(Nature’s unceasing generosity lets man mistake himself for a separate power)
end. If Nature were to shake herself a little, the human race would wake up to its utter helplessness. Nature remains generous. Paradoxically it is this unceasing action of giving that enables man to believe himself to be a separate power.
What comes is not just “good vibrations”. It is as if we become aware of the compassionate eye of Nature - who is aware of our difficulties and of what a task has been laid upon us - looking upon us. No matter how much we destroy, the compassion does not weaken.
The privilege is really an obligation. Many years ago, I had a talk with D. T. Suzuki, a wonderful man who did so much to introduce Zen Buddhism into the West, on this very thing. He visited us at Coombe Springs and spent a few days with us. One evening we were sitting together in the evening.
(The right — and obligation — to be conscious that everything is Buddha)
For some reason I said: “Everything is Buddha”. He answered me: “Yes, everything is Buddha, but we people have the right to be conscious of that; and if we do not exercise this right, we are not as we should be”.
There is great value in practicing the Vayu Prana meditation. We come to see air not simply as a combination of material gases but as nourishment of our inner being. When we go further and see the unlimited and the giving nature of air it is a spiritual perception.
In this experience, something is received from the spirit of the tree. As I have said on another occasion, part of the experience belonging to the New Epoch will be the re-awakening of perceptions of the spirit world and the spirits that reside in living things. But the spirit of the tree cannot speak in our language. She opened herself and love came from the tree and the tree wanted to say something. It could not understand her problems, so what could it do? It reached that part where words and ordinary thoughts are not needed and asked this part, the higher self, to do something.
is a totally different experience for us when we are not obsessed by being at the centre. Then the centre is everywhere and we see differently.
Nature is not sentimental. We can learn a great deal about this by working in the garden. We have to destroy many living things in order to have a garden.
has a creative element - it is fanciful in the old sense of the word - and we have to be very gentle and not attempt to make anything out of it, else it turns very quickly into indulgence. To know how not to indulge is very important. When the spontaneous ‘fanciful’ perceptions
come they enable us to be in tune with Nature and to see that there is a creative self-expression which is not brought in from our subjectivity. Someone spoke about Nature as sometimes almost threatening. We experience
DOING - July 22, 1974 This is an edited and abridged version of theme talks and discussion, on “Doing’: July 22nd, Mr. Bennett by talking of working at the movements.
(The state of doing: when you and the movement become one)
MANY OF YOU have probably experienced that moment in a movement when you are aware that you and the movement are one: it is no longer possible to say whether you are doing the movement or the movement is doing you; you feel fully yourself and the movement is wholly expressing what you would want it to express. This usually comes only for a short time, but when it does come it is unmistakable. There is bliss, thankfulness and the realization that a different state of life, a different way of living, is really possible for us. If I call this doing you will perhaps think it rather strange. In order to make it clearer, let us take the opposite of this: the state of identification. In that state we are lost in what we are trying to do; we ourselves are simply not there and we have become altogether involved in what we are doing. We are in a state of emotional tension, not at all free, and if anyone disturbs us or puts us off, we react to them. We may be so oblivious to what is going on that we are not able to take any changes into account.
You remember that in the last chapter “From the Author” of Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff says that the ordinary modern man does not do anything, everything does him. He doesn’t think, it thinks in him. He doesn’t speak; it speaks. He doesn’t make things; things are made and so on. At first this seems an exaggerated statement until
There can come a moment when one is really aware that this movement is in us wholly and that we are at one with it. It is an extraordinary experience. When this first began to happen to me in the movement, it taught me more than almost anything else. I realized how it is possible to be quite at one with what one is doing, yet feel oneself wholly free and at the same time without the feeling that ‘I am doing it’. The feeling of I disappears and when it disappears in that state - that state of real doing - there is something much greater than this that comes. It is a state of bliss: Sat-chit-ananda. Sat-chit-ananda - being-consciousness-bliss - belongs to the higher world, the alem-i-imkan”. When you are able to do, you are not withdrawn into solitude, into a state of rapture; no, you are acting in the world. The state of acting in the world, when you know that what you’re doing is perfect, that it is what you were meant to be doing and that you are doing it exactly, is really the state of being-consciousness-bliss. There is an awareness that this is what it means to be. You must realize above all that doing is not divided into an intention that comes at one moment of time and an action that comes at another time. Doing is the actual state in which one is, when there is one whole and there is no separation: no “I am doing this”; nor “this is doing me”. There is just the perfect action - so perfect that it has no longer any one part separated from another.
(Holding “I must” and “I cannot” together until something else emerges)
July 26th: Responses to students’ observations on the theme of “Doing” We can have two contradictory states in us - a state of ‘I must’ and a state of ‘I cannot’. If we lose one of these then some compromise arises. We either do what we can, or we do something different and pretend it is what we must do. But if we don’t compromise then this can bring us to that moment when something else emerges that is neither affirming that we must, nor denying that we can.
We realize that we must and that we cannot. Then from nowhere there comes something else and we find that things have happened to us that we cannot understand.
As soon as ‘I’ comes into it the sense of peace and inner-stability goes.
There is a rightness in action where all effort disappears, because one is doing it right. But in order to come to it, one has to realize that there is a toilsome path to travel. How difficult it is really to learn to use any instrument so that there is no wasted energy, no forcing of anything!
(Perfect action enters the treasure; doing rightly is an act of worship)
You must not think of doing as a private satisfaction that just you experience. It is not. When something is right then everything benefits from this. It is like one flower: if the flower is perfect it is not its own satisfaction, but that there should be such a flower, From the words of Mary at the Annunciation “Be it done to me according to Thy Word”. that matters. If a dance is perfectly danced this is something objectively real. It enters into the treasure. One must never feel that this ends and disappears because it is over in time. We don’t see where it goes to but everything that comes up to the required quality becomes an act of worship. It is far truer worship to dance properly than to do a prayer half-properly.
Clearly Solomon does not ask for experience, because that will come. He asks for Wisdom; and he is given Wisdom which is an ‘eye’ of discernment. When Solomon gained a great deal of experience and became an old man his experience got the better of his wisdom and he got into a sad mess. The picture suggests that somehow the water of experience seems to have diluted the wine of wisdom.
Solomon and take it that this is where imagination or fancy belong. This is what Gurdjieff calls the Higher Centre. It is the ‘eye’ for the truth, the inner-perception. It is there in us and it works in us but something has gone wrong with it. Instead of being filled with wine something has gone sour; false imagination has entered, and it has become filled with our own imaginary pictures coming from our own egoism. False imagination is like wine gone sour: it becomes vinegar. And you know the property of vinegar? If there is a little vinegar in a bottle and you pour wine in, the vinegar will overcome the wine and the wine will become sour.
(Wisdom turns to vinegar when ego claims it as its own achievement)
This is what happens to us. Even when some of the wine of wisdom enters, because there is already a ‘soured’ false imagination, it also becomes soured. Although we can have wisdom, it quickly turns false in us. Wisdom and doing are intimately connected with one another. Rightness, an awareness that things are just right - that is the taste of Wisdom. The joy, the freedom, the disappearance of effort and striving that comes at this moment when things are right - all of these are the marks of Wisdom.
don’t confuse Wisdom with some kind of grim or solemn assessment that really belongs to our mind and is an attempt to impose logical rules on our freedom and imagination. One can see that to be able to rejoice all the time one must be free from the vinegar of false imagination and self-love and the rest of it which so quickly turns the wine of Wisdom sour. We can hardly hold on to it before something in us says: “I am doing this. This is my doing, my achievement”. Immediately the Wisdom has gone sour and the doing collapses. The highest thing that is said about Wisdom is in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”. This purity is in being rid of all the vinegar of our own self. Then this wisdom becomes a direct perception.
The kind of wisdom which we call ‘instinct’ is certainly not the same as the experience we have spoken about before because it is not built up bit by bit from commerce, intercourse, with the outer world; it is somehow a gift that is given to the bee hive or the cow or the mother tiger.
the beginning when I spoke about the wine, saying however many bottles it may go into, small or large or round or square, it is one and the same wine. I say that it’s one and the same wisdom that enables us to come to the moment when we can do the movements properly or the Morris dance is done so that there is really unity.
Throughout this course I’ve tried to share with you my conviction that there is this something that can work in us if only we will free ourselves from our own vinegar; that has worked and is working in the world now.