“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)
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.
To enhance our probability of real spiritual growth, we need to get all the centers in our body/machine, the instinctive and moving mind, the emotional center, and the intellectual mind, all lit up and in working order. This brings us to maturity, or what’s known as good householder, so that we can stop living in the imagination and instead start dealing with what’s real. It’s easy in this day and age to get stuck in the teenager ego and refuse to accept responsibility or acknowledge the part of work in accomplishment. It’s necessary to learn to be capable of dealing with life head on, before we start thinking too much about enlightenment and a life with no resistance.
magical ship
Richard Rose taught that we need to let go of the egos in the right order or else we risk becoming a functional idiot, useless in life, and to other people. If we remain immature too long, we risk having our minds become crystallized, fixed in an unreal belief system. It’s very painful to have to then break them up and start over to regain some resilience, a functional mind in good working order. It’s better to go through the pain of growing up and becoming an adult as an integral part of our spiritual path, rather than living in fantasy, waiting for our mythical spiritual ship to come in.
It’s the one thing that we can work on regardless; we can work on growing up into a mature man or woman, and therefore get used to the idea, in a practical manner, of what working on ourselves in a spiritual sense really entails.
This process of beginning work at our current level also takes us farther within, because we back out of the body, the hormones, and teenager dreams; and become older. Rose also said that he was trying to age a few young people. We can try and age ourselves; become wiser, more capable, more mature.
magical lights
While we can’t force ourselves to surrender, or to be enlightened, we can work in terms of becoming more mature: at having a better mind, a wiser emotional center, and certainly we can get in shape physically. These are tasks which will develop a pattern of heading in the right direction, of not being afraid to work, of knowing what that really means rather than living in our head, imagining lights and magical powers and how everything will be handed to us because we’re special. This way, the way of the good householder, we’ve got something we can actually do; we can work on ourselves, every day.
We post the latest quote by Adya or Ramana, proud of our apparent spirituality. We agree with the wise men’s words when they tell us all the wonderful things we seemingly see in ourselves. For we have had our hard knocks; now we know and agree with the wise men. We’ve become humble, experienced, and oh so clever.
contradictions
We agree with other people’s memes, the beautiful photos, wonderful quotes, yet strangely enough, never see our own contradictions. We fail to see how we act against our own best interests. How we never really work for the spirit, but stay in a perpetual dance of supporting and glorifying the all mighty ‘ME’. That feeling of uniqueness, our specialness; that which keeps us different and separate from others. Though when the need arises, we agree with them, and hope they agree with us. We may by turns argue with them, even yell and scream, stomp our big feet, but this is all just to maintain that separateness, that uniqueness. To help them as they help us; by loving or hating each other in turn. We can’t see how we never really change. We simply spin in the same old pattern of routine, base desires and needs, and never move towards anything higher. That would require that we go against that separateness, that specialness. But no, we continue our lazy dance, bumping into the furniture, oblivious, only hearing the music of our own special song.
end of fun machine
Sooner or later the fun machine will wear out and die. Then we’ll have to get a new one; the party will continue. The dance can go on, seemingly forever, with maybe some new awkward steps thrown in here and there. But never with the realization that we contradict ourselves with every move. That the one thing we need to get to the bottom of all this madness, is to go against that specialness, that uniqueness, and instead find the similarities between us, the common ground that lies ever within, covered by the noise and distraction of our song. To go against ourselves; not in agreement, but in wisdom. To go against the feeling of ‘me’. Not in contradiction, but as a quietness, an acceptance. To move into the silence where we find we’re all the same. And that the uniqueness, rather than being the thing that helps us, has actually been our greatest enemy.
“When the thought and the mind goes away, all you are left with is the real part of yourself…. In the quiet, there is a sense of eternality and unconditional love.”
~ Bob Fergeson
The sense of eternality marks the work of photographer, mountaineer, and spiritual teacher Bob Fergeson. Set among the Rocky Mountains, Bob’s story weaves the passions of the creative life and a love for the outdoors into a compelling narrative of a spiritual search. From his childhood attempts to capture moments of ethereal, quiet beauty with a Brownie box camera, Bob’s life careened towards a crushing encounter with alcoholism, then flowered in a time of self exploration through painting, drawing, and dreamwork, led to years of spiritual disciplines, and culminated in a final encounter with Truth that left him weeping on a Colorado mountainside.
Whether you frame your quest as a search for God, truth, enlightenment, awakening, certainty, or an aching longing to fill a void inside, you will find this feature-length documentary is more than just a film, it is a resource that you will mine for inspiration and advice again and again.
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If you want High Definition, the digital version is for you. It’s also great for avoiding postage costs.
Being asked to write a Seeker’s Story by Tess, poses an interesting challenge for me. Although, for a long time, people have told me that I should write, for as long, I have found this peculiarly difficult. Even determined attempts to do so would wilt under an enervating sense that it just didn’t feel right to do so. This would grow into a kind of revulsion if I tried to write about myself, particularly if the slant was in some way spiritual.
Recently I read Black Elk Speaks, the dictated autobiography of the Ogala Sioux medicine man.
I found myself nodding in agreement whilst reading his opening words: ‘For what is one man that he should make much of his winters even though they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hills.’
Despite fighting against the army and cavalry to save his people and homeland, he witnessed their massacre and loss. He travelled abroad with a wild west show and lived on to old age to finally share his story with the poet Reinhardt, but he would still claim that ‘this is not the story of a great hunter, or of a great warrior, or of a great traveller.’
Autumn Leaves
He explained that although the incredible adventures of his life, ‘may come to seem to be the very tale itself,’ in truth, ‘it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered, and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.’
In his final words, Black Elk called out to the Great Spirit, in the frail voice of his age and dereliction, ‘ With tears running, O Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather- with running tears now, I must say the tree has never bloomed. A pitiful man you see me here and I have fallen away and done nothing. Here, at the centre of the world where you took me when I was young and taught me. Here, old I stand and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather.’ When I read these words, I want to stop writing my own because what offerings are they in comparison? And who am I to do so?
But it is the words that follow that give me pause for thought, ‘ It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then.’ Aye, Black Elk, my silence is not worthy of you, and if you can raise your frail voice to the Great Spirit, I’ll raise mine for you and for the nourishment you so desired.
And so it comes to be, that after all this time, I am asked to write three times in one day and it seems to me that the universe is telling me to do so as if shouting in my ear to be heard through the cankered wax and deafness of my disbelief. And though I am not on a mountain, nor a medicine man, but sitting in a chair in my living room, still full of misgiving, I ask you Great Spirit to help me.
As I was walking home this evening from work, through the cold and dark of an early winter’s evening, a man crossed the road in front of me and with swift, aggressive purpose smashed the ground floor windows of a house with a hammer. The violence was stunning in the sleepy fishing village where I live and I was the only person on the road. After phoning the police, the man disappeared as quickly as he had come, I wondered that if the hexagram patterns of life are an I Ching of meaning, what would this mean for me? I wondered too about the dream I had last night in which I ran desperately through the streets and markets of an Asian city knowing that I was going to miss my flight. I wondered too about my father dying hopelessly and slowly from cancer bereft, it seems, of even the smallest root of the sacred tree in the wasteland of his despair.
Is it presumptuous of me to conclude that this is the tableau of a warning that I would be foolish to ignore, as I have ignored gentle advice and encouragement for many years, and that the truth will out, if not with shouts, then with the swift aggressive purpose of Job’s devastation?
The night before Halloween, I lay awake, death-suited, thinking of my father, worried that the physical pain that had begun to afflict me was, in some way, my body’s reaction to the contamination of his fear in a sympathy of cancer. Eventually I slept, to be woken at 6.00am by my two young sons of six and three dressed in their halloween costumes, standing by my bed. Torin, the eldest, was dressed as a skeleton, and Lachlan as a wizard with a pointy hat and long white beard.
‘Daddy,’ said Torin, ‘ I have to tell you my dream.’
‘What was that?’ I replied, bemused by their costumes and seriousness.
‘ I dreamt I was walking through a graveyard, Daddy, and I was scattering seeds amongst the gravestones. As I looked down, I could see that trees were growing up beneath the gravestones and pushing them aside, and as I looked around, I could see huge trees growing everywhere where there were gravestones, and I danced for joy, Daddy, because I had done such a good job.’
Aye, Black Elk, a small root flourished in my boy that night, and through him, it nourished me. And I heed your warning Dad, Great Spirit, Grandfather to my boys – the Buddhists always say that the blessing of angels can come in terrible forms – and I honour your devastation, your dark night as holy ground, and it is for you that I offer these pages, these sacred leaves from our branch, so that your pain may prove fertile ground for the nourishment of the tree where birds are singing and flowers grow.
I passed through a deep crevice at twilight,
And I saw a narrow vista of trees,
Crevice in the Rocks
Magical in the mists-
Vocal to the hush of meaning,
Whispering to the wisdom of shades,–
Of degrees,–
Before the backdrop of eternity. . . .
And I had a friend. . .
Whose dust with mine was not the bond,
Whose love with mine was not the bond,
Whose teaching with me was not the bond,
Both of us had been to this same place,
To the twilight in the narrow crevice,
And because of this place, we are eternal.
Zen Camp: Campsite talks from Bob Fergeson on such topics as spiritual retreats, beauty, and nostalgia, a playlist from the Nostalgiawest Video Channel
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.”
