This is an excellent blog post from a student/teacher of the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff - a Sufi Master who developed a distinctive Practice, a Way, to become One again with our True Nature. The title says it all so I will let this wonderful blog by Lee van Laer take it from here. Enjoy!
Namaste'
~ By Lee van Laer, a member of the New York Gurdjieff Foundation
This morning, I was pondering the role of time, and ended up reading part of Dogen's Uji, or, “existence–time.”
In the Tanahashi translation (Shambhala, 2011), we hear:
“Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of
grasses [all things] throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and
each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the
beginning of practice."
"When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one
form; there is understanding of form and beyond understanding of form;
there is understanding of grass and beyond understanding of grass. Since
there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time
there is. Grass being, form being, are both time. Each moment is all
being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or
any world is left out of the present moment.”
Because Dogen routinely presents sophisticated ideas, and because his
arguments appear to be dense and complex, one tends to be drawn towards
abstract, or intellectual, analysis. So much of his work reads like an
argument of this kind, one is perhaps tempted to be academic about it.
Yet I think that the whole point of his arguments is to defeat such an
approach. His ubiquitous, self-reflective dialectic isn't meant as a de
facto call to complexity; rather, it is to point our own complexity out
to us, calling our attention to the fact that we are perpetually trapped
in dualistic complications. His words and statements, one after
another, throughout his teaching, morph into koans. Each one tries to
point beyond the dualism that we know, the affirming and denying,
towards a third force–a force of reconciliation–that we are not
sensitive to. Gurdjieff, one may recall, indicated that man is “third
force blind.” We are unaware of this reconciling factor, which could
otherwise make the world whole.
Sp there is nothing academic or intellectual about this brief passage.
We are called, rather, to a sensitive emotional moment: in this
translation, the point has been deftly realized by referring to grass.
(The Nishijima and Cross translation,which has its own transcendental
moments, does not quite rise to the occasion in the same way this time.)
Associations are called forth: the green color of grass, the delicacy
of grass, its tenderness, flexibility, suppleness. The way that grass
cover surfaces gently, its movement in wind, the ability of grass to be
composed of myriad forms (blades) and yet be one thing, acting together,
seen together, experienced together.
Buried deep in this teaching- in all of Dogen's teachings- are body,
blood, bones and marrow, not just of the intellect, but of an emotional opening.
We are called to a simple moment, a moment that has nothing to do with
trying to figure things out. We are called to this immediate moment. We
are called to a relationship with grass, to form- to a relationship
with both our inability to understand form and the existence of form
itself. Our awareness becomes a bridge in which we inhabit both the
condition and our failure to understand the condition. ( I am reminded
of my conversation with my daughter last night, in which she pointed out
that for Kant, the sublime– the quality of spiritual purity or
excellence–begins with our failure, our inability, to comprehend... "the study of this is the beginning of practice."
We discover feeling.
An emotional opening to the quality of grass and the existence of form
brings us to a moment where wholeness is possible. Nothing is left out
of the present moment. We are called to understand– and do not
understand– the present moment, at the same time. Our understanding
lies– as the understanding of Socrates lay– in being neither wise with
our wisdom, nor stupid within our stupidity, but being just as we are.
"The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless." (Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Apology, p. 9, Hamilton & Cairns, Princeton University Press, 1989)
Hence we discover blades of grass that gather themselves together in a
landscape: Zen Masters, German philosophers, wise Greeks. All of them
understanding that while we try, and while we fail, we still inhabit the
wholeness of all the forms we know– and that this wholeness comprises
an ineffable truth that cannot be denied.
Jeanne de Salzmann calls us back over and over to this act of seeing,
this act of inhabiting the moment. Nothing is left out of the present
moment. We do not need to change the present moment. The need is for the
present moment to be seen.
It is not the present moment, its nature, or its content, that distracts
us from experience and relationship; the present moment, its nature,
and its contents are completely valid and true. They need not change;
only our relationship to them must change.
Don't think about the grass... be the grass.
I respectfully ask you to take good care.
*
“There do exist enquiring minds, which long for the truth of the
heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to
penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into
themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path
he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at
himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is
himself and what his place is in the world around him.”
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