Good luck trying to kill our ego, but perhaps there are ways to help it send less May Day distress signals

 

    That hair piece was given to me by a good friend in Key West, who felt it needed a good home.

    I seem to be getting nudges to post more regularly at this blogspot, which hatched in 2017 after goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmorningfloridakeys.com were recalled by the factory. The title of this blog, A Fool’s Work Never Ends, seems to fit my often stranger than fiction meanderings.

    It’s not just because I clerked for a federal judge who presided over every federal criminal prosecution in north Alabama that I keenly follow the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump’s pecker in a New York State Court in Manhattan. I enjoy watching his Christian supporters in the U.S. Congress and across America keep trying to pretend God and Jesus trust in Trump as much as they do.

    After receiving today's Erik Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws Substack newsletter, where truth, beauty, love, irony, irreverence, etc. still breathe pretty good, I took a nap and dreamed of sex and woke up and wrote a comment which gets to that topic deep in the comment, and has do with with the spiritual sage G.I. Gurdjeff, mentioned by Alan Watts.

Transcending Yourself

By: Alan Watts

POETIC OUTLAWS

MAY 01, 2024

The following is a brief segment of a lecture Alan Watts gave on The Psychedelic Experience. 

The following is a brief segment of a lecture Alan Watts gave on The Psychedelic Experience. 

In a way, all consciousness-expanding drugs have something to do with death. Why? 

Because all spiritual disciplines are, as Jung pointed out, preparations for death. And every spiritual discipline involves a form of death, that is to say, of what is called dying to one’s self; what the Christians call dying daily, or being identified with the crucifixion of Christ. 

In the famous words of St. Paul, “I’m crucified with Christ, yet I live. But not I, for it is Christ that lives in me.” That is to say, he also uses the phrase “being baptized into Christ’s death.”

Now, that’s all very funny language to the modern mind, but it is a commonplace of these spiritual disciplines that what you do in them is die in the midst of life: you are born again a second time. And that death refers to the death of the ego—that is to say, you leave behind the state of consciousness in which you thought you were no more than an isolated individual center of consciousness. 

That drops back. 

And so, in that sense, you’ve died. And spiritual disciplines very often involve, as an aid to that, the contemplation of death. We think it’s rather ghoulish nowadays, but monks used to keep skulls on their desks. 

Buddhists meditate in graveyards. Hindu yogis meditate beside the burning ghats on the banks of the Ganges, where they are always confronted with death, knowing: this is going to happen to me. 

Gurdjieff once said that if anything would possibly save mankind from its idiocy, it would be the clearest possible recognition by every individual that he and all others around him are most certainly going to die.

Because this, when it becomes something perfectly clear to you, surprisingly becomes a source of intense joy and vitality. Because when you have accepted your own death in the midst of life, it means that you’ve let go of yourself, and you are therefore free. 

You are not any longer plagued by worry and anxiety. You know that you’re done for anyhow. So there’s no need constantly to fight to protect yourself—because what’s the point? 

And it isn’t just, you see, that people spend all their time really doing something to protect themselves—like, say, taking out an insurance policy or seeing that they eat properly—it’s what we do that doesn’t issue in any action at all: the constant inner worry, which leads to no action except more worry. And that is what is given up, you see, by a person who really knows that he’s dead. 

So do you see that transcending yourself, going on beyond your ego, is the great preparation for death?

Sloan Bashinsky

Alan Watts was refreshing. 

 

I think, though, without the ego, we would cease to function, for the ego is what does what we do after we wake up each morning :-). 

 

As for using psychedelics, many people have done that, and many people do it now. What happened to me was au natural, which quite a few people I knew, who had used psychedelics, could not believe.

Over time, I learned there are critters out there in the other realms, some very nasty, others opportunistic, that are pleased to hop onto psychedelic travelers and return to earth with them and be with them indefinitely. I told some people about that, and that it might be safer for them to trip with an adept shaman leading interference, who knows a bit about what’s out there and how to deal with it. 

 From all I read and heard and personally experienced, the spiritual path is the ego grows up, changes, as life’s servings show up- or that does not happen, and people stay the same- or maybe even regress, and I think that is what reincarnation is about.  

 

Saying it another way, my experience is the spiritual path is becoming someone new, reborn, so to speak, but not in the quick born again sense mainstream Christianity panders. In my wanderings, it wasn’t just one death of the old, but many, many deaths of the old. Along the way, I heard or read somewhere, “When we ruin our reputation, we can be free.” 

 

For it certainly does take a heap of effort to defend a reputation. And, it certainly does take a great deal of effort to try to be someone we are not, which our social, religious, political, educational upbringing made us become. 

 

Re Gurdjieff quoted by Watts, I got involved with a Gurdjieff group in my hometown Birmingham, Alabama, via my publicist for my early books, which were written for people buying and selling homes and using lawyers. The leader of the group, about my father’s age, was a physician. He and his students referred to Gurdjieff as “Mr. Gurdjeiff”. Over time, I read and was fascinated by Gurdjieff’s books, Meetings With Remarkable Men, Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandchildren, and Life Is Only Real Then, When I Am, which ended in mid-sentence, because he died before completing it. 

In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff is himself when he was young and not very far along and himself after some ego adjusting. Beelzebug says humans are three-brain beings: a brain in the skull, a brain in the heart, and a brain in the solar plexus. He describes several saints who tried to help humanity, some well known, others not. He says, of all of those saints, the one whose teachings has the best chance of helping humanity is St. Jesus. When I mentioned that to my publicist, she looked like she had been jolted by a cattle prod. 

When I lived in Boulder, Colorado in the early 1990s, the heavens opened to me in many ways, mostly brilliant, but some not at all pretty. Looking back, two poems that leaped out of me jump-started it.

"Living Poets" 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets never stop singing it 

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life 

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself 

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will 

(1991)

"The Mockingbird" 

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing its fool head off –

I asked it how and why it sang?

But all it did was look ahead,

all it did was sing.

It never turned to see if I was watching,

or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

or asked if I liked its music,

or expected a recording contract –

It was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

(1992)

The really rough stuff, internally and externally, would show up after I moved back to Birmingham in 1995. Not quite as rough has continued to now, but the never-ending course in mirrors angels imposed on me began in Boulder.

In Boulder, I read the fascinating book On a Spaceship With Beelzebub: By a Grandson of Gurdjieff, by professional writer David Kherdian. The book is about his Kherdian’s time in a Gurdjieff group in New York City, and what it was like to leave that group, what he learned about doing The Work, which is what spiritual work is called in esoterica circles, and about Kherdian’s time later with a Gurdjieff group in the Pacific Northwest of America, and what it was like to leave that group. As Kherdian described it, it looked to me like leaving a cult, and it was pretty interesting what he wrote about how the two group leaders behaved over his leaving them. 

The main thing I took away from the Gurdjieff group in Birmingham and Khedian about The Work was, when something punches my buttons, I should try not to react, and I should try to sit with the emotions, because it strengthens my will over time. My publicist in Birmingham told me that patience is the mother of will. That also is the method presented in A Course in Miracles, which says anyone really acting out is actually screaming for help!  

 

I bumped into that stewing in emotions method many times in situations with people on the spiritual path, and I thought that method explained why Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek and loving and praying for one’s enemies. Lot easier said than done, of course.

In Boulder, I met a man and a woman involved in a Gurdjieff spin-off group. The man was a lawyer, and one day he told me his dream had come true via the group leader, who was a man, becoming his partner. The woman came to me hoping I could help her wean from that group, and when she eventually asked me if I was coming on to her sexually, I said I was married and had all on my plate in that regard that I could handle. My sense was she was sexually involved in the group, and she was having a hard time leaving it, but she wanted to leave it. How it finally turned out for her, I don’t know.

I met people people, who had belonged to different spiritual groups in which the group leader, eg. guru, had sex with his/her students. Those people seemed to me to be really struggling with being who they really were. it was as if they were possessed by their teacher, and getting over that was not easy, or for some of them even possible.

After moving back to Birmingham from Key West in 2019, I met the granddaughter of the man who led the Gurdjieff group in Birmingham. She told me that it was well known in Gurdjieff circles that he produced babies with his female students. I grinned and said I wondered why I never heard about that when I was in the group? She grinned and said they felt it was disrespectful to “Mr. Gurdjieff” to speak of it.

As for using psychedelics, many people have done that, and many people do it now. What happened to me was au natural, which quite a few people I knew, who had used psychedelics, l could not believe.

Over time, I learned there are critters out there in the other realms, some very nasty, others opportunistic, that are pleased to hop onto psychedelic travelers and return to earth with them and be with them indefinitely. I told some people about that, and that it might be safer for them to trip with an adept shaman leading interference, who knows a bit about what’s out there and how to deal with it.

    I wonder how many MAGA women secretly wish Donald Trump would have sex with them?

    In 2004, I highjacked Meetings With Remarkable Men's title for A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known, which got attaboys from most people I knew, who read it, which wasn’t how my other books about the spiritual path were generally received by people I knew, who read them :-). The “He Was a Parish Priest” chapter is about the pastor of my mother’s Episcopal Church, who told his vestrymen, if they turned away blacks who wanted to worship at the church, he would close the church. A free read, no ads, no soliciting, at the internet library,  https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210, and at its blogspot, https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-few-remarkable-alabama-peoplei-have.html

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com