INTRODUCTION
'There is no solution. Because there is no problem.'
Marcel Duchamp
'Let nowhere abide and generate the Mind.'
Diamond Sutra
'Why do you prate of God? Don't you know that whatever
you say of him is untrue?'
Meister Eckhart
''To know means to
know all.
To know a part of something means not to know.
It is not
difficult to know all, because in order to know all
one has to know very
little.
But in order to know that little, one has to know pretty much.'
G. I. Gurdjieff
It can take a lifetime to understand that little - to
realize a few simple things.
What is the nature of reality? And can it
be directly known? Through the ages, mystics have said that it can. Although
their experiences are identical, because Unity is one, their expressions for it
are myriad, because truth can't be defined in words. And so all such expressions
attempt to describe the same thing.
The Cloud of Unknowing.
The Unmoved Mover who moves all things.
The Void.
The
Silence.
The Stillness.
The Original Face.
The
Absolute.
The Great Mind.
The Now.
Intrinsic
Being.
The I AM...
And can we flawed, undisciplined beings
ever aspire to know this thing - not philosophically but organically. Can we
know it with certainty - as fact?
Through the ages, there are always
people who preserve the approach to unitive knowledge - people in touch with
more than philosophy or belief. But even if we can find them, we won't
understand them. Because, without a long and difficult apprenticeship, truth
appears as stupidity or paradox. For instance:
'Passing away is the
essence of abiding.'
Or: 'Eternity is no other than this instant.'
To a rational mind, this is nonsense because rationality is too blunt an
instrument to receive such perceptions, even if we are as brilliant as
Heidegger, who came up with the interesting question: 'Why is there anything,
rather than nothing?'
'The real is simple,' we were told. 'It is
you who are complicated.'
How, then, can the complex understand the
profoundly simple?
While great spiritual traditions remain as fixtures
in time, their beliefs are passed down in increasingly distorted forms. And
belief, at best, is a comfort or defence - not a fact.
Inevitably, the techniques of their founders enter the marketplace - mostly in a
form so warped or weakened that they do little but mislead.
Many
Masters have declared that, three generations from the source, distortions and
ignorance are assured. When the outer aspect of a revelation, degraded to mere
information, filters into general life it becomes useless for serious study.
Zen, Taoist and Vedantic sages had no time for belief, only facts. And to wake
people from the dream we call our lives, they used practical means - such as
self-inquiry and the study of attention. You'll find the pith of their methods
here. All a genuine teacher can do is try to get people to see what is in them.
But to see ourselves is the thing we cannot face.
Robbie Burns put it aptly:
'O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us.
It
wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.'
We cannot see
ourselves without the image unless we have a science of Being. Yet even in
places where such knowledge is preserved, most students remain followers,
staring up at their gurus or down at their books without perceiving what is in
front of them. And if, by chance, they discover a shred of truth, they preserve
it like a pressed flower - to comfort themselves or feel special, instead of
discarding it and going on.
Because the price of contacting reality is
everything we are or possess.
We were taught that we need to recreate
what we have learned - that to parrot it verbatim shows little has been
understood. To effectively transmit anything one needs to BE what one knows.
Unless a teaching is embodied it cannot effectively be passed on, as the
understanding is unitive - not mental but organic. As the Baul, Shri Anirvan,
beautifully said: 'One must know how to make use of the force and grandeur of
philosophy, but in the heart, know how to feed oneself on radiant beauty alone.'
So can this body - this organ of perception - connect directly with the
universe? Is something so outlandish possible?
This book attempts to
be a touchstone. But that doesn't make it accessible.
Still, as
inner teachings spread like pollen across the West and certain concepts become
more available, if you have assimilated some of them you could find direction
here.
What follows is based on a lifetime of work in esoteric groups.
Specific advice is omitted because it relies on oral transmission.