Placelore

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In Response to your feeling of his death.

(Before dawn in an Indian Temple)

You were his spiritual father and he, devoted son. Such living relationship is beyond time, thought, all words. 

The heart of Co. T. is not a place, neither is it of numbers, it is sighted in the holy vision which mercifully can awaken even those long lost and dead.

M. was fond of Van Morrison, the wild Belfast lad who danced with the words of children’s rhymes and helped us feel that we were not alone in our isolated lonely selves, and that northern man with the gravelly voice sang this rhyme …

 

“I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow

Casting shadows on the winter sky as you stood there counting crows

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for girls and four for boys

Five for silver

Six for gold and

Seven for a secret never to be told”

 

Lord in your Mercy

I ask not for angels 

but for warriors 

to stand guard by his side.

 

 

Life and Fate

The axis of Vasily Grossman’s historical novel Life and Fate is the horrendous conflict that engulfed the city of Stalingrad in the severe winter of 1942–43. It is often compared to Leo Tolstoy’s famous literary effort War and Peace, based upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of and subsequent retreat from Russia.

I found this an impressive, heart-rending book. It offers profound insights into the effect of conflict upon the individuals involved and also on the ideologies and state apparatus which facilitate brutality and destruction.

Grossman counsels that it is best not to judge those who informed on others unless you yourself have lived through the conditions that rested on the propaganda, violence, fear, and rewards of a totalitarian state. There are many touching and memorable descriptive passages: the last minutes in a gas chamber of a doctor who sacrifices her opportunity to survive so that she can remain to the end with a lost child; the powerful, universal emotions of a distraught mother who grieves for her dead son; a transcending love felt by a famished German soldier for a Russian woman in a cold, encircled cellar during the last weeks of the siege.

Life and Fate is a drama with a large cast of characters radiating out from and interconnected to the Shaposhnikov family. Here we have generals and soldiers, Gestapo and KGB interrogators, concentration camp inmates, escapees, refugees, torturers, collaborators, informers, and gravediggers.

What happens when the walls that insulate us from savagery and insanity collapse, when there is no longer any divide between the darkness without and within? What happens to those who think they know who they are–and what they live for? What happens to those who believe that they would never confess to concocted crimes in the confines of Lubyanka, a place where a man or woman can be so beaten that not a mark is left on the outside of the body but where every internal organ is damaged and bleeds, a place where even the strongest prisoners who have endured the unendurable finally succumb and scream out in the night, “I will sign anything, anything.”

This not a comfortable book to read. I found it humbling and on several occasions felt myself stopping and quietly turning to the words “Lord have mercy,” for as we are, are we not in need of help to enable us to protect and nourish what is fine and human?  In Life and Fate, mercy comes through suffering, a suffering that reveals that all that reduces us to slavery, in all its myriad of forms, is within. The trapped German soldier asks about life: Is it all a great folly, or is it fate? Viktor Shaposhnikov, the physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences, comes to realize that it is not too late to stand up and enter a struggle with forces which oppose his wish and determination to become an honorable man and to truly become his mother’s son.  

Tolstoy was born in 1828, sixteen years after the events he described in War and Peace. Grossman, on the other hand, personally witnessed a great deal of what he describes. His determination to record as honestly as he could earned the respect not only of many veterans of the Red Army and the civilian population, but also members of the invading forces. Life and Fate is more than a novel. It is also a historical record, part biographical, and a searching journey for truth and redemption. It is a lament for the innocent dead and an affirmation for the joy of life. It is sensitive and appropriate that the last word of this noble effort of writing is silence.

 

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Man's Search For Meaning

In the quietness of dawn I finished re-reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning,[1] it is a book imbued with deep insights into the human condition, and although it has no pretensions to be so, I deem it a spiritual classic. The first part, and core of the book entitled Experiences In A Concentration Camp is eighty-four pages, each one of those pages carries the weight of someone who survived four camps, and by moments entered states not of sentimental escapism, but of transcendence.

Are there words which can truly describe such horrors, brutality, violence, as permeated such places as Dachau in 1944? What was, if any, the meaning of it all? Why is this happening? Who am I? Why am I here?

He writes,

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly... Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

The second part of the book deals with Logotherapy[2] the concluding chapter of which is aptly entitled, The Case For For A Tragic Optimism. Dr. Frankl recounts, in the camps people did not blur into a ‘uniform expression’, “on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints... You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let is be alert — alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

 

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[1] Viktor  E. Frankl Man’s Search For Meaning, Washington Square Press 1984 edition.

[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo#55D501

The Greek term logos will be familiar to students of theology. It is often translated as the "Word" or "Will" of God. In a broader sense, it can be viewed as "that which gives reason for being." Dr. Frankl prefers the simple translation of logos as "meaning."

Therapy [ˈθɛrəpɪ] n pl –pies (Medicine)

a.  the treatment of physical, mental, or social disorders or disease

b.  (in combination) physiotherapy electrotherapy

From New Latin therapia, from Greek therapeia attendance; see therapeutic.

 

 

Awareness, De Mello, A.S. Neill

Before the journey began two friends offered me a copy of Anthony De Mello’s Awareness*. I read it along the way, within its content there were important reminders of the consequences of a life lived through unawareness.

“The unaware life is a mechanical life. Its not human, it’s programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood.” P.67

This is a strong statement, and although various quotes from mystics, saints and scholars are presented throughout in support of it, the author does not offer (in my view) a discriminating perception of what is being stated. This is not to dismiss the book, for there are levels; many have found and will continue to find his writings helpful.

De Mello on several occasions evokes St. Thomas Aquinas, and the fact that St Thomas declared after what appears to have been a profound mystical or supernatural experience that all he had written was “so much straw in the wind compared to the reality of the divine glory.” I have heard others over the years evoke this saying, however they forget to add that St Thomas also indicated that his writings had not been a wasted effort, they helped to bring him to the encounter he had on December 1273, a few months before his death.

I was touched while reading Awareness to come across the name of, and some quotes from A. S. Neill who established the unique school Summerhill in 1921, and is the author of a book by the same name.

Neill had a beneficial influence on my life, and in the explorations of the meaning and purpose of education. I saw this fine man being laughed at by many, in an audience in Dublin, forty years ago, they may in the light of revelations about violence and abuse over the past two decades have less room now for condemnation of such an explorer. They had little or no understanding of his work, were swayed all too easily by a clever television/radio personality who had even less. Whereas I may not now agree completely with all of A.S. Neill’s views, nonetheless I heartedly recommend the book Summerhill for all who are interested in education and children of all ages.

“Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad-tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil … There is no violence in those children, because no one is practicing violence on them.” – A. S. Neill, Summerhill

 

*Anthony De Mello, Awareness, A de Mello Spiritual Conference in HIs Own Words. There are various editions 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._S._Neill

 

 

Time and tribulations horizontal

Hello, Ted,

You must be in AVP now and not in your intensive stage treatment, so the chances are good that you will read my message…

This one is a delicate issue, but I know you will understand.

I suspect to be ill with one of those illnesses that are called incurable and just progress in time. I am not a nutcase, not a hypochondriac, the medical visit is scheduled soon, but I know already...

 I have never felt good about Allopathic medicine and came to Avp last year, because the idea of a doctor seeing a suffering human being in you instead of an illness to be treated or discarded was very appealing. I took my time to metabolize the six weeks' experience at AVP and somehow today I can't help feeling that I was again a piece of an assembly line, in a different way from the classic experience with allopathic doctor/hospital, but still a piece of an assembly line… I enjoyed my time, and it was a new experience I wanted to have, yet there were small pieces here and there that were not quite matching.

I wanted to ask you if you had ayurvedic experience in other hospitals in India and if it is not a very invading question, why do you keep coming to AVP (I know that you consider Dr. Rv… an authority in ayurveda; we have talked superficially about this before) and not feel tempted or maybe tempted to try another hospital

 

Dear I…,

I always welcome hearing from you, your questions are deepening, rich, and in essence simple, which are the real questions. They also help me. 

Dr. Rv… I trust within the level of my present understanding, but I cannot say he is an authority on Ayurveda - can there truly be such a one? If I had the wherewithal I would search more intensely than I have over the years, though I have sought from many in different countries. 

I have returned here for the third time for as yet I have not found another place or human being of high degree with experience and understanding, that is not to say that I have ceased from searching, the feeling remains to continue questioning, ever deeper, but where to go from here?

The Yoga Therapy I have found helpful but here too the same applies, there is a tendency for the sacred to be made profane, a kiss to become mechanical, a vocation to become an assembly line business, you are sensitive to all this, thus the tears of suffering.  

I am in the wonder of not knowing, but 'know' in my heart that I need help, maybe it would not be remiss of me to call it divine help, an essential need.

The content of your email I find achingly pure, so follow your intuition, try other places, I can but encourage you to keep searching, maintain a vertical direction in the midst of time and tribulations horizontal. 

With My Love

 

 

 

 

Essential Oils

Essential Oils—are wrung—

The Attar from the Rose

Be not expressed by Suns—alone—

It is the gift of Screws—

 

The General Rose—decay—

But this—in Lady's Drawer

Make Summer—When the Lady lie

In Ceaseless Rosemary—

 

Emily Dickinson 

 

No preferences

The Great Way is not difficult

for those who have no preferences.

When love and hate are both absent

everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however,

and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth

then hold no opinions for or against anything.

To set up what you like against what you dislike

is the disease of the mind.

When the deep meaning of things is not understood

the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

Seng-Ts’an Hsin Hsin Ming

http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/cmSengTsan.htm

There is  nothing so disobedient as an undisciplined mind, and there is nothing so obedient as a disciplined mind.

The Buddha

 

 

 

 

The Unresolved

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017lbcx

Broken in pieces all asunder,

Lord, hunt me not,

A thing forgot,

Once a poor creature, now a wonder,

A wonder tortured in the space

Betwixt this world and that of grace.

 

My thoughts are all a case of knives,

Wounding my heart

With scattered smart;

As wat’ring-pots give flowers their lives.

Nothing their fury can control,

While they do wound and prick my soul.

 

All my attendants are at strife

Quitting their place

Unto my face:

Nothing performs the task of life:

The elements are let loose to fight,

And while I live, try out their right.

 

Oh help, my God! let not their plot

Kill them and me,

And also Thee,

Who art my life: dissolve the knot,

As the sun scatters by his light

All the rebellions of the night.

 

Then shall those powers which work for grief,

Enter Thy pay,

And day by day

Labour Thy praise and my relief:

With care and courage building me, Till I reach heav’n, and much more, Thee.

 

George Herbert: Affliction (IV) 1633

The Secret Sits

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost 1942

Miss Goldie - Pathways

Q: Have I got this quote of Margaret Goldie right?

“The work is about building pathways throughout the body so that in time something can pass through.”

A: As you know, Miss Goldie rarely used Alexander language in her teaching, as in her view from what she had witnessed over the years the words had become meaningless.

Instead of talking about directions and non-doing, she used language such as “brain-thought level”, “giving and withholding consent”, “you are not up yet”, “let all the good working go on in the back.”

Thus if she asked you to move your arm-hand onto the upper part of the leg, you withheld consent to do so. Then through watch-fullness and sensing through brain-thought level/body,  "Give consent and let it happen" (her words). Taking part of course in the movement, through this practice gradually "You are building pathways in the body along which in time something will travel." The pathways are of course not It; neither are they what we might call the directions. 

For myself as I have been guided deeper towards the Work, I have found that one comes to experience that the channels are already there, in the spine and along either side of the spine, conveying energy to the centers of the body particularly at the base of the spine, abdomen, solar plexus, heart area, throat, centre of the forehead, crown of the head. But this is profoundly subtle and not something one can 'do' without guidance.  

However, Miss Goldie's words on their own would probably have only confused me if I had not also the influences of good dance classes, Mr Macdoanld, Rose Li, Walter Carrington, properly guided meditations under worthy guides. But all these influences are wrought with pitfalls. It is best to be clear that the work practice is not the Work. I can only go on what has been said to me about the Work: "One becomes joined to it through grace." Intuitively I feel this is so.

Q: When you say " the pathways are of course not It; neither are they what we might call the directions," would it be fair to say that the directions are the means whereby we might recognise "the channels that are already there"? 

A: Yes, as long as the directions are correct in orientation and in their bearing. Mr Macdonald would sometimes call upon us to bear up. 

Q: I understand your statement “one comes to experience that the channels are already there” in relation to the exposure I’ve had to relatively many certified, practicing Alexander Technique teachers. Many that have worked on me seemed to be engaged in “releasing” tension without respect to the directions. This would often subjectively feel good (at least at the time; more recently, I do not experience it that way). Equally, I have experienced those who use force to pull the body in what they believe to be an upward direction. As Macdonald writes:

What is certain is that in civilized Man there is a growing tendency for force “A" to dominate force "B", and the results are (or should be) obvious to all. It is necessary, therefore, in order to bring the body back to a state of integrity, to minimize the effect of force "A" and restore that of force "B". This, though a fairly simple piece of re-education, is subtle and needs the help of a highly skilled teacher, otherwise the attempt to restore force "B" will almost certainly result in a strengthening of force "A".

For the most part, such people wind up simply “resculpting the body” as you have put it to me in the past.

My experience is that neither of these versions of “teaching”–i.e., a downward “releasing” of surface tension creating an inappropriate softness or a reshaping of the exterior of the body in a direction that appears to be more upright–consists in a usable, employable technique. Neither version gave me a way to inhibit and direct, and I believe that your statement “one comes to experience that the channels are already there” explains why.

If the directions are not, as you say, “correct in orientation and their bearing”, they are not directions at all in the parlance of the Alexander Technique. Without such directions, any attempt at inhibition will be relatively superficial. The few teachers who seemed to have received and are able to pass on “direction” (as I read Alexander) are marked by one feature: The direction I received from them is still accessible to me. So to follow on from your comment that “one comes to experience that the channels are already there”, it seems that those teachers who have shown me a “true direction” have simply awakened an existing channel that had gotten obscured rather than imposed an artificial idea of what is needed on the body.

A. With regards the concept of 'resculpting' the body one may find it of benefit to try and understand something of Wu Wei. 

The Sage is occupied with the unspoken

and acts without effort.

Teaching without verbosity,

producing without possessing,

creating without regard to result,

claiming nothing,

the Sage has nothing to lose.

- Tao Te Ching Chapter II

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