CALISTHENICS FEBRUARY 1984
· FACING “OTHER” – LIVING FINER AND FINER –REACHING UP – SYMBOLISM OF THE NIGHT –GUIDED FANTASY – CREATE THE ATMOSPHERE – REQUIREMENTS –PRACTICE THE RESULTS –PARTICIPATE. --
Facing "Other" /Living Finer and Finer
….If your mind works sequentially you have to tune your mind to face "Other" or Christ in-the-first-place. Then, for the situation to become more obvious, more evident, live finer, finer in that climate. See what I mean? Then it begins to make sense, because as you live finer, the whole climate becomes a lot clearer, more evident, more obvious.
….. Training finer, finer, as well as relaxation on the level of your mind, is poorly understood -- which doesn't mean you cannot do it better than you did it before, you can. You simply have to observe several important points: First, the relation with "Other" or Christ, then when you practice finer and finer, you have experiential evidence that it does make the difference in your relation. Your mind is kind of lost with "finer and finer," whereas if you relate to "Other" or Christ, finer and finer makes sense. one day you will realize that if you really begin to face, you cannot do it in the usual condition, then you will be happy you practiced with finer and finer. You will experience the need of it, and you will go even further.
Relative to relaxation: As I said, you simply relax finer and finer points, but usually only on the level of your consciousness. Relaxation, as it is known, is very primitive, and the awareness of relaxation is very poor in the beginning. I'm hinting at a practice in which, when you do it finer and finer, you make endless discoveries.
If I relate, for instance, to the desire exercise, the principle is that if you have fulfilled your desire the desire/tension is gone and then you can begin to become aware of what is working behind. With relaxation you can go behind instantly. You simply relax. But you need practice until you really do it. Let us say it's a step beyond the desire exercise. You just relax and the movement is gone. So you discover what is behind. This is a beginning of a mastery over your personality. You can train your personality to behave according to what you, the comedian, need. If, for instance you begin, as you just told, by living finer and finer with mainly the mind, and you come to a dead end, you relax, the movement is gone, and you are free to do something else.
One of the more difficult points to relax is your brain, because you are used to relaxing everything except the brain. So, do that for the brain and possibly different parts of the brain, depending on what you feel inside. The brain itself is physical, but you can also relax patterns in your brain. Then you can relax patterns outside of the brain, meaning you begin to be able to follow brain-supported awareness or awareness without the brain, and so on. That's a whole world of discovery.
It's not just simple relaxation, you relax because you need it. If you want to live finer, finer, finer, facing "Other" or Christ, for the sake of "Other" or Christ, you will notice that the spinning of the mind and so on are automatic functions, sometimes so coarse relative to your relation with "Other" that you have to stop them -- so you relax them. Then relaxation becomes a tool that allows you to go where you want to go, instead of having the functions in the way all the time.
Another point: When you become aware of, let us say, the genuine note of your relation with "Other" or Christ, as you live finer, finer, you will notice you have a note of that relation all the way down into and throughout the body. This is important, this is what has to happen. And when I say "genuine" I make a difference between what you imagine your relation is and that very different quality where the relation does exist in spite of, and with or without, the functions of your persona.
….Incidentally, that finer and finer practice relates directly toyour experience. It slowly takes away that heaviness, that clumsiness you felt, so it immediately has a very practical purpose. And maybe you learn that other conditions are real, sufficiently real to modify the persona. You have an apparently adequate persona and then something else comes along and suddenly you realize the persona is no longer that adequate, that it has to be reshaped for the purpose of that presence.
But, right now, you have a kind of difficult task because you have to acknowledge and recognize that other condition which is you, instead of imagining that possibly you have a higher self. And it's kind of puzzling. As you experience it, you also realize that the idea you had that your instrumentality was so simple and so finite is definitely not complete and you can experience your body, for instance, very differently. When you feel those high vibrations it's not just high vibrations, it's like particles in suspension instead of a heavy body. See what I mean? This is closer to reality. So just continue.
One of the major problems you have on the level of personality is recognizing the reality of that other condition, respecting it, and letting it work of it's own authority, instead of interfering and deciding everything that has to be done for it. With finer and finer you become aware of what it needs. You don't reduce it, for instance, to mind awareness. And ,as with the previous participant, I would insist that you give a big emphasis to doing it facing "Other." It's very important, very important, because little by little it will diminish the power of what is called "ego," which is artificial.
I have often quoted Patanjali because I find what he says about Atman (which is our symbol for the comedian, and a bit more than that) quite good. He says that Atman projects itself into chitta (mind substance), and the mind makes an image of Atman, feels it is that, and feels being conscious. Patanjali says the mind is not conscious, Atman is. It's a bit difficult for your minds to realize the implications. It means that what we call consciousness is simply a function on the level of the persona, real consciousness is not on that level. Livance is real consciousness. We had to make a special word for it, and you have to learn to respect it. Livance is not dependent on any aspect of consciousness, consciousness is just a function.
So the one who is aware is Atman, but the image on the level of chitta is what is called "ego," and chitta believes it is that. one day you will lose this belief and experience another condition. In the meantime the base remains that ego, that image it makes of Atman, that reflection of Atman on the level of the mind. When you have learned and trained even our own mind to recognize a reflection as not being it, then what you begin to sense of that other presence becomes very real and eventually the center of gravity shifts from the reflection side (ego) to Atman.
But it's some work, some training, you have to adjust consciousness. You have to get the consciousness, all of it, including the sensory, to adjust to the presence of that other condition. This is tremendously hastened if you do the practice facing "Other," for the sake of "Other." As long as you do it for the sake of yourself it is possessiveness and possessiveness is the mode of action of the reflection called ego. Possessiveness, if you want, is a function of survival. The other aspect is not possessive at all.
…..You accept it because I have said it. You have to experience it. You follow your mind understanding more than you follow what you actually live. In your whole situation you practice along a pattern you've had for a long time: Giving your gratefulness to "Other." Then you feel that something is inadequate. You are uneasy with the form, so the form becomes the culprit for your uneasiness.…. Why don't you simply practice finer, finer, finer, facing "Other" -- for the sake of "Other," not for the sake of your being worthy . It's situational, if you want to face "Other," everything, including form has to be finer anyway.
Just behind is something very beautiful, and every once in a while you come out with it. It reminds me of a Hindu book I read a long, long time ago, of which I remember just two sentences. One sentence says, " the effort is the help," and the next says, "the effort is the hindrance." Practically this means you can make the effort in a certain direction for only so long, after that it become the main hindrance. So relax. Facing "Other" is spontaneous. It's not said that first you have to do something and only then, when you live finer and finer, do you face "Other."
Someone else --if you still have the courage.
Participant: It strikes me that we all have a big tendency to work along this line, thinking of finer, finer, finer as a thing that we can somehow produce, and the more I go the more I find that this finer, finer is there all the time ...
Martin: Now, that's a good point.
Participant : ... and it presents itself, not because of what you do consciously, but because of the fact that you, meaning the whole you, can allow this other quality just to be free and there's no pulling or tugging or manipulation of any kind. I would even hesitate to separate the finer, finer, finer from the "Other" or Christ. You can't separate them.
Martin: No, you can't, but neither can you attribute those qualities to them. It's kind of a paradox. But the point you come up with about the tendency of trying to produce it is right. You don't produce it, you allow yourself to live it because it's there already. It's simply that the usual frame of mind and the usual surrounding you live in doesn't leave any place for "finer." So you have to set yourself in a different atmosphere, then that finer aspect is there.
Do you have any comment on what happens when you face "Other"? Because it makes a whole lot of difference -- provided you live it rather than project it, as you said.
Participant: First of all I'd have to say that you don't face anything. You can't set up your mind or anything about yourself thinking that you're facing something. It's beside the point So right away if we think along the usual lines it doesn't work, it's a totally different proposition.
Martin: How would you word it?
Participant: I would say that you open up your eyes, your heart, your everything , to what is there right in front of you. That doesn't sound right either. Well, first it kind of goes without saying that you have to be totally silent within yourself. Totally free of the usual way that you work. You have to have an interest in being out instead of in. Instead of: "How will it be for me?" "How will I feel?" ... you have to first be out -- that's implied in being free. That's a start.
Martin: Okay, it's part of the training, I fully agree, but who can do that?
Participant: There's a point too about a certain way of aligning yourself with what you are, with what you really live.
Martin: I hope you realize that the understanding of what you really are is very poor group-wise.
Participant: But still it's there.
Martin: Sure it's there. How do you proceed to relate, more or less with consciousness, to what you really are without falling in the trap of ego-centeredness?
Participant: Well, you work by that experience that you build that is a giving out. once you feel taking in it stops, and you go back to ego-centeredness. It's just a movement that's not static. It's not inward. It's just outward.
Martin: Okay, but in that proposition "Other" is missing. I remind you because you might have forgotten that all propositions that you come up with, with your mind, feelings, sensations, or whatever, drop when you face "Other," because "Other" is "Other." All propositions go along the line of known references, whereas "Other" is "Other." It's not those references -- all that falls away, including the feeling of having to come out, including the feeling of "real self," because it's "Other." It's not just an inconvenience you push aside.
Symbolism of the Night
I remind you that in St. John of the Cross you have the night of the senses, the night of the understanding, and the night of the soul -- meaning all you have to give is gone. What you expressed tonight is possible only when you face "Other" -- not a concept of "Other" but the fact of "Other."
At just about the same time that St. John of the Cross spoke of the three nights, St. Francis expressed the same thing with holy poverty. We approach Easter and the cross. On the cross, everything is gone, symbolically speaking. It's a discipline. The rules of the game have to be observed, otherwise you fall back into old patterns.
Among the old patterns, there is one we find all the time: reaching up toward the higher self. You find that everything, your body, your emotions, everything stands in the way, so you act like a monk and go into a cell or a cave, away from everything --in order to reach up. Well you can reach up for as long as you want and you will still miss the point.
I repeat the example I have given many times on what I experienced when I was practicing guided fantasy. In that guided fantasy there was an aspect that is pretty well known: the going up to the top of the mountain. Usually people stop there and come down again, but it so happened that every once in a while there was someone who wanted to go higher, beyond the clouds, higher and higher -- across, let us say, a whole region where there is nothing but blue. Then the person goes into a region where there is no color at all, it's completely black -- not black as a color, but black as absence of any color. At that time it is like the night of the soul. Then they come to the point where they lose all sense of orientation, and the drive they started with is gone. They don't know what to do, they are lost. So we suggest that they look around to find if something is attracting them. After some searching, the person sees a point of light, and we suggest they go toward that point of light. So, you have the changing symbolism: the push of causality, up to the point where it vanishes, and then you have the opposite of causality, finality -- a point attracting the person, which happens to be the sun. So the person goes to the sun. They face the sun. Then it is proposed that they go into the sun, into the very middle of the sun. In the very middle of the sun there is beautiful light, everything is beautiful, all the rays are around. So I say to the person: "Turn around and face the way you came -- and now, what do you see?" There is a pause, and sometimes surprise, and the person says: "I am the sun, the rays come from me!"
Now this fantasy is a lot tricker than what I have described, because you have to be able to live with the person and really follow what they are experiencing, and the situation is not always clear -- sometimes you have too much interference of subconscious and so forth, but just to simplify the example. If you want to be the sun you have to turn around. As long as you reach toward the sun you are not the sun, even when you are in the very center of the sun, you're still not the sun. It's surprising that people have not realized this, because the pattern works every time.
So you have the persistence of the pattern of reaching up, and this pattern has to go. St. John of the Cross is quite explicit when he speaks of climbing Mt. Carmel: As you climb there is nada (nothing), and once you are on the top there is still nothing. Now look at your patterns, you always want to climb the mountain for something, then you say it is not egoic.
When you face "Other" you face nada, nothing, because you have no valid reference whatsoever. The game implies you respect "Other" as "Other." of course you can rationalize and decide with your mind that it's simply the absence of known references, but have you the ability to work without known references? From what we see it's not yet here, but it is feasible, provided you respect the game. Facing "Other," you respect "Other."
What can I say? If you want the sun to shine, you have to reshape the persona so that its condition becomes linked to sun. And, if "Other" is accepted, changes are going to go on in the personality whether you want it or not -- even the awareness will change.
So it depends on the possessiveness you have in your own persona. The training diminishes that possessiveness, making everything relative to "Other". "Other" proves itself to be more real once you live it, but as long as you are limited to your person, you just have the intuition of it, or the longing for it.
There is also another point that is usually forgotten: Living a higher condition is a lot easier when you have the climate or atmosphere proper to it. As an example, you have some experiences here with us, and then you go home and suddenly it's vanished -- that is unless you insist again and again, and then it comes back. So, let us say, it's easier to tune to something finer when you are here than when you are at home. This simply means you haven't created the finer climate at home. The atmosphere has to be created.
Or let's take another situation: You want to help someone tune to that "deeper" self. It's not that difficult if you provide the climate. If you don't, it might prove to be impossible in some cases -- simply because the climate or atmosphere is not there. So when you offer help, don't just offer the function going on, offer the atmosphere, the climate, the terrain in which it is a reality.
Participant: Do you create that terrain just by presence?
Martin: The first requirement is that you have to live it. If you live it repeatedly it begins to create an atmosphere in your surrounding. There is a more advanced stage in which you actually create it, but, just for now, understand that the first requirement is to live that condition as constantly as possible. If it's deep in your heart, vital to you, you might forget it for a few moments, but it's always right behind the action of the moment. When you live steadily, continuously, you never really get out of it. If it looks like you do, you might notice it's right behind, and if you stop for one second, then you notice it's already here. This is what is involved in my idea of training. You have to create the atmosphere, and you have to repeat it. You have to realize, psychologically, that if you want an action to go all the way down to your subconscious, this is done by repetition. You have to live, and live, and live, and live -- until it sinks in. Then you finally have an action that goes throughout. Another word for throughout is "transparency" (trans-appear- ency ).
Speaking of atmosphere, right now you have a certain sense of fineness, stay with this facing "Other." We are going to play a piece of music called "Dawn" -- the sun rising on a pond. Symbolically you are the sun, the pond is your persona. Notice that as we work together we give you another atmosphere, and notice that it changes quite a few things. The point I want to make is the importance of the climate you create. Climate, atmosphere, terrain -- call it what you want -- even another planet if you want, just as long as it works for you.
Fine, fine, fine ,facing Christ or facing "Other." Respect "Other." Do it for "Other."
( music )
Now see for yourselves. Look around. You have a climate that is very different from what it was just a moment before. Please register the importance of "climate." It's a lot easier to live fine, fine, fine in this climate, isn't it? "Other" is more real too.
When you live finer, finer, finer, facing "Other" or facing Christ, you change. You feel different all over, including physically. If you go in front of a mirror, you will see a change. I don't say your features change, but the life expressed by them does change. If there is no change, you have made a construct -- something developed artificially, with a mixture of desire and thinking. You might, with your thoughts, come up with all the fine points you have heard of or invented yourself and apply them, but this does not mean you live it.
You know I am in a difficult situation with you. I do see what is functioning, and actually it's more comprehensive than seeing, but I am not always free to tell you because you might find it too rough. As long as you have the feeling that I'm trying to put you down, it's your ego trying to defend or justify itself. This is not the point. we are involved in an action and there are requirements to be met. If they are to be met, practice/action has to go along in a certain way so that you have results. From the beginning, up to the point where practice starts to bring results , you have all sorts of experiences to go through, and if I tell you that something is a mental construct, or it's a mixture of so and so much emotion and so and so much mental, of this quality rather than that quality and so on, you might be shocked, because you believe in what you feel.
You know, I have said that you have to train your mind to recognize itself when it functions in a reflecting way, accept that it is a reflection, and find what it is a reflection of. It's a discipline. Until the discipline is practiced successfully, there is the tendency, if the imagery of your mind is clear, to take that imagery for reality. Now if we tell you this is a mind construct, you might make a depression, so I have to be careful with what I say, until you are mature enough to be able to accept the situation as it is. You have many ways to check by yourself, and I wish that you would never accept anything just because I say it, everything has to be experiential, so that there is no discussion in your mind. But most of the time you check with what is called the concrete mind and seldom with the more abstract side, which is a higher mind and has a function that is altogether different.
There is also another difficult aspect. Sometimes when you tell your experience, you show the other side, what we call the "real one," but the mind still exerts supremacy, meaning you reduce what you live to the dimension of the mind. So let's say you tell me something and I see a mind construct and I tell you that this does not correspond to what you live, very often, instead of dropping the mind reference and going back to what you really live, the mind tries to justify itself -- "...but I live something else." Sure you live something else, but the center of gravity is still in the mind instead of on that something else. There is a limberness to be developed in which you can play with those different aspects, so that you can go back to what you actually live and then see clearly what you do with your mind, instead of staying at the level of the mind and trying to justify.
We also have a chronic difficulty when we ask for feedback or questions from your practice. We have seen today that you are still reluctant to speak. It's getting slightly better, but there has been a tendency not to speak unless you can speak "right." I hope that soon you will be more mature than that. When you use words that are appropriate because it's in the text of the book, or you serve back something that is in the transcript so that you are sure to be right, if you don't live it, I don't accept it. The reverse is that you live a condition but you express very clumsily -- I do accept that, because I accept what you live. And when you actually have some kind of problem that you don't want to give out, you might do a disservice to the others, because that very difficulty might trigger an answer that helps someone with the same difficulty. So it's a service for the whole group. Then, also, if you are stuck, there are ways to get out of it that you might have forgotten. If you stay stuck you manifest a climate of " stuckness ." If you follow the climate in the room, for instance, you might realize that it is not based on being stuck, so it might help you to release the pattern, relax it, and then you might realize that you can live otherwise.
Some of you are chronically silent, instead of participating alive. It's a pity, a loss of time. You show that you come again and again, so there is a purpose behind. Go with the purpose, don't waste time. of course, sometimes you just have no questions, but most of the time when you refrain from speaking, it's just that you go back into your little ego. In the service of Christ we have no place for that. We could do so much if the exchange were more alive. Most of the time when I ask a question, it's not to see whether a higher condition is alive or not, but rather to see whether, or how much, or in what way you are conscious of it.
Participant: In human terms that's still the same trap. If you don't think you are conscious of it, it's easier to not say anything -- then you think you've not been revealed.
Martin: Here you have a point. You know, what strikes me so often is that you do show an activity of the condition we are working with, and your consciousness does not acknowledge it. For instance, we live something together, so you go home and try it again. Psychologically, you ought to register that you just lived it, so you can live it, but instead you go home and take up the old pattern and negate it in order to reach it. Be consistent with your experience. The old pattern: "First I have to reach it" is actually a negation of what you are. How can you reach yourself? Don't you see all that you accept that does not correspond to what you live? This is why we insist, not on thought-processing, but on living. Living is also called "experience," so the process is experiential. We use still another term: "evidence." In front of an evidence you have no question in your mind.
So, it's getting late. We'll play two pieces, one after the other. Just face "Other." Finer. Finer. Finer. Without trying to do anything.
I'm aware that the terminology "facing" implies a duality, but practically speaking you cannot "reach" unity when your mind says, "Let's drop duality and play unity." You know from experience it doesn't work. Face "Other" or Christ until the relation is so obvious that the situation little by little changes of it's own authority and not the doing of your consciousness. Consciousness is a function of personality and a function only. Real awareness is different.
Participant: In living that finer, finer, finer and facing Christ, should there be a complete stillness, no movement, or can there be a natural movement.
Martin: Practically speaking, you begin as you can, but you will notice, especially if you are in tune with the music , you might have even emotional movements. The more you practice with relaxation, the more you learn to drop those movements, because you enter finally into a completely different relationship.
In the first movement, for instance, there is an exchange of love, but it is love as you know it persona-wise. One day you experience love in the exchange that is utterly different, no comparison of any kind. The references the persona has for love is a very pale image of what it actually is , but you have to begin somewhere. But I would agree that it becomes quieter and quieter and quieter, until you are able to face "Other" with no movement at all from the persona. Now this we cannot ask at the start, but it is a definite possibility that happens at sometime. So the tendency is toward that quietness.
If we take the symbolism behind the Desire Exercise, you relax all that is creating the tension on the level of the persona. All movement, of whatever kind, implies a tension. So if you relax everything, you become aware of what is behind, and if you relax your own awareness, then you start experiencing something different. But for some people, the idea of quietness makes them do something artificial. Instead of relaxing a movement, they block a movement. This is a heavy weight. It's not the way to do it, because a movement blocked means simply that it has lost its freedom, so it's going to burst out somewhere, sometime.
And I'm fully aware that the tendency in some minds: when we speak of quiet, quiet, is to try to perform it through mind, emotions, or some sort of emotional willpower. No, it has to be a natural occurrence, free. If you cannot do it naturally, at least express something, make an exchange as you can. Don't stay in that condition, don't fix it. Life is changing constantly, today you use this expression, tomorrow you use another one.
( music )