• No One

    July 10, 2018

    To be present in the present is to be both someone and no one.

    The ‘someone’ part is easier to understand. The state of being present in the present is palpable. One has the feeling of weight, of occupying place and time (but not time passing), the feeling of existing, which is an experience of being.

    The ‘no one’ part is more subtle. When I am present in the present, I am not any of my identities. I am not my past, not my habits, not any of my roles in life, not boundaried. If I remain present, I experience a feeling which I recognize as indefinably but always ‘me’, a ‘me’ that has no overt expression in the ordinary world, one that is absolutely itself but does not derive from any known thing.

    Who am I? I am someone and I am no one.

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  • Friend

    May 24, 2018

    One of the mysteries of zikr is that it seems to take place in another country which is not known to me in my ordinary state.

    In my everyday life, I know where I am.  I have a physical and psychological orientation, a map of my personal territory, which is as fixed as a street address. My movements take place around a few locations. I am placed within my tasks, my obligations. My life is a construction of things learned, past events, failures and successes, relationships won and lost. A thousand associations and habits keep me in my place.

    There are things that I do and things I do not or cannot do. The culture says I can be or do whatever I want if I follow my dream. This is foolish. Clearly I have limits in my life and whether they are self-imposed or imposed by others, many of these limits are real and true. A street address says not only where you are but also where you are not. I learn that there are places that are not for me.

    Work on self begins to peel away the layers of this onion, separating true from false. Impartial observation begins to whittle away at the reactions, judgments and justifications which maintain my location. Inwardly, I gain degrees of freedom from self. The world becomes larger. I find that there is an ‘I’ that is not constructed, not limited by a local fixed address and this ‘I’ explains the best of my doings.

    Work on self is not self-improvement but rather deconstruction, from the outside in. That is one direction for change. It is slow but certain.

    Zikr is in another direction. Its location is not in my ordinary world and I can’t get there when I am myself.

    Can I simply step outside of myself? This may seem illogical. For it to be true, I must magically be that ‘I’ which is not part of the construction, temporarily leaving it behind. How is this possible?

    The present is a crack in the cosmic egg. Without past and future, now being all the time there is, my presence is called to be, replacing my identities. ‘I’ enter. Can I can enter the present so fully that I no longer have a fixed address? This is what zikr is. This transition is made possible by several factors. First, it is most helpful to have a special space that is removed from my ordinary life, a chamber oriented by repeated use to have access to another country. These spaces are in part made by our efforts but it is also true that they are first found to exist because they are aligned to factors outside of the ordinary world.

    Second, it is most useful to have the collected attention of a number of participants. This creates an attractive consort for the forces that can assist the zikr and attract them.

    Third, I must be willing to surrender myself and cease to be the center, the active agent.

    Finally, I must ask for the transition. This is invocation which is, along with attention, a great and inexplicable mystery.

    These factors attract help of another kind. I am drawn into contact with another reality.

    Last night, entering the zikr chamber, sitting together, watching the breath, a subtle presence entered.

    It is sometimes possible to re-cognize the nature of a guest, to know it as one knows something of oneself. I cannot re-cognize a stranger, only someone known to me.

    The one who has entered is the Friend. Who is the Friend? The Friend is that one who is more me than I am. A friend is remembered. This Friend is remembered. His signature is always there in me even though I constantly forget.

    Can I open myself to my Friend without reservation, allowing Him to search every corner of myself, to see every bit of deceit and arrogance? This exposure is a whole sensing of who I am without Him. It is a great relief to admit this search, to allow my secrets to be seen. It brings us closer.

    Zikr is in the heart tonight. It aches with pleasure.

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  • Identified

    January 15, 2018

    I am not sure I know what it means to be identified. Does it mean that I assume an identity when I am at my job, or my role in the family as a mother or sister?

    That’s partly it, for sure. We do have behavioral programs that enable us to perform our duties largely unconsciously. But these are the uppermost levels of a superstructure of identification that reaches deep into the body and does not always have the usefulness of the programmed roles we assume in our daily lives.

    Each of us has pervasive sensations that were fixed in us by our experiences as children. These sensations have associated physical postures and gestures as well as rudimentary thought patterns similar to tape loops. The result is an identity, an experience of self and the world that is mostly unconscious but comprehensive in its effects. The seeds of these identities are found in sensation-states such as being small, abandoned, angry, unappreciated, guilty, ashamed, aggressive, strong, entitled, pampered, inadequate, frustrated, pitiful or weak.

    These states are programmed into the nervous system and the muscles. Most of us have several such underlying states, therefore several different identities, which are triggered by our experiences.

    Now, as we get older we may have a dim perception that these states exist in us and that certain stimuli will trigger them. This may lead us to enrol in our own ‘finishing school’ where, over time, we invent and rehearse a narrative that supports and ‘explains’ our habitual behavior and may even excuse it. Some of the narrative may even be factual. Thus we may develop ‘refined’ personalities with justified-in-advance personal and family histories suitable for ‘bon ton’ society, as Gurdjieff says.

    But this is only half the story. What I have described is the formation of identities. But the process of identification also requires that these identities be adopted, that is, that we accept them and identify with them. But that is a topic for another day.

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  • Transition

    November 14, 2017

    Students of this work often seem to think that presence is an end-state, a goal to be accomplished. This thinking is far short of the mark. The state of presence is a point of transition. Presence provides mobility. Its great value is that it allows you to move, to change states, to enter other categories of experience.

    What does this mean, to enter other categories of experience?

    Our ordinary state is one of involuntary identification. The identities I assume are deeply ingrained ways of behaving which are based on even deeper habits of perceiving and reacting, based on even deeper self-images and assumptions about myself. These layers of habituation do not allow me to behave, perceive or think differently. In my ordinary state, I have zero degrees of freedom. This is what it means to be asleep. I can only truly know this through observation of self. Hearing or reading this will not convince me of this most basic fact of my existence.

    To be present is to be unidentified. My habitual patterns no longer contain and limit the range of experience available to me. My body and my ordinary mind may continue to ramble on during presence…we can call this the momentum of sleep…but the ‘I’ of presence, a not ordinary I, can see over the barricades and also experience its own presence in the present. This is an opening. Or perhaps we could call it a threshold. It is what we call being.

    Sleep continues while you are present?

    Remnants of it, yes. These reverberations of the biological machine die down in time. This is because the body and ordinary mind exist in successive time. Their processes unfold and change from moment to moment. Presence does not. It has the quality of immediacy, therefore timelessness, from the point of view of body and mind. Presence exists in the second dimension of time as a kind of alien outside the flow of successive occurrence.

    Presence can continue to be present in the present only if it is continually renewed. Only presence can know itself to be present. Only presence can hold itself in the present. When I fall into identification once more, presence is no longer in the present…it has succumbed to the momentum of sleep and I have re-entered successive time, time passing.

    But while I am unidentified, I can feel, I can contemplate, I can invoke. I can know things immediately from the inside as if they are myself. You could call this voluntary identification…not repeating the habits of the body and ordinary mind but engaging in the essence of other beings. This is the mobility possible in the state of presence.

    This sounds easy but it is not. To remain present in the present for any period of time involves ongoing struggle. Somehow I must function in two different worlds, two different dimensions of time. I remain in a body. The pull of sleep does not cease. At any time my presence can be pulled into forgetting itself. Then I am swept into the river of successive time, the fashioner and sustainer of my identities.

    Only presence can know it is present. It does so immediately, in the place of no time. Anything in successive time is in a different realm, of a different nature, too slow to participate.

    Only presence can hold itself in presence. It remembers itself. Presence is sustained by its own experience until it is interrupted. While engaged in its experience, presence can also know the tiniest slip towards sleep, those interrupting sensations and thoughts that beckon me to re-join my limited but known universe. Has observation of self impartially exposed the ways of sleep so that they can be seen and resisted as they arise? If so, presence may be able to continue in the present.

    My ordinary self cannot will itself to be present.

    From the point of view of ordinary mind, moments of presence are very fleeting, if knowable at all. Can I remember being present? In my ordinary state, it is inaccessible.

    From the point of view of presence, its moments are eternal, comprising all the time there is. When presence returns after an absence, it is completely itself, as if it never left. This is what it means to be.

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  • Crystallized

    March 31, 2017

    I would like to come back to the difficulty of remembering to work on self. I get into my day and that’s it. I fall into my habitual identifications and I sleep through the day.

    Yes. Work on self, voluntary attention and presence…none of it is needed to bounce through the day on automatic pilot.

    How can I make my work important to the rest of my life? Would that be a solution?

    I think this would be dangerous to your work efforts. Could I adopt a work identity? Sure. I could say that I have reached a certain level of capacity, say man number four. I could call myself a teacher or guide, a guru or murshid. I could go to a weekend seminar on shamanism. If these roles support my self-esteem, if I enjoy the status and enhanced self-importance, I will find it much easier to remember the ideas of the work and the postures and gestures of someone who is “in the work”.

    All I need to do is make the work valuable to me personally. But the trick is, then I am no longer doing the work. I am not engaging in impartial observation of self. I am not present. I am just another insufferable idiot who is pretending to know something. This is what Mr. G called wrong crystallization. It’s a short cut that proves to be a dead end. The work protects itself.

    We do not have ceremonies other than zikr. We do not have regulation prayers and rituals. Why? Of course it would be comforting. These activities would give us something to do that would allow us to think that we are doing the work. We would have more structure, more apparent continuity of effort. But the insincerity involved in making formalized efforts would eat away any real motive to do real work.

    What is the real motive to work? Wishing to wake up and see things as they are. Recognizing sleep in myself and feeling that it cannot be accepted. This is a path of constant failure. It is our nature on this planet to forget, to become lost in ourselves. But I do not wish to fool myself, pretending that I am what I am not. In this path I commit myself again and again to see the truth and to deal with that. This makes my life a constant battle with myself. Everything is workable but the work is never done. There is no end point, no final arrival. But there is also much beauty on the way.

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  • Attribution

    March 20, 2017

    One of the most common errors in our society is to attribute our behavior to intention and innate qualities of character. This view assumes that we are reliably who we are.

    Impartial observation of self exposes the view that we have multiple identities and that each of them is activated by a specific stimulus, or lack of stimulus, in the immediate environment. I revert to my good-boy role or my angry parent role depending upon the circumstances. The situation I am in evokes the identity that habitually reacts to that situation. As a human biological machine, I play out the accumulated conditioning of a lifetime.

    Is the aim therefore to observe our identities?

    Yes and no. Identities are compound constructions. It is tempting to make them conceptual and then the capacity for observation is much diminished.

    The best starting point is to observe that certain circumstances cause specific sensations in me and these sensations trigger a set of observable behaviors…primarily gestures and postures but also more subtle reactions such as thought loops and self-images. Over time, as I see the repeated connection between my environment and my reactions, I become more able to see and sense a complete pattern which I can then characterize as an identity.

    It is very important to avoid what some psychologist call the Fundamental Attribution Error which means attributing behavior to the person and not the circumstances in which the behavior occurs. This error leads to theorizing about the person and pre-judging their behavior. Let’s suppose you see someone expressing anger in a forceful way. The error is to say he is an angry person. The truth is to observe that certain specific circumstances trigger expressions of anger. The same is true of supposed virtues such as honesty and humility. Every one of us is capable of nearly any behavior depending upon the circumstances.

    To observe self is to see the connections between your reactions and the time, place, people and other circumstances where those reactions arise, and to see these connections impartially and in real time.

    How does this effort connect to the establishment of safe places where reactions are not triggered?

    In our work, we wish to see our habitual reactions. Work on self requires that I know myself, my identities and their relationship to my life as it is actually happening. A work place is a safe place for having and observing my reactions which are triggered, thoughtfully or otherwise, by my work mates. This is not a comfortable process nor is it meant to be. Engineering a place without triggers is anti-work. It ensures the complete subjugation of my possibilities as a human being to my conditioning. To protect myself from my reactions is to be a slave to them.

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