A Seeker

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - The Shock

 

This is my 11th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 10 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

Shock is an unplanned, sometimes painful, but fortuitous occurrence. Although Appelbaum does not present it this way, it seems to me that he describes two kinds of shocks - both revealing of my mechanical state. One type of shock comes from my state of constant distraction. I am daydreaming and so I walk into the glass door. The other shock comes from the events that reveal my unconscious mental framework. The shock of hearing myself lying reveals the assumption that I am always sincere. So shock uncovers a resisting force that operates beneath the surface. This resistance is the mechanicality of habit, that which, in Gurdjieffian terms, keeps me in a state of sleep.

Shocks are fortuitous because they expose fresh surface. Since my last post I reread the section on surface and saw that I had missed several aspects of the unencrusted surface. First, it is not the skin. Sometimes it is located just under the skin; sometimes it extends further in volume; sometimes it is concentrated; sometimes it is diffused and sometimes it is the whole organism. Secondly, surface is an effort - the effort to surface (now a verb) "what lurks in the shadows."

I think that Appelbaum's surface (or 'sur-face' - which he begins to use to emphasize the meaning on-the-face) is Gurdjieff's self-remembering. Appelbaum writes, "Sur-face makes perception mine in the sense that it is essentially a perception of myself....A background element in my perception comes forth - myself....Sur-face is the enactment of my meeting myself." Compare this to how Gurdjieff introduces self-remembering, "You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks,' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still 'is noticed,' 'is seen.' (In Search of the Miraculous, pg 117)

I want to quote here William Patrick Patterson's description of self-remembering because it explains how "what lurks in the shadows" is revealed. "One divides [the attention] between sensation of self and the perception of an object, exterior or interior. In so doing, what colors and personalizes impressions - imagination, identification, inner considering, and judgments - is observed. If one cannot absorb the shock of a given impression, there is immediate reaction followed by a train of secondary reactions. If the impression is registered and not reacted to - not fought, not expressed, not fed - then observation...has duration and depth. The octave of impressions can proceed and its energy is further refined so as to be "food" for a higher body without which no true self-remembering (work with sensation and feeling) can begin to take place. In time a difference in quality is intuited between what is seen - the contents of one's awareness - and awareness itself. The ensuing friction created from the absorption of the energy of impressions and the denial of reaction produces an inner separation, an inner space."  (Taking with the Left Hand, pg 91) 

Photo source: Orlando Weekly

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Surface

This is my 10th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 9 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

The effort to abide within the body develops a sensitivity to events that is separate from pre-existing mental constructs. What Appelbaum calls the "language of sensitivity" provides facts about "the perceiver's state, about resistance, blockage, receptivity, relation, and openness." The body is the milieu through which these facts are expressed. "The language of the body is a language of presence."

One would assume that with the inward focus of perception and the containment of energy that there would be a separation from the exterior world. But Appelbaum says that that is the intellectual perception. The organic perception is different. Here he introduces the word "surface." I don't think it is exactly the surface of the body - the skin. It is a larger concept than that. It is our connector to all and everything. "Surface is a reminder of relation, a tangible sign of the fact that inner and outer mutually penetrate each other and that the distinction is a functional convenience. Surface is where the organism perceives."

Surface is a "sensitive membrane" that can either be fresh and open - via the stop, or encrusted and inflexible - via the reliance on old concepts and assumptions. Without the stop we are insulated against perception and surface "becomes a shield against connections."

In the next post: how surface gets exposed by shock.

Photo Source: flicker.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Life of our life

This is my 9th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 8 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In Chapter 5, The Organism of Text, Appelbaum has a short paragraph about how, with the stop, human perception is dual. At first, I thought he was referring to Gurdjieff's practice of self-remembering as Ouspensky describes it in In Search of the Miraculous:

When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe - a line with one arrowhead:
I ----------------------> the observed phenomenon.

When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line:
I <--------------------> the observed phenomenon.

Ouspensky explains that the observed phenomenon "could as well be within me as outside me."

After reading the paragraph several times I realized that Appelbaum is talking about a deeper, more subtle form of self-remembering. He is talking about an awareness of a "movement of energy" that takes place before our "our inner activities" take form. These activities or functions are our thoughts, desires, judgments, self-will, etc. These are functions that take on forms and we perceive them. But prior to the taking of form, there is a movement of energy and this can be perceived as well. He says, "This is the Life of our life, that which is a source for particular undertakings of functional life. Perception thus takes note of how percipient energy enters life on our ordinary level, how it animates forms of life, and how it remains distinct from these forms."

Although Appelbaum doesn't spell this out, it seems that he is indicating that there is a choice then at the moment of perception of the movement of energy. One could choose to stop the thought, the desire, the judgment and then the mind would remain formless.

Gurdjieff Music Recital: Berkeley, San Rafael, Sacramento, California

Here's a short video of the recital, Sacred Music of the Eternal Present: Prayers & Music of G.I. Gurdjieff. As I posted previously, it was performed at several venues on the East Coast last year and is now coming to California. It is happening this week in Berkeley, San Rafael and Sacramento, so don't wait to check out this link for all of the information.

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Prolongation of the Stop

This is my 8th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 7 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

Although there is a lot more that I want to write about in terms of Prof. Appelbaums description of the experience of the stop, it seems appropriate while the Olympics are going on that I should relate what he says about the prolongation of the stop. The connection to the Olympics - in my mind anyway - is about perserverance.  Of course, the perserverance required to excel at a sport is of a completely different type than the effort to come to a stop in the midst of the mechanicality of life. So now that I have my excuse for using a picture of Lindsey Vonn, I'll drop the analogy.

Appelbaum says that the stop "has no permanence and must be regained, if at all, by dint of effort. By a kind of exertion...[one] can repeat the action of the stop....The stop is the protoeffort. All effort is directed, implicitly or explicitly, toward cessation of thought construction....It would be misleading, however, to speak of stopping thought as the aim of the stop or as the effect of the initiation of will. The stop takes place, and, as a result, thought stops."

Since The Stop is a philosophy book, not a teaching or a Way, Appelbaum doesn't go much beyond that in terms of how to do it. For that, I go to the literature of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. In the Fourth Way Meetings section of William Patrick Patterson's  Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time there are several questions from students about the "associations whirling around my head." Part of the answer to one of these questions is: "To break out of the thought-world takes aim, knowledge and effort. The aim is to awaken, but as long as I think I am awake how strong can my aim be? So I must verify through the evidence of my own observed experience that I am almost always asleep in the dream of myself, rarely awake. This observation must be a self-observation. That is only possible if there is self-sensing, a conscious attention. So this is not an 'effort' in the usual sense of the word. It's not an outward effort but inward. We need to get the taste of refocusing, grounding, breathing, guarding, dividing attention."

It is this "taste" that is the key.  I think this is what F.M. Alexander meant by: "You can't tell a person what to do because the thing you have to do is a sensation."

In my next post - the stop and the two-foldness of human life.

Photo Source: nydailytimes.com

The Gurdjieff Journal

The lastest issue, #51, of The Gurdjieff Journal is now out. The cover essay, Certainty in a Time of Uncertainty, gave me a lot to ponder. The first part that describes the uncertainty in our times is a bit upsetting to read. But the discussion of how to stand "on the cliff edge of the certainty of uncertainty" gives some hope. Can I prepare myself to experience "the potency of a somatic-emotional-intellectual connection to one's actuality that allows a fluidity and flexibility for an adequate response to whatever arises"?

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Beyond the Conceptual Framework

This is my 7th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 6 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In The Stop Prof. Appelbaum explains that without the stop, with a mental, rather than an embodied awareness, we moment-by-moment construct a conceptual frame of the world as a detached onlooker. The frame consists of ideas and concepts all based on previous experience and conditioning. The body becomes one of these concepts. The actual act of perceiving becomes lost, powerless and invisible.  It gives its energy to the conceptual frame. Perception, following habituated pathways of mental associations, views events through previously established intellectual categories. The energy of perception "escapes the fleshy folds of the body."

"The stop arrests an attitude of control, driven by a fear of and vulnerability to the dark unknown. It dissolves a need to foreknow, presuppose, prefigure, and plan out in advance, just as it dissolves the need to arm, fortify, and consolidate territory." (This statement really resonated with me which is why I selected the dark forest image for this post.)

With the stop, the energy of perception remains within the body, no longer magnitized by the mental activity of world-creation. A "network of relations constituting the organism" are sensitized and energized; a nonmental responsiveness is awakened. The body ceases to be an idea and becomes "a container of an unknown identity through which move currents of sensation....One's body becomes available to an attentiveness of an entirely different order."

Listen to how William Patrick Patterson describes it in Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time. "...there is a stop, a shift in which we say 'yes' to Being - that which is consciously aware of itself and its contents, gross and subtle, and in which the quality of breath becomes fluid, palpable....Time seems to stop, space expands. Silence, the ever-present background of all that is, is tasted. Verifying ourselves in this way we literally stand in our own shoes. Released from the self-talk of the make-believe world, the ongoing societal hypnotism, we experience the primary - that is, the sensation of ourselves, the breath, the attention, perhaps an interior sound."

As I get further into Appelbaum's explanation of the stop I see more and more of its connections to Gurdjieff's teaching. However, I'm not familiar enough with F.M. Alexander's writings to find deeper parallels. I invite comments from anyone who has delved into the Alexander literature.

The next post will be about the prolongation of the stop.

Photo Source: msp291.photobucket.com

Gurdjieff Seminars - Tucson, Arizona and Morristown N.J.

Two seminars with William Patrick Patterson have been announced on the Gurdjieff-Legacy site:

Tucson, Arizona - March 26 to 29. The theme is God, Machine & Me

Morristown, New Jersey - May 28 to 31. The theme is I Am, I Am Not, I Am

Gurdjieff Music - Berkeley, San Rafael, Sacramento, California

Sacred Music of the Eternal Present: Prayers & Music of G.I. Gurdjieff which was performed at several venues on the East Coast last year is now coming to California. I flew back to Washington D.C. to see one of the performances and am excited that it is coming here next month. Here is the link to all of the information.

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Emodied Sensing

 Allegory of the Five Senses by Lairesse

This is my 6th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop. If you missed the first 5 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

In The Stop Appelbaum explains how, thanks to Descartes and others, we take the senses to be separate - each being a different window onto the world outside of us. He relates the problem presented by Locke in his 1694 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. If a man blind from birth is suddenly able to see and is shown a globe and a cube, will he know which was the one that was smooth to his blind touch. Locke answers that he would not know.

From that perspective, because there is no commonality between the senses and no communication between them, there is no unifying awareness.  Appelbaum explains, "The one who looks with eyes is not the same one who touches with hands...sight and touch, hearing and smell and taste, no longer speak a common language....They do not look from one place into one and the same world." This lack of communication "is overlooked in a growing preoccupation with object consciousness." This a selective focus requiring constant discrimination and differentiation. However, the one who makes the distinctions has become invisible; the question of "from what awareness does the object world spring" is not considered.

With the stop, we come back to an embodied awareness. Attention is no longer the hostage of repetitive, obsessive thought. When we arrest "the habits of listing, sorting, weighing, and arranging the furniture of the world...the awareness undergoes a slight shift...to an inner composure....One ceases to be a manager of things - a something among other somethings - and instead takes one's place as an inhabitant of a cosmos. The return is to an original position of embodied awareness and its native perceptivity."

Appelbaum begins Part Two of The Stop with a discussion of what we can see from this emobied awareness. He introduces "divinatory perception." This concept is a bit elusive for me as it has to do with the reading of signs. He says, "Perception must pass from its closed circle to the open pathway, from objectification to a frontier along which the concealed emerges from the unconcealed, the about-to-be-manifest from the manifest." What came to mind in reading this was Ouspensky's description in In Search of the Miraculous of what he was searching for: "I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us." Once he was able to bring himself to the emotional state where he could truly remember himself, experience the stop, he was able to see beyond the the thin film.

In the next post - percipient energy and the conceptual frame.

 

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Embodiment

This is my 5th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop. If you missed the first 4 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

A primary principle in the Alexander Technique is what F.M. Alexander called 'inhibition.' This is not the Freudian concept of repression. It is a moment of conscious awareness of there being a choice to stop prior to a movement in order to inhibit habitual patterns and allow one to organize the body for correct usage. As counter-productive habits are prevented, the body becomes freer and is allowed to lengthen and widen into its natural state of poise.

In The Stop, Appelbaum describes this activity as finding "a gap in the revolving door of habit." He says that it is a receptivity directed toward an "embodied awareness."

So now we have come to the crux of the matter - embodiment, a state of "global sensation." Appelbaum says that the work of awareness is "the return to an organic, archaic level of experience." I thought that his choice of the word 'archaic' was rather strange so I looked it up in the dictionary. The first definition is "belonging to an earlier period." I think he is referring to childhood - that time of our lives before we got stuck in our heads. 

One of the subheadings in the Introduction to William Patrick Patterson's Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time is "The Facticity of the Physical." It's a succinct description for how being embodied moves us from the world of abstraction into the real world. He writes, "Simple observation will show the attention abstracts randomly (or because of fear, desire), switching past-future, future-past, between what has happened or will happen, or some admixture. So, though we appear to be here, our attention, and the thoughts and feelings which accompany it, are off there in a world of abstraction, not in a here whose facticity is a concrete, palpable experiencing."

This is why in the Gurdjieff work the practice of self-observation begins with postures. If done correctly, it brings us out of the head brain and into the body and the present moment to observe the facts of what we are doing - not what we are thinking about what we are doing. F.M. Alexander was also aware that “All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

In the next post I will relate Appelbaum's descriptions of the "body of sensitivity."

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Between Tension & Poise

 If it is true as Professor Appelbaum says that poise cannot grow out of tension, then how do we get from here to there? He says there must be a transition to poise that "brings closure to the context of preoccupation and despair....The betweeness is a hinge that belongs to neither one nor the other. It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways....It is the stop."

He makes the case that the stop is everywhere and in everything. He does this by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kepler, circular orbits versus elliptical orbits...way over my head. But then he brings it down to simple stuff - the stop is evident in every action in which we take part: hammering, opening a door, using a pen, eating, lifting, etc. "All involve a joint. There is a hinge around which events pivot. An initial impetus to movement runs its course and is followed by a new impetus leading to a new movement. All earthly movement is a deviation from perfect continuity in that it stops, begins again, stops again, hesitates, recovers, moves on..."

So what keeps us from being aware of the stop? It is our constant inner talking. Our attention is "repeatedly, ceaselessly, and unknowingly given over to an onrushing stream of associative thought." For this Appelbaum uses the term "rational automatism." "An endles automatic movement of thought obscures the stop."

Gurdjieff described this state as an embalance of "centers." Our three main centers - the intellectual, the emotional and the moving/instinctive - are out of balance because the intellectual is allowed to dominate.

As William Patrick Patterson writes in Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time , "We have become so enthrolled by our rational part, and the material benefits and powers it has given us, that we...are now more and more disembodied, our animal nature misunderstood, judged and renderd inferior. And so our sense of incompletion and isolation has grown proportionately as we have become more and more mentalized, all without our really knowing it."

More on the stop and awareness in my next post. 

Photo source: www.deviantart.com

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Tension

In The Stop Professor Appelbaum gives a description of tension that is pertinent to the modern, information age. He says that tension is characterized by "overabundant information and impoverished by an absence of real facts." In a state of tension I am "trying to figure out, plan, and engineer outcomes." With tension we are always 'out of synch,' missing the opportunities of the moment.

This is the activity of what Gurdjieff called the formatory mind or the mechanical part of our intellectual center. Ouspensky comparied it to a card-index system in the brain. Everything is old, nothing new or creative can come from it, it can't respond to the current moment other than by shuffling through the cards. It lives by rote.

I try to function with this mechanical thinking and am blind to the reality of the situation because I am so afraid of failure and am constantly trying to prove my self-worth. Appelbaum dubs it the "psychophysical milieu of accomplishment."  William Patrick Patterson in his book, Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time refers to this as "the ongoing momentum of life's constant Becoming - where everything is in a a stage of becoming greater or lesser." It is opposed to the state of Being. In the Introduction he writes, "Even a casual observation will confirm that I am constantly talking to myself, comparing myself, judging myself - lost in self-talk. My attention is captured in narcissism of continual self-referral, self-enchantment and daydreams. Though I apperar to be in the facticity of the physical world, I am off into the abstract." In the section of the book that is questions and answers from Fourth Way group meetings there is this answer: "We live in thought. We conceptualize everything, systematizing, organizing, building great edifices of thought dedicated to what? Ourselves, of course...."

The posture that I picture acccompaning this psychophysical milieu is the head back-and-down. (Check out where your head is right now.) F.M. Alexander found that people habitually overwork the neck muscles, tensing the back of the neck, pulling the head back and down. This tension in the neck then works its way down into my shoulders where there is an habitual holding whenever I have allowed all of my attention to drain outward into this milieu of accomplishment.

Until tension eases, poise can only be an idea in the head. Appelbaum says that poise cannot possibly grow out of tension - "a process that begins in distraction, preoccupation, and insensitivity."  How to get from tension to poise? - my next post

Photo Source: Cover image from A Mind Taut With Pain by Philippa King

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Poise

 
In the introduction to The Stop Appelbaum defines it as: "No theoretical construct, the stop is an actual moment, the moment of poise....An active concentration of awareness.... [It] gives us a key to a deeper engagement in a meaning that unfolds our lives. For it offers a choice. Either to remain habit-bound or to regain a freeedom in one's approach to an endeavor. The stop is the advent of an intelligence of choice."

Appelbaum seems to being using 'poise' and 'the stop' interchangeably. The stop is poise and poise is the stop. Here is his description of poise: "...a balanced concentration immediately prior to action. It is the a priori of a self-aware act. Poise itself is an action, but one of a wholly different kind. It differs from ordinary undertakings in point of origination, intention, quality of attention, rhythm, and reason. Poise is the response of awareness to the call of a situation...Poise is ever fresh in its ability to answer to the forms addressing it. In its continually renewed sensitivity, it is unlike its apparent siblings - control, steadiness, and firmness of intent. Poise has flexibillity. It stretches, bends, adapts, and accommodates while the others remained fixed....Poise is fluidity of response."

F.M. Alexander said that we are born with a "natural poise" and that is what we need to return to.

In my next post I'll describe how tension works against poise.

Photo: Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba in Within the Golden Hour, photo by Erik Tomasson

Krishnamurti on Craving and The Word

"There is no entity separate from craving; there is only craving, there is no one who craves. Craving takes on different masks at different times, depending on its interests. The memory of these varying interests meets the new, which brings about conflict, and so the chooser is born, establishing himself as an entity separate and distinct from craving. But the entity is not different from its qualities. The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it. He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself. He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict. When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear. Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought. Thought is the result of experience; and though it can ponder over emptiness, have sensations with regard to it, it cannot know emptiness directly. The word loneliness, with its memories of pain and fear, prevents the experiencing of it afresh."

I found the above quote from Krishnamurti on this blog.  There's a lot in that short paragraph and it has to be read many times. I felt that it connects to what I was recently reading in Ouspensky's The Fourth Way about fear. He is answering a question about Gurdjieff's concept of identification and says, "Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-try....You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you."

Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time

William Patrick Patterson will be discussing and signing his latest book, Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time at a couple of locations in Maryland this week. He will also be leading a workshop this Saturday in Baltimore - How To Overcome Uncertainty-Fear-Suffering. You can get all of the information at  this website .

Gurdjieff and the Instinctive Center

This is one of a sequence of pictures showing a polar bear and dogs playing together. It can be seen on this website along with a video. But what I found interesting about it was the comments that people left. They range from things like "This is so cute, why can't humans be like that" to "If the bear was hungry he would have eaten the dogs."

This brought me to pondering Mr. Gurdjieff's instruction to learn about how the world works and about how we work. He quoted Hermes Trismegistus-"As above, so below." Most of us know very little about polar bears and we know very little about how our own instinctive center functions. We don't realize the strength of that center until an episode of overeating or totally stupid behavior (can you say Tiger Woods?) brings it to light. But it is there, it is part of us. 

The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique

I just finished reading The Stop by David Appelbaum, a professor of philosophy at State Univ. of New York. I am not well-read in philosophy so much of this book was way over my head, but I feel that I managed to glean a few insights and I would like to reinforce them by exploring them here. Warning: this is my interpretation and may or maynot actually correspond to Prof. Appelbaum's thesis.

For those of you familiar with the stop exercise that Gurdjieff employed and that is described in In Search of the Miraculous, that is not what Appelbaum is describing...well, he is describing that, but not as an exercise. I think that it would be more accurate to say that he is, in part, describing a level of Gurdjieff's multi-level practice of self-remembering. And he is also describing the Alexander Technique of "the pause" before movement - the organizing of oneself for proper usage of the body. So I want to explore these concepts and connections and see what I can unravel from Applebaum's thesis.

He begins with sight, perception - making a case for embodied perception that is not distorted by thought constructs that alter what is seen to fit assumptions of the intellect. Disembodied perception excludes the seer and is detached from other sense experiences. "When sight ceases to be related to its organic condition, it loses its freshness of perception. It fails to penetrate assumptions we project about ourselves and grows increasingly intellectual."

Embodied perceiving takes in impressions-unaltered by the intellect-in a way that supplies an energy that includes the seer in the process of the perceiving. This is the result of "resensitizing sight." "Engrained habits of disembodied sight give over to fuller, intenser visual perception."

How does this come about? Through the employment of the stop. I'll describe that in my next post.

I wonder if Appelbaum is assuming that everyone who has not learned the stop perceives in the same disembodied manner. I am thinking of Gurdjieff's division of men (who have not worked on themselves) into three categories: man number 1 whose center of gravity is in the physical body, man number 2 whose center of gravity is in his feelings, and man number 3 whose center of gravity is in the intellect. (In Search of the Miraculous pg. 71) All three are equally asleep, but it seems that their process of perception must be different.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

I just finished watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which tells the story of the thousands of Liberian women, both Christian and Muslim, who helped end the bloody civil war in 2003 that killed over 200,000 people. Through nonviolent protests, these women forced a resolution in the peace talks, and their efforts led to the election of Africa's first female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

This was an incredible testament to the power of women in a country where rape was used as a tool of war (half the women in the country have been raped) and children were recruited as soldiers and sometimes even instructed to kill their parents. Although this sounds like it might make for gruesome viewing, you actually come away from this film with a feeling of hope.

The DVD version that I got from Netflix has a Bill Moyer's Journal interview with Leymah Ghowee, the central figure of the film and Abigail Disney, the producer. Both women are extremely articulate. I advise viewing this on a separate evening; if you watch it after the documentary you will go into emotional overload.

One thing that particularly struck me about the story was that the women had nothing - no money, no social status, no weapons. They had only their presence, their being. A pivotal point in the film is what takes place at the peace talks in Ghana. The women go to the talks - first they are out in the street, but when no progress is being made in the talks, they stage a sit-in and refuse to let the war lords leave until agreements are signed. The women accomplish this just by their presence. They become the reminding factor for the men of the impact of their actions on the women and children.

It's interesting that the women's activities got very little coverage because they were discounted by the media. One photographer said that he did not take any video of the women presenting their demands to the president of Liberia, Dr. Robert Taylor, becauce they looked so pathetic sitting there in the dirt. As Mr. Gurdjieff said, "People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man's knowledge but they do not value the level of a man's being..." (Search, pg 65)

If you want more information and updates on what the women are doing now here is their website.

Awakening to One's Real Self: The Gurdjieff Approach

Awakening to One's Real Self: The Gurdjieff Approach was the theme of the retreat that I just attended in Florida. Awakening to one's real self is an iterative process and before you can even get glimpses of it, there is a lot of slogging through the false self.

One of the aspects of the false self that I had the unpleasant opportunity to see this weekend was selfishness - in big things and in small things. My apologies to any fellow retreatants that were cut off in the food line by my instincitve center.

The retreat center had an indoor labyrinth (pictured here) and an outdoor one under a canopy of trees. Evidently labyrinths are experiencing a resurgence. There is even a labyrinth locator website -http://labyrinthlocator.com/ . The labyrinth is a metaphor, a symbol, the path of life, a journey into the self. But I just used it to put one foot in front of the other, trying to be present to that alone. Which, I think, is what life is about.

There is going to be a retreat in Arizona this coming March. I highly recommend it. You can check out the details here .

Photo source: Duncan Center