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Garden Queen
Honored Fellow Grover
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Posted: Sun Dec 7th, 2008 06:17 pm |
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I feel that I suffer consciously and I am smart enough to know that I do much unconsciously...I have been doing a lot of meditating, praying and self remembering...I found this wonderful site after seeing I could not afford this dude's
book..someone recommended Nicoll to me because of my background in Jung and art
and christianity...(which is also because of Roy!  ) this has helped me so much to continue functioning in the toxic environment I am in..which actually who of us is not
in one.? I will add this and hope some put it on their favorites for reading if they
are interested in esoteric Christianity,Gurdjieff and Jung.
http://www.mutank.com/newsite/maurice.html
COMMENTARY ON CONSCIOUS LOVE
Some time ago I received a letter in which a question was asked about a phrase occurring in theist Epistle of John. The passage is about love-actually about conscious love. Now all conscious love depends on throwing out what is bad and selecting only what is good. Mechanical love is of a quite different order. The passage in question was as follows
"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,
because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth is not made
perfect in love." (i John I V 18)
In the Gospel of John and in the Epistles of John we find love emphasized-not emotional love, as the conversation with Peter shews in the last chapter of the Gospel of John, but a different kind of love, which is connected with the idea of a goal, an aim, a gradual perfecting. In the above passage the phrase `perfect love' really means, in the Greek, love that has reached perfection as it were through long trial and error. John followed the way of Bhakti Yoga. There are different kinds of Yoga:
Jnana Yoga, which has to do with work on Intellectual Centre, Bhakti Yoga, which has to do with work on Emotional Centre, Hatha Yoga' which has to do with work on the Moving Centre, and many branches of these three different lines which belong to Man No. 3, Man No. 2 and Man No. 1.
In the 4th Way that we are beginning to study a man must work first in two rooms, and then in three, and finally in a fourth room if it is opened to him, because in the 4th Way it is necessary for a man to reach some state of balance in which all his centres begin to reflect the Work.
But here in the writings of John we have evidence of the Way of Bhakti Yoga and the awakening of conscious love as distinct from mechanical emotional love and physical love. The object of this Way is to get in touch with Higher Emotional Centre directly through love. Of course we cannot understand what this love is from our ordinary idea of love, which is turned outward towards physical objects. John is speaking of another kind of love, just as the Work speaks of another kind of love possible for us, which is conscious love. But this kind of love is very far from us and to imagine
That we possess it already is the greatest foolishness. We have to realize the illusions of love and how we ourselves cannot love and how indeed we both love and hate at the same time.
For this reason John says : "He who hateth his brother is in the darkness" and also : "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar". Further, he says that whoever has not this love of which lie is speaking is dead.
He speaks indeed of this love as a new birth, calling it being begotten of God, and says: "Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin because his seed abideth in him and he cannot sin because he is begotten of God."
All love, he teaches, comes from the love of something higher than oneself or the world. He says God is love and the only way in which love can be made perfect is to know and acknowledge the existence of God. It is in this connection that he says: "Herein is love made perfect", and that in this kind of love there is no fear. And that is why he also adds "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar".
He speaks often of how this love conquers the world and all its fears and cares and anxieties. He is speaking of something that can be awakened within us that is stronger than anything in life. He is speaking of something that changes the signs in us and reverses them so that what was active becomes passive and what was passive becomes active.
In this connection you will remember the teaching in the Work about Personality and Essence, about how Personality is active and Essence passive, and how a man must undergo a complete reversal within himself so that Personality becomes passive and Essence active, so that he is born anew.
We are given no hint of the method of the school to which John belonged but we can see that it was a Bhakti Yoga school, and we can also see how in the 3rd Epistle someone called Diotrephes had entered this school and was apparently trying to teach some other method.
John says that he loved pre-eminence. Now pre-eminence belongs to ordinary love which is self-love. Everything we see in the Gospels about love is obviously not about self-love. When the disciples quarrelled about pre-eminence, they were told that to be great in the sense of the Kingdom of Heaven they must become servants.
The world and its psychology in us is contrasted with the Kingdom of Heaven and its psychology, something utterly different. When this Work speaks of Imaginary `I', False Personality, and so on, it is seeking to begin to bring us into another orientation, into a new psychology of ourselves which is ultimately called in the Gospels the Kingdom of Heaven. It is of this love John is speaking, and not the love of the world, and of this love he says :
"If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father, but of the world."
And he adds, speaking of the individual man and his attachments and identifyings: "The world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." If we could all of us catch this rope of which the Work speaks and hold on to it, we would be better able to understand both what John means and what this Work means. When the valuation of this Work is great it makes us strong inside, apart from what happens in life. We no longer have to prove ourselves in life, to satisfy our fear, to keep up our False Personality, our reputation, because we begin to obey something quite different-i.e. in our case the teaching of the Work. And this keeps something eternally young in us because we all have in us something that can always remain young and alive.
But this means that we turn in another direction for our nourishment, and, passing through the doorway called
SELF OBSERVATION,
we begin to find what it is we really want and what we can really get.
After a time we begin to catch glimpses of what this love means of which John speaks, and which the Work calls conscious love, because as we cease to play with ourselves and invent ourselves, so do we cease to play with and invent other people.
And instead of trying to meet them and get to, know them from the outside inwards, we begin to feel and know them from inside outwards. We begin to feel a common existence which is without passion, and simply is what it is without further definition.
When we realize this point of inner experience we begin to understand what conscious love is, however dimly. But unless we have separated ourselves from our invention and pictures and falsities, we cannot reach this point, which is indefinable.
We reach this point only through something stronger than life.
If the Work, if the Gospels, if all esotericism had not something stronger behind it than anything in life, we could never reach this point. But you must understand that in the reaching of this point endless struggles are necessary, endless failures, confusions, and uncertainties, because it is we ourselves who have to win to this point by inner choice.
In all ages in the past, very many have reached this point, and they communicate their strength to us. Let us hope that we ourselves may reach this point where we come to realize that love that has become perfected casteth out all fear. Certainly, taking ourselves for granted, taking ourselves as one, never letting the Work into ourselves to break us up, we cannot expect to reach this point. Only Real `I' can love consciously. All this Work is about how to reach Real `I'. It is all about what `I's we have to leave behind from our own choice. Let us try to make a stronger feeling of the Work in ourselves and all that it is connected with throughout the ages, and not simply be creatures of the moment
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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Mon Dec 8th, 2008 01:15 am |
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I wonder what it means to "give up suffering." I am aware of when I suffer and of the agents. At some point they get pulled into my cage with me and dance for the benefit of an unseen observer seated out of view. I know the observer is myself. The play must go on! The zombie of suffering rising again and again. It needs to really be dead once and for all! The Crucifiction, death, and resurrection. To be born again. Is what Freud saw in the Death instinct? Certain thoughts and mental dynamics must die? Along these lines I suppose to give up suffering means to draw the life force completely out of the images so they die and thus to restore the life force to ourself. When the circumstance of suffering is here and now so I suffer now, but later when for example I am gardening or cooking I do not suffer and my life force is not ill spent.
Age old questions about suffering. Being self-aware is the start of journey to give up suffering once and for all. I sometimes get this vague feeling that to give up suffering I also have to give up something I really want to keep.
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Mon Dec 8th, 2008 02:17 am |
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Good point, Phil.
Conscious suffering is actually what conscious love always demands of us. Neurotic suffering, the suffering of a person not whole, is something that has to be given up.
Neurotic suffering is a defense against what really has to be, what is of the Self. Neurotic suffering comes from attempting to accommodate our outer authorities, our groups, family and others, and our own Sacred Cows of belief, habit and so on instead of following our real, differentiated feelings.
We give up the job that makes us nuts, the relationship that doesn't work and give up neurotic suffering.
At that point we take up conscious suffering, the cost and pain and work of going against gravity, of going with the flow of the outer world, and choose to suffer loneliness so that we can be ourselves and meet that person that, for example, we should meet.
Then our conscious love comes into play as we learn, for me, as I attempt to learn, to forego my anger and so on and treat my love as she should be treated.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Sat Oct 31st, 2009 10:42 pm |
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Time to bring this lovely thread to the top again.
Every Thursday we have intercessory prayer and bible study at a member's home. This week we talked about trials and suffering. All the kids and youths are away at a retreat so it was just us old people at the meeting. One elder asked an interesting question. At Sunday service the young sit in the front and us old people sit in the back. It's just the way the congregation spontaneously sorts itself. We in the back tend to get very ecstatic from the beauty of our Lord. Loudly praising, jumping, dancing, hugging each other tightly, crying, openly weeping, waiving our arms, shouting, speaking in tongues, etc. The young ones up front just stand there, sway a little, sing quietly, maybe with arms out front in supplication. Why do we get so wacked by the Holy Ghost so emotional and ecstatic but the young not? We figured that in part it is because our young ones haven't suffered like we have. We got a good laugh at the thought we have to make our kids suffer more. LOL.
Maybe the kids need to learn that the heart can go places the head can't.
On a different track the same elder woman said when her first husband died a friend called but didn't know what to say. Out of her mouth without even thinking came the words "it is an opportunity for me to grow."
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Sun Nov 1st, 2009 03:53 am |
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The kids' presence is not entirely a free choice, Phil. Most are there because of their parents and are now in the grip of trying to appear acceptable to their peers so that they can get in on the communal party and find a mate.
They have to reject the parents somewhat to do this, to find their own identity. That is why we had Confirmation. You get baptized and you become a member of the Christian faith, but you don't really become one on your own until you have reviewed why you are here in that and want to be in it on your own.
I have been talking to a lot of Mormons of late because I drive a lot of the execs from Salt Lake City. One of them told me that the first person you convert when doing Mormon missionary work was yourself.
Also, elders have a sense of the Spirit, Phil, that the young, except for children under 7 or so, might not have.
We must take care of our bodies to do this, be a vehicle for the Spirit. If we don't, we can't express, act on, what we get out of our link to the Spirit.
Have you read Castaneda's The Power of Silence?
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Mon Nov 2nd, 2009 01:49 pm |
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"One of them told me that the first person you convert when doing Mormon missionary work was yourself."
Like in the airline video for passengers how to put their oxygen masks on. First save yourself then save the others. 
Yeah, I'm sure there are social factors involved with the behavior of the youths. I know though my daughter wants to go because I won't remind her when the youth group meets, she comes to me asking me to take her. She really loves it and she freely sacrifices other activities I know she likes. I remember the youth group meeting on "Let Your Light Shine," I was hanging out in the lobby but could hear the pastor's wife give mighty exhortations and the kids made such a huge ruckus that I thought the doors would blow off any second. They are very much into the tangible practice. They always have for every meeting an activity or game, usually outdoors, based on the spiritual principles taught. Kind of like the secular executive and team building retreats you see where the participants do stuff like fall backwards off a high wall and trust the other members will catch them.
I'm definitely the spiritual leader of the family. I read a study on the phenomenon of church going kids dropping out from church when they go to college. Once in college only %15 of the kids continue to go to church. The interesting thing is families where the father is the spiritual leader the drop out rate was only half that of where the mother was the principle spiritual leader. The fathers effect was even more pronounced on the college women. Jung was spot on when he wrote that it is the father instills spirit into their daughters. Nocturne are you listening?
Definitely Roy, our physical health is very important. That was a bible group subject we had a several weeks ago. The Left claims christian fundies attempt to control what the members eat like some sort of cult. LOL!! Seriously the left wing guy that wrote "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" actually abhorred churches for attempting to get people to eat right and exercise!! A far out of touch with society can socialists get?
I've read just about all of Castaneda's books but I don't recall the Power of Silence. It is interesting that silence as in meditation is one of the things our pastor advises to be part of everyday practice. I've always been an advocate of daily meditation. Science is only now doing detailed examination of brain states in each of the varieties of mediation (physically active, passive, monk chanting, TM, possessed by the Holy Ghost, etc). The results are interesting and affirmative.
If we look at suffering as a test or trial we encounter the greek word peirasmos whose root is peiro meaning to pierce. The education of our spirit can come through piercing trials. This means suffering is supposed to have a beginning a middle and an end. The process through which our soul and spirit get divided from flesh, sifted, and inspected. Jung explored this quite a bit using Christian and Alchemist writings.
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Wed Nov 4th, 2009 03:01 am |
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It may be that people need a time to be away from what they did in childhood to make it their own so they can return.
I would probably go to a Greek or Russian Orthodox church if there was one this side of the river.
My main dispute with the Catholic Church is the Vatican. But, I am not orthodox at all in my beliefs. I am a heretic. LOL.
Phil, The Power of Silence came out way after Castaneda made his first big splash. It came out about 1988 or so.
I have read it 16 times. The last time, I knew why every single word was there.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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