Source Text
Foreword E.J. Gold has hit the nail squarely on the head. Man is an unfinished animal endowed by nature with the capacity to complete itself. It can then take charge of its own evolution and become worthy of the proud title Homo sapiens. The alchemical process of self-completion is shrouded in mystery and understood only by a few people in each generation. The Great Work consists in transforming a helpless other-directed puppet into an inner-directed, unified being that understands its place in the scheme of things. Nothing can be more important than the attainment of this understanding. Without it we are at the mercy of our dreams and delusions and our technical devices become more of a menace than a blessing. If a great catastrophe is to be avoided, a growing number of people must grasp the central truth. To complete one’s own inner transformation is the only task worth taking seriously. Everything else is secondary.
Introduction (This is a transcription of a talk given at a special workshop)
To lie down, take a little nappy state. But you might be standing and napping. It’s different from sleeping, because sleeping implies that you’re actually regenerating something, that you’re deep, deep, deep in the subconscious levels. That’s not necessarily true. Napping is a very light state of sleep, and that’s what I mean. It’s a somnambulant state. It’s a state where you can carry on business as usual.
The napping state you normally experience is one where you seem to be awake, but you are not actually awake. What does awake mean? First of all, if you’re going to talk about the “waking state”, you must identify it as a very specific state. Otherwise, it’s just this kind of amorphous blob of stateness, which is not the same thing as “a state.”
The waking state is to be truly awake. That means to be completely, utterly, absolutely aware, with all the senses of reality, meaning that you actually are in that space that we all know about, that space where we are truly awake. Again, what does awake mean? You get the concatenation of everything all at once. You’re at the highest possible level of consciousness for you. Everyone achieves some sort of waking state at the limit of their tolerance. The waking state that we’re after is just a little past your level of tolerance where it’s almost too much, but not quite. The sensations, the thoughts, the feelings, the concepts, the knowingness, the wisdom – whatever it might be that falls upon you in the waking state – that is the waking state that we’re after, for you…
When you begin consciously working on yourself, you’re remembering yourself, which is re-membering, assembling, re-assembling yourself, putting yourself back together into the waking state. Right now, you’re spattered all over the universe. You’re going to be reassembling yourself into the waking state. The waking state – you take as much responsibility for Godness as you can possibly manage. You let yourself be God as much as you possibly can. Maybe that’s very little, maybe that’s a lot, doesn’t matter, doesn’t…
Why do that at all? Why not just let one take that full responsibility? The answer is pain – anguish, actually. And so we are learning to take some of that responsibility, some of that burden. Let’s call it “the great burden.” Take some of the great burden upon ourselves, even if only momentarily, or for a short period of time, or for a long period of time; it’s all subjective because time doesn’t actually exist in that space. So, sharing that burden, there is a network of sharers of that burden. That network is called the Great Work: those who share the great burden of Godness, of Absoluteness. Learning to share your portion of that is part of the conscious act that you perform in this work,…
To sacrifice your own personal suffering as the Absolute, all alone. You must share the burden if you…
Actually what the waking state does is it brings to an end your napping cycle. It brings to an end – not the end – your dream, the dream you’re dreaming right now. It brings that to an end. And in order to achieve, even momentarily, the waking state, which is all you’re going to try to do is just get one moment of waking state – just a single glimpse at it. You’re not going to try to hang out in there – that’s very unwise at this time. You need to learn the Zen Clap in order to get to play this particular game. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of theory at this point. I’m just going to show you how the game is played. Then it’s up to you. It’s your own responsibility whether you play the game or cheat the game. In order to play the game, you must absolutely, without fail, go into the waking state, awaken, at the clap of your hands, on a particular question.
And that’s the failure of any question in any serious way. How precise is the question? How good is the question? Because the question will be a determinant factor with the answer. In other words, the answer to the question is only as good as the question was specific. Otherwise, you get “42”, and you have no idea what the question was.
AI Summary
The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus by E. J. Gold presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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