Mad, Mad World

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. I think Osho may have been telling a porky when he said that Gurdjieff was ten when his father died and gave him his deathbed advice. The Wikipedia article on Gurdjieff has this to say:

In March 1918, Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff, and four months later Gurdjieff's eldest sister and her family reached him in Essentuki as refugees, informing him that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May.

Now Gurdjieff was born sometime between 1866 and 1877, nobody is really sure, and his early life is a bit of a mystery. There's very little known about him until he showed up in Moscow in 1912 and started attracting followers. One thing's for sure, he wasn't ten years old in 1918. Of course, Osho might be quoting from Gurdjieff's autobiographical "Meetings with Remarkable Men", I haven't read this yet but it is regarded as highly suspect in terms of its historical authenticy.

I was interested to learn that this book was made into a movie in 1979 and starred Terence Stamp, with somebody called Dragon Maksimovic playing the adult Gurdjieff. Suffice to say that both Osho and Gurdjieff were never averse to bending the facts to serve their purposes and that's fair enough. To quote from Brian Eno, "if you study the heuristics and logistics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely run in a line" or something like that. Their primary aim is to unsettle the minds of their followers, to shake them up, and playing with historical facts is a great way to do that.

The mind loves nothing more than a solid timeline to make sense of whatever the hell is going on. If we read that Gurdjieff was nine or ten when his father died and was given this deathbed advice and later he found this advice incredibly helpful, we feel that we have a bit of a handle on what the guy is all about. Of course, we haven't but we like to think that we do. Our minds try to make the mystics understandable but of course they can't be understood with the mind at all. Our mind is the biggest barrier to understanding. Well my mind is anyway, I don't know about yours.

Gurdjieff said that most people were asleep, sleepwalking through life, caught up in daydreams and mental meanderings, going nowhere as in Gary Jules' "Mad World" lyrics:

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out place, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very, very
Mad world, mad world

As Ouspensky, an early follower of Gurdjieff, quotes him as saying "Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies". I'm finding it quite a struggle to wake up.

Osho on Gurdjieff

As I continue my reading of Osho's "The Book of Wisdom", I've found some interesting anecdotes and commentaries about various spiritual figures. One figure mentioned is George Gurdjieff and the story Osho tells about him is this. When he was about ten years old, his father lay dying and he gestured to young George, who was standing at a respectful distance, to come closer. His father whispered that he some very important advice to give him and that he should never forget it. The advice was this: if ever anybody insults you, wait 24 hours before you respond to the insult. His father then passed away.

George really didn't understand what to make of this but he dutifully remembered his father's advice and faithfully practised it for the rest of his life, rating it in adulthood as the best advice that he'd ever been given. The reason was that it forced him to reflect on the insults that were directed at him during his life and he was denied the ego's usual response which is to react instantly and defensively. Normally the ego steps in to defend itself and people are drawn into an argument with insults and counter-insults being hurled about. The situation rapidly escalates and all because the ego has been slighted and wants to defend itself.

This approach of course is what all spiritual teachers advise. Create a space between what happens in your life and your reaction to it. In that space, you can decide on the most appropriate course of action rather than being overwhelmed by emotion. At times this is very difficult to do and it has to be practised continously. It is important not to be too discouraged by the setbacks that inevitably occur. I assume Osho's little story is true but I haven't corroborated it in any way. He also has some hilarious things to say about The Theosophical Society and Krishnamurti but I'll save these for a later post.

The Black Stone

Pursuing my theme of the significance of stones, I was reminded of the famous Black Stone that is located at one corner of the Ka'ba in Mecca. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about this stone.

The Black Stone (called الحجر الأسود al-Hajar-ul-Aswad in Arabic) is a Muslim object of reverence, which according to Islamic tradition dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. It is the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba, the ancient sacred stone building towards which Muslims pray, in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Stone is roughly 30 cm (12 in.) in diameter, and 1.5 meters (5 ft.) above the ground. When pilgrims circle the Kaaba as part of the Tawaf ritual of the Hajj, many of them try, if possible, to stop and kiss the Black Stone, emulating the kiss that it received from the Islamic prophet Muhammad. If they cannot reach it, they are to point to it on each of their seven circuits around the Kaaba. The Stone is broken into a number of pieces from damage which was inflicted during the Middle Ages. The pieces are held together by a silver frame, which is fastened by silver nails to the Stone.

While Muslims don't ascribe any healing powers to it, they do believe that it has an abundance of what is called Baraka. I hadn't heard of this term before but it translates as something like divine blessing. The LOOKLEX Encyclopedia has this to say about the term:

In Islam, divine blessing that is normally associated with holy men or women, waliy, either in life or in death. Baraka can be transferred from one person to another, or from a material item to a person. Common in Islam is baraka that comes from local shrines, but the strongest baraka is in Mecca, and then especially, at the Ka'ba.

Healing Stones

There's been a lot of news coverage here in Indonesia recently about a ten year old who was out playing in the rain when he was struck by lightning. He was temporarily stunned but otherwise unharmed and immediately formed an attachment to a stone that he found nearby. This stone seems to have remarkable healing properties and thousands of people have flocked to the Indonesian village where he lives in order to be healed. Here is an article reporting on the phenomenon.

The Javanese love this sort of thing and it's easy to dismiss the whole business as mass hysteria. However, it got me thinking about rocks and their healing powers. The different varieties of crystals have well documented healing properties, regardless of whether you believe in crystal healing or not, and even quite ordinary looking rocks often contains small quantities of crystals like quartz. The photo that I used in this blog post was taken from a site called "Healing Rocks!" by Ananaia O'Leary and here is a quote:

The first step is realizing that stones are allies, not objects. They have ancient wisdom to share and will work with us generously if we approach them with respect. If you wish to find a stone ally, set your intention to welcome a healing ally and go out into Nature with an open heart. Remember, you are inviting partnership with the mineral realm, not hunting for a resource. Take a walk in your favorite green space: your backyard, local park, greenway or along a river or stream. As you walk, breathe in the scents of the Earth, feel the soil beneath your feet, the Mother holding you with each step. Be open and aware … your stone ally may come to you in many forms, a piece of landscaping rock, street gravel or a rock jutting out of a riverbank. It may jump out at you, catching a gleam of the sun, whispering to you as you walk by “Notice me.”

Now it's easy to scoff at advice like this and ridicule the idea of having a pet rock but it's obvious that this person does not view the mineral kingdom as being populated by inanimate objects. Meher Baba is quite clear about the fact that rocks possess a rudimentary form of consciousness and there is a great deal of literature on the topic of nature spirits connected with the mineral kingdom. I'd like to pursue this subject further but right now it's past midnight and sleep calls.

Osho on Love and Relationships

This being the eve of Valentine's Day, it maybe appropriate to include a little quote from Osho's "The Book of Wisdom" that can be downloaded from here. I haven't read all that much of the book but the little I have read makes excellent sense. I particularly like the way in which he draws a clear distinction between the noun "relationship" and the verb "relating". Here is a small extract:

Love is not a relationship. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished. You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you. Relationship means something complete, finished, closed. Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun. And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? -- because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

In fact, in "The Golden Wing" he makes further reference to nouns and verbs:

My suggestion to all my sannyasins is don’t trust in nouns, trust in verbs. Become a verb than becoming a noun. Rather than love, think of loving. Rather than being, think of becoming. Rather than of a flower, think of flowering. Always think in terms of verbs and you will never be frustrated. Your life will become a constant growth from one peak to another peak, and those peaks go on becoming higher and higher.

Gravity's Rainbow

I've recently come across a fertile source of ebooks and was elated to discover that Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" was amongst them. I've been searching for this book for quite some time. It's widely regarded as a "difficult" book, akin to James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake", but I'd come across some intriguing references to it and had managed to read an excerpt in Google Books. The little that I'd read there inclined me to read further and now I can. I'll have to choose my time. Some people have been known to sit down with this book and keep reading non-stop until they've finished.

My fertile source contains many books that I recognised and some of which I'd already read. At first I thought that it was just a collection of someone's personal predilections but then I happened upon Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2006. Most of the books on that list are in this collection and so with the number of my ebooks growing by the day the prospect of an iLiad becomes even more appealing.

The iLiad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad

This is no reference to Homer but to a portable device that let's you read and write just like you can do on paper. The image is stable in the sense that it isn't getting refreshed 60 times a second or so. The subliminal flicker caused by this refreshing is what makes reading ebooks on a computer quite tiring on the eyes. The technology is called e-Ink and involves the manipulation of little microcapsules that appear as black or white pixels depending on whether a positive or negative charge is applied. The slow page refresh, more than adequate for book reading, means that animation is not possible and the display is limited to black and white.

The fact that you can write on it with a stylus and thus add notes to what you are reading or draw your own diagrams is of course very useful. Connectivity is via Wi-Fi or USB cable and the price is around US$600 which I can't really afford at the moment but hopefully I can buy it in the middle of the year. I have a growing mountain of ebooks to read but I'm not getting through them using the software-based ebook readers on my computer and laptop. The good thing about technology however, is that the longer you wait to buy a technological device the cheaper and more feature-rich it becomes.

POSTSCRIPT (written 14th October 2018): 

Here is the start of the Wikipedia article:

The iLiad was an electronic handheld device, or e-Reader, which could be used for document reading and editing. Like the Barnes and Noble nook, Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle, the iLiad made use of an electronic paper display. In 2010, sales of the iLiad ended when its parent company, iRex Technologies, filed for bankruptcy.

Well I fortunately never did buy an iLiad but I did buy a Kindle some years later, in early 2015, for a little over US$100. I'm still using toward the end of 2018 and have felt no need to replace as it does its job. It's fine for ebooks but not adequate for PDFs so I use my old iPad for that.

A Visitor to the Garden

This morning I spotted this beautiful lizard in our garden. It was absolutely motionless and I was fortunate enough to be able to get up close and take this shot with my Nokia N73 camera. Our garden is a walled garden with jagged pieces of glass along the top which tends to discourage wildlife from entering but little fellow found its way in. Before taking this shot, I had picked it up by the tail and repositioned it in our front garden, away from the family dog who only the night before had killed a mouse that found its way in. I didn't want the same fate befalling this creature. Sightings of animals like this are relatively rare in heavily populated Jakarta and so this discovery was a pleasant surprise. Let's hope it lives long and prospers.

Mao's Last Dancer

I was supervising an examination earlier in the week and noticed a book on a shelf called Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin (pronounced Lee Schwin Sing). Now that I'm heading to Shanghai in August, I'm starting to take more of an interest in China where I'll be staying for at least two years and probably more. The book has caught my interest and I'm already well into it. Apparently, there is a film adaptation of the book and that is due for release this year. Li has his own website and has certainly come a long way from his impoverished life in rural China. In 1972, as an 11 year old, he was plucked from obscurity and chosen to train for ballet in Beijing. As an astute observer may have noticed, I am reading the Young Reader's Edition of the book.

Books Loved by OSHO

Not long after my post about shelfari and booklists, I received a Google alert about a post on a blog called http://enlightensoul.blogspot.com and the title of the post was Books Loved by OSHO. Meher Baba's God Speaks was on the list and that's why I received the alert. I won't reproduce the list here but here is the link to the actual blog post for those who might be interested.

Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was of course an interesting and controversial character. Followers of Osho are often called Orange People because of the colour of the clothes that they favour. When I first arrived in Pune in the late 90s, I remember being surprised by the number of westerners wandering around in orange robes. As I later learned, they were from the famous Osho ashram that attracts visitors from around the world. At the time, I was just passing through on my way to Ahmednagar and then on to Meherabad.

Followers of Osho are sometimes called sannyasins or neo-sannyasins (the word means "renouncer" in Sanskrit) and following Osho's death in 1990 quite a few of them were attracted to my old guru Barry Long. When I first started attending Barry's talks in the early 1990s, I noticed that a leaflet was always on display that was addressed specifically to any Osho followers who might be in attendance. Barry was based at Tambourine Mountain and often gave talks at the Gold Coast. There is a large Osho community around Byron Bay and many would have come from there to attend his meetings. Barry was always respectful of Osho and acknowledged his spiritual credentials.