‘The Movement Towards Inner Freedom’

     
Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the death of George Gurdjieff, the founder of the Fourth Way, whose teachings are kept alive today by inspired followers such as the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. The Foundation will host another introductory lesson next week. From the publicity:

The Movement Towards

Inner Freedom

Gurdjieff Foundation of New York

Friday, November 9 at 6:30

240 East 53rd Street, Manhattan

(Quest Bookshop)

RSVP here

“Liberation leads to liberation.”
G.I. Gurdjieff

The evening will include presentations, readings, practical exercises in movement, the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music, conversation, and refreshments.


If you are a thinking Freemason, you may find these studies worthwhile.


The other day, Parabola magazine published online an excerpt from a book to be released in February. Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy by Roger Lipsey will be published by Shambhala Publications. Lipsey’s other books include a biography of Dag Hammarskjöld.

One sample paragraph:

G.I. Gurdjieff

The Rue des Colonels Renard is centrally located. Today you might want to stop in a café at the intersection of Avenue Mac-Mahon and the Rue des Acacias, where Gurdjieff often had his coffee, and surely looked from time to time past a receding row of street lamps toward a flank of the Arc de Triomphe not far off. At some point he turned that view into a parable about the distant aim toward which one might well be toiling and the many smaller aims and thresholds, requiring meticulous attention, that precede it. His apartment was nearby in a street like any other. Yet it was là-bas, as one of his pupils put it—there yet far off, another world. “Here in my house,” Gurdjieff stipulated, “all must be quintessence. Rest you do at home.” There was a further rule, captured by another of his pupils: “Here there are no spectators.”


Check out the excerpt here.
     

‘Mindfulness and the Arts’

      

MindfulNYU offers another public event next week, which I publicize here (and will attend) largely for Parabola’s Tracy Cochran’s involvement. From the publicity:

Mindfulness and the Arts

Hosted by MindfulNYU

Wednesday, November 18

7 to 8:30 p.m.

238 Thompson Street, Room 461

New York City

Free tickets here.

What do a cast member of Star Trek, a pioneering social justice filmmaker, and a highly accomplished journalist have in common? Mindfulness!

Join MindfulNYU’s Generation Meditation, Stressbusters and three mindful artists for a night of interactive activities and stimulating discussion as we explore how mindfulness can enhance our creative lives.

     

‘The Pipe of Reconciliation’

     
One essential periodical that is as healthy as ever is Parabola. I make a point of not publishing others’ articles in their entirety, but when I do, it usually is from Parabola. This one is an oldie from 1989, but the editors linked to it on Facebook several weeks ago, and I’m glad they did. Being a believer in the varied benefits of pipe smoking, I share it here with you.

The following is copyright © 1989, 2015 Parabola.

The Pipe of Reconciliation

by Joseph Epes Brown

Click to enlarge.

Dr. Joseph K. Dixon, A Native American sends smoke signals in Montana, June 1909, National Geographic Creative.

The sacred pipe of the Native Americans is a potent symbol of relationship. Through it the human breath sends to all the six directions the purifying smoke that connects the person to the divine and is the link between all forms of life: mitakuye oyasin, we are all relatives.

In the foreword to The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), Black Elk is quoted saying:

“Most people call it a ‘peace pipe,’ yet now there is no peace on earth or even between neighbors, and I have been told that it has been a long time since there has been peace in the world. There is much talk of peace among the Christians, yet this is just talk. Perhaps it may be, and this is my prayer that, through our sacred pipe, and through this book in which I shall explain what our pipe really is, peace may come to those peoples who can understand, an understanding which must be of the heart and not of the head alone. Then they will realize that we Indians know the One true God, and that we pray to Him continually.”

On a recent visit to Joseph Epes Brown, we were shown a beautiful pipe and a braid of sweet grass, and he told us the following:

This is the pipe that was given to me by an old Assiniboin when I was traveling west to find old man Black Elk. I found out where he was, in Nebraska, and walked into his tent with this pipe, and I prepared it and lit it and puffed on it and passed it to him. And he puffed on it and passed it back. I was getting a little bit uneasy, and he looked at me and said, “I’ve been expecting you. Why did it take you so long to get here?”

The sweet grass is mostly to add some fragrance, like incense. Back in Maine when I was a boy, I made friends with some of the Abenaki people there. They used to hunt on our land, and they would give me these braids of sweet grass.

Once the pipe is lit, it is very important to keep it going. They pass it around the sacred circle where the Sun Dance takes place, and they use it to smoke people with, too—they smoke the dancers, as part of the ceremony. There’s a lot of smoke, believe me.
I remember how much Black Elk used to smoke. He smoked violently. He would actually disappear in the smoke: smoke would seem to be coming out of his ears and eyes.

The pipe is always associated with the center. It is pointed to all four directions in ceremonies like the Sun Dance, then pointed above and below as well. It ties them together— the horizontal and the vertical. That’s very important. The symbolism is very rich. For the Indians, the smoking of the pipe is the same as taking the Eucharist to a Christian.

The bowl of the pipe is essentially the place of the heart, and the stem is the breath passage. There’s also the foot, on which the pipe rests.

They associate the pipe with the human person: it’s anthropomorphic symbolism. Like a pipe, a person has a mouth and windpipe, he has a heart, and he has a foot. And his heart is where the fire is. In the pipe it is the point of interception, where the tobacco burns. In the ceremony, they designate each pinch of tobacco: this one for the winged of the air, for example, this one for the horned beasts, this one for the fishes. They do the same with all the beings of creation. And then the smoke contains all that which has been made sacred by the fire.

The pipe also represents the relationship between the people who are participating. The ceremony is a communal thing; it is one pipe that is passed to everyone. It speaks of who we are, in a sacred sense—that we are all relatives. It’s the idea of the joining of all peoples—which is certainly a very real kind of reconciliation, on a very high level.


Joseph Epes Brown on the Native American symbol of relationship, Parabola, Winter 1989, “Triad.” This issue is available here.
     

‘An essential part of the spiritual path’

     
If you have yet to heed my advice to make Parabola magazine part of your regular reading, perhaps this excerpt from the Spring issue will convince you. It’s very rare I reproduce someone else’s writing in its entirety on the Magpie, but this essay below by Lee Van Laer is worth breaking convention.

Inner Wisdom

By Lee Van Laer

If one traces the roots of the word wisdom, one discovers that wis- is, logically enough, related to the word wit, and that both ultimately trace their origins back to an Indo-European root related to the Sanskrit veda (knowledge) and Latin videre (to see).
The -dom originates from the Latin dominus, master.

So wisdom is a mastery of seeing. But it must be referred to as a mastery of seeing from within, an inner vision or understanding. In traditional societies, and traditional religions, this inner wisdom or inner seeing was held as the most valuable kind of insight. Often attained through age, but not always by education, wisdom is presumed, in tradition and mythology alike, to carry an emotive content as well as an intellectual one; and it usually embodies itself in a venerated figure, a master clothed, more often than not, in robes of humility, which denote compassionate practice. Often the master also manifests a commanding physical presence; so his corporeal presence carries an equal weight with his emotional and intellectual capacities. Traditionally, he is wise who balances these three qualities.

Wisdom does not loom large in the modern psyche. It has been replaced by knowledge, which does not pretend to emotive value; in its least appealing forms, it even eschews such associations. It is strictly about things and the manipulation of them; and, unsurprisingly, it’s directed outwardly, towards the technologies of life and not their meanings. So we have many people who, externally speaking, are able but not wise; active but not prudent.

And perhaps this defines our society and our age as much as any other set of words: activity without prudence, or, imprudent doing.

To have prudence is to have foresight, to attend to. But attention is born from within, not from outward circumstances; and in the great esoteric traditions, as well as the traditional religions, attention is of a divine origin, not a worldly one.

The idea is hardly a new one. The great Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn Arabi insisted that man’s duty was to extend his intellect beyond the territory of the everyday into the challenging and mysterious realm of divinely inspired wisdom. This inner seeing, Arabi tells us, is essential to the meaning of our existence: of man, he says, For the Reality [God], he is as the pupil is for the eye through which the act of seeing takes place. (1)

And it is no coincidence that Emanuel Swedenborg titled one of his greatest works Divine Love and Wisdom. Of wisdom and seeing, Swedenborg wrote:

... since what is wholly itself and unique is substance and form, it follows that it is the unique substance and form, and wholly itself; and since that true substance and form is divine love and wisdom, it follows that it is the unique love, wholly itself, and the unique wisdom, wholly itself. It is therefore the unique essence, wholly itself, and the unique life, wholly itself, since love and wisdom is life.

All this shows how sensually people are thinking when they say that nature exists in its own right, how reliant they are on their physical senses and their darkness in matters of the spirit. They are thinking from the eye and are unable to think from the understanding. Thinking from the eye closes understanding, but thinking from understanding opens the eye. They are unable to entertain any thought about inherent reality and manifestation, any thought that it is eternal, uncreated, and infinite. (2)

Arabi and Swedenborg shared a notable consonance of philosophy, as Henri Corbin has pointed out; and both of them, men with intellects and education unusual for any age, insisted that seeing—intelligence in the form of wisdom—was 
an essential part of the spiritual path.

Both of them, however, were referring to an inner intelligence, an intelligence born of a divine spark within man, with which they both had personal experience. Swedenborg called the arrival of divine intelligence in man the inflow; G.I. Gurdjieff referred to it as an influence. All of these teachers felt that man needed to open his heart—and perhaps his very soul itself—to this inward flow of a divine energy, which the Christians call Grace, in order to become informed—inwardly formed—in accordance with divine law. Only then can prudence be acquired; and only after that can action be wise.

Wisdom, in other words, is the outward manifestation of an inward quality, not the self-reflexive relationship of outward qualities to one another. In this sense, for right action to be possible every active must begin as a contemplative. Rather than separating them, contemplation and action must undergo a marriage that is born from an inner attention.
This is where the beginning of wisdom lies.

1 Ibn-Al-Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 51.

2 Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation’s New Century Edition, 2003), 67–68.
     

‘Saving Mr. Banks’

     
And speaking of films, from Parabola magazine:

A remarkable film opened on Christmas Day called “Saving Mr. Banks,” about P.L. Travers, a founding editor of Parabola. Have a look at the trailer for the film here:





In honor of the occasion, Parabola will publish [on Facebook and the Parabola blog] material written by Pamela Travers that has appeared in Parabola over the years. Here is an excerpt from her essay “Remembering,” a lifelong pursuit of Something Else, from Summer 1991.


A Hebrew Myth, a potent element in the annals of the bees, tells us that when a child is born an angel takes it under his wing and recites the Torah to it. Having done that he puts his forefinger on the infant lip and says one word, “Forget!”

Clearly, every tradition has a similar angel, for where is the human creature who lacks indentation of the upper lip, that little valley of flesh where the same word has been so ineffaceably expressed? And, indeed, of necessity. For how, without forgetting, can remembering arise? And remembering leads to search.

Detail of painting ‘Tobias and the Angel’

by Raphael. National Gallery, London.

Maybe it needs another angel, though this time leaving no manifest mark, to set us on our way. Angels, anyway, thread through our lives, invisible presences, energies, messengers, bringers of dreams–not the hodge-podge of daily events–but those rare dreams of portent and revelation that can change the course of our lives. There are angels who walk beside us as Raphael walked with Tobias, pilgrim angels who carry bowls, not for begging at doors but to hold to our lips from time to time to refresh us with a taste of that emptiness which in their land is fullness. Such a draught–even the brush of an angel wing–can bring one to oneself, and thus to remembering; for without remembering we dream our life away and arrive at the end of it to find that there has been nobody there, the initiatory touch truly forgotten and never woken from. The way has been in us but we have not been on the way.

I cannot recall the time when I was not searching for a nameless unknown. Something Else, I called it as a child, and as that it is still known to me. The longing for it affected me most strongly at sundown, and I would weep, not allowing the grownups to comfort me, tenderly or testily, with assurances that the sun would surely rise in the morning. I knew that. But this unknown was clearly connected with it and seemed to depart with the sun.

As I grew, I learned to contain my sorrow, indeed–except at moments when an angel passed–entirely to forget it. Daily life needs its full share of the human creature’s two natures–the mind its inventions and imaginings, the heart its orchestra of feelings (oh, the drumbeats, the clarinets, the trombones!), flesh and blood their various feastings, in order to have the material to question and to know. Was it not this share that the Prodigal Son–and most of us are Prodigal Sons–set out with his portion to seek? And after, again like most of us, spending it–the revelings and the subsequent sufferings–he came at last to himself. Having forgotten, he had to remember, reminded, perhaps, by a passing angel, and knew he had to turn home.

The parable does not tell us much more. But can we suppose that he spent the rest of his life making merry and feeding on fatted calves? Would he not, after such an awakening, such a realization of his own unworth and at length such a welcome home, feel the need to search within for his essential self? Prodigal in all things, would he not submit himself to the fire of self-question, pursue the reparation of the past through the process of metanoia, and with this new energy stirring in him, apply himself to working in the patriarchal fields along with his elder brother who, significantly, never left him?

There is much to be said for that elder brother who is so often maligned. Clearly, having been told to forget he had very soon remembered that what he was searching for was to be found nowhere but at the father’s side.

Most of us have to go far before we find what is nearer than the neck vein, but the very distance draws one closer. For myself, Something Else no longer sets with the sun. Rather, the sun goes down in myself and I am lost in the twilight. O Forgetting, sustain my Remembering! Stay my feet, angels, upon the way, so that the seeker becomes the sought, and I, too, may be spied from afar as someone comes running to meet me.