ANXIETY – PLEASE

Edited extracts : Alan J. Rudner  
Compiled by Tami / Zakiya  22.7.07

I

Suffering is considered to be the worst thing in the world. No one wants to suffer. Hide under the table if necessary. A terrible mistake is being made there. People do not understand what suffering is for – don't realize its PLACE. Not only can suffering be useful – it can help us in ways as nothing
else can. But People don’t want to go near it.

Here I have somewhat of a dilemma – I'm suffering, don't know what to say next. That's also suffering, no? – when you don't know what to DO? If you really got down to it you might find this is the root of all  suffering!

We can drown in words, 'explaining' to ourselves and everyone else, constantly – condemning or admiring everything we lay our eyes on. From morning to evening justifying, trying to be 'okay'. What a shocking  realization.

It's almost considered a sin to feel okay, NOW. It seems everybody is in such terrible need that maybe you should be doing a hundred different things to help. What is the relationship between such thinking and feeling? Are our feelings conditioned only by our relationship to others? What influence do  we  have  over  our  own  emotions?

We are subject to three kinds of pain – physical, emotional and mental. What hurts most in any of them is not understanding – not knowing what to 'do'.

Childbirth is supposedly most painful. The only thing that can help the woman is ATTENTION. The issue is beyond thought. Many of our experiences are like that, where the only recourse is to attention. Pain is only 'pain' when you don't go to it intentionally. When you do, it's just a vibrational fact. Just to watch it, not analyze, not 'explain' – just to give the wave, long or short – attention.

Much of the confusion and suffering that goes on around the sex business is because people hardly ever get to experience the sheer energy-vibration of it all. It seems we not only have difficulty in awareing 'pain' but also 'pleasure'. It's all vibrations.

It's a strange truth that suffering is not 'bad’ – it's a door you can go through. You can learn from it, or turn your back and miss the lesson. Don't curse suffering or think that it shouldn't be. If you didn't suffer you'd be dead. You are now suffering the impressions, experiences, that you've already been given. When you give those vibrations attention – you effect a HEALING.  If  not,  not.

How can we turn the 'terrible' into the Good? Real Good would require a lot more energy than you now have. The habitual struggle and judgments around 'good and bad' are worse than useless – they suck you dry. First of all you must stop leaking energy.

There are a slew of potentially painful issues in life – health problems, war problems, children problems, parents problems, money problems, sex problems, love problems, old age problems – you name it.

The essential challenge is always to Remember-Your-Self. To get back to your simple, Essence, beginning. A 'Return' (חזרה בתשובה) it  is  sometimes  called.

Understanding is limited by the un-willingness to move through the threshold of pain. The moment you say 'it's too much' you've just blocked yourself. Our usual ideas around good and bad are like trying to stand on a foundation which simply does not exist. Until we have our energy freed from fear, and our love back again, we are simply as stupid  and  ineffective  as  anyone  else.

You can't afford to make an important issue  'bad'.  Even  if  it  hurts!

A woman giving birth takes the pain, because she WISHES for the result. Love is transcendent to pain. One must pass CONSCIOUSLY through the suffering in order to get back to the love. The more attention the more amazing it all gets. Face those vibrations fully. Not to 'analyze' – that's  the  tricky  thing.

Then how do you deal with the suffering of others? Until they fully face those vibrations their life will be a terror no matter what you do for them. Maybe you can just manage not to get in their way.

There is so much in life that pulls us away from the simple logic of all of this. Society is selling everyone pills against suffering – television, movies, dancing, grass, liquor, sex, family, children, houses, money, cars, motorcycles, airplanes, credit cards, travel.

'Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!'

The fact is that we live in a wild, violent, lying, manipulating, distorted world. You really need something that works in you that is larger than your own imagined 'self-interests'.

There's so much energy in an understanding of how to suffer without resentment. If you were to turn it all on yourself, you'd explode.

An evolution transcending yet including this world, is possible. Until you come to realize that there is no way you can really get a 'handle on life'. You may have a lot of ideas, pride or guilt – but that's all within evaporating imagination.

In putting a jigsaw-puzzle together, people can get so absorbed as to forget it's only a game. In life – the more you get to see, the more Basic Reality will expose Itself to you.

We are now living in a most advantageous period of time. All pains, agonies, questions and confusions are changing so rapidly that no one can stay identified with anything for long. 'Buffers' are breaking down. We were never meant to remain puppets attached to a thousand strings, dust to dust, seeds that never  opened.

The Work is not aimed at turning you into a 'nice' or more respected person. The hope is in  getting  you  Up  and  Awake.

REMEMBER: all negative energy can transform through non-critical self-observation.

ENERGY –  IS  THE  ISSUE.

Don't piss it away in vanity, pictures, anger, the wish to be right and the mechanical expression of irritation. Work is in transforming and transcending all the pain and sorrow.

That requires intelligent effort!

II

We  are  esoterically  advised :

'DIE  BEFORE  YOU  DIE'

Die, that is, to all the crap and corruption. You 'die' when you've seen the uselessness of it all – and can no longer wish to maintain an  'as  if'  identity  within  it.

This world IS Anxiety. There's not a thing you can think of that isn't going to slip away, one way or another. The real challenge is to
get  to  the  bottom  of  all  anxiety.

All our different fears are psychologically connected. They eventually come together as one big mountain – one massive lump of Anxiety.

The problem with anxiety is that we fight it – paying no attention to its sheer ENERGY, its total vibration. It's got everything in it, the whole history of distorted humankind. If you allow yourself to feel the discomfort fully, not objecting, then you've got some real  transformation  going.

Anxiety must be regarded as a GIFT. It's a tremendous ENERGY RESERVOIR. You can't think yourself out of it in a million years. You can take a drug, be a workaholic, a fanatic in something – artistic, artistic, artistic  –  but  that  will  not  cure  it.

If you 'call it up' CONSCIOUSLY, say ANXIETY – PLEASE and MEAN it – then that Energy is absorbed and TRANSFORMS ! !

Anxiety can only maintain its painful-self when you struggle and identify with it. When you don't, it's just Energy, that with ATTENTION, transforms, actually.

ANXIETY


AVAILABLE  ENERGY

I would so much like to polish that diamond so that everyone could see it. But you have  to polish your own diamond – polish your own understanding. Work has an AIM to it. It's your Soul growth and SURVIVAL – not merely a struggle with petty pleasures and  sentimental  fears.

No one can control war or peace, sickness or death, how anybody else thinks, feels, takes you, or doesn't. You can't control whether your children will be happy, who they take-up with, study or not, smoke or not.

Can  you  not  see  that  now ?

Finish with the mess down here. You've been struggling with it long enough. You got so exhausted that you had to develop a few tricks, that hardly work anymore – more pills, drugs, smoking, whatever. Don't turn yourselves into zombies. FEEL the anxiety fully. It's only vibrations. Your work is to re-find your SELF – behind it all.

Everyone is in need of another level of Understanding in order to build a Soul. The whole world could clap for one's cleverness, or whatever, without it adding up to  one  sustainable  Soul.

REMEMBER –

death  of  the  Illusory  is  not  darkness, it  is  LIGHT.

III

Most of the things we call 'good' have at least as much anxiety in them as they have good. A very mixed kind of good. Maybe good for one 'center' and not for another. We have a memory of when we felt 'perfectly good' and experience anxiety, more or less, when we're not in that place. We simply don't
have the HABITS that would allow us to maintain  ourselves  at  the  higher  level.

Most of our habits are of struggle – with the fear, the greed, the insult, on and on and on. Among other things the psychological Ideas of The Work attempt to deal  with  this  endless  anxiety.

We have learnt to live within what could be called 'Program A' – a life based on the betterment of 'me', an 'I' constructed from a vague sense of yesterday, a shaky today, and a speculative tomorrow – all within a media inspired, imaginative time-picture geared towards 'tomorrow'. You can say many things about it, but it's like a mountain of yesterdays that builds up and keeps us constantly, nervously and busily trying to project  some  kind  of  acceptable  'future'.

The WORK is about NOW. That's what we're missing – I, NOW. That requires a completely new program – 'Program B'.

You have to learn how to function IN the NOW. The first thing to understand is what you need to DO, in order to BE. For if you'd BE, you would then be in a totally different relationship to life. It's the end of one story, and  the  beginning  of  another.

We are in a period of history, the likes of which mankind has never before had to face. World-wide hysterics. There is nothing remotely close to it in what we call recorded history. There are reports of a sunken continent of Atlantis way back when – a highly developed, scientific civilization which brought about its own destruction. We are again living in that kind  of  a  mad  self-destructive  wave.

The Jews who would never teach Kabbalah to anyone less than forty and having experienced all the complexities of married life, are now ready to instruct almost anyone who shows an interest. It was known that if a person were to be exposed to the Truth all at once they'd simply go crazy. And obviously nobody wanted that. Now it's all so crazy, there's  nothing  to  lose.

In a particular school of Hinduism, emotions were not dealt with at all. As The Work points out – there is only ONE true emotion. The rest are 'fictitious'. In that Hindu school they would relate only to the 'Divine Emotion', the  others  being  disregarded.

They  then  give  us  this  remarkable  quote:

'EMOTIONS  are a  DISTORTION
of  an  uncontrolled  and  misplaced
SENSATION.'

We have absorbed a mass of twisted energies from distorted humankind, both current and from time immemorial. Accident on top of accident, on top of explanation, on top of accident, on top of everything. We inevitably reflect all of that mentally, emotionally and physically – with the totality of those mixed vibrations ending off in our body.

Our BODY is EARTH. Do you want peace, love, truth, presence – what some call God? That's the next level up, within you. It's very innocent relative to the so-called 'normal' world. In order to raise to that higher level, sometimes called Heaven – you must start from  Earth,  in  your  Body.

People are always trying to jump to Heaven from the level of the moon. The 'moon' being symbolic of imagination – reflected light, images. It's a media world with a multiplicity  of  imaginary  'I's'.  'I'  like,  'I' don't like, 'I' want,  'I'  don't,  and  everything  in  between.

To be truly alive in a more real place within yourself, you must be grounded. You can't get to Heaven from the moon – you can only get  there  from  EARTH.

From morning to evening we're thinking, thinking, thinking, doing, thinking, thinking, thinking. What are we up to? We're trying to get ourselves 'happy', fully satisfied, right? We're trying to 'think' ourselves into Heaven. And  it  doesn't  work. You can't do that anymore than 'kiss your own elbows' or 'jump
over your own knees'. That's only frantically trying to establish an identity within a mass of old impressions. Actually all 'I's' would like to escape  from  that  circus.

Should you extract all the lies and distortions from that usual mechanical personality, there would be no 'I' left there at all. Take 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' away and who are you? NOBODY. But within that truth you  are  really  SOMETHING.

The  basic  issue  is  not  'who'  you  are but  WHAT  you  are.

'TO  KNOW  THY  SELF IS  TO  KNOW  THY  LORD.'

And for that we are blessed with The Work.

People are moving through all kinds of  emotional waves, and not feeling particularly well. Can you 'aware' the location of those feelings? They are VIBRATIONS that are now in your body. You can't 'think' yourself out of it – that level of thinking got you into it in the  first  place.

'The only thing you can really call thinking, is  thinking  from  an  Idea.'

In order to think from a Work Idea you must be present. It's not possible while you're in that place of 'grinding of the teeth'. You must BE, to some degree. The degree that you can BE, is the degree that a Work Idea can be integrated. To put it in simple language – you can't understand deeper than you are. You can only start to work from where you are, but you've got to BE where you are, and in order to be where you are, you have to be sensitive to yourself, incarnate, in your fuck'n body – whether you like it or not, right?

So the Hindus say: 'EMOTIONS are a DISTORTION of an UNCONTROLLED and MISPLACED – SENSATION'.

Let's look at it. A distortion is something twisted, out of place – here, an uncontrolled and misplaced SENSATION. How do you control something, anything? How can you control a sensation? Like everything else in The Work, it's indirect. How do you control a horse? First of all you have to get  through  its  nervousness!

ATTENTION  IS  THE  NECESSITY.

Only by giving attention to a sensation can you get it 'under control'. It moves this way, that way, stronger or weaker. It's an issue of attention. So simple, so clear, so obvious.

Our most real problem is that we lack sufficient energy to FUEL that attention. And where are we wasting it? Well, trying to 'figure out' all those, as if, 'funny' emotions.

That's DUM – D for distortion, U for uncontrolled, and M for misplaced.

What is being emphasized here is that an 'emotion' is only identification with a sensation. It results not from paying attention to the sensation, but from identifying with it. What we're touching here is essential, essential, essential. Hopefully we can get a handle on it and stop trying to 'jump over our  own  knees'.

When the mind is, again, as if, struggling – SWITCH attention to the sensations in the body. Does the usual 'thinking' get you anywhere? When it just goes on by itself you're making the same mistake a million times a day.

There's so much tension in the body that the mind is inclined to take 'personally' and tries to struggle with. It seems sometimes that the only alternative is a drug, sex, or television.

No one can digest a Work Idea for you. And it doesn't happen 'just like that'. But as this world continues to spin faster and faster, we desperately need something 'just like that'. We need something IMMEDIATE. And what you've got most immediate is your  BODY.

The closer to the real, to the tears – the more beautiful it becomes, actually.

Emotion – Distortion  of an  Uncontrolled and  Misplaced  Sensation.>

That truth is not meant to be taken as an excuse. It's an enticement. 'Enticement' is like encouragement, only stronger. Here, an enticement for directed attention.

For real health, strength and clarity, a person needs sensitivity to the total vibration, sensation,  of  their  body.

Shakespeare  said  it:
'To  Be  or  not  to  Be  –  that  is  the  question.'

The simplest, most natural thing in the world. You don't have to tell that to a child.

Our hope is not in how to cook-up a picnic in hell – it's to pass through this life with our sanity intact.

Gurdjieff said :
“ You  people  think,  think,  think. I  don't  think,  I  watch.”

There's something so large in that – having to do with SELF-knowledge, BE-coming, really  alive.

Each one can understand this, more or less. It all makes sense – oh yes, it does.

In truth, everything you've done in your life up to now, has been Tironut (Basic-Training).

'This ain't a dream no more, it's the real thing', as  Dylan  put  it.

IV

Now you're ready to hear it - lucky you.

All your suffering, up to now, is not so much the result of 'how you have taken things' – but simply the fact that you have taken in so MUCH. It's all a random collection of  confused and crooked impressions – fed into the world by distorted men throughout the ages. It is a curse at one level – and a
potentially immense gift at another. The more 'shit' the better fertilizer, nutrition, for the seeds of truth deep within your Soul.

The 'fumigating shit' is now so powerful and pushing that any intelligent effort can attract this  immense  force  from  'below'.

Now take heed of this! You come from another World. No doubt you did not start here. Religions have been telling you that for  millennium. That Truth seldom penetrates along with its amazing IMPLICATIONS. Implications that should 'change your mind' (metanoia).

Again, pains of all sorts result from twisted vibrations within your organism, caused by the unbalanced and corrupted thought patterns and activities of countless generations of semi-conscious human beings, disconnected from Higher Centers. The cumulative results have now reached a 'NADIR' – the maximum possible for human beings to contain. It's now a case of madness, total, or the Truth that 'you not yet know'.

But, you can, now, know. That is what is so absolutely remarkable about this current piece  of  time.

What is that Truth? It's your Cosmic Connection. That may sound fancy, like a fantasy to some, but it really is a FACT. In fact, your only possible escape. Here we have the gist of all religious 'propaganda'. An issue, though, as real as real can be.

So,  what  can  we  poor  slobs  do?

GOD,  the  PURITY helps  those  that  help  others!

The results of your activities may barely be known to you. But your heart-felt intention and effort to serve the 'good' at every opportunity, with all or any entailed suffering, raise your vibrational level closer and closer to a possible connection with Higher Intelligences that are duty bound to respond to  your  strivings.

Seek connection with a situation more advanced than yourself on this trek and learn and use what has been discovered. Pass it down the line and you will receive more from one source or another, recognized or otherwise.

Don't waste your time and efforts in concepts from an age and world that has so clearly turned  into a Twisted  Nothing.

Seeing the truth of all of this can in itself transform energy to a level where help can reach  you.

Don't expect a contact with a situation in advance of yourself to be necessarily comfortable. It is inevitably bound to be most uncomfortable to your renegade level. The test is  the  Truth  –  not  at  all  sentimentality.

REMEMBER. The World from which you came is the World to which you will return. Hopefully  in  better  shape  for  the  effort.

V

TRANSCENDENCE

4.2. 2008   Through  Na'ama

Avoiding  the  knowable
is  the  request  of  the  unrequest
as  the  limits  are  soon  to  break  down
and  miracle  is

Look  and  be  open  in  the  void
when  all  pictures  walk  in  front  of  your  eyes
as  dimensions  founded  in  the  solar  system
to  work

Estimate  your  being
into  flawless  of  emotion
are

Be

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