Practicalities

     Much of what I have written in this blog is intended to impel the reader to the conclusion that one must try this practice. I suggest that you try it now. Put your attention on some physical movement, posture, gesture, facial expression, on some simple activity that your body is presently engaged in. Try to attend to the movement of your eyeballs as you read this. Put all your attention on that. Bring it back when it wanders. It is within your means to do that. You want to experience awareness of your reality that is simultaneous- that is, actual awareness, not thinking- and impartial, which is also a characteristic of actual awareness as opposed to thinking. In the beginning, one doesn't know how to experience that kind of awareness. But you do know how to put your attention on simple physical behavior. That is a good way to start. Don't waste your time trying this when multitasking is required of you. Practice it in simple conditions. You can practice it right now, when you have time to read this. Just let your eyeballs move over the screen. Put your attention on that. Let your actual reading be unconscious for now. As for thinking about it, you can do that later.

     I am suggesting this way of beginning to work to you. It is not identical with the way that I was taught. I am borrowing something from mindfulness meditation for you, and leaving out Mr. Nyland's explanations regarding the "little I." Mr. Nyland placed great emphasis on the fact that our ordinary mind is not capable of awareness of reality. This is true, but rather than accounting for it by a mechanical explanation, such as Gurdjieff loved, I think that it is better to account for it by deeply ingrained habits of distraction and dependency on thinking, and let it go at that. When you are able to experience impartial awareness of reality, the necessary "machinery" for that awareness obviously exists at that time. There is no real need to think about the mechanical structure of your consciousness, and it definitely can become a distraction. 

     Our habitual state of distraction prevents us from even "getting to first base" in awareness of reality. We cannot maintain our attention on this attempt, and it continues to be divided several ways and to wander. You have to develop the muscle of your attention. This is done by exercising it. You have to try this seriously for short periods of time. Even thirty seconds of real effort to put your attention on simple physical behavior is a long time. Five seconds is a significant time. Try seriously for five seconds. Of course you will be counting off the seconds. Bring your attention back to the behavior or physical activity that you have chosen, and return it when it wanders. You will discover a great deal about the wandering of your mind by making this effort. In five seconds your mind does a lot of wandering. If you aren't making this effort, that's how you live. Gurdjieff called it "waking sleep." Exert your will and keep bringing your attention back to the focus you have chosen, with no description and no liking or disliking.  If you can be at all successful, it is exhilarating. Do it for ten seconds, extend your effort. This is the taste of having a free will. You can make this effort at any time. You can be a free person. Do this for fifteen seconds, for a minute, five minutes. Extend it as far as your will can take you. But it is important to be honest with yourself about the extent of your will and of your skill. 

     We are not used to making this effort. I believe that it is possible for any person to put one's attention on simple physical behavior simultaneously, that is, now. You can do this if you wish, if you are not too distracted. Turn off your God damned T.V., turn off your radio, stop playing video games for a minute or two and just live like a simple person for a change. One really has to learn to say goodbye to a lifestyle of distraction. That isn't easy, not only because of our bad habits, but also because it has become our culture. Our culture is "circling the drain," and those of us who love America and the spirit of Western civilization have to fight for it, not against some fabricated enemy, but against our own sluggishness. The spirit of the West is individual freedom. You fight by waking up, by having the guts and brains, the soul and spirit, to actually become a free person. It starts with having the courage to face the truth of what you are.

     Just live simply at times. Go for a walk without headphones. Turn off your smart phone. You be the smart one, for a little while. Just wash the dishes, make the bed, pet your cat. Just have a simple conversation, a little honest interaction of human kind. Just work honestly, whatever your work is. Just go to the bathroom honestly. You cannot practice awareness of reality when you are distracted. 

     Theoretically, it is possible to understand that our consciousness is not as it should be. Emotionally, it is possible to understand that we are in relationship with that which has created us and placed us here, and that in gratitude for our existence we wish to respond appropriately to the reality of our existence. Sometimes this is felt powerfully in a person, in me. Yes I will, so help me God, because I love. Yes, I am here, I have not forgotten. I will do anything, whatever I should do. All I ask is to see how I should live. Sometimes this is called spirit, and it is maybe the most important reality of our lives. But our spirit needs to be fed and exercised, like a horse. It needs to be ready to run. This practice gives you a means of feeding and exercising your spirit, of keeping your hope and love alive. Jesus advised us to "keep your lamp trimmed and burning," that is, to be ready to respond with all we have, with our whole talent of responding. But how to be ready? By practicing. This practice is an opportunity to give all you have, for the love of God. It is not false. Reality is reality. By definition it belongs to God.

     I happened to visit the Gettysburg battlefield recently. I stood where Pickett's charge was launched. There was no cover, three-quarters of a mile uphill to the entrenched Union lines. Even to stand in the open there would have been deadly dangerous. Lee broke his army there and ordered many young people to their deaths. You look up that slope, and you think, "how stupid." But they went, and with a will. A little later I read the story of another charge, this time by Union cavalry. I saw the picture of a young general, a glorious specimen of twenty-five-year-old male humanity, handsome, obviously very intelligent, sensitive. He was ordered by General Kilpatrick, known as "Kill Cavalry," to make a stupid attack, suicidal, meaningless. He knew what the result would be, and so did all his troopers. "Do you mean it, General? These men are too good to kill." He and sixty men died in that utterly futile attack. The spirit was willing. But we need the enlightenment. Otherwise the best in us is killed, becomes a casualty of the battles of life because it is at the forefront, and we stumble on dispirited toward our deaths. We need wise generalship in our lives, generalship that will nurture our spirit, not break it.

     I think that one needs to understand our aim- awareness of God's reality, given to us. If you don't like the word "God," I certainly don't blame you, but one needs to understand spirit for oneself, and one needs to understand how to feed and develop one's spirit. God does not refer to the Easter Bunny. This term refers to reality, understood emotionally. God is that which our spirit loves, that to which we say yes with all our might because it is utterly beautiful and infinitely profound. 

     But it comes down to the practicality of making efforts. Only that will actually feed our spirit and enlighten our mind. You have to do it, correctly and definitely, and with the requisite force. It is not required to drive the ball out of the park. You have to make contact, and maintain contact, maintain now.  It takes a lot of practice to learn how, but the crucial element is to make the effort. That is the Philosophers' Stone, the healing power. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." In the effort, the Lord is with you. It makes a break in the monotony of your waking sleep, like that drill breaking through to the miners trapped underground. Light rushes in, simultaneously.

     You need to understand this: rescue is impossible for you. Not only has the world forgotten about you, the world is in the same predicament. This is the absurdity of the mental health system, assuming that we can really help anyone. As Jesus said, we have a beam in our own eye, and we might better address that before concerning ourselves with the motes in the eyes of others. As Gurdjieff might have said, "it is enough to make the cat laugh."

     But God has not forgotten about you, and God is both omnipotent and omnipresent. And you are not really trapped in a cave. That is a metaphor, as all our thoughts are metaphors. Your predicament is the state of your consciousness. You have allowed your Garden of Eden to be overrun by weeds. Nobody ever told you that you needed to tend it. Nobody but you can set it right, obviously with God's help. It is His garden.

     The story of our alleged expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a slander on God. It isn't God's fault that we live as we do. We still live in the Garden of Eden, but we have let it go to hell. Somehow or other, we never realized that we have to work to maintain reality. God shows us by example. He is active now, active at every moment, on duty 24-7. It's a miracle. 

     You have to make this effort, and persevere in it. Then you will find out what I mean. "Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and the door will open. Ask, and it shall be given."

     I want to say something about meditation. Meditation is an established part of major Eastern cultures, but not of Western culture. If it is a cultural given that you will meditate, then the question of how to meditate is certainly relevant. But in our culture, this is not a given. For "Zen in America," meditation is a means to an end. If the aim is awareness of reality, then the aim of practicing meditation is the same as the aim of the practice that I learned from Mr. Nyland. 

     But I really question the effectiveness of meditation as a means to that end. I think that meditation is a crutch. I do think that people who practice meditation correctly and seriously experience awareness of reality. As has often been pointed out to me, it is relatively easy to experience this when one has absolutely nothing else to do. But it is never really possible on Earth to have absolutely nothing to do but experience reality; meditation is thus founded on an illusion. One becomes dependent on the crutch, and that is not what we need. We are able-minded. If you have been told that you have a mental disability, you have been told a lie. We are lacking in the skill and in the will, and we are lacking in the will because we are stupefied. We have been trapped in the cave of our unconsciousness so long that we have forgotten the light of day. We do not need to lean on a crutch. We need to be able to fight like wildcats for our freedom. 

     It comes down to making this effort now, maintaining the effort now. That is what this practice is about. Usually I don't do it. I have no end of excuses, maybe they are even acceptable, but excuses will not move me on my way. This is not the practice of thinking about awareness of reality. 

     Meditation focuses too much on the specific activity of meditation, which usually is performed according to a certain routine, often at a particular time and place, and even in a certain posture. At that time, when one meditates, one may well make good efforts. But we need to make these efforts in our lives, whenever and wherever we are. We need to make them now. Meditation, I think, can lead to the illusion that we are fine as we are, because we meditate at times. 

     We are not as we should be. The problem is not superficial. We look fine, and our behavior is often perfectly acceptable. It is our state of mind, our consciousness, that is not acceptable. But when you are aware, it is acceptable.

     The force of spirit and will is experienced in a moment. Life is real then, when I am. This is how one learns to work, this is the way of life. It is in that moment when I make this effort to wake up, in that moment when I make this effort to maintain my attention on awareness of reality. Now. It does not require a mighty, heroic and exhausting effort. How much effort does it take to direct your attention? You don't have to wear yourself out thinking about it. You do have to learn. You learn by doing. You have to maintain this effort to be awake. What is so impossible about that? You maintain your heartbeat even in your sleep. You maintain your thinking constantly. That takes effort, but it is habitual for you. We are not in the habit of being aware of reality. When one knows how to do something and really has the will to do it, one just does it. One needs to learn to work like that. This is required of us by life and by God. Why are you here? Become aware of your reality, then you will know. "Only then, when I am."

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