(De Ropp and the urgency of self-completion)
Robert S. de Ropp was a household name among the “counterculture” of the sixties: his book The Master Game burst upon a naive reading public carrying the data that there are schools in the West and there is access to mastery on the spiritual path from where we stand.
His message is distilled to its essence in Self-Completion. It addresses the same crisis he addressed in the sixties, with the same sense of urgency. More than a doomsayer, far more than a scientific observer, beyond the limitations of a utopian dreamer, Robert de Ropp speaks out with the integrity and acerbity of an old Testament prophet.
To the Reader Greetings! I am an elderly hermit who lives on the side of a mountain in California. I share this mountain with deer, skunks, opossums, rabbits, hawks, mice, vultures, redwoods, oaks, pepperwoods, grasses, not to mention about a zillion nematodes, fungi, bacteria. I am part of a complex ecosystem, a very small part I might add, a member of a trouble-making species, a naked ape that has become the bane of the biosphere because it has failed to find its proper place in the scheme of things.
In their incompleted state human beings thought they were awake when they were really moving about in a state of hypnotized sleep. They thought they had will but they had no real will. They thought they were free but they were really slaves. They thought they had something they called “I” but they had no real I, only a multitude of petty selves with different desires and different aims. In their state of “waking sleep” humans voyaged from birth to death aboard a ship of fools. The captain was asleep, the steersman was drunk and the navigator had forgotten the aim of the voyage.
(The System, waking sleep, and humanity as food for worms)
The System, if one understood it fully, would explain everything, from the origin of the universe to the peculiarities of human behavior. Everything was linked to everything else in a chain of interdependent cosmoses which ranged from the megalocosmos to the microcosmos. Each cosmos was governed by its own laws. The cosmos above imposed laws on the cosmos below. Man, the microcosmos, lived under laws imposed by the cosmos above him.
Man, who should become food for higher beings, becomes instead food for worms. He drifts down instead of rising up. He fattens his flesh instead of nourishing his soul.
The dreams save the dreamers from making serious efforts to awaken because they dream that they are already awake.
This is our little world, familiar, confining, dull. This is our “boss reality”. It imposes laws on us that we break at our peril. We must drive on the proper side of the road. We must get to work on time. We must pay taxes and bills, buy groceries, send the children to school. We live under many laws. We are not free agents.
(I AM HERE NOW: self-remembering and the self outside spacetime)
The Lattice of Karma I AM HERE NOW. I AM. The full awareness of my own being is given to me only now and then. Why? Because, much of the time, I am lost in fantasy. I am definitely not here now. I am wandering around in the past or dreaming about the future, or thinking about something, speculating about something, talking to someone who is not even there, imagining, indulging. What a way to live! But the full sense of the I AM comes to me when I remember. With it comes awareness of place, the HERE, and awareness of time, the NOW. And with it too comes the sense of separation, the feeling of being outside spacetime, an observer standing on the bank of time’s river and watching the flow. This is zikr, remembering. Self-remembering? But I have many selves. I am a veritable ship of fools. Which self do I remember? None of them. This Self is outside of spacetime, the white bird, messenger of the pleroma, beyond change, beyond death.
This enables the gnostics to look directly into the mysterious forces that have shaped the cosmic drama.
In the beginning, said the gnostics of Alexandria, there was the Mind Force, the nous. The Mind Force was all pervading. It was the “God outside Creation”, beyond time, beyond space, beyond matter and energy. How can one describe such a being? The proto-gnostics said it was impossible. This entity was inconceivable to our minds. Nonetheless they had names for it.
“In the beginning”… With these words most creation myths start. They are wrong. There never was a beginning, say the Eastern gnostics. The Supreme Lord, the Ultimate Cause, the indescribable Brahma has no beginning and no end. It simply is. But there is a rhythm, an alternation, similar to the alternation of day and night. The two phases of this rhythm, the night of Brahma and the day of Brahma, are also called the nitya and the lila. The nitya is unmanifest, the lila, the “play of God”, is manifest.
(Eastern gnosis: three forces, maya, and liberation from the cycle)
“All actions result from the play of the three forces; only he who is blinded by egoism thinks, ‘I am the doer.’”(19) This is one of the key ideas of the Eastern gnostics. Human beings, like all sentient beings, are bound by action. As long as they are part of the creatura they can no more escape from action than they can stop breathing and eating and still remain alive. But certain rare humans, endowed with the gnosis cardias, could see through the veil of maya and learn to separate themselves from their activities. They could sit back and watch the play as if they were God himself. In fact they could blend with God for God, the Supreme Brahma, was present in all of his creations. God was the Higher Self, the Atman. Human beings, by freeing themselves from the illusion of separateness, could find that Self within them. Once they had found that Self they would be liberated, able to watch the divine play without bothering to enquire whether it was good or bad, whether it had meaning or no meaning.
Complete liberation from the cycle of births and deaths was possible only for those who had stepped outside the cycle of time with its alternating phases of creation and destruction. Liberation involved stepping out of the creatura and entering the pleroma, the realm of the imperishable Brahma.
This is certainly no easy undertaking but Yama, King of the Dead, assures us that it can be done and Yama should know, if anyone does. Arise! Awake! Having attained your boon now understand it. As a razor’s edge is difficult to pass over so is the path to the Higher Self difficult to tread. That Higher Self is not born and does not die: it sprang from nothing, nothing sprang from it. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, THAT is not killed when the body is killed. If the slayer thinks he slays, if the slain thinks he is slain, both are deceived. THAT slays not nor is it slain. Smaller than small, greater than great, in the hearts of all creatures THAT is hidden. Sitting down it goes far, lying still it goes everywhere; it is bodiless amid bodies, changeless amid changes. How shall an ordinary man understand THAT to whom both priest and warrior are as food and death a condiment? (20)
imposes laws. Without it the cosmos would be a chaos in which anything could happen and all would be permitted. This is the crux of the matter. The cosmos is not a chaos. It is ordered and ordered with the utmost precision. The slightest deviation of certain fundamental constants from their observed values would bring the cosmic drama to a halt. “The universe is a put up job”, observed the astronomer Fred Hoyle. It is fine tuned, balanced to an amazing degree, amazing, that is, to those who insist that the whole thing was an accident, a product of a blind chance.
neither collapsed nor did it blow up. It expanded in an orderly fashion, differentiating as it did so. It is still expanding and differentiating, transforming potentials into actualities. It will probably continue to expand and differentiate until all its potentials are actualized. It will then probably contract and return to the unmanifested state.
The cosmic drama results from the interaction of the Force Affirming and the Force Denying, the Mind Force and the Antimind. The Mind Force imposes order, the Antimind creates disorder. The outcome of these interactions depends on a third force that acts like a catalyst. This is the Force Reconciling. The affirming and denying forces would deadlock without the third force and all action would cease. Affirming and denying forces are easy to see but the third force is not. On the cosmic level the third force provides that element of balance without which the cosmos would either collapse into a black hole or blow up into a tenuous cloud of gas. To generate “interesting objects” and make the cosmic drama possible the original cloud had to clump. The clumps were generated by the action of the third force. They took various forms: galaxies, stars, planets, moons and fragments of matter ranging in size from planetesimals to dust grains. It is on certain of these clumps that sentient beings play their parts.
something emerged from a nothing, breaking the laws of the conservation of energy and matter expressed in the term nihil ex nihilo. Nothing from nothing. “The inflationary universe attempts to build the universe from almost nothing. In fact the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.” (21)
Einstein was a gnostic and a deeply religious man. “Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame.” Einstein’s God was “the Old One”, subtle, elusive, hard to approach. “Quantum mechanics is very impressive,” he wrote in a letter to Max Born, “but an inner voice tells me that it is not the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but it hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am, at all events, convinced that He does not play dice.” (24) Einstein’s “inner voice” was the gnosis cardias, the “knowledge of the heart”.
In certain living entities, of which Man is an example, ordinary mind has the possibility of being transformed into higher mind (buddhi) which blends with the Mind Force, thus completing the cycle of creation.
But how do we know the Mind Force exists? To the modern gnostic the answer to this question seems obvious. Open your eyes and see, look within yourself, look about you I Are you not surrounded by the products of the Life Force in the form of countless living organisms ranging in size from bacteria to whales? Do you not detect in these organisms the workings of mind, a mind which, in some respects, is cleverer than your own? Are not you yourself the
possessor of a mind and a part of the human collective mind, a formidable affair that has accumulated skills and information over thousands of years? And is there not evidence that the human mind, defective though it is in many respects, can be strengthened, freed of its illusions, enlightened, purified? Is it not clear, moreover, that this process of self-transformation, which involves not only the intellect but other functions as well, is the proper work of Man? “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” (25) This from Stephen Weinberg, theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate. Sure it seems pointless if one insists on ignoring the higher forces. Gravity, the strong force, the electromagnetic and the weak force are no doubt manifestations of the superforce which weaves together spacetime and matter. But let us not rule out the existence of other forces merely because we lack the instruments with which to measure these forces. The Mind Force works within us. To deny its existence is to deny the highest aspect of our own being. The physicists may have discovered, or perhaps they have invented, that mysterious entity they call the super-force. But it was the Mind Force that invented the physicists!
What are quarks? They are thoughts, physicists’ thoughts. No one has ever seen a quark. But presumably they exist.
What Is Life? Life as we know it is a self-reproducing system of three macromolecules, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), and protein. This is life’s “holy trinity”. DNA carries the basic
That perceptive neurophysiologist, Paul MacLean, has compared us humans to a trio consisting of a man, a horse and a crocodile. The man cannot talk to the horse or the crocodile because they have no spoken language. But both beasts are very powerful. They are liable, in crises, to take charge. As they have no capacity for reasoning their behavior is often disastrously inappropriate, especially in the crowded, dangerous world that we moderns have built.
But man lies to himself and his habit of self-deception has no survival value whatever. It cuts him off from the real world and causes him to inhabit a world of dreams. It fills his awareness with paranoid delusions which cause him to squander his collective brain power on inventing destructive devices instead of using it to solve the urgent problems he confronts. If the destructive devices are ever used they may prove fatal, not only to Man but also to the whole of Earth’s biosphere.
(Master versus slave: defining the real Work and its traps)
The Work involves the transformation of a muddled, delusion-ridden slave into an enlightened, integrated master. Let us define what we mean by the words master and slave. The slave has no control over his or her life, is pushed about by external forces, is at the mercy of casual impressions, a slave to habits, most of them bad, a prey to credulity, suggestibility, hopes and fears. Above all the slave is a creature of fantasy. It inhabits a world of dreams. It is cut off from knowledge of the real world by a mechanism in its brain, the working of which generates delusions. The slave lies to itself about itself and about everything else. It does not know that it lies. It is a slave that dreams that it is free. It is a liar that dreams that it knows the truth. The master has liberated himself from the delusion-producing mechanism in his brain. He is a dweller in the real world. In order to enter this world he has had to sacrifice his dreams. He has dared to confront the truth about himself and about his fellow men. He has been strong enough and cunning enough to escape from the prison in which the slaves pass their lives. He is fully awake. He has seen the truth and the truth has set him free. But he has paid a mighty high price to attain that freedom. Think very carefully. Can you pay that price? Do you dare to confront reality? Can you bear to know the truth about yourself and your fellow humans? That truth is not in the least bit comforting. Here we have several thousand millions of human beings going round like blindfolded donkeys in a treadmill, driven from behind by the stick of fear, lured forward from in front by the carrot of greed.
Any well-meaning liberator who attempts to awaken them from their state of sleep will certainly be attacked, kicked and bitten, for daring to suggest to the donkeys that they are slaves.
The answer is that very few really do escape. The overseer of the Treadmill, the dread spirit that some call maya, some the Devil or the Father of Lies, has many good tricks at his disposal. He has been around a long time and understands very well the inner weaknesses of the human race. The Spirit of the Lie knows that his ancient adversary, the Spirit of Truth, can sometimes influence these hypnotized donkeys. It can give them a fleeting glimpse of reality and awaken them for a moment from the fog of dreams in which they habitually pass their time. There is, in the human psyche, a will to truth, but this will is weak compared with its opponent, the will to self-deception. The Spirit of Truth works through the will to truth.
They are just as much slaves as they were before they left the Treadmill, but the grand illusion that they are “in the Work” prevents them from seeing this. They have entered the state called Second Sleep from which it is very difficult to awaken. People in Second Sleep dream that they are awake. The pseudo-Work consists of a series of traps. Falling into any one of these traps will suffice to bring the real Work to a halt. Some people fall into one trap, some into another. Some manage, after long struggles, to escape from the traps. Others never escape for the simple reason that they do not know that they are trapped.
do. Even those who have escaped from the Treadmill would often rather enter the fantasy Work and keep their illusions than enter the real Work and sacrifice them.
Trap #1. The Talk-Think Syndrome This is a subtle trap and many fall into it. They talk about the Work. They think about the Work. But talking and thinking about Work will no more produce results than talking and thinking about sex will produce a baby. Actually the Work involves stopping the interior dialogue, but we, who have become accustomed to incessant inner chatter, do not feel comfortable in the silent state. We must talk to someone about something. If we cannot find anyone else to talk to we talk to ourselves.
All the victims of Trap #3 have one thing in common. They are on an ego trip. They want followers, the more followers the better. This is the characteristic that distinguishes them from the real Masters. Genuine Masters never try to attract disciples. On the contrary, they tend to discourage them, warning them that the Way is difficult, that it is better to remain comfortably asleep than to become half awake. A second feature of victims of the False Messiah Syndrome is that they will never let go of any of their followers. They want to keep them in a permanent state of dependence. So schools started by these phony Masters have one thing in common. No one in the school ever graduates. No one can leave of his or her own free will. The false Master makes slaves of his followers, exacts total obedience, discourages independent thought and action. Anyone who rebels against this slavery is regarded as a traitor. The behavior of a genuine Master is the exact opposite. He encourages the student to rely on himself, to find his own way, to discover the teacher within himself. He will offer advice only if advice is asked for. He can hold up a mirror in which those who wish to see can see, but he will not attempt to force anyone to look in that mirror. He will make no attempt to hold on to any of his pupils. If they want to leave him, he will encourage them to go. He is not interested in surrounding himself with a group of hypnotized sheep who slavishly believe every word he says. He is concerned with liberation, not with substituting one form of slavery for another. He gets no satisfaction from dominating his followers. Such ego games do not interest him. Whether he has one pupil, a hundred pupils or no pupils is, for him, a matter of indifference.
Being free of ego, he is genuinely indifferent as to whether other people admire him or not. He does not need their admiration. He has reached a point at which he can be neither flattered nor insulted.
Real salvation involves becoming liberated from the personal self and the narrow confines of the ego. The kingdom of heaven, in so far as this much abused phrase means anything, refers to this state of liberation from ego. We can no more enter the kingdom of heaven wearing our egos than the gospel camel can pass through the needle’s eye. Worrying about “what shall I do to be saved” merely makes a bad situation worse. “I” cannot be saved. “I” is the obstacle, the creator of the great illusion of separateness. The real Work involves a struggle to separate from this I, to transcend the narrow ego, to attain union with the higher Self, which is real and impersonal and outside time-space. “He who sees the Self in all things and all things in the Self, he is liberated.” Being liberated, he is no longer concerned with his personal fate. He does not bother to ask whether he is saved or damned, whether he will go, after death, to heaven or hell. For him, all ideas about heaven or hell are fairy tales only fit for children. Once the personal self has been shed, all talk about what shall I do to be saved becomes meaningless. There can be no salvation for the personal self because it is based on an illusion.
The trap is subtle because the idea behind it is close to the truth. The Work does involve great effort, but it is a very special kind of effort. This effort involves the maintenance of balance and awareness. It is more like the skill of a ropewalker or a juggler than the sort of heroic teeth-clenching efforts involved in feats of derring-do such as climbing Mount Everest. Underlying the Super-effort Syndrome is a deeply rooted misunderstanding about the nature of the Work. The real Work consists of a struggle against the state of identification. Identification means becoming totally immersed in what one is doing and in losing all objective awareness of one’s own existence. Many people pass their entire lives in this state, and our culture is designed to ensure its continuance.
They think they must demand of themselves not ordinary efforts but super-efforts. They do not understand that the Work is a game of skill to be played lightly in a spirit of detachment. For them, the Work turns into a sort of ordeal.
(Knowledge, power, wisdom, and the neo-gnostic aphorisms)
III THE REAL WORK Knowledge, Power and Wisdom Real Work involves the development of knowledge and power. Knowledge without power gives no results. Power without knowledge gives wrong results. Wisdom emerges from the balanced interaction of knowledge and power.
These are the aphorisms of the neo-gnostics. Define your life aims. Conserve and concentrate chi. Your life depends on it. Learn how to convert your knowledge into wisdom. Stop dreaming; be here now. Breathe consciously.
Substitute intentional doing for accidental happening. Do only what is necessary. Maintain a watchman at the gate of impressions. In activities learn to see the play of three forces. Believe nothing; test everything. Distinguish between the higher will and the lower wills. Strength exerted gives more strength; weakness indulged gives greater weakness. Separate from all the manifestations of your machine. Distinguish the quality of essence from that of the persona. Stand on the bank of time’s river and watch the flow.
I am a slave; I aim to become a master. I live in a world of dreams; I aim to enter the real world. I am enmeshed in lies; I aim to know the truth. I am many; I aim to become one. I am a separate ego; I aim to blend with the All.
(Chi, the watchman at the gate, and breath as the core practice)
We can observe, without becoming identified, our thoughts, movements and emotions. In alchemical terms chi is the great transforming agent through which base metals can be turned into gold. As long as we conserve chi we can observe ourselves and separate from the manifestations of our machines. Once we allow our supply of chi to dissipate, we are helpless. We become the playthings of our impressions, our emotions, our dreams. Chi gives us the power to catch our impressions before they engage our inner machinery. As long as our chi is not dissipated we can protect ourselves from the impact of casual impressions. This function of chi is expressed by the aphorism: Maintain a watchman at the gate of impressions. It is difficult for us to avoid dissipating our daily supply of chi. As soon as we wake in the morning, we are assailed by day dreams which replace the night dreams from which we have just emerged. We rarely awaken with a clear awareness of our own presence. We plunge, instead, into a stream of associative thinking that is likely to continue through the day. As soon as this daydreaming begins our chi drains out of us. We may lose our entire supply during the first hour of the day. For this reason it is necessary, as soon as we awaken, to begin a special exercise calculated to prevent this loss of awareness. Breathing and Repetition This exercise is designed to prevent the wastage of chi. It has been stated by many teachers that chi is derived from the air we breathe, by an intentional process that extracts it from that air. (43) This intentional process involves centering the awareness on the heart and following the breath as it flows into the lungs. By lowering the focus of our awareness, we create a new center of being. We emerge from the persona and enter the essence.
This intentional process involves centering the awareness on the heart and following the breath as it flows into the lungs. By lowering the focus of our awareness, we create a new center of being. We emerge from the persona and enter the essence.
As long as our center of awareness is located in the face, we are living, so to speak, on the surface of our selves. Living thus on the surface, we are at the mercy of every wind that blows. An unpleasant impression, a word spoken in anger or scorn, a disturbing memory is enough to destroy our calm. By learning to center our awareness at a deeper level, we attain greater stability. Repetition can be linked to the rhythm of breathing. Used in this way, it will prevent the flood of associative thinking from occupying the center of our awareness. The technique of repetition is very old. It is the basis of mantra yoga and of various religious practices.
The mantra is displaced by a flood of associative thinking. The face becomes tense. The center of being leaves the cave of the heart and locates in the mask of the persona. The little ego takes the place of the real Self and starts to fuss and fret, squandering precious chi in the process. What can we do about it? First it is necessary to realize that this will happen. Again and again, in the course of the day, we will become identified. The watchman at the gate will fall asleep. All sorts of casual impressions, day dreams, random thoughts will occupy our awareness. Instead of being centered, we will become scattered, blown about like a leaf in the wind. Our chi will be dissipated. We will end the day exhausted, feeling that we have accomplished absolutely nothing. We may even entertain serious doubts as to whether anything can be accomplished by the way of the inner Work. Perhaps the whole idea of the Work is one more example of our almost infinite capacity for deluding ourselves.
The central question of life aim has to be reconsidered. What do the other servants really want? To go back to the Treadmill? To turn themselves once again into blindfolded donkeys? To lose sight altogether of the great peaks, the Mountains of Power and Liberation, and spend the rest of their lives going round in circles, lost in dreams, dominated by illusions? How could such a retrograde step be justified? Having set out on the journey, how can one afford to go back? It would surely be better to perish on the Way than to allow oneself to drift back into the Treadmill.
There is no legitimate life aim that cannot be attained more surely if one is awake. To be awake is everything. It is the function of the Observer, who is the forerunner of the Master, to convince the other servants of the truth of this aphorism. We gain nothing, absolutely nothing, by passing our lives in a state of hypnotized sleep. Sleep of this kind is not only unpleasant. It is dangerous. In sleep one does not know who one is, where one is or what one is doing. One is blind. One trips over obstacles. One makes mistakes. To be awake is everything.
Power is developed through practice, through steady, unrelenting effort, day after day, week after week.
The real Work involves constantly repeated effort, a never ending struggle with identification. We become identified again and again in the course of the day and must drag ourselves back and remember. Only in this way can any permanent change be brought about. Hence the aphorism: Until your practice reaches a certain level of intensity and continuity you will not attain any permanent results.
The higher will pushes people in one direction only, from sleep to awakening, from weakness to strength. It has three components, the will to power (over oneself, not over others), the will to truth and the will to self-transcendence. (45)
Sunpath, Moonpath Higher will is developed by the struggle between yes and no, between the Force Affirming and the Force Denying. The struggle can take place within any of our functions. It may be physical, emotional or intellectual. It may involve all these functions simultaneously. It may take the form of a struggle with some mechanical habit, with physical laziness, emotional instability, intellectual fuzziness or various manifestations of the persona, referred to collectively as character defects.
Always we are tempted to follow the way of weakness and overlook our bad habits, but unless we resist this temptation we will never develop real will. The struggle between yes and no takes different forms in each of the three components.
Care of the Carriage A common delusion of people who have allowed the fantasy Work to replace the real Work relates to the care of the Carriage (the physical body). Such people imagine that they can indulge in all sorts of harmful physical habits, that they can use drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, take little or no physical exercise, eat all the wrong foods and generally neglect their health and still build within their bodies the inner Temple.
If such people are challenged, they invariably come up with excuses. They say they are not interested in the body which is merely a vehicle for their lofty souls. As for their bad physical habits, they could get rid of them if they wanted to, but they don’t want to. This cop-out is especially favored by those addicted to tobacco. Students of drug addiction are well aware that tobacco smoking, particularly cigarette smoking, produces a very subtle form of slavery. It is not a crude form of physical dependence like heroin addiction. Those who decide to free themselves from this slavery do not suffer from obvious withdrawal symptoms. They do not sweat, vomit, suffer from sleeplessness, have convulsions. They simply feel a craving for nicotine and the craving is so strong that many who try to free themselves give up the attempt.
The fact is, of course, that they have no real will, and are following the Moonpath while convincing themselves that they are following the Sunpath.
All sorts of people who live unhealthy life styles claim to be working on themselves when they obviously are not. The real Work calls for the maintenance, not of ordinary health, but of super-health. This involves more than the avoidance of harmful practices. Aerobic exercises designed to increase the capacity of the lungs and to strengthen the heart should be combined with stretching exercises to promote flexibility. Only a properly trained, flexible body will last for the full human life span of a hundred years. It is natural for those in the Work to try to attain this full span. They need all the time they can get to complete the building of the inner Temple.
Another aspect of the care of the carriage relates to the sleep-waking cycle. There are two systems in the brain, the ergotropic and the trophotropic. The ergotropic system arouses the brain to activity, the trophotropic urges it to rest. Both are necessary and they must be balanced. Excessive activity produces a tense, nervous individual who
lives always on the edge of exhaustion. Too much rest produces a dull heavy creature who seems only half alive.
But the Observer who has to take charge of the conveyance in the absence of the Master cannot talk to the Horse because the Horse has no spoken language. It will respond to gestures, is sensitive to tone of voice. It reacts very rapidly. A word spoken in anger, a threatening gesture, are all that is needed to set the Horse rearing and kicking.
To make matters worse, the Horse communicates its panics to the Driver. This is due to the fact that thoughts and emotions are closely linked. So a thought can produce an emotion and an emotion can generate a thought. This is particularly true of negative emotions. They generate floods of negative thoughts. These in turn generate more negative emotions. A vicious circle results which can have disastrous effects.
To do this he can make use of repetition, replacing the stream of negative inner talk with a mantra. Once the inner talk stops, he can try to quiet the Horse.
The Observer has to learn to separate from his own emotional states. The capacity to say “it feels emotions” rather than “I feel an emotion” marks the achievement of a definite stage in the Work.
Alcoholics, for example, may be victims of an essence defect that makes it impossible for them to take alcohol in moderation. Their situation is hopeless unless they first face facts and then resolve never to take alcohol under any circumstances. The entity that makes this decision is in personality. It can be greatly strengthened if the alcoholic associates with others who are facing a similar problem. When the new element in the personality becomes well established it begins to enter the essence. The pattern of refusing alcohol becomes, as is said, “second nature”. This term “second nature” refers to patterns of behavior that started in personality and finally became part of essence.
Limiting Activities Those who have entered the real Work will understand the importance of limiting their activities. This aspect of the Work is referred to in the aphorism: Do only what is necessary. Another formulation of this aphorism is: Avoid needless karma. The word karma refers not only to action but also to the fruits of action. Every action produces a chain of results. Some of these chains may be very long and drastically affect a person’s life. A hasty decision, a few words spoken in anger, an unwise financial transaction, a chance meeting, a brief sexual encounter, all can have life-damaging
damaging consequences. We are all, to some extent, at the mercy of accidents. Those who have entered the real Work know this and they move with care. They understand the meaning of the aphorism: Strive to live under as few laws as possible. Random activity which is not connected with the attainment of our inner aim puts us under more laws. Above all, it puts us under the law of accident. Some people live entirely under this law. They have no inner direction, but wander here, there and everywhere impelled by chance impulses or desires. This random activity is dangerous not only because it exposes the person to all sorts of accidents but also because it is a sure way of exhausting our supply of chi. The importance of avoiding such random activity is formulated in the aphorism: Substitute intentional doing for accidental happening.
They will particularly avoid those activities of a purely social nature that have no other function than to give people a chance to show off. Social activities of this sort are very destructive of chi and for this reason should be avoided.
Panic Zone, Drone Zone, Control Zone In a previous section, the inner Work was compared to such activities as rope walking or juggling. It involves skill, attention, and a kind of relaxed awareness. In short, one must learn to “keep one’s cool”. This involves careful training of the Horse. One of the most dangerous tendencies of the Horse is its proneness to panic. When the Horse panics, the whole Conveyance is placed in jeopardy. Huge amounts of emotional energy are poured out in situations that do not call for emotion at all. The emotion tends to make a dangerous or difficult situation worse.
This means that the Driver, who is commonly either asleep or drunk, must at least become somewhat more awake. Who awakens the Driver? This is the task of the Observer, forerunner of the Master. How does he do it? By convincing the Driver that the awakened state is desirable.
The spiritual level of a civilization can be measured by the amount of objective art it generates. By this criterion, our technological civilization is not much better than a gadget-infested barbarism.
They know that, in the state of hypnotized sleep in which we pass most of our time, the transmutation of materials stops short. It could go a lot further but it does not. This is because the vital transforming agent, chi, is dissipated in useless or harmful activities. The Work is an act of self-creation and the triad involved is analogous to the one employed in the production of objective art. It involves the production of a higher form of being. This involves two acts of creation, the formation of the Observer and the transformation of the Observer into the Master. The Master is, in fact, already within us, but we have no contact with this entity because we live in the lowest part of our inner dwelling.
The real shaman (and there are phony shamans in plenty) generates chi by the struggle between yes and no. This generally involves a number of physical ordeals designed both to toughen the body and strengthen the will. The training of the real shaman is extremely tough. It is not a career to be entered upon lightly.
This means that he or she has climbed at least part of the way up the Mountain of Liberation, is free of the urge to play ego games, is a servant of the Work and a servant of truth. Only one who has reached this level of development can safely undertake such a difficult enterprise. People at this high level of development are rare. Moreover, those who have reached this level may not feel much inclined to start a school. They are likely to have in mind the aphorism which states: The itch to teach others is often a manifestation of ego.
can bring their search for a real teacher to an end and permanently turn them against the Work. It may be said that this is only what they deserve for having plunged carelessly into a dangerous region. An aphorism states that the pupil always gets the teacher he or she deserves.
fraud. This is true. There is no sentimentality in the Work. Those who set out on the Way do so at their peril. Having broken out of the Treadmill they must find their way through the Forest. The Forest is full of traps, of paths that lead nowhere and of guides that do not know the way. To avoid falling into the traps the seeker needs a goodly supply of the three sacred qualities, practicality, determination and discrimination, particularly the latter.
They are practical men and women who understand the laws under which they live. Because they understand the laws both of the microcosm and of the macrocosm, they can see what the future holds more clearly than can their fellows who do not understand these laws. They recognize the existence of certain rather obvious truths.
The spiritual sickness of our age results from the lack of clearly defined life aims. To an increasing extent everything is being done for us. Computerized robots take over one job after another. More and more humans are becoming technologically unemployed. They can find no place in the economy. This is not good either for the body or for the soul. The struggle to build an ark can provide a worthwhile life aim for the builders. Both the building of the inner ark and the external ark demand from the builder a combination of power and wisdom if they are to be built correctly. A properly constructed ark will contain all three vital components, garden, temple, university, needed to feed the three aspects of human totality. The garden feeds the body, the temple feeds the soul and the university the mind. Within such an ark, a man or woman can learn both how to live rightly and how to die rightly. One can hardly ask for more than this.
“Take my own life as an example. At one time I thought that the secret of success lay in the family. So I married a good woman and we had children. They were good children, studied hard, did well. I have no complaints on that score. My family life was successful. But so what? My wife is now dead. My children have children of their own. I have only accomplished what any good animal does, reproduced my kind and reared my young. “I also thought that my career would provide the key to success. I was a physicist. I delved into the secrets of matter and energy. I worked as part of a team serving a gigantic atom-smasher. We used billions of electron volts trying to shatter protons. That game was exciting while it lasted. Now it seems only an exercise in futility. I see the gigantic atom-smashers (and they are proposing to build bigger and bigger ones) as an almost criminal waste. Surely we can find better things to do with our brains and our money. “I also looked for success in the realm of books. I was gifted with the ability to write clearly about subjects generally considered obscure. So I wrote. My books were published. Some of them sold, some didn’t. So what? There they sit on the shelf like fossils of my former thoughts. “So here I am, retired, a “success” by the standards most Americans apply. My name is in Who’s Who. My books are still read. I have three children, five grandchildren, two houses, an adequate income, and I enjoy excellent health for a man of my age. And yet, I feel that I have somehow missed the boat, wasted my time, not accomplished anything. But what should I have accomplished? Can you give me the recipe for real success?” “Willingly,” said the Sufi, “but you are not likely to accept it. This recipe is not for everyone. It is contained in four very simple aphorisms.” At this point the Sufi paused, then, as if he were chanting a magical formula, he slowly and deliberately pronounced the following: Expect nothing. Demand nothing. Desire nothing. Be nothing.
We are no other than a moving row Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go Round with this Sun-illumined Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show; Impotent Pieces in the Game He plays Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.” (57)
(Shedding the ego: waves, ocean, and the gnostic secret)
“So what is the job?” “The job is to become both actor and spectator, to act in and, at the same time, to watch the play. The job is to transform a slave into a master. The job is to shed the personal ego as a snake sheds its skin and to blend with the force that gave us life and mind.”
“Waves form, crest, break, sweep up the beach and flow back into the ocean.” “Exactly. They die and are replaced, but the ocean remains. But suppose a wave imagined it could survive death. Suppose it fantasized about a “world to come” in which it would have “life everlasting”. In that “world to come” all waves would exist forever, the “good” waves in a place called heaven, the “bad” waves in a terrible place called hell.” “That would be a pretty foolish fantasy for a wave.” “Exactly. But millions of human beings take this fantasy seriously. They want to hang on to their personal egos. They want to carry those egos with them beyond death. They don’t like the idea of blending back into the ocean from which they came. But the gnostics have no use for this pathetic fantasy. “So this is the secret of the gnostics. Now, while you still have the body, enter the Tavern of Ruin and leave your ego outside. Discover and blend with your higher Self, which is part of the Mind Force and the Life Force that created us all. This ocean of life is, for us, the creatura, the Creator God.
Breathing, Bennett declares, is the activity that nourishes the higher body, the vehicle called by Gurdjieff the kesdjan body. This nourishment is extracted only if the breath is taken attentively. Breath control formed the basis of the zikr of the Masters of Wisdom and they attributed their great longevity to this practice. Awareness of breathing was also used by the Christian Masters in the Syrian desert and is described in the Philokalia. (Kadloubovsky, E., and Palmer, G.E.H., translators. Writings from the Philokalia on the Prayer of the Heart London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 33.