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Cartoon Wisdom
Something for Nothing
“We are what we do, not what we think we do.”
“The fact that you don’t act means you don’t have conviction.” – Richard Rose
I’ve found as I get older that some of the seekers I meet are getting long in the tooth too, and suffer from a lack of conviction (inability to act) brought on by a combination of age and success in life. They have time and money relative to their youth, but are reluctant to use them towards their spiritual path. Perhaps this is not done consciously, but could be that a life-time of work and struggle, not only in the outer world but also in the realm of personality, vanity and ego along with the effects of aging, have left them almost unable to act any other way. The strange thing about them is their ‘conviction’ of commitment to the spiritual path, and the simultaneous lack of ability to act in that direction.
The following is a list of characteristics peculiar to this type of fellow and some questions for him in the hope he will see, and resolve, his paradox:
You have heard that all is One and there’s nothing to be done, and have used this to cleverly rationalize your inability to act towards spiritual work.
You have heard that one must work on oneself even while going about daily activities, but have used this too as a rationalization to avoid actual involvement in spiritual work, especially with others.
You find the view pleasing from resting high on the shoulders of those seekers who have gone before. Why do you refuse to carry someone yourself, to continue the chain?
Your spiritual work consists mainly of reading and ruminating, along with some so-called self-observation while going about your business. Seldom does it involve actual work, even less work with others, and never work for the Work.
Your comfort zone has been made secure by years of effort. Do you think you will make the trip within to the Truth by this continued comfort, both mental/emotional and physical?
Any suggestion of change is met with cleverness, for you have become averse to anything that might rock the ego from its throne.
This vanity of being always right even extends to your ideas about the ego itself, as evidenced in your insistence that you will ‘destroy the ego’, thus entering further into dichotomy.
Most of this occurs because of a deep-seated vanity that you are special, and thus have no need to involve yourself with the struggles of the less fortunate.
When facing confrontation about your lack of action, you put on a polite yet knowing smile. Your sense of superiority carries over into spiritual work, and is defended by very subtle yet effective masks.
You gravitate towards those that flatter your vanity, and if the going gets tough, you get gone.
This vanity is your biggest block, and keeps you from your inner self, though you think just the opposite.
When your superior attitude is pointed out, it is rationalized by declaring that underneath you still suffer from a feeling of inferiority. While this may be true, it is seldom worked on, and never resolved.
If a meeting or retreat is attended, it’s usually only once, for if there is no immediate profit from it, you feel there is no reason to go again.
The idea of work being profitable only after years of constant effort has somehow slipped your mind. Possibly because your vanity says you have ‘been there, done that’, now it’s time to relax and reap the rewards. You have found in business how to work smarter rather than harder and this gives you an edge over the competition, but what is it you actually do with this newfound time?
You expect teachers and fellow students to cater to your schedule and seem to have no sense of how much actual work and effort they have sent your way.
Do you have an understanding that they are actually working, in actions as well as words, to get you to do the same?
Do you think you could reverse the habit of feeling you deserve something for nothing, and start paying, with your actions, for what you take from teachers and fellow seekers?
Something for nothing is a valid method of work, but only if it involves between-ness. You trade your ‘something’, the vanity of the ego and its suffering, for the inner self, which knows its own nothing-ness.
Bob Fergeson
Listen Attention Audio
Audio of The Listening Attention
Several chapters of my book, The Listening Attention, are now available in audio on YouTube, check them out here!
The Listening Attention Playlist- YouTube
Bob Fergeson Interview
Bob Fergeson, author of The Listening Attention and Dark Zen: A Guru on the Bayou, is a spiritual teacher who focuses on the nuts and bolts of spiritual seeking while also conveying with his presence the ineffable message of Reality. Hopefully this Bob Fergeson interview offers a taste of both.
In this episode with Bob Fergeson, we discuss the emotional traumas and “knots” which can block one’s ability to access the Listening Attention. Bob offers tips and techniques for releasing these knots and freeing this blocked energy.
http://www.spiritualteachers.org/po…/bob-fergeson-interview/
What Does It Mean To Be Awake?
What Does It Mean To Be Awake?
Paul Rezendes and George Leoniak ask the questions: what does it mean to be Awake, or is Enlightenment real?
Author and photographer Paul Rezendes joins tracker George Leoniak in an impromptu discussion of what it means to be awake. Paul clears up misconceptions around the terms ‘awake’ and enlightenment’ and how they may not be what we think.
The first half is video of the two in discussion, while the second half features Paul’s landscape photos with the audio. Click the title link below for the vid on Vimeo:
What Does It Mean To Be Awake
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For an introduction to Paul’s work, check out this interview by Shawn Nevins of Poetry in Motion:
Paul Rezendes Interview 
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For another video series of Paul and George talking about their experiences in an outdoor environment: check out their Mindful trackers series:
Mindful Trackers 
Pauls’ website with his books and photographs is:
www.paulrezendes.com/
photos by Paul Rezendes
The Dangers of Culture
by Franz Hartmann
“There are thousands of people who work hard all their lives, without accomplishing anything which is really useful or enduring. There are thousands who labour intellectually or mechanically to perform work which had better be left undone. There are vastly more people engaged in undermining and destroying the health of man than in curing his ills, more engaged in teaching error than in teaching the truth, more trying to find that which is worthless than that which is of value; they live in dreams and their dreams will vanish; they run after money, and the money will remain while they themselves perish and die.
The obstacles which arise from the external world are intimately 
connected with those from the inner world, and cannot be separated; because external temptations create inward desires, and inward desires call for external means for gratification. There are many people who do not crave for the illusions of life, but who have not the strength to resist them; they have a desire to develop spiritually and to gain immortality, but employ all of their time and energy for the attainment of worthless things, instead of using it to dive down into the depths of the soul to search for the priceless pearl of wisdom. Thousands of people have not the moral courage to break loose from social customs, ridiculous habits, and foolish usages, which they inwardly abhor, but to which they nevertheless submit because they are customs and habits to act against which is considered to be a social crime.”
— With the Adepts, An Adventure Among the Rosicrucian, by Franz Hartmann (1910)
Becoming
When you go into openness, the listening attention, you have become something good. You are something good rather than trying to feel good. You also have become in terms of: you don’t need to learn, you don’t need to think, you don’t need to analyze, compare, use concepts. You’re out of the thinking mind. You are, you’re awareness, the listening attention. In that state all the thinking, comparing, etc., are seen as lower states of the body mind. They have their functions, but they cannot tell you what you are; the lower cannot create the higher.
This is how you describe becoming rather than learning. You go from experiencing and thinking to just existing, to being. This doesn’t happen by constantly trying to get thoughts in the right order, get the thinking right then you can become, it’s more like you have to get sick of the thinking and clearly see that’s it’s a dead end and drop it. There’s no thinking that has to happen per se, it’s only the realization of what thinking is, and how it doesn’t ever lead anywhere in terms of becoming.
The Mindful Trackers
Who are we, really?
“Track the most cunning animal of all… the self, and come face to face with who it really is.”
Photographer and writer Paul Rezendes has an unusual take on realization, formed in part from his years of experience in the outdoors as a wildlife tracker and teacher. Join him and fellow tracker George Leoniak as they take us on the journey of self-inquiry, into the wilds of our inner world to find the ‘self’.
“This is spot on and different enough in flavour, it should be shared”- TH
The complete video series on inner tracking, featuring Paul Rezendes and George Leoniak, is available for viewing here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX-EJS3PQTD_dWyytfKEZUF8E14k3C7f-
The preface from his book, The Wild Within, gives a brilliant example of Paul’s realization: “realization is living, being energy that is aware or awake to what is, or to what is arriving in the moment. An awareness that is at rest and has no intention for anything to be other than what it is.”
View the complete preface here: http://mysticmissal.org/blog/?p=1002
Double Head-Head
I once had a dream of having another head on top of the original, like an appendage emanating from the present noggin. In the dream I was told that I was using spiritual work to build this second head, the ‘double head-head’. Instead of using self-observation to see my present personality pattern, the pattern of experience built up through my present life forming what I called my ‘self’, I was engaging in a strange fantasy. I was manufacturing a second head, which I then ‘worked on’, rather than observing the original. This kept me safe. I didn’t have to actually face anything unpleasant about myself, for everything in this second head was created with the express purpose of keeping the ego intact and unassailed. This new head was all I really knew, it was ‘me’.
I could keep being ‘myself’ while thinking I was engaged in serious spiritual work. I could ‘see’ things about myself freely, for they would be recommended and okayed by the ego. The realization struck me that I had been doing this for decades, living in a false self-created ‘self’ that kept me a stranger to the relatively real me. I was a mystery to me, but not, apparently, to everyone.
After the shock of the dream, I began to look more closely at myself, hoping to catch glimpses of the double head-head, and how it worked. Listening to others when they offered advice or criticism began to hold value too. Group work suddenly held a new purpose. How did this work? Could I see it in others as well? How could one be so naïve?
Later, I came to understand what Alfred Pulyan had called the Ego1-Ego2 game, the ego splitting itself in two, and calling the separated part ‘ego’, thus keeping itself safe from scrutiny. And also Carl Jung’s work on the ‘shadow’, that hitherto mysterious dark side of which I was sure I was immune.
Working in an illusion serves the ego’s prime directive: survival. It feels threatened with annihilation when things such as self-observation and looking at one self directly are entertained. In order to survive, it creates an ‘ego2’, a second head, on top of itself.
This process has been going on all of our life. Many of our phobias, inferiorities, and grandiose imaginings about ourselves are only in this second head. Once we cut it off through self-inquiry, a form of productive thinking, we are free, free to begin the real work of facing the original head.
To give an example, we may feel we have something wrong with us, stemming from the negative criticism of a parent figure when we were too small to understand or protect ourselves. This may have given us a feeling of inferiority, for God as the parent has told us we are lacking. Later in life this feeling of something being wrong is what is answered to. We may be engaged in spiritual work to compensate for this: to fix our inferiority complex. In actuality, we are working on a fantasy, an incorrect idea of ourselves injected into us from outside. We may never have even begun to act on our innate positive potentials due to being sidetracked: trying to fix a false problem. Have we ever tried to find what we are, inside, without relying on what we have been told? Has this outside information kept us down, or inflated us with a grandiose expectation of things?
Living in our imagination will not set us free, for what we seek freedom from is our own false conception of ourselves. Take courage and patience, learn to look for the facts of your life, not the fantasy of the double head-head.
–Bob Fergeson
Here’s the Double Head-Head video: