print version: 
Miracle or Funeral-NEW.pdf
Miracle or Funeral-NEW.pdf 
A MIRACLE OR A FUNERAL
A MIRACLE or A FUNERAL
The Last 33 Days
Edited Highlights
ALAN J. RUDNER
12. 12. 1933 – 6. 9. 2010
* * *
A MIRACLE or A FUNERAL
The Last 33 Days
Over a period of 33 days from August 5 to September 6, 2010, Alan fully cognizant of his imminent death used the remaining time to address the most serious issues of the human condition, relate to the inner-worlds of numerous friends and enable the witnessing of a very exposed final journey.
Day or night, students in the house would be called, friends attended their last encounters and final telephone calls were exchanged.
Close to 100 talks spanning over 150 hours were recorded and transcribed.
A MIRACLE or A FUNERAL (Edited Highlights) is intended as study material consisting of chronologically selected essential issues from numerous meetings.
A MIRACLE or A FUNERAL (Full Version) details the dialogues, issues, and poems as they developed during each meeting.
A cd of selected poems from meetings is in preparation and will be available on request.
August 5, 2010.
STAY ALIVE, FOR WHAT?
There is what seems to be a 'taken for granted' assumption that people know why they want to stay alive and why it's so important NOT to die.
In the struggle (against all odds) to remain alive you would really think they had a sense of the value, were getting something from it, and they were feeling that their participation in 'life' had some kind of ultimate importance and significance.
An organic, powerful compulsion, actually in face of the ultimate impossibility. If you want to see how ridiculous it is: What am I doing? I've just postponed the inevitable. For what? Taken so totally for granted.
Nobody wants to die. Unless you go through something that I just went through. It was an agony that there is nothing it compares to. 'Death agony', beyond explanation, it's like an agony of facing extinction, of being nothing. You'd rather be something miserable than being nothing. I made a joke out of it: a person's name is a label for a package of pain.
If we were not so afraid we could consider the word death to take away the inevitable ignorance created by the vibration of fear. Maybe that's what it's for, I've got to get significance to it for myself, so I can say, 'ah, that's what it's for'.
It's really touching the contradiction of contradictions . . . to spend one's whole life trying to do something – 'to stay alive'. It's impossible! You're not getting any satisfaction from being alive. It's fearful, that's maybe why it's so miserable.
'Life cannot be explained in terms of itself.' Here's a good example: someone wants to keep themself alive and you would think they were having such a good time. There's little evidence to support that . . . when even orgasm can kill you . . . the 'ultimate joy' in life, taken for granted within society generally.
People think they get something from it, but the truth of the matter is that they give everything they are to it. It's a strange business, from so many angles. Maybe that's what we always wanted . . . we wanted 'out'. Isn't that what orgasm is, it's 'out' of life, which is death. So in a strange way, what we're all praying for, without realizing it, is death. It's the ultimate gift.
To really know what is larger than life – you have to be freed from the restriction of life's limitation, basically the identification with the body and the mind.
August 9, 2010.
A MIRACLE OR A FUNERAL
I am doing something (this particular day, or it might go into a couple of days) that from a certain angle is madness. It will end, in my estimation – in a miracle or a funeral. I'm ready for either one of them, no problem. I'll go with my boots on.
This building was built as a Turkish military hospital, by money from Italy. I'm very aware since I bought it, that I bought a hospital. People that tried to live here normally have never made it. This building serves, or whoever didn't is 'out'. That's the history of the building.
If we are going to rely on positive energy in the world in order to transform what we need, we're barking up the wrong tree.
Everyone's out there looking for love, what they need is a good dose of hate, and to make love out of it. Whatever love is, you can know what it isn't. You need a strong dose of 'what it isn't'.
You've got to care for what you're doing, more than you care for staying alive, ultimately. Fear is the last barrier, you can't be fully yourSelf, you can't be fully human, you can't be fully love, you can't be fully truth, if you have fear.
You can get away with it along the Way, but the path gets very, very narrow. So my experiences have shown.
Take advantage, time is short, the situation is critical in the world. You know that, I know that, others know it more or less. Even those that don't know they know it, are in the middle of it.
'PIECES'
Why do we care about each other? What's our connection? It's so clear – we're in it for the good, and we recognize that in each other . . . call it God, Truth, Sanity, Love, call it Brotherhood.
I and other serious people have pursued the issue and its conformation from experience. In the end it is not a sentimental issue – the issue is actually the Soul.
That is (in a particular terminology), the Soul is the psychological body, it's an electronic body. We are not our physical body.
Your life is valuable beyond imagination. With our pride, vanity, competitiveness and comparing (measuring one against the other), pathetic as they are, the most exaggerated egoist, however self-important has no idea how really important he is.
'You', I know you, a thousand times better than my own sister and mother. It's connection, it's seeing. I'm connected to you and you to me. It's a fact. You don't do nobody a favor . . . actually you're seeing yourself. Love loves love, truth loves truth.
You can't pretend humility. You have humility when you know you don't know. You think what you think when you think it, you feel what you feel when you feel it, you sense what you sense when you sense it . . . and anything more than that is a lie. And you can't lie to yourself anymore. So on the way to humility is what's called humiliation. And without humiliation, you're an asshole even if you have ten PhD's. As a fact.
After humiliation is shame. To see it, the truth . . . that's an honest person. Your defensive moods and your attitudes all come from society. It's not you, there's nothing wrong with you. You have to be careful not to call it 'I', not to call habit 'I'. That's what Work is about: how to separate.
You are needed . . . in your humility first of all. And how exactly you're needed . . . you don't know . . . you've got to be available.
What difference does it make if we live or die, to ourselves, or to anybody else? Why do we want to live longer? What actual difference does it make to whom, to what?
Those are serious questions. Those are real questions.
This glorifying of marriage is such a ridiculous business in itself. 'My wife', 'my husband', 'my children' . . . it's a horrible word 'my'. Then you're 'supposed' to do, obligations, you 'owe them', they 'owe you'. Good doesn't come from owing. Guilt comes from owing.
You think you can love this child and not that child? What does it mean to love? You choose between human beings? Oh my god, you're still living in a bubble.
You know what satisfaction I have in being able to talk to you like this, there is no resistance because you actually love the truth . . . even when it's not complimentary at all. That's the sign of a decent person, and it's rare.
You smile too much, you're shy, it's unnecessary. There's a lot more to see at different levels, but if you're embarrassed at not seeing it, then you block yourself from seeing it and there's ego there. You get proud of what you see, and you feel guilty about what you don't see . . . you don't even realize it. You're still moving in that area of 'how you're seen'.
That's what the Work says, 'We live from being seen'. We get a sense of ourselves 'how people take us'. That's the barrier you've got to break through. Whether they see, or don't see, doesn't really matter. What you see matters, it's between you and you.
I think actually you've got a genuine humility. You're not a proud person, but you're an ego person. You're still in 'how one is seen'.
August 10, 2010
USE EVERYTHING
Last bit of advice – use everything you've got with joy. If you've got anything that you think is worth anything, then give it away as quickly as you can and make room for something more. 'You don't really have something until you've given it away'. It's not really logical in the usual terms. Maybe it's also to do with your so called life.
'This world is like an anteroom at the entrance of the house. Prepare yourself in the anteroom to enter the house.'
We've got to pass through this mess called imagination, self importance, this level of violence and lies no matter how it's caused – it's an evolutionary step. We have to be free from it, even if we're not liars and murderers ourselves, we're still walking in that field. We're fearful of the mechanicality of the evil around us. We have to recognize the inevitability of what's going on at this level. We 'die' in the truth, actually as an individual, but we're much more universal than we are petty personal.
I'm ashamed when I talk that way, there's only so much you can see as long as you're in the body.
A description of relationship: who is doing what, why?
No one is very happy trying to relate to another person's dream. It simply doesn't work. Their dream mixed with your dream, two imaginary 'I's struggling to dominate the scene. (Written August 9, 3.50 pm)
Now, if that ain't famous Last Words.
SLOWDOWN
Your body is going to keep on doing its thing, no matter what. The best thing you can do, is relax in it. Attention is light, light heals. You can know where you are. What do you do about it? You can relax. And if you don't, you're just eating your own tail.
* * *
I came to the conclusion that for happiness and for peace, there's one formula 'IF ACT, ACT ON BEHALF OF OTHERS' . . . that kind of 'spirit of the matter'. The wish for the good has energy in it, has good in it, has the openness for connection. Acting on behalf of others has no fear in it. You do what you can . . . it does something, it doesn't do something, doesn't matter . . . you just do your best. If you're doing for 'yourself', you've got to figure out 'is it going to work', 'is it not going to work', 'am I getting', 'am I giving'. You have to worry about the results. If you're working on behalf of others, you just look around . . . to have an intuition of something that can happen now, which makes now better.
The Work says 'Work for the sake of the Work, don't work for results.' The sake of the Work is what's working now, and it's always working NOW – different levels, but it's now. Be Now . . . and listen.
You eventually find out there are no others – there's Consciousness Itself. It's in each individual, and each individual has its mechanicality, and they look so different . . . but they're not. If you do good for a person, you're doing good for something essential in them, and it's the exact same thing that is essential in you. There is nobody to help but yourself, it's called Consciousness, it's called God.
They say also, 'do what's useful for someone else, and pleasant to yourself'. It's a good balancing.
This is what's so remarkable about a situation like this. Slowly, slowly, you begin to see you can put a drop here, you can do something over there. There are a whole lot of things you can do that are not in the usual sense, for you. You've got opportunities to test this in many different directions. There is a deep satisfaction in doing something that affects now, positively – not after – now. The intention itself, just the intention.
When it says 'external considering' and 'internal considering', there's a difference – different laws function. You have a taste of it here and there, and every once in a while, something goes 'oh wow!'
Go back once a day, read something from one of the serious books, from Nicoll or Gurdjieff or Ouspensky.
You have the opportunity. But it's good to know how 'good works' . . . it's lawful. It's good to know why you're doing, what you're doing and what the motivations are.
'CAN I HELP YOU?'
What is Love? It's a recognition of your own nothingness at an egoistic, self-important, self-initiated level. As if you made whatever you are, yourself. You know it's the death of you, of the person as a demi-god.
This whole life being a rather cheap little episode in the episode of the soul, but it must pass through this level of identification . . . by Being – it's very unimpressive in itself.
You must remember for the rest of your life, whatever goes on now, that you Remember Yourself. If there is something that you have to do or get connected with, it can only happen in a state of Self-Remembering, non-identification. Availability for whatever . . . holding on to nothing. I don't want to hold on to my last breath, I want to use my last breath.
Service, at this level, is having your faculties at your disposal where you can serve it up, so to speak, to the Higher, where you're master of yourself. Master can serve. Master can listen, Master can connect to what's there at a particular time that can serve a particular purpose.
I think to myself, what does she want? Not in any cynical kind of way. A person wants to help someone, but behind it they're trying to relate to themselves . . . whatever their imagination, feeling of themselves. It's a little bit tricky. Do they really want to help or do they want to get an identity through helping (which is not necessarily bad)? They want to help something that they feel has value, and if they can identify it in themselves, then they know what has value in themselves . . . it smells something consistent with their deepest intuition of why they're alive, at this level.
Clever and wise are not the same thing. And cleverness un-checked can lead to something really disastrous for a soul, called cynicism.
I sit with people now, roughly the same age. You've already seen your own imagination upside down, inside out. You don't know who you are, you don't know who anybody else is, you don't know why you did, what you did. You still carry a certain amount of, as if, self-respect, that you can say, 'what, I did my best!’
Everyone here . . . they were loved, seen, cared for, in the deepest sense, what they were, and what they valued. Unfortunately, fear is very powerful. And the one thing that is most feared is death – covers everything, it knows no shame. It's reality, but it's a false cover, it's a paper-thin, ridiculous pretense.
August 12, 2010
WAITING ROOM – waiting for the end
Nothing has more power (in anything) than the issue of meaning.
If you want 'profit' from the truth then you're just feeding your own devil, ego. The truth brings you more truth . . . if you want 'profit', it brings you more lies. You've got to do the truth, because you can't do the lie . . . not because you're going to get profit from doing the truth.
There is only ONE, in a way. You have to choose your side . . . everything going on has got two sides to it – it's called life.
'THINKING, THINKING, THINKING'
We're thinking, thinking, thinking, we're always thinking. We're describing things: ourselves, our relationships – maintaining ourselves in the reality of words.
Now, if you can stop that for a moment . . . like now, maybe you'll get lucky, something interesting may happen. You get another task, because all the thinking is actually describing pictures – you're actually looking at a picture and putting words to it.
Pictures are made from vibrations. 'Everything is vibrations'. And these vibrations hit the screen of Consciousness and they make pictures. And In the pictures there are different kinds of moods – fearful moods, helpful moods, dark moods. Every picture you look at has a mood.
What is a mood? It's the totality of implications, of vibrations, of everything in the picture.
Everything's happening, and one way or another you're holding it together, as if. And I say stop that, just do your best whatever you're doing, because whatever is happening, and whatever the causes and effects are, you can Be there or not Be there. You can be related to the happening or not. And don't worry whether 'what you're relating to', all of a sudden, ends off different than your picture!
You already see the subtleties around this issue of 'doing' or 'not doing'. You know that you don't really know 'how things really happen, and what you can really do about them'. But you're definitely playing a part. When it says 'man cannot do' . . . he cannot do in the way he imagines he's doing.
Whatever you're explaining – look at it – you're actually following a picture, and the picture has a mood in it. You can see the explanation, you can see the picture that's explaining, and you can see it's changing all the time. But 'why do you take it so seriously?' It has a tendency of 'disappearing' as a solid reality, which it never was.
This is really the end of the story. You're an honest person, basically, if you can't conceive of getting benefit of something real from imagination, distortion, manipulation. Awareness is very decent, it's just aware, it's not trying to be a big shot. Awareness wants to be aware.
You are Awareness itself.
I really have to direct every breath and hold it, or I'm 'gone'. Maybe I've been tasting ultimate surrender . . . I still 'expect'. So, it brings up the 'ultimate why'. I just don't want to be stupid, that's all. It's not that I want something more from this life, but I don't want to be stupid. Maybe there's something that's really important.
Why don't I take it easy? Why don't I take care of myself? It's a wrong attitude, it's 'death'. Use what you've got. It's like I keep saying, 'everything you've got'.
NEW SCHOOL
'The new school is for this new age', if we will not assume that people are essentially different and better than their actual life activities demonstrate.
* * *
Who will donate to the school? This is to them whom I'm talking to now, in a preliminary kind of way.
The school will be YOUR school, and you will pay for your school.
A totally new force will have to come directly from the participants of 'a new school'.
I do believe much will have to be spelt out in more detail with what little present energy I can draw from the source – the source in you – presently functioning.
Everybody in this room knows the truth of their nothingness – in some degree, in some way.
Use every goddamn thing you've got, you idiots! You don't save nothing for tomorrow! Your description of tomorrow is from a dead picture of the past. 'It's over – it ain't going any further.' Your energy, your love, your care, your muscle, your credit card, your god knows what – use it! And expect nothing in return, nothing. You don't know how to pay for your last breath, for the drop of blood in your veins. You have no idea, you're up in debt.
'Let go', it's the 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end'. You don't really have anything, unless you 'let it go'.
August 14, 2010
AN EXISTENTIAL ELIMINATION
The experience with death, it's a door. Without a cognizance of some kind of death, there's no life, it's a complete illusion. We know we've not always been here, so we're here, in this little world, but the other end of it – the obviousness that it ends in this form – is absent. So the imagination takes on an infinity.
If you were to see the truth full face it's devastating. Devastating that's nothing, it's like an existential elimination. Because the truth is that at the social level we are nobody other than competition and comparison.
The mystery is infinite, and the power, and the variety. That's why I say 'competition and comparison are ugly things', because they clutter the mind. They close the door to the spirit of the matter, the Essence, the HaShem.
You have no idea how important you are. You have no idea how one life is so magnificent. We're witnessing a sliver here, restricted by our gross necessity to be 'somebody'. Not the necessity of Being.
We're in 2010 with 2011 coming up, and 2012 around the corner, and it is not the same world, like it or not. It's really now to 'collect the pieces'. And the pieces are spread amongst us . . . he's got pieces, I've got pieces, you've got pieces . . . this is it, we need each other like fingers on a hand need a hand. The hand without the fingers is nothing, and the fingers without the hand are wild.
It's very interesting how people find fault, mechanically, exactly where they have their own weaknesses.
Every aspect of our life we think about has some kind of explanation. But when the energy runs to zero – all explanations were 'talking', and they knew they didn't have the answer. And they joined up into a bundle of anxiety which was overwhelming and pulling – it's a very fearful business.
You've tasted some of that already. It's not you, it just happened to you. Look at the credits you're carrying . . . if you can't figure that out, then nobody can. So you could easily come to a disastrous conclusion. If you can't be the best, be the worst, right?
You want to be individual? So then you've got to be more or less in one or another area. Be you, and Be me.
On a positive side, in terms of other people, I strongly see things coming. Within a year, I see it changing. And I'm counting on the honesty of our exchange, not our agreements, that when I say it's very important, it's not just going to be speculative, it will be. And whatever is needed . . .
'They'll come to love but as refugees'. (L.C.) And that really is the answer. That's the level where conscience is your guide, where conscience is the connection with actual God, Now.
You either do or you don't, Now. And it's the only thing that is going to work. The rest of the systems that seem to work, are grinding us into dust. We can see they don't work, but they're still going on by momentum. But when the momentum stops, you're going to be left with the deepest care in yourself.
It's my obligation to keep the spirit of that care alive. So when it's the only thing left . . . it's said 'you only really Work when your life depends on it'.
* * *
I talk to them like they're me, but they're not me. They are what they are, and life is what it is, and they're in a particular stage in relating to it. It's really hard to believe that they continue to live life, as if it's normal, in their awkwardness where they're guilty in front of, how a marriage 'should' work, how you're 'supposed' to love and treat the children. They're guilty or proud in front of a reality that doesn't exist.
COMPASSIONATE CURIOSITY
You take someone seriously, you know who you're talking to. I talk to the Essence of a person. I talk to that Being there, which is there, whether they know it or not, or whether they're putting mascara and makeup on or not.
'I know', or the horror of insult on injury, that 'I don't know but I should know', which brings up exaggerated pride, vanity, guilt, all against one's own as if knowing.
You add anything to I AM, it's a lie, it's an idea, you are in what they call, illusion – a convenient explanation for approximate circumstances and for the limitation of your perceptive capacity. All your ideas of 'who' and 'where' and what', are at best 'as if'.
* * *
So, right on that line between the 'everything and the nothing'.
I am amazed that I am vital at the moment, and I'm amazed and doubly satisfied that I can demonstrate this peculiarity, and you come on and sit right there with me, in the 'everything and the nothing'. That's wonderful, that's where we are between the 'everything and the nothing', that's what the truth is. So I mention it, as I register it.
I've moved very far from that innocence at various times in my life. I'm not so sure I saw pictures of you as a child, but when I see it now, it looks like you couldn't have been less innocent then, than you are at the moment . . . at least that. And inevitably that's where the trust is, that's where the now is, that's where the relationship is. Even words 'trust', 'relationship' . . . you've got the 'I' in it. When you take that away, you've got the BEING.
And that's the issue, it's the BEING. Being or not Being, the AM in it.
Somebody can only lead down the path that he has been, to some degree. But the truth is the truth, and the Way is kind of the responsibility of the guide.
We sit here as nobody in particular. And yet, full of interest in everything – compassionate curiosity.
RIDING A TIGER
I've dealt with ten people today, and they don't have a day like this once in a year or in a lifetime. It's so remarkable, because it's OPEN. It's remembered, it's fearless, it's life. It's not hiding, darkness, guilt and pride.
I know that if I 'go' tomorrow . . . all this nonsense will continue to go on, and that's fine, it doesn't matter . . . it's nonsense. What really matters is to see enough of it so that you're separated from the nonsense. You stop feeding it with your soul energy, and allow the consciousness, the essence to flower in this rather mixed seeded garden, with a lot of these 'artificial fertilizers'.
I feel whatever had been going on (in my relationship with them, their relationship to themselves), is like they are really overwhelmed by what they call karma. Their life, their attitudes, their relationships are so determined, so problematic, within which they get a perverse, but nevertheless, livable identity . . . leading ultimately in advanced age, to pathetic broken 'animal-machines', where if they can find a man over seventy that can put two sentences together in sanity, they say 'ooh . . . Wow'.
Opinion, on opinion, on hope, on pride, racism, nationalism, sexism – it's mechanical, the mechanical results, of the mechanical use, of the higher faculties of man. A random collection of thought, feeling and sensation coming together in some compulsive act which we call life – primitive, without awareness, in sleep actually, in dreams actually.
You're not going to change it. There's no good, there's no bad there. Nevertheless, the 'bad' is . . . that if you're involved in it . . . it stops you from doing something that could be really magnificently useful to yourself and the universe. (To) withdraw yourself from 'pushing to make a good impression in hell', to be accepted in 'prison'.
Hopefully to free people from taking it all so real, refusing to acknowledge the uselessness, (it's) changing . . . there's no security there. There's seeing. It's sleep, it doesn't exist. Stop 'living from being seen' and start paying attention. Start asking yourself what's real, what isn't, what are the options?
Worry is ridiculous. As much as you can use your intelligence, even when it's rusty. Use it until you can see like I can see – it doesn't matter! We're interested not because it matters, we have to come and see that it doesn't matter. Then we get our attention and our Being back to ourselves where it can dance and do where it does matter (in a pleasant way), not a false matter, but a truthful matter and a simple matter.
We don't know 'what' . . . we can't do what's useful, until we stop doing what's useless, and we can't stop it, until we see that it's useless. As long as we think it's going to 'do something' or 'give something', it will continue. We feed it.
August 15, 2010
SANITY – THE PRIMARY ISSUE
A stage of Understanding is a stage of something Known, and something known doesn't have to justify itself . . . a waste of time, minimum.
To be relaxed in the 'I'm not sure', is 'I am now doing the best that I can, from what I know my possibilities are in life'. From an intellect point of view, which is far from the issue of conscience, 'I am in good will', 'I am in good conscience', 'I am using my energy with priorities of what is important'. In other words, doing my best – then I should be relaxed.
You can't know values unless you live them, and see what the results are. Patience, confidence, you'll have to be very sensitive to the moment.
How do you see yourself as a human being? Worth anything, other than your own safety and comfort? At this level it's accepted, 'grab your money and run', that's the rule.
If you're interested in the truth, you get attracted. If you're interested enough, you begin to see things that you never saw before. And you become more and more aware of sharing the burden. Gurdjieff wasn't just a good guy. He dedicated his life. Whatever he gave to anybody . . . his life was on the line, everything!
You still have fear in you, and pride, and 'I deserve' and 'I'm lacking'. And that limits your intelligence, your goodness, and limits the best qualities you have that are very real.
One of the biggest things in the learning capacity is to be able to take criticism even if it's not true . . . because you know who you are. You know not to take anything for granted, especially yourself.
'DARK FORCES'
Human Beings, on the surface are so different. But if you love them, aside from their personal complexities, you get to see that they are suffering, and that they will suffer more.
Circumstances of my interests in life and Humanity have brought me to this place where I am doing a lot of suffering, but it's obviously the suffering of the people that I'm close to. I'm suffering their suffering. So I'm forced to go into it and try to understand what it is. The Work covers it: why people suffer.
It's so obvious that people are feeling that they're 'missing something' and they 'deserve something else', whether it's material or comfort or love . . . more of this or that now. They get angry when they don't get what they think is coming to them. They really believe that they're missing, and they believe that it should come. That's overwhelmingly the situation. A man on earth 'I want me, mine and more'.
These are not tapes that definitively describe anything, but they throw out pieces of the pain and the confusion and the sickness that is a result.
The energies have got so low, that death is calling. I've got a feeling it could be 'forcefully' taken out of this world, which seems some kind of a shame. That's also an interesting angle.
August 16, 2010.
CORRIDORS OF HELL
Because of the energy field that we are in – individually, outside people, the house, Rosh Pina, Israel, the world, 2010 – certain remarkable things will open.
This thing we move in which we call 'our life', becomes ever more obvious – a very fleeting series of impressions, moods, pictures of where we are (from the house you are in, to the community), to some kind of intuitive sense of what we're moving in, as if we know 'who we are'. In simple terms, an imaginary sense of 'I' in an imaginary sense of reality.
We're dealing with something which is on the edge between life and something else – a thin veil between our inner and outer world.
Is it worth something? We're told yes. It's even hinted at – different levels of Consciousness, different states of Being, a different relationship to reality.
The Work is to make us think. What does it really mean to 'look at life through the Ideas of the Work' . . . not to come to conclusions?
To be able to open up the picture a little bit and a little bit more. But that only happens as a basis if you stick with yourself as close as possible – the more remembering, the least identification . . . the more seeing, the more external considering . . . whatever the Work suggests. It gives you a chance to POSITION yourself in the midst of this storm, so that you can know where the hell you are . . . and is there or is there not something to do.
And here we are 'trying to keep Alan alive' . . . as if it's up to us. I've had many experiences in this area . . . to die is very simple, it's like going down a water slide . . . no problem.
We don't know exactly what we're going to. But to know what's on the other side of the veil after the body drops which is also there now – you have to be ready to 'let go'.
You are holding things, and actually you cannot hold nothing. You can hold it for a while, but, whatever you're holding you are restricting your whole life to that thing – you're concentrated on holding.
If I were to 'go out of the picture', things would be different. Could they be worse, so to speak (laugh)? They would be different.
PERSONAL DECLARATION OF SURRENDER
I have noted in many places that mis-conceptions around the subject of death are very unhelpful, especially in terms of the 'passing of the body' as an irrevocable loss.
Of sensing and cognizing the issue, in one way, it's obvious that whatever that part of a human being (Spirit, the Essence) might experience beyond the body, that maybe some people can break that barrier, and know totally the 'other side' – while they are still in the body.
There is a 'veil'. The Essence, of what is on the 'other side', which is larger than our so-called individuality, is also present in the Totality, that we call the Universe, Now. And we're in that Now, now as well.
We can know it maybe in its purity, but if there's detail . . . what 'fantastic things' are going to be required of a consciousness in other realities? Can that even be any other than more elaborated imagination, because Reality is not imaginative? And 'that' which is not imaginative and (is) Universal, in all worlds, and of all worlds . . . it's called, LOVE – what we can take from 'here' to 'there'.
What is Love? Total acceptance and awareness of what IS, called UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. Love that has to do with Presence, Being.
It's so hard to separate Being from body. While we're in a body, we want BEing IN body, an aspect of the ONE Being which we call God and the Presence always and everywhere.
'My Personal Declaration of Surrender'.
It would be nice, to 'go out' in full agreement, understanding and a satisfaction of not resisting the whole process (the inevitable step along the Way that we know not, until we've taken it), as well as to assist and co-operate with fellow travelers, so that they can have more productive, comprehensive, and useful passage in this world, without the burden of prehistoric fears – primitive objections to CHANGE.
So maybe, this is what's needed now.
There are so many people who say, I'm not afraid of death, and yes, I sense there's more to it, I don't know what exactly . . . and yes, conscience, compassion, presence are obviously the elements in common. But nevertheless there's in them resentment for pain, or the so-called uselessness of the regular life.
In terms of just what we are here, it's so pathetic – all the struggle, suffering, the holding on, the making of impressions, and the disappointments in not establishing any kind of an identity that lasts for more than seconds. It is so obviously a hopeless, helpless and almost 'tricky reality' to find yourself in. If it was only that, it would be 'a crying shame'.
It's a no-win, everyone suffers, and everyone is 'undressed' and humiliated at the 'end', as anything special or unique in themselves. So they know the truth, and even have a sense of something larger, but there's an awful lot of wasted energy and potential by having any residue of complaint.
Complaint is like the obvious ultimate stupidity – to complain with what IS, and how IS works. The what IS, what they call God, the Conscious, Intelligent or otherwise levels or 'everything together' – the Totality. To complain about the Totality. . . what egoism, what ultimate idiocy!
So I think this Document will end all documents, and open the door to a totally co-operative relationship with what Gurdjieff referred to as our Common Cosmic Father. The connection and the integration is IN Love.
'You'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song'. (L. Cohen)
Holy, holy, holy. Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, Adonaii Tzevaot meloh kol ha'aretz kevodo (Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory. Isaiah 6)
'Do' . . . Get a sense of passive Do.
ADDENDUM TO 'PERSONAL DECLARATION OF SURRENDER'
'One mountain of anxiety' – all the impressions throughout history of distorted humankind, separated from Higher Centers, all the accident on top of accident, on top of accident. You can't figure it out. Our peanut little mind wants to understand what?
It's ENERGY – the horror of getting 'I'dentified with it, struggling with it, liking it, getting proud with it, guilty with it. It's all subjective little snapshots of an immensity of everything, mainly accident at that level. But there's energy, and it's food for TRANSFORMATION. We need to have energy to move on to the next potential that a human being has of a Higher Level than that devilish thing we take as ourself.
Testimony: Being afraid of what you don't know, is ridiculous. Objecting to it is even more ridiculous, and also totally understandable. All under the heading: 'Better the devil you know, than the devil you don't know'.
A PINCHED SOUL
It's interesting, people talk about people with a 'pinched soul'. Every time a child is ignored or misunderstood by adults, it's like pinching their soul. 'Pinched soul', it means when the soul is restricted, it's closed-in. It's very understandable, every time it tried to express itself a 'full' soul interfered with it.
Examples with Eliya (ten years old) around here, where anybody is, in her words, 'not themselves' . . . she pinches them – their ass, their nipple . . . she throws back their last words at them. She's doing it playfully. She's doing it from a different place, she's not trying to restrict. She pinches the 'scab' on the soul. She pinches the crust that happened where someone else pinched the soul.
How do we free our soul from conditioned reaction to being 'pinched' – free it from fear? A pinch is only a pinch . . . like the end of the poem that goes:
'when no word
twisted turned or bent
can touch us
in the place we've went' (we do this work)
'Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me'.
That kind of experience with the rather amused outer layers of the soul . . . they've been tickled, pinched . . . they're seldom cut. It's not really so serious. But it's very serious when we spend our life reacting to that. We're limited by the sensitivity of the outer coating of the soul – the soul being our intelligence.
August 17, 2010
DILEMMA
In the midst of 'people's not knowing' where every issue of choice is a dilemma . . . is the fact that there are two basic questions that they don't face and realize they don't know: Why am I alive? And, Who am I? Or turn it the other way 'what am I to do in life as I experience it, as an 'I something'?
Well, they sound like existential, philosophical, abstract questions . . . nevertheless they are not. Because if you don't know who you are, and you don't know what or why you're doing where you are – no other issue is clear.
The family – in a 'family ghetto'. Actually it's so typical in the world and sold by all societies, 'be good to your family, be good to your family, be good to your family'. You've got to talk people into that. They can't be good to nobody, they can't relate unselfishly to nobody. Sickness covered up with pancake make-up.
Family is sickness – it's 'me, mine and more'. It's worse than chauvinism, it's worse than nationalism, it's worse than racism, it's meanness with a moral, as if, explanation. I take care of me and what is mine, and let the 'devil take the high most'. It's 'us' and 'them'. It's war, it's evil, it's blind, it's asleep, it's fearful, it's violent, it's sick, it's debilitating . . . and set-up in society as glorious. Because if you didn't have people busy with something, there'd be nobody to make money from. You've got to keep them moving.
But it's an immense issue, to move out of that is rare. Although in the times we're now, it's going to have to be general. So there could be a lot of survivors because it won't work at all anymore . . . not that it just doesn't work well.
SPOON-FED
There's going to be a lot more to see in this period, 'you ain't seen nothing yet!' But now at least you're beginning to realize that. And what you're going to see happening, is going to be a hell of a lot more simple than you would like – it's not going to leave you with guilt because you're not up to your own god knows what standards or pride!
Do you want to know the truth of the matter? Everyone in this place, for years, has been coddled like a child and spoon-fed – from necessity of the leftovers from the corrupted society that you were born into – just as a fact.
Work for the sake of the Work, and the Work is NOW! You don't have to look forward to it. What is actually happening Now or maybe more specifically 'where are you' relative to the Work, and whatever else is going on.
As vital as a growing sense of BEING and realization of the amazement, the magnificence, the glory, the gift of being alive, of being a piece of this overall mystery . . . the more you take a personal stand in that without any egoistic sense of 'where you are' and 'what's coming to you' – just the amazement of BEING. The greater the degree, the more you're my Friend.
You've got barriers you have to go through, like everyone has, and you haven't got the vaguest idea what they are.
Now if you believe that you know more about progress and I'm getting in the way, then you act accordingly. And if you can't stop and shut your mouth, then you're in the wrong place. Nothing to think about . . . take my advice. How a shade of modesty, turned into a little bit of activity, and turned into a 'dominant' something . . . in order to fix their picture . . .
I'm going to die, we'll see what happens. 'Die', I'll tell you my friends, it looks more and more . . . not only what's real in me, but also what's real in you, is really around in eternity. The deeper the Awareness . . . let us say, the better the relationship to whatever continues at whatever level.
COMPLAINT
Never, never believe her weakness . . . it's all habit. Listen, let it go in one ear and out the other, and I think it will be less and less. She ran the risk in life of turning into one big complaint. Everyone runs that risk actually. It's like blaming God, objecting to reality.
You begin to see it's ridiculous. You know whatever each individual is made out of and whatever is going on in the world . . . it's just happening. To object to that is to object to the creation and whatever pathetic state it might be in at any particular time, and get identified with it as if it's all happening to 'you'.
REMORSE OF CONSCIENCE
Gurdjieff talked about 'Remorse of Conscience'. No individual has done enough mechanical horror, call it 'evil', if you like. Our individual ups and downs, good and bad, and our 'terrible' are not enough to really have Remorse of Conscience. This is what overwhelmed, what I became aware of, not so long ago.
We're the children of the slaughterers and also the 'victims' with rage inside of us. People don't see human beings, they see threat. Humanity is now being swallowed by its swing between perpetrator and victim.
How do we break out of this historic prison? Only one way – the increasing sensitivity to the difference between the 'light' and the 'darkness'. The religious terms are God and the devil. In Work terms, Conscious effort and mechanicality, or Self-Remembering and negativity.
There's a fine line that separates the 'devil from the deep blue sea'.
To recognize that the least blame or displeasure is negativity, and it is totally and absolutely conditioned habit, from a world partially yours and immensely wider . . . identified with the evil, negative forces of the Universe, and therefore, part of it. The slightest justified negativity in terms of aggression or self-pity, justified on the basis of the victim or the perpetrator, but negative, nevertheless. Negative, meaning a result of Internal Considering as blind and as unconscious as it is, as opposed to External Considering which requires a re-membering and an open view.
The PRACTICE . . . the only escape is through the practice of 'out of my skin' . . . to be a growing AWARENESS of the difference between the LIGHT and the DARKNESS. That's the Havdala service at the end of Shabbat.
'To remember yourself always and everywhere', to be constantly on guard in awareness of what is light and what is darkness. To refine the cutting edge of the knife that breaks through the cold ice of the darkness – the ice cutter. The more a sense of helplessness, of nothingness, of absolute nobody-ness, the greater the freedom to BE and to SEE . . . greater the freedom to luxuriate in the Light.
Uzi: I had an experience today that I hope, will change my life. I woke up this morning and I could see who is waking up, someone angry, and finding fault in everything. And I paid attention to it. I saw every man that I'm seeing, I'm finding fault with. And since your last period of health began I've been asking myself, 'What is my question' and 'Who am I'? And all the time I have no answer. I know only one thing, that I'm existing. And today in the workshop, I've heard it many times, but, it was a fact: I am Consciousness, that's what I Am. It was a state, a fact. And then I understood for the first time what you mean by 'You can't catch New-York with a butterfly net'.
Alan: My feeling is, it's not a statement of inevitability, but at the moment you're saying, 'I hope I'll never forget it'. 'I hope I'll remember that'. But you'll forget it . . . but you can never totally forget it. What you're going to be facing when it comes again, is the pain of that increasing. You'll never believe it again, but it doesn't disappear so quickly. That will be increasing Jihad without choice, because you can never get totally identified with it again. In that you'll understand what Work is, and you'll also see that every time it happens where you're forced to confront the devil, that it's an opportunity. You no longer can turn your back on it, you have to resist, make some kind of separation. In that effort alone there's a transformation of energy, and that energy is so needed to get out of and then to exist outside that prison. So that, in a strange kind of way, every negativity is a gift.
So, in that, all of a sudden there's a 'door'. There's a sense of freedom. It becomes the only thing you can really do in the human existence that has any real meaning, the real meaning in up-grading energy for a wider and deeper Consciousness.
Awareness is even a stronger word, because we're conscious of 'this' or 'that'. Impressions fall on the 'screen of consciousness', but, one can get identified with what you're conscious of. Where Awareness is just awareness. In Awareness, there's 'nobody' there, it's just awareness. In consciousness, there's the subject and the object. 'I' am conscious of 'that'. There's still an 'I' there . . . that has some kind of dignity or pride or guilt or something.
AWARENESS is just BEING.
So with the awareness you can start paying attention to the fact of our incarnate state, of Consciousness IN BEING at this level (with sensation, vibration, emanation . . . Energies).
To Know Thyself is to Know Thy Lord. Mankind in a micro-cosmos of the macro-cosmos.
And slowly, slowly, 'a life for a life' – a so called life of pleasure and pain, significance and insignificance, seen and unseen, loved and hated, acknowledged or ignored – all that goes on in the ego sense of oneself. There's no basis at all other than imitation and habit. Born into a dream and lived out in a dream.
The Now of Awareness has everything in it. The past has a peanut-brained identification: 'I', the center of everything that's happening. 'I' choose what's good, bad, right, wrong. You can't meet me with your past. And that's been the problem all along . . . it is with everyone.
You can't see God and live. You can't be Now and before. You can't be Everything and 'something' unique. You can't Be and NOT Be at the same time. Ego identification is not BEING, it's imagination. You can't logic yourself out of it. You can only see yourself out of it.
You cannot know 'thy Self'. You can know thy 'not-self'. You can only see the truth through the lie. You can uncover yourself by suffering the shedding of the klipot (coverings) of illusion. You don't know how they happened, but you know they make you negative. Reality never confirms 'coverings'. Reality, Now, always rubs 'not-now'. That's pain and that's negativity, and to get identified with the negativity you feed the darkness. If you stop doing that, you suffer your progress. You suffer for Reality with the non-Reality, you pay with the useless.
What moments of clarity, what a light in the eyes, what a blue, simple reality, what a simple smile. What a lightness, what a pleasure, call it Love, call it Now, call it the residue of shame. The tears of the eyes that say 'thank you, I see'.
August 19, 2010. DAY AUDIOS:
TIGHT BUNDLES OF IMPOSSIBILITIES
The Work says man cannot do, it's a complete illusion.
We move with intuition. A perfect movement is perfectly reversible. If you 'do this', you should be able to 'do this', not if you 'do this', you're stuck there. If you get into anything, you should have an 'exit strategy'. Why imprison yourself, if you can help it, you don't know what's going to come up.
That's what we're here for ultimately . . . to see the truth of the impossibility of all our pretentious, as if, doings – so that we can leave room to see Consciousness and the Soul behind it. And the more you begin to see that, you can separate yourself from the nonsense, a life other than the bank, and the tax people.
You see the truth through the lie. When the obvious impossibilities expose themselves, it leaves room for things that are more Universal.
DIS-SATISFIED
The general state is one or another degree of dissatisfaction . . . which is emotional . . . 'I'm not happy', 'I'm not satisfied'. And you somehow feel responsible for it and you struggle to think yourself 'out of it'. But the struggle is obviously not successful. It's not an idea that's going to make you okay. Why the insistence on feeling satisfaction all the time? Why add insult to injury? There's no reason to feel guilty.
That's the sequence – discomfort in the body, the emotional state, and struggle with the mind.
SURVIVOR
Does anything make any difference other than just how it feels at the moment? Does it make any difference to put a question? 'What to do', 'how you feel', 'what you say', 'how you relate' . . . does it change anything? Or is it just 'sort of what are we doing', kind of surviving on a rather bouncy energy, bouncy waters.
You see more or less what goes on outside, but what's going on inside? What are these random thoughts and speculations and contradictions and likes and dislikes, and should and shouldn't? Everyone is going through life so 'serious' . . . struggling, working for one or another reason. What are they doing it for? And they never once stopped to ask.
They don't want me to die. Why, because I'm having such a good time, because they love me, or they don't want me to die because they're going to lose something?
It's 'common sense' actually, you as most people . . . the taking care of yourself means extending your lifetime. We want to live longer . . . 'take good care', you going to live longer, right? I mean obvious. 'I care' – it's the fear of loss.
Did anybody have any control on who died when? So how come they're dead, and we're not, for instance? Can you really control how long you're going to live?
My relationship to being alive is that every day is important not how many days. The end of the body, is not the end of your 'business' this is the point. While you're here you can deepen, at least, in understanding. It's not 'how to use the days', neither another hundred, nor a thousand days don't change nothing. When you're over the 'other side' a lot of the things you just dealt with superficially, come back and bite you. If you'd pay attention, you would have seen it deeper, and if you saw it deeper, you would have understood more, and if you understood more, you wouldn't have to come back again to find out what you didn't. Roughly put.
It's not for long life, it's for good death.
How can we distinguish between Conscience and self-satisfied self-image?
AM – is the Truth
HEAVEN is a BALANCE of ENERGY – it's not an exaggerated focus.
The Way of the Work is very simple, in a way. NON-CRITICAL SELF-OBSERVATION – you've got to keep an eye on what's happening in the centers, non-critically, but yes, aware. All that's going on in your body is like the first level of external considering, which is external to your awareness.
Then NON-IDENTIFICATION – because you can be non-critical about something, and unconsciously be saying 'I'm fearful', 'I'm jealous'. The (Work) expressions say, that's called 'fear', that's called 'jealousy', that's called 'don't know what to do'. SELF REMEMBERING, that's back to zero, back to AUM, back to amen. There is nothing real but that. The fact that I AM, the fact of BEing.
Our centers – open with everyone – keeping that BALANCE, is one hell of a challenge.
They are the basic elements of The Fourth Way. They are not optional. They are a part of a Way, where certain efforts can be made and certain things can be seen. You can POSITION yourself.
A Way is necessary. No Way = a drift. You can drift into a whore house, or you can drift into a pornographic (site) channel, or you can drift into an acupuncturist's needle.
When the focus really becomes in SEEING, with some confidence that the method you're using works, you trust it more than anything else you trust in your life, and everything else is secondary. You let go. Anything that you are 'holding' for any reason comes from fear, comes from insecurity, comes from the usual normal level . . . everyone's in it, everyone has a 'limited vibration' legamre (completely).
You can have a billion dollars, it's still limited, you are still holding. The only strength is in 'knowing', not in holding. In other words, you can't hold anything, it's all moving. You can't even hold the knowing, you have to BE, with it.
Anything you're attached to in the outside world, you have to be free from because it's a 'limiting vibration', even if you think you can be good to it by not being free from it, like Eliya (10 years old), for instance. You're learning that, every time you ('hold'), you see that doesn't do you, her, or anybody any good. And the freer you are from her the more everybody benefits.
Wonderful, you see these things. Some of the pain is like stripping off skin. But you see that whatever you are identified with, 'limits you'. They can give you all the sex and love in the world, all the money in the world but if you are dependent – you are limited, you are in jail and you know it, and you are guilty. Never mind that you are negative, but you limit yourself to what you could experience if you were FREE . . . and what you can experience, what you can do, what you can Be, is needed also.
We need free people. God needs free people. The truth in you, and the truth in everyone . . . the hand needs the fingers.
You are not missing anything other than your Self. And when you have your Self you are connected, and when you are connected, you are connected to several things Higher.
But we are not allowed to want those other things Higher – those are gifts that could be useful under certain circumstances. Your only legitimate want is to have yourSelf. Anything else is greed and exaggeration even if it looks like you're 'saving the world' with it. If you had yourSelf, you don't know what you'd do, you might take care of your own child, you might take care of another hundred . . . and it's all moving, and it all comes from the same Source, and there is nothing you can call 'mine'.
There is only ONE answer, it's yourSelf. That vibration of Real Self, we have to find it. Your Real Self is God on earth. And you can't worry about anybody seeing it, because those that see, see, and those that don't, don't.
August 19, 2010. Night Audios:
3 am. WHAT TO DO?
It might be a very big subject – we slide into negativity feeling 'not good', because 'we don't know what to do next'.
It might be a whole layer of general negativity that people are so used to, they don't even notice it. It's not terrible fear, it's not terrible anger, and it's not anything that you would recognize. It's almost like a 'constant caught', "I'm not sure what to do next" . . . and you can't say 'I don't know'.
'Not knowing what to do next'. Is it possible, a totally taken for granted layer that holds one in negativity . . . a general feeling of GUILT, completely un-noticed, based on one or another level of feeling 'something's wrong' . . . and somehow 'I'm responsible', 'I should know better'.
Even though I don't feel the same kind of guilt you do around 'not knowing what to do next', I've got a little bit of guilt 'not knowing what to do with you'. If you're miserable in the same room with me, it must be my fault! I know you're trying your best. Why can't I BE in good conscience? Why do I feel miserable? And I'm struggling 'what to do', right now.
It's an exaggerated example of 'three o'clock in the morning'. We can't even go bake a cake or wash a dish, I mean, it's ridiculous.
Tami: You have to go to the energy. It's not in thinking. It's stuck in the body and it's causing us to think. We have to pay attention to the body. Before the thinking and the emotions, it has a negative vibration in the body.
Alan: Discomfort or disquiet, with no particularly clear cause, or any particular clear escape.
Tami: Right. If you want to rise above it to find a clear escape, you have to be able to give attention to the energy in the body.
Alan: That's the answer. That's the conclusion of the conversation, and how 'that' . . . like, nothing else really works. You have to do, to see. It's the end of talking.
EXPLANATIONS
Explanations following any event, but particularly large events – are essentially meaningless. The 'explanation' is, at best a 'speculation', a 'suggestion', a 'maybe'.
Again, this business, of 'living from being seen'. You have to explain everything, especially when it's something that seems large.
So, last night, I was fully expecting what they call 'death'. And nothing of the sort happened (laugh). And, yet, in another way, something did happen. And the strange words that come up now that in the experience – I didn't die, everything else did.
Anyone who wants to have a relationship with me or for me to have a relationship with anyone, the person would have to be 'in the loop'. People 'in the loop' are doing something together, they get information, they hear information, they pass information.
And 'that' is the element that is new, not totally, and it's actually the requirement, all the time, for a person who's serious, doing something not randomly out there.
It's a process of a new structure, a 'new order', relative to certain inevitabilities in human beings with a background of Work (also relevant to the period of history we're in and to everything that is in interaction and movement, constantly – sometimes called the Universe, sometimes called the Creation, sometimes called God) – that it's un-mistakenly a challenge of total reliability, it has to be – total reliability and availability.
Less than that will not synchronize with 'higher purposes'.
LEADER OF THE PEOPLE
What comes to me now is a kind of amazement, how people in general have no interest in other people.
I'm not talking about interested in their well-being . . . just generally speaking, they don't find people interesting. They don't see people as having some kind of unique value. They look at a precious stone or even a new sports car, there's a curiosity as to what it can do, what it is meant to do.
But with people, they will pay attention, talk, engage one or another . . . who at some level can be 'helpful' in some way, good to know socially, economically, with a position, with a child, whatever.
you want their help
they want your help
to help the others too
help help they say
you got to prove
we can always count on you (Help)
It's so obvious: they don't expect it to end having learnt something. Understanding is not part of it. The 'understanding' is proved by what you can collect around you. If your understanding can turn into something material that can be viewed, you're considered to have 'understanding'.
What possibly could come out of a talk like this? Maybe in some subtle way, a demonstration that there is something to do – it has to do with understanding, with experience, and with attitude.
I can't believe that I'm compensating for the real unless I can pass it. You prove something is authentic when it's functional, repeatable maybe . . . seeds planted.
* * *
Two things that come are striking:
The effort to maintain attention – it's so clear that is the key.
The other one is what they usually call FEAR . . . which arises periodically, momentarily, and in a way familiar . . . in another strange way unrecognizable. Occasionally something hits and it's not exactly clear . . . but it's what they call fear. And it's clear that I'm not afraid. It's not something I feel heroic about, but it's a fact.
I'm well prepared for it. I don't carry 'luggage' over in terms of being other than I AM, which is what we all ARE.
I don't want to miss the 'last chapter'. That's really the story. I can't afford to miss, and I won't. If I fall asleep in some kind of dream which has some kind of reality . . . I know how to say stop to that.
I was looking where the fear was – the fear is that I wouldn't have any control over it.
The issue is not time on earth. I need a bloody good reason, I do my part and there'll be help. The universe helps the good, the useful, the possible. So in a way, pushing to a new kind of breakthrough.
There are things in this universe that can make the impossible possible. But that would take such an incredible focus and force of 'what for'.
There's a statement that says, 'mankind is an experiment of the sun' – an experiment in evolution. Few evolve of the masses, they're just not interested . . . it's less interesting than cars, houses, dogs, racehorses, Miami Beach, Las Vegas.
Mankind is an experiment of the sun, obviously needed. People like us, if I might say so, are needed . . . that movement, towards 'light', in terms of the truth away from the (false) . . . is needed (we know it in our guts) for ourselves, for our friends, for God. It has value, we know that. We're blessed (we don't know that). Individuals acting right have value, are worth something, very few know that. The field that we have value in is infinitely more complex and amazing than anything we normally measure and value. And the common element between this level of 'right action' and others is what they call Love.
If you learn to maintain your humanity, in the deepest sense, in the midst of all of this, then you'll maintain it wherever you might find yourself.
That's the truth of the matter. I can say that – there is nothing but God, actually, nothing. There's no 'thing'. All 'things' are figments of imagination. Everything, from a person to a thing . . . the whole energy field is maintaining everything all the time. There's no 'thing', it's everything. There's nobody to help but yourself. And the only help you can have yourself is to BE.
In India, forty odd years ago, I'm told, 'according to your horoscope, you could be a leader of your people'. Later I wrote, to be master of the multiplicity of 'I's. Free of identification of all the little voices inside, all the little devils that want to scream, whatever it is. That would be 'master of your own people'.
Attention is the issue, Awareness is the fact.
It's all about Knowing Oneself, and more explicitly of knowing an awful lot about what isn't oneself.
i feel so very good right now
i wish the same for you (Incha'llah)
SUPER-EFFORT
I want to give you a little encouragement for what you're already seeing for yourself and also reading along the way. Without a conscious effort it's nothing . . . whatever goes along the line of least resistance . . . Mindless.
You've had enough of that, you're sick and tired of it! That's why I can talk to you now. That's not to talk you into anything, but a little bit of encouragement.
Work talks about Super-Effort. Another 'frightening' term, but it's not . . . if you get to the logic, rather than the emotion in it. It's not necessarily to have perspiration running down your face or have your eyes bulging out.
It's not normal, this is the point. Normal is what keeps everyone busy. So it's more than normal, it's 'super-normal'. It's not natural, natural goes nowhere, if you've looked around enough. It didn't take your father very far and didn't take your mother's Christian friend very far.
And try and do what you can now, so it's not hanging around next week. You've thought of that already, hopefully without guilt and any false kind of 'eegh' . . . some kind of an evaluation.
It's time for you to be questioning yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and is there something else you can do? Without pressure, without stupidity, just with legitimate, adult calculation . . . how do you see it, how do you see where you are, what's going on, and how do you see yourself. Not who you should be, or what should be, but just what IS.
That's our problem, we've learnt to shadow box in what 'should be' or what 'could be' . . . it's just enough to drain our vital energies. Rest when you want to rest, and take responsibilities for everything that you do, because nobody else can do it. And it's good to be capable, it's good for you, it's good for your friends, it's good for the world and it's good for God.
And 'enjoy yourself, it's later than you think'.
August 21, 2010.
WHO DO YOU SERVE?
The liquids in my body have seeped down into my feet, the blood in my heart is pouring out of every pore, and I can't figure out nothing that will make a difference. I'm swimming in my own shame. It's inescapable. It's impossible. And there's not a person in this room that couldn't walk out there with their chest out making an impression on every person they bump into. They're going to 'maintain' – that's the reality.
So what am I going to do? On top of your shame, to make guilt. Here I sound like I'm accusing. There's nobody to accuse but myself. Don't ask me how that works, it's something I know.
The time is 'after twelve'. If you can't hook-up with some passion with people that you feel understand 'enough!' 'No more!' To function in a community of a spirit of righteousness . . . not compromised.
WHO DO YOU SERVE?
'Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die'. It suits exactly what we're talking about here, because there's no 'why' in it. It takes everything just to maintain the BEING. And if you do, you do because it's the only thing in the world that has a chance of working. Working what, you don't even know.
There's what to talk about, there's what to look at. Wouldn't it be nice, 'no expression of negativity'. You can't build something solid and also be reactive in life. You've got to stop being busy with your individual concerns, which in the so called normal way, everyone is busy with. The mind is turning all the time.
It's very tricky. Anything you call 'mine' is the same as 'me', and what you're actually doing is worrying about the future. At that level, thinking is totally unproductive. The things you're trying to change or avoid mechanically there's very little you can affect there. But, more important is that mentality stops you from seeing other levels in the world that we're in and, to one degree or another, a preparation for the next stage of existence which we know nothing about other than it requires the same thing that's required her – Awareness and Love.
Whatever you struggle with, every loss of identity is like a little death. The issue is psychological. Maybe the people in the house are seeing enough of their usual maze, it's useless . . . goes nowhere.
So in this time, people are awake as much as possible, things might surface that might be useful to you and whoever else.
In order to get more, you've got to experience more. In order to experience more, you have to suffer the mistakes of experiencing. Our problem isn't that we have too much pain . . . we don't have enough, actually. Whatever we start experiencing is a mess, Gurdjieff called it the 'pain factory' . . . each one internally considering. It's all 'catch as catch can'. It's a mess.
You cannot bypass humanity on the way to freedom / truth. To get to Love . . . you have to know Humanity, because you're part of it.
All the Teachings, all the Religions at the basic level are saying what you've got to do in this life – you've got to SERVE, serve, serve and then serve some more. Not to be a good person – to BE.
To become free from trying to figure-out everything that you can't. When you know you can't, you're left with a compassion, in a way, love. You see that you can't, and you look around at everybody . . . it's so sad, like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to do things that are impossible.
The Teachings and Religions are teaching how to GIVE. When you can give, then you are free . . . as simple as that. And misery is from not being free, and no matter what you have in this world, if you're not free you're nothing.
Everyone is going to face death. How many years? It doesn't matter . . . pains here and there . . . the mind turning . . . what are you going to do? (You've got to pay for it).
The less you have when you die the better off you are. And that goes for material, or other so called 'mine'.
You must never ever believe the low opinion that people generally have of people. Must not be sucked in.
It's a magnificent, incredible thing to be born a human. And if by chance you should think that you really love the Truth and that's where you get satisfaction, be careful with it. Or as it says, 'There's no fooling the Work'. The Work is the Truth of how things work. Don't fuck with the truth.
There's no happiness at the level of ignorance. You want to be happy, or you want the truth? You 'want' the truth. That's not enough. Do you love it? If you just want it and don't love it, when you come across a truth that's not complimentary, you don't want it anymore, and you're fuck'n with God. Don't fuck with God, that's stupid, how stupid we can get.
We are not our body. But it will sure try to convince you that it is.
The profit is in the pain. Every center, every sense, is demanding your attention and 'I'dentification, calling itself 'I'. If you can resist that, if you can remember, if you can BE . . .
OCTOPUS
Octopus – 'devil' personified . . . it works completely mechanically . . . kind of a little instrument that no matter what the circumstances are, it shifts and manipulates to its advantage without reference to anything other than self-interest . . . completely oblivious to anything . . . as quick as that.
Octopus – everyone grabs another one, eventually chokes itself to death. Where everything cancels out everything.
One of its voices 'not at my expense'. It's a 'not at my expense' machine.
You can't divide the person from the surrounding individuals.
There's the expression 'I saw the devil, and it was me'. But the horror of the awareness in its full of that phenomena . . . we're 'working', we're 'teaching' . . . everyone keeps an account book, you never know where one might be able to use a justification. It sounds so innocent.
August 22, 2010.
STAND UP
If you're not ready to die for what you want, you're not worth shit. That's a fact, not an idea.
As everything in life is connected to everything else, there's no such thing as a small thing and because everything is connected to everything else, there's nothing you can talk about that's not connected to everything else. So somehow you've got to make some kind of choice, should you presume to value your time and your energy, your company, your life.
There's also what they call 'sibling rivalry'. People don't realize it, everyone spends their life comparing and criticizing. How do we know who we are, we're more or less of this or that, with this one or that one. At a social level that's who we are. And you can be sure no one wants to be less. But now, these days are not a joke. We're not in it for the accolades, we're not in it for the 'who's who' . . . and we're in it, and we'll be out of it 'like that'.
The requirement of the new stage has nothing to do with the past. The past is dead. Effectiveness and needed-ness in a context larger than the individual . . . is really a piece of art, it's absolutely not an imitation. Even more than that there's a new social reality, new realities at other levels. So, 'there's no cure for love' (LC).
Conscience, where you don't 'have to' do anything. Right action doesn't come from 'have to'.
Adam: I ask myself 'why should you be suffering so much in this period?'
Alan: It's a payment for Work. Actually, it's the receipts of Work, the things we witness mostly . . . the twists. The suffering has a number of elements in it, and it's not as it might appear. Any kind of suffering, is taken too quickly as being negative.
August 23, 2010.
5 AM MEETING
We are all here getting a lesson, on 'how to die right'. I doubt whether there is a more important thing to learn in your life. And if you don't have any background, if you don't have the 'measure', it could be terrible. Never mind being terrible in terms of discomfort or fear, but what an opportunity to go out consciously.
In a way, it's holding on to fearlessness. What is fear in this instance? It's the unknown – all 'after', all towards fear. And when you're facing what you think is death, it's for sure something you never (faced). The worst thing you can imagine is the worst thing that 'already' happened to you. And in this particular case it's got multiple elements, because that 'never' happened to you.
A 'reasonable' perspective on 'here' and what might come 'after' is so important. It's not within the usual things we consider important.
Stay away from lies and 'worrying about things' you can't do anything about, which is most everything. Whatever what's called the Spirit, Consciousness ItSelf, whatever other realms might come 'after' are of a part of the Totality. Can you be prepared for death, or what we call 'death', or whatever's after? This is the issue.
In every conscious Awareness with discomfort (physical, emotional, intellectual), you're aware of a subtle change (sometimes it's called transformation), just by your attention – there's no satisfaction like that on earth.
There is nothing, nothing, (that's my experience in life), nothing to fear in this life. No matter what you go through, you gain something from it, mainly an 'oh'. I've managed to pass through that and 'oh, I feel stronger'.
THE ULTIMATE ISSUE / THE TEST OF TESTS
What I want for you is good strong continuance which is so important for you, for everyone. This is the most difficult challenge for me personally.
Stick to your love of everything, it's all ONE, everything.
At all levels our biggest waste of energy is our training and inclination of always looking for cause and effect. It doesn't exist really, everything has multiple causes to it.
Whatever you have come across at different levels in the Work, it's true. The more you have the opportunity to witness it, experiment with it, the more the truth exposes itself. The higher the pressure . . . we've had a number of experiences, some very interesting with what we call, breakthroughs.
You know, you know, you know and then you KNOW. With a certain energy those 'knowings' coming together . . . that's what's called a quantum change.
By separating energy waves, without being identified – there's the ultimate issue.
In some ways they know me so well, that they don't see me.
'Politically correct', to be moral, relative to the society we come from, as if fair according to our sense of social conditioning . . . and to actually know what Conscience is. There's the test of tests. It's not morality.
They are still coming from a 'calculating head' not a loving head.
24 August 2010
I WISH TO REMEMBER MYSELF
I WISH TO REMEMBER MYSELF
There's the breakdown:
When you say 'I' – some sense of 'I', sense of Presence.
'WISH' – is a very deep want. 'To want' is the ping-pong game that goes on between the toes and the nose. 'I WISH' is a very strong combination of two factors within a human being. It's a deep something.
I WISH TO RE-MEMBER – 'members', like the members of the feet, members of the hands, members of a machinery, of a package. To Re-member, to put things together, in a way. I want to be aware of all the 'members', the gestalt . . . that takes practice, as well. There are different ways 'remember' is used. A person remembers themselfs – the first thing is to pass their Attention around the body.
I WISH TO RE-MEMBER. And all those elements together with MYSELF. Myself with just an 'I', is not complete, and myself with just a 'wish', is not complete. To remember the pieces.
I WISH TO REMEMBER MYSELF . . . all of it together, as myself in a BEing sense.
All of these words have a vibration in them, have a reality in them, these are not merely words. To Be, or not to Be . . . that is the issue. And 'to Be', requires an 'I', and a Wish, a Re-membering – through Attention, through the BEing of my Self.
August 25, 2010.
TRUST
It's simple enough, it's clear. Alan's always acknowledged YOU.
He trusts you more than you trust yourself. You don't trust yourself, because a whole lot of stuff you wanted and tried, you never got. In a certain way, you're a failure in your own eyes, because you're not satisfied. Can't even say where, right?
It's not a comfortable position to be in. Makes it also a little bit difficult because, I say 'do what you want' . . . if you're alive, you're not going to impress me. And they did what they wanted and that didn't impress them.
To come to peace with themselves they've got to work their way back to realize that they 'don't know who they are'. They've been holding up a very elaborated life style on the basis of 'I know' . . . and it's not true.
So, their children and their wives, their husbands . . . no one is playing that game with them. A little bit, maybe, but not enough to give one confidence that you can carry all the way to your death without, what they would call, 'losing it'.
MORNING MEETING (6.30 am)
It's right on the edge – it's the end of nothing and the beginning of everything, in potential. The tricky part of it is that everything has a beginning, and there's no way of judging its value. It's like nothing before.
'After' is always an illusion . . . with patience you collect facts . . . 'in'. Your progress is patience in humility . . . with simple evaluation it is possible. You've already established a sense of what's what 'inside'. Evaluated fact according to what you conceive you know best.
What is 'sleep', what is 'awake'? That is the key issue: what is 'awake'?
Is 'awake' all the memories of yesterday: 'he said', 'she said', 'I promised myself', 'I will', 'I won't and 'then I'll do'? Some kind of a dream picture that's popping-up in us all the time and then it changes. We're dreaming constantly.
What would awake mean / be?
How can you answer a question like that when you're asleep? You have your whole identity in your dream . . . it's full of 'I', 'I', 'I', 'I', 'I', 'I'. You leave that go, you have no 'I'. It's a big issue, are we alive in our dreams or are we alive?
We are Alive IN Love. It happens. Not in love with somebody, just BEING.
(Love) that's life, the rest is dream. Before you know it you end-off taking yourself as the dream and you forget about life. Love supports love. When you love somebody, you can see yourself in them and vice versa. There's nowhere to go in this world other than IN to increase the Consciousness of what IS. Don't be afraid of it.
Use what you've got around the Work even if you've got 'that little' around it, use it! It's not quantity of ideas, it's the quality. Be careful, handle it like a new baby. It's talking about things that you can intuit here, and know later. It's not at all about a little bit of knowledge here and there.
Relax in the 'not knowing', when you say, 'I don't know', you're open. It's not accident they say, another name of God 'I don't know'.
One way or another with me you're going to see something, with yourselves as well, hopefully. Because if I live, you're not going to believe it, and if I die you also won't believe it!
Feel the awkwardness, ask yourself a few questions around it. Don't feel bad even being miserable, it's got a lot of energy in it. I testify to that.
Everything is exactly the way it has to be. A person takes advantage, you complain about nothing – you 'take advantage'.
DYING TO THE LIE. Review meeting
The assumptions, taken as real, are running our lives most of the time. . . 'I'll get up in the morning', 'I'll do this', 'I'll always do this' . . . whatever. It goes on. The difficulty is in establishing any fixed identity in it, or a fixed expectation from anybody. People are becoming aware of that now, in a closer circle.
Everyone dying to personality. When you're older you know you can't sell anybody on anything that isn't actually what it is. You can't go on being 'interesting' to people all your life, to put it simply. It's a whole area, an identity with them by being 'interesting'. So, everybody becomes frightfully uninteresting . . . but, that's all they've got.
We've got each other in the truthfulness that we are really 'nobody' at a social level. And in the acceptance of the truth of that matter, there's a humility and a realness, a lack of pretension. That in its own unique way is really quite satisfying.
Your relationship with your sisters, family generally, is fluent. Nobody can force you to dance according to their picture. And yet, they're ready to dance with you whether you're ready to dance or not. They 'flow'.
In these days I'm in a more awkward relationship to the truth that we're all dying. I think the body is going, and the mind, 'identity within knowing' is going. It was always a question of 'you think what you think when you think it' and 'you feel what you feel when you feel it' and 'you do what you do when you do it'. Anything more than that is a lie. When people are going around saying 'I'm always like this, I'm always like that', it's a lie. That 'lie' is dying.
RELATIONSHIP / EXPECTATIONS
In fact everyone is dying . . . but we don't think about it in those terms. So, the moment you see someone whose body seems to be in a more rapid movement towards that, there's this double effect.
1) What is the relationship to this being that is dying, (what do you care)?
2) What are the implications of the fact that everyone is dying?
You begin to realize that we maintain a relationship with people according to how they're taking us. Then when they are as if on the road to 'disappearance' . . . we see that a 'person living from being seen', is like not being seen, and more or less not Being, not living.
There's no one that you can 'expect' to act in a certain way. I think that's more and more the general atmosphere in this house itself. They can ask, (even with an extreme case like Uzi and or what seems that way, sometimes Tair), but their fixed expectations of each other are weakened. They know that the other one can only do what they can do.
WHO IS ALAN?
Who is Alan and what's the issue? We have to take the sentimentality out of it. What works, and what doesn't work? There's a difference between one man and another? And what's the difference?
Awareness is the issue.
But again, the issue is not a verbal one. It's an immense issue, Identity within personality.
I'm glad you're here, and by the way you 'are' . . . not knowing who, what and where . . . which is as close to the real as you can get. Stick to your integrity, nobody owes you anything, no body. It's a horrible thing, because right action doesn't come from owing, only guilt comes from owing. Owing according to whose idea, whose what?
To know the difference between what should and could be, and what's possible. A good willed-person is trying to do his best all of the time, juggling god knows what. Let them juggle, let them do the best with what they've got.
Our problem is that we don't trust God. It's very complex, we don't trust Now, we don't trust that basically everything is fine. In the Work it says, 'You've got everything you need'.
The mystery is infinitely greater than our imagination, and functions at levels that we see only when the lower levels drop away. We don't keep ourselves alive, the Universe keeps us alive, moment by moment, everything's connected with everything. This is the way it is.
Breath is a food, air is a food. You've got to be very relaxed and present to take it in.
The body is actually a bit of a pathetic phenomenon at the moment. But it's amazed to be doing whatever it's doing.
The 'gap' between how we take things, and how things really are . . . sometimes you have to get sick or shocked to realize it.
August 26, 2010
PEOPLE DON'T LIKE PEOPLE
People want exclusivity affection-wise, time-wise, get-wise – not 'interested-wise'. People don't like people, generally speaking . . . they 'want' people.
What does it mean to love someone . . . that you want them in your pocket?
The question is 'Are we strong enough here to hold our ground?'
August 27, 2010.
SELF-IMPORTANCE IN LIFE
ENERGY is the issue – squandered in this compulsion to be 'somebody' of influence at 'this level of existence'.
'This level of existence' – is the key – it appears to us to be 'everything'. We call it life.
But even if we were to take 'this life' as the 'only' life . . . if we were honest people . . . we would see the pretentiousness, egoism, self-importance, the pathetic-ness of people – being propped-up in a sack of fragmented, convincing, projection of being 'worthy', of being influential, of being listened to by their neighbors, their friends, their children, of knowing what cause and effect would make things right, whatever right they might conceive – and that the foolishness of their activities produces vain, contradictory, frustrated, blaming people. 'Everybody's got his price'. You can buy anybody, that's the assumption.
Know ThySelf. Live from CONSCIENCE not morality (fictitious), not the 'should' and 'shouldn't's. Indications of QUALITY certain people had or have, seen as religious, as if, for their PAITENCE, not imitation. Simple, in worldly terms. But, the world wants 'special' people, they don't want simple people. They want to know someone they can name-drop.
The fact is that there is more to it all than these little games, 'I'm good', 'I'm bad', 'I'm liked', 'I'm disliked', 'I'm more', 'I'm less'. These comparative, as if, challenges among people surpass any kind of security or stability. This is a challenge in competition and comparison to be 'more' than somebody else especially those closest to you.
So, with decency, with honesty, with humility, a person can begin to see and actually live up to the truth that it's not so difficult to take care of yourself. Then you have a chance of seeing what you're in the midst of, which is mainly man-distorted-magic. If you can pass the wish to out-perform the impressers, then what?
Life here is an OPPORTUNITY to be your simple Self. It's stupid to leak energy by worrying about things you inevitably have no control over.
The crime of, or maybe the inevitability in the creative process is that should people have initiative, then as a result they have to build some kind of egoistic sense of 'I am creative', 'I am important', and a kind of necessity to improve on and be recognized 'along with God'. Then you get this imbalance, not co-operative with creation, but a competitive something – which results in violence and heartlessness – we lose heart. A kind of appreciation for the beauty turning into competition with it.
To have a realization – that there's an awful lot MORE to Existence than we consider. It's not merely pride and vanity. Creativity is more than just 'interesting' and 'stimulating'.
To get to the more, you have to pass through the less, with the minimum intelligence that you've developed, or been given and to be able to see a lie as a lie, a pretence as a pretence, vanity as vanity. If you believe that this 'life' is the only thing that exists, then you want to make the best as most people are doing – challenging each other to be something 'special' within nothing.
BUSY DYING
Try to listen to people, see what they 'want' . . . you can never satisfy them. You've got to be sensitive to Now. If you were perfectly sensitive you would satisfy them.
Only by BEing can you find out how you can touch something Now.
August 28, 2010
BELIEVE IN GOD
What does it mean to 'believe in something'? The first thing it indicates is that 'you don't know'. You 'hear' something or 'feel' something or you 'believe' something. So you don't know whether what you believe is true.
People don't believe in God. If God is something real then it's 'the way things are'. It's been said, 'that it's not enough to want the truth, you've got to love the truth'.
'You've got to' – is there any way to do that? It's another way of saying, 'you've got to hate the lies' that are being presented. If you don't love the truth, when you hear a truth that is not complimentary, you don't want it anymore.
So who loves the truth? It's a big one. I don't know if we're born that way. 'People believe in the truth as an option seldom exercised'. They don't trust the truth . . . it doesn't do them any good.
'The truth' – how things actually are, momentarily; how someone sees something, feels something, thinks about something.
Long term: money makes you happy, you've got to have children . . . because it's 'good'.
What makes something good? We're very open around there, you don't have to decide 'no children', 'yes children'… you don't know. You don't have to make a decision on something that you don't know . . . it's also a truth. The biggest truth is 'I don't know'. People can't say that.
They say if there's no God, then the person becomes 'god' . . . 'I' will work it out. If you don't build yourself on a basis of what is truth, 'how things work actually', then you've got to construct it all by yourself.
Happiness will be if I've got . . . got, got, got. You can feel it with people sometimes, the further away from the truth the harder they recoil. You have a certain sense of that element here.
Morality and ideas have a way of substituting for the truth. We decide that this 'should be', and that 'shouldn't be'.
The truth, kind of, balances out with everything, it's called Conscience.
'STILL PLAYFUL'
I think it's mainly among the men, that you can feel suspicion or lack of trust. It's a kind of habit that's very interesting to watch – not to fall into that place where you don't believe anybody. But it's not all negative, 'you don't believe anybody' is when you don't believe yourself. You got exaggerated in the pressure on the outside that you had to dig your heels in, and you had to as if be suspicious of everybody, of everything. I'm opening the door, but I'm not insisting. It's all a little awkward for us to be at home with ourselves, and at the same time 'open up the door'. We're kind of suspicious egoists in our environment.
What does it mean to be awake? It's totally non-judgmental, no matter what we hear. We can't just listen to whatever's happening at whatever level. You say that's impossible . . . you've got to place things.
So it's 'yes and no' in a way, because as the saying goes 'Be as innocent of evil as little children, but at least in your own minds be mature' (St. Paul). Now, how do you work that one out? Can you be clever enough to be nobody?
You want to add insult to injury by being more clever? It's like imagination, dreaming, self importance, 'knowing' . . . if it's unwinding, there's an end when it's unwound, it's not endless. Maybe that's the mistake, if it were endless, it would be hopeless. You box yourself in with some words.
To reach a place of 'organic shame' . . . the gift in the knowing (and the perception that is unusual) is not in conflict with the ignorance. The ultimate value of it: two opposites almost clashing to the point of irreconcilable, enough to eliminate a person, turn them into a zero. It won't eliminate the gift and the value. Maybe the ultimate that looks like the worst . . . so how thankful.
THE UNIQUENESS OF TRUTH
You must respect your goodness,
You must respect your care.
You must never identify with awkwardness,
It's legitimate, it's fair.
You should never suspect your good will.
The burden it must bare.
We're in it for the truth and the good, without pretentiousness, without fear. There is a lot to see. There is an immense amount to BE, no hesitation, and no rush. You cannot push the truth of Now around.
Believe in yourSelf, totally. It's really there.
Enough reaction to false accusations, historic and contemporary. Enough reactions to what are essentially other people's subliminal fears, relative to their own unresolved issues. No need for defense, for a corrupted audience.
Sincerity will prevail, anything less than 'could be' will dissolve. You have the power in a natural mode, sufficient . . .'sufficient unto the good'.
I'm happy for anybody who can understand the inevitability of the slips and errors, and habit and reputation, the mixture of wish and effort, and guilt, and inadequacy and the pain of not being understood, and not understanding. It's all part of a 'Level of Being'.
If you can just remember that you're in it for the good, and that developing a 'functional good' takes experience. It takes the experience of the human condition, inner and outer. There's nothing to be guilty about.
It's really a short trip here. The only problem is that it looks like 'everything', and as long as you're IDENTIFIED with it, it is 'everything'. You want to be something special in the 'everything'? If you can survive the 'everything', without anger, without resentment . . . with amazement, with thankfulness – that's special enough.
Every psyche is faced with its own package, in a world which is revolving around the same issues in different combinations. So integrity requires a certain adaptability to common sense, which illuminates false pride and false guilt.
It's Work – it's all working your way towards clarity. That's a Way. Work is working a Way, towards what you can . . . whatever it is, whatever you want. But in the real part of you, what you really want is to have a 'productive Way', not necessarily comfortable, but not unnecessarily uncomfortable.
‘A communion of goodwill' is an essential element in a 'productive Way'. It's not an individual way . . . the Knowledge is Universal. Conscience is Universal. But human beings in the universality get very subjectively packaged in pretence, fear and guilt . . . peculiarly packaged 'survival systems'. . . and we can be more than that. Even a little bit in that direction is a satisfaction. Perfection is simplicity itself.
Egos want to be 'special', not to be 'simple'. That's a big one. The uniqueness of Truth, not the uniqueness of personality.
29 August 2010
'DEEP CONCERN'
What is love? What is affection? What is fear? What is want? What is expectation? What is disappointment, in connection to what?
What is coming out now, relative to 'me', seems to be a lot of surprisingly 'deep concern'. All of a sudden, all eyes are on Alan.
Who cares if I live or die?
Na'ama: Somewhere I don't believe that anyone's concern is real.
Alan: You don't believe it's for anyone else other than themselves. That's obvious. You care if I continue?
Na'ama: What, I should care if you live? I don't know.
Alan: That's the question 'What do you care?' What's worth something? What can a person do? Even to say 'I don't know'.
Tami: The words that come to me, is that you give us (anyone that knows you) attention, love, recognition. We know we're seen, we know you know us. Then to think of you 'out of the picture', it's like part of us. We will have to maintain ourselves without that outer feedback. In a way we will be left on our own, but there's a big challenge in it. A choice of trying to remember what we know best or to cry that we don't have what we need.
YOU LOVE ALAN?
With whatever efforts I make to stay alive, there's a whole lot of stuff going on that allowed me to be alive . . . it's hard to say that I made efforts, because of maybe 'unexpected circumstances'.
I flash back every once in a while, what Stephen experienced in Australia, years ago . . . what in some strange way kept him alive, but was also in some strange way overwhelming. How can you explain it?
Many other experiences in life that were remarkable, you wonder whether you can say 'I did anything'. You can say 'I witnessed or experienced things one way or another, and I survived'.
'MAN CANNOT DO', it's an illusion. Is that what we're talking about right now? And what are we so busy with there, being 'somebody', seen or unseen, valued or not valued, appreciated or not?
You begin to see it's all so ridiculous. What have I got to do with it? It's my picture of how I'm being related to in terms of someone else's picture.
He doesn't blame anybody specific. He doesn't have a feeling that somebody SHOULD or COULD be doing this, that or the other thing. Owes him, or anybody else, for any reason to do something that he thinks they 'should' or 'shouldn't', 'could' or 'couldn't'. So, he lives more in the mystery in that area than you do. In your enthusiastic, at times, sense of being who you are, some part of you thinks you should be sitting up there on a throne with a crown. There's a tremendous feeling of superiority, with no guilt. Just as a fact. He doesn't have that kind of sense that he's going to lead the 'McNamara's Band'.
Oh! Me name is McNamara,
I'm the leader of the band.
Although we're few in numbers
We're the finest in the land.
What's a human being? Consciousness wrapped-up in flesh and blood and a rather dubious nervous system.
To Thy own Self be true. Trust your own goodness, trust your own deepest motivation. Don't be embarrassed in front of any man. Don't compare yourself to nobody. There's nothing on earth like you, nothing.
Stick to your integrity, as much as you can be, BE. Don't fuck around with the truth and honesty . . . not from other people's false morality, to their false judgments. Don't spend your life getting the better of some little petty thief.
SLUGGISH
What do you do in a world when no one is pleased with a goddamn thing anyone else is doing?
You recognize the feeling? That's what I said about Tzvika, he was 'yelling' all the time.
So it got sluggish. Sluggish!!
September coming up, a whole new year . . . all that old shit coming up and no one knows what they want to do. A job, the school and, and, and . . . we're going to go through that cycle again? I'm guessing this is what's going on. Maybe something is hanging in the air right now. Familiar, so I pick up on it . . . and I'll ride it to the end.
Okay, you're not sure why you're doing what you're doing and I raise my voice and you guys want to crawl in the corner. It's just the tone, there's no one to complain about. Complaints are ridiculous.
Pay attention. You're doing your best, and there's nothing to be guilty about. You don't know what to ask, that's what's happening most of the time. What's the problem?
30 August 2010.
1.30 a.m. 'SORRY TO BOTHER YOU'
It's a 'sleep' world . . . to be reborn in an 'awake' world you have to die first, but before you can die to what you imagine you are, you have to realize what you imagine you are, you have to Know Yourself. You have to die to something.
'I'dentity . . . if we don't get somebody bouncing off us, whether they agree, they disagree, it really doesn't matter, at least they acknowledge our dream world.
"Tight Little Packages" dissolves the person into their 'I know that your thoughts and feelings are passing through you or recurring through memory impressions, and are not 'YOU'! Your other 'possessions' also come and go, including those most 'hard-earned' and including your most cherished 'blood-relatives' – are NOT 'YOU'.
YOU that came into the world as a spot of living consciousness / awareness – YOU that can come to SEE and UNDERSTAND the above mentioned FACTS – that for me is YOU!
It was a good piece, sharp. If I had it here I would try and read it . . . I think it would ring a chord here in a strong way as to what we are wound-up in unconsciously kind of masturbating ourself trying to establish an 'I'dentity.
So I got you on the line. It's late, I hear 1.30. 'Late?' Holy shit, nothing's started yet, and it's already late.
You felt that 'the limits of friendship' really says something . . . and for compassion of the suffering people slipping into little corners of imagination that no one ever pointed out to them. Wow . . . they could just come alive.
I'm wondering what is it that's not allowing it . . . and god knows the people are suffering in their darkness and you're carrying a bunch of matches around there. There's something stuck there. So I've wondered, whether just by reading this one piece might have the effect of opening up some light.
So that's it, if you feel like coming over with that one piece, and if not. I don't know, I leave it to God. Okay?
Na'ama: I'm going back to sleep, Alan.
Alan: Okay, bye.
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU !!!
What an amazing reality in Now, how little we live it, and how many other alternatives there seem to be, from seeking an identity, to working out 'how I'm going to be with this one or the next one'.
We're so afraid of Now. All of the past is gone, except for some residue people keep over . . . 'you never listen to me!’
Goodnight everybody.
THE BLAME GAME
What's the problem, now? Why is there the feeling of 'not okay' now?
I have to realize, I don't have a goddamn problem in the world. Who has a problem that's of any real substance? There's awkwardness with this and that person, with this and that attitude, the mother, the father . . . no one is satisfying nobody.
People are looking for satisfaction in some kind of an arrangement that is going to take place. It's all play a 'happy friendship' games. What a pathetic state of humanity. You're going to adjust to that without falling into 'the blame game'?
INTENSITY OF INTEGRITY
In the intensity of my involvement in various sides of life there's a certain special quality of vibration, that being the 'quality of integrity', natural.
In whatever I was involved, there weren't the usual weakening distortions that come in terms of compromise, selling yourself a story of something coming from pride rather than from fact, being insincere, trying to manipulate and color facts to make them convenient to what you think you're trying to do.
Integrity towards a natural respect for what IS and a confidence of profiting from the clarity of being consistent to the IS of things.
I had a sense of fairness, a respect for people, without judging them 'they're good', 'they're bad'. People as they 'are' in life 'as it is'. I had a keen interest, whatever I was doing, in 'how do things work'. I didn't feel I had to override, in order to make things work to my advantage. I didn't feel competition with people. I didn't struggle with one person for the attention of another, through any kind of artificial means. So there was an intensity of integrity which was very natural.
Love is the answer. Fear is the figuring-out (that you cannot do) with guilt in it.
That's the answer in words. I had to say that just in case I drop dead now . . . I don't want to leave you empty.
Love is the answer. Regardless of circumstances, regardless of vibrations, regardless of understanding, regardless of 'I know', 'I don't know'. It's a humility based in Love, in knowing that 'to thine own Self be true' and everything will be fine, in this life or afterwards. How many people have a sense of that?
A human being has what he has. In whatever situation, he absorbs certain vibrations one time, he's conditioned by one or another something, has the limitations of human beings, in general. To judge oneself is ridiculous, measuring yourself competitively with someone else is ridiculous.
Better word than Love: amazement for it all. Be joyful and thankful, it's amazing, the movement of it all.
You have to pass through the pride, vanity, self-pity, magia li (I deserve), haser li (I'm lacking), blaming of one kind or another which comes from childish reactions. You have to move through that. If there's integrity, you'll have no choice but to move through it. You think you can make God feel sorry for you?
* * *
When there's no pressure, no problem. No problem – no fear. No fear – no compulsion to think yourself out of anything. You're in peace, you're in patience, you're in what IS. If it has a strong demanding vibration, then take a strong demanding vibration. It may require the ultimate simplicity of a human being, and to be able to say 'I don't know'.
UNIVERSAL MISTAKE
We were talking about what brought you to 'collapse', and you said maybe it's the 'universal mistake' that people are trying to 'make things better', instead of letting things be what they are.
In a way, what could be more obvious? How can they be other than they are . . . and if you want to 'make it better', how can you be aware of the multiplicity of elements (historic, background, inter-related issues) that keep them as they are. Whatever IS, is the total, the inter-reaction of everything. It's like saying, whatever IS, is God.
They don't work to our satisfaction, so it seems.
There's a poem that goes:
'It's all still going on, an endless view, an endless song.’
There's a difference. You can say, you're not happy in 'how' it works. What about your objections? It's very personal, 'I don't like the way it works'. You want to change something?
I'm thinking of these pieces that were written up on the wall, somewhat before this crisis.
'Your negativity is making me sick'.
In a way I'm saying, I see your negativity as ugly . . . I think you get yourself into trouble with it. It's all happening wrong. I'm pointing out propositions so that you can look at your negativity and stop being negative. I want you to stop being negative, so much, that when you don't stop being negative it makes me sick.
There are things you can do. You don't have to be negative all of the time. Maybe external considering is the main principle, captures all of them. But isn't external considering, in a way, acknowledging or seeing 'how things are' rather than wanting to change them to your benefit? If you're looking at the people and want them 'not to be negative' then you think you're externally considering, it's more like internal considering . . . because what they're doing is making you uncomfortable. That can be so obviously true . . .
You see the whole thing is a mess. A primitive, pathetic interaction among so called intelligent human beings – 'who started', 'what happened', and 'who does it to whom'.
NERVOUS WRECKS
Nobody connecting really.
What are the implications? In this passage through life is there anything to be accomplished, in terms of Understanding, where there is a DIFFERENCE, where what you learn and what you see is just taking care of your own financial interests unashamedly, OR, you actually 'stretch yourself' to see what other human beings are, what the situation is and whether they are 'worth anything' other than in a sentimental way?
In other words, is there anything that makes a difference in your life? Because if not . . . 'save your money' and 'buy your own oxygen machine'.
Which few among the many, might hook into an evolutionary reality that goes beyond the death of the body, beyond the comfort and prestige? Something that has got meaning, a significance, a reality that exceeds 'alive' in the body, and 'finished' without it.
This period or the elements of it that I've influenced by my 'happenings', shows people actually are in a very delicate relationship to themselves, to life, to death, to value . . . and they're really riding a very marginal, hysterical relationship between their 'day to day' and their death. They're not at peace, in any sense, with their life, relative to anything ultimate like death – it's a potential different value.
They're so nervous with me now . . . they're deeply concerned, all nervous wrecks. This they fear, yes, and they don't know what.
Now it takes a tremendous, particular kind of effort to relate to people 'out' of their associative, changing, habitual feeling and expression of themselves. It's really with an effort to pull them into Now, regardless of what's going on now.
AFTER A DIFFICULT NIGHT
Is it possible for a human being to hear something like the words 'calm down' and actually be able to do something about it? What control does a human being have over the various vibrations (the heavier vibrations)?
August 31, 2010.
'WORTH SOMETHING?'
In a strange way, there's no such thing as death. For something to be a thing, you have to be aware of it, so if you're dead you're not aware of it. So death can't exist, in a strange kind of way. There's no such thing as death.
You're living in a big period of history, don't weaken out. This integrity of understanding that there is value, and that you do have value and your carefulness, your cleanliness with that value, is vital.
STOP IT
You've got to get behind everything that we ever thought we knew. It's no more figuring out, it's putting it aside! That's what I'm saying "Stop it!" 'What?' Doesn't matter what. You cannot do for yourself. You lost yourself the moment you got into the body.
The fact that you don't know is really not so serious . . . what's so serious is that you are 'supposed' to know. You are supposed to know what's going on in the world, what's advantageous, what isn't advantageous . . . where you can profit. Do we have to become smarter and more manipulative in order to find out how it works for 'me'?
So it's been said in this environment a long time ago:
If Act, Act on Behalf of Others.
See what they take, and what they don't take. See what there is to take. See what there is that can be taken without necessarily giving. Find out what's useful. For 'yourself', you'll never find out.
You're finding an opportunity for that kind of thing here in this house. How does that happen, I don't know, you don't know exactly. In a strange kind of way it works. And since I got, as if incapacitated, almost totally, there's a lot to do, what to consider, and how much you find out about yourself.
You're starved, and you're angry, and you're frustrated, and you 'want everything for yourself'. You're blind, pathetic, beggar. Don't know what to grab at, first.
It's a very new ball game – no more lies, no more pretense.
You're finding out it's not a shame to be real.
The world as it is, is perfect. Our only problem is we don't know how to leave it alone.
September 1, 2010.
NO! NO! STOP IT!
The problem is that there are too many words out there . . . people are complaining all the time – they don't realize it.
Maybe what's happening now doesn't end merely in our individual death (whatever that is). But, maybe there's an opportunity. We're living in a remarkable period of time. What this world needs right now is everyone to stop complaining, about anything or anyone. It's ridiculous. And there's such a force behind that.
There was a kind of fear (not in the usual sense) of being stupid. Fear of not using this thing we call life for the fullest effectiveness possible – not missing.
Isn't it lovely! On the edge of death, it's all so simple. I'm on the edge, now, of death and also of a tremendous energy of clarity. I don't want to waste this.
"STOP IT!" whatever it is. "Stop explaining, stop trying to explain. It's not that you're necessarily complaining, at least not realizing it. But stop explaining. Your explanations are just confusing you and whoever you are talking to.”
What difference does anything actually make? That's what interests a person when they're on the edge of death. The world has intensified to such a degree now. It just may be that one move makes a difference at a period of history.
MONEY
They're struggling, they're lying, they're manipulating, taking it totally for granted, for the 'giver of all good – money'!
You can't deal with the truth, and also save money . . . they are deathly enemies for brain cell activity. You can't do it. In that mind, what can you trust? Money, reputation, ambition, spiritual ambition, self importance . . . all these things, they dissolve in the face of what IS, of how things work.
If God is anything, if the Truth is anything, it's fluid. You can't hold nothing. Anything you hold, is anti-Christ, is anti-Truth, is anti-God.
REVIEW
If you just follow the simplicity of the moment, and the inevitability of the circumstances, then you can only do what you can do when you can do it. And if you're coming from good will basically, you should feel wonderful about it, because you're in it for the good. To see exactly what it leads to or what it's affecting . . . no time to think about that. Just to do it, or not to do it . . . so that's what's happening, in a way, right now.
So at the simplest level it's quite a trip.
PERFECTION
It's 'so perfect' . . . and it takes 'nothing' from me. It's almost like being on the edge of a knife – there's nothing happening, nothing needed (at the moment), psychologically relaxed. I'm beginning to again . . . sort of like 'ahh' . . . it's so perfect – unreal. Like, at the cosmic invisible level, each little blood vessel is hooked into a . . .
It almost feels like a 'lifetime', where there's no contact with that kind of total gestalt (of life). Anything more is like 'how man tests magic', doing the impossible. It's there already, but yes, it takes Work.
Hesitant to say anything . . . it's like impossible . . . without a touch of awkwardness, it's overwhelming. I don't want to 'lie down' into such perfection. It's like something almost dehumanizing, I never felt the body in such disarray . . . broken pieces.
The perfection was so great, it eliminated time. And without time, it's like God couldn't be on the other side. It was too overwhelming, too perfect, like God couldn't be alone . . . everything was just happening 'like that'. There was no place to be alone. And then begin to realize, almost to the point of confinement, that before, you could die . . . there, you couldn't die.
Just to lie in the perfection . . . whatever it is, IS.
It's like 'unusual perfection', like we were back in touch in a long time. We let this become more perfect. It can be left alone? Is that what we're supposed to do now?
That's how God becomes infinitely more interesting. That's what reminds me (worlds were, activities were, relations were) . . . that we're in the middle of magic.
Comfort comes in before the realization of discomfort. We're on the edge of really something magnificent. Then something moves, can't be excited about it – it's just so 'out of this world'. All that's happening in the awkwardness, it's like 'do what you want, you can't help but come perfect'.
It was such an 'exhibit of perfection', it's like nothing left for man to do. Still, I would be happy to get into it. All you have to do is close your eyes, and it happens so quick, it's almost too fast.
And now what? You grew up, became perfect. What's left to do?
The line between sentimentality and value – this is the thing that touches the Real. This is too (good) to be 'important'. It's like 'important' has to be better than good, better than perfect. Because perfect is already known. Perfect and I didn't have to do anything.
September 2, 2010
NEGATIVITY
Everybody arrived under different circumstances and they would have liked to have hid their pain, their confusion, their cornered-ness. I've got to see that clear enough almost to step aside from it. But this was so overwhelming. It was the truth if I yelled at them back . . . that was one thing I had to do. I don't carry any of this.
At least I wish they didn't pretend.
You've got to serve, serve long. How many lifetimes of having to absorb this particular phenomena, here. It sits on me, through me. This time it must be dealt with in a different way, or so it appears.
Negativity is IGNORANCE (no 'and', 'ifs' or 'buts').
TESTS
What's remarkable about these days, I was thinking generally of the world, visible and not so visible. The tests are yet to come. In terms really of who is who and what is what.
September 3, 2010.
CHOICE
CHOICE – has a considerable amount to do with the larger and psychological condition of human beings that we're dealing with constantly.
What does it mean to have choice?
We are informed that 'MAN IS ASLEEP'. How can a person 'asleep' have a choice? Based on what?
SLEEP – what is that exactly, because everything that comes in puts you into another mood. Each mood has got another piece of your view of the world at the moment, but nevertheless psychologically you're living in there (you feel good, you feel bad). You look around, and that's what everyone is moving in. They are a punching bag for every energy that's out there in the world. Everybody that passes by 'pricks' you, and we don't even notice. It's taken all so for granted, and we call it 'life'. The body is a big spongy adaptation for craziness!
The Work says that's not life, that's a dream. What kind of a CHOICE can we make in the midst of that? If you are aware, you watch it. Are you dreaming the dream or is the dream 'doing' you?
You're making decisions according to that mood, that mood or that mood. It can be a little bit frightening, but better be frightened by the truth. Just get to know, what it means, 'MAN IS ASLEEP'.
You can 'take' anything, if you stop naming it, struggling with it, analyzing it, and comparing it. It's changing all the time. Let it do its work, and then maybe you can do something else.
So that's what we've been thrown into in these particular days. How to BE and BREATHE behind that amazing overwhelming confusion. Because when you die, that's all gone. It never was.
'You cannot do' . . . centered on horrible self-deception mixed with care, mixed with fear. These days we're in, are impossible for that. Whatever you've got is NEEDED.
You must become more ruthless with what you know.
It's not 'life and people die'. It's that you're going to lose the opportunity . . . so close to the Real. Infinite value, INFINITE.
September 4, 2010.
THE COMPLEXITY OF PEOPLE
There's something about the relationship between those three people that disturbed me, a so mundane 'attention-share', as if, of similar interests, and some crossed-vocabulary.
Between the simplicity of relationship and the complexity of a Being, there's such an amazing range of reality that has so little respect for the potential . . . of what we don't know.
We're restricted by the concepts of the physical body. But even within those concepts, we begin to see certain phenomena that obviously has delicacy and value infinitely greater than your reputation, your professional status, your children, your money.
You put the three of them together and there are areas of somewhat extra-special perception . . . together something quite remarkable. But they're overwhelmed by their natural so called instincts, or so it appears.
Some people only look for clarity in what's bothering them seriously. It's not a bad idea, but how about clarity for what's just generally going on. Maybe 'what's generally going on', is more important than the clarity you want for something so specific you're struggling with.
I'm suffering from 'modern' medicine. What a pill they slipped me. You have to be really sick to go to a doctor and believe him. I'd rather die of normal causes.
LET GO
'Directory', the First chapter (part):
End of September 1982 - Rosh Pina.
"And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him, he said, 'All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them' . . ." (L.C.)
What would be your last words, your last last words, spoken on the face of this, God's planet Earth. What would be your last words if in fact you were on the way out . . . And.......
And man is in the grip of overwhelming fear about just about everything.
What would be YOUR last words, my friend, your LAST words to those who are to remain, the survivors, let us say the children.
What would be your last words to those whom you love. Yes, yes, those whom you love!
Why to those whom you love? Well, why would anyone want to say anything to anyone, say, other than for self interest? That's the usual state of affairs - is it not - 'say', to get? But here we talk of the person on the way out who could not get anything in return from what they say. So why would they want to say anything?
They may want to say something from LOVE, maybe.
What would be the last thing you would say, say out of love? Something that would help. Something that would help, ho, ho !
What would help? What WOULD help?
If you were on the way out you could afford to help, no?
Is there ANYTHING that could HELP?
G. said: 'Only a man who is constantly aware that he could die at any moment, and that anyone that he may be with may die at any moment, has a sane and real relationship to life.’
He said something like that - and it's true, very TRUE, true that anyone could die at any moment.
So . . . let go . . . let go . . . let go.
Last words - LET GO!
Same day later:
What a DEATHLY thought - to remember that death could come to anyone at any time in any place . . . what a DEATHLY THOUGHT.
But my friends, there is no peace without the truth. Get that - there is NO PEACE WITHOUT THE TRUTH. And the truth of the matter, one of the truths of the matter, IS that death indeed can and does come at any moment and could in any place. Sorry, SORRY, so sorry, but that's, as they say, the 'God's honest truth'. And, if you come to know that truth, and get to live with the full weight of its reality, you can begin to live at peace. Wow!
LABYRINTH
Feels like I've been dragged into a labyrinth . . . and bound to be dragged out somehow. Didn't have to see all that I'm seeing, but . . .
MANKIND
Why does it keep coming up in me? How, somehow, mankind is the perpetrator of all the evil and all the good. It's like a deep sorrow for mankind, how he lied to himself. How sad, how we don't see a person. Every time we don't, we're all part of that balance. There's a piece in one of Gurdjieff's writings, he puts it as clear as I've ever did: cruelty, Russians, they defeated their enemy and strung them up on wire.
There's something in mankind that can do that . . . it's all blocks of horror.
September 5, 2010.
AFTER MIDNIGHT An Unknown but Friendly Entity.
This is 'happy', so it feels comfortable . . . if it's unhappy, something uncomfortable. How to make after better? This whole life, we don't realize, that's all we're doing. It's a waste of time because what makes us 'happy' is going to run-out, we're going to have to experience whatever we're going to experience without the 'long lastingness' of it.
If you really dig into why people are doing what they are doing, it's enough to drive you crazy at first, but if you don't, nothing really gets better.
Somewhat uncomfortable thinking about it – that's not very comfortable spending a life in comfortable / uncomfortable.
So thinking about it, there's the prospects, maybe, of making it a little bit less uncomfortable. But the more I think about it, the more I get this funny little feeling here that (it) is very uncomfortable. Maybe it's better not to think.
What's worse, living in the swing between comfortable or not so comfortable . . . or realizing that no matter how your 'swinging force' goes, you're never comfortable. Some people think it's really best to kill themselves, no matter what they do, they can't make themselves 'happy'.
So if they're not going to make themselves happy, they're going to make someone else happy. Does that work?
'To make someone else happy', then maybe 'they' try to make 'you' happy . . . because you're not really trying to make them happy. In the end they are 'concerned' with themselves.
You can question yourself as to what you are relating to, in me, not what you should or what you could, but actually the 'what' of it. What's being felt is this kind of compassion, suffering, difficult but profitable in certain ways? In what ways? What is it that appears to be happening or not happening? If so, what?
Strange, I have a feeling I'm stronger to take another step, there are layers to clear up with people . . . even if it doesn't change the world, so to speak, as we know it. It has different levels in it. These 'other worlds' are being worked parallel and the significance is in an area that takes time.
Real 'I', sense of God – Meaning.
A FINE LINE
You have a choice between observation and explanation. Sometimes when the habit of explanation (wherever it comes from) wants to insert itself, I go 'ho!’
Strange. There are moments, I feel I can 'turn around' and be vital again. On the edge of it . . . a fine line. Lots of energies around . . . no excuses now. The issue is just to BE THERE.
FEW WORDS
What do you want to do with the rest of your life? What choices do you think you have? You're seeing a lot more than you realize you're seeing – 'what is good, and what is bad, and who's still 'on line'?' Whether they should or they shouldn't, the awkwardness of it, the expectation.
The Work says 'Man cannot do'.
What does it mean? Does that ever go through your system? Why has it never been such an obvious issue?
What are people doing, if they don't know what they're doing?
What is good, if people don't know the results of anything?
What is Conscience? A trick? 'Conscience is conflict free'.
'THE HORROR OF MANKIND'
'Acme of creation' – proud bunch of sons of bitches from top to bottom. It's not so much the 'good' or the 'bad' . . . the sickening part, people have no idea what the results will be of anything they do, or don't do. People will face it.
The horror of mankind is that a person cannot seem to say 'I don't know'. That's what it's grown into – talk about lies!
RELATIONSHIPS
Tami: It scares to face someone so weak and on the line of death and leaving this world . . . leaving 'our' world, it's frightening.
Alan: It's touching their own life. It's the exact opposite of what's needed, part of the rational of the usual 'adjusted' mind – sadness, sentimentality, affection, good-will, relatively without accounts, nevertheless, in illusion of being good.
What's this 'good'? Good is good for what? And we can convince ourselves that we're in it for the good, or is it the 'convenience' that presents itself as good? It's obvious all of that is possible.
People convince themselves 'good', as a demand for 'payback'. You'd expect 'good' to come from real good, or happiness, or knowing why you're doing what you're doing. To strengthen that.
After a while you realize that everybody thinks they're 'doing good' . . . for themselves, for the surroundings. And the Work says, 'Man Cannot Do', it's all just happening . . . oh my God! If it's all happening, what will the results be, in terms of what?
Her mother being so much 'her mother', her father being so much 'her father' – it's for themselves. Another ten years, in their seventies, they wouldn't know how to play somebody else's game even if they wanted to. They don't know people, they struggle with people . . . 'I'm right and you're wrong, I do it my way' . . . 'I'm so busy being good, in my terms'.
Take away all the little assumptions in partnerships – you can, kind of, wonder who you are.
September 6, 2010
LAST FEW WORDS
Terrible to get up in a worse shape from when I lie down . . . terrible! Especially when you feel the items are so biting (which I haven't told you about yet).
What do I do now? How does it look like from the outside?
Tami: Doesn't look good.
Alan: Meaning?
Tami: Painful, suffering, very strong suffering.
Alan: Hard to believe how anyone could live with that degree of suffering . . . that it exists in the world
.
Tami: You are talking about what you are feeling now?
Alan: Well . . . a shade out of it. Pour me water.
END.
I've heard the crow
it seems i must go
let no one mourn
i've seen the show
the purpose it seems
is to see the dreams
and to go out clean
(The Crow)