Plavan N. Go Interview
Plavan N. Go has
recently submitted three articles
to GIG. His own web address, both in Japanese and English, is centered
around the Movements and the seminars that he is arranging. Some of the photos
Plavan took on his travels in Central Asia are used in our E-cards.
Reijo:
In Japan you have Zen, which to me looks fairly complete as a way for personal
development. You have studied Gurdjieff's ideas now for about twenty years. What
made you prefer Gurdjieff to Zen?
Plavan: Zen exists in the
proximity of a man like Gurdjieff. The question of preference does not arise in
me at all, either between Zen and Gurdjieff or between Gurdjieff and Osho. When
I am pulled by the presence of such men, it is not due to my preference.
Similarly, it is not quite exact to say that I studied Gurdjieff for nearly
twenty years. In these years, this "I" in me has simply been overwhelmed by what
he was and what he taught.
A Zen master may hit you very hard after
hearing you say that Zen is a way for personal development. Zen may appear to
you more destructive than developmental. It destroys our mind, that is, a
false bridge between various sets of dualities that we find in and out of
ourselves, so that we may drop into the gap and find ourselves there. Several
weeks ago, a student of Zen told me that the work he experienced with us was
more destructive than what he experienced so far in the tradition of Zen. He
said it as a compliment, not as a criticism. The group broke into a big laughter
after hearing him say this with a certain amount of seriousness in his voice.
I tasted something of Zen when I learned Zazen and swordsmanship at a
local Zen monastery in my childhood. In my adulthood, however, I did not attempt
to look for a teacher in the official lineages of Zen Buddhism, so much burdened
by formalities, political concerns, and authority trips; not mentioning the
occasional happening of sexual perversion and violence to novice students in
monasteries.
If you read Zen anecdotes, like the ones included in Zen Flesh Zen Bones
The way of direct
transmission as followed by authentic Zen masters is quite different from what
we associate with the word "lineage." This English word is quite problematical
because it assumes linearity of transmission as if in a top-down flow. It also
gives an idea that a disciple can reach somewhere simply by following a single
line of teaching that appears straight only to his deluded mind. Neither
Gurdjieff nor ancient Zen masters supported such views.
At certain places
in Japan, one may come across the lingering smell of something real that must
have happened around the presence of an authentic Zen master. This smell,
however, comes mostly from the past. Those who are interested in making a
contact with the true spirit of Zen may have a better chance of finding it
elsewhere.
Reijo: What you say may well be also true of many other
traditions. What Gurdjieff taught is nearer to us in time and in the
formulation. What do you see as the main difference? Is it just a matter of
linguistic differences or is it something else?
Plavan: Traditions
are different lines of dispersion. They are surely different from each other and
even contradictory. Originators of traditions are not part of their traditions
or of any particular tradition. Gurdjieff draw from many sources, making himself
available to contradictory influences and reconciling them by nothing less than
the power of his being.
Some of the contradictions that we find among
different traditions are superficial while others are serious. People who
believe that they are moving in similar directions may actually be moving in
opposite directions. The reverse can also be the case. With all types of
contradictions, we must learn to be able to use them instead of avoiding them or
compromising them with explanations. How can one use contradictions to benefit
one's being? This is the central subject of Zen. By sincerely struggling with
this koan, we may come closer to the source of all traditions, which can
be defined either as a point of no contradiction or the point of maximum
contradiction.
Compared with Zen patriarchs, Gurdjieff may appear closer
to us. Still, these several decades following the departure of Gurdjieff is
already a great distance. For example, it seems difficult now to find anywhere
the Zen aspect of Gurdjieff's teaching that must have been there with him.
What's hopelessly missing is the sharpness of contradictions that a man like
Gurdjieff must have allowed in himself and evoked in those who were courageous
enough to be with him.
Different lines of dispersion stem from a man like
Gurdjieff because one cannot bear the contradictions that had been harmonized in
him by the power of his being. A little mathematical thinking is enough to see
that everything will be lost very quickly in the process of radial dispersion
unless the different lines of dispersion make dangerous contacts with each
other, creating something out of the heat produced by clashes, which are
inevitable. This is not necessarily a political suggestion; one can produce such
clashes within oneself and benefit from them. I thank you for creating and
holding a space where such may happen at least in the Internet
universe.
Reijo: There certainly are contradictions enough, also
when we look at what has been done in Gurdjieff's name in just over 50 years.
What held together all the contradictions in what he taught was, as you say, his
own understanding and being. Some of it can be sensed in his writings.
The internet is a good example from where I am sitting; I often feel
like playing the role of the devil, however badly I do it!
I find your
remark about the courage of the people who followed him at his own time very
interesting. I am not at all sure that I could have the courage to be with him
if the situation arose.
Enough speculation! Would you like to tell me how
you work; what you see as important for yourself in your
Work?
Plavan: Reijo, I think your position at this particular
space in the Internet universe should be that of a creator or of a maintainer
rather than that of a devil, even though a creator may have to include in him
something of a devil in order for him to be a real creator. It is good to enjoy
the awareness of our being a medium of different forces in the Law of Three at
different occasions and in different contexts.
Would I have followed
Gurdjieff if I was living in his time? I responded yes to this question when it
was placed to me long ago by Mr. W in our meeting with Ms. M, a woman who had
been a long time member of a Foundation group which was then led by Lord
Pentland. Mr. W, the representative of a publisher that sold Gurdjieff's
Meetings with Remarkable Men along with many books by Osho, then spoke
about Osho's sannyasins (approximately but not exactly meaning disciples) he was
in contact with and about his mixed feeling of admiration and fear in seeing the
risks they took in their involvement with the communal movement around Osho. Ms.
M then said something about my intellectualism and told me that I would have to
learn from a man like him, whom she regarded equivalent to Gurdjieff but more
"vulgar." I followed her advice a few years after this
meeting.
Ironically, Ms. M did not follow her own words, leaving the
Foundation group a few years later after writing a book in which she stated that
she found something better than Gurdjieff, which for her was Mouravieff. From
one of her ex-group members to whom she recently advised to work with me, I
learned about her criticism of Gurdjieff and Osho being "too powerful." About
this comment of hers, I must say that the first thing that struck me in seeing
Osho was the absence of that kind of power which we often associate with such a
man: the power that commands and dictates. When I became aware of subtler
something that flowed from his presence after some time, I began to see how this
subtler something, in its interaction with the space outside, produced a
phenomenon of such a scale that even Ronald Reagan took notice of and found it
very disturbing. Gurdjieff had the same presence, as I confirmed from seeing him
alive in a part of a French documentary film.
There are many stories
about how, in the presence of Gurdjieff, people were stripped naked, revealing
both the best and worst of themselves. The same has happened around Osho and
kept on happening even after his departure. In any case, it is rewarding but
arduous to stay near the presence of such a man. Osho's sannyasins have a high
"death rate"; probably less than one among a few hundred nominal sannyasins
really took the intensity of being authentically a sannyasin for more than
several years. In Gurdjieff's words, others are probably "shits" but I cannot
help loving most of them seeing the purpose they serve.
It is my
conviction that one cannot expect to be able to work on oneself alone. When we
find out that we are the slave of what we believe as ourselves, how can we
proceed without some external help? I heard Osho say that something must enter
us from outside, breaking the vicious circle in which we live, before we become
capable of moving on our own. I also heard him say that even though we become
freer of ordinary needs as we grow, the need to work with others will remain. I
find these words true and so it is most important for me to be in a situation
where I can have dynamic exchanges with others. But now, due to the rapid
disintegration of the communal movement around Osho in the last several years, I
cannot expect others to maintain or provide such a situation for me. So my focus
has changed to making small experiments locally in producing a situation for
such dynamic exchanges. It is also important for me to seek connection with
other individuals and groups in the world that hold interests similar to ours,
even though the number of which may not be so many.
Reijo: I fail
to see why anyone can go from Gurdjieff to Mouravieff! It does not make any
sense! Mouravieff made a mixture of Ouspensky's interpretation of Gurdjieff's
teaching and Orthodox Christianity. There is no need to mix these two. The
result is a mess and a theoretical presentation of 'something' without feeling,
without life. It can be compared to mixing a cup of coffee with a cup of tea.
Contacts are important. The best of Gurdjieff work for me has come from
contacts with people. Perhaps it is just me, but I have learned much more from
my friends than from group work. I am talking of a special kind of friendship,
where work is always somewhere in the background and can come into
focus.
We need the 'outside', but we also need to work ourselves. On a
more personal level what about your work? What are the efforts you make to work
on yourself? What is your definition of the work?
Plavan: I think
I understand what you call a special kind of friendship. In fact, I find such
friendship very compatible with group work; not so with institutionalized work.
Such friendship is definitely a quality of the group work I pursue. It is
special because it can go against the rules of ordinary friendships at any
unexpected moment. So it can happen only among the group of people for whom
truth is more important than convenience. Our ordinary relationships including
marriage are governed by unspoken agreements about the mutual sharing of certain
illusions, often called aims and ideals, and the mutual avoidance of certain
issues. Such relationships cannot endure even a few words of truth. I hope
not-so-many of work groups in the world are the gathering of people who
rigorously follow their own set of such unspoken agreements.
You
mentioned the need to balance the work on oneself and the work with others. The
local group I lead is based on the principle of mutual exchange where one is
expected not only to take but also to give. If any group member including myself
does not work on oneself and stays in the group mostly for getting some juice
out of it, he becomes aware of it through noticing that he has nothing to give.
If this person acknowledges that he has nothing to give, however, he is already
giving something valuable to the group in the form of his awareness, which also
is a part of his work on himself. Not depending on one's level of development,
everyone has something to give. Even the need that brings one to the group, if
it is an authentic one, is a valuable offering to the group. For this mutual
exchange to happen, however, each group member including myself has to fight
against one's tendency to give something false instead of something real. I have
a strong determination to maintain the rigorousness of the special kind of
friendship, which does not allow the group to turn into a social club or an
institution. By the way, I use the pronoun "he" only because of my male
chauvinism even though the majority of our local group members are women, which
hopefully should prove that I am not really a male chauvinist pig.
I
define the work as whatever we do outside the scope of survival, convenience,
and comfort in life. It is both obligatory and voluntary. It is obligatory in
the sense that my desire for work is something at the core of myself but still
not of my own; it is something that comes from the fact of myself being born as
a man. It is voluntary in the sense that man has a freedom to ignore this need;
a very deceptive kind of freedom because this need or obligation can be ignored
only at the cost of a great loss. So the work is inevitable. Since a grownup man
may not only accept but also welcome this inevitability, the word "effort" may
not always be appropriate. I simply follow what is experienced as the deepest of
desires in me.
In the work as well as in life, I find myself often guided
by a definite sense of orientation that I have in my body, physical or
nonphysical I don't know, especially in the area of what Japanese call hara. I
hate keeping in my head notions about what I should do or what I want to do
because they cloud my perception. I like to keep my perception open to various
possibilities and evaluate each in reference to a definite sensation it produces
in my hara. What I choose to do in the context of my work on myself and my work
with others can change wildly from moment to moment; still they are coherent
because they all produce in me and probably in others a similar sensation in
this particular part of the body. This is not something very esoteric at least
to Japanese who have many idioms that describe this phenomenon. I am following
the same principle as I respond to you in this interview.
Reijo:
If Hara is not anything esoteric then perhaps I could just call it 'gut
feeling', which in the English sense I associate with having 'guts'. I am not
sure that you would accept it.
Would it be correct to connect hara with
sensation of the body and to throwing an anchor, which enables a certain
'stance' when one is back in the body? Or am I just 'wiseacring'?
Plavan: Difficult to judge . . . Let me ask two girls over here
now who are our group members. [They both say mmmm . . . .] The way you
described it can serve the purpose of describing how hara is experienced in
everyday life. But when you say "throwing an anchor to enable a certain stance,"
you are referring to an idea that I initially did not intend to address in
depth: that is, an idea that this is something one can practice. If we choose to
talk in this context, things are more esoteric, so then we need to describe it
in a different way.
Even in terms of our everyday experience, hara is a
point where we can have the maximum contact with whatever is moving in us. Since
all movements happen between opposites, it is equivalent to saying that hara is
sensitive to oppositions, conflicts, and contradictions. When there is an
unspoken conflict between two persons in the group, for example, it produces
something in my hara even though my head may ignore it. When we encounter a
danger, it produces a shock in our hara with the awareness it brings of death
opposing life. In those moments, we may have the sensation of being hit at and
then holding something in hara. This idiom "holding something in hara" in
Japanese has a negative connotation of "not acknowledging." If the expression
"gut feeling" means something similar, it is not the sensation we are finally
looking for.
This "something in hara" is produced and remains there
because we could not digest the contradictions we swallowed. This "something in
hara" may include what we call "guts," if they come from the force of biological
reaction against our acceptance of the opposition in us between life and death.
This reaction obscures our perception of the matters of life and death with an
animal-instinctive conviction that can be translated as: "I will not die as long
as I follow this force of biological reaction." People with guts are often those
who are busy doing something in order to survive and succeed. On the contrary,
Zen masters and samurai reach the depth of their hara through their awareness of
the inevitability of death.
It is not good to practice focusing on hara
by emphasizing the sensation of "something" that already is there. It often
cultivates a false sense of strength. Exactly for this reason, some teachers
like to teach such a method of "developing hara," which immediately attracts
people. This is a mistake commonly made in the circle of martial artists.
According to a martial art jargon, however, a real master is the one who has
"broken open" his hara. Such a man is free from stances and unpredictable in his
actions. So it is not good to use "anchor" as an example because it means
holding something in hara. What we pursue is penetration into hara, which at
some moments breaks this "something." Its sensation can be compared to liquid
seeping into a gap in our being or a knife cutting into the core of our being.
The essence of what happens to us in the practice of Movements and some
other exercises can be described as: "dividing up things that are usually
connected and connecting things that are usually divided." This process is most
observable in the combined functioning of hara and a center in our head of
impartial awareness. The products of compromise that we hold in our hara have to
be broken up again in our awareness into the opposing elements which originally
formed them. In this process, something is released which can seep into the
depth of our being, where we find a force that brings about true reconciliation.
This process is described as "falling into hara," which in Japanese carries the
same meaning as "understanding." In this connection, you may refer to what
Beelzebub has said about "djartklom."
This experience of penetrating hara
or falling into hara is often the result of our impartial perception and
balancing of opposing elements that are in us. Paul Reps, a Zen student aware of
Gurdjieff who discovered the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, called it "centering." Some
centering techniques can be as simple as balancing one's weight as one sits or
matching the openness of perception with the intensity of sensation. For details
of such techniques and more reliable description about the phenomenon of falling
into hara, I recommend that you read Osho's book on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
titled The Book of Secrets. The girls over here, by the way, have
just looked at your picture and told me that they like you very much because you
look like a man who has "warmth in his hara."
Reijo: Yes, what
would life be without girls! I keep 'falling in love'. Please tell them my
regards - I also felt the warmth! I have found that particularly the elder women
in the work are very feminine and have a quality of 'eternal youth' in them. One
of them was my Movements teacher, Mrs Rosemary Nott and this brings me to the
Movements themselves.
Talking about Beelzebub it is amazing what
discoveries can be made. Recently in another context you mentioned the old
Chinese/Japanese calender and the 'nine day week'. Your specified the days in
this way:
1 Sunday / Sun
2 Tuesday / Mars
3 "Ketu"
4 Monday /
Moon
5 Thursday / Jupiter
6 "Rago" (or "Rahu")
7 Saturday / Saturn
8
Wednesday / Mercury
9 Friday / Venus
After your tip to Beelzebub
mentioning China and the Law of Seven one of our friends quoted from The
Tales:
"And so, my boy, these great terrestrial learned beings, the twin brothers Choon-Kil-Tess and Choon-Tro-Pel, now saints, were the first, after the loss of Atlantis, to lay anew the foundation of this knowledge They not only laid anew the foundation of this 'totality of special information' but they were also the first on Earth to ascertain two of the three fundamental particularities of that great law about which I have told you, that is to say, they were the first to ascertain its two 'mdnel-in.s ' That branch of genuine knowledge, similar to the one known on the continent of Atlantis as the 'science of the seven aspects of every whole phenomenon,' they called the 'Law of Ninefoldness', and they called it thus because they added to the seven clearly differentiated manifestations of this great law, which they called 'doostzakos,' the two particularities first observed by them which they named 'sooansotoorabitzo,' a word signifying 'obligatory gap aspect of the unbroken flowing of the whole ' And they named this law thus because during their exhaustive research they became convinced beyond doubt that in all the 'cosmic transitory results' they investigated, these particularities are necessarily found at specific places in the process of this great law. " [BT 1992 p. 761; 1950 p. 831]
Your answer to this was:
"I first came
across this system of nine planets at a temple called Sekizan Zen-In at the foot of Mount Hiei in northern Kyoto.
A monk at that temple showed me an old scroll that described a ritual called
Hoshi-Matsuri (ritual of planets). In this ritual, they imagine a circle on the
temple floor and move between different points on the circle. I don't know if
they still perform this ritual today. I imagine it being something a little like
the Enneagram Movement taught by Gurdjieff."
Interesting
coincidences!
I was recently impressed when I read how you had taught
some Movements to children in Vladivostok in Russia. You have referred to the
Movements in this interview. What is the power of the Movements? Is it that the
main message of 'the Teacher of Dancing' was in fact not at all a 'system' (like
Ouspensky thought and taught), but something non-verbal and completely out of
reach by our 'wiseacring'? A puzzle comparable to a Zen
koan?
Plavan: You touched upon some very interesting topics, the
perception of which have brought up in me a number of thoughts. Not to be
carried away, I have to summarize and rephrase them in my own way:
(1)
Importance of girls in life and miracles that happen to them
(2) Study of the
Law of Seven (or "Ninefoldedness") in the Chinese context
(3) The power of
the Movements versus our tendency toward intellectual
systematization
About the first topic, I also see the importance of being
around girls and that is why I don't entertain the idea of entering a Zen
monastery, which is a male-only society. One Gurdjieff group I came across in
the past had a long history of being almost a male-only society. One of the
members sighed as he told me that girls do come once in a while but run away
soon. They cannot tolerate men's intellectualism; they find out quickly that men
are out of touch with reality. If one's girlfriend or wife does not show
interest in what he does in the name of the work, maybe it does not worth any
respect. With regard to "miracles," I think it is enough to say that the two
girls over here I mentioned earlier, Baby and Godzilla, are also examples of
phenomena that are in sheer violation of physical laws. Baby was already young
when she joined the group, and getting younger as she grew, she is now a baby.
Godzilla was tall when she joined the group, and getting even taller in the last
few months, she now begins to spit fire when something hits her deep in her
hara.
Now, we shall go into the second topic, something about the Law of
Seven. The sequence of the Nine Planets of the Week as you have given is exactly
as it is applied by oriental astrologers when predicting a series of events in
our life. They are usually assigned in this sequence to different years in our
life. The two intervals, Ketu and Rago, are associated with years in which
things do not happen in the way we expect. If you sort the list in the normal
order of the days of the week after removing Friday, it gives the enneagram
number: 142857. Though this is indeed an interesting coincidence, I cannot go
over the question of "so what?" because my attempt to study further in this
direction was met by heaps and heaps of mumbo-jumbo documents that discuss this
system in the context of the Hindu or Chinese astrology.
A related topic
that I find more clean and interesting is the study of ancient Chinese poetry,
concisely written following a set of mathematical rules that determine the
number of lines (typically four or eight) and the number of characters per line
(typically five or seven). At the same time, they must follow some rules about
tonalities and rhymes. Within these constraints, the intent of the poet is to
make a full representation of the reality as he experienced it. With this aim in
view, the poet provides the reader with a new, additional, or complementary
perception on each of the lines, carefully calculating its effect in
relationship to what he presented in the preceding line(s); what he may present
in the subsequent line(s); and the cumulative effect of the all. In these
poetries, one can observe the manifestations of lawful irregularities along with
their impact. Often it is also possible to identify the two intervals and the
difference between them. Poets deal with the two intervals by such techniques as
introducing a new perception (e.g. suddenly bringing in the perception of time),
changing the perspective (e.g. from narrow to wide), changing the modality of
perception (e.g. from vision to sensation), switching the inner/outer gestalt
(e.g. from descriptive to personal), and so on.
According to my
observation, discoveries that concern the Law of Three tend to be existential
(penetrate my hara) while discoveries that concern the Law of Seven tend to be
practical (help me even in making money). With regards the practicality of the
Law of Seven, I believe that I have understood something about the two questions
Gurdjieff has placed and nobody seems to have answered: "Why the second interval
comes after Si in the musical scale while it comes after Sol when represented in
the enneagram?" and "What does it tell about its difference from the first
interval?." I avoid giving my answers to these questions because it may destroy
the opportunities for others to find them out by experiencing them.
Now,
after this small interval of intellectual talking, it is a good time to go into
the last topic you mentioned: the power of the Movements versus our tendency
toward intellectual systematization. Thanks to this small interval of
intellectual talking, we are now in a good position to ask ourselves: What is
this intellect that seems to run on its own? Whose order is it following? Where
does it take us? These questions lead us to a horrifying revelation about the
real nature of something that drives us into the infinite process of
intellectualization.
Morpheus: Do you know what I am talking about?
Neo: The Matrix?
["The Matrix"; the first film; and not the Reloaded one, which is not taken account of herein, and in which Morpheous, Neo and other humans are seemingly less self-aware than programs]
The Matrix is
another name of what Gurdjieff called Kundabuffer and what Zen masters and Osho
called mind. In this context, mind is a technical term the exact
meaning of which you should not assume that you know even though it manifests
itself everywhere. It refers to the constant process of compromising dualities
as well as our beliefs and mechanical patterns that are the results of these
compromises. In this particular usage, mind does not mean the faculty of
intellect, even though its misuse is at the base of the phenomenology of
mind. When Morpheus or Gurdjieff uses the word "mind," on the other hand,
it refers to the faculty of intellect or intelligence that is usually under the
domination of the Matrix, Kundabuffer, or mind (as a process of
delusion):
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It's all around us; even in this very room . . . It's the world pulled over your eyes to blind you from truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: Of that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you are born into bondage; into a prison which you cannot smell, taste, or touch: a prison for your mind.
The last
sentence of Morpheous remains true even when we rephrase it as "a prison
of your mind." In other words, our intellect in its ordinary state
is nothing but a slave of our conditioning, that has a biological basis as
Gurdjieff suggested in the Beelzebub's Tales, one particularity of which is that
it is blind to the inevitability of our death. Since our mind (no italics) in
its ordinary state is only a slave or extension of our biological function, what
we experience as the body-mind duality is something very cheap; it is nothing
higher than petty fights between husband and wife, which in Japan we say "even
dogs don't eat." In other words, body and mind, even though they fight each
other, are both slaves to a single force running the game that does not really
benefit either of them:
The head does not exist; it is the result of the body.
[Gurdjieff; May 25, 1944]
It is rare to find a man who
realized the extent to which our intellect remains an extension of our
biological instinct even though it is clear enough that it evolved as a weapon
for survival. What drives anyone into wanting to cover up reality by a system of
thoughts? It is fear. Such a man is afraid of the universe and cannot
live without the security of convincing himself that he has known
everything.
Now, finally coming to the topic of the power of the
Movements, its action is destructive to those who are still clinging to this
security of the mind; soothing to those who began to realize and suffer the
consequences of this security; and developmental to those who went beyond the
point of maximum despair. About the insights into reality that the Movements can
provide to people of the second and third categories, I think that I have spoken
enough in my other articles; so I will not mention them now.
To people of
the first category, the practice of the Movements shows how isolated from
reality they are and how their fearful way of dealing with reality cannot even
succeed in coordinating their physical movements. They come with an idea that
they can use the Movements for training their body and mind. No. The Movements
have to destroy something in them before they can develop something in them that
is above their body and mind. This sounds rather dangerous, but it is not more
dangerous than not taking the risk. Studying Gurdjieff's ideas and avoiding the
Movements is very dangerous. With Russian children, however, I did nothing
destructive of this kind but simply played with them even though I may have
destroyed something in their teacher. I have no interest in making the practice
of the Movements into a form of body-mind training. The first requirement,
according to Morpheus, should be the readiness of "a man who accepts what he
sees, because he is expecting to wake up."
For anyone who has any real
intelligence, the process of intellectualization should be experienced as walls
closing up from all directions, encapsulating him into a "prison which you
cannot smell, taste, or touch," as Morpheus described it. As the film suggests,
the search starts from the moment when one begins to see that "something is
wrong." From this moment, our need to know about the real state of affairs is no
more intellectual but instinctive. Even though I call it instinctive, it comes
from a part of our organic presence that has separated itself from the force of
biological slavery that has been in command so far.
When this moment has
come, again as the film suggests, we must start looking for our real body which
can be in a really pitiable state, the awareness of which should make us vomit.
After going through a lot of vomiting and receiving much care, we become ready
to begin our further inquiry into the secret of this mechanism that turned us
into slaves and the way to become free of it. At the same time, it should be a
real concern for us whether any purpose exists or not for our existence apart
from the purpose of being a slave. These are the questions of life and death as
the film depicts them so.
Now, it must be interesting for you to compare
these views of mine with Mr.
William Patterson's article on The Matrix, after reading which I become
afraid if he was not under a contract with the Agent Smith. On my part, however,
I have to confess that I must also be biased because I cannot help being
identified a little with Neo because this is how I was once called in America,
the first part of my given name Naobumi, the Chinese letter for which coincides
with the one pronounced "sho" in Osho, a letter that symbolizes "multiple
expansion of consciousness" according to his description.
One of Mr.
Patterson's criticism is that our awakening cannot be as simple as taking a red
pill. As far as the first awakening that I described a moment ago is concerned,
it is actually as simple as that even though it has its own hazards as the film
suggests. We are doing all kinds of efforts, even in the name of the work, in
order to prevent this first awakening to happen. Gurdjieff, and more recently
Osho, have distributed the red pills in abundance. Ouspensky must have had many
chances to take these pills but obviously he refused. Apart from this first
awakening that actually is not all-comfortable, the film depicts another type of
awakening that should follow the first but is not as simple as taking a pill.
The Movements can be helpful in the process of the both.
With regards
your last question, I agree that reality is unreachable through our wiseacring,
a practice that can easily turn into the act of "titillation," but it is not
something apart from us. Things that keep on happening in and around us in
reality are puzzles to our mind but have their own logic. Most importantly, we
may be awakened to the purpose of everything that exist through deepening our
contacts with them. In this sense, the Movements show us a way that Osho
described as "reaching the ultimate through the immediate."
I would like
to finish by quoting Gurdjieff's words on self-love, the same as those which you
have chosen for the menu page of the Articles section:
Without self-love a man can do nothing. There are two qualities of self-love. One is a dirty thing. The other, an impulse, love of the real "I". Without this it is impossible to move. An ancient Hindu saying - "Happy is he who loves himself, for he can love me."
[Gurdjieff, 1941]
There can be a long period of transition between our departure
from the first type of self-love and our arrival at the second type of
self-love. I am fortunate in having received supports from others in this
transitory process and wish everyone else on this path to receive the
same.
Reijo: I have enjoyed our exchange and getting to know you
better in this way!
To finish I will quote a little anecdote from Stanley
Nott, because in a way it is related to how I feel about this
interview.
I visited him quite often at his cottage, this time with a
friend. Mr. Nott was a very able gardener now approaching the age of 90. Among
other things he cultivated roses and had a large vegetable garden, which he took
really good care of.
One of his larger crops was potatoes, which grew to
a good size and formed a large part of the meals he cooked for us.
We
were all having a good time working a little, talking and laughing a lot. He
then disappeared into the cottage and called us for a meal, which tasted very
good. It was simple, but extraordinary; a meal never to be forgotten.
Mr.
Nott could see how much we enjoyed the meal and said: "Yes. The best potatoes I
ever made."
Plavan: Yes, good potatoes indeed! About these
potatoes, Mullah Nassr Eddin would say: "Potatoes love shits because they are
nourishments. Shits hate shits because they cannot see their purpose. It is a
sign of your growth if you begin to love shits." We have to be aware, however,
that potatoes do not love plastics.
At the end, let us return to the
sentence I pronounced earlier when I referred to the characteristics of the Law
of Seven:
Things do not happen in the way we expect.
It now occurred to me that I have written quite a lot in one of my articles how the universe can be maintained without going down the drain exactly because of this. Let us meditate over how our mind is afraid of this aspect of reality and then how it is objectively an aspect of reality that contains real hope. Balancing our awareness of the both may produce a small explosion inside. This is the result of combining our understanding of the Law of Three with our understanding of the Law of Seven.