First Entry

"From January 17, 2007.

Today was my first day in a class called Consciousness and Spirituality. My professor described the class as the psychology of consciousness and the evolution of human consciousness. For the first half of the class, he explained the syllabus and out texts. He went down a road telling us about G. Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher and mentor to P. D. Ouspenksy and J.G. Bennet. Gurdjieff grew up in Georgia, and as an adult, decided that he would dedicate his life to the search for ancient, long-lost knowledge. He finally joined a monastery (I can not remember the exact name and location) he believed would give him the knowledge he needed and lived there for a while. While living at the monastery, he was given the task of bringing what he learned there to the outside world. He established a school outside of Paris in order to convey this information to the world. My professor told us that Gurdjieff believed that we are not born with souls but that we must cultivate a soul and strive to help it develop to its full potential. I regret not being able to provide more detail and I hesitate to use the internet because of the burden of having to sift through unreliable sources.

My professor gave us his own insights about the nature of being and the insights of his own mentors on the subject. He said that “[we] are the living manifestation of the collective mind” of civilization. He believes that people are a product of their particular civilization and that individual people as members of a particular civilization are “like fruit on a tree and berries on a bush.” This how powerful the force of culture is on a person. One civilization can be thought of as an apple tree and another as a pear tree.

When a person is “awake” or truly conscious (as opposed to the “sleep” in which most people seem to move about daily), a person goes beyond the forces of culture. They go beyond their programming are no longer slaves to their cultural programming. My professor said that in a state which he calls “true self-consciousness,” a person is in a state in which he is consciously aware of where his is in his own being. I suppose the state in which most people are existing is such that people are not really sure where they are in life. They just go through life with the flow. I am not talking about people who follow no schedule, nor do I think that following schedules are a bad thing. I just agree with my professor that most people are simply not “awake.” Most people simply get up, go to work/school, come home, focus on their material lives, and maybe include some religion here and there as custom dictates. I have to wonder whether or not most people I see on the street are “awake.” I honestly can not make that judgment, but my professor said something about a story in which the first Buddha, Siddhartha, was walking along. A man came up to Siddhartha and noticed something different about him. The man asked him if he was a king, prince, owner of much land, or some other type of prestigious person. Siddhartha simply answered, “I am awake.” This goes back to what Odin, former owner of BewaretheScribes.net, said about people who are saved (and I paraphrase): “Those who are truly connected to God will be identified as such [or at least as something different or special].”

In another story the professor told the class is one in which Siddhartha was walking along with many, many disciples following him. A person came up to Siddhartha and asked him about his teachings. Siddhartha said that he could not teach people about the level he (Siddartha) attained. He went on to say that he hopes that he is giving his disciples “a thirst” for conscious growth. I suppose that is what happens when the Spirit convicts people. That is what happened to me, at least. I suddenly had this thirst to learn and grow. After a year or so, I started to slack off. I’ll talk more about getting back off my bum in a minute.

Anyway, we took a ten minute break. I asked the professor for clarification of some detail on the syllabus. He clarified it for me and remarked that I was very detail-oriented. I sheepishly agreed with him and told him that I had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. What he said in response made sense and confirmed what I had already thought. He told me that many times assets are treated as illnesses. He added that having what people may call an “anxiety disorder” means that a person is “like a rabbit that just came out of his hole looking for danger,” and that it could be a real asset. He did agree that the energies of those talents may be focused in life-disrupting patterns (such as excessive, repeated checking, obsessing, excessive washing, excessive “prayer,” and other compulsions). The point of this is that many times, talents can be misdirected into behaviors that do not serve us well. Being detail oriented is useful in many situations, such as designing a automobile or space station component, but when those energies are focused into unproductive behaviors, they only serve to make us miserable. Sometimes, useful behaviors can be mislabeled as being a symptom of a disorder. My professor explained that even though Freud did give psychology many useful ideas, but his habit of calling any strange behavior a symptom of some illness was shortsighted. Instead of correctly identifying truly dysfunctional behavior and thought processes (that come of misdirecting energies) as symptoms, many people would say that being detail-oriented is itself an illness. My professor said that the job of the therapist is to redirect energies (or something to that effect) so that a person engages in fewer instances of dysfunctional behavior. I suppose the complete ceasing of dysfunctional behaviors is possible in adepts (sages or enlightened people) who have “made it” all the way to the highest state of consciousness, if there aren’t infinite dimensions of consciousness. (That’s a doozy to think about, eh?)

We did a class exercise for the second half of the class period. The professor instructed us to walk around the room and gaze closely at other people in silence. We had to really look at the people we passed and think about what we were feeling when we looked at each person. I was apprehensive about looking closely at others and about having others look closely at me at first, but then I started feeling like I was looking into people. I also felt that they were looking into me. With one person, it felt as if we were meshing halfway. The time we spent looking at one another seemed longer and deeper than the time I spent looking at others. There were a couple of others with whom I seemed to connect as well. After this part of the exercise, we were to pair up with the person with whom we felt the best about connecting. I tried to pair up with that aforementioned person, but I hesitated and he paired up with someone else. I paired up with someone I knew but felt somewhat good about looking at. I guess that feeling about her came partially from recognizing her from a past class we had together and already having preconceived notions of what she was like based on what I knew about her from that time. She also did not look at me for very long. I felt that she was holding back a little like many other people in the class. Anyway, in our pairs we were to walk around the room and look at other people as pairs. I felt some connection with the people, but not nearly as much as I did when looking at others one-on-one. I felt that I the connection was more spread out and less concentrated than as it was when looking at others individually.

Then, as pairs, we paired with other pairs and sat in a circle. We talked about our experiences walking around in pairs, and then we were clustered into larger groups. The larger groups were to talk about their reasons for taking the class and what they hoped to gain from it. One lady really stood out to me. She said that it was her third time taking the course because something in her did not want to go further the last couple of times. Something in her became extremely uncomfortable. It was not the amount of material to read or the difficulty of the tests, but there was something in her that recoiled during the process. I could say it was something in her that she did not want to confront, but only she and the Godhead know that. Another person said that she wanted to gain more knowledge for the sake of learning. This lady was a true scholar. She had such a thirst for knowledge that she said learning was “like Christmas morning every day.” She laughed with delight as she was saying this. I have never seen such zeal before, and I have to say that I am envious of her zeal. Another person said he wanted to learn to understand people better since he is working internationally as a mechanical engineer.

I am taking the course because I want to not only fill in my elective requirements, but also to further my spiritual development. I believe that I am backslidden a bit, and I have not been growing much recently, if at all. Hopefully, the experiences in this class would jumpstart the growth again. I have a sense that I will be challenged a great deal and experience some level or pain along the way. My professor even said that the course was challenging, saying that “[we] will gain a thirst for that development or choke on it.” He even said that some people may not be able to handle the class if they are so stuck in their beliefs and want nothing to do with challenging them. One lady decided to leave and put off taking the class until the next Spring semester so she could give all of her time to the class. I was about to ask God about whether or not I should stay, but I immediately sensed something to the effect of “You’re Staying!” So stay I shall.

Finally, we all got together in a large circle as a class to discuss our feelings on the exercise and about sitting in the circle. I mentioned the sense of connectiveness in the circle and the feeling of love that seemed to go in and out of me and everyone. One incredibly bright lady said that the connection itself is love and the loving of another person. It makes sense, because connecting at a deep level (at least to a level one is not accustomed) makes one vulnerable. Allowing someone to come in takes a great deal of trust, and it becomes such an intimate experience as my professor said. It’s quite difficult to put it into words. The professor quoted a character from the beginning of the movie Crash: “This is not a real city. In real cities like New York or Chicago, people brush up against each other. It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”* The same bright lady I mentioned earlier also said that how you perceive a spiritual experience (or even if you perceive an experience as such) depends on your outlook on life. Some people are more open to receiving a taste of wakefulness and others are not. People color experiences with what is programmed into them by their culture. I imagine the coloring of experiences happens progressively less as someone gets closer to the higher state of being for which everyone strives in some way. Some people just happen to get on the wrong road to it, whether it be by drugs, eating, material wealth, religion, and other mundane things. Aristotle said that everything strives for its final cause, or telos. Many times, what Aristotle calls the agent of motion may be events that change us and rattle our cages to wake us up. This whole discussion made me think of the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic. Read it and you’ll see why." http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/plato/the_republic/book07.html

*Part of this quote was taken from Wikipquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Crash