Essays on inner and outer impressions
A collection of observations originally posted on Zenyogagurdjieff.blogspot.com
Over the past few days, there have been several discussions about the nature of inwardness and outwardness that provoke me to revisit this question.
Beatrice Sinclair was over for dinner on Thursday night, and she made the comment that "a princess never loses her inwardness."
Having contact with your inwardness -- your inner work -- at all times, even in ordinary life -- this is work in life.
Readers will recall that I have mentioned we actually have two sensory systems, each one belonging to one of our two natures. The outer sensory system, the five ordinary senses, takes in ordinary impressions, "coarse" impressions at a lower rate of vibration. These senses, which operate at the speed of moving center, are only capable of just so much and no more. When the Buddhists talk of being invested in an external life, and attachment to the senses, and desire, they are referring to man's habit of living through these five senses.
Hui Neng comments thus: "People of small capacity... possess all the wisdom of prajna, the same as people who are truly wise. So why don't they understand the Dharma when they hear it? it's because all these beings have deluded themselves into looking for a Buddha through external practices and haven't yet realized their own nature that they remain people of small capacity." (The Platform Sutra, p. 23, translation by Red Pine, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006.)
All of the practices in the Gurdjieff work that seek to cultivate sensation begin with sensation received through the outward senses. However, as one begins to learn the meaning of sensation from inside the body, one eventually encounters a different kind of sensation that can arise as a motive force for Being. One begins to learn to discriminate between inward and outward sensation, and, consequently, may begin to see the difference between inward impressions and outward impressions.
When we say that people lack discrimination, it is precisely in this area that the discrimination is lacking. I would suggest, if you truly want to try to "stay in front of your lack," that you try starting here.
People rarely pause to consider the idea that they have a structure, an apparatus, for the inward receiving of impressions. This structure, the physical organs of emotional center, is built to receive impressions at higher rates of vibration.
Indeed, the idea is very esoteric -- it is inward, inner, and one doesn't even encounter it unless one encounters a Work. Even then, because so many works are confused and partial, one does not necessarily encounter the idea that the structure is quite specific and operates according to a set of laws, although that's completely logical. After all, the structure is a machine built within a biological organism, and every biological organism follows natural law.
Thus, when the Buddhists say that awakening is to awaken to your own true nature, this is literally true in a biological as well as an esoteric sense. On this level, it is impossible to separate biology from consciousness. On other levels, the manifestation of consciousness is different, and does not express itself through DNA-based organisms. Here, it does.
That fact invokes inevitable consequences that many works appear to wish to get rid of in one way or another. In Gurdjieff's system, however, we see a method that begins with and is rooted in the work of the biological organism itself for the development of Being.
Hui Neng commented thus: "All of you should listen carefully. Everyone's physical body is a city. Your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin are the city gates. These five gates are all the outside, and on the inside is the gate of the intellect. Your mind is the kingdom, and your nature is the king. When your nature is there, so is the king... when your nature is present, your body and mind are present. ...When the Tathagata of your enlightened natures shines the light of wisdom on the land of your mind, the six gates shine with purity." (The Platform Sutra, p. 30, translation by Red Pine, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006.)
Readers who go to the original text will see that I have edited some, but that is only because it is lengthy. I believe the editing still preserves the essence of the message: There are not only five outer gates of the five outer senses: there are also six inner gates through which something much finer can enter us.
Because of the variety of experience that can arise through the receiving of impressions through any combination of the inner gates--as I call them, the six flowers--we get a confusing array of interpretations of this inner structure. Only Gurdjieff's Enneagram brings a sensible order to that confusing array, because it understands the structure according to law.
Most of the Tantric schools preserve significant fragments of this knowledge, and of course, because everyone wants their own special river, every school claims that it has it right.
Maybe it doesn't matter who has it right. I think the point is that you need to discover the six inner gates within yourself and investigate the structure. People may disagree as to how the structure appears, what it consists of, and count the different numbers, but there is a structure, anyone who investigates for long enough will discover this.
Gurdjieff brought an undeniable order and a new kind of logic to this. Other schools get more and more confused and more and more complicated in order to explain the nature of the inwardness from a structural point of view; the Enneagram (which for some seems to be an extraordinarily complex diagram) is actually quite simple and beautiful once one begins to understand it from an inner point of view. In and of itself, it offers a path to work which can, as Gurdjieff himself said, accelerate the development of Being. This is why he called his work "Haida yoga," or, "hurry up yoga."
It's always true: when you know where you are headed, and you have a good map, you get there faster.
Getting back to the question of the intersection between inwardness and outwardness, once one cultivates inwardness in such a way as to bring a wholeness to the inner structural apparatus, it operates in a synesthetic manner, that is, it receives inner impressions in a single whole environment that mimics the arrival of information from the outward senses. That outward information is experienced as one single experience, even though what takes place is divided by the five senses into five separate sets of inputs.
That kind of inner unity within the six inner centers can lead to a completely new set of rather magnificent experiences.
One does not want to get too caught in this, however. The inward experience alone is not what develops Being. That is the mistake that so many make. Taking one last quote from our good friend Hui Neng, "...if you practice empty-mind Zen, you will fall into a featureless void." ((The Platform Sutra, p. 20, translation by Red Pine.)
The featureless void is beautiful. But there's no there there.
In this intersection between inwardness and outwardness, we discover the two natures in intersection. Once we create something more whole within ourselves arising from the organic sense of being, and existing within the circulation of energy that takes place when the six inner sensory organs are in relationship, we can retain it.
Our ultimate effort is to dwell within outward life in every circumstance, all the time, knowing that there is not only outwardness but also inwardness.
This retention of presence within is often referred to as having a new kind of attention. Perhaps that's dangerous. Does it need a label? That phrase has been used so much that perhaps people don't hear it anymore. Our understanding of it has become habitual.
We need to learn to attend to our inwardness and bring it into life so that it meets and blends with the outwardness of our experience. The vessel needs to be made whole in order for that to be possible, and only the intentional application of consciousness to the situation can seal the vessel.
Over time, as I may have mentioned before, the taking in of inner impressions can lead to the elimination of negativity. This is a long process. It is, however, inevitable--because negativity cannot exist if the structure functions properly.
And wherever and whenever inner negativity does not exist, it is replaced by something indescribable.
Much love to you all, as we gently approach this sacred moment referred to by the Christians as Christmas.
confusion, inside and out
Crabs: hard on the outside, sweet on the inside. In Shanghai at this time of year, the freshwater crab is the seasonal delicacy.
This morning I came across this quote from Hui Neng's Platform Sutra (Red Pine's translation, as published by Shoemaker and Hoard, p. 37.)
"When a person's mind has no thoughts and is fundamentally empty and still and free of false views, this is the greatest of all causes -- which occurs when you aren't confused about the inside or the outside, when you are free of dualities. If you're confused about the outside, you're attached to forms. If you are confused about the inside, you're attached to emptiness. To be free of form amid forms and to be free of emptiness amid emptiness, this is when you aren't confused about the inside or the outside."
In pursuing this question of inwardness and outwardness, it's pretty clear that for the most part we live outwardly. We experience life through the five senses and are convinced that this is the only truth. If there is anything in us that needs to be changed, we must acquire the change from the outward part of life, through the five senses, through what we eat, or words, or yoga or tai chi practice, or breathing exercises, and so on. We seek to acquire through form, which is, of course, a form of desire.
Eventually, if we work diligently enough, especially at meditation, it will began to dawn on us that there is an inward life. We'll also see that inwardness can change us, much more radically than outwardness can. Then we begin to seek to acquire through emptiness, which almost immediately becomes the very "spiritual materialism" Chogyam Trungpa warned against.
What interests me about this Buddhist quote -- and about Hui Neng and Dogen in general--is that they repeatedly emphasize that inwardness is not everything either. It's not the solution... but it can actually become part of the problem.
Inwardness is incredibly convincing--the same as outwardness, maybe even more so--and once we first discover it, the temptation is to abandon outwardness in the interests of penetrating the inner. The miraculous nature of our inner being is just as much of an allurement as the outward senses of life. Just like ordinary life, it's a place to get lost.
The need, then, is to learn to inhabit the intersection between these two sets of sensory possibilities, inward sensation and outward sensation.
Hui Neng points us towards an interesting possibility: to be free of form amid forms suggests living within form, within outwardness--with awareness--but not being identified with it; and to be free of emptiness amid emptiness would be to live within emptiness, within inwardness--also with awareness--but equally without identification. So he posits a state in which we inhabit the juncture between the inwardness and the outwardness: in other words, true consciousness functions as a bridge between two worlds.
We should be careful, in our work, not to invoke the elitism of silence, which appears to be deep, but ultimately promotes duality by overemphasizing the inner. Of course, we ought to avoid any elitism at all, if possible, but this is probably too high a practice for us to fully understand.
Hui Neng also comments thusly:
"In speaking with others, remain free of appearances when you explore appearances, and remain free of emptiness when you enter into emptiness. If you become attached to emptiness, you will only increase your ignorance. And if you become attached to appearances, you will only increase your delusions.
And you slander the Dharma if you simply tell people not to use words. If you tell them not to use words, then people shouldn't use language. Language is words. You can say their nature is empty, but the nature of truth is not empty. The deluded only confuse themselves when they get rid of language." (Platform Sutra, p. 42.)
So what interests me right now is the juncture between inwardness and outwardness, occupied by Being, with an active understanding of the immediate existence of both aspects.
In biology, it's well understood that edge conditions are just about ideal for life.
For example, when an upwelling of deep, cold ocean currents meets warm water, carrying nutrients, there, in the juncture between the two, life explodes and congregates. Salt marshes are another good example of an edge condition. The one you see in the photograph is at the mouth of the Sparkill on the Hudson River.
Once again, we see that nature, understood correctly, contains all the necessary lessons. The question of intersection of inner and outer impressions is exactly the same.
From contact with inner impressions--from the cold, deep, religious core of silence--nutrition wells up within our being.
And continuously, the warm, sensuous outer impressions of life cascade in through the senses.
The two sets of impressions mix together to create a potential; within this meeting point arises what we call consciousness.
There is a mystery here. The inner impressions come from another level; the energy within the body may be of the body, but its origins lie beyond the body. What creates the body is what creates all matter; it is an intentionality that collapses the quantum state, a resolution of improbability into reality.
No one can explain this intentionality; the Buddhists call it the Dharma; the Muslims call it Allah; Christians call it God.
We all want to name, but perhaps it is best for this to remain nameless. Suffice it to say that there is a source from which all reality, all being, arises. We have the inner equipment to know this, not with the coarse parts of the mind, but the very cilia of our cells themselves--or, like the three little pigs, by the hairs of our chinny-chin-chin.
And, come to think of it, there's an interesting story. The pigs, by becoming progressively more inward and more contained in more and more solid dwelling-places, ultimately devour the wolf. Thus, the increasingly stalwart inwardness of the three-membered pig family learns to ingest the outwardness of the wolf, instead of the outwardness of the wolf eating the inwardness of the pigs. And it's on the threshold --at the edge--that all the real action takes place.
From within the upwelling out of silence and into being, something can enter into life, just as life can enter into us. It is our responsibility to stand on the edge and become the life that inhabits it.
It is in the effort to become sensitive to, understand, and dwell within the meeting point of these two conditions that our consciousness approaches the possibility of development.
Can we stand within our life, directly in the middle--the middle way of the Buddha--between both the inner and the outer, and help them to meet one another in a right way? We need to discover the meeting place, within ordinary experience, and see how we inhabit it.
To be between the devil and the deep blue sea is to willingly stand between the alluring desires of outwardness, and the seductive bliss of inwardness--both accepting the gifts, and assuming the responsibilities.
In our continuing investigation of the question of inhabiting the juncture between the flow of inner and outer impressions, we can tie it to other essential concepts found both within the Gurdjieff teaching and Zen, as well as important Christian parables.
In the Bible, we may recall that Jacob is smooth-skinned, and Esau hairy. In other words, Jacob understands the relationship to the internal- hence his smoothness- and Esau is invested in the outer-hence hairy. (See Maurice Nicoll's The New Man for a more detailed discussion of this.)
By investing in the outer, Esau unintentionally sacrifices his ability to claim his birthright. Jacob has a superior understanding that begins with his inner state, and he claims the birthright as his own--using the way of the sly man, in other words, by an oblique method--not by "going directly."
This doesn't solve all of Jacob's problems, however--in the parable, having an understanding of the inner is just the first step on a long and difficult path through life. No matter how clever, Jacob still has to develop a right relationship with the outer, and he's surprisingly susceptible to naivete and gullibility--right up to the point of accepting the "wrong" woman, Leah, as his bride the first time around. It turns out that Jacob's nemesis Laban is, in some senses, just as cunning as Jacob is. We see from this lengthy parable about Jacob that the inner has a clear and absolute need to be in relationship with and understand the outer. By itself, it is incomplete-and, surprisingly, perhaps even not so smart.
One need look no further than Gurdjieff's magnum opus Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson for examples of the seeming cluelessness of higher forces when it comes to interaction with lower levels. In Biblical tales and mythologies we also find, refreshingly, that God is not entirely infallible.
So while it confers distinct advantages, beginning with a solid connection to the inner isn't the whole answer either. Something more is necessary: the meeting of two worlds, not investment in a single one. The outer must inform the inner in the same way that the inner must inform the outer. A circulation of Being is required. The enneagram is, among other things, a map of the circulation of being.
In the Gurdjieff work, we encounter the ideas of essence and personality. These two concepts are very closely tied to the understanding of how inner and outer impressions interact, as a further quote from the platform Sutra may help illustrate:
"The Master said, 'as for the three bodies, the pure Dharma body is your nature, the perfect realization body is what you know, and the myriadfold transformation body is what you do. To talk about the three bodies apart from your own nature would be to have bodies without knowledge. Once you realize that the three bodies have no nature of their own, this is what is meant by the four kinds of Knowledge of Enlightenment. Listen to my Gatha:
Your nature possesses the three bodies
which develop the four kinds of knowledge
they lead you straight to Buddhahood
if you believe what I'm telling you now
you'll be forever free of delusion
don't follow those people running around
talking all day about enlightenment."
(The Platform Sutra, p. 278, as translated by Red Pine, Shoemaker & Hoard 2006)
Those mystified by the comment that the three bodies "have no nature of their own" would do well to turn to and ponder page 1091 of the new edition of Beelzebub, where Gurdjieff describes the "fourth personality." This January 1924 lecture, by the way, receives far less attention than it deserves, since it almost incidentally discloses essential information about the structure of emotional center (the six inner flowers) which I do not recall Gurdjieff referring to in any other material. Anyway, the fourth personality-- " real "I"-- is formed by the three parts consisting of outer impressions (as received by moving center), inner impressions (as received by emotional center) and active intelligence, acting as the intentional mediator between these two worlds.
When Hui Neng advises us that "the pure Dharma body is our nature," he speaks quite precisely of what Mr. Gurdjieff calls our essence. This substance is close to what Christians refer to as man's soul -- it is given by God, and it comes from "elsewhere." The essence maintains contact with the Holy Spirit, whereas the personality has none.
"The perfect realization body is what you know." This is what Mr. Gurdjieff calls the personality. It is all the information that is acquired over the course of a lifetime. It is quite distinct from the essence for obvious reasons. Because the personality is formed from contact with the world, it is impure. There are deep connections between the concepts of both karma and sin and the formation of the personality through the receipt of outer impressions. Sin can only arise within personality; and then, only according to the ability of the receiver to discriminate. It is in the lack of discrimination itself that we begin to sin.
Essence is closely connected to the idea of the Virgin Mary -- essence has a purity that cannot be soiled in and of itself, because the inner impressions it receives originate from a higher source.
"The myriadfold transformation body is what you do." Here we come to the idea of third force, action as the mediator between the dialectic of inner and outer impressions. In a rightly ordered life, intention and attention, that is, active consciousness, inhabit the juncture and make transformation possible.
As we progress, we begin to see that all of these ideas are tied together into one whole understanding. Essence and personality relate to inner and outer impressions. Inner and outer impressions relate to the intersection of our two natures. Our two natures are defined by the inner and outer senses, and the inner senses are defined by the Enneagram. The Enneagram describes the vessel, the vessel is the crucible which receives the material that forms the being. In the end, it is all about the question of in-formation -- what forms inwardly in the context of consciousness which stands on the threshold between our inner and our outer lives.
I would urge readers to study the question of both inner and outer impressions quite carefully, to try and make an effort to understand exactly what an inner impression is and how one is fed by it. Only by knowing the taste of this particular action within the being can one begin to approach the much larger questions that are raised in the many essays I have written about the Enneagram, the inner flowers as the physical structure of emotional center, and the role of the vessel in the development of being.
In particular, it is important to begin by learning to experience the essence as a living inner force, and to assist it in its efforts to find expression within ordinary life through the organic sense of Being.
At the same time, it is important to stand aside from personality even as we experience it, which is the exercise Mr. Gurdjieff called "separation of the self from the self." Identified with personality, we cannot even recognize it. Once we step aside, we also experience it as a living force in its own right.
the five senses
Someone asked me this morning how important the five senses are to our inner work. It seems like a good question to examine into more detail, in fact, such a good question that it ought to be examined by us collectively.
It's safe to say that modern science does not recognize any senses other than the five "ordinary" senses. It's equally safe to say that there are senses inside that sense things quite differently, and are capable of sensing things that the five senses don't adequately cover.
The inner senses have their own specific organs for receiving and processing impressions, and their own range of abilities, which we are for the most part unfamiliar with. When idiot savants perform astonishing feats of mathematics, or display extraordinary artistic or musical abilities, the origin of these achievements may well lie within the range of what the inner senses are capable of.
We don't know. What we do know is that things go on which are absolutely inexplicable when considering the action of the five ordinary senses alone.
The outer senses are absolutely vital to our work. Man was not put on the planet in order to live within the inner senses alone; that's been discussed in this blog in several different postings. The inner senses need the outer senses in order to develop. The outer senses need the inner senses in order to develop. The law of reciprocal feeding operates here, as it does everywhere. Within an edge condition, it is the meeting and blending of the various sets of impressions that create exchange, growth, and evolution.
One-sidedness in any kind of development is no better than parthenogenesis, i.e., asexual reproduction.
Here, again, nature becomes our instructor. It has been known for several hundred years -- and perhaps much longer, among intelligent people who study such matters -- that there are animals that can reproduce asexually. They don't need mates.
Sexual reproduction, in fact, is entirely unnecessary from a biological point of view. The organisms that do not use it seem to succeed fairly well, from an evolutionary point of view, over long periods of time. Biologists are still somewhat at a loss to explain why sexual reproduction has become so dominant in the natural world. This is especially true of larger organisms, where it's safe to say that 99.9% of them reproduce sexually.
The simple fact, I think, is that a much richer set of possibilities for development arise when two different elements blend. Within the blending of disparate factors comes the possibility of change, and something entirely new emerging.
This suggests, among other things, that the nature of man was created in order to allow a certain kind of sexual reproduction to take place, where a new potential of consciousness is created between the blending of inner and outer impressions. That is, in fact, almost exactly what Mr. Gurdjieff posited.
Here's another thought.
Without the five senses, and the interaction with the ordinary world, the higher would not be able to penetrate this level and perceive it. Without perceiving it, it would not be able to draw any food from it. In other words, the five senses may be part of what one might call an "astral food web," that is, a means by which higher organisms -- which are composed of more mobile energies, and not crystalline molecular entities--gather what sustains them. If we view it this way, we would then understand organic life as part of an ecosystem, which--once again--is pretty much the way Mr. Gurdjieff pitched the idea to Ouspensky. The difference between his ecosystem and the ecosystem that biology proposes today is that Mr. Gurdjieff's ecosystem extends from the top to the bottom of the universe.
He was a man who understood how to ask the big questions.
If you remove the five senses from the picture, it's like taking all the anchovies out of the food chain. Without any anchovies, the birds don't have any food to eat. Without any bird droppings, the pelagic microorganisms that feed on the nitrates don't have anything to eat, and they die off. Then there's nothing for the anchovies to eat. Remove one link, and it's all over.
So: here's a universe where everything depends on everything else. You can't have a God without men who sense through the five senses, and you can't have men without a God who needs their perception as part of his food.
A lot of religious works seem to be dedicated to somehow transcending the five senses, getting out of the body, and living on an astral level of some kind or another. I think all of these works miss the point. There is a reason for incarnation. It is necessary; it is vital; it is inescapable. We need to be incarnated. We would not be down here on this planet sensing as we sense and doing as we do if it were not necessary. This is another lesson that nature always teaches: every single element is there for a reason.
All of this being said, because man is so intensely invested in his outer senses, to the point where he believes that that is all there is, inner work begins with the necessity of going deep inside to discover the place where inner sensation arises.
Equipped with that understanding, one can begin to recondition a receiving apparatus appropriate to the needs of both the inner and the outer being.
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