“… And the root of every human being is evil, bad, and sinful! Only through the grace of our lord Jesus Christ may we be saved!”

I usually walk past these open space preachers with a wry smile on my face, but for some reason the particular words I happened upon struck a nerve. Not that any of the nice young folks perched on the square’s main ghats were paying him any attention, positioned in their focal point as he was – but immediately Osho’s stinging remarks about the powerful institutions of this world doing their best to keep people weak and fearful came to mind. How, instead of loving ourselves, we are taught to loathe ourselves. I started getting angry.

I started directly towards him, crash course. Swerving at the last minute, I stood behind him, and held rabbit ears over his head, which curiously was decorated with a black skullcap. As more drivel spewed from his mouth, the rabbit hopped happily, twitched its ears, and roamed from head to shoulder and back again.

He shortly became aware of my presence, and turned around. “And are you saved?” he asked.

He was a young man, no older than twenty five. Considerably overweight and with slightly pinched eyes, his face seemingly carried the traces of baby fat. His voice was a bit shrill for someone his size.

“Yes, I am.” I said, beaming at him.

He hesitated. “And how do you know you are saved?”

“Well, what did you mean when you asked me?” I asked.

“Have you been born again in the realization that Jesus Christ is the one and only true savior?”

“Why is that the definition of being saved?” I asked.

“Because it is said so in the book of God,” he replied. It seemed like he was speaking to someone over my shoulder.

“Oh,” I said, “So you read that somewhere. But you didn’t have the feeling or experience of being saved.”

“No no, it’s not about a feeling!” He said. His eyes narrowed a bit as a ray of recognition entered his thoughts. “And are you a follower of the devil child of Satan, Buddha?” he asked.

“What do you know about Buddha?” I asked.

Maybe it was a breakfast which consisted solely of two handfuls of soaked almonds; maybe it was the heat of the day, harbinger of coming summer days; maybe it was bearing the weight of the djembe over my shoulder throughout my morning walk, a little unfamiliar in the past couple of weeks. Maybe it was a manifestation of outrage – but if so my mind was still feeling cool, or playful in the midst of fire. My body started to shake. My arms and abdomen trembled, my legs began to quake uncontrollably. I stood there, trying to absorb the experience, feeling the silent scream of Nakata, about to rain down fish on his foes.

“Ah Buddha, born Siddhartha, son of a prince, who went on to sow deception and lies!” he said proudly.

“Did someone tell you that? You sound like you are reading from a manuscript,” I said.

“You too must be deluded.”

“What does it mean to be deluded?”

“Not to recognize Jesus Christ as the only path for the redemption of our evil, cursed souls. Do you recognize this?” he challenged.

“No, I don’t.”

“Then you are deluded,” he replied matter-of-factly. “For Jesus himself said, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me.’” To his credit, he did not seem to harbor ill intent – just a very thin lacquer of self-assuredness. (Underneath which …)

“Didn’t Jesus also say that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’? Are you meek?” I asked, and an image of a field of yellow lilies swaying in the breeze washed over me.

“Yes, I am,” he said.

“Are you sure? You are saying of yourself that you are meek? Are you the meekest, the most humble?” I asked.

“Well …”

But I cut him off before he could continue. “How can you be humble when you are standing here casting judgment on all of these people? Saying that you are right and they are wrong, that you are saved, and they are condemned?”

He paused. Then he said, “Open your heart to Jesus, or else you will burn in hell.” With that, he turned back around toward the audience … how many people were listening, and of those, with anything but amusement?

I stayed put. The rabbit ears sprung up again, and after prancing around for a while, transformed into thumbs up / thumbs down, a squawking pacman, earplugs, and other fantastic visions. Suddenly, a different idea occurred to me.

I unzipped my bag and lifted out the djembe. Pinning it between my legs, and still hardly a foot from the man, I started thumping out a rhythm, as loudly as I could. DHOOM! Taka – ka taka DHOOM! Taka – ka taka DHOOM! High pitched as it was, his voice was mostly drowned out.

It must have been a strange sight. I imagine people may have been confused – was I supposed to be complementing his sermon, or sabotaging it? And why was he, perhaps unconsciously, starting to move his legs to and fro as he was talking? As if the drum was evoking something even more essential within himself than the empty words coming out of him, in turn simply the reflection of the thin porridge that had been poured into him for years. He was dancing! I wanted to shout, “Dance! Dance!!!”

Another tactic occurred to me, to weave in the power of silence. I stopped my drumming.

“In Hinduism …” he started.

I beat the djembe with a furious fanfare, completely cutting off his words.

He paused, and I stopped.

“In Hinduism …” he started again.

Again, I beat the living daylights out of the drum. He stopped; I stopped.

“In Hinduism …”

TAKA TAKA TAKA TAKA!!! TAKA TAKA TAKA TAKA!!!

“In Hinduism …” he tried for the fourth time.

TAKATA TAKATA TAKATA TAKATA!!!!!! TAKATA TAKATA TAKATA TAKATA!!!!!!

He turned partway around to address me, while allowing others to overhear. “And you will burn in hell for a very, very long time.”

I returned his look silently, with a devilish grin that I am pretty sure communicated, “Looking forward to it!”

* * *

Later, I am sitting on the Path train next to a woman with a baby. She sees the djembe, and asks me if I play it, and where I got it from, how much it cost. It turns out she is from Guinea. She tells me about the wedding ceremonies there, where everyone drums and dances all night.

I touch the baby girl’s small hand. She is a little surprised, and looks at me. It is so small, so soft, so relaxed.

I think about those first words I heard the young man utter. They sound so laughable. Yes, there is war, crime, exploitation, suffering in this world. But there is also love, kindness, generosity, and ecstasy! I want to show him this little girl, and ask, “Where is the evil? Where is is the sin? You just show it to me, now.”

In the small plaza at the center of Vilcabamba, a group of young twenty-something men sit in benches and squat on the cement. There’s nothing much to do on a Tuesday afternoon. One waves me over intently.

“Jackie Chan? Do you know kung fu?” he quizzes me in garrulous Spanish. He is certainly the most bold of the group.

The men are really boys with a dose of machismo – as we chat, I am reminded of my students in Hunan – behind that facade of manliness, exists sort of timid openness, that could easily hook onto something or someone with a strong sense of direction. Despite a slurred manner that suggests they’ve all been drinking, they pay rapt attention to me, giggling frequently.

Jose is from Columbia. He’s in Vilcabamba working as an errand boy for various tourism needs.

A group of young girls walk by across the street, eating ice cream. Some wear halter tops, as seems typical for this area. At any rate, the plaza is the one place in Vilcabamba to be seen, for locals. The boys start hooting and making catcalls – I am amused at how excited they actually get. The girls, in turn, completely ignore them.

Jose turns to me and asks, “You like? Very nice, right?”

“They’re very young!” I exclaim.

“Hey! No problem!” he assures. “Yeah, you don’t drink, you don’t smoke – do you … ?” he makes an “O” with one hand and sticks an index finger through. The others twitter half-sheepishly.

I’m not sure how to respond, and certainly not in Spanish!

For some reason, they all want to keep talking to me. Jose, in particular, doesn’t want to let me go. Finally, after we have a few more laughs, he tells me not to forget him.

“No me olvidas!”

A few days later ….

We are walking uphill, with some difficulty, on a street going towards the Condor reserve outside of Otavalo. We pass dogs lazing around, children squatting in groups whispering to each other, and a passerby here and there taking an interest in the two tourists who have decided to come this way on foot.

Seeing us pass by, one man calls out, “Extranjeros!” He ambles towards us directly.

He looks like he might have been drinking, but then again maybe not – it’s hard to say for sure. He asks some basic questions, speaking and responding very slowly, but his eyes seem clear. He carries sadness with him, however.

He finds out we are Chinese, and has Mom write down his name – Francisco – in Hanzi. “You are welcome to come to my house,” he says. He asks what I do in the states. I tell him I’m an engineer.

“I’m an engineer too,” he says. “Of bread. I work in a panaderia in town.”

Without warning, he tells me that his girlfriend has just passed away. Tears well up immediately in his eyes, and I feel like he is in great need of consolation. “I’m really sorry,” I say, but in Spanish it comes out sounding flat, emotionless – I myself am shocked by the way it sounds. I translate the story to Mom, and she sighs and offers a sympathetic look. I still feel helpless.

Francisco collects himself somewhat, and slowly the conversation moves onto another topic. Again, he says, “You are welcome to my house!”

“Your house? Thank you,” I say, a bit uncertainly. For some reason, an image of Kasimjahn flashes through my head.

“My house is Ecuador,” he continues, not to answer any question my response had contained. “You are welcome to my house. But we are brothers and sisters around the world, am I right? Brothers and sisters everywhere. Don’t forget me.”

I take this as a cue to end the conversation. “Adios!” I say.

“No!” he replies abruptly. “Never ‘adios’. That’s when you part forever. Just ‘hasta luego’. We will meet again.”

“Hasta luego,” I repeat. With this he seems satisfied, and with a sad smile, starts moving away down the hill.

The anode-beginning, or force-plus, or masculine element, was always the intention from which meaning derives. The cathode-beginning, or force-minus, was language. Language for Gurdjieff, was passive, the feminine element in discourse. Speech, or the medium of communication, was the reconciling principle or neutralizing force. This is one reason why it is important to hear Gurdijieff’s writings read aloud and it probably explains why Ouspensky said that he was a magnificent lecturer but a poor writer. Speech reconciles the poverty of our language with the exuberance of our intention.

J. G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, 279

Suggestibility, creation, automatism, inertia, essences over personality, domination of feelings over mind, Lesser and Greater Freedoms, intentional suffering, Reciprocal Maintenance. Gurdjieff as Sufi. The ideas take shape, but in order to take root and thus preserve shape the soil of my being must be more fertile, tilled, watered, bathed in sun. How to prepare the way?

His aim was not to initiate an action, but to study people of many types in order to find a way to help them to liberate themselves from the universal disease of suggestibility, which makes them ‘believe any old tale’.

119

The basis of marketing, the hidden mechanism (defect?) at work when I am put in the conflicted situation of feeling bad, and not knowing why. It has been suggested, and I was susceptible to it. How much of my beliefs are founded on suggestion? Believe nothing you do not come to know directly.

Yoshi, it seems the search for a doctrine of universal morality is doomed to fail. Better to work for individual morality first, something which already seems quite unachievable. Maybe through the study of people.

“First you must understand the situation as it exists now. What you call ‘will’ in yourself is only from personality. It has no connection with real will. Something touches personality, and it says ‘I want’ or ‘I do not want’, ‘I like’ or ‘I do not like’, and thinks it is will. It is nothing. It is passive. Will can be only in essence. Such as you are now, your essence has no will, only automatic impulses. The desires of essence are your own desires, but they are not conscious, they are not will. They arise automatically in you because you are like that.

“Essence and personality are even in different parts of the brain. Nearly everything that belongs to personality is in the formatory apparatus. Essence cannot use all this material, so it has no critical mind. It is trustful, but because it does not know, it is apprehensive. You cannot influence essence by logical argument or convince it. Until essence begins to experience for itself, it remains as it always was. Sometimes situations arise where personality cannot react, and essence has to react. Then it is seen how much there is in essence. Perhaps it is only a child, and does not know how to behave. It is no use telling it to behave differently, because it will not understand your language. Personality can easily be influenced, especially in modern man. Personality gives itself up to every suggestion, however absurd. Maybe sometimes the mind knows better, but then essence is timid. The mind may know that it ought to love all, but essence cannot. So it remains only words.

“With most people, essence continues to receive impressions only until it is five or six years old. As long as it receives impressions it grows, but afterwards all impressions are taken by personality and essence stops growing. Sometimes if education is not too unfavourable, the essence may continue to grow, and a more or less normal human being can result. But normal human beings are the exception. Nearly everyone has only the essence of a child. It is not natural that in a grown-up man the essence should be a child. Because of this, he remains timid underneath and full of apprehensions. This is because he knows that he is not what he pretends to be, but he cannot understand why.

“You cannot tell how essence can be changed and take a normal part in your life until you have more knowledge. For this, you need a new ‘language’. At present, I could not tell you even if I wanted to. By self-observation, you will come to know what has to be changed and why; but, even if you know what has to be changed, you cannot find out how to work for yourself. Because essence is unique, each one needs an individual programme. But to establish an individual programme a long study is needed, not only by oneself, but also by others. This is how it is arranged for people in the Institute. When they come, they begin to study themselves, and others study them also. After a long time, it is possible to arrange for each one his own corresponding programme of work.”

134-5, notes from one of Gurdjieff’s lectures

“The mind is capable of functioning independently but unfortunately it also has the capacity of being identified with the moods and feelings, of becoming a mere reflection of the feelings. In the majority of those present, their mind does not even try to be independent, but is always merely a slave of their moods.”

143

Of course, the mind does not realize when it is being a slave to moods and feelings. It is always convinced of its rationality. I think what Gurdjieff tries to bring across is something much deeper than confirmation bias.

“Who can love like a Christian? It follows that to be a Christian is almost impossible. Christianity includes many things; we have taken only one of them, to serve as an example. Can you love or hate someone to order?

“Yet Christianity says precisely this – to love all men, to bless those that hate you. But this is impossible. At the same time it is quite true that it is necessary to love. Unfortunately, with time, modern Christians have adopted only the second half of the teaching and lost the first – which should have preceded it. First one must be able to love, then only can one love. But how can one be able? It is the knowledge of this that is lost.

…

“Let everyone ask himself, simply and openly, whether he can love all men? If he has had a cup of coffee, he loves; it not, he does not love. How can that be called Christianity?”

144

“Freedom leads to Freedom. Those are the first words of Truth. You do not know what is truth because you do not know what freedom is. All the truth that you know today is only ‘truth’ in quotation marks. There is another truth, but it is not theoretical: it cannot be expressed in words. Only those who have realized it in themselves can understand that truth.

“Now I will give you a detailed explanation of those words I have spoken. It rests on the following basis. The freedom I speak about is the freedom that is the goal of all schools, of all religions, of all times. And, in truth, I tell you that this freedom can be a very great one. Everyone wishes for that freedom and ever strives for it: but it can never be attained without the first kind of freedom that I will call the Lesser Freedom. The Greater Freedom is the liberation of ourselves from all influences acting outside ourselves. The Lesser Freedom is the liberation of ourselves from all influences acting within ourselves. For a start – for you who are beginners – the Lesser Freedom is a very big one indeed, as it is not subject to your dependence upon outside influences.

“You have to understand that so long as you are the slave of inside influences you cannot come under the action of outside influences. This is perhaps even a good thing, so long as you have no inner freedom. You must understand that the man who is freed from inside influences begins to fall under the play of outside influences.

“Inner influences, that produce in you inner slavery, come from many independent sources. That is to say, there is a great heap of independent factors that cause a man to be inwardly a slave. These influences are different for different people. In one case one influence is strongest, and in another case another. But in every one without exception there are so many factors of slavery that, if you had to struggle with each one separately, and free yourselves from them one by one, you would need such a long time that half a lifetime would not be enough.

“Therefore we must find such a means or method of working as will enable us to destroy simultaneously as many as possible of the enemies within us from which flow these influences that produce slavery.

“As I have said, there are very many independent enemies: but two of the chiefest are Vanity and Self-Love. In one doctrine, these are even called the chief ambassadors of the Devil. It may be added, by the way, that for some reason they are called Madame Vanity and Monsieur Self-Love. I have quoted merely two of these inner enemies as characteristic, because it would lead too far to mention them all now.

“We have also many slaves within us – each of these slaves wishes to be free, but it is difficult for each slave to work directly and straightforwardly. It is especially difficult for our slaves to content with these enemies, because none of our slaves has enough time. At one moment one slave is present: at another moment it is another slave, and to contend with these enemies requires a great deal of time. In the upshot, it has to be done indirectly in order that we can get rid of several of the enemies simultaneously.

“For this we have to understand how these enemies work and from where they get their power. You must know that these representatives of the devil stand all the time on our threshold and deny entry to all outside influences – both good and bad. Accordingly they have both good and bad sides. If anyone wishes to limit the entry of outside influences, it is well for him that these sentinels exist. But if, for some reason or other, anyone wishes that every kind of influence should enter him, then he must free himself from these two sentinels. Only it is necessary to understand once and for all that it is impossible to select the influence one wishes. For example, it is impossible to select only good influences. The sentinels are only undesirable for those whose real aim is freedom. Those who have this aim must strive by every means in their power to liberate themselves first of all from these two enemies – vanity and self-love.

“To do this there are a heap of methods and many different means. But I, Gurdjieff, would personally advise you to get rid of them, without subtilizing, by merely reasoning simply and actively with oneself.

“This is possible by active mentation: and I must warn you that, if you fail or find it impossible by this means, then some other means must be found, because there is no hope of going further until some of these enemies have been eradicated.

“For instance, self-love or false pride takes up half of our time and half of our life. If anyone or anything outside us should hurt our pride, we are injured, not only for the time being, but for a long time afterwards. And that wounded feeling, acting by inertia, closes the portal and so shuts out all life.

“I live! Life is outside. I am life so long as I am connected with the outside. If life only exists inside me, this is no life at all. When I ‘behold myself’ I find that I am linked up with the outside world. Everything lives after this wise and cannot exist without this linkage.

“One experience fades away and hardly has time to do so when another takes its place. Our machine is so built that it has not various places in it in which different experiences can subsist at one and the same time. In us, there is one place where experiences can be, and if that place is occupied by experiences of one kind that are undesirable, there can be no question of its being occupied by experiences of another kind that may be desirable. You have to grasp and realize as a fact that your experiences cannot lead to any kind of achievement unless you have lived through them. You must have experiences – even more perhaps than you can possibly imagine, both pleasant and unpleasant – but you must not let them make slaves of you. On the contrary you must use them in order to prepare a place in which you can be free.

…

“If you wish for Freedom – even the Lesser Freedom – you must be ready to pay a big price.

“Sometimes people complain to me that they cannot do the tasks I give to them. What do they expect? It is enough if you see the possibility of doing them – the rest depends upon the strength of your own wish to be free. At present you cannot do, because you are not free.

“You must understand that you cannot begin with freedom – freedom is the goal, the aim. People say that God created man free. That is a great misunderstanding. Freedom cannot be given to anyone – even by our all-loving Creator Himself. God has given to man the biggest thing he can – that is the possibility to become free. The desire for freedom exists in every man worthy of the name – but people are stupid and they think they can have outward freedom without inner freedom. All our evil comes from this stupidity. Unless we desire, first of all, to be free from our own inner enemies, we shall only go from bad to worse.

“Therefore everyone must examine himself and try to find in himself a sincere wish to be free from the forces of vanity and self love acting in him. That inner slavery is the worst degradation for man, it is the Hell in which man allows himself to exist. The sincere wish to be free from that degradation is the beginning of real pride.”

148-52

I am stupid when I think the Greater Freedom is achievable despite never having achieved the Lesser Freedom. The fake-it-till-make-it approach is possible only if we understand the order in which barriers for freedom may be conquered. Meditation. Or else the illusion of being free.

Experience can enslave us, because the means of our slavery already exists within us, unvanquished. Every experience that we do not “live through”, what I interpret as Osho’s sense of remembering factually without retaining a hidden psychological memory, will only serve to bind us tighter to our inner enemies.

Failure is never absolute. Only listening to others and our inner enemies makes it seem so.

The Sufi Stop Exercise:

“In this exercise, the pupil must at the word ‘stop’ or upon a previously arranged signal arrest all movement. The command can be given at any time or anywhere. Whatever he may be doing, whether at work, repose, at meals, on the Institute premises or outside, he must instantly stop. The tension of his muscles must be maintained, the same state as they were in when the command caught him. The positions thus obtained are used by beginners for mental work in order to quicken intellectual activity while developing the will.

“The Stop exercises gives no new postures; it is simply an incipient movement interrupted. We generally change our attitudes so unconsciously that we do not notice what positions we assume between two attitudes. With this exercise the transition from one posture to another is cut in two. The body arrested by the sudden command is forced to stop in a position in which it never came to a standstill before. This enables the man to observe himself better. He can feel himself with new light. In this manner he may break through the vicious circle of his automatism.

“For the arbitrariness of our movements is illusory. Psychological analysis and the study of the psychomotor functions as laid down by the Gurdjieff system, show that every one of our movements, voluntary or involuntary, is an unconscious transition from one automatic posture to another automatic posture. The man takes form among the postures open to him those that accord with his personality, for you see his repertoire is by force very limited. And all our postures are a mechanical result. We do not realize how intimately tied together are our three functions, moving, emotional and mental. They depend one upon the other. They result one from another. They are in constant reciprocal action. One does not change without others changing too. The attitude of your body corresponds to your sentiments and to your thoughts. A change in your emotions will inevitably produce the corresponding change in your mental attitude and in your physical pose. A change of thought will start another current of emotional energy, which will naturally change the physical posture. So that, if we want to alter our ways of feeling and our forms of thinking, we must first change our moving postures, and at the same time, without changing our emotional and mental postures, it is impossible for us to acquire new moving postures. We cannot change one without changing the other. For instance, if a man’s attention were concentrated on fighting, the automatism of his thinking processes and habitual movements would prevent a new way of thinking by producing the old mental associations. And not only are the thinking, feeling and moving processes in man bound together, but they are condemned to work, each and all, inside this closed circle of automatic postures. The Institute’s method of preparation for the harmonious development of man, is to free him from automatism. The Stop exercise helps much toward that object. The physical body being maintained in an unaccustomed position, the subtler bodies of emotion and thought can stretch into another shape.

“It is however essential to remember that an external command to stop is necessary, in order to bring the man’s will into operation, without which he could not keep the unfinished posture. A man cannot order himself to stop, because the combined postures of our three functions are too heavy for the will to move. Coming from another the command ‘Stop!’ plays the role of the mental and emotional functions whose state generally commands the physical posture, and in that case the physical posture not being in its habitual condition of slavery to the mental and emotional postures loses its strength, thereby weakening the other postures. And that enables our will to rule for a time over our functions.”

227-8

I resolve to try the Stop Exercise with my most trusted friends. Osho spoke about it often. Dr. Koh even uses it to show which of our habitual movements are degenerate. It is a good start.

He does not use email, saying that he used it from about 1975 until January 1, 1990, and that was enough for one lifetime. He finds it more efficient to respond to correspondence in “batch mode”, such as one day every three months, to be sent by postal mail.
Wikipedia entry for “Donald Knuth”, 2006-02-01