Quest Magazine

JAMES ISHMAEL FORD
Wisdom Publications, 2018. 248 pp., paper, $17.95.

Of course the bird we see and hear exists. It exists, but what I mean by that may not be exactly what you mean.

—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

To come across one good book on a topic like emptiness is what I would call a blessing. To get two is a major blessing!

Emptiness is hard to understand, even though it is a central component of religious teaching. The computer mouse I use feels hard to touch, and my mindfulness training says to feel the hardness and the smooth surface. How do I know that it is empty?

Guy Armstrong, a guiding teacher at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, has written a book that is practical and easy to follow, especially for beginners, and includes several meditations. The book is in four parts: “Self,” “Phenomena,” “Awareness,” and “Compassion.” The first three parts are based on traditional Buddhist schools, mostly the Theravada Pali canon. The last part is more contemporary.

Emptiness, a translation of the Sanskrit word shunyata, can have a number of meanings. The Buddha discerned that human experience is empty of a self. A present-day interpretation points to a state of mind where we are “in touch with the present moment and not preoccupied with wants, needs, or issues of past or future.”

The section on “Self” is detailed and profoundly enlightening. When we say self, we are saying I, me, and mine. The Buddha said one can use these words, but one should not be confused. The world is empty of self, and the two understandings, absence of self and emptiness, are synonymous.

How do we relate this to our day-to-day experience? There are six ways: our body; ourselves as owners of our body; our emotions; ourselves as owner of our emotions; as an observer; and all of the above. How do these experiences align with the four basic assumptions associated with the self: continuity (we think self is permanent), control (we think self has control over body and mind), independence (we think “I” am seeing), and singleness (we believe we are one person and not two)? The self, as a combination of body, mind, owner, and observer, fails the test of the assumptions. Our experiences are changing moment to moment, and our notion of control is an illusion. What is real, then?

The Buddha said that what makes up a person is the six sense bases and the five aggregates of form, feelings, perceptions, volitional formations, and consciousness. The question again is, are these valid grounds for validation of self, or for some kind of ownership? This points us to a basic cycle: we own because we desire. We become attached because we desire. We suffer when things inevitably change or are broken or die. The great Thai forest master Ajahn Chah explained, referring to a glass of water he had: “You say, ‘don’t break my glass!’ Can you prevent something that is breakable from breaking? If it doesn’t break now, it will break later. If you don’t break it, someone else will. When someone else doesn’t, one of the chickens will. When you use this glass, you should reflect that it is already broken. . . . Develop this understanding. Use the glass, look after it, until one day, it slips out of your hand and breaks. . . . ‘Smash!’. . . no problem. Why is there no problem? Because you saw its brokenness before it broke.”

This is the key to understanding emptiness. How do we assimilate it? Armstrong helps us by giving practical instruction in vipassana, insight meditation. As Anagarika Munindra said, “If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.” We deconstruct our illusions and then see things as they are. Armstrong gives a profound description of how observing autopsies in a local hospital in Bangkok gave him a different insight into our experiences.

The final step in our understanding of emptiness or no-self is to go beyond self. We leave behind blind identifications and develop the three qualities that Armstrong says have the capacity to help us bear the burden of emptiness: compassion, patience, and faith. We practice wholesome action by becoming aware in six different ways: before we act; while we act; after we have acted; in our relationships; in habitual behaviors; and also in mysterious ways we don’t understand. We use karma to change karma and then to end karma! This is called “abiding in emptiness.”

The section “Phenomena” returns us to the realm of the objects of the six senses and asks: in what way do they exist? How do they arise and pass away? The Buddha gave a discourse called A Lump of Foam to address the emptiness of phenomena. Everything is void, hollow, and as insubstantial as a lump of foam on a river.

Armstrong also talks about the seeming paradox in emptiness. Things exist, but they don’t really exist. The Heart Sutra states, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

James Ishmael Ford’s Introduction to Zen Koans leads us to the land of paradox. The word koan is frequently translated as puzzle or riddle. I like Aitken Roshi’s meaning: “a matter to be cleared.” The language of koans is called the “language of the dragons” because it can be enlightening as well as terrifying at times. It is the language of the opposites. Zen Master Huineng had this advice: “If in questioning you, someone asks about being, answer with non-being. If he asks about non-being, answer with being. If she asks about the ordinary person, answer in terms of the sage. If she asks about the sage, answer in terms of the ordinary person. By this method of opposites mutually related there arises the understanding of the Middle way. For every question that you are asked, respond in terms of its opposite.”

Ford’s book is divided in three parts: “The Heart of Zen,” “The Practices of Zen,” and “Living Zen.” Ford is a great storyteller; he makes koan practice approachable and not so much like working with the dragons. He quotes Zen Master Seung Sahn’s example of what emptiness means: “Here is a wooden chair. It is brown. It is solid and heavy. It looks like it could last a long time. You sit in the chair and it holds up your weight. You can place things on it. But then you light the chair on fire and leave. When you come back later, the chair is no longer there! This thing that seemed so solid and strong and real is now just a pile of cinder and ash, which the wind blows around. This example shows how the chair is empty: it is not a permanent, abiding thing. It is always changing. It has no independent existence. Over a long or short time, the chair will eventually change and become something other than what it appears. So this brown chair is complete emptiness. But though it always has the quality of emptiness, this emptiness is form: you can sit in the chair, and it will still hold you up.”

Zen practice requires three things: great doubt, great faith, and great determination. The most famous koan is Zhaozhou’s mu. A student comes to Zhaozhou and asks, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Zhaozhou replies, “Mu.” Mu means no, but that is not all. It is an invitation to delve into Great Emptiness. It means, “Although it is, it isn’t and although it isn’t, it is.”

I am tempted to ask: Ajahn Chah’s glass of water and Seung Sahn’s brown chair—are they the same or different? The two books would answer.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.

Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch over Human Destiny

MARK STAVISH
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2018. xviii + 140 pp., paper, $16.99.

It is a basic Theosophical idea: thoughts are things. Although mental images have no physical substance, they are composed of a subtle mind-stuff sometimes called the astral light. Most of them are evanescent: they have no independent life or power. But if a certain kind of energy is directed toward them, they can gain power and cause effects in the physical world.

If this is true of individuals’ thoughts, it must be even more true of thoughts that are held by many people. Egregore is the name for these collective thought-forms. It comes from the Greek grēgoréō, to be awake or to watch. It appears to have been coined by the French author Victor Hugo, who uses it in the first part of his poem La légende des siècles (“The Legend of the Centuries”), published in 1859. Hugo describes one character who “knows the art of evoking demons, vampires, and egregores.”

As Mark Stavish points out in his new book, the term was popularized soon after by the occultist Éliphas Lévi, who connected it with the mysterious “watchers” mentioned in the pseudepigraphal text 1 Enoch. They were supposedly the sons of God who lusted after the daughters of men, cryptically mentioned in Genesis 6:2. From Lévi, the idea made its way into the French occult tradition called Martinism.

But it was Russian esotericism that brought the concept to the fore. Grigorii Osipovich Mebes (1861–1930), a Freemason and Martinist, is virtually unknown in the West, but he has been extraordinarily influential through the work of two of his disciples: Dymitr Sudowski (1898–1966), who, using the pen name Mouni Sadhu, wrote the widely read book The Tarot, and Valentin Tomberg (1900–73), author of the anonymously published but acclaimed Meditations on the Tarot. It is not quite clear how Mebes viewed egregores, but his disciples gave them a great deal of attention. Mouni Sadhu describes how they are created:

Imagine that an intelligent and well-disposed man, who is able to concentrate, is thinking about a good idea, giving it a certain form. He may then find others, who have the same or similar ideas, and so a circle of men may come into being, who are all thinking along the same lines but in a different form. It is as if every one of them is repeating the drawing of a plan, placing a pencil again and again along the same contours. The thing grows in strength, develops an astrosome [astral body] and becomes an “Egregor” or collective entity.

Mouni Sadhu believed that there could be both good and bad egregores, but Tomberg did not: to him, egregores were always bad. In fact he discusses them in his chapter on the Tarot trump of the Devil. For Tomberg, the meaning of the Devil card is (in Stavish’s words) “to illustrate how individuals can lose their freedom to an entity that they or others have generated—an entity that is an artificial being whose creator becomes its slave.” Mouni Sadhu cites as examples nations, states, religions, and “even minor human organizations.” We could add political parties and sports and celebrity fandom.

The subtitle speaks of “occult entities that watch over human destiny.” That is, egregores can be more than simple collective thought-forms. They can also be, in Stavish’s words, “the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with the material world” (emphasis his). They are not necessarily mere creatures of imagination. They can serve as astral vehicles by which supernatural entities can interact with us.

Stavish gives a brief but engaging history of the concept in modern times, taking us from horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, with his tales of the “Old Ones,” to the Italian esotericist Julius Evola, to the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), to Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich. An appendix from a 1929 Italian esoteric magazine edited by Evola even describes a ritual reviving the egregore of ancient Rome around the time of World War I. A message was conveyed to a Milanese newspaper publisher saying, “You will be Consul of Italy.” The publisher was Benito Mussolini. After Mussolini’s famous March on Rome in 1922, we are told, “a person clothed in red came forward and handed him a Fasces.” Thus was the fasces—originally the symbol of the Roman republic (it is still displayed in the U.S. House of Representatives)—transposed into a symbol of totalitarianism.

Stavish includes a useful chapter on freeing oneself from egregores. One technique, taken from Meditations on the Tarot, involves making the sign of the cross in the four directions and reciting Psalm 68:1–2: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.” Additionally, “one must spin three times to the left and cross oneself.” A less august method, discussed by scholar of esotericism Joscelyn Godwin, is “therapeutic blasphemy.” For those enslaved by degenerate forms of Christianity, Stavish writes, this might involve “a period of public denunciation of Christianity. . . . Otherwise they are doomed to remain perpetually under the thrall of the cult of the creed-making fishermen.”

The idea of egregores could inspire paranoia in a certain kind of personality, and of course that is unwise. But it is no doubt a good idea to remember that false idols can take the form of thoughts and ideas as well as objects. Stavish’s book is a timely, intelligent, and enjoyable reminder of this truth.

Richard Smoley 

 A Russian esotericist informs me that Mouni Sadhu’s book is based on Svyashchennaya kniga Tota: Velikiye arkany (“The Holy Book of Thoth: The Major Arcana”), by Vladimir Shmakov, published in Moscow in 1916. To my knowledge this work is not available in English, except in automatic translations.

The Gurdjieff Movements: A Communication of Ancient Wisdom

by WIM VAN DULLEMEN
Chino Valley, Calif.: Hohm Press, 2018. 286 pp., paper, $24.95.

Since his death in 1949, the life and work of the influential and enigmatic Greco-Armenian spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff has been the subject of many books, but few have focused on his extraordinary contribution to sacred dance, known to Gurdjieff students as the Movements. In his new book, Wim van Dullemen, a longtime student of the Gurdjieff teaching (known as the Gurdjieff Work), emphasizes the importance of the Movements to Gurdjieff’s spiritual legacy.

The book is divided in two parts. The first summarizes Gurdjieff’s background and his adventurous life, touching on his vision of an awakened consciousness in human beings. The precise date of his birth is unknown, but it was sometime between 1866 and 1877. He was born in Alexandropol, now Gyumri, Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire. From a young age, he sought to understand the mystery of human existence, traveling throughout Asia and perhaps to Tibet to find answers.

Gurdjieff’s teaching is embodied in what he called the Fourth Way, which stresses the urgency of overcoming the “sleep” or the deadening hypnosis of ordinary life. Dullemen summarizes Gurdjieff’s written work, as well as his relationships with noted students like P.D. Ouspensky, A.R. Orage, and J.G. Bennett. He highlights the various transmissions of Gurdjieff’s teaching after his death by leading students.

The second half of the book concentrates on Gurdjieff’s spiritual legacy through his music and especially the Movements, shedding new light on their history and early choreography. Although the Movements are considered a form of sacred dance, they do not fit into any traditional category of dance. Relying on his extensive travels through Central Asia and his study of its sacred dances, including dervish dancing, Gurdjieff created something original, unlike anything previously seen in the West. How they became known as Movements rather than a collection of sacred dances is unknown, but Gurdjieff introduced them to his students in the early 1920s, perhaps as early as 1919.

In short, the Movements are a repertoire of hundreds of rhythmic dances, poses, and exercises. When performed, they are accompanied by Gurdjieff’s unconventional and stirring piano music, composed in collaboration with Gurdjieff’s student, Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann. They became known to the general public in 1979, when British director Peter Brook included them in his film Meetings with Remarkable Men, based on Gurdjieff’s book of the same title. As Dullemen points out, the Movements shown in the film were chosen by Gurdjieff’s foremost student and Movements teacher, Jeanne de Salzmann.          

Broadly speaking, the aim of the Movements is to free certain energies in the body in order to experience unity and harmony within. This encounter with a greater level of awareness can even connect the dancer to the cosmos itself. Thus the Movements are said to embody a hidden language which transcends the spoken or written word. This idea is amplified by the subtitle of Dullemen’s book, A Communication of Ancient Wisdom, and he suggests that the Movements are a bridge to a higher state of consciousness, if only temporarily.

Dullemen is at his best when he explores how the practice of the Movements can integrate the body, the emotions, and the mind into a silent, unified whole, capable of receiving a more subtle energy. He elegantly describes what can happen when performing the Movements with sustained inner attention: “A silence occurs in the dancer’s inner self. . . . Each moment is lent a certain timelessness, and even the walls of the hall in which the work is taking place appear to dissolve into a space without boundaries—a space in which the past and future no longer exclude each other.” He doesn’t claim that this is a common occurrence, only that it is possible under the right conditions.

For those who are interested in a historical survey of the Movements, their mathematical underpinnings, and their ongoing importance to the Gurdjieff Work, this book is valuable and worthwhile. Dullemen is adept at presenting what the Movements can evoke in the human body, and he is unequivocal in his view that they are the living expression of an ancient wisdom that can lead to self-transformation.

Cynthia Overweg

Cynthia Overweg is an educator, writer, and retreat leader. She is a frequent contributor to Quest. Her website is www.cynthiaoverweg.com.

Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

DIANA BUTLER BASS
San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018. 224 pp., hardcover, $17.70.

Are you grateful? I have read several books on gratitude and thought I was. After reading Grateful, I was struck with a new appreciation for the expansiveness of this topic. Grateful takes experiences from history, contemporary events, and the author’s life to help the reader become more aware of how gratitude occurs in life.

The author possesses a Ph.D. in religious studies, with an emphasis on American church history. She served as a college professor before becoming an independent scholar, and has written and published ten books.

I found Bass to use humor and sincerity in just the right proportions for me to comprehend her perspective. For example, while she was growing up, her mother insisted that she write thank-you notes for gifts. But like many children, she didn’t want to do it. One Christmas she received an etiquette book with a bookmark conspicuously placed at the beginning of a chapter on writing thank-you notes. She got the hint but still did not write them.

After becoming a mother herself, Bass tried to instill the importance of writing thank-you notes in her daughter. But she was not thrilled about the task either, instead responding with phone calls or emails. When those fizzled out, Bass began to wonder if ingratitude was part of their DNA. Realizing she knew little about this subject, she began conducting extensive research on gratitude in psychology and science.

The book was based on studies of the emotional complexity of the electorate going into the 2016 election. Americans were angry, fearful, and divided. Acts of violence occurred as a result of the intense rallies and speeches in the political arena. Today there seems to be a cultural argument about the nature of gratitude. Political candidates or elected officials can make donations or do favors in order to receive help later from the recipient. This can result in a corruption of gratitude: the ruler inevitably ends up sitting at the top of the organization’s pyramid, relegating the poor and those with little power to the bottom. But gratitude should not be a weapon or tool to control the masses or maintain power. The ultimate goal would be to have a politics where everyone is at the table of gratitude.

Rather than a debt or a duty, gratitude should be a gift of genuine thankfulness and goodwill. When expressed gracefully, it does not impose any obligations upon the recipient.

The author describes how many spiritual traditions avoid treating gratitude as quid pro quo or debt. For example, she uses the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1–7 to explain her point. Jesus was always surrounded by big groups of people who wanted to hear his teachings and to see and experience his miracles. Zacchaeus, who was wealthy and the head tax collector of Jericho, was a short man. He climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus over the crowds.

Jesus called to Zacchaeus, told him to come down, and said he would go to his home for a meal. Zacchaeus obliged. They met at a place of common ground by sitting at the table. The presence of Jesus inspired Zacchaeus to give back half of his wealth and pay back the people he had defrauded. A miracle happened, and Zacchaeus reclaimed his gratefulness.

What I got the most out of this book was the author’s recommendation on how to be constantly aware of gratitude. It could be the appreciation of the sun shining, a lost pet returning home, or treating others with respect and compassion.

The author also mentions a gift her husband gave her. It was a hat with an inscription that seems to sum up her book. It reads: “Make America Grateful Again.”

Marie Otte

Marie Otte is a writer, meditation teacher, and astrologer. Her work has appeared in Quest, DreamNetWork.net and Satvidya.