Chapter 2, The Pond
Posted: February 3rd, 2010 | Author: Teresa Dietze | Filed under: UncategorizedSound file for Chapter 2
Feel free to leave comments on the chapter, below.
Here are the sound files of the group on Chapter 2:
“. . .the psychological warp in the average person makes him shrink from facing the most negative and corroding tendencies in his make-up; . . . only through precipitation of acute inner crises can even the most earnest seeker be forced to face the pressing issues of his psyche, and thus create the opportunity of dissolving them.”
~Meher Baba
Love this course PWOS! Thank you for your presence!
PWOS: “Trying to change the machine directly is like trying to change the course of a speeding train with our bare hands. We can use these organic reverberations for our own evolution by containing the outward expresion, just as we would contain the steam in a pressure-cooker.”
If we arrange our external life so that we, as much as we can, try to avoid disturbance of our nice quiet pond, what are we actually doing? Are we mainly unknowningly steering clear of the path that can provide the energy needed for our slow cooker to fulfill its true function? The machine is not our enemy. Awareness and knowledge of the machine is a beautiful thing. Sing along….Getting to know you….getting to know..every little thing..about you.
At the end of last week’s class we mentioned learning to be a container, something like a magnetic ‘jar’ that is used in physics to contain high energy plasma that no container made of matter can contain. Here is a quote I ran across that helps understand one aspect of this. I will just reproduce the quote in its original words and each of us can substitute the words needed to tweak it for our own work. (If anyone does this please post it or email it to me, thanks.)
“If you consciously maintain within yourself three quarters of your power and use only one quarter to respond to any communication coming from others, you can stop the automatic, immediate, and thoughtless movement outwards, which can leave you wth a feeling of emptiness, of having been consumed by life. This stopping of the movement outwards is not self-defense, but rather an gentle effort to have the response come from within your presence or being. This process reverses the natural movement of energies of nature and brings it back to its seed form. Let this become your way of communicating with others.” To Live Within (1972)by Lizelle Reymond
Also consider this from p130 The Joy of Sacrifice EJ “Do not expend Power Center energy within the dream. Conserve it for work….” Or as he suggest in the book HBM as a Transformational Apparatus p32 “Row, row, row the boat, Gently down the stream…..Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,…Life is but a dream.’
PWOS “We can learn to ‘open the water’ before the pebble so that the biological machine offers no resistance to the pebble so reverberations do not occur. In this way, the negative emotion will at most be only momentary.” (Today, I caught the seduced “I” expecting the end to the negative emotion that was coursing through the HBM so I laughed at the little guy leaving the present moment for another misguided short-cut.)
How does this work when the HBM gets excited about something? When the HBM is anxious for something (some expected outcome, or highly desired object or desired fulfillment etc) and it just can’t wait to get to whatever it is anticipating? It is a kind of excitement that can suck up our sense of presence. What allows us to ‘open the water’ under these conditions?
PWOS: “Because these are not true emotions, but sensations of the motor and reflexive centrums, to which we have learned to attach mental significance, and because they originate in the machine, we call them negative emotions.” They are not what the ‘seduced or captured I’ thinks they are and to stay stuck in them is a waste of time and energy (the substance we need to awaken the HBM and come into the present rather than being caught up in this false present that leads nowhere). As I begin to understand this, then just learning to be present and allow the breath with these conditions can help ‘open the water’.
“States are a form of inspiration. To observe our states is to observe ourselves being breathed.” E J p100 The Joy Of Sacrifice
Observing the coming of such states, I open the water, for the benefit of all being everywhere. May it be so.
I practiced this exercise when I met with a group of persons with which I have some problems. It worked very well for all the time that I reminded to do it. I tried to sense my body, my breathing and relaxing my face and that helped me not to react negatively. That was very useful because it gave me a clearer view of the problem I have with the group in a more objective way.
PWOS: “It is not the original muscular spasm, but the ’emotional reverberations’ in the muscles and nervous system and the corresponding significance which the mental centrum attaches to these organic reverbarations which produce the extraordinary negative effects on our evolutionary alchemical processes proceeding in the machine, destroying temporarily with each emotional storm the machine’s function as an apparatus for the transformation of the nonphenomenal self.”
In my post right above this one, we can see that an ’emotional storm’ can be triggered by anticipation of some kind of pleasure and/or excitement about an expected outcome that can occupy and be sustained by the mental centrum and thereby stir up an “emotional storm” short circuiting the machine’s function as a transformational apparatus. However we can use such situations by learning to “open the water” so the impacts and pressures of involuntary expectation don’t find any further traction in the HBM to give rise to the choas of negative reverberations.
Possible help in learning to ‘open the water’ comes from a now dead Tibetean who said, “Remain with the goundlessness of the present situation without retreating to the safe territory of conceptualization.”
PWOS: “Think of the HBM as a calm pool of water and the shock of impressions as a pebble. In this case, the ripples would represent organic reverberations of negative emotions.”
Are these negative emotions, these reveberations, anything more than sensations plus labels from past memory that automatically arise as conditioned reflex from the mental centrum? Are they any more than “a sensation which we automatically categorize as emotional, and which seems to us very natural” -PWOS
Learning to ‘open the water’ results in removing the effects of these reverberations and this eliminates in ourselves the larger part of our negativity and mechanical suffering. (adapted from PWOS) This is what Gurdjieff was talking about when he said to “sacrifice your suffering”.
PWOS: “We have no authority over these ‘pebbles’, by which I mean external or internal shocks (as they come to us), nor do we wish to. We can have authority over something. But what?
If we hope to eliminate these involuntary reflexive organic reverberations in the machine we must take authority over the machine, not in the ordinary way, but in a very special way.
We can learn to ‘open the water’…..” We can have authority over something; we can exercise authority over something. What is this something or other that we can take authority over? Can we come to experience opening the water and practice it as we need to? Is there a wrong way of practicing ‘opening the water’?
“One more key to the pebbles and ‘opening the water’. One teaching suggests that we simply say “thank you” to the pebbles. And this can become real to us as we begin to see and trust that the ‘pebbles’ can serve as food for our simple presence. The pebbles can be used with the prayer E J gives in The Invocation Of Presence p 6 “Repeat, but not automatically, the prayer ‘I wish this to be used for the invocation of the presence of my presence into the present’…..”
For me when I do recieve a pebble/’shock’, that is the moment to remember the prayer…May I be allowed to be open such that the nature of this ‘shock’ can serve as a kind of anchoring food that the presence of my presence may engulf in one bite, but if this is not yet possible, then may my presence nibble on this just as it is in surprising me with its own way of eating its way into the present. So be it. Over a span of time we may find we can say “thank you” when we are served a pebble or shock.
Rumi: “Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me when the time is right.” Is Rumi maybe even suggesting that these pebbles can be seen as a kind of sugar? Maybe so after quite a lot of transformation of the essential self but before then it behooves us not to fall into the trap of unconsciously rejecting what is given because we think it should be this way or that way.