Richard Lloyd's Solasishock

"Punk" Chaos to Couture exhibit at the Met/ Richard Hell From Facebook

2013-05-09T13:19:00.002-04:00

So they have this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Chaos to Couture" with Punk as it's underlying influence, and here I must give Richard Hell his props. I can say in all honesty that Richard Hell in the person of himself and no one else, made an impact on fashion that exploded like a nuclear bomb the ramifications of which still continue.

Last night At the Metropolitan Museum of Art they held fashions most important party of the whole year and the whole world. This year I had been asked for a photograph which Danny Fields took of me the first night I ever wore the T-shirt with the words "Please Kill Me". It must've been 1975 or so, and it was at Max's Kansas City on the second floor where they held musical events.

The hippest and most groovy and impossibly deviant sexual barroom at the time was the back room on the first floor of Max's Kansas City. It was hard to get into and easy to get blocked if you are not a "Trisexual", my word for my own condition, which was that in the realm of sex, I would do anything a couple of times or several times to be technically accurate before I would decide whether I was going to continue or to drop that type of sexual activity. There were many Warhol people, and flaming sexual creatures who could defy any type of labeling.

At dinner time, or what they called "happy hour" they would put out hors d'oeuvres in the front bar and I must tell you that those chicken wings and things saved my life more than once from complete abstract starvation, a condition I brought upon myself by refusing to do anything except party and forward my agenda, that I had formed when I was 15, setting the parameters of what my life was supposed to look like for the next 40 years.

People would ask of me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I would tell them, "I already am what I'm going to be when I grow up". If that just didn't confuse them into silence they would ask me what I meant, and I said, "I am going to be a world renowned electric guitarist who makes an impact on the history of rock 'n roll".

This was often met with the statement, "but you can barely play that thing" and I would respond by saying that if I wanted the Eiffel Tower to be upside down in my backyard tomorrow morning it would be there – and that France should thank me, because that's not what I wanted. I wanted what I said – it was a kind of Will/Wish that I took aim with and let fly. I told them that it didn't matter that I wasn't any good at the guitar because all of them that were better would find themselves in a job in their guitar would be in the closet, which happened to most of them.

I want to say this again, so I am not misunderstood.

Richard Hell had a vision of fashion that no other single person on earth had. He is entirely individually responsible for Televisions early look and everything that came after.

Malcolm McLaren desperately wanted to manage Television and his intention was to make Richard Hell into a complete superstar – a dazzling supernova with his other three bandmates right behind, and Tom, who was responsible for most of the music and arrangements would have also cemented his place as would have I, into the edifice of rock 'n roll history. Television DID impact Rock and Roll history, in more way than one. Tom refused to lat anyone help him or tell him to work.

Tom did not want to work with anyone who made him work – and Malcolm McLaren preferred Richard Hell to Tom Verlaine which I completely understand drove Tom to the brink of a nervous breakdown. So he just said no, no, no, no, and marginalized Richard and even though they had begun as the best friends of life, Tom pushed Richard out and we replaced him with Fred Smith. We had done some demos for Island records which sounded terrible to our ears, but what was more important was that we for the first time could hear Billy's crazy drums and Richard's loopy bass playing made Television's overall impact a ridiculous chaos.

So when Tom pushed Richard Hell out of the band he was replaced with Fred Smith, one of the best and steadiest bass players I have ever run into. And the Music became the focus rather that the "act".

So, I am in the coffee table book on page 33 wearing the first "Please Kill Me" T-shirt. I refused to wear it again despite all of Richard's efforts because after the showed too young hippie dippy's who could of been in Manson's family asked me if I really meant it, because they would help me if I meant it. That's spooked me. I've had run-ins with those cult people before and it ain't pretty. So, I never wore it again, and Richard started making his own version, nuttier and more color and dynamic.

Richard recently released his autobiography and I must say that he captured the exuberance some of those first rehearsals, and his portrayal of Tom Verlaine is accurate. He makes a few mistakes with regards to me but so what. Here I am on Facebook writing what I should be writing elsewhere – my own memoirs. But this is practice.

I will say it a third time: Richard Hell is the individual who single-handedly influenced fashion globally. And that is incredible. He deserves the respect that he has earned.

So, I lived the life of a teenage alien hobo from outer space with a guitar. I had a band but we only did one show, and then I forged Television with bandmates Tom, Richard and Billy. It's the only band I consider that I have ever been in, and I was in it wholeheartedly. Contrary to the ridiculous films of rehearsals where Tom and Richard couldn't sing in tune and yet wanted me to join them. I considered that ludicrous – I told them – develop a harmony and then I'll come in because I can hold a tune and neither of you can.

The first time I ever saw Tom Verlaine he was playing by himself on audition night at a place called Reno Sweeney's – the first thing I saw as he tried to get through the door with the guitar on his back and carrying a tweed amplifier was Richard Hell getting up from the table and going to help him carry his stuff to the stage, but at the door I could see that Tom was wearing a ratty old T-shirt but that Richard was not satisfied until he tore the shoulder so that one of Tom's nipples were showing. Tom came on and played three songs and during the second song I leaned over to my manager Terry Ork, who wanted to manage and be a patron of the arts to some kind of rock and roll band, with me at the center, but I knew I was missing something and so was Tom, and I could see that we each could fill in the missing part of each other.

So Terry worked at Cinemabilia – a Hollywood posters and mugshots of the stars. Richard Hell also worked there and Terry asks him to talk to Tom about my request for us to get together and see if we could mesh. That happened. Tom and Richard came down to the loft which was in Chinatown and we passed my guitar back and forth between Tom and I and then Richard and Tom went off in some kind of corner and had some kind of a conference and came back and said "yes – let's try it." So Tom and I coerced Richard (who did not want to play bass because he said that working with Tom was a visit to the dentist). Tom wanted him to do it and so did I – I cornered him at the loft and told him that he had movie star looks and that we needed him because in addition to bass playing he had very definite ideas about the way we should look and present ourselves. In hindsight, I call it "The Glamor of Poverty".

Our first rehearsals felt like we had moved into a new dimension that didn't exist on earth and that we were cosmic teenage hobos with guitars who had joined the circus – the interstellar circus I might add. There was a hell of a lot of laughter and knocking mic stands down and rolling around on the floor continuing to play sing and laugh. It was the cahoots. We invited people down to see us and it was super hilarious. Then we rented our own theater and put on our first show. Even with the best of intentions we could not replicate what we had experienced while alone rehearsing in the loft in front of an audience. Something got lost and something was gained.

Throughout the years Richard Hell held a grudge against me, even though I almost left the band because of his departure, but with Fred Smith the music got ethereal and majestic. It was a second kind of Television, and one which endured until I left amicably but frustrated in 2007. They have added Tom's buddy and are continuing to use the name Television, which our band permitted so long as there were three of the original four, in case anyone left or died. I should not have permitted that but it's water under the bridge. They are in South America and then Australia and then they go to London. Cookies crumble. They just do.

So they have this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Chaos to Couture" with Punk as it's underlying influence, and here I must give Richard Hell his props. I can say in all honesty that Richard Hell in the person of himself and no one else, made an impact on fashion that exploded like a nuclear bomb the ramifications of which still continue.

I want to say this again, so I am not misunderstood.

Richard Hell had a vision of fashion that no other single person on earth had. He is entirely individually responsible for Televisions early look and everything that came after.

The Quickening, Id Ego and Personas.

2013-05-07T16:17:00.002-04:00

The human being (woman) usually only has one child at a time. One birth – sometimes twins, either identical or fraternal. Rarely a triplet and above usually due to intervention of some medical sort.

While the fetus and infant is in the womb it is in a state of bliss – after "the quickening", this new person has its own heartbeat and lives an aquatics state. Recent advances in imaging have shown that this fetus seems to enjoy and have a lot of fun in the womb, kicking and playing, masturbating (yes, it's already too late not to grow hairy palms) and having the life of its mother's life by being inside, breathing the peritoneal fluids and being fed through the umbilicus, which in cutting my own sons umbilicus taught me, is no flimsy rope but a really tough multi-structured entity.

What was once heaven turns into hell after the "Great Flood" written about in all the world's archetypal history but really refers to the water breaking, which sends a woman into labor. Now the previously glorious womb turns into a Python like squeezing device, trying to expel the infant, who is probably going into shock just about now. After the woman has dilated to 10 or 13 cm, in a healthy birth we have the crown coming out. As a man I can barely imagine the suffering that the woman must go through. (My only analogy might be trying to crap out an intact watermelon – boys, remember that – your mother went through that agony which is from the early Greek and means "The Trial").

As the head is the largest part of an infant, getting the width of its cheekbones and skull out of the vaginal opening usually results in the rest of the infant flopping out quite easily with the placenta and the other mucositis. That part I can barely remember, because in 1951 they routinely knocked the women out, and some of whatever it was manages to get through the umbilicus so that I came out woozy.

This is not a first-person singular autobiography so suffice it to say that I do remember the doctor holding me upside down and smacking me on my ass to get me to cry, and in hindsight I see it as a kind of Christian confirmation: "Welcome to the World – This is what you can Expect from it." I guess they do all the normal things like cutting the umbilicus and tying it all off and suctioning mucus out of the infants ears, nose, mouth and throat. Then they swaddle the infant and put a hat over the soft spot – whether you like it or not, your first yarmulke! (I think that is hilarious)

But anyway after my mother woke up they brought me to her and I remember staring at her in an existential shock – where was I, who is this woman and what happened? My mother reports her own version: She says that when our eyes met she thought she was looking into the eyes of the oldest man she had ever met, but that after about 90 seconds I softened and became a baby.

The infant comes out with its own Id, the roots of which mean "one's own self". To this newly arisen being, everything exists as its self in one of two states – comfort and satiation, and hunger, discomfort and frustration. I can certainly tell you that I felt like an idiot, being a baby means being so dependent on others. But the id still exists in a primordial (before number) and primeval (untouched) state of cosmic bliss.
This state exists even into the playground where a young toddler might see a toy she likes and just goes ahead and grabs it and plays with it with no respect to the other child that might be the owner. When the object is withdrawn from the child who is taken it, it might raise a fuss declaring "mine, mine, mine". Unashamed pure id.
After a time the child begins to see and accept that there are boundaries between things as well as between him or her and other people etc. This facilitates the growth of what is called ego – and absolutely necessary instrument of discrimination and boundary acceptance. There is nothing wrong with having an ego. You will have an ego for your entire incarnated life, and there is nothing mysterious or bad about it. Now the child has an id and an ego. Fine, but here comes something else called persona, from the root sona meaning sound because in Greek theater several men (women were not permitted to act) would where various masks and change the sound of their voices to assume the different characters in the plays.
A person begins to build various personas with which to deal with the various circumstances and vagaries of life, and whomever that person is having to deal with. Man does not just have one personality, he has lots and lots of them – practically a different one for every situation. That's one of the things people don't understand about personality – it might be a kaleidoscope of 1000 parts which arrange and rearrange depending upon whom they are dealing with. When I was growing up I had both white and black friends – when I was with only black people and I was the only white person, I developed a persona – a personality who knew their lingo and slang and could hang with them. I certainly did not expose my parents to that personality. I had a different personality for them, and I hid many other personalities from their vision. I probably had 12 different personalities in school. One I showed the principal and teachers and others I showed different groups of people.

So, what Mr. Gurdjieff reiterated is absolutely true. Man's name is Legion. He is not a single person, ever. I use the following analogy often – the man who sets the alarm clock is not the man who has to get up to it, or there would be no need for a snooze button. In fact, if a man were singular, he would probably never need a clock at all. At the Priere they devised a manner of drinking a certain volume of water in order to get up at a certain time, using the bladder as an alarm clock. A singular man without quotation marks or anything else could set his alarm clock and would wake up simultaneously as the gears inside the clock prepared to sound the alarm.

But all of these personalities are not the worst of our troubles. The worst thing imaginable gets imagined – a "perfect self" who is never wrong and should be worshiped. It is the very tsizm of idolatry. And embarrassment or stage fright or anything else like it occurs when we believe that the "other" can see both that imaginary self and the flawed self that actually manifests. This imaginary self is our foremost enemy. It must be ruthlessly ferreted out and destroyed. But a person cannot do this on their own, or perhaps it is so rare that it might as well be a fact that no one can do it on their own.

But at the beginning of the work – when one meets our work and our tradition, one is told that one must not change anything in the personalities except to observe them in an objective manner, as if we stood outside of ourselves and could see ourselves as an actual walking talking object. And one of the reasons why we are told not to change is because our only desire is to change in the direction of the imaginary worshipful false self, and if we change, as much as it may hurt to not change, we will be playing a shell game with ourselves and we will never see what others have seen of us. We will try to hide that we are sorry-assed pigheaded idiots, who are filled with internal considering and what are called "Requirements." Even if a man could just get rid of requirements he will have come a long way in our work – accepting reality as it is rather than how we would like it.

ID, Ego and Personas.

2013-05-06T19:57:00.004-04:00

In my experience which includes a full blown classical Kundalini Awakening, while on tour in Osaka, Japan, and which took 18 months to get a handle on the explosive force which would even wake me out of my sleep into a psychosexual pinball game on tilt. It really is kind of funny because I came back to New York and sought out kundalini yoga classes where everyone else was trying to awaken the kundalini and I was trying to get it to go back to sleep or rest. I could not look upwards with my eyes because it would instigate another episode. I had read all of the ancient texts such as The Hatha Yoga Pradikipa by Svatmarama, The Geranda Samhita, The Shva Samhita, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Shat Krama Chakras and many more.

I learned that what I thought was metaphoric was literal, and what seemed to be literal turned out to be metaphoric. Well, Mr. Gurdjieff does say that we live upside down and topsy-turvy, so I guess I found out about that, pretty damn impressive. But this post isn't about that. It's about what is called the "Ego". When a child is born it arrives with ID – the essence or in Sanskrit, the Rasa, or "Juice" of the self. This ID is the root of the words identity and identify, ad infinitum… It fills the entire creation from the baby's point of view – absolutely everything is "Me". That's why young toddlers play in the playground but separately, and if one sees a toy it likes it simply takes it and if it is told to give it back to its owner it replies with the words "mine, mine, it's mine", and the parent has to superego the child into relinquishing the other person's property.

Somewhere between two and three or four years old the now toddler begins to identify that there is a boundary, or separation and that there are separate things and separate beings such as "mother", "father" and "brother or sister" or "Friend". This is the beginning of the boundary which is the "Ego Essence". All of this is simple developmental stages which were probably better as Paget delineated them, but I am working my way towards a particular slant.

Now that you have an Ego, and you begin to recognize boundaries and concepts like mine and yours as separate. All well and good. We can't have human beings just simply walking around like zombies taking what they like as complete moronic idiots, can we? (sounds like some people I have heard about: the 1%)

Personally I don't think so, but now that we have the ID and the Ego we can begin to build the person--ality. The personality of course comes from the root word sona which means sound – as a few men would put on a play in ancient Greece they would simply switch masks to play different roles. The men also played the women, as the women were not permitted to act. So here we have a young being in the midst of grown-up beings that haven't been (even as much as they would have liked to) given a proper upbringing – so that the sins of the fathers visit upon the sons unto the third or fourth generation, after which they wash out but are replaced with pretty much the same load of shit.

We are very proud of our educational system, which has a child sitting in a chair hunched over with a writing implement in his or her hand for something like eight hours a day, five days a week. At the conclusion of 12 years of this, they are usually "graduated" either into the workforce or further education (I refuse to call it higher education – it's just college). That involves sitting in lecture halls listening to so-called experts prattle out their curriculum. And so it goes…

Some anthropologists want to change the name of our species, and they are serious. They want to change the name from Homo Sapiens Sapiens (man who is aware of his own awareness) to "Homo Sapiens Sedentarius , man who does not move. He sits in front of the television or the computer or the dinner table or in the car, and he hardly knows what to do with himself as regards physical health, so he joins health clubs for six months and quits after two weeks. This is due to the deviation in the half steps of the Scale and Solfege, going round and round on the right-hand side of the Enneagram performing his little songs of do re mi, do re mi, do re mi, or 142142142142 his whole life.

As an aside, when I was eight years old I had a hamster. I loved my hamster and I used to take really good care of him and watch him run around on his little wheel. I often wondered if he knew he wasn't going anywhere for that he was not leaving anywhere, but one day my hamster ate a little ball which was hanging from the curtains, and died from being poisoned by the flame retardant chemicals. That guy meant a lot to me. And with his wheel he taught me as I watched him endlessly.

So, in growing up we imitate and invent characters for different situations. These are our personalities. Everyone can have as many as they like. Personality is strange, because it is built out of everything we aren't, really, and it is built as needed, so to say. Man's name is Legion, and the guy that said that wasn't kidding. As I was growing up, when I was with my black friends I learned their lingo, and when I was with other musicians I had a different persona. I had a persona that I allowed my parents to see, and many that I hoped they would never discover. As a Teenager, I had more personalities than I could keep track of.

Eventually a man decides he's got to embark on a money making something. He has to do ordinary work, whether it involves millions of dollars or penny candy means nothing. He struts around with his personalities like roosters – have you ever seen a rooster farm? They each have to have their own little hut so they can strut. Once on tour we rounded a bend in either Kentucky or Tennessee and by golly there was a rooster farm. I had never seen a rooster farm so I asked the driver to slow down. It was fascinating. Each rooster had his own A-frame house and they would either strut back and forth in front of it or they would climb on top of it and preen themselves. I just couldn't believe it. I felt like the luckiest boy on earth that day, because I had never seen a real rooster farm, and now I had. If the roosters got too close to each other they would peck to the death, just like men.

So a man has a job or work or a career (he gets fancier as we move along) and he becomes somewhere within the 99% who aren't the one percent who are super rich.

I never wanted a job because I thought it would harden like cement around my feet and I would be inmobile and stuck in that one place, so I became a musician of sorts playing in a rock 'n roll band and traveling a lot and making some recordings. My definition of a successful musician is as follows: "a successful musician is paid to go where tourists pay to go, and when you get there they applaud."

Enough about me. Let's get back to this study of the realm of personalities. No one, and I mean no one, even Mr. Gurdjieff, has only one personality. Everybody needs at least a handful if not an entire crowd. I was once doing some quiet work and I heard a murmuring just like you hear at the intermission of a Broadway play where everyone goes to the lobby or outside and has 1000 conversations, only in my quiet work they were all my different personalities having what seemed like endless conversations. I almost have to laugh at myself for that one. It sure was a bucket load of Richards, and they were all capable of saying "I" and causing me endless difficulties and problems.

They are still there chattering away, but I have learned to not bother listening to them. I have an Agenda; I have a Aim, and it consists of providing service to the Work at large.

I've been inside the "Inner Circle of Conscious Humanity", and I like it there a lot. I don't know about you, but I expect to spend my dotage there, until the undertaker overtakes me.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people on earth, and I don't believe in luck. I was asked if I believed in God when I was little and I said "no, I know". The idiot adults couldn't get past the phonemes and asked me what I meant and I told them, "I don't need to believe because I know, and knowledge is superior to belief."
It still is.

Burnt Toast.

2013-04-23T16:12:00.001-04:00

Burnt Toast

This is an old work story called burnt toast. There was a man who woke up one day feeling wonderful and full of life and very excited about the day ahead. He was married to a fine woman, had a nice house and a nice car and a wonderful career where he never felt like he was actually having to work, but that his work was fun, and brought Win/Win situations to every endeavor.

However there was one thing he hated, and that was when his wife would burn the toast. So today he wakes up feeling wonderful, gets dressed and starts down the staircase to the dining area but his nose perks up and he thinks he begins to smell burnt toast. His wife had been preoccupied with one of the children and had in fact burnt the toast. She tried scraping it and put another couple of slices in the toaster, but he had smelled the burnt toast. His good mood was destroyed and he stormed into the room and asked his wife what she smelled, and she admitted that she had burnt the toast. Now she also, lost her good mood in the smell of burnt toast.

The man ate his breakfast hurriedly and went to the garage and started his car and began backing it up into the street but he wasn't really thinking and his rear end collided with another car coming down the street. The driver of that car had been in a very good mood this morning – he had gotten a raise and had proposed and was now engaged to be married and he loved it. Until that unconscious bastard banged into his car. Now that guy was fuming and he smelled burnt toast. They exchanged insurance information and each went on their separate way smelling and tasting burnt toast.

The man's secretary had woken up in a great mood. She had finally caught up completely with her work at the office and this allowed her a little bit of free time to attend to her own needs, such as polishing her nails. Her boss, our man, roared into the office screaming at her for polishing her nails and telling her to get back to work. Now the secretary smelled burnt toast instead of nail polish.

The men had a meeting that was almost certain to earn him a great deal of money but because he was in such a foul mood he transferred the taste of burnt toast to his client who promptly fired him and went somewhere else.

Perhaps you can begin to see how negativity spreads like a contagion – just like a virus on the border between life and nonlife it spreads like wildfire, and by the end of the day perhaps 1000 people have been affected by this one event of the wife burning the toast by accident.

That's the story of the Burnt Toast. There is nothing more to say and it is a perfectly true story being played out all over the world. People have requirements, no matter what they are, and if they are not fulfilled – well then, burnt toast.

What is the Work?

2013-04-20T11:07:00.001-04:00

What is the Work is a question often posed at the beginning of each semester at the Gurdjieff Foundations as well as the question: "Why do you keep coming here?"

These are questions not easily answered, as one's ideas of the meaning of Gurdjieff's Work tend to change over the years. At the very beginning when he showed up in Moscow and began to accept pupils the first thing he would ask them was, "Why are you coming to me?", And "What is your aim?" And then he would say to them that if their aims and his correlated (and at the time he declined to describe his personal aim), then they could walk along together for a while. But at some time in the future perhaps their aims will diverge, at which time they would of necessity go their separate ways.

He made all of this very clear to everyone who came to him – that to follow him was not easy and would never be easy but only get harder and harder, because "man" is a swine, unbalanced and malevolently formed. Gurdjieff said the same thing that Jesus said: "Man's name is Legion."

In physics work is defined as a certain amount of energy required to stimulate activities among the molecules of water in order to raise their general temperature by 1°. That's pretty cheap work, and Mr. Gurdjieff emphasized the fact that his Work was very expensive, requiring many zeros. One, 10, 100 and so on. He once said to the D Hartmann's that he could raise their temperature to 100°C (the degree at which water turns from liquid to vapor), but that they could not remain there but would return to their own temperature. He told them that they must work on themselves to increase their temperature to 100°C and keep it there.

Notice that if you have water in a container and you heat it up to 100°C it will evaporate and become water vapor and no longer constrained by the container that held the liquid – now the vapor is constrained by the shape of the room you may be in, and there is no way (according to entropy, the second law) for the vapor to condense back into the bottle. So, not only do you need an alchemical vessel or bottle but you also need it to be in the shape of an alembic, so that the vapor condenses in the alembic and drips down into another container, but that which is in the new container is purer because the contaminants and debris remain in the alembic.

So, as an alternative method of looking at this one can use the image Gurdjieff used of the vessel containing metal powders, where they heat will melt them into larger and larger chunks – less "Legion", and more single person. That is the right direction.

These larger chunks can be made magnetic, or radioactive or radiant. There are many things one can do once one has become a single individual that are not within the scope of powers of the ordinary man.

Of course, these new powers must not be used, because they are simple signposts that one is headed in the right direction – they are Great Natures own powers which as a last resort she bestows upon a man in an attempt to get him back inside the net of illusion. One must recognize them as what they really are – signs that escape from lower orders of laws is imminent. This means that that point is that where a man must be more discriminatory and vigilant in order to congeal these new powers so that they cannot be taken from one – one must fuse them into one's own being.

But most of us are so very far from that. One of the aphorisms that used to be in Dr. Welsh's basement and which came from the Priere said "I Love He Who Loves Work".

Once upon a time it was a thorn in my side – I did not know what the work entailed and I did not want to work, as far as I knew as my associative thinking allowed me to consider what work was.

Now I see differently, and I am eager to work, according to the five strivings: on myself, with others and for the Work itself. I have become a grateful servant, a watch guard on point, and I Am Responsible. I Have an Aim and cannot be dissuaded from it.

The Olive Press

2013-03-31T16:02:00.004-04:00

This is BTW, an old, old story:

Once a long time ago, the Devil and his ministers and demons held a conference. The Devil was tired of using all his manpower to assign a devil to each person in order to squeeze negativity out of each one separately, and he sought for a way to set up a kind of "toll booth", or other such contrivance that would squeeze and suck out the negativity of many people at once, or at least free up some demonic power to be used on another front.

There were many suggestions, but the one that interested the Devil the most was the idea of the "olive press".

If you know anything about olive oil, then you won't have a hard time following this logic: First and best olive oil is called cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, which is really sweet high grade olive oil. Then there is second cold pressing, followed by third cold pressing, after which the olive need to be heated to get out more oil. Then there is final pressing which crushes as much oil out of each olive as can be gotten. The remnant is simple pulp which is thrown away.

One of the Devils most trusted Demons, who had been studying engineering in his spare time suggested setting up mechanical devices all over the world that would squeeze the oil of negativity out of people as if they were olives.

First cold pressing virgin olive oil could be gotten from small children simply be placing obstacles in their way, like high walled cribs, and those leashed that parents put their children in, and they invented the word NO, which they taught to parents all over the world...

Every time a parent or guardian would tell a child NO (try to imagine how many times a child hears that word before it is even 5 years old -- it's astronomical), a little trickle of really high quality negativity would be squeezed out of the child, and eventually the word NO would have a siphoning effect, and the child would learn the word and use it on it's parents and then the olive press would work on the parents too, so that this one word, a negative word, NO, which had never been in Man's vocabulary until then, would serve as a wonderful way to introduce children to the world of demonic negativity. At the same time, at about the age of two, soon after the child started to talk, it would learn this negative word and use it on the parents, and the oil would start to flow from all sides.

Yummy, thought all the demons and imps. They applauded this engineer Demon and called him a genius and immediately began teaching the parents to say NO to all sorts of harmless things like a child exploring it's world. They added "DON'T" and other spicy words to the parents vocabulary and the olive press was all set. Nothing for the demons to do but sit back and enjoy their contrivance at work. Wonderful juicy extra virgin oil out of mankind.

Then they thought about the adolescents, and their natural rebelliousness, and they added a few adjustments and they managed to create huge fights between parents and their teenagers. This is "wonderful", they thought, "magical", now they had a second pressing and got tons of delicious oil from families.

The engineer demon wasn't finished. He called together all the architect devils together and asked them to influence the world by setting up devices all over the place to squeeze negativity out of otherwise calm and "good" people.

They worked all through the night (which in hell lasts forever), and then put their plans into action. Some examples of "olive presses" that squeeze negativity out of ordinary folks might be:

Hotel elevators that are too small, so that when everybody checks in or checks out they have to rub up against one another.

Construction on highways that cause bottlenecks and traffic jams, which drive people nuts and cause them to honk their horns at each other (which by the way, does nothing positive - makes nobody go any faster, but just increases everybody's tension)

Squeaky brakes. General increase of noise in cities. Narrow sidewalks. Detours. Crowded shopping malls.

You name it... the list goes on and on. And on and on and on.

Now, I play a game. I listen and look for the olive presses. When I see one I yell out (not out-loud but to myself),

"OLIVE PRESS, OLIVE PRESS, OLIVE PRESS!

I ask myself if I am going to let the olive press squeeze negativity out of me and I use their own word on them and say inside, NO.

I see "olive presses" all day long, and hardly any of them get any negativity out of me because I see them for what they are. Contrivances set up by the Devil and his cohorts.

How do you re-act when you are face to face with an "olive press"? Do they "get you", or do you recognize them?

Now that I have explained this subject, I wonder if it might be of any use to anybody else, to be on the lookout for olive presses and resist letting them squeeze you? Or will they succeed day after day getting the oils needed for the fires of hell? It's up to each of you your very self. Please let me know, and if you notice any "olive presses" that I have not mentioned, please make me a list, so I can be on guard for these nasty devices.

Right now they are using a jackhammer in front of my apartment, and have been making all kinds of noise from 8 in the morning till 5 at the very least. I know that they are only doing their construction jobs, but they are also without even knowing it, acting as an olive press to all the tenants in my building. They may get oil out of my neighbors (in fact I have heard some of them complain in the elevator), but they get very little out of me.

The I AM in each of us & the Homunculus Concept.

2013-03-18T14:03:00.002-04:00

When I was five or six years old a mantra came to me. I said it over and over for several years, especially when seeing "other people" It read:

"I AM the same I AM as you are, when you say I AM"

The ONLY difference is conditions; if I had been born into your body by your mother at your time and place and conditions, I would BE you. Completely, substantially and fully; I WOULD BE YOU. Not like you, not a doppelganger but actually you. The only thing that exists is relationship.

I said this mantra day and night for years, until it became an inviolate part of me. I AM as you ARE, and we all live as One, fractured only holographically.

If you take an ordinary photograph, and break it into pieces, every little part will be in focus, but only contain part of the image; However, if I take a Hologram, and break it into smaller pieces, each piece will contain the entire picture, but the smaller the piece, the less focused the whole would be.

This means that the search for what are known as Homunculi ("little man") is important to the alchemist and hermeticist. Above you can see two pictures of the same ear. The one on the right is easily recognized as an ear, but the one on the left (the same ear upside down) can be with little effort be seen as a fetus in the womb. This represents a homunculi. A little picture of the upside down ear shows the entire body as it forms in the womb.

This is how the Chinese build a method of acupuncture in the ear, so the outer rim of the ear now represents the spine, the ear lobe now represents the brain and inside the ear are represented the internal organs and their respective 'meridians'.

So the Hermetic Alchemist looks for Homunculi, and the study of ratio and music turns out to be a very large piece of the Holographic Universe. Chemistry and Alchemy were born of the same parents, as did Astronomy and Astrology. Religion and Science were also one, and the schism between them has cost the world it's primordial and primeval connection to the levels above and below. Admittedly, each seeks the other, because without the Alchemical Marriage between the two, the world is doomed. The Earth will have failed; great Nature will have failed, and the Sun through which the Sun generates it's radiance in the sky may fail.

The greater universe may not even notice, but we sure would.

The Imperfection of Perfection

2013-02-20T16:16:00.000-05:00

The Imperfection of Perfection

When I am working with my musical students on guitar I teach musical theory which is based on very ancient sources – many thousands of years before Pythagoras, whose name means "He who is as a Python" (the snake that kills by squeezing the breath our of it's victim). The basis of this beginning of musical theorem is the concept of Ratio, which is based on the ancient Greek root word Logos.

The word Logos can mean a symbol, such as copyrighted shapes that designate products and companies; Logos can also mean Word, in the sense of a word being an image phenom that is a symbol for something else. It can also be translated into English as the word Ratio/Symbol/Word, which makes the beginning of the Gospel of John all the more interesting, because an equally efficacious beginning might be as follows:

"In the beginning was Ratio, and Ratio was with God, and Ratio was God". This is as fruitful as "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"

Ratio is defined by the relationships that exist between differing sizes, numbers or shapes. In music, I only need a single string (called a mono chord) to study the ratios of what is known as the Major Scale. Here again we come up against language variants – when I say the major scale I do not mean that there is another scale, because all other scales and chords are developed by means of this one static formula: whole step, whole step, halfstep; whole step, whole step, whole step, halfstep. But this scale interval numbers of 123456 and 7 can start at any pitch so long as they follow the formula WWH, WWWH, WWH, WWWH, WWH, WWWH and so on. On a piano or similar keyboard this is why the black keys come in sets of twos and threes. Now let's return to the word ratio and look at the ratios within the major scale:

1:1 unison, (the tonic) and in perfect agreement with itself – this agreement or agree ability we call consonance, and at the very bottom we have dissonance to the point of what we call noise. The next ratio would be found by stopping the string halfway and allowing only half of the string to sound. This was give us the ratio:

1:2 equivalence, (the octave) and perfectly in agreement with the tonic and sharing its name or designation. Any multiple of two will yield octaves straight up in a vertical line, and always yield even numbers. Then we come upon the next ratio –

2:3 the Dominant (the fifth major scale tone) it is dominant because in a world of unison and equivalence we have no measure, but the dominant is a different tone completely, although it stands in complete agreement with the tonic. Then –

3:4 the Subdominant (the fourth major scale tone). A little bit of arithmetic may help us here; the four is an octave of the two, and one of the threes is above while the other one is below – this is why they are called the Dominant and Subdominant and are also considered perfect in relationship to the tonic.
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We have reached the end of the intervals considered perfect, and now I get to ask a rhetorical question: if I state that there is something wrong with "Perfection", what might it be?

The answer is rather simple: Anything that has reached perfection has no reason to change or to move, and is therefore nonexistent. There is nothing in the phenomenological universe we live in that is not subject to change over time as well as in motion relative to all the other factors in the universe. So we need imperfection and asymmetry in order to sustain anything at all. The next ratio is:

4:5 the Mediant (the third major step in the major scale) played along with the tonic it is not perfect. Next we have:

5:6 this is the minor third and contains a good deal of suspicious sorrow when played along with the tonic. We're going to skip the ratios of 6:7 and 7:8 because they are only found within portions of the major scale. The next ratio we find usable is:

8:9 the super tonic (the second major tone in a major scale). It is also what is known as a whole step. Then penultimate, we have the ratio of:

15:16 this is a minor second, or a half-step As the numbers get higher and the notes get closer together they become less and less affable or consonant and more and more dissonant. In the tempered scale that we use in modern music the only more dissonant and ugly combination of notes is found in something called the Tritone, which is also called the Devils Interval, because in the major scale it rests between the perfects of the Fourth and Fifth and is equally three whole steps from the Tonic and it's Octave.

Now if you have followed this simple progression from unison and perfect consonance down to the utmost dissonance, we find that we can utilize these ratios to create what is known as the Major Scale.
1-2-34-5-6-78-2-34-5-6-78 etc. ad infinitum...

Now we should have a look at the words of Jesus as he tells his disciples to "be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect".

The Greek word in the Gospels is 'teleios', which is used 48 times in the New testament, and has multiple meanings, meaning both Perfect or Mature. Certainly Jesus could not have meant Perfect as I have described the Creation, because as we have noted, nothing in the phenomenological universe can be perfect. Anything that was perfect would automatically disappear or become non-existent and this includes the entire Creation.

Mr. Gurdjieff knew this well, as he differentiates the original condition of Creation by the term "Autoegocrat", which means essentially "I govern by myself" – this is a condition which must exist outside of time or space,, or what Mr. Gurdjieff calls "The Mighty Heropass"; the equivalent of the Hindu God Kali, the wrathful goddess who represents the irrevocable destruction of all things through the inexorable movement of time.

And as we have seen through our creation of the major scale by ratio, that a single octave is asymmetrical, which concurs with modern physics in its examination of the big Bang which describes the creation of a minute ratio differential between matter and antimatter, where for every million particles of antimatter there may be 1,000,001 particles of matter. It is that minuscule differential in favor of matter/energy that allows for our universe to exist

Mr. Gurdjieff calls this change from perfection to a cyclic asymmetry by the term "Trogoautoegocrat", a term that means "I Govern by Eating Myself", this symbol for which is called the Oroboros, the pictured of a snake eating its own tail, which by the way proved to be the solution to what is now known as the benzene ring, which opened the door to organic chemistry, discovered by a fellow named Kukulke. This is also the secret of the third force of which Mr. Gurdjieff asserts that we are blind. He calls us "third force blind".

Mr. Gurdjieff asserts that every manifestation requires three equal and opposite forces to come into existence, which he calls the "Active, the "Passive" and the "Reconciling". They are also known as "Affirming", "Denying" and "Reconciling". These correlate exactly to the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost as well as the parent of this concept of three attributes of reality that braid together to form the Creation which is the Hindu Philosophy of The Samkya (which translates as "enumeration") and which calls the forces the three Gunas, or tendencies, Rajas or active; Tamas or the resistance of Inertia, and Sattva, which sits between them in the same manner as the backwards S in the double fish Yin Yang symbol of Chinese Alchemy, and is considered balanced and "perfect" in the meaning of reconciling and mature.

Physics also describes these three forces, although our Scientists do not know the esoteric or inner meaning of their schemata by the designation of the three forces as Centrifugal, or Shiva, the God of Creation and Destruction both. The Big Bang falls under the authority of Shiva which blows all things apart; Physics' opposite of Centrifugal is for Centripetal, or inward force that is under the auspices of the God Vishnu, the "preserver", who causes gravity and for things to have stability through time. The third force in Physics is something rarely thought about, although without which, centrifugal and centripetal cancel each other out, is The Revolving force, The God Brahma, who has no devotees in Hinduism, but which creates the process of the Trogoautoegocrat, meaning that everything rotates either around itself, like the Earth, which creates the illusions of day and night (although the Sun, which also revolves, pours out radiant energy in all directions at all times), or revolves around some other center, yielding spirals all the way from the fingertips to the galaxies.

Again we are brought home to the Hermetic formula: "As Above; So Below"

Be then as mature as your chosen deity, understanding that "God" may not be as perfect as the usual reading of Jesus' words would seem to apply. Mr. Gurdjieff said it best when he noted that "Angel can teach only one thing; Devil can teach everything" Become as meek as Doves and as wise as Serpents. Drink with the Devil, but leave him to pay the bill.

The Prayer of Jabez

2013-02-19T13:24:00.002-05:00

The Prayer of Jabez

Hidden amongst the Chronicles in the Bible is a very strange paragraph which deviates from the line of heritage that Chronicles is mostly concerned with; that is, so and so begat so-and-so begat so and so, and so on (pun intended). Embedded in this 1 Chronicles 4:10 is something called the story of and the prayer of Jabez.

It is a very short piece which goes something like this, paraphrasing in my own language that which is translated slightly differently in various versions of the Bible: "And a woman birthed a child she named Jabez, which is translated as "I delivered him in pain and sorrow ", and Jabez was considered more righteous than his brother and he prayed:

"Dear Lord, Oh, that Thou would bless me and increase my purview, and let me not lapse into Unconsciousness, whereby I may cause Harm, and our Gracious Father Endlessness Granted This unto Him ":

Also rendered as "And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that Thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that Thine hand might be with me, and that Thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested."

After that detour the Chronicles returns to the lineage of who begat whom begat who, almost endlessly. Torturous to read, but this simple Jewel stands in stark relief. How am I to interpret this short prayer? First, he asks for a blessing – and the blessing among the Jewish people of antiquity was the placing of the dying patriarchs hand upon the head of his firstborn son and imparting to him the spiritual power and blessing that the father has to give. Then, he asks for an increase in purview, which is the area under which one has control – one might also read it as "increase my reach and the power thereof". Finally, in the third section of the prayer he asks for God's continuous presence, so that he may not cause harm or suffer in vain himself.

These are three lofty requests, but it then says that God granted him that which he requested.

For me today the most important part of the prayer is connected with the word purview, the definition of which is:

1a : the body or enacting part of a statute

b : the limit, purpose, or scope of a statute

2: the range or limit of autha : the body or enacting part of a statute

b : the limit, purpose, or scope of a statute

: the range or limit of authority, competence, responsibility, concern, or intention

: range of vision, understanding, or cognizanceority, competence, responsibility, concern, or intention

3: range of vision, understanding, or cognizance

I am particularly concerned with definition 2, which describes the scope or boundary of one's authority and responsibility.

The question then falls upon me: what is the scope and boundary of my authority, competence, responsibility, concern or intention?

Certainly, the government of the United States is beyond my purview. I can have a small role in voting, and I can have a horizontal input with my activities, but these are attempts to enlarge my purview, acting outside of my real and authentic powers, perhaps in order to attempt to bend a higher power towards my wishes. But if I recognize my own purview I will come to understand that I am incredibly small – practically nothing. In my room I am large, in my building I am smaller and in my neighborhood I am a tiny speck of life which goes hither and thither.

If I read a newspaper or watch news on the television and take-up a political opinion which I then attempt to foist onto my fellows, I am looking and speaking outside of my actual purview. If I am to be a mature adult, and not simply a grown-up child who asks childishly for things to be different, I thereby become a fool. So I do not gossip, and I do not engage in useless dialogue, "barroom arguments" or anything of that nature. Men do not realize how much of their own energy is wasted by this frivolous imaginary powers that they pretend they might be in possession of. They are NOT.

If I am honest and sincere with myself and allow myself to be disillusioned from these imaginary false and chimera capabilities, and very soon come to the conclusion that my real purview is vertical while radiating out horizontally some short distance from myself. But myself – that self which is beneath the false and the ludicrous, within those bounds is my true purview. I may pray as Jabez did, that my purview or sphere of influence becomes enlarged, but I cannot do it – I have no power in that area. One might say that one's being has a number of limits: my actual physical body, the body of my emotions, the body of my mental facilities and my attention and powers of image making, or constructive imagination – constructive imagination is what I need prior to any real impact in the world of inertia, the world of things, and I cannot influence the being condition of another, unless there is a common aim or search for commonality.

Today this is my prayer. That we may find commonality, because we are all of one species.

The Devil

2013-02-03T12:59:00.002-05:00

The Devil

Who is the Devil?

1): There is a hidden teaching which says that when God created the universe it was perfect, but because of this perfection it had no reason to change. It was perfect in all directions. It therefore threatened to collapse in on itself and disappear. This would have undone the universe which would have made God sad and bored. He therefore brought his firstborn principles before him, the Archangels; and asked which of them would be willing to descend into the material creation and to act as a "stop gap"; introducing asymmetry and preventing perfection from threatening creation. Lucifer was the most beloved of God and stepped forward. He agreed to this task even though it would make him a scapegoat, because he would prevent the perfection of any created thing. Since all created things have an urge towards perfection in the hope of returning to the bosom of the primordial unity and bliss, they would necessarily resent this action of Lucifer's.

In addition, because Lucifer loved God more than any other and because he was going to be sent to the position farthest away from God in his task, he decided he would perform another service for God that could only be performed from the position of the antipode. He decided that he would invent allure, and seduce all those who sought to move towards God away from him. This would have a double action: it would keep God's love for himself, as the first action of jealousy, and second; it would keep all the unworthy out of God's "hair." In this function, the devil would act as "trier" of purity and intention, with the ideal that none should pass into God's bosom.

Because Satan would be at the antipode of creation but standing between the fulfillment of perfection, and since God in his role of creator stands at the center of the creation, from the position of those things which are created, Satan would seem to have usurped the divine position of the creator. This has the result that the universe resembles a house of mirrors, and thwarts any efforts towards finding God. With the introduction of the devil at the antipode of creation, the universe becomes an exitless magic circle.

The foregoing is from an esoteric musical teaching.

2): How are we to relate to the Devil?

In the late 1800s there was a group of French poets who reasoned thus:

Since God and the Devil were engaged in a kind of military warfare, one should use military allegory to understand spiritual strategy. They reasoned that most persons are of very little interest to the Devil because while thinking to themselves that they are headed for heaven, by their own actions they are in fact headed straight for Hell. It is therefore unnecessary for the Devil to waste any of the energies of his demonic legion on them. They could be assigned very minor imps and demons who would guide them towards the right berth in Hell. These souls were also quite skinny -- providing very little fuel for the fires of Hell. To the demonic reasoning most of the world provided much quantity but very little quality. This was offset however by certain individuals who led exemplary lives or who performed holy actions known or unknown. These souls were headed directly towards the gates of heaven, even sometimes without knowing it, and especially without intention (which itself would be a disqualifying "sin"). In order to capture these types of souls, a kind of ambush needed to be set up. This required rather high-ranking devils to hide in ambush near the gates of heaven. Then, after the "do-gooder" saw that he was virtually at the gates of heaven he would let down his guard or become Shanghaied and become ripe pickings for the demonic hordes. These types of souls would provide plenty of fuel and nourishment for the fires of Hell.

Again, the poets reasoned in the following manner: It is extremely difficult to find the gates of Heaven. It is not so hard to find the Devil. Since the Devil is likely to be waiting in ambush near the gates of heaven, finding the gates of heaven only requires that one heads straight towards one's own strongest Devil. Of course there is the difficulty of eluding his clutches when you are headed straight towards him, but the poets reasoned that it would be worth the attempt and that in addition, great art might be spat out during the throes of battle. If one could weather this centripetal force, then one would be flung through the doors of heaven though a kind of trampolining effect. In addition, one's art would testify on one's behalf of one's original intent. This lead to the terms "disarrangement of the senses" and "intentional vertigo."

3):   Spiritual cultures around the world have come up with different terms for dualism, for the active and passive forces which operate in the world. For the Chinese and they are called Yang and Yin. In the Indian subcontinent there are called Rajas and Tamas. The Christian culture would use the terms Heaven and Earth. In each of these sets of opposites the first term would be the light and active force and the second would be the dark and resistant force. This second force would include the ideas of the Devil. But not so well known is the fact that in each of these sets of opposites there is postulated a relationship between them which has its own name, and which forms a third and invisible force. For the Chinese this is called the Tai Ji, or great ultimate limit; in India it is called Sattva, the balanced pure and spiritually even force. Even in Christianity the third force is known specifically as the holy ghost, which is usually termed the love which exists between the father and son; the son in this instance standing for the passive or resistant force. Therefore it is not simply a case of choosing between opposites but rather coming into a balanced relationship between two only seemingly antagonistic forces which create the world. In this instance, the Devil cannot be avoided, resisted or eliminated. Instead, the Devil and all that he stands for needs to be integrated into a balanced whole. This is very similar to the ideas in psychology of C. G. Jung of the integration of the shadow self as part of the job of individuation, which is the goal of Jungian psychoanalysis.

4):    Astronauts are known to lose muscle mass in outer space where there is no gravity. Science realizes that bone density and muscle mass are depended upon weight bearing work against resistance. Without resistance no work can be accomplished. In a world without any friction nothing could develop. Therefore the Devil is necessary for any kind of spiritual development. If he did not exist we would have no chance to develop our spiritual musculature at all.

5):   Beelzebub is known as Prince of the Devils. He is also known as Lord of the flies, and flies are connected with the elements space and air. As Lord of the flies Beelzebub commands these forces. To human beings, flies are irksome pests who are obstinate and troublesome. In a way, flies are like our own unwanted habits which seem unamenable to our will and which return to plague us even as we shoo them away. Interestingly, in Hatha yoga there is a figure who is one of the founders of the yoga called Matsyendra. Matsyendra is known as Lord of the fishes and king of the yogis. Why is this so? One reason is that the energies of the body are likened to shoals of fishes who travel through the body and who are as difficult to control as the direction of fish in the water. Therefore, he who has mastered control of the subtle energies of the body, or Prana, is called king of the fishes. Clearly an analogy can be drawn between these two perhaps mythical entities; Matsyendra and Beelzebub both represent a mastery over ordinarily uncontrollable forces. One could also deeply ponder the connection between the flies and air, and the fish and water; Air and Water being two of the great elements postulated by ancient esoteric teachings worldwide.

The Power of Real Wish

2013-02-02T12:24:00.002-05:00

the depth of wish

Star light, star bright,
first star I see tonight;
wish I may, wish I might,
have the wish I wish tonight.

As human beings, we are each endowed with the same organic format and limitations,the result of being living, physical creatures who breath and eat and think. We take in food and air and sensations, we excrete behavior and we have an inner life. In this inner life are thoughts and desires; unspoken and even unconscious urges. What is the nature of wish? What is the meaning of this action within us which can be stronger than hope? Where in our inner nature is the platform upon which we can examine the nature and meaning of wish, which seems so fleeting against the mundane world, and what happens in each of us as our ability to wish is tempered by the facts of material existence?

One may speak of dreams, of innermost desires; of the deepest longing of the heart;even when crushed by the weight and gravity of our ordinary existence these longings still have the power to renew us; to surge forgotten energies within us; to cause us once again to fall in love, not with any other person, or even with ourselves, but with an idea, with a hope of the unrealized potential within us. When we wish; when we truly come to recognize that within us as a wish (and not simply a made up desire or objective, but a surge towards a longing which lives an independent existence from us), then for that moment we open to a life which is ordinarily denied us, and we have access to a power that can organize us into wholeness, and which can move mountains on our behalf. Even if only for this reason and no other, we owe a debt to ourselves to go within and search for the meaning of wish.

All myths and fairy stories contain tantalizing remembrances that there is within us the hope of a primordial connection with one's wish and of the realization of one's destiny. Destiny; as opposed to fate; as opposed to conscious intent; destiny as the unfolding of the greatest of possibilities out of the unformed potentialities contained within a given life. This is why the image of the genie, the fairy godmother or the wizard are such profound symbols of how the deepest inner wish in a person can be independent of all of the actualized aspects of a person, for the true wish comes to us from an entirely other level. This also points to the reason why the true wish can never be mistaken with simple desire or objectives which may be self-realizable. The creative force always irrupts into consciousness from a level outside of it. This is whythe wish has power at the same time that it is disregarded in ordinary life, because the wish can only await its actualization, and can never "do." This also means that one cannot influence the wish in any ordinary way. Yet wish is strongly differentiated from hope, which contains within its jurisdiction the element of happenstance, upon which we may rest our hope. Wish, on the other hand, does all, contains within itself all authority for what is to be, and yet "does" nothing.

What is the goal of wish? There are many levels upon which wishing may be said to reside. There is the wish blown upon the birthday candle. The wish sent with a coin into the fountain. There are the teaching wishes granted by the Jinn, where the fallacious nature of desire is revealed by the foolhardy wishes of the recipient and where the last of the granted wishes is almost always a fervent plea to return to the state which existed before the wishes had been granted, but which can bring at the end a hard won maturity. There is a coin of wish, and all know that the spending of this coin can be foolish or wise. There are the unrealizable wishes, verging on fantasy, but which can still be perhaps amongst the wisest of purchases. For those who dare to wish to fly to the moon or to have secret powers of wisdom, perhaps the wish pays its dividends in unearthed energies and ideas leading to invention. At the very least, the fabulous and sweeping wish which is scarcely to be expected brings within it a delicious inner thrill, and it is a sad thing that so many have forgotten its delights.

As to the highest wish in a person, the "true wish" and its goal, this goal is much further and has a much more concrete form. All myths and fairy tales suggest that one can exert no influence whatsoever over the form of this wish (although one may "blunder" into the formation of the actualization of one's wish, when all of the normal avenues for the attainment of one's desires are paused, or disabled, and usually through the innate "goodness" of one's heart or essential nature -- which is the part closest to power in wishing). Power in wishing must be bestowed upon one, and not always by overtly beneficent forces. There is the tradition that bestowed power to wish is almost always a test, which not so much separates good from evil but that separates the innermost essential in one from everything else. Tradition holds that any wish other than one connected to the essential treasure of the heart (and which also moves one in the direction of one's hidden destiny) will be a wish that will bring a dismantling of elements within the self which are false. The false wish, when it comes true, brings decay which is objectively speaking healthy and true, like a pull upon the reins of the wayward horse. Only elements which do not belong to the true and essential self may be ruptured in this way. The Alchemical axiom is: "gold does not fear the fire," but for those upon whom this wish is bestowed, the event is one of a preternatural winnowing fire out of which none but the purest intention can emerge unscathed.

In the archetypal chakra system of Kundalini yoga there exist two minor chakras near the heart which are forbidden as objects of meditation. In English these chakras are named respectively 'the wish granting tree' and ' the seat of unutterable anguish.' These two chakras are considered to be sister and brother, and one may not be opened without opening the other. At the base of the wish granting tree is an altar upon which is placed the deepest wish of the self. This wish is placed upon this altar prior to the birth. Any other wish placed upon this altar is considered a desecration and a rape of the sister by the brother. He then comes to the rescue of the sister and cuts down the tree, and if the chakra is opened duplicitously, the brother in his wrath opens and reveals the sacred conscience. In the hidden and apocryphal legends of Jesus it is said that both of these chakras in him were fully open, which is why he was said to be a man "well acquainted with sorrows." The idea in Buddhism of the bodhisattva or perfected being who remains on the earthly plane in order to support the salvation of others is also connected with these two chakras and their opening. When the chakra of the wish granting tree is opened and the Great Self receives its wish, it also receives the deep and penetrating realization of the plight and inner state of others via the brother. Of these two chakras, it is forbidden to say more.

Now, for those who have come to recognize their wish, the journey towards itsfulfillment is an odyssey of epic proportions. Against this truth every man is the hero,set upon the seven voyages, or demanded to fulfill twelve tasks and to return with a proof not given lightly. Almost always mythical forces are set against this adventure; the dragons of the unconscious guarding the precious treasure. For one who is set out on such a quest, tradition allots years of search for guidance, and a journey of unimaginable distances through dark and dangerous places. One's own resources are never equal to the task, and therefore must come a search for tools with which to perform the tasks which are strewn against the intent, and which almost in every case cause the supplicant to detour, and to undertake Herculean tasks which on the surface seem to have no connection to the goal. Thus, one on such a mission seems to the outside observer perhaps to be headed in wrong direction, and even to seem the dolt or idiot. On top of this is the fact that these tasks are usually formulated to be wellbeyond the ken of the seeker and cut perpendicular to their strengths and abilities and requiring the assistance of magical elements and of a guiding guardianship. But the true seeker after his wish has in all cases magic in his pocket, a compass or lodestone which guides him unerringly towards his goal. All the rest move like lemmings convinced of their direction while the seeker after the true wish of the heart moves in a direction wholly opposite to expectations.

But in our world, legend and myth and fairy story are relegated to childhood , and so with wish. We ask our children to wish, but not ourselves. We remind each other to wish on the birthday candles but have forgotten why. We throw coins in the fountain but we do not mean it, and which of us would dream of wishing on a star in any seriousness? What has happened to us? Not only has our power to wish withered but even our recognition of its power. We relegate wish to the purview of the naive. And yet we hear the words: "lest ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise see the kingdom" and do not take them to heart. Are these words of fiction? While we consider that we live our lives in fact, richly or poorly, it may be that our lives pour out from underneath us. The idea of a study of the meaning of wish should be far from trivial; but we will have to walk backwards, working ourselves out of the disarray and complications we find ourselves in, {and return to simplicity in order to find it. In this place of simplicity we can again pick up the thread of wish and follow it home, to the land of make-believe, where anything is possible and where nothing yet has happened. Perchance we may then again find our forgotten true wish, and begin again.

Some time ago I took a survey asking various acquaintances what their ideas regarding wish had been when they were children and now, as adults. The wishes took many forms. Some came true and some did not. There seemed to be an intuitive inner understanding that a certain coin of wish is given to each of us to spend, and like the child in front of a selection of candy, we ponder our choices, we take aim with our hopes and at last, we let fly with our desire. Once having made our wish we wait, curious but certain of a power having been loosed and certain of a response from the universe. We can still do that. One person told me this: that when he was young he had been careful not to spend his wishes foolishly, but there came in time to him a wish that was simply stated, preposterous. Because the wish was an impossible one, he told me that he knew that he could make this wish without fear of spending his precious wish money. As he told me of his wish, the impossible wish of a child's heart, his face softened and his shoulders relaxed. His eyes began to twinkle and moisten and he began to laugh. As I saw this change come over him what I saw was this: that he became more himself and less the trappings of life. He became younger in fact before my eyes, years peeling away as he remembered, and I knew in my heart what I told him then, that the impossible had worked its magic. That the wish itself held the power he had been looking for, and that his wish had in fact, come true.

The English word wish is derived from the proto-IndoEuropean language root 'wen,' which translates as "to desire, to strive for." Closely related, and from the same root is the modern English word 'win,' to win. In old English the word wynn means pleasure, joy, and the old English word 'wenan' means to expect, imagine, think. The old English word for wish is actually wyscan. The origin and development of human language as a means of expression is deeply shrouded in mystery, and the study of the source and meanings of even a single letter can provide rich nourishment in the search for understanding, often offering multiple lateral avenues for exploration. The fact that sounds uttered by the human voice can convey density of meaning via metaphor, allegory and veiled allusion should rightly return us to a state of awe at the original mystical nature of our very existence. The word wish contains three basic sound components: 'W', 'ie' and 'sh'. Each of these phonemes can be examined individually into search for depths of meaning concealed within the compound sound group which makes up its word.

The 'W,' is a letter derived from 'V,' or 'U,' hence double 'U.' It comes from the Semitic 'vau,' meaning nail. The 'V' contains the idea of identity, of point, and the double 'U' connotes the image of relationship, of I and you, or I and thou. Thus the words 'womb,' 'woman,' 'with.' In the quality of its sound is a wooing. A pulling, an asking, like the sound of a wind instrument, deep and vibratory (as against the 'K' or labial 'L' for instance). Thus the questioning words: 'who,' 'when,' 'why,' 'where,' 'what.' In its representation of the doubling of 'V,' we have the idea of twisting or turning back upon itself; bringing us the words 'weave,' 'whirl,' 'worry' and 'world.' One could continue and exploration of the hidden and primeval meanings of the 'W' sound in words like 'word,' 'wise,' 'wife,' 'warm,' etc.

The second letter in wish is the vowel 'I,' sounding 'ie.' This letter comes from the Semitic 'Yod,' meaning hand. The hand is the human tool for grasping; for making connections and the 'I' as a vowel sound form stands for a connectivity, the binding. It is the center vowel in the vowel series AEIOU. In this central position it embodies the idea of developing and maintaining a connective relationship. Consider the identification we have with the body and with the thinking which is represented by this letter as a personal pronoun. Also, the 'I' can serve as a balance between two ideas as a fulcrum and as a mechanism of joining, as in the suffix 'ing' and as the 'i' in semi circle.

Finally, the last two letters, 'S' and 'H' together make up one phoneme, 'sh.' The 'S' is derived from the Semitic 'shin,' which means tooth. It was originally pictured on its side, which can give the image of the teeth. It is used in this sense of the wave in the words 'snake,' 'shape,' 'smooth.' This consonant is generative, standing for the sexual power. For this reason adding an 's' at the end of a word plurals it, multiplying, as in 'senses,' 'eggs,' 'brains'. The "S' stands for the teeth, the instruments whereby food is taken into oneself, whereby the food is divided and possessed. It is hot and sensual as in 'hiss'. The 'H' is from the Hebrew 'cheth,' which stands for fence. This is like two 'I's connected, but enclosed. If is a frame which prevents the passing of energies. It is close in meaning to the numeral '8' stands for infinity when placed upon its side, because the energies on either side of it are made to circulate rather than dissipate. This 'H,' this fence at the end of 'wish,' helps to secure its power and serves as a kind of hermetic seal upon the word.

Bibliography:

The Grimm's Fairy Tales
American Heritage Dictionary
Kundalini For The West
The Serpent Power - Sir John Woodruff
Shat Puri Karana
Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am" - G. I. Gurdjieff
A Mystical Key To The English Language - Robert M. Hoffstein

The Machines

2013-02-01T16:59:00.000-05:00

The Machines

It is said in an ancient teaching that man lives in a large house, but for some reason, spends all of his time and energy in the basement. The house has numerous rooms and each room is filled with furniture and various machines. Each of these machines may run on a different type or grade of fuel. Some on gas, some on kerosene, some on electricity. The house is wired for electricity but the switches are all left off so that man stumbles around in the darkness and stubs his toes. He only uses the machines in the basement. Sometimes, one of the rooms lights up by accident for a moment because the wiring is frayed, and then a man may go there and see the room and the machines which are in it, but they are in disarray. Then the light goes out, and he curses and returns to the basement scratching his head. Occasionally one of the machines may turn on by accident and a man may get messages, but because of the darkness he doesn't know what to do with them, or even if the lights are on for a moment the messages may be in a code, and he cannot read them.

There is a small lamp in the basement but the man doesn't know how to use it and he has never learned how to focus its light, so he can confines himself to the small area of the basement which it lights willy nilly. He is content to let the lamp run on a low grade fuel which trickles into the house on its own. There is a pump nearby which can upgrade the fuel, but the pump is manual and requires work, and the man doesn't want to work. He is content to sit in the half dark and occupy himself with the toys and small games which are stored in the basement. Some of the games which he plays are called "I am grown up," "powerful," "beautiful" and so on.

If one of the machines accidentally turns on, or if one of the rooms lights up by accident, or if he gets bored with the toys and games, or perhaps if he is told of the other rooms, he may get curious. If his curiosity lasts long enough and is strong enough he begins to wander through the house but finds it too dark. If he then cedes to work, he can use the pump to upgrade the fuel which runs the lamp. It is hard work, and he doesn't want to do it, but then the lamp works much better, only not for long. The fuel container is too small. There are larger containers (and even other lamps) in the house but he must find them. But if he works to collect fuel he can head out with the lamp to explore through the house. Whenever he comes to a new room he will see that it is in disarray, and he may see the machines but not be able to get to them because of the clutter, so he starts to clean up. Then the fuel runs out quickly, and he must return to the basement and pump again so that then he can return to the room. For each room he must return again and again tidying the room up in order to reach the switches on the various machines. If he cleans a room sufficiently he may see a light switch on the wall. Depending on circumstances it may be rusted and break or it may be stuck but operable. If he gets the light switch turned on he can return to the room more easily.

Then he can see the furnishings and the machines much better. Some of the machines he may have heard about, and some he doesn't recognize at all. The rooms are handsomely appointed. Some of the machines may be rusty, and some may be broken from when he wandered around in the dark stubbing his toe. He may even have broken some in anger with his cursing. He doesn't know how to operate the machines but some of them have manuals left beside them while others have manuals in the library. The manuals may be written in different languages. If the first room he finds is the library and he gets the light switch on, he may see the manuals, but not the machines. The library also contains fiction, which is easier to read than the technical manuals and more pleasant. If he tidies up the library and gets the light switch on, he might spend all of his time reading fiction. He might read both the fiction and the manuals. He may think that the manuals are a form of fiction, and he may even write his own fiction, or write fanciful manuals.

If he turns a machine on without reading the manual it may do very strange things, frightening him, and he may abandon the room and return to the basement where he has learned to be comfortable. Because he knows nothing about the machines he may leave one on which then drains the house of energy and dims what lights are on, or it might damage the house. A machine which is left on by accident may catch fire from overheating and burn the house down, and because the man hides in the basement he may not know it until it is too late to do anything. The sprinkler system is in disrepair and untested. However, many of the machines have timers or fuses to protect them. But if he blows a fuse on one of the machines he cannot find another because he doesn't know where to look, and he may become frustrated and angry. He may go on a rampage.

If the man is sensible he will proceed slowly. If he is careful and gets a machine to work it may help him, but then he may fall in love with the machine and try to use this one machine for everything. But each machine has a specialty. Each of the rooms in the house have themes, and the machines in it are connected to these themes. There may be a telephone in the house, but it is disconnected so that those who might wish to call him are unable to do so. The man may not know that there are other houses, or he may disbelieve it. If he finds and turns on the radio the broadcast may be very faint because the antenna is elsewhere. In the basement are both kitchen and bathroom but poorly appointed. Upstairs, there may be others, more lavish, and cookbooks and a larder. There may be recycling machines for garbage, air filters; even solar panels. The owner of the house may have been very erudite. The man may find a chemists laboratory, a wine press; even a distillery.

As the man works more on cleaning up the house and straightening out more of the rooms he sees that it is appointed lavishly, and by and by he begins to move his things out of the basement and into one of the other bedrooms. The owner of the house is clearly wealthy. If he reaches the master bedroom he may see an ornate bed. There may be a note upon it. It is from the owner. He is away on business. The man may have full use of the house. The owner asks him to treat everything as if it were his. The note says that if the man should undertake to set the house in order, that there will be a reward upon the owners return. Along with the note there is a diagram of the house and a list of all that is in it. There are instructions regarding the care of the house and the use of the machines. Next to the bed is a night stand, and upon it, a bible.

Adapted from p.44, paragraph 4 of Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P.D.Ouspensky, quoting G.I.Gurdjieff.

Richard Lloyd's Solasishock: A Short Study Regarding Beelzebub

2013-02-01T16:29:00.001-05:00

Richard Lloyd's Solasishock: A Short Study Regarding Beelzebub

A Short Study Regarding Beelzebub

2013-02-01T16:28:00.003-05:00

Beelzebub is the penultimate Devil, also known as

"Lord of the Flies".

Flies have some interesting characteristics:

First: They have compound eyes so they SEE almost an entire spherical 360 degrees

Except where their thin bodies are. Their blind spot is therefore much smaller then

Ours. They see right through their wings when in flight, and they do not take off

Like birds, but vertically, like a Harrier Jet. They almost have eyes in the back of

Their heads.

Second: They fly, and there is a kind of stickum on their feet so they can land

Anywhere; upside down, on ceilings, walls, anywhere.

Third: ALL their hairs act like our ears, sensing changes in air pressure as well or

better than a human's two ears.

Fourth: They have giant orgies in flight,; that is to say, they have a crazy mind

boggling acrobatic sex life.

Fifth: They can eat almost anything, although they prefer sweets.

They eat through a proboscis, like a vacuum cleaner.

Sixth: They are constantly cleaning themselves, and cleansing themselves and their

Senses.

Seventh: They have Real Will -- if they want to land on your nose, you can brush

Them off but they will just fly around and re-land on your nose, if that's where they

Want to land.

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If "Man" had that kind of Will Power he could do almost anything, and he could but

He doesn't know it because he is near comatose, glued to "The World".

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Eighth: Which starts a new Octave, Flies only have to live for six weeks, Lay eggs

And die. I venture they die a happy death, because their lives are so vivid.

And they remember themselves 'Always and Everywhere'.

WITW#16 To Serve Live Sacrifice becomes Grace - Einstein

2013-01-30T14:37:00.001-05:00

"In the Service of Life; Sacrifice becomes Grace"

Albert Einstein: October 28, 1930

In terms of our Work, how do we see this? Is it "lip service"? Or something real? What do you FEEL about this Statement?

Do we serve Life?
What can we Sacrifice?
What do we HAVE, to Sacrifice?
What would we be WILLING to sacrifice?

WITW#15): The Blind Spot

2013-01-30T14:31:00.001-05:00

All things have a center, from which they whirl; the fingerprint has whorls; the hair on the skull has crowns, the spot where there is no hair and which serves as the center of the hair whorl; the eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve is attached; even Achilles had a place where his Mother held him which dipping him into the pool pf immortality, his heels.

The galaxies have large "black holes" at the center, and everything circulates around this center; why then should not Man have a ridgepole around which his personality revolves. I contend that he does, and it is called "Chief Feature;" a prevailing center around which the constellation of his personality whirls. We have been told by Mr. Gurdjieff that we cannot be told straight out what this is, as we will deny and rail against this fact, as it is two things: too close to our principle identification, and in a blind spot -- in our Subconscious and Unconscious aspects.

There is a well worn work story worth telling: Once two men in the Work decided to help each other by observing each other and discovering Chief feature in each other; after a set period they got together to discuss it. The first to speak told his friend that he had discovered the other's Chief feature and was invited to report it, and he told the other that he was "Argumentative." "Nonsense", said the other, "I am NOT argumentative, and you have lost your mind for thinking so, but I will tell you yours; and that is you are wishy-washy". Whereupon the second man asked the first, "do you really think so?".

This tells the tale. It is a VERY delicate matter, and not easily presented. A man will balk; will rail against this truth, will deny and squirm out of the insight. He has to find it himself, but also requires the presence of others. And this requires the face to face in person presence of those who are further on the way, or else a man will invent all sorts of glorious rubbish for himself, and as James declares in his New Testament letter, will be as men who look in a mirror, turn around and forget what they look like. This is a law.

Now, I spent nine months on this website, working my fingers to the bone participating and trying to see if anything essential could be conveyed over the internet. I got mixed results, but although "something" can be transmitted in words alone, a more important "something else" cannot.

NOTHING can take the place of an oral tradition, and by oral, it is meant that there be actual physical presence together, face to face. It is far too easy to hide behind pretty words and ideas, where the work is NOT. The ideas are NOT the Work. Words are NOT the Work; and only the Work is the Work, and it remains an oral and personal transmission. One can write cooking recipes of thousands of exercises, but as Mr. Gurdjieff has told us, there are general rules and Work for all, and then individual Work for each man, because each man bring with him, his life, which is his being, and the Work is a science of BEING, not of knowledge, or smarts, or of anything else.

So I have been visible here far less. It does not mean I have abandoned this group, only that I am Working, and working is not words and never will be. So I mean no judgement, but only state what I see. The vision of the fact that it is too easy to hide here; there are some who have come and set up "shop," who may not even realize that they have strayed far from the Work or never met it, but this I can be assured of. Those who do not find the Work itself will perish with their ideas; and "die like dogs", as Mr Gurdjieff would put it, and all of their know-how and knowledge will perish with them, and they will have squandered their lives in dispute and contention, arguing like "bon-ton" scientists, while the ship of the Work slips away.

Bless you all my friends. You will hear from me, but not in the manner of before.I cannot be as I was then. I have spent my "time" here, and found that I had to "move on," to "plunge into life" and swim in the "real world" rather than spend precious time blathering here. Enough blather. back to life, and back to the invisible Work.

WITW#14): Can I see me as the object you see?

2013-01-30T14:26:00.004-05:00

I look out on the world, and people are objects who manifest in various ways. Can I look upon myself from their eyes, as an object traveling through their space? Can I separate from my self-centered view to a heliocentric view, forming an all seeing eye above me and those I interact with?

This requires a real effort, and a release of my personal requirements. My "requirements" are vast and varied, from having you do as I wish and love me at the same time, to telling the wind and the rain to stop, or something I have mishandled from falling and breaking on the floor. How can I develop an acceptance of what actually IS, without turning into some new age guru who says that everything is perfect if I just realize it?

It is NOT perfect, and will never become "perfect"; perfect things have no reason to change or to move, and thus cannot exist in this cosmos, which is asymmetrical. Can I accept that nothing including myself will ever be perfect?

I wish to work but at the same time large parts of me are lazy and prefer not to paddle, letting the current of life sweep me away, second by second.

I realize my nothingness, more and more -- that I will have NO effect on world history, or even wish to, and yet I wish to help. How can I help from where I actually am? Can an individual without a world stage role, help mankind - become conscious and develop conscience? And if so, does scale even matter? These are the questions in my consciousness of late. Any dialogue and exchange welcome. --Richard Lloyd

WITW#13): The Lazy Man's Building

2013-01-30T14:22:00.001-05:00

There was once a "man" who came upon the Work. He walked into the lobby and asked the doorman, "How many floors does this building have?" The doorman said, "many, perhaps 33 (conscious lying)"

"FANTASTIC" said the inquiring man and he ran home and got out his little toolbox. He came back and began building according to the architects rendering, but soon tired, so he began re-naming the floors 1 - 7 - 12 - 28 - 29, 31 and the luxurious penthouse, floor 33.

Ah, I have written the law of seven into my building, having 7 floors. And the 33, this must mean first and second shock. And, the 33 must also stand for the 3 forces in the second generation; That of all Created Things

But he looked over at the Foundation and noticed that they had a lobby whereas he had failed in his haste to put in a lobby, so that those who wished in had to climb in a window. "Good"" said the man. Whereas across the street they just walk into the lobby, my method STARTS worth Work...climbing in the window of the first floor takes balance and maneuvering... as the windows are 3 feet off the ground, I am guiding people through the law of 3 before they even are aware of it" And he was satisfied.

The biggest problem was that nobody climbed into the window but thieves and weirdos, and those with a shred left of common-sense walked into the lobby, where they were given the first exercises, quiet work sensing the body and then it's breath.

When those were told to, they went to the second floor they were given another set of instructions, etc... Nobody was truly satisfied because there were seemingly always floors above them, but the view got nicer and nicer. The "Pseudo-buidling" only had the windows on the "Ground floor/First floor, because the man who built it didn't want to "waste his time" putting windows on every floor. Those that went into the shorter building found themselves alone and in the dark (except for the other 'idiots' who had chosen the "fast route"), and they never got to meet the builder till they had climbed all seven floors, alone and in the dark.

But the Pseudo - Building got great reviews, from those had been inside and because it was shorter and seemed easier to reach the aim, whatever THAT might be. The real building shunned the reviewers; there were enough quality people with "common sense" (not that common, as we soon find out), and they had learned not to talk to strangers but only with those who had been in the building.

In the pseudo-bulding, because there were no windows, didn't even have a clue as to who had been in that building, because everything was done in total darkness; but those who came back out of the first floor windows took up teaching asap.

To those in false buildings, a shout out and a warning to those who haven't: Get out of that building asap, keep your mouth shut for a decade, and enter the building across the street, if you can find it (you may have been in the dark too long, and need to adjust to Sunlight).

Just a word to the unwise. The wise already know this.

WITW#12): A bit about "quiet work" (sitting/inner exercises)

2013-01-30T14:08:00.005-05:00

I sit, and I seem to be present. I have asked all of my parts to help me. I am breathing and I notice that. No haste, just noticing. Just for now I feel quiet. I feel like I could stay here forever. I AM. Is there anything more that I can say which would be helpful?

Silence. No prayer, no mantra, no song.

Silence.
----------------------------------------------------
From a meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff:

Question. work in revealing two worlds to us has revealed to me two different kinds of time. First, that of the body in which we live, the time of disquiet, of fear. And that time of remembering when there is neither disquiet nor anguish. Everyone contains in himself an explosive force which can contain in a very small packet a second force richer tthan 10 years of the life of the body. -- Of sleep. In my ordinary study I am afraid of losing time. I would like to know what time is.

Mr. Gurdjieff... you notice that the6re are two different times for you as there are two states -- the ordinary state, The habitual state in life and that state in which you remember yourself. That makes two different times -- one time to which you are used, and another time when you come to 6 rue des Colonels Reynard. The time in which you are used to understanding and receiving everything is the time of the rue des Colonel Reynard...

Now, if your fear comes up in the second time, that is to say, if you are afraid, sooner or later, of losing your time, then measure time by your state "I am": for this has a being, I am. With the head you say "I am" -- it must be felt with the entire presence, in all gestures, and at once it will change for you. Cosmic time will have to run as will be necessary for you. You are you. Even cosmic laws submit to unity, however small that unity may be..

WITW#10): A little Homage to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

2013-01-30T14:05:00.001-05:00

A part that has stuck with me of late is that "One must obtain oneself at cost of oneself"

This is so often misunderstood, that life and death are two sides of the same coin. Each breath brings death to what has past, and each inhalation brings a new creation, in which we have been given a new abiding chance, to follow the instructions of our master.

Again, I will share that the 20th century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that "When Christ calls a man; he bids him come and die"

Bonhoeffer returned to Nazi Germany to lead the "Confessing Church", and spoke against Hitler and was banned from speaking. Later he was arrested and spent time in 9 differrent prisons and camps before being hung on April 9, 1945, on direct orders from Heinrich Himmler.

He was in New York being pleaded with not to return, but he followed that call to it's inevitable conclusion. When I read his slim volume "To Live Together" I could not be think of us, following Mr. Gurdjieff. Every page shouted it loud and clear. But to obey that call if it should come?

Who could do that? Only a MAN.

He who is called but shirks is not only a coward and traitor, but inherits the death of the dirty dog.

At least I see and understand my cowardice. It is a never ending pain; an abiding suffering of my minuscule self.

WITW#8 Creating the "Doppelgänger"

2013-01-30T14:00:00.004-05:00

When I was about 3 years with the New York Gurdjieff Foundation I was placed in a writing workshop. As a result, my mentor in the work said that one day I might be able to write about the work. Here is what I wrote, as I kept it through the years:

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There is a New Adventure, yet which is older than Time itself, and I am invited to participate in it, should I wish. We, as a people, have the memory of this wish embedded in us so deeply that we languor in the forgetting of its promise.

We make our wish at birthday time and then turn away from its meaning with the extinguishment of the candles and we turn again to our belief in the world which has trapped us. At some point in the past I began asking people about the word wish and its meaning to them. I wanted to know if they thought that wishes could come true, and if they thought that there was such a thing as wish money–I believe that every human is given wish money at birth by one's Guardian Angels and from our forebears and even from our progeny, from the far distant future. They impart to us sometimes small coins of wish, sometimes paper money and sometimes in trust funds large amounts, which when they mature we can gain huge spiritual advances if we are sensitive to them.

A friend of mine l in discussing wish, said that when he was a child is distinguished the coin of wish. He said that he knew the difference between little wish l, which cost pennies, and big wish which may cost more than we can pay. For him l, these wishes were not entered into lightly. He said for we have been allotted to us a certain amount of wish money (get the exact amount is always kept hidden from us )

I asked him l if there was ever a wish for which he knew that he could not pay and he said yes. He said that when he was younger l he wish to be on a rocket ship to the moon, and as he said this to me, I saw his cares fall away from him; his face lit up with glee and he became himself in a way which I had never seen of him–he looked about 20 years younger, and die, in that instant, knew that this was the wish of his had been answered, and in that wish he was given a moment free from gravity, and from the Earth's laws of encumbrance.

In that moment l, hearing of his impossible wish, I also left behind the shackles of myself, and my self-imposed sorrow. Perhaps the only wish worthy of us l is that for which we have no means to pay.

This is that New Adventure beckoning me, as old as I AM, and made of Starlight. There is a passage in “Fragments” which interests me. Mr. Gurdjieff is telling Mr. Ouspensky that in order for a man to move up in the Work One must put another Man in his place, and that this is a law. I had always taken this to mean l that one had to find another man in another physical body, in order to pass on a kind of understanding, but now I believe that there is a more sly way of tricking Great Nature and making our escape from the prison of horizontal life that we are forced to live in.

I've come to believe that there is a trick being played on us. How l do I escape from the laws which bind me here? The Moon and the Earth and the Planets need me, demand me, and will hunt me down with doubled efforts if I should abandon my place and try to run. No, if I am to escape I must fashion another–a dummy to take my place. Only by fashioning a dummy to trick the guard as he does his head count will I have the time and the chance to escape.

I must create of myself a doppellganger.

This is the other man we must put in our place. As Zen l says so well: “Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water , after enlightenment chop wood and carry water” I cannot change this, but I can have Wish with a capital W. And I can fashion another man–an inner man , fed by wish and not subject to the fierce demands of the moon.

For the outer man it is too late, and has always been too late. He will always get angry,–the moon has made him so, and he is made of dust and will return to dust–I must not cling to him. But I can and I will l make him a shell. Slowly I shall move within my wish. Slowly I shall build an ark l to live in so that the waters will not overtake me. Yet at the same time, I will leave myself exactly where I am.

It is only in this way that one may pay l for this journey–this is the taking up of one's cross . This is the payment demanded for such a wish. One must obtain oneself at the cost of Oneself. My friend l had forgotten his wish and even how to wish. I also forgot how to wish. But now I see a little, and my wish comes back, lingers a little and fades. This then is my work, to gather myself against the tide, little buy little, and beckon to my wish.

Excuses; and a little talk about Siddhartha Buddha

2013-01-30T13:57:00.003-05:00

Reasons that have been given for not joining a meet in person lineage group:

"This is boring"

"This is not what I expected"

"I don't like these people"

"These folks are not my 'type' of people"

"The sitting is tiresome"

"I had formed certain expectations which are not being met"

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Things one loses by not proceeding against one's arguments and staying with the Group (assuming that they are direct lineage groups:

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'Camaraderie between people that may cause friction because they can't stand each other"

'The sittings, where Mr. Gurdjieff's "secret inner exercises" are presented, always in first person singular"

'The possibility of being able to join in "movements classes"

The weekly meetings of one's "home group"

The opportunity to work together in one larger group, for a day, weekend, or week, and in the summer, sometimes for 10 day

The opportunity to be amongst people of greater and lesser "being", all driven to be there by the same aims, to work on themselves, with others and for the work itself"

The arousal of positive emotions such as compassion and tolerance towards those who seem lost"

The understanding that one is in a house of repair, and that the others are mirrors of one's own faults and vanities."

The strength of self-love preventing inclusion in a setting where you may not decide for yourself, the tasks to be undertaken" Of course we hear you say:

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'The work seems too slow"

I would be better off on my own, than follow this motley crew"

'I am not a 'joiner" (then why go even to one meeting -- nothing can be ascertained by going to weekly meetings for sometimes a long time before a new feeling arises between members of your group"

'Nobody seems to be conscious here"

I am wasting my time with these idiots"

I am too smug and full of vanity to follow anyone else"

The leader is a jerk; the members are sheep"

The group is a fraud out to get my money"

It's a cult"

Gurdjieff was a shit, the memory of whom attracts morons and idiots"

I am as or more intelligent than anyone else here"

And So On....

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So this list if for all of us to ponder; every new semester

(Yes, the foundations run in semesters and yearly cycles)

Every new semester begins with a question: "Why are you here? Why do you come back here year after year?" "Why do you spend your time in sometimes long travels to get here? What do you expect to gain from coming here? And so on...

So I will ask it today: Why are the members here? What prompts some members to post a lot and others to remain silent?

Once after a lengthy sitting (meditation if you like), a man approached Madame de Salzmann and told her it was a boring session and he kept falling asleep. He complained that the leader spent too much time between speaking and long periods of silence caused him great discomfort. She thought for a moment and asked him point blank:

"What did you do to help?"

That left our bored fellow with a great deal to think about. He thanked madame and turned and walked down the stairs in a much different state than when he sat through the dull and long sitting. Now here was again, life in his eyes, and Madame had bestowed upon him a precious gift, which changed his entire attitude towards the Work.

We Work to Serve: If I serve and there is excess, I "earn it" and little by little it adds up until it precipitates out and becomes the base of the Alchemical vessel that I need to create second body, and then nurture this new life within me just as I would an infant, whose blood is Hanbledzoin. The entire schemata of Mr. Gurdjieff's teachings are there.

Acknowledge the lower, Forge a proper vessel and become a vertical conduit and reach for the higher just as a schoolchild might raise his hand and plead: "Call on 'me', Teacher; Call on ME!"

Always ask of yourself, why? Ask of your manifesting self, WHY? Why am I acting as I am? What propels me? Self-love and Vanity, or having heard a call, perhaps a distant call, but familiar, and answer it by heading in it's direction.

I call than being in possession of what is known as a "Lodestone". If you have a lodestone, you have found a rock that has become a permanent magnet. The ancient Chinese knew this, that if you strike off a sliver, it will float in water, and it will point true magnetic North and South; what Mr. G called a "Magnetic Center"

From then on, no matter the rush and direction of the lemmings, you KNOW the direction you are going, and knowing THAT yields a precious inner force, where nothing and nobody can dissuade you from reaching YOUR aim. Even if it takes turning around and going in the opposite direction of everybody else, YOU know you have the lodestone and can no longer be fooled, by anybody or anything.

Looking from above, even though a river ALWAYS runs down to the sea, it sometimes because of the obstacles and topography, seems to head in exactly the opposite direction - it still runs downhill to the sea. They call that a "switchback", and speaking personally, I have often been labeled with outlandish codes and snarky names and thought to be an imbecile who leads others astray, it has never been so.

Look at the life of the Buddha Siddharta: He ended up teaching the middle path for forty years, but he did not arrive at NirVana himself through the "middle path"; in fact, quite the opposite: he practiced austerities (Real Yoga and Study with many masters); When he looked like a dead man from a concentration camp he finally let a woman nurse him back to health.

After he recovered, his companions were mad as hell, hot under the collar that he had abandoned them. Siddhartha then chose a Pipal Tree and began a new practice of sitting and pondering:

"When did I feel the most happiness in my life?"

And he remembered an experience when he was nine years old ad had sat under a similar tree and had suddenly been overtaken by sensations of the beauty of nature and not that he was loved, but that he loved, and he allowed this loving to grow; he felt compassion and mercy for all things as they grow, whither and die.

But this no longer bothered him, as he saw the rounds of nature passing through his mind. He then felt great indifference towards the inevitable changes that anything in nature is subject to; He felt a great friendliness towards everything and all creatures large and small; good or bad suddenly made no difference, because, and this is the most important part.

Buddha did not feel these sensations and feelings towards himself, but only outwardly from his innermost nature. Then he began to teach. He had reached NirVana, a compound word meaning literally No (Nir) Wind (Vana). In the state of nirvana one's flame of life burns without being subject to any wind or breeze. It is an equanimity with regards to ALL things, self included.

But Siddhartha Buddha taught the "middle path", even though he did not reach his nirvana except through "Super-Efforts" that nearly killed him.

Gurdjieff was asked, "Mr. Gurdjieff, can we become as you are?" and Gurdjieff replied, "Yes, only to have suffered as I have suffered."

No easy task no matter how you look at it.

WITW#7: Why did Ouspensky Leave Gurdjieff?

2013-01-29T12:34:00.004-05:00

I have been asked to comment on this question. It is a very complex question, and it is far in the past. Mr. Ouspensky died in 1947 and Mr. Gurdjieff died in 1949, and I was born in 1951, so I knew neither man personal as an adult or as a child within this incarnation. I am however an ardent student who has never ceased from studying the subjects that interest me. This has always included all of the sciences as well as the religions and spiritual disciplines that have reached the earth. When I first met my first teacher in the work, who had known Mr. Gurdjieff as a teenager and whose parents were some of his first followers in New York during the 1920s, she said something to me and I replied. She said, "if you are looking for a Guru, you're coming to the wrong place, because I am not a Guru." I replied, and I repeat verbatim, "That's good, because I am Guru-proof". This has always been true of me, but I took Mr. Gurdjieff as my teacher, and he IS my teacher. Not was, not will be, but IS. I have also read every published word of Mr. Ouspensky as well as some of the unpublished documents which are at Yale.

Now I have to go and enter life and meet my obligations. The great thing about a blog is that it can be edited, so as soon as I get an opportunity, I will continue to ask and meet the question, as it is an extremely important and revealing question. Remember that there are within us elements of the Tramp, Lunatic and Obyvatel, in varying proportion, and most of us are drunk on Moonshine or schizophrenic (literal translation -- broken soul) or madder than Hatters. We all have buffers within us so that we do not see our complications. But I will try to take myself by my own hand and with a gentle affectionate compassion I will address our question... in a little while. I am a patient man, and I abide by that virtue -- I know delayed gratification and how to remain hungry and thirsty.

Mr. Ouspensky was an incredible man, blessed with a towering intellect and a decided realization that the world was wrong, and that somewhere was an underground stream of perfect knowledge and tradition. He claims, as I do, that he was never a child or an infant -- that he was born quite old. This is not to say that he did not wear the mask of a child, but that he saw through it, and felt that the loneliness that I felt when I was a child among children. I speak for myself when I say that I could find no Child or children who were interested in the subjects I was interested in, so I learned to wear the mask of a child and perhaps I even enjoyed; in fact I certainly enjoyed some of the aspects of being a child, like playing on a swing or playing tag or taking other childlike risks when the adults weren't around to speak the poisonous words "be careful."

As Mr. Ouspensky grew, he began to search. He joined the theosophical foundation and became one of its rising stars. He had a method of oration that drew people to him. He could expound on the most sublime and elusive subjects with incredible clarity. He had an almost flawless memory and could recite almost anything that passed before his eyes or ears. He therefore drew large crowds who listened to his lectures, mostly about the most abstruse subjects concerned with the destiny and fate of man, and the hidden knowledge which he had sought after.

He became a journalist and did quite well, having his own byline and writing about whatever suited him. Therefore his journalism was much praised and respected. At a certain point in his life he reached a crux point; he was convinced that somewhere in the world there still remained authentic schools of knowledge and of learning which have been made invisible but permanent, and which contain all the knowledge and wisdom of mankind all the way back through the mists of recorded history. With his stipend from the newspaper he gathered his things and went on a long journey through India and Ceylon and many other places. He spoke with many gurus and visited many so-called schools. Some of these were real and some were phony, and being incredibly astute Mr. Ouspensky could taste the difference. The problems with the real schools where that one needed to submit one's entire outer life, at least for a time, and retreat from the world and its distractions in order to come to some real results. As Mr. Ouspensky was a journalist first, he could not agree to any such terms, and so he moved on. He used a number of narcotics and drugs that were available at the time which opened many doors which otherwise cannot be opened. However, when these doors have been shown to you and opened, one should no longer need the drug to find the door and to open it. Ouspensky knew this, so like Rene Daumal, these were not addictions but experiments.

It can be said that he both found what he was looking for as well is that he did not find what he was looking for, because he did not submit to any particular discipline or guru, and upon returning to Russia he was greatly discouraged. He planned another trip, but in his time back at home he gave a series of lectures on the topic of "In Search of The Miraculous", which drew thousands wishing to hear of his discoveries and adventures.

Now this was in 1913. In 1912, Mr. Gurdjieff began his outward teaching in Moscow and then later in St. Petersburg, gathering disciples and students around him very carefully, picking types to work with. When he got wind of Mr. Ouspensky, he asked his students to read everything that Ouspensky had written and to make a report to him about Mr. Ouspensky's strengths and weaknesses -- his knowledge and understanding and lacks thereof. This his students did, and Mr. Gurdjieff decided that he could use Ouspensky to further his aim, which at this time was left unrevealed. He told one of the Russians, a certain Dr., to "inveigle" Mr. Ouspensky -- that is, To pique his interest, which the good doctor did. After causing Mr. Ouspensky a great deal of trouble he arranged for a meeting for Ouspensky with Mr. Gurdjieff.

At this meeting, which is well recorded, Mr. Gurdjieff played all of his tricks of placing obstacles in a man's path, which he has to cross in order to meet Mr. Gurdjieff. Mr. Ouspensky left the meeting with an incredible feeling of peace and love and dancing feet. He told his then girlfriend that what he had been looking for all over the world he had now found at home in Russia with this man -- Mr. Gurdjieff.

Now Ouspensky was introduced to one of Mr. Gurdjieff's groups, and allowed to join. Mr. Gurdjieff allowed no note taking or writing down of anything that was said or spoken of in the groups, but Mr. Ouspensky told Mr. Gurdjieff that his outer life was that of a journalist, and unless he were permitted to write it would not be able to follow. Mr. Gurdjieff gave him permission tacitly that he could write down whatever he could commit to memory, but not to write in the presence of the others or while in the group, so Mr. Ouspensky, with his prodigious memory, would run home and quickly write down everything that he could remember. This was the beginning of the book that Mr. Ouspensky called "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching."

The book became ISOM, and it is a journalistic report of Mr. Ouspensky's time with Mr. Gurdjieff. Mr. Ouspensky had some fixed ideas -- one of the most compelling was the notion of his desire to know the future and his concepts of recurrence, which he had taken from Nietzsche. Mr. Gurdjieff frustrated this question and refused to answer it to Mr. Ouspensky's satisfaction. Even in the moment where Mr. Gurdjieff sees Mr. Ouspensky enter the Café in a sad face and offered to answer him any question that was put to him, Mr. Gurdjieff already knew what Mr. Ouspensky would be asking. It was about recurrence, and although Mr. Gurdjieff answered him with great clarity, he only used it to show how easily Mr. Ouspensky was turned from sad to happy. Mr. Ouspensky was a man number 3-2-1, and those who really knew him knew of him as a really pleasant person, good to be around -- as Mr. Gurdjieff says, good to drink whiskey with, and with a deep sentimental nature. But at the same time, Mr. Ouspensky was in a kind of trap-- he wanted to become conscious but he did not want to suffer conscience, and he was something of a dualist; what I mean is that he did not want to work with the body -- he loved to ride horses but he did not like the movements which Mr. Gurdjieff taught, and he completely balked at what Mr. Gurdjieff called duliotherapy -- which is crudely translated as slave therapy -- where a man submits his will completely and absolutely in order to develop real will of his own -- which replaces the confluence of desires and aversions that constitute a man as he is mechanically driven from the outer world. This submission, which is the exact translation of the word Islam, was something that Mr. Ouspensky could not submit to, and in addition, during a trip to Finland, after three years work with Mr. Gurdjieff, he was granted a taste of what he had been asking for -- objective consciousness. This was preceded by his taking it upon himself without consulting Mr. Gurdjieff, a series of fasting and breathing exercises and other such procedures.

When Mr. Gurdjieff noticed Ouspensky in this state, he communicated to him telepathically that Mr. Ouspensky had disobeyed Mr. Gurdjieff's teachings, and he told him that finally, Ouspensky had gotten exactly what he wanted and he might as well enjoy it -- but it scared Mr. Ouspensky to the core, and Mr. Gurdjieff puts certain conditions upon him if he wished to continue in Mr. Gurdjieff's company. In Mr. Ouspensky's constellation of character attributes and flaws, he could not accept these conditions, and mistakenly referred to them as Mr. Gurdjieff moving in a religious direction; the kind of obedience that he had been asked for by gurus of the real schools in India, and which he could not accept. Now he was brought to a barrier. Every man in the Work reaches barriers, which if he allows them to turn him aside, stops everything in a dead stop.

So Ouspensky began to separate from Mr. Gurdjieff, with a resentment -- which is from the French and means "to feel again". Eventually Mr. Ouspensky settled in England, having his escape from the Russian Revolution paid for by a wealthy English woman, and he set himself up as a professional teacher of the Work, which he called the System. He refused to acknowledge Mr. Gurdjieff except by his first letter, "G". This did not happen until 1924, right before the accident of Mr. Gurdjieff's. Mr. Ouspensky even hosted Mr. Gurdjieff when he visited England, but was personally insulted when Mr. Gurdjieff did not let him translate but instead brought a secretary/translator whom he insisted was better at translating into English than Ouspensky. This crushed Mr. Ouspensky's self-esteem and made him look like a student in front of his own students. That was probably the breaking point.

Whereas Mr. Gurdjieff's aim was never work with a single person or group of people, which he called his guinea pigs or lab rats, but his aim was to bring a dispensation of spiritual insight which is superior to any other before given to mankind. In every age man is given a spiritual impulse which begins with a warning and which is followed by a solution. As this enters into the world the solution is forgotten, and the warning is disregarded, and all that is left is a dribble of the teaching which is no longer teaching, but becomes the subject of discussion and argument and dispute.

This is already happening to Mr. Gurdjieff's Work, and it is by law, that is -- lawful. It happens here on WITW, as well as anywhere else where Mr. Gurdjieff's ideas are spoken about. The ideas are not the Work. The principles are not the Work, and Mr. Ouspensky, who had a very magnetically attractive personality and who taught only through lecture and in answering questions centripetally, has formed a bridge towards Mr. Gurdjieff. We have much to thank him for, but he was also a weak man -- who became a professional philosopher/teacher.

His entire life was spent lamenting his break with Mr. Gurdjieff, and his sentimentality was only increased by his constant and increasing use of alcohol. Finally, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, he suffered a series of strokes which left him rather helpless and defenseless. He died in a period of great sorrow, trying to regain a sense of where he had been by revisiting old places. He forever wished to return to Russia, but it was not to be.

Ouspensky is neither a man to disregard or hate; neither is he a man to love unabashedly. As I have said, he was in possession of a towering intellect and a prodigious memory and in his meetings with those who became interested in the ideas, he was essentially flawless -- his answers are an extraordinary accomplishment, but at the same time, he could not submit and he met a barrier he could not cross. Sadly, Mr. Gurdjieff was obligated by a very high law under which he served, so that he could not avoid placing that barrier across Mr. Ouspensky's path.

You see, conscious love is not sentimental. The light is not kind, and the truth is indigestible. Part of our Work is to create new stomachs, which can handle truths about ourselves that otherwise would cause us to run screaming like the painting, "The Scream."

Now, I am interested in your impressions of my attempt to meet the question honestly and from the deepest place in me that I can reach just now. Love of the Work -- Richard

WITW#6: Africa. A New Impression

2013-01-29T12:31:00.005-05:00

I have been all over the world, as a musician, but haven't until last week stepped foot on the continent of Africa. I read anthropology and all manner of disciplines, and it is said that Africa was the birthplace of mankind.

But it was hearsay and I am a skeptic. Then I came to south Africa, and as I stepped off the plane and my feet found the ground I KNEW. The impressions have been SO deep that I spent the first entire week weeping at the brotherhood of Man. Here, as opposed to the United states where I live and where I have called New york City my home for 50 years, I came in contact with a different reality. I cannot describe the impressions except to say that I am irrevocably changed. I have been eating such rich food of these impressions that I am staggered by the depth of them, and the new understandings that they have given me. My compassion has been increased twenty fold, and I now say (striking my chest), "I Man", (Striking gently the chest of another man black or white) and saying "You Man", and I then say "Human" as I pass my arm across the horizon, to suggest that we are ALL on the same level.

The time is different here also. Now does not mean the now of New York. There are three nows here. "Right Now" is the closest to the "now" of NY, but not quite, because the "Now" of NY is an hour ago. "Now-Now" is "shortly" and "Just Now" means anytime in the future, but it will be done. A little like Jamaica, where "soon come-little while" means what "Just now" means here, but not quite. There is an irrepressible natural buoyant joy here, both in the blacks and in the whites, many of who feel a deep guilt from Apartheid, but it is SO much more respectful than the racial issues which exist in the US. The shame many whites feel here is nothing like the resentful false crap of the rainbow political farce that exists in America.

Another man said to me that this is the home of rhythm, and it is true beyond experience. When I told him that I felt the natural joy in even those with nothing he said that the best music was born of oppression, and I said instead, the music is in SPITE of oppression. Unlike mathematics, where a negative number times a negative number equals a positive number; a negative emotion does not negate another negative but multiplies the negative.

I have come to see that negative against negative is like a knot in a rope; pulling on the ends of the rope in the attempt to undo the knot seems to make it smaller, but only tightens it and makes it harder to untie, where the action required is to push the ends together and take the small fingers of the child inside the knot and loosen it. Then and only then can it really be undone. We cannot add anything in the Work, only remove the filth and untie the knots.

In Yoga there are three Granthis (knots) which bind the sense of identity (Ahamkara) to the worldly figure, and these three knots need to be undone before freedom can be achieved. The first Granthi is with the physical body; the second with the E-motional body, and the third with the Mental body.

When these identifications are cut or untied; there arises a natural freedom -- the lesser and greater freedom. The bodies do not die but then live not as slaves but as free men -- the "Three Brothers" Mr. Gurdjieff wrote about and then burned in 1934, when he had a bonfire built and burned all of his papers -- to the tears of Olgivana deHartmann and Madame deSalzmann. Oh, what we may have lost. The library at Alexandria perhaps?

All I know is that I am in Africa, and spend my time in two places, two worlds...outer and inner richness I cannot explain or describe. And there are two places in the studio building where I am working right next to each other -- the studio where we are making music, and next to it, an anechoic room where it is silent and dark so that it makes no difference whether your eyes are open or closed. I have spent much time there alone, and like Napoleon after he slept in the great Pyramid at Giza, and came out white as a ghost and never told what he experienced till his dying day, when he was asked, "Now that you are dying, would you like to tell us about your experience in the Pyramid?" and he began to say "Yes... but oh never mind, you would not believe me", and then he died...

Something has died in me, and I do not miss it one iota.

WITW #5 The Cosmic Sacrificing Satan

2013-01-29T12:28:00.003-05:00

This is an ancient story which belongs to an esoteric musical theorem that I follow. It has concordance with the ideas of Mr. Gurdjieff, but is not from his Work directly.

The Cosmic Sacrificing Satan
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In the beginning, the Creator was alone, in the ratio 1:1, and having unopposed Will, Being and Consciousness, he deigned to create a universe to enjoy so he moved in a dream away from himself and looked back. This was the Ratio of 2:1, but being of God's own nature, it was perfect and equivalent and he only stared back at himself. This in music is the "octave".

Being perfect has significant problems. Anything that is perfect has no reason to change and no reason to move, so that the Creator was at a standstill. No "time" or "space" existed. Without "time" or "space" the universe collapsed back into the unsullied being of the Creator.

Again and again the Creator tried to create a universe to enjoy but each attempt brought the same results. No time or space and no change or movement, so that his creation kept going "poof" and dissolving back into his perfect nature.

Being lonely, he decided to create companions for himself so he created the Archangels which were also perfect, one on each side of him. To his right was Lucifer, the light-bringer and guardian of energy, and to his left Gabriel, the guardian of matter. These stood in Ratios of 3:2 and 4:3 and were the first Holy Trinity with no faults or flaws.

Still, being perfect in Trinity, the Creator was stymied. There was no "time" in which events could occur nor "space" for them to occur in. So he asked a favor of the Archangels; asking who loved him enough to diminish himself and take on the role of the Satan, which means opposer. This would be a being that would create asymmetry in the universe, making it imperfect, and allowing things to have a wish for movement and change. Something would need to act as a stopgap, not allowing any created thing to achieve perfection. This would enable the creation to rotate and swirl in an everlasting movement of agony and hope.

Lucifer the first born stepped up and declared that he would diminish himself. In music this is the most dissonant interval, in a ratio of 45:32, and is called the Devil's Interval, and is as far away from the 1 as possible. So the Creator let Lucifer be diminished, and asymmetry was born, and with it, "time" and "space". Lucifer became the "Cosmic Prodigal Son", who denies any created thing from reaching perfection, because if any single thing reached perfection, the entire universe would disappear.

In music, Satan created all the dissonance, and the Devil's Interval (1 -- bV -- I) is the ground root of all musical movement by reason of it's extreme dissonance which demands resolution, and makes music as well as all things "move" and "change". In Music this is called the Cycle of Fifths/Fourths and it has 12 stations or "notes" which rotate around in an endless spiral. Just as the Major scale is the static law of music; all scales and chords coming from it, the cycle of Fifths is the involutionary movement, the Divine Fiat of the creator, and movements along the Cycle of Fourths are the hope of all things who have found themselves in the world of multiplicity to return to the bosom of the Creator. But they are not allowed to do so, by the denying force of the opposer.

If this is understood, as the musical form of the Enneagram, all things can be understood. There is a saying:

"If you wish to know God, make very good friends with the Devil, because they are in cahoots; always have been, always will be".

Selah!