Chief Feature ... an exercise

From a paper journal, dated 131208:

From memory ... not even that.
Features of False Personality

Imaginary I
Many I's
Lack of SR
Internal Considering
Lying
Buffers
Expressing negative emotions
Unnecessary talk (out of control)
Requirements
Identifying
Vanity
Self-will
Lack of self-observation
Out of control imagination

And then, what I missed (forgot)

Sleep
General lying & self-justifying
FORMATORY THINKING
MECHANICAL ROLES
Self-pictures
Negative/useless attitudes
False suffering
Mechanical associations
Mechanical dislikes/opinions
Mechanical annoyances.

Most of what I missed, was just that, failing to bring into memory but once I looked them up, it was obvious - like I know that eventually they would've popped up. They weren't really forgotten. Not so for those two features highlighted in capitals. I experienced a real shock realising I had missed them. I really had forgotten all about these features - to the extent that having them back in memory almost immediately released me from their power, if only temporarily.

And maybe there is something in this. Remember, this exercise came about after a discussion of Chief Feature and being disappointed with myself for having actually forgotten what I once understood. (Although, I read in a work source quite recently that this is known to happen - but that hardly helps!). So maybe I should entertain the idea, because it doesn't seem impossible, that my Chief Feature could be that I get lost in Mechanical Roles.

Update 010209:

His Chief Feature is that he is contradictory. He has to assert the contrary or opposite. I knew it all along!

The Gospel of Satan

By chance I stumbled upon this article. I may not have bothered to read it under such circumstances but the author being not unfamiliar I began the first paragraph. I don't have any commentary to append except perhaps to say writing of this quality leaves us all exposed and we would do well to heed those final words to examine ourselves, to measure ourselves by the Word of God.

As a side note, given the insight I touched upon here regarding the Book of Proverbs, and C's insight on Proverbs serving as a handbook for the Spiritual Quest it may be of relevance that of all the books of Scripture it was this same book which first penetrated Pink's heart.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. - Proverbs 14:12

State of Being

"For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey ... "

And we find ourselves left wandering, travelling through this earthly kingdom openly exposed to the "subtil of heart" who wish to draw us into a chamber of death, to snare and then slay us.

And this is the picture of any one of us at any time we are not engaged in the effort to awaken, at any time we are not assembled to rule the congregation.

[Proverbs 7]

Transform the Unmanifest

We want to place a point of consciousness at the tip of a particular activity or event. We want to transform something, at least one thing each day. We want to create energy of consciousness, preserve something rather than lose it in the ceaseless passing momentariness of the day. It doesn't matter what the event is - sailing a skiff, ironing your night shirts, milking an anglo-nubian, ploughing the legumes, cooking plantain ... for breakfast. Or something entirely different. We want to give what we have - our time - in conscious service to the Glory of God. We need to do this much to stand still.

But here's something to think about. While we aim to put consciousness into events, and recurrent trivial events at that, there are yet greater glories to uphold. Certain things are not meant to enter into manifestation - there are things that need not come down at all. The Work has always been something we experience in the flow of life. It picks us up in the commotion of daily living, long recognised as the best place to experience and thus find valuation for the Work. Amidst this daily agitation, we quickly come to understand that our point of contact is often already too late to effect much transformation. We are left developing a passive Observing I. No bad thing in itself but only an early day motion. Even in the heat of more direct efforts and planned programs, we are too often found bloodied, conquered by forces beyond our previous imagining. It is obvious to say it, we need to work in the unmanifest. If it sounds at all doubtful then observe something simple, a coarse event: the presence of negative emotions in daily life. So commonplace is this infectious fever - it's nearly invisible - we can say, almost confidently, by the time we are adults the majority of our emotional tagging of events will be negative. Our neuro-emotional networks are riddled with dark cancerous markers just waiting to release the next wave of negative energy into the world. The most trivial things are tagged to release this poison. It takes very little for most of us to throw out our dummies, those that don't see this have not yet experienced their personal limitations. We're such very delicate, self-important things. And none of this even touches on the influence of giant sinkhole events such as 9/11 or the current meltdown of the worlds financial institutions.

We are surrounded by people, they are everywhere and they are all making demands of us. When they are not making demands we find ourselves wrestling with ideas or monologues triggered either by the memory of other people or else in some other manner related back to our musings on our relationships with others, be that real or imagined, physically familial or as tenuous as connecting with a long dead author. And if any of that abates for a moment, life-events fill the vacuum, some crisis occurs. Or else we are overwhelmed with loneliness, boredom, a sense of inadequacy, lack of recognition for our personal genius or what ever other emotional stupidity is having the better of us. It is a world full of negative emotions swirling in a dynamic melange of human interplay. All of this negativity is first established in the unmanifest. By giving expression to our negative emotions we give 'it' manifest form to breathe and prosper. Once it's out there it runs amok - and that is the level at which daily life conducts itself.

And then we have the Work. We may practise placing consciousness in Dance Movements or the Art of Pancake Flipping but recognise that these efforts simply cock the hammer, the energy of consciousness that we so struggle to contain is what ignites the powder and drives out the leaden force of negative emotion. If we sit and wait, we get what comes. It's very simple. Never forget and work actively to transform the unmanifest. Not because we can or ultimately that we need to - after all, the fields are full of Angus, Guernsey and Charolais and the grass is usually green - but because it is the will of God. And because it is an expression of our Service that we seek to cleanse ourselves.

Divine Learning

A few weeks back as I was getting into bed I found myself awakening, coming into presence, with an unusually deep sense of a 'visible' umbilical spiralling out from the core of my being to the heart of God. The energy was wholly in the connection. My thoughts rushed towards the Bible, the Book of Proverbs. I can reason that very quickly. If our objective is contact then wisdom and understanding are the access roads - wisdom of the Holy Spirit - and this is what Proverbs teaches. Get ye understanding and wisdom ...

A day or so later with this event still fresh and an effective influence, this little gem was brought to my attention.

Dead Tomes

It has been a while now since I last read Homer, though he's often close in mind, and this without intentional effort. I'm always considering another reading of Homer. With Homer, as with the Holy Bible and a few other key works, distance and time between readings only further increases some natural arising within my soul that draws me inward and closer towards the essence of what these works embody. I can of course reach a point in my daily wanderings where I might admit to having lost all connection. There's no truth in that but there is an animal within that when dominant allows that kind of language to float through. The truth is these works soar down in the quietest of moments tearing from the heart the impurities and sullied accruals of daily living. I am drawn to the magisterial beauty of works that have a power to purify - it may be fleeting, and short lived in real time, it may even be imagined - we can allow that, it makes no difference. Always there is this cleansing aspect, this power-to-order that identifies them as more than books, wholly rare influences and unique. If, like Johnson you will agree books are mortal like men, these books are the Immortals. And yet, there are those who simply do not have a clue ... and there is no good reason, as I can see, for such rank idiocy. I recently came across Alessandro Baricco's translation of The Iliad. As Homerica goes I've never heard of him. I know nothing more of his achievements. What strikes me as shocking in Baricco's effort to rewrite Homer is that he has ditched the essence of Homer - the inhabitants of Olympus, the very representations of a divine society - and, doing so, created an obsequie for a society deranged with vanity and self-will. Not only is our media riddled with worms who crawl around on their bellies, jaws a-clatter declaring God to be an imaginary figure of our primitive minds, but there are hick scholars the equivalent of delinquent teenagers quite unable to value the treasures they hold. Satisfied that God has been erased from the conscience of man, even it would seem the pagan Gods, and in essence all forms of higher influence, so now it must be stripped from the literature. What hollow glories are these? Hectors religious solemnity suddenly means nothing, has no bearing or value, his whole relationship with Helen undermined. He may just as well make that wine-offering to Zeus with the blood dripping from his hands. Who cares? How are we to understand Achilles knowledge of death, his self-belief and confidence? And what value Apollo's warnings or Zeus' promises? How can we understand the sadness of Helen's great beauty without understanding her cursed fate as a victim of Aphrodite? Nor that her longing for death and deliverance are matched only by the grip of a goddess too strong for her to do anything but yield. It isn't just that a translation of this sort considerably alters the surface texture but that it bleeds the essence of the work, makes slaves of unwary readers and tells an artificial story, a lie - a real Trojan horse. Perhaps the essence of tragedy is retained but what a tragedy that there should be no Athene.

The Ugly Usher

At the end of octave the primary observation blocked out in front of me like an immovable slab of millstone grit is the presence of a Little Man who despite everything stands at the forefront of all that I experience, of all that comes in towards me. The Ugly Usher that was there before any of this Work began is there after the theatre has fallen silent. I have to be careful not to leave an impression here that the Work has come to nothing. It's a wary usher that now knows he can't hide any more. He breathes easy, but that same ease will usher in the New Season soon enough. His presence is a gift that will serve to further the Work. The grail is very paradoxical like that. We always stated: Increase real will, consciousness & understanding. It was never put more simply. It was and remains the whole focus. What comes after the silence at the end of octave? Re-statement, renewal. Personally I always understood that the Work should not edge us further to the outer reaches of society, as recluses or social spastics - I was probably both of those before I engaged the work. After the sacking of Troy, it was only natural that Menelaus would return home with his superficially beautiful wife. Where else was he to go? Helen is Helen, how could he reject her when ultimately she needed his lead? The perfect ascent is impossible.

Just what the blazes is the ‘work’?

Anti-hero Nemo has delivered a response and true to his name he continues to roam the deep dark depths avoiding contact with anything touched by the light. Perhaps, like his fictional counterpart, he too thirsts for vengeance? Who's to say what personal experiences have driven him to these shores? For sure Nemo expresses some certain partiality towards an earthly, sensual - even devilish - wisdom. His confusion is the big give away. That clamshell heart steering a willful, dogmatic adherence to this absurd role as a Debriefing Agent for misguided souls unfortunate enough to have gotten snared in the Gurdjieffian mind fuck. Personal aggrandisement? No such thing. It's straight from the heart, Nemo wants to save you from the false formulations of the big black magician, but ... (oh! damn) his writings read like a string of non-sequiturs. He asks the basic question, what is the Work, but casts that aside in case the answer gets in the way of his edifying topic. And so we are informed that behind all the noise of the Work there is nothing but an undefined abstraction. Glad you checked it out mate.

The Work begins with an act of self-observation, seeing oneself as one is, seeing what you are like as a person. No one can do this for you. Definitely not Nemo nor Gurdjieff, definitely not anyone else. You will have a picture of yourself, the kind of person you imagine you are. You may be aware of that picture but most likely not. So observe yourself, your thoughts, feelings, moods and how they motivate and influence your actions and the things you say and do. You cannot be parted from the illusion of what you are until you are able to see yourself as you are. Exposing this inner disorder is uncomfortable, sometimes difficult and emotionally unpleasant. It has to be by necessity. When you can see the contradiction between the imaginary picture you have of yourself and the picture of yourself as you are, then you begin to lay down a new memory of yourself. You are not what you imagine and as you observe more of yourself amidst the clamour and noise of personality, truth emerges. At this stage you can receive help from above. The difficulty is that until this stage is complete a person still believes they are 'awake' - what the practise of the Work verifies is that you are buried beneath accumulated layers of self-satisfaction and vanity. And that, at least in part, is what we call 'sleep'. As for self-observation, it never really ends, it only grows as the Work deepens.

Nemo's drawn his line in the sand, his position obviously something of a non-aim. He likes what he knows and he knows what he likes: the Work never was for that type so it shouldn't surprise us to find him coughing and spluttering in the cold wind that blows through time. There is no malice, for the course of true love never did run smooth, and Nemo protests a little too much.

2Th 3:5
And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the patient waiting for Christ.