RARO: Nets & Cages
Living in this reality of spontaneous flow, the biggest sin I can commit is to become strongly attached to particular people, things, and places, and to become fixed in a particular view.
Being attached and being fixed are, in the end, just manifestations of end-gaining.
This has been the story of my life, especially since my world was shaken by a kiss one autumn evening 28 years ago, and even more so after I saw on a late spring day 25 years ago a small Japanese businessman walking towards me with seemingly random footsteps. Those events are in the long distant past, but the sin of attachment/fixity I commit here and now.
It is a glorious September morning here by the forest -- complete solitude except for twittering from the hedgerow and cooing from the forest.
HOZO ONOZUKARA HIRAKU
“The jewel-treasury opens by itself,” and jewels flow out, spontaneously.
That is the message not only of Master Dogen but also of the occasional falling leaf and the flowing stream.
And yet, while being here amidst this, I cannot truly compare myself this morning to a dragon that found water, or a tiger before its mountain stronghold.
We end-gain, it seems, on levels deeper than those of which we are aware.
In an Alexander lesson, we investigate the desire to gain clear and explicit ends. The primary goal of the teacher is, or at least should be, to teach the pupil how to work on him or her self, BY THE CONSCIOUS MEANS OF inhibition and direction. To this end, the pupil is guided to investigate the gaining and non-gaining of ends such as rising from a chair into standing, and extending one leg while lying on a table. The principle is understood that we only wish to gain these particular ends IN THE PROCESS of working against bad habits of using the self (i.e. stiffening the neck, pulling the head into the body, arching and narrowing the back, fixing the hips, et cetera).
In two or three weeks of solitary sitting-zen, long and deeply suppressed desires are liable to come up to the surface. The conscious means-whereby principle, as I understand it, is exactly the same, but the challenge is very much greater. One may sense a lack of ease, or lack of peace, in one’s sitting practice, and one may suspect that the cause is the desire to feel right in the gaining of some end, but the end in question is not ncessarily clear and explicit.
Marjory Barlow was not only an Alexander teacher to me, but also a friend in sitting-zen. In her book, “An Examined Life,” she writes as follows:
“You know the two lovely illlustrations FM gave of directing? he said, ‘It’s like laying down railways lines along which the train will eventually go.’ That’s one.
The other is that it’s as if you live in a forest and you always go from point A to point B, and gradually wear away a little grass path. One day you think there must be a better way so you start going around another way. In time you’ve got two pathways. Then you decide the new one is much, much better so the grass grows over the old one.
Isn’t that beautiful? I love the idea of the grass growing over the old pathways, because he talked about pathways the whole time, you’re making new pathways in the nervous system.
How did he know that? He knew that because he’d done it, that’s how. He knew it based on reality.
He said, ‘In time everything we do in this work will be proved to be right, but only in time, not yet. Every single thing we do here will be proved to be right.’
What a man though, to have that confidence. It was because it was all based on his own experience. Absolutely no equivocation.
All his family thought he’d gone mad, spending hour after hour in front of a mirror. They knew that actors do that anyway, but with his mother anything Freddy did was okay. I don’t think she ever understood about it, but he was her first born.
There’s something to being a first born, do you know that? All my best friends are first born... the one who’s pushed aside. That’s a very cruel lesson we had to learn, that we weren’t the only pebble on the beach, and never going to be again.
As I have written before, I had the sense that as soon as I walked into Marjory’s teaching room for lesson one, she had my number, right down to the deepest level of my being. She saw all my terrible end-gaining, all of it, but was not the slightest bit judgemental about it. Her only interest was to give me the means-whereby I might begin to liberate myself from it.
Being awake to the end-gaining tendency in herself, she was totally undisturbed by mine. What an example she set. What a true teacher she was. She did not affect a lovey-dovey earth mother kind of teaching style. It was not that one sensed from her the strong presence of something called love. It was rather that one didn’t sense any trace of blaming the pupil for his inept end-gaining and irrational fear of being wrong. There was no hint of bullying. Just very very clear understanding of the problem of end-gaining, right down to the deepest level of a person’s being -- right down, for example, to a first born’s desire to regain his infantile status of only pebble on the beach.
Being attached and being fixed are, in the end, just manifestations of end-gaining.
This has been the story of my life, especially since my world was shaken by a kiss one autumn evening 28 years ago, and even more so after I saw on a late spring day 25 years ago a small Japanese businessman walking towards me with seemingly random footsteps. Those events are in the long distant past, but the sin of attachment/fixity I commit here and now.
It is a glorious September morning here by the forest -- complete solitude except for twittering from the hedgerow and cooing from the forest.
HOZO ONOZUKARA HIRAKU
“The jewel-treasury opens by itself,” and jewels flow out, spontaneously.
That is the message not only of Master Dogen but also of the occasional falling leaf and the flowing stream.
And yet, while being here amidst this, I cannot truly compare myself this morning to a dragon that found water, or a tiger before its mountain stronghold.
We end-gain, it seems, on levels deeper than those of which we are aware.
In an Alexander lesson, we investigate the desire to gain clear and explicit ends. The primary goal of the teacher is, or at least should be, to teach the pupil how to work on him or her self, BY THE CONSCIOUS MEANS OF inhibition and direction. To this end, the pupil is guided to investigate the gaining and non-gaining of ends such as rising from a chair into standing, and extending one leg while lying on a table. The principle is understood that we only wish to gain these particular ends IN THE PROCESS of working against bad habits of using the self (i.e. stiffening the neck, pulling the head into the body, arching and narrowing the back, fixing the hips, et cetera).
In two or three weeks of solitary sitting-zen, long and deeply suppressed desires are liable to come up to the surface. The conscious means-whereby principle, as I understand it, is exactly the same, but the challenge is very much greater. One may sense a lack of ease, or lack of peace, in one’s sitting practice, and one may suspect that the cause is the desire to feel right in the gaining of some end, but the end in question is not ncessarily clear and explicit.
Marjory Barlow was not only an Alexander teacher to me, but also a friend in sitting-zen. In her book, “An Examined Life,” she writes as follows:
“You know the two lovely illlustrations FM gave of directing? he said, ‘It’s like laying down railways lines along which the train will eventually go.’ That’s one.
The other is that it’s as if you live in a forest and you always go from point A to point B, and gradually wear away a little grass path. One day you think there must be a better way so you start going around another way. In time you’ve got two pathways. Then you decide the new one is much, much better so the grass grows over the old one.
Isn’t that beautiful? I love the idea of the grass growing over the old pathways, because he talked about pathways the whole time, you’re making new pathways in the nervous system.
How did he know that? He knew that because he’d done it, that’s how. He knew it based on reality.
He said, ‘In time everything we do in this work will be proved to be right, but only in time, not yet. Every single thing we do here will be proved to be right.’
What a man though, to have that confidence. It was because it was all based on his own experience. Absolutely no equivocation.
All his family thought he’d gone mad, spending hour after hour in front of a mirror. They knew that actors do that anyway, but with his mother anything Freddy did was okay. I don’t think she ever understood about it, but he was her first born.
There’s something to being a first born, do you know that? All my best friends are first born... the one who’s pushed aside. That’s a very cruel lesson we had to learn, that we weren’t the only pebble on the beach, and never going to be again.
As I have written before, I had the sense that as soon as I walked into Marjory’s teaching room for lesson one, she had my number, right down to the deepest level of my being. She saw all my terrible end-gaining, all of it, but was not the slightest bit judgemental about it. Her only interest was to give me the means-whereby I might begin to liberate myself from it.
Being awake to the end-gaining tendency in herself, she was totally undisturbed by mine. What an example she set. What a true teacher she was. She did not affect a lovey-dovey earth mother kind of teaching style. It was not that one sensed from her the strong presence of something called love. It was rather that one didn’t sense any trace of blaming the pupil for his inept end-gaining and irrational fear of being wrong. There was no hint of bullying. Just very very clear understanding of the problem of end-gaining, right down to the deepest level of a person’s being -- right down, for example, to a first born’s desire to regain his infantile status of only pebble on the beach.
posted by Mike Cross at 8:43 AM
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