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Stuart and I have been in Australia this week passing on the Tayu dharma to a sincere Fourth Way practitioner from Mauritius, a small island nation east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Sydney has been a convenient spot to meet, since it is roughly half-way between California and Mauritius.

Our dharma friend from Mauritius has expressed the desire to come to California for further, more intensive training in Tayu practice as soon as he can make that happen. Since Mauritius and California are literally almost exactly opposite one another on the planet, that may take some time, but we trust that whatever is supposed to happen will indeed occur. In the meantime, he has gotten some powerful impression food to take back with him to Mauritius, to share with the practice group that he has formed there.

We have seen that the Tayu Co-Meditation exercises are an excellent example of a true esoteric body of practices. It is a point that many Tayu practitioners who have had the good fortune to learn them from Stuart and me, or Robert himself, may not appreciate fully. The Co-Meditation exercises only make sense when presented within an appropriate context. Stuart and I are, after many years of presenting them, quite skilled in creating and maintaining the appropriate contexts. And it may be all too easy for those who have tackled Co-Meditation in those contexts to take the contexts for granted.

What do I mean by "context" for Co-Meditation? I refer to the fact that the natural egoic obstacles to the practice of Co-Meditation, as with any other experiential esoteric practice, would make it virtually impossible for a newcomer to actually do the practice without help. There would be far, far too many excuses for the ego to throw up as obstacles to proceeding further. This doesn't feel natural or comfortable, I've never done anything like this before, I don't know what might happen, this could psychologically harm people, etc. The ego can generate a multitude of barriers to self-examination in the blink of an eye. The proper context can neutralize this strong egoic tendency.

So one of the things that Stuart and I can send back to California, prior to our return there, is just this point: although you may not have been used to thinking of them in that way, the Tayu Co-Meditation exercises are an excellent example of an esoteric body of "knowledge" available only in the context of a spiritual school.

Posted by Rob Schmidt at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been reading a book by C. Daly King recently called The States of Consciousness, published in 1963 immediately after the death of its author. King was a student of Gurdjieff's famous follower, A. R. Orage, and one of his significant contributions to the Work was his privately published book, The Oragean Version. In The Oragean Version King meticulously lays out the principles, both practical and theoretical, of Orage's interpretation of Gurdjieff's teaching. The States of Consciousness includes many of the same ideas as The Oragean Version but it is supplemented by King's own scientific work in psychology and neurobiology. He seeks to elucidate the various states of consciousness available to human beings.

King's take on Self-Observation is particularly interesting because it represents one of the clearest published descriptions of the practice that we have run across. King is uncommon in his recogntition of Self-Observation as not just a method or technique, but rather as a distinct state of consciousness. King calls this state Active Awareness. In fact he he felt the term Self-Observation was "a somewhat confusing terminology, since what is observed is not at all the self - the 'I'-entity can never observe the 'I'-entity."

He lays out the seven characteristics of Active Awareness as follows:

1. It excludes any element of criticism
2. It excludes any element of tutorialness
3. It excludes any element of analysis or other mental process
4. It involves a a complete non-identification from the organism
5. It is directed only toward the prescribed area of objectivity
6. It involves the mediation of all sensations appropriate to its objects
7. It is not limited in its exercise to any special times or places

The first characteristic of Active Awareness means that it there is no process of judging taking place; what is observed is neither good nor bad. If judgment is happening, that is not Active Awareness (though one could in principle be actively aware of judging happening). The second characteristic means that active awareness does not seek to alter or improve what it is observing. The third characteristic emphasizes that Active Awareness is not a mental process. Mental and logical analysis are distinct from consciousness in this formulation.

The fourth characteristic represents for King one of the more challenging aspects of Active Awareness - that it requires non-identification with the organism. When we observe the manifestations of our organisms in Active Awareness, it is as though we are observing the manifestations of a stranger. The identification that "I am my body" must be released to cultivate Active Awareness. It is when we identify with the object of Active Awareness that the criticisms, agendas, mental processes, emotional reactivities, etc. flood into our field of awareness.

The fifth characteristic clarifies that the field of active awareness is the organism - that is what one has to work with. Things external to the organism are only "represented indirectly through the body's own receptor mechanisms." The raw energy of experience of the organism, internal and external, is the proper scope of Active Awareness.

King emphasizes that it is better to start a practice of Active Awareness with the sensations of the organism. King's emphasis here is grounded in the belief that it is easier for beginning practitioners to stay non-identified when the scope of their Active Awareness practice is confined to the sensations of the body. In Tayu practice we have found it productive to extend the early practice to include feelings and thoughts as well as sensations. As long as Active Awareness is practiced in the context of a Work-group with experienced guides, our experience has been that the scope can quickly include the functioning of the mental and feeling centers as well as the body center.

The sixth characteristic states that Active Awareness is not necessarily atomic but may involve a variety of sensations, etc. For instance, if one is actively aware of one's posture, one will be aware of a variety of sensations extending up and down the musculature of the body. Sometimes we observe small things, sometimes we observe more complex manifestations of our organism.

And finally, the seventh characteristic of Active Awareness emphasizes that this is a practice and a state of consciousness that is intended to be available at all times in all contexts. The cultivation of Active Awareness is not meant to be something we do 20 minutes every morning - it is intended to be something we do whenever we can remember to do it. Our practice is intended to shift the operating point of our consciousness from its habitual waking state of semi-hypnotism to the spacious freedom of Active Awareness - but this is no small task.

In King's description of Active Awareness, he is quick to point out that although the description above seems straightforward enough, the difficulties necessitate working with a guide or a group that has experience with this practice. It is extremely easy to become identified with the contents of our Active Awareness; it is extremely easy to start thinking about that which we observe. To achieve Active Awareness is an uncommon endeavor tha requires much more assistance than we may like to think.

Posted by Stuart Goodnick at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Visitors to Tayu House outside Sebastopol know that gardening has long been one of my persistent preoccupations. Assisting plants to grow and flourish can provide great satisfaction, not least because the successes and failures of gardening offer ongoing instruction in the ever-changing processes that constitute Great Nature. Gardeners attune themselves to this instruction by paying attention to the effects of these processes on the plants they select for cultivation.

I was reminded of this earlier this year when I came across a wonderfully succinct and sage bit of gardening advice by a woman who owns and operates a delightful plant nursery (Annie’s Annuals) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her advice is so simple and straightforward that its application to the practice of meditation instantly suggested itself to me. If you want to grow a garden, Annie says, spend 10 minutes every day walking through the garden, observing what’s happening.

Such simple advice! Yet how many beginning or would-be gardeners do not think to apply such a direct strategy. Instead of hit-and-run gardening, dominated by bursts of energetic activity followed by long stretches of inattention, Annie’s advice suggests cultivation of a consistent, appreciative relationship with the garden and its contents.

To linger with awareness means to put aside other considerations. In the garden, that entails letting go of the usual egoic habits of mind. So instead of imagining what you’ll do later in the day, or remembering the offensive remark your friend made the night before, you recollect your consciousness so that you can observe how this area is dry while that soil remains moist. This plant is unhealthy, while another is so vibrant that it is growing through and over two other plants. The honeybees are going crazy for those flowers while ignoring those others. What an enormous praying mantis on that stem! Those tomatoes need to be harvested and eaten soon, or they’ll go bad. The more you look, the more you see.

The same principle applies to spiritual practice. The more you look at the contents of consciousness, the more you see.

Moreover, despite what you might have heard or read, this principle applies to the contents of the egoic or android mind as much as to any aspect of consciousness. It is easy to get the mistaken impression from reading spiritual literature that we should direct attention away from the ego/android (which is “bad”) and toward spaciousness of mind, compassion, love, “higher” energies, etc. (which are “good”).

It is easy for the visitor to the garden – and the visitor to the garden of consciousness – to have such an attitude, because it is the natural tendency to seek out the beautiful, or the interesting, and ignore the ugly, or that which we think we already know. Yet the skillful gardener understands that every part of the garden – the successes and the failures, the barren and the lush – has important and useful information, if only it is seen and appreciated for what it is. Similarly, the accomplished spiritual practitioner knows that the ego/android is a vast resource for engagement with the practices of non-identification and non-grasping.

Seeing and objectively appreciating what the garden contains does not mean that the gardener abstains from the responsibility to make necessary choices. Without choices, there is no garden. The sustainable process of gardening encompasses sowing, planting and fertilizing, as well as pruning, harvesting and composting. The gardener makes choices about when to engage in any aspect of gardening based upon the best information possible. That’s why Annie’s advice about the daily witnessing of the contents of the garden is so crucial. Consistent witnessing is the best source of data for the crucial choice of timing.

Living life beyond the constraints of egoic/android habits means discovering what the Universe – the greater Garden – calls you to do from moment to moment. It means giving up the crutches of android/egoic attachments and directives, and listening instead to hear the song that tells us of the service we can offer right now, in THIS moment.

But this can only be done with full attention and awareness. The beauty and even elegance of the system is that we learn to cultivate full attention and awareness through observation of the tawdry, contractive egoic/android aspects of consciousness. Although they act as obstacles because of our tendency to become ensnared in identification with them, the products of the ego are not irrelevancies to be ignored. To transcend them, we MUST come to know them objectively and without reservation. The garden of consciousness will sustain itself and flourish best with the generous application of that full regard and attention that all aspects of creation call out for.

So take regular walks through your garden, observing all there is to see. And objectively witness the contents of consciousness on a consistent, regular basis. Thus will your gardens grow extravagant.

Posted by Rob Schmidt at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At a recent Tayu Sunday Meditation Communion, the subject of Faith and Doubt came up in our discussion. The Buddha is known to have advised his followers that the path requires Great Faith and Great Doubt. In Gurdjieff's masterwork, All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, Beelzebub describes Faith as one of the sacred being impulses natural to a properly developed three brained being. Because of the distorted conditions of being existence on the planet Earth, however, the sacred impulse of Faith has degenerated in most of us into its mechanical shadow: belief.

To understand how Faith can function, it is useful to contrast it with Belief. When we believe in something, be it a thought, a whole framework, or a feeling, we take that something as true. We identify with the thought or feeling in the sense that our particular belief now becomes inextricably tied with our sense of identity. If someone challenges this belief, our instinctive reaction is to feel threatened at an emotional and body level. Belief is contractive in the sense that for us to identify with a particular belief requires that we reject or filter out alternative potential beliefs. When we identify with beliefs, we collapse the realm of possibilities - our Universe becomes smaller.

It is interesting to note that modern neurobiological and psychological research is turning tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the brain to study the mechanics of belief (see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-political-brain&colID=13 for a recent article). A well known phenomenon called Confirmation Bias has been studied in this way. When Confirmation Bias operates, someone who identifies with a particular belief will routinely filter out any new information that contradicts this belief and amplify the significance of any new information that supports this belief. We see this behavior writ large in our modern political climate. Studies using fMRI and various other techniques are now demonstrating clearly that Confirmation Bias is a non-cognitive process. The study cited above shows that Confirmation Bias has much more to do with the emotional functioning of the brain than with the  cognitive functioning.

I recently ran across a description of another study in which confirmation bias could be seen to operate in individuals with injuries that limit the function of memory to a 30 second time window. These brain-injured subjects were asked to rank several pieces of art. Among the pieces these subjects ranked, a number of pieces were ranked equally - that is, the subjects showed no preference of one over the other. They were next asked to chose between two pieces that they had ranked equally - thereby forcing a preference. When asked later (much beyond their window of recollection) to rank all the original pieces of art again, the test subjects would consistently now rank the piece they had been forced to highlight in the previous round as more desirable than the other pieces which had previously been seen as having equal desirability. In other words, at a non-conceptual level, our choices condition our future evaluations. The lesson of these studies is that as biological organisms, we are hardwired to identify with our beliefs and to filter our experiences of the world in terms of these beliefs.

As a sacred being impulse, Faith operates much differently than Belief. Faith has much more the quality of an affirmative assertion of Being. It is the quality of our Being that engenders the sense that there is a point to existence. It is that innate quality of existence that affirms that no matter the external circumstances of life, our lives have meaning. In contrast to Belief, Faith is expansive and inclusive - the Universe gets larger because regardless of the details of personal experience, Faith gives us power to carry on and to find significance in our circumstances. Faith gives us the courage to try new things - to test our understanding of life with new practices and ways of looking at things. It does this because Faith engenders the intuition that no matter what happens, at an existential level we will be fine.

The challenge of Faith in light of our habit patterns around belief, and the neural programming of the organisms we inhabit, is that affirmations of Faith often can descend into the rigidity of Belief. Though the action of Faith may lead to a transcendental experience of freedom, the habitual tendency is to attribute this experience to the consequences of a particular set of beliefs and practices. Even well-meaning practitioners can mistake the forms of their beliefs as the causes of their most profound experiences. And once that identification is made, the nature of the organism reinforces the maintenance of the identification.

The role of Doubt is to act as an antidote to the descent of Faith into Belief. Doubt is a denying function that negates the identifications we create to sustain our beliefs. In the Hindu tradition there is the well known practice of neti neti (not this, not this). This is the practice of Doubt. No matter what the identification or what the belief, we constantly challenge ourselves not to settle for a particular formulation of truth. Doubt frees us from having to believe in anything in particular. Doubt requires us to test in our own direct experience any claims made by other people. Doubt serves to liberate Faith from Belief in that it constantly undermines our systems of belief.

The challenge of Doubt is that, unchecked, it can lead to a kind of nihilism. Doubt can descend into a sense that nothing matters and that nothing means anything. In a way, Doubt can also descend into Belief, but in this case it is the belief that there is no meaning in life. In such an extreme, Faith then acts as the antidote of the descent of Doubt into Belief. Faith and Doubt mutually sustain each other and keep each other free from the lure of identification.

In Fourth Way parlance, Faith acts as an affirming function and Doubt as a denying function. The reconciling function that allows Faith and Doubt to coexist and to mutually support each other is the very presence of Being. Presence of attention enables a balance between Faith and Doubt. This balance sustains an affirmative and positive perspective, without succumbing to the biological imperative of crystalizing identification with experience in the form of rigid beliefs. Presence of Being allows us to wield the twin forces of Great Faith and Great Doubt to create an ever expanding and open experience of life, and to retain fluidity in every context.

Posted by Stuart Goodnick at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)