, the Lords Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Kabbalah Invocation: “let thy will be done.” Particle-waves of enlightenment are latent within the body of each circumstance. Within every challenge of love, grief, boundaries, fair conduct, discernment and “I will”, the opening catches me inescapably. My father called the hardy pink campion flowers “bridget in her bravery“. Bravery is the bride.

seabird and boat, near isle of Rhum

Connect
I finished and published the Minona post in my other blog (17 September). The Minona and Beethoven drawing which I had such trouble with, is powerful. The soft blaze of grief is in her eyes.

Beethoven and Minona

I went on reading my 2014 journal on the bus home from the Quantock hills, enjoying it; I raised my spirits by softly singing the Gayatri mantra for a while. There is a lot in my journal last year, about the evolution of eros in our world. Adam-Eve had thoughts which grew into trees, animals and life – did I not walk down the Quantock hills into these, my soul body, my absence into Real-I?

Make this intention ongoing through the “unknown cognition” towards a community of grace. Let go into the opening field space. The blue Maurice Nicoll Commentary books contain the essence of Self enquiry, Ramana’s teaching, for post war western survivors in the Work.

So what to write now, to connect? Wait and listen and it shall come. Be willing for the Master to write. Remain quiet. I woke depressed and confused this morning, semi-dreaming about getting stuck on sheer pillars of rotten rock and cheating my way down to the ground. The false mind sets cruel tasks. But earlier I dreamt I was in a car with a man from the past – and our legs touched, and the feelings blossomed like they used to, brooking no deflection. I want to move on, yet the way in this lifetime powerfully embraces each other.

To connect, I wait and listen to Nicoll’s Commentaries: “You cannot reach Real I through personality, only through development of Essence…. Essence however, cannot grow unless personality is formed around it by life on this planet … A man must learn from life, become a good Householder …” In other words, God does not create us perfect, we are active, responsible participants in the Re-membering.

“You may ask why, if we were created perfect, at a level higher than Earth, it is necessary to be made to descend at all. The answer is that a being created perfect has contributed nothing to its own development. It would be easily tempted. Man by descent and ascent thus becomes stronger ‘than the angels’, as it is said somewhere.”

I made this balsa boat for my grandmother in about 1963. She called it “Annapurna in cumulus clouds”

My sense of descending into the Landscape Bowl of mud and villages and steep fields and curving lanes as my vital parameter, awakens. When it is separate, or just a background, I am shut away from empathy or taste of Life.

Crossing the road at Hammersmith bus station – all the moving flock are “I”. Their mystery moves through mine and is my being; I create them as God does, or a child in the garden of being. Their never ending history is ready made. The instant they are created, their infinite past thread springs to life, just like that. This perception has no room for war, and outmodes religious conflict. When such a thought form is focused and strong, it has power to connect and to generate life and love.

Harbour 1987 – my ship of the soul

I am reading The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende, which suggests that creative imagination in the human psyche strikes eternity fore and aft as it becomes fully conscious; there is no beginning or end to being. But great gaps of Nothing encroach, where the faculty is abused, distorted and destroyed.

The great evolutionary change occurring in humanity may be the shocking revolution that there is no heavenly thing or ruler which is God.

Instead, the dimension of God is kindled with the tinder-sticks of compassion laid together. The moment God is kindled through compassionate empathy and acceptance of each other, the One Reality, unendingly past and future, is omnipresent. We can no longer devolve our responsibility onto an almighty figurehead: that was the codependent dream of infants. Opportunities to ‘do the beautiful’ as the Sufis say, are given to our inter-dependent re-cognition. We see what was and is done by religious wars to destroy life and origins, and in the media jungle to erase human worth: the gaps of Nothing in the never ending story. There is an enormous resistance to awakening; the ground resists the upward spring; the long dark shadows cast by the rising sun, are Karmic samsara enclosures, which slowly fade.

Return to the flowing nature of God: the tetrahedral cycle of J H V H through human eternity: the vital solar spark of SAVITUR in the Gayatri, through the subtle intelligence.

Nicoll asks, What is Understanding? “If Intellectual and Emotional Centres cooperate, then understanding begins. Does it mean a seeing together of many things from many points of view, and so quite distinct from one-sidedness?”

“We make aim in the Work, but do we understand our aim?”
To understand is essentially, to connect, with all our parts.

Boats at Alet, Brittany, 1985

Boats on storm tossed marina, 1985

To be present when I am in pain or sorrowing, is to earth it. Then pain and sorrow are not trapped in thoughts or moral scholars, they exist freely. There is no argument or resistance to existence. “If you don’t fight with life, life takes you up, puts you on its shoulder …” Pain and joy and the light of foot belong here equally and seamlessly, passing into one another. If I grasp the root stem of my grief, it becomes still and holds the ship like a mast. Upon the larger part of my being, the words to tell are a scrap, a wet hanky only. Moments of inner connection are searing, silent and deeply satisfying. The understanding is not verbal. Understanding is presence … stand under the water falling.

tidal wave 1986

Harbour - these two paintings were on the same day.

Harbour 1986 – these two paintings were on the same day.

Moments of the inner connection connect with this level of being, throughout the humanosphere. My inner connecting connects socially, and beyond. In this strata I may pick up the Messages of the Great Ones. We are a fleet of living masts – and masts are aerials, antennae, antakharana – the One mast, of infinite variety.

Signal the Companions of the Light.

Ships in my mother’s house

Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2015. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/

Touch Wood

Posted on September 19, 2015 by janeadamsart

Ramana & Arunachala children

Nearly two months ago, I dreamed about “the blue books of Ramana”. In fact they looked exactly like the collection of Maurice Nicoll’s Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff. These four volumes – from Alan Jacobs’s library – have sat on my highest bookshelf for many years.

“I dreamed I was late for an event and toiling or dashing up and down a long street to collect items which others expected. Among the parade of shops on the right, a sign stood out, advertising an unknown book about Ramana Maharshi. I forgot the title, but it was his soul in the teaching. The sign remained consistently visible. At last I investigated, walked up that side of the street, looked for its doorway among the restaurants, hairdressers and supermarkets – and found: an Indian goods emporium. My way to the counter was blocked by a herd of huge brown smelly buffaloes. I turned away, dispirited, but then the herd miraculously cleared. I made enquiry for the book, and was directed to another region of the vast shop. Upstairs where the books were. a friendly Indian woman assistant said Yes she knows the book, and got it for me. It was a set of slim old volumes with worn cloth binding, a beautiful natural dark blue, like Jim Ede’s Moroccan jacket, faded and buffed at the corners. There were three larger ones and one smaller one. I looked among the pages and wanted it very much. It contained everything in the “Talks” and other recorded conversations, and more …. what a collector’s item!

“The woman smiled and said this is not cheap. It is a first edition. How much? I asked. She replied, £700. So I couldn’t possibly buy it. She smiled. Then I woke up.

“I don’t need to buy it, for I have it in my soul – the beautiful blue covers of this teaching, the feel of the close white written pages inside: the liberation. It is enough to hold it for a moment in my hands, and remember. Maybe the significance of the 700 will emerge? This contact un-crowds my life. I touch base.”

Ramana coming down off the hill

Some difficult weeks passed; then at last I reached up for Volume Four of Nicoll’s Commentaries – which wear the same jacket. I rediscover inside, in the practical way it works for me, the soul of Ramana Maharshi’s Self-enquiry. In the last decade of Ramana’s life, Dr Nicoll was teaching and exploring the Work in his kindly way it seems by morphic resonance, in England during and after the war.

Dr Maurice Nicoll

14 September 2015

Nicoll – “The Work teaches: ‘Observe yourselves uncritically and become more and more conscious of what is in your being and so become more and more objective to yourselves.’

“As you know already, this will gradually dissolve the Imaginary I, the False I, the False Personality that one has hitherto taken as oneself, and has nothing to do with the true centre of gravity of yourself called Real I.’”

He then goes on to discuss Recurrence. Ouspensky worked out a dimensional cosmology whereby we recur until the change begins to be made at birth. I don’t go fully with this, but I do observe my recurring Difficult Corner where I have failed and where I identify with what life throws at me – it is the identical misery and discomfort each time. So for me Recurrence is a psychological reality but not a literal one.

On the other hand, Nicoll feels the recurrence of Self remembering makes itSelf stronger also. There is also the idea of Conscious Man reincarnating in an earlier part of historical time, where he can prevent things from going as they did. There is a plethora of parallel universes or possibles.

Violet Crystal 1988 – particle interaction in Tao of Physics

In quantum physics a particle travels back and forth in time as space, through interaction. The entanglement of future probables and re-shaping is an open mystery beyond the mental reach. The standard intellect collapses here. So people say it is impossible to reincarnate in the past, because of the advancing doctrine of time; but I am not sure. There is a power of choice. The choice is powerfully identified with the genetic flow and with cause and effect; but that same power might also antedate the causality. This power clasps the self or role I think I am. The role rides off with me. The historical possibilities are limitless, but I am voluntarily confined to the one familiar.

The full form of Self remembering is “the self that knows its own nothingness.”

Reacting to life is not doing or choosing. Reacting to life is not proactive but passively being driven into the difficult corner. “To change the action of life on you by inner work on impressions, is certainly to begin to do … begin with smallest daily things. … If we say that one meaning of Self remembering is to remember the Work at the moment when life makes you negative, here is a practical idea of Self remembering. The Work is brought into intimate personal existence …”

In the next Commentary, he says Time is a dimension of psychological distance and the ways of Self remembering must be held together, else they get lost. He says Truth is silver (like the parable woman looking for a piece of silver in her house) – it is also a hatching egg: the contact must be sustained by nesting.

The Work and the way it thinks, is a lift, an elevator towards Those that stand in the light. “By means of our own thoughts, which are those of sleeping people imagining they are fully conscious, we cannot reach the thoughts that belong to people who stand in the light of Self remembering, and view the meaning of existence from that level… which weakens the mechanical power of sensual life/thinking and its apparent reality…. Now, if incoming life/impressions falls onto the Work, its energy is transformed; the first Conscious Shock.”

(The Enneagram was a significant part of Gurdjieff’s teaching – an octave of musical intervals wherein the Work’s 1st and 2nd Conscious Shocks occur at the semi-tones. At the level of 2nd Conscious Shock, negative emotions transform into positive – as I understand it.)

The Work has to be the skin on which life’s impressions fall. If they fall on me personally, I react with mechanical skinless stress, and recur. There has to be this something to buffer and transpose and filter the events. In fact my journal is this filter. It records, but it attempts to filter the data to allow passage to those who stand in the light. The data become that passage. It is like being in a wood of dark trees, and first the stems turn grey, then the same stems are illumined as light. And then there is a threshold of not knowing but being: my small self gives up trying to solve issues, but touches wood.

Touch wood!

That is neat.

The Work is the process of transforming the negative effects of life. Touching the wood is in the present, the Now.

In the Babel or Confusion of Tongues, none of us understand each other. The Conscious circle of humanity perhaps speak in tongues, like the Pentecost. When I am not in Babel, I seem to hear another person’s being. I seem to hear many tongues of being, like a river, simply as being; and respectful of their private flow. My engine stops. Every morning, my writing’s objective is to find this point again: non-interference.

“Those in the Third Consciousness get help from higher Centres – another way of understanding their apparently insoluble life-problems. … If life could be solved, then this Work could not exist. This Work is to make life possible in the sense that you cannot understand life save in terms of something else. This something else is the Work. Therefore if the Work could fall on the Work, internally we would awake.”

Observe yourselves uncritically and become more and more conscious of what is in your being and so become more and more objective to yourselves.’

This becomes phenomenological. Instead of my assumptive and headstrong bias, lay out the sensory I’s and attachments on the table; observe uncritically and be aware.

I find this hard, because anxious I obscures all the other I’s. Also, ghastly self image of being a dog with a grimacing gyrating grinning human waving the collar over my head and trying to put it on. Ah-ha. So to observe an I is to be it from inside! Empathy. Any others?

What about wading into the sea? being biffed by small salt waves.

The king is in his counting house, counting up his money, the queen is in her parlour, eating bread and honey. Play patience with the game of life.

In general today, do not isolate the I’s, enter and engage with them consciously. Let the Work act on them. Do not analyse but observe – it is extremely difficult to observe the causes of negative emotions. Ah-ha, here is one: the fallout of Romance. My romantic-I enters and invests heart and soul into proud and happy love affairs. Sooner or later that quality begins to shift, to unseat and to change – to doubt itself; to discover it was all a projection or has become one. What about the warmth, love and happiness that drives and vitalises the projection? Understand that no state is sustained. Everything arises, settles, changes and vanishes. I have been lucky to have love affairs of different kinds in the Work. Nothing is permanent.

So there are two – dog in collar and Romance-love. These are passionate, enthusiastic states of being, and I just had a hefty dose of the dog in collar. How they run together and blur!

With Maya, a friend's dog whom I loved and have had to say goodbye to - how I cried! - and am starting to recover. This and the other photos of Mask and Mantree were taken by an artist, Tony Wigg in the woods, for a spontaneous 'happening' - I stepped into the mask and veil.

With Maya, a friend’s dog whom I loved and have had to say goodbye to – how I cried! – and am just starting to recover. This and the other photos of Mask and Mantree were taken by an artist, Tony Wigg in the woods, for a spontaneous ‘happening’ – I stepped into the mask and veil.

There are the Intellectual, Emotional and Moving centres. It is helpful to recall these, ‘phenomenologically’.

There is the I who doesn’t want to upset or offend. The I who finds it complicated to speak. The bossy controlling I, who knows best. The cliff-path exploring I. The child I. The creative art I. The perfectionist I. The liar I. The lazy idle I. These for starters. They all pretend Real-I, but they are not. Real-I offers their inclusive sub stratum. And (added later) – the ASHAMED I, which lost my way home. And FEAR-I. And GUILT-i.

There is an expression: wasting force. Locate and do not waste force.

In the Emotional centre, observe the taste of the emotions, and whether I am identified or not. In the Moving centre, observe physical and subliminal tensions, and how I hurry or move. In the Intellectual centre, be aware of the kinds of thought going on, and whether I am hooked.

(Gurdjieff Movements: Photos by Amir Kaufmann)

Intellectual, Emotional and Moving centres move at different rates. You can’t apply Intellectual centre to Moving centre, because Moving centre is much slower than Intellectual centre’s rapid transactions. But you can use Moving centre with the breath and awareness of hips, soles of feet and so on … to slow down and integrate the other two into a vehicle that stays in gear. Being aware of the three centres is helpful – to discriminate them.

Gurdjieff demonstrated that people have habits in their three centres, which are very difficult to change. It is difficult to change habits in intellectual and emotional centres; it is easier to change them in the moving centre. So he taught the movements and the dances which interrupt the habit. Work on intellectual and emotional centres must accompany and integrate work on moving centre. Many years ago I practiced slowing my negative thoughts down to the physical rate of speech. Mind stuff is mercurially self-addictive like lightning. It was amazing how quickly it got bored and the drama vanished, when I spelled out the ‘hot thought’ slowly! I couldn’t complete the sentence.

One of the many disciplines for moving centre, is hatha yoga.

Another exercise: for five minutes, put consciousness into every part of body, beginning with face muscles, to prevent being identified with a stress or wasted force. “Putting consciousness into the muscle tension is both internal and external attention. Try putting it in your right thumb – then in your left.”

Now, a question is asked (p.1253) – “What is this Work about? Why do we do it?”

The Work, the Great Work, and any form of esoteric study or spiritual practice, is done because I am not alone in the world, I live and interact with others. I am thrown in the world systemically among the moving plates of the sea, and how I interact and externally consider others, makes a difference. I cannot live with myself without it – without repeatedly trying to be aware in and as the world.

I seem to embark on long follies or illusions in my relationships and romances. Their learning curve is how I am made. I try to avoid it, and cannot – I throw myself into the golden key. In each, there is good will, love and rich data, as well as shadow. There is recurrence: there may one day come an opening through recurrence.