John Robert Colombo reviews: Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim

John Robert Colombo reviews Keith A. Buzzell’s latest publication

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These days the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is much in the news, at least in the American news, occasioned by the candidacy for the leadership of the Republican Party of the person of Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Senator and Presidential hopeful. The man who has his eye set on occupying the Oval Office of the White House is a fifth-generation Mormon, and while he has lived a squeaky clean life to date, he apparently holds as gospel truths some of the bizarre beliefs and strange practices of the Mormon church.

Recently a researcher drew the attention of the reading public to the fact that in the eyes of Mormons, God is not the creator of the world. He is not the creator of the universe either, though it seems God resides “in” the universe and not “beyond” it. This is peculiarity that should be of interest to both theologian and geophysicist. Who then did create the heavens and the earth? Genesis 1:1 of the King James Version of the Bible states that God accomplished the deed “in the beginning.” Here is the standard Christian belief in the wording of the Apostle’s Creed: “God the Father Almighty … Creator of Heaven and Earth.”

The Mormon belief, formulated over eighteen decades ago, is that God, while in no way the architect of creation, nevertheless is a dweller in it as well as its superintendent. Indeed, the location of “divine throne” is known, for it is “near” Kolob, which is a celestial body in some distant sector of the cosmos, unsuspected by astrologer and unknown to astronomer. Is Kolob a planet or a star? The Mormon writings are obscure on this point, rather like the traditional beliefs of the Inuit of the Arctic whose cosmology conflates planets and stars. It does seem that the Mormon God is more akin to mankind than to spirit-kind.

Are the Mormons Christians? It seems that they are Christians in the same way that members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are Muslims. Their membership in greater Islam is denied by Sunni and Shite alike, especially in Pakistan where the Parliament passed a statute declaring the Ahmadiyyas to be non-Muslims: So there! In the same way, fundamentalist Christian denominations and sects in the U.S. heartland refuse to extend the term “Christian” to include Mormonism: Take that! Yet the Ahmadiyyas consider themselves to be good Muslims, just as the Mormons consider themselves to be good Christians.

I am not sure why it is so, but I find all of this reassuring. Perhaps it reassures me because it is so human – to cling to peculiar beliefs, in lieu of any evidence at all, and to withhold validation to designated groups on account of their differing beliefs. It reminds me of the subterfuge and euphemism employed by Palestinians and other Muslims who insist on referring to the State of Israel as “the Jewish entity.” All too human!

With respect to the LDS tradition, it is enlightening that there should be a god or demiurge who lives on a celestial body named Kolob, for it seems the divinity is a being who – or which – has some sort of physical or corporeal existence. There is no reference to Kolob in “The Book of Mormon,” but it makes its appearance in the quasi-scriptural text “Pearl of Great Price.” The subject is of interest in that one may be a good Mormon without worrying much about the nature of divinity, whether architect or superintendent of the universe. In a sense, then, belief is a matter of degree and the responsibility of the individual and hence changeable.

I could continue with a discussion of bizarre beliefs held by many Christians – such as the rise and fall of the concept of Purgatory, not to mention the existence of states of Heaven and Hell, veneration of angels and saints, prayers for the posthumous rehabilitation of the death, the physical resurrection at the End of Days, etc. All of these fall into the province of Theology, the “queen of the sciences.” The list of endless. As the cartoonist Robert L. Ripley of “Believe It or Not!” fame once wrote, “Strange indeed is man seeking after his gods.”

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What does all of this have to do with what appears below, or with the new book that I am about to review? (I use the verb “to review” with some reluctance because the book in question is a weighty one, and the arguments it presents are complex, indeed too complex to encapsulate in a relatively short review article.) The answer to the question is “not much,” except that there is little evidence for what is being described in the book’s pages. If the descriptions are taken seriously, the deductions and extensions truly follow. So the book is a disciplined work, a work of scholarly analysis. It is titled “Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim,” and I will describe the physical appearance of the volume before I turn my attention to its author, Keith A. Buzzell and to his previous publications, and only then to the general argument of the new book.

“Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim” is published in 2012 by Fifth Press, an imprint based in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Mormon headquarters (as it happens!), which has issued earlier titles by Dr. Buzzell. It is a handsome trade paperback, 266 pages of text, plus preliminary and postliminary matter, including a glossary of scientific (but not Gurdjieffian) terms and a bibliography that includes books and articles on philosophy, neurology, cosmology, mathematics, etc. There is no index, but the text is well organized in fourteen chapters, and there are four instructive prefaces (contributed by the book’s editors, John Amaral, Marlena Buzzell, Bonnie Phillips, and Toddy Smyth). There are also innumerable diagrams, many of them in lovely pastel colours. A rough approximation of the word count is 145,000 words. Although I found a couple of minor misprints (footnotes on page viii and page 7, for instance), the text is well edited and the argument is clearly expressed.

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Now let me turn to Dr. Buzzell and his publications, paraphrasing what I wrote for this blog on September 28, 2011. (It is still archived here.) At the time I wrote: “It is apparent that there are many scientifically minded and technologically trained people like Dr. Buzzell who are ‘in the Work’ and are making sizeable efforts ‘to square’ what Mr. Gurdjieff wrote in ‘Beelzebub’s Tales’ with contemporary scientific and technological theories and practices. This is one way to ‘make relevant’ what the author wrote between 1924 and 1927, the text of which was translated into English and published in 1950 and subsequently reissued in a revised (and controversial) edition in 1992.”

“Dr. A. Keith Buzzell was born in 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied music at Bowdoin College and Boston University, and received his medical doctorate in 1960 at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. For the past thirty-five years, he has been a rural family physician in Fryeburg, Maine, a staff member of Bridgton Hospital and currently holds the position of medical director at the Fryeburg Health Care Center.”

“Dr. Buzzell has also served as a professor of osteopathic medicine, a hospital medical director and a founder of a local hospice program. He has lectured widely on the neurophysiologic influences of television on the developing human brain and on the evolution of man’s triune brain. In 1971 Keith, and his wife Marlena, met Irmis Popoff, a student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the founder of the Pinnacle Group in Sea Cliff, Long Island, New York. From then until the mid-1980s they formed work groups under her supervision. Since 1988, Dr. Buzzell and Annie Lou Staveley, founder of the Two Rivers Farm in Oregon, maintained a Work relationship up to her death in 1996. Keith continues group Work in Bridgton, Maine.”

This information is also reprinted in the current book. As for the earlier volumes, these are the three volumes that I reviewed: “Perspectives on Beelzebub’s Tales and Other of Gurdjieff’s Writings” (2005). “A Child’s Odyssey: Explorations in Active Mentation: Re-Membering Gurdjieff’s Teaching” (2006). “Man – A Three-brained Being: Resonant Aspects of Modern Science and the Gurdjieff Teaching” (2007, 2^nd edition, 2011).

I have found these books to be among the most serious publications about the physics, physiology, neurology, and psychology of G.I. Gurdjieff’s thought – and also the most demanding to read. In their comprehensiveness, they remind me of Maurice Nicoll’s five-volume series of “Psychological Commentaries,” but whereas Dr. Nicoll generally limited himself to the psychological aspects of the system, Dr. Buzzell does not so limit his inquiry but attempts to relate metaphysical concepts with chemical and physical reality. The present title is no exception.

The title of the book struck me as odd for the reason that I was unfamiliar with the expression “Gurdjieff’s whim.” I assumed I was missing something – I quite often have this feeling, and with some justification! (Indeed, the phrase brought to my mind the not-unrelated, traditional Islamic words “Mohammed’s wont.”) I checked Sophia Wellbeloved’s indispensable volume ‘Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts’ (2003) but found no references there to “whim.” Nowhere else in the literature of the Work have I encountered any discussion of “whim,” so I conclude it is a synonym for “aim.”

I checked the “Guide and Index” and located “whim” (in the singular) in “All & Everything,” where it appears in the original edition on page 688 of the section on “France.” The author wrote as follows: “ … they occupy themselves out of idleness, in order to satisfy their whims, with devising ‘new-forms-of-manifestations-of-their-Hasnamussianing,’ or as is said there, with ‘new fashions,’ and spread them from there over the whole of the planet.” There the word is used in the plural and it refers to things of passing interest. I reluctantly returned to the notion of “one’s personal aim” in life and in Work. Perhaps it was related to the three aims of Group Work.

I was still uncertain about this, even after reading, on page 1, the words attributed to Gurdjieff: “to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word.”  This is equated with Gurdjieff’s personal aim. Indeed, even earlier, on page ii, in the first of the prefaces, Toddy Smyth writes as follows: “In a rare moment of divulgence, Gurdjieff revealed his own whim: to bring to mankind a new understanding of God.”

There we have it. Smyth continues: “Keith Buzzell’s work is a verification of this whim – an aspect of a new understanding of God is to recognize and to gain the capacity to actualize one’s own whim. A portion of Dr. Buzzell’s whim could be summarized as the striving to understand how self-transformation – a process that requires the action of an independent will – can be possible within a Universe governed by unyielding, automatic law.”

Smyth goes on to describe the present book as “a dynamic synthesis of the indications found in ‘The Tales’ and ‘In Search’ with recent discoveries in quantum and cosmological science.” Indeed, as Dr. Buzzell has written elsewhere, “Gurdjieff’s conception of Okidanokh represents a major aspect of his effort to reconcile science and spirituality. As such, it plays a powerful role in his new conception of God in the world. The manner in which he accomplishes this reconciliation is quite ‘oblique’ or indirect and one has to read his complex elaboration with considerable care and attention to see how thoroughly he has blended the ‘way’ of science and of potential transformation with the ‘way’ of the spirit.”

He takes pains to place Gurdjieff’s exposition alongside those concerned with quantum physics and the theory of relativity. He could have added alongside as well of photographic proof of the expansion of the universe which was discovered by Hubble and Humason during the same period.

But perhaps the key passage appears in Philip Mairet’s memoir of A.R. Orage: “Whilst they were talking in this vein, someone asked Gurdjieff if he would disclose his own ‘whim,’ and he said it was to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word.” This passage is cited a number of times, and its source seems to be an unpublished lecture of J.G. Bennett’s. Bennett quotes Orage as saying his “whim” is to publish “the best literary journal in England,” an aim he achieved. Apparently the word “whim” in Armenian and Russian expresses not merely fantasy, as it does in English, in the sense of whimsy, but determination, intent, and wish. The reader will decide whether or not Gurdjieff realized his “whim.”

In some way this “new conception” is connected with those unwieldly terms Okidanokh and Triamazikamno, the former term representing the “reconciliation” of man’s inner world of three brains with the outer world that expresses the familiar Law of Three, and the latter term the all- encompassing Ray of Creation – our individual and collective place in the world.

Each of the fourteen chapters of Dr. Buzzell’s book is composed of sections a few pages in length, and any one section would lend itself to study and analysis, as it is immersed in the vocabularies of “The Tales” (as he refers to “Beelzebub’s Tales”) and “In Search of the Miraculous.” In this sense “Reflections” could be regarded as an organized gloss on central concepts presented in allegorical and other forms in “The Tales.”

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The sheer amount of information and analysis in the book would overwhelm the casual reader (as it does the ordinary reviewer!) who has but a general understanding of and a passing interest in the mechanics of the work’s dynamics. So what I will do is parasail from chapter to chapter, suggesting some insights to be found therein. The author has made this easy to do because, in effect, each chapter examines a specific aspect of the system – indeed, each key word unlocks a portion of the whole. Here are the topics of the chapters:

(1) Whim as aim. (2) Evils old and new. (3) Generations, notably sons and grandson. (4) Conscience, reason. (5) Wiseacre, know-it-all. (6) Laws of the universe. (7) Suggestibility, including hypnotism. (8) Okidanokh, or reconciliation of science and spirituality. (9) Essence which has mellowed. (10) Organic life. (11) Individual and group place and presence. (12) Foods and the Ray of Creation. (13) Reconciliation that allows for self-perfection in a structured universe. (14) Quantum considerations as approaches to “the non-mass and mass-based worlds.”

Some of the chapters come in two parts. I noticed that the earlier chapters are highly specific and analytic, whereas the later chapters are somewhat speculative, historical, and once in a while personal. (The early explorations bring to hazy recall the detailed discussions, chemical largely, mentioned by Dr. James Carruthers Young and others at the Priory in the mid-1920s.)

There is a shift of perspective in this book from impersonal to personal, and it could be said to occur around Chapter 10. The theory comes first, thereafter its application. Indeed, in that chapter, “The Life Force,” Dr. Buzzell describes two instances of awareness and intention that occurred to him, the first stemming from an encounter with a disliked hardware clerk, the second stemming from his habit of leaving his socks on the floor of his bedroom!

Here is a brief summary of the contents of Chapter 10, which may act as a guide to how the author proceeds. Synonyms for “life force” is mentioned: Qui, Chi, prana, Shakti, pneuma, Great Spirit, Godhead (Jehovah, God, Allah). These are Eastern conceptions and there is no “action from below” and it is all “action from above.” It is Western conceptions that offer “action from below,” and these are sometimes called vitalism, will to live, élan vital, life force, formative drive, entelechy, orgone, etc. For a balance of “actions,” turn to Taoism. Newton and Darwin and Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity have begun to “bridge” reduce the gap between spirit and matter (to use basic terms).

Here is what Gurdjieff brings to this notion: “There is no intimation that life of any type (non-brained and brained) was a unique or separate creation of HIS ENDLESSNESS.” Life is a universal phenomenon, the Ilnosoparnian process, with Earth as special because of the collision of the comet Kondoor. Earth, Moon, and Anulios and what they represent are “imbalanced” and hence requires special consideration.  There is much discussion of the nature of the “imbalance” based on passages from “The Tales.” “Gurdjieff carefully emphasizes the participation of the Divine Will Power _only_ at the onset of the Creation and yet has HIS ENDLESSNESS very active, via HIS Reason, _within_ the Creation.”

Everything proceeds lawfully. “The end result of the _actualizations_ of HIS ENDLESSNESS creates the possibility for the transformation and crystallization of ‘active elements’ …. ” As well: “Applying this Will, each of us three-brained begins can participate – be an active agent – in our own self-transformation. One becomes an active participant in the creation of the Higher Bodies. Efforts in this regard are _one’s own_ ; they are initiated from lower worlds and move upward. This is _evolution_ in the Gurdjieffian sense.”

The possible success of such effort leads to a discussion of “later octaves” in the Great Ray. (I would like to have known more about “coating bodies” vs. “crystallization.”) There is a section about: “All of life, therefore, is required and fulfills a cosmic need while, simultaneously, the actualizations of HIS ENDLESSNESS make it possible for certain of the three-brained begins to coat High Being-bodies.” This action is symbolically represented with respect to what looks like a multi-coloured cosmic pyramid. Movement (instinctive centre), eating (moving and instinctive), and survival (instinctive and moving and sex centre) are discussed. The role of H12, “the power of paying attention,” is discussed interestingly and importantly. Also discussed are characteristics and comparisons of first, second, and third brains.

Pages here resemble a textbook on neuro-anatomy. There is much discussion of the “location of attention” and the question is asked, “Where does ‘carbon 6’ come from?” The octaves of Food, Air, and Impressions are discussed. The subject is complicated, yet the exposition is clear, so the author deserves top marks for his hard work. In an ideal world – rather than on a planet like ours that falls under 48 laws – I would be able to summarize in greater detail the contents of all the chapters.

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The quality of any work that is serious may be judged by the influence that it has on serious-minded people. The Gurdjieff Work was introduced to the West in 1915, so it nearly one century old, perhaps a lot older in fragmentary form in the East. Texts that were written in the 1920s and published as late as the 1940s are still able to beget serious discussion and engender new thoughts and feelings. Proof of the seriousness of the Work is that it inspires Dr. Buzzell and other scholars and scientists to “dig deeper.” Yet for all its length and depth, it seems that “Reflections” is but the first half of Dr. Buzzell’s analysis. For it is promised that there will be a second volume in this series to be titled “Further Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim.” So stay tuned ….

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Lurking in the back of my mind, as I read these fourteen chapters, was the planet or star named Kolob and the lonely God of the Mormons, who lives in our cosmos, distant from us but not apart from existence. I must admit that this image brought to my mind Mr. Gurdjieff.

John Robert Colombo is an author and anthologist based in Toronto who is interested in esoteric ideas, Canadian lore and literature, jokes and anecdotes, and contemporary poetry. His latest collection of aphorisms is called “A Strange and Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore.” Check his website:  jrc@colombo.ca

John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 15: “Mother”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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John Lennnon c 1948

Part 15: “Mother”

Mother. “Mother” is the most harrowing song Lennon ever recorded, and
is the most harrowing piece of rock’n’roll I have heard or could
imagine being put down. There is even something confronting about its
stark title: it isn’t “Mother, You Had Me”, or “Goodbye, Mother” or
“My Mother”. It’s just plain “Mother”. It bears a mute challenge: what
does “mother” mean to you? The word utters a primal reality. Four
other songs on 1970’s classic John Lennon-Plastic Ono Band album also
had one word titles fired point-blank: “Isolation”, “Remember”, “Love”
and “God”. With nothing but single words, Lennon evokes divinity, a
parent, a terrifying state of existence, a poignant faculty of the
psyche, and the most powerful feeling-impulse we know. This is a
record of essential experiences. All artifice, all glossy surfaces,
are sanded back, and the heart, the raw matter of life is presented
through the vehicle of an art so perfectly mastered as to appear
artless. On this album, Lennon means and does business. Yet, it is
also the moment of his greatest apparent hypocrisy, his most signal
failure to live up to his own standards.

Mother. Our relationships with our parents are always in flux, even
after they have died. Nothing seems to remain static for very long:
not how we feel towards them, not what we think of them, not our
dominant memories, and not our overall assessments of them. And it
must be so, because our relationship with our parents is essential,
and as long we change, so will that relationship. This is neither good
nor bad; it is simply a fact. Good and bad become meaningful only when
we have an aim, and so a set of principles. If we are aiming for
conscious growth, then we must aim to become more loving, and this
will mean – at an absolutely fundamental level – to love our parents,
whatever issues we may have had. Until we can find love there, in that
relationship, we can only know passion and obsession mixed with
appreciation and esteem in varying degrees (and passion, I think, is
what passes for love with us).

When we speak about Lennon’s life a little further below, his mother
Julia and his father Fred, I shall mention the distortion which seems
to inevitably affect our memories of our parents. But just to briefly
make the point here, one cannot love while we are subject to these
distortions, irrespective of whether they are “favourable” or
“unfavourable” distortions. Love is impartial, or more accurately, it
includes impartiality, as George Adie said.

Of course, we cannot love anyone, not even mothers, on demand, and
anyone who thinks so doesn’t know. But we can do something in that
direction, and the need to do so becomes more urgent each day we have
not reached that state, because the longer it’s left, the harder it
gets. What we can do is prepare the soil for love by forming attitudes
which might foster or welcome love, by cultivating understanding, and
by striving to make negative emotions passive. Perhaps most
importantly of all, we can strive to acquire being, and with that,
individual will. As Gurdjieff is reported to have said: “Sometimes ‘it
loves’ and sometimes ‘it does not love’. … In order to be a good
Christian (and so to love) one must be. To be means to be master of
oneself. If a man is not his own master he has nothing and can have
nothing.” (In Search of the Miraculous, 102)

Being stands above emotion, and individual will is not just a power of
decision-making, but a manifestation of the real self which is based
on and understands my own unique makeup (so this will is not
experienced as tyrannical or even as an imposition, but more as a
return to home, to where I should be). Making effort, any effort for
being and individual will, allows more emotional control, so that we
can play a conscious role in forming the attitudes we want and need.
There are no guarantees, but we can make honest attempts. The road is
one of self-education, or self-agriculture. We know that if we want
anything to grow in a particular field we need to prepare the earth by
working it, adding substances to it, and removing impediments. And so
it is with loving our parents.

At some point in life, everyone will have issues in their
relationships with their parents, or so I see it. I am not speaking
about resentments, but about issues: ongoing attempts to reconcile
difference of opinion on important matters. I do not believe that it
is possible not to have some sort of serious issue, provided only that
you know your parents long enough and are sufficiently honest with
yourself. The more anyone argues otherwise, the more they convince me
that they’re in denial. So it is not just you, and it isn’t just me:
we’re all in the same position.

One can, of course, form theories about this: for example, that in
growing up in a world different from that which our parents knew they
must inevitably, to some extent, misunderstand us. Or one can theorise
and say that in acquiring our own individuality there must be a
reaction against our parents’ individualities. That is, there is an
inevitable tension between the infant’s natural impulse to imitate the
parents and the adolescent’s urge to become independent individual. We
could say that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and
there’s a lot of truth in all that. However my assertion is not based
on either theory: it’s just an observation. But the observation is
good enough for me. It is based partly on introspective observation,
and also, wherever I’ve been close enough to someone to tell, there
have been issues.

I am not speaking about dislike. I am not saying that we are bound to
dislike let alone hate our parents. On the contrary, I think that what
is real in the relationship is the love. An essence relationship is
always and can only be one of love. My position is that the
differences and issues arise in personality, and can be handled
without rancour. It is an indictment of us that they too infrequently
are. One does sometimes see cases where beneath even the disagreements
and misunderstandings there is a current of certainty in love. True
affection is not given on condition or subject to recall.

The issues are more or less serious, and are more or less harmonised
or aggravated by the passing years, but they’re always there. To take
an example which struck me quite forcibly, one of my friends had the
not a-typical match of the “perfect mother” and the “perfectly awful
father”. In this case, I always found the beauty more puzzling than
the straight-forward beast. One day, when he was already in his 40s
and his mother had been dead for several months, my friend suddenly
said to me, in what was a mildly depressed explosion, that his mother
had silently consented to his father’s rages. She had effectively
collaborated with him. As stated, I think everyone has issues with
their parents.

More importantly for this article, John Lennon thought so too. When he
performed “Mother” at Madison Square Garden, he introduced it like
this: “… a lot of people thought it was just about my parents, but
it’s about 99% of the parents, alive or half-dead.” I only wonder why
he made an exception for one per cent. Was it just optimism? Yet, the
song itself is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Lyrically, it is
almost clinical in its concise, naked statements of fact:

Mother!
You had me,
But I never had you.
I wanted you.
You didn’t want me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Father!
You left me.
I never left you.
I needed you so bad.
You didn’t need me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Children!
Don’t do what I have done.
I couldn’t walk,
And I tried to run.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Mamma don’t go!
Daddy come home!
Mamma don’t go! Daddy come home!

I have allowed a separate line for each line of the song as it’s sung.
The lyric sheet doesn’t do justice to the measured barrage of short
addresses. The entire sound of the piece is funereal. It sounded like
that to me the first time I heard it, and it has never sounded any
other way. But the lyrics, when I set out then like this, read to me
like an indictment. Except for the emotion in Lennon’s verse, one
could imagine a clerk of the court reading them, methodically
ploughing on (so too, in “God”, the list of people and things Lennon
does not believe in sounds like a list of convicts read in a
Dickensian criminal court). And who does it indict? Lennon’s parents,
of course, but equally, also himself. Lennon does not preach at his
family from some easily assumed superiority. Even his singing of the
opening word of each verse – Mother! Father! Children! – sounds more
like a calling from island to island.

Another feature of the song is its extreme economy with words. Even
when Lennon sings: “I just got to tell you, goodbye”, he’s being
minimalist. He means that he has to say it, and that’s all there is to
say. He’s driven to impose finality. Even the word “just”, which I
recall Lennon and McCartney once said was a “filler”, to be avoided
where possible, is exactly the right word for the poetry.

Yet, there is no finality. After the prose of the verses bidding
farewell to mother, father and children, Lennon yells: “Don’t go! Come
back!” Which is it, goodbye or come back? It’s both. His mind and his
heart sing that he has to take his leave, and move on. But his
feelings scream that he wants more  of them, not less. The song is
made by this tension between the two poles of departure and return,
burying and retrieving the past. The tension cannot be maintained in
life, but only in the song.

The third verse is the key to the whole piece: he accepts that he is a
failure as a parent, and can do nothing more constructive than to warn
his “children” (although he only had Julian, at that point) not to
follow his example. The children are not part of the banshee grief.
Yet, we feel that this verse is related to the rest of the song. There
is a hope that the children may succeed where Lennon and his parents
have not. Lennon tells the children to learn from the pitiful examples
before them, and to this end, he’s prepared to let us see that he had
never recovered from his painful childhood. Was Lennon perhaps saying
that he tried to run too soon because he was running after his
parents? Maybe. Parents spend a bit of time encouraging their children
to take a few steps towards them, and anyone who has ever done this
knows how deep and purely joyous are the feelings evoked in both the
adult and the toddler by this simple play. No parent would dream of
coercing the child to run towards them, and yet, perhaps, they make
the demand that with their emotions the children race the wind. So
Lennon warned the children, and showed them where the dangers are. Of
course, we are the children, and so too, I think was Lennon. After
all, he did try again with Julian and later with Sean.

But here we come to the apparent hypocrisy I referred to above. At the
time Lennon wrote “Mother” he had a child, and had run out on him.
Lennon could have done more for and with his son, but it appears that
he was too selfish to do so. My own view is that he knew he could rely
on Cynthia, his first wife, and this made it easier for him to leave.
I am not seeking either to excuse or to condemn Lennon, but just to
state that whatever Lennon’s subjective culpability, there is an
“apparent hypocrisy”, and Cynthia’s book, with Julian’s forward
effectively says as much. This being so, no wonder he was so cool to
her on the few times they met in the 70s: she reminded him of his bad
conscience. You can even say that Cynthia carried the burden of his
self-centeredness.

Lennon did not use the word “selfish” on “Mother”, even though, if one
thinks it through, it’s tolerably obvious that selfishness is the
danger Lennon was pointing to. There are almost no bounds to our
selfishness, and yet, once we have risen above it, selfishness has no
strength at all. People will gladly sacrifice their health, their
money, and their own lives, once they have put selfishness beneath
them. Once again, I think of Dickens, and in particular, of Sidney
Carlton from A Tale of Two Cities. But it is not a case of “once
overcome, forever vanquished”. One of the real dangers in parenting,
as in life in general, but especially in parenting, is that while the
real me, the essential I, will make a sacrifice, personality will come
in later on and claim credit. Personality claims its “due reward”, it
speaks the language of entitlement. Obviously, an act of love can
never come with a demand for gratitude let alone recognition. Such a
demand proves that it is not and never was “love”. This requirement of
reciprocation – love me as I loved you – ruins many relationships.
It’s a commerce in the expression of affection, and it excludes love
because it swallows up everything real with selfishness.

Then love becomes mixed – not in itself, because in itself love cannot
be sullied. But love can become mixed in our psyches by an emotional
entanglement. The mother’s love is forever being offered, and then
withdrawn if her prior unstated conditions are not met. The child
becomes confused and hurt: “I thought you loved me for myself, but now
you’ll reject me if I cannot force myself to some display which to me
feels unnatural?”

And yet, I must admit that people who spend all their lives in
personality seem to be content with this state of affairs, or at least
not to question it. How can such situations persist? Surely one part
of the answer is that we do not confront these questions sufficiently,
and with sufficient being. We do not place ourselves before the
issues: we think about things, and our emotions pass over the fields
of our lives in a more or less intense shadow play. And then, with
time, the ordinary tempo of our existence reasserts itself, and the
tender pink membranes of scar tissue are buried deep. But the
“pondering” (or “being-logical-confrontation”, as Gurdjieff put it),
which could lead to a real change – to maturity – is rare.

If we could ponder, we would see the lies we tell ourselves. By
“lies”, I don’t just mean outright untruths, saying that I was there
at 5 o’clock when in fact I wasn’t. I chiefly mean self-deception and
distortion. These deceits always support a particular judgment: “My
mother was the greatest”, or the opposite, or something different. In
their turn, these moral judgments seem to always be that things were
or were not as they should have been.

It is hard not to judge our parents, after all, they teach us to
judge. The irony is that this lesson which we learn only too well,
then works against them. I knew a woman who effectively taught her
children to criticise and be embarrassed of their father. She did not
do it consciously of course, but that was the effect of her incessant
and vicious attacks. It was as if she thought that her children would
rely upon and esteem her all the more if she could alienate them from
their father. With one child, she succeeded, with another she failed,
and with the third the results were mixed. But what she never
appreciated was that if she taught them to criticise and to be
embarrassed of one parent, they could do the same with the other, and
would become suspicious of and hostile to most of the world.

These judgments support what Adie called “justified by God
grievances”, and as he saw so deeply, the more justification there is
for a grievance, the more dangerous it is. Gurdjieff showed that
negative emotions can never be justified. Further, as he said, many of
our grievances are based upon a false belief that matters could have
been different, when in fact, as he said, “If one thing could been
different everything could been different.” (In Search of the
Miraculous, 21-2).

Clearly, “Mother” is entirely founded on Lennon’s belief that his
parents should not have left him. The recent publication of Philip
Norman’s book on Lennon was important not least because it refocussed
the picture we had of Lennon’s parents. This piece is already long
enough, so I encourage anyone interested to read Norman. But the
bottom line is this: the fact of the matter was not so much that Fred
Lennon ran out on Lennon (although there is some truth in that, he
could have made greater efforts to speak to his son). It’s more that
Fred was weak: “just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen”, as
Bernie Taupin said of Elton. Here the queen was probably Lennon’s Aunt
Mimi more than his mother Julia. Further, Norman also reveals that
Lennon knew that there were two sides to the story: one of Fred’s
brothers, John’s uncle, had written to him, setting out their side of
the story.

So Lennon’s view of the past had become garbled, and he seemed to be
wedded to the distortion. When we are subject to this distortion, we
can remember mostly those incidents which fit the twisted
world-picture. So, if for example, I have a grudge against someone,
then whatever unpleasant things they did come to mind quickly and
forcibly, and when they do, I feel at once the impact of my
accumulated dislike. Hatred is a feast for a glutton, and it is never
satisfied without revenge, which is why revenge seems so sweet. On the
other hand, if while I’m in the grip of this distortion I do manage to
remember the good things my parents did, they tend to come with less
power. In fact, they often call up with them an accuser, who will
explain them away. This is part of the spell of negative emotions:
they have this defensive quality that they attract similar negative
emotions and supporting memories, and subject reality to a selective
canon of interpretation. Being able to curse is a form of revenge, and
the gladness of cursing then seems to justify the resentment. And so
the fatal cycle unfolds.

There are two vitally important things here. First, we feel we must
judge, and in the rush to judgment, we introduce distortions.
Incidentally, U2 capture this very nicely in one of my favourite U2
songs, “Dirty Day” from Zooropa. Second, we are bound to these painful
untruths by the strongest bonds – our sufferings. As Gurdjieff said:
“Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to
anything as he is to his suffering.” (In Search of the Miraculous,
274)

I feel as if I could finish there, but one cannot leave “Mother”
without mention of Janov and the “Primal Scream” therapy he gave
Lennon and Ono. At the opening of this piece, I described the one-word
title “Mother” as a “primal reality”. In the Rolling Stone interview,
the question was raised as to whether John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band
might be the first “primal” album. As I recall, Lennon quite properly
deflected the question as a sterile curiosity about labels. “Was
George’s the first Gita album? It’s that relevant”, he said as I
remember, meaning that what you called it was irrelevant. But while
Lennon may not have been keen about such tags, the album is a record
of a man’s encounter with the first human things.

When I read Janov’s The Primal Scream, I was impressed by certain key
insights, but that was it. It struck me like having a black-tie supper
to celebrate painting the house. I’m not qualified to speak about
Janov’s therapy on Lennon, although I am suspicious. Lennon was quite
enthusiastic about it for a while. He had Janov come to England to
treat him, and when Janov had to return to the USA, he followed him
there. Although he soon left Janov rather abruptly, he retained a
sense of the importance of Janov’s ideas, at least for a while. Thus
in “Aisumasen” from Mind Games, he says “It’s hard enough, I know, to
feel your own pain”. Gurdjieff spoke of “intentional suffering”, but
also of “conscious labours”. There is a lot more to do than relieve
one’s past tortures. From what I can see, Lennon tried to move on. But
primal therapy did not seem to help him tremendously in the middle
term, if Lennon’s experiences in Los Angeles are any guide.
Shouldering the responsibility of raising a child, however, did: it
brought him to the clear-eyed sanity of “Beautiful Boy”, “Clean Up
Time”, “Living On Borrowed Time” and “Grow Old With Me”.

Also, the theory that all traumas go back to childhood, or even to
birth, leases a spurious credibility from a trick of the eye. When we
try to account for anything, we consider its history. An earlier cause
always seems to be a truer cause. So if a problem in an adult can be
attributed to something which occurred in childhood, we seem – by this
trick of the eye – to be really probing the depths. Janov’s idea that
childbirth was causative of later disorders may then seem persuasive
beyond what any evidence would warrant, simply any later conditions or
factors can be explained as derived from, or being potent because of,
the earlier problem – and it is difficult to prove the hypothesis
wrong.

To try and sum it up, I feel that there is a real danger of
identifying with the pain, and of manufacturing it in accordance with
expectations. Perhaps it’s something like the way that if you think
about headaches long enough, you’ll get one. I have a sense that there
is a good idea somewhere in the slick presentation which was Primal
Therapy, but that it was taken to an extreme, and that other good
ideas were blocked out by the seduction of the “primal scream” theory.
I am not saying that Dr Janov never helped anyone. I would be quite
certain that he did. But I cannot help but wonder if this had more to
do with his considerable personal powers than with the theoretical
value of his Primal Therapy.

As one learns to feel one’s own pain, one needs to learn be able to
bear it. One can proceed only by careful degrees. Perhaps this is part
of the reason why a teacher is necessary on the spiritual path, at
least in the beginning. My own view of people such as Van Gogh is that
they could not bear the force of their own impressions. To be able to
bear any influence, especially perhaps pain and suffering, being and
understanding are needed. There is no such thing as emotional
strength: the emotions do not have muscles of any description. If we
have being, then our emotions will not knock us over. But I cannot
believe that it is helpful to relive the pain and lie on the ground
screaming. The idea of being able to feel your pain is good, but the
idea of being able to feel your own presence is even better. As
Gurdjieff said in his last years, “by so much as one is conscious,
there is no more suffering.”

Lennon returned to some of these ideas later on in a song which was
never publicly released, and which I know as “Memory”. We come to that song next time, and continue this train of thought.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
==================================
Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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JOHN LENNON 13: Instant Karma

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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John Lennon: Essence and Reality
Part 13: “Instant Karma!”

“I’m only beginning to understand what this record was about”, said Lennon in 1972, more than two years after it had been released. I am sure that Lennon could have said the same thing in 1980, the last year of his life. “Instant Karma!” is, I feel, a song so large that it is difficult to take it in. I mean this the way that sometimes, by grace, one has a moment where one is struck with the reality of something: an animal, a person, the sky, the clouds, the wind, a reflection, or a street sign. Buddhists have referred to these illuminations as seeing the “suchness” of reality. It is a big thing when one can sense the “suchness” of one’s own reality, because to the extent that I can, I am able at will to sense myself in relation to other realities.

Such experiences need to be borne, meaning that they involve both “birth” and “bearing”: it is as if a new man is coming to birth, and an inner health or strength is needed to be able to bear the vision. When, in time, such moments have brought some quality of soul to birth, they can be supported for a longer period, so that the soul can do more than blink in the sunlight for a moment or two. The results of the experiences then work together, as Gurdjieff said, and one can even perhaps sense the face of God in creation, at once instantly immediate, yet also transcendent.

We shall return to this at the end of this piece, but I have said this much now because, grandiloquent as it may sound, I feel that some sort of experience along these lines is needed to receive the impact of “Instant Karma!”. Forget words like “heavy”, although for my money, it is far heavier than anything Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple or Judas Priest ever conceived. It may well be the most powerful song of the rock and roll era. For spiritual magnitude, the best polyphonic Western music to which I could compare it, would be the “Requiem Aeternam”, “Kyrie Eleison” and “Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem, where, of course, he availed himself of words from the sacred tradition.

The secret of the power of “Instant Karma!” is not far to seek: the music and the delivery correspond with raw fidelity to its urgent message that judgment is sure, and glory is possible; that as we sow, we reap; and that we are responsible not only for our own lives but also for the lives of all those we affect and who we can affect.

The production of this song is now legendary: Lennon awoke on 27 January 1970, wrote it on the piano that morning, recorded it that evening with George Harrison (guitar), Phil Spector (producer), Klaus Voorman (bass) and Alan White (drums). On 6 February, it was available in stores, and on 11 February they performed it on Top of the Pops. For Lennon, the entire process was immediate, and this comes through in his voice and in the playing. Lennon keenly felt that he could, and even should, communicate directly with his audience. This idea was encouraged by Yoko Ono, whose own art sought, among other things, to forge an imaginative partnership between singer and audience.

Part of their thinking was that by producing topical singles like “Give Peace A Chance”, “Power to the People” and “Karma!” with a minimum of fuss, music could be as alive to the moment as a newspaper. Personally, I am not fond of “Give Peace A Chance”; to my ear it aims high but delivers low, especially in the verses, which are self-important when not meaningless. Yet, formidable critics such as Johnny Rogan relish it, so perhaps there is something in it I cannot hear. However, in the case of “Karma!”, I agree with the critics that Lennon struck gold, if not platinum. Like newspapers announcing the outbreak of war or the signing of peace, this is a bulletin of permanent value.

Two steely notes on piano into the first words, delivered by a man who sounds like he means them: “Instant Karma’s gonna get you!” This means, of course, that the results of what we have done remain with us. It means that there is justice, and that we will get our just deserts. For most of us, the outcome will be mixed. As Newman, I think, once remarked, most of us are worse than we could be but better than we might have been. And so it is that for almost each one of us, the reckoning will be bitter-sweet. As an aside, this fact of life demonstrates the sheer good sense and realism of the teaching of Purgatory – a teaching shared by Gurdjieff and mainstream Christians. This is yet another reason why, the more I study Gurdjieff, I see the main influence on him as being Greek Christianity, which holds the concept of Purgatory while rejecting that Latinate word.

This is not such a detour from Lennon as may seem, for in “Karma!”, the law of cause and effect works as a sort of Purgatory. First, in the verses, there comes the judgment, and then in the chorus, the exaltation. This, it seems to me, is how the song hangs together. The verses are chiefly, but not entirely, given over to warning and admonition, until they invite the addressees to believe that they are superstars – if they believe it:

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right on the head:
You better get yourself together,
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.
What in the world are you thinking of?
Laughing in the face of love!
What on earth are you trying to do?
It’s up to you – yeah you!

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna look you right in the face,
Better get yourself together, darling,
Join the human race.
How in the world are you going to see,
Laughing at fools like me?
Who on earth do you think you are?
A superstar?
Well alright, you are!

And then comes the chorus, almost deafening in its intensity:

Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Ev’ryone! come on!

The third verse adds force to the message, by declaring that we cannot possibly be here to spend our lives suffering. And then, asks Lennon, why do you limit yourself to one small place, one groove, one role, when you are made for greater things? He says:

Instant karma’s gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right off your feet
Better recognize your brothers,
Everyone you meet.
Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear.
Why on earth are you there,
When you’re everywhere?
Come and get your share.

Never before have I quoted much by way of repetitions, but I do so here so that one can at least see on the printed page how the hammer strikes the anvil:

Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on,
On and on and on, on and on.
Well, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.

And then, in a masterful touch, at about 2’ 56”, the song softens rather than fades out:

Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah, we all shine on …

Why masterful? Because the power is not lessened. One hears the decrescendo as a controlled performance. I repeat, it does not sound to me like a gradual fade: at the word “like”, Lennon lowers his voice for the rest of the piece. To me, the effect produced is, fancifully perhaps, as if the moon and the stars did not fade so much as they withdrew further back into the deeps of the sky.

My interpretation of the song as referring to judgment, justice, and mixed deserts, at least has this to commend it: it makes sense of the otherwise inexplicable gap between the condign punishment promised in the verses, and the celebratory chant of the chorus. Otherwise, surely, it would be contradictory to hurl thunderbolts, but then announce a general human apotheosis.

Commentators have noted that the chorus is based on the “Three Blind Mice” motif of three descending notes, which Lennon favoured in some of his greatest works, such as “All You Need Is Love”, “Imagine” and the poignant “My Mummy’s Dead”. The simplicity and the endless interest of the theme seem to me to be typical of Lennon’s genius. But there are more than just tricks in this song: there is depth. As Lennon explained later on:

… it occurred to me that karma is instant, as well, as it influences your past life or your future life. There really is a reaction to what you do now. That’s what people ought to be concerned about.

This insight that our actions affect the past as well as the future is an extraordinary one, involving as it does, the understanding that in each moment, our actions not only comprise the present, they determine the future by laying down the tracks upon which it will run, and they are the ever-changing connection with the past, for one knows the past by its effect, and we are that. To try and explain this, one could take Gurdjieff’s concept of “repairing the past”. I have dealt with this in George Adie, but to give an example which may clarify things: let us say that we have a neurosis, and we can say that the neurosis can be traced back to our parents’ behaviour. One could then say, “what the parents did was bad: it caused this neurosis”. But if the neurotic is healed, so that he is no longer neurotic, or at least not such a neurotic as he was, then one could say: “what the parents did was bad, but not as bad as we first thought, because the neurosis it caused was curable.” And so on: in this way we repair our past and even our parents’ mistakes, which is, as Gurdjieff said, an honour.

And so Lennon had this tremendous insight, that by taking action now we can remedy the crimes and errors of the past and build a better future. Taken as a whole, the song is a century of thought and wisdom in three minutes and about 23 seconds. It takes us from judgment and condign punishment to justification and exaltation.

But there is one more matter to mention before leaving: karma. Is karma in fact the notion of cause and effect, that one is one’s past and cannot escape it? What karma initially was, I don’t know, but Gurdjieff had an interesting view of it, retained (so far as I know) only in Ferapontoff’s Constantinople notes. This perspective states that the doctrine of karma was originally this:

Absolute conditioning of the smallest action. You have thought so far that you can do something. You can do absolutely nothing. You must understand that you are not, that you can change nothing (p. 29).

But, as with Lennon’s admonition that instant karma will hit us right in the face, this grim perspective is not the whole of the story, because if actions are totally conditioned, understanding is not:

To understand the situation is already a great thing and it is the first necessary step. Such understanding already includes a certain freedom. … What you call inaction would have been precisely a real possibility of action. In doing one must not create a new Karmic chain. … Unity means isolation from karma (pp. 29-30).

Now this was not quite Lennon’s understanding of karma, but it is, I think, a fuller one, and corresponds more perfectly to reality. We can see how the concepts are related. If karma is the conditioning of even the smallest action, then each action is the result of the past. If some freedom from karma is achieved by not starting a new karmic chain, then there is some sense in speaking of “good karma” and “bad karma”. But it is not so simple a thing as people imagine: good karma consists in consciousness, being, and doing for an aim, without identification. Bad karma is mechanical doing. So, in the end, while Lennon may not have understood all of this, he grasped, and he felt, that we are as we act, and this is a necessary corrective to an unbalanced emphasis on “being”.

Now, to return again to where we started, I had noted that even Lennon did not understand “Instant Karma!”. He was fortunate that something very fine came through him, that he was faithful to it, and served it. Something the same is possible when we have these moments of suchness. If I can sense my presence, I can bear the moment. If I cannot, it unsettles me, which is what I think happened with Van Gogh: he did not possess the inner strength to sustain what he saw. It is not enough to express these illuminations, although that certainly will help. They must be lived. And so the question is, then, how do we live?

This is an appropriate time to stop, but I shall pursue this in the next blog, when I look at two of Lennon’s uncompleted masterpieces, “Tennessee” and “Real Love”.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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