SEEING AN OSCAR-WINNING SCREENWRITER VISIONS

THE UNSEEN ON SEEING THE TRUTH AND ILLUSIONS

Parabola {Where Spiritual Traditions Meet}

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 PARABOLA { Where Spiritual Traditions Meet }

SEEING
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 FALL 2011

6 WHERE'S THE TEMPLE? Trebbe Johnson

In which the author opens "a doorway into the world beyond the known"
➛
14 ILLUSIONS James Opie
Quite a bargain, that grand old painting...or was it?

18 CHERRY TREE BLOSSOM James Whitlow Delano

Amid the devastation of the tsunami, hope and beauty bloom

24 THE UNSEEN RIVER Joyce Kornblatt

Peering into the sacred heart of things

32 THE COSMIC METABOLISM OF FORM Christian Wertenbaker

A meditation on a "great cosmic ecology of consciousness"
➛
38 LOOKING WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY
A conversation with acclaimed artist Jane Rosen

46 SEEING IS AN ACT Jeanne de Salzmann

Rare wisdom on "how to see"

48 AWAKENING SIGHT David Ulrich

What happens when a professional photographer loses an eye?

62 DIGGING DEEPER
A conversation with Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal
➛
66 "SEEING" BY ZEN MASTER DOGEN Kazuaki Tanahashi
Commentary on, and original translation of, the great Zen icon

74 DIONYSOS George Latura Beke

There, in the skies: A golden pathway to the heavens

80 HUGH BROCKWILL RIPMAN Martha Heyneman

Introducing a remarkable spiritual teacher

82 THE EYES OF THE SOUL Hugh Brockwill Ripman

An unforgettable story about crossing the threshold to Reality
 original art by
Kazuaki Tanahashi

88 THE SILENT WITNESS Hugh Brockwill Ripman

Questions, and answers from a man who knows

94 SEEING AND THE YOGA SUTRA Dolphi Wertenbaker

Toward freedom of seeing

EPICYCLE
28 NOMAD GIRL Anonymous | Tibetan Buddhist
Retold by Barbara H. Berger

POETRY
56 VANISHING POINT Tina Schumann
57 SPRING FOR EDWIN Linda Ann Suddarth
58 ANCIENT FRENCH ART HISTORY
LESSONS IN GLASS-ENCASED POOL Anna Roach
59 ~REFRACTION~ Leila A. Fortier

ARCS
60 I LOOKED UP

TANGENTS
100 "GOD AS A VERB" Ron Starbuck
A review of Paul F. Knitter's book WITHOUT BUDDHA I COULD NOT BE A CHRISTIAN, and a
conversation with the author
110 SEEING ART Patty de Llosa
A review of Alexandra Isle's film HIDDEN TREASURES, and a conversation with the filmmaker

BOOK REVIEW
116 EMINENT GURDJIEFFIANS: LORD PENTLAND
James Moore | reviewed by Stephen A. Grant

128 ENDPOINT
 EDITOR & PUBLISHER Jeff Zaleski
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The parabola represents the epitome of a
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ticular point, and then back home, along a
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ty: as in a satellite dish, all parallel beams of
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VOLUME 36, NO. 3, FALL 2011
 FOCUS | From the Editor

“FOR NOW WE SEE THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
This passage from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians sums up
the human condition. As we are, we see the world, ourselves, and the
sacred only dimly. But greater clarity and depth of seeing is possible,
Paul promises—as does every major spiritual tradition. And when we
see and know more, it is said, the universe will respond, and know us
as well.
And so this Fall 2011 issue of PARABOLA is devoted to the critical
act of seeing. The bold image on our cover, drawn by artist and
translator Kazuaki Tanahashi, means “see” in Japanese script. Within
the colorful pages that follow, Mark Boal, Oscar-winning screenwriter
and producer of THE HURT LOCKER, talks to us about film as a means
to realize truth, and sculptor Jane Rosen speaks of seeing as an act
of attentiveness that involves body, mind, and feeling. The issue also
features a stunning portfolio by master photographer James Whitlow
Delano, who allows us to perceive beauty and hope among the
devastations of the recent tsunami in Japan, as well as photographs
and memoir by another noted photographer, David Ulrich, that
reveal the suffering and incandescent beauty that can accompany
deeper seeing.
These and other contributors offer spiritual insight as well as
visual. Here theologian Paul F. Knitter explores how two great faiths,
Christianity and Buddhism, can shed light upon one another, and in a
special section, writer and teacher Hugh Brockwill Ripman offers
illuminations through story and Socratic dialogue. In the issue’s
featured book review, a longtime student of two of G.I. Gurdjieff’s
foremost pupils offers revelations about that spiritual master’s legacy.
Poetry, too, can provide memorable visions, and this issue
introduces what we hope will be a recurrent highlight of PARABOLA—
poems from an array of voices that, we anticipate, will have readers
singing with joy. All are invited to submit poems to us; for details,
please visit www.parabola.org.
May this issue of PARABOLA help each of us to see and to be seen.
—JEFF ZALESKI

SUMMER 2011 | 5
 “Where's The Temple?”:
Seeing Behind the Foreground
Trebbe Johnson
A PROFOUND LESSON IN SEEING was revealed to me many years
ago, on the evening of the midsummer day I moved into an old
stone cottage in the Berkshire Downs of England. The event
lasted only a few seconds, but it showed me a key to spying the
wondrous amidst its camouflage.
I was in the upstairs room of the cottage, standing before
open casement windows that overlooked a wild, long-untended
flower garden and creating a writing desk for myself out of an
old wooden door and two sturdy crates. The June nights came
on slowly that far north, but the downs were finally settling into
shadow. At the periphery of my attention, then, something
glowed, and I looked up from my adjustments on the desk to see
what it was. A patch of lilies, star-white by day, now flared silver

6 | PARABOLA

in the bluing twilight. All the plants in
the garden had faded to dark except the
lilies, which looked, at that moment,
as if they were radiating back into the
oncoming night some of the sun they
had absorbed by day. And then, as I
marveled at this botanical perseverance,
the lilies were extinguished. The color
simply faded, and all the garden was
plunged into night.
I felt I had witnessed something
extraordinary, a cosmic process I had
not been meant to see. It was as if I had
Mantoku-ji Temple,
Obama, Japan
peeked for an instant through a crack
in a door and beheld an exalted place
like a queen’s palace or a lama’s cave.
If I had looked up just seconds earlier
or seconds later, I would not have been
privy to the sight of lilies holding the
last light of day and would not have
seen that light drain out of them. And
in that instant I understood that if I
were to pay attention to the spaces
between and just behind the things I
thought I needed to look at, there was
no limit to what I might witness.
FALL 2011 | 7
 Barns near Berkshire Downs, England
THERE IS A DOORWAY into the world
beyond the known. At least that’s what
I believed as a child. I was always on the
lookout for it—glancing sideways at
nesting birds, climbing trees and
pretending I lived there, cracking the
ice on ponds and puddles, staring at one
spot in the sky. I thought if I could just
catch nature from the right oblique
angle, I would spy the workings of God.
It’s human to probe the mystery, not
just as children, but all our lives and in
many ways. We long to peer into the
remote and inaccessible, because we
imagine those elusive places to be more
exalted than the common areas we pass
through easily. They seem to hold a
truth that, because it is unknown, must
therefore be lofty and magnificent, and
that, once tapped, will be part of us as
well. The mountain climber drawn to
high peaks, the Native American
Church member who ingests peyote to
align with spirit, the artist trying to
manifest a more revealing view of
reality, the scientist who explores the
micro- and macro-universes, and all
who question, practice, probe for the
path they’ll know only when they step
onto it—all are on similar searches.
8 | PARABOLA
They aspire to perceive the unknown
world more clearly and experience it
more intimately. Humans are endowed
with what Jung called “divine curiosity,”
which “yearns to be born and does not
shrink from conflict, suffering, or sin.”1
Jung was talking about consciousness
here, about how hauling the
unconscious into the bright air of
consciousness sates this divine curiosity.
But you could say that we are all seized
to a greater or lesser degree by a divine
curiosity that makes us feel we’re just on
the verge of perceiving the one thing
that will clarify and even redeem
everything else.
Yet the secret world, the keepers of
the mystery, whether birds, gods, oil
paint, supernovas, or people with shady
pasts, are often loathe to share their
secrets with the mortal curious. Myth,
legend, and lore remind us of this truth
over and over. When Actaeon witnessed
the goddess Artemis at her bath, she
punished him by turning him into a stag,
and his own hunting dogs tore him to
bits. Psyche lost her beloved Eros when
she shone a light on his mysterious form
after she had promised never to look on
him, and when Bluebeard’s wife peeked
into the room that her husband had Homage to you, Best of Gods!
forbidden her to enter, she inadvertently Be gracious! I want to know you
enrolled herself as the next corpse to be as you are in your beginning.
I do not comprehend
stowed there. Lot’s wife became petrified
the course of your ways.3
into a pillar of salt when she turned back
to glimpse her city of Sodom one last I thought of Arjuna, dashed and
time. And everyone knows that a person sizzling after being granted the vision he
who finds his or her way into the realm so longed for, when I read about the
of fairy and later leaves, either by escape epiphany of the self-trained nineteenth-
or permission, will instantly age a century scholar George Smith. He was
hundred years upon returning to the in the British Museum poring over
world he assumed he’d left behind only ancient clay tablets when the barbed wall
days before. These and other audacious of cuneiform suddenly parted, and he
humans and their terrible fates are cited understood that what he was reading
by the cautious as proof that those who was a tale of the Flood. He was so
peer into what is forbidden, invisible, and excited by his discovery that he leaped
impenetrable will be punished. From up and started tearing off his clothes.
Prometheus, who stole fire from the And then, after he had calmed down a
gods and offered it to the world, to the bit, he returned to his work and
Renaissance painter Caravaggio, whose continued to penetrate the text that,
“Death of the Virgin” was condemned thanks to him, was soon to become
for “realism bordering on blasphemy,”2 known to the world as THE EPIC OF
to contemporary scientists exploring GILGAMESH.4
stem-cell medicine—those who attempt
Partial clay tablet,
to see into the murky frontiers beyond Epic of Gilgamesh, The British Museum, London
the known and drag a new
known into the light are often
considered dangerous.
If the gods do permit a
human a glimpse of the sublime,
it can be too much. In the
MAHABHARATA, when Arjuna begs
to see Krishna in his divine form,
the god consents, but warns
Arjuna that he is going to
provide him with a “divine eye,”
since no human could withstand
an unmitigated view of such
splendor. Even so equipped,
Arjuna is terrified by the vision
that appears before him—and
even then, he longs for more:
Tell me—
who are you
in this terrible form?

FALL 2011 | 9
 Columbia Crest, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
IT’S NOT JUST THE GENIUS or the
personal friend of a god who can be
privy to great visions. Sometimes all it
takes is looking just to the side of the
obvious. Seeing the lilies in the garden
extinguish the light of day was a boon,
especially happening as it did on my first
night at the cottage. Beginning the next
morning, I took walks every day in the
woods, hills, and fields, and then I’d
stop walking and simply wait and look.
Eventually, invariably, something
amazing would happen: the reflection of
a hawk flew over a pond, the wind
chased the clouds across the field, a fox
dashed through the snow, a single red
berry twirled crazily on the end of a
vine. This way of seeing accompanied
me throughout that year in England and
during several dark years back in New
York, and it has informed the work I do,
which stems from exploring how simple
and profound it is to spend time in
10 | PARABOLA
nature, both wild and wounded, and
pay attention to what arises within and
without. I have never forgotten the
lesson of the lilies, for it is valid
everywhere, and not just in nature
either. I have been granted access to
amazement in a subway, a recycling
center, a plane, even a funeral home.
As John Berger, who has widely
explored the avenues of seeing, has
written: “Not to say that behind
appearances is the truth, the Platonic
way. It is very possible that visibility is
the truth and that what lies outside
visibility are only the ‘traces’ of what has
been or will become visible.”5
Japanese designers build the interplay
of the visible and invisible into the
gardens they create. The aesthetic
principle of miegakure, or “hide and
reveal,” celebrates the ever-shifting
delights of overlapping perspective along
the path that meanders through the
garden, so that only a slim glimpse of
rock, tree, or waterfall is visible at any
one time. It is said that miegakure
imparts vastness to a small space. Like
fresh neuronal pathways in the brain, the
garden path constantly presents the
visitor with impressions that rise afresh
and in an ever-new relationship to other
impressions. All the way along,
something is a little bit hidden and
something is a little bit revealed. You
never know what vision, what insight,
will emerge, and from where.
When we see, the world enters us.
And, contrary to what we may assume,
it does not flow from eyes to brain as a
stream of purely objective data. We
build the gates that receive our world
and can rebuild them at any time. The
neuronal pathways that inform how and
what we see are plastic, and they change
and adapt not just when we are young,
but throughout our lives. When
neurons that are highly connected, or
“facilitated,” are repeatedly stimulated,
they require relatively little input to fire
and so pass the signal of recognition
on to the next neuron, and so on,
deeper into the network. Laura Sewall,
ecologist and author of SIGHT AND
SENSIBILITY, writes that, like fish
swimming through rocks in the sea, the
pattern of firing wants to
take the path of least
resistance. We see what
we’re used to seeing,
what we expect to see.
However, vision can
change. “Plasticity is not
simply a matter of
developmental phase.
More essentially, it’s the
act of attending (the
amount of ‘arousal,’ in
traditional neurophysical
terms) that makes the critical difference.
It is being as excited as a child and as
mindful as an adult that makes all the
difference.”6 In order to see the
unfamiliar, the beckoning, the truly
revelatory, we need to open up new
pathways for those neurons. We need to
look between the lines, nod to the
obvious and then glance quickly to the
side where the not-so-obvious resides.
The Lakota holy man Black Elk
taught the spiritual version of this
scientific truth when, speaking about
hanblecheyapi, the ceremony of crying
for a vision, he emphasized that the
person who fasts in the wilderness in
hopes of receiving guidance from the
sacred world “must be alert to recognize
any messenger which the Great Spirit
may send to him, for these people often
come in the form of an animal, even one
as small and as seemingly insignificant as
a little ant.”7 In other words, don’t get
so fixated on what you want to see or
what’s easy to see that you miss what’s
right before you and doing its best to
get your attention.
The old tales remind us subtly yet
repeatedly of the importance of turning
our full gaze to those impressions that
dance at the periphery. So many stories
are about the quest, of course, the
Hanblecheyapi, GrandPaTree, New Mexico
FALL 2011 | 11

Mountain Peaks, Lahul, India
search for that one hidden treasure that
will once again bring harmony to the
world. But the heroines and heroes who
are open to the unexpected along the
way and respond appropriately to it are
far more likely to succeed than the ones
who see only what they’ve determined is
worthy of their attention and reject
everything else. The person who pauses
to give water to an old woman or delays
a critical journey in order to help an
animal is the one we admire and root
for. He’s the one who bears a sensitivity
to the whole world; she’s the one who
insists that there is always time to veer
off course when something vital
beckons. Beauty and epiphany bide
their time in the sidewise glance.
RECENTLY, on a gray, rainy afternoon on
the island of Bali, a place I visit every
year, I impulsively asked my driver, Eka
Merta Sedana, to take me to Tanah Lot.
I had never been to this temple on the
sea, only accessible at low tide, for it is
known to be inundated with tourists
who come to take photos of the sun as it
sets dramatically behind the open-sided
structure. But I was curious and needed
a lift. I was feeling sad because a Balinese
friend was very ill and I didn’t know if
I’d ever see him again; because, just
two weeks earlier, the devastating
12 | PARABOLA
earthquake,
tsunami, and
nuclear meltdown
had struck Japan
and the situation
was so sad and
frightening; and also
because, as so many
people in Bali were
remarking, the
weather, for the
third year in a row,
was so unusually rainy that the flowers of
the fruits and crops were being knocked
off the plants, threatening the harvest.
Why not stop at Tanah Lot?
The parking lot was huge, and the
long, narrow street between it and the
temple was crammed on both sides with
tiny stalls selling T-shirts, food, CDs,
Balinese offerings, and souvenir kitsch.
So far the place was meeting my low
expectations. I reached the end of the
street and walked down the wide stone
steps that led down to the stony beach.
The tide was coming in. I could see at a
glance that the temple, perched on a
high crag perhaps a quarter mile out
across the flattish, black rocks, was
inaccessible. Still, people from many
places—Java, Japan, Australia, France,
Bali, America—were trying to get as
close as they could. They were wading
out on the rocks to get a photo of the
temple, which really did look dramatic
even under the leaden skies, and to take
pictures of one another with the temple
or the sea in the background.
I was wandering among them,
watching my footing on the rocks and
thinking I wouldn’t stay long, when a
wave dashed in and splashed everyone.
And it was in that moment of practically
unanimous reaction that I saw the real
spectacle in this event. Every time a
wave washed over the rocks and dowsed
the crowd, people burst into shrieks of
delighted laughter. They were
acknowledging this moment of
happiness, moreover, not just among
their own friends, but with whomever
was nearby. It was a shared experience.
Each shower of surf against skirts, jeans,
jilbabs, sarongs, and bare legs brought
people’s gazes together in a joyous
release of national differences and
personal cares. I took the lens cap off my
camera and started shooting pictures.
When I re-entered the parking lot, Eka
was waiting for me. I was so exhilarated
that I could not stop babbling to him
about what I had seen. Back in the car, I
pushed the View button on my camera
and showed him some of the photos I
had just taken. He looked a while in
silence. Then he turned to me. “Where
temple?” he asked in surprise.
It was true. I had not taken one
picture of the temple. For this
pilgrimage had led to something more
wonderful than that sacred place: it had
revealed people of many lands playing
together in the waves. Glancing just
behind the foreground, I had been given
to spy a wonder.
1 C.G. Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE
UNCONSCIOUS, trans R.F.C. Hull (New York:
Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 96.
2 Will Wlizlo, “The Art Sleuth,” Utne Reader,
February 24, 2011, http://www.utne.com/Arts/
The-Art-Slueth-Silvano-Vinceti.aspx.
3 THE BHAGAVAD-GITA, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller
(New York: Bantam Books, 1986), Chapter 11,
Verse 30, p. 103.
4 Paul Jordan-Smith, “Living Stories,” PARABOLA
(Vol. XI, No. 4, November 1986), p. 53.
5 John Berger, THE SENSE OF SIGHT (New York:
Vintage Books, 1985), p. 219.
6 Laura Sewall, SIGHT AND SENSIBILITY: THE
ECOPSYCHOLOGY OF PERCEPTION (New York: Jeremy
Tarcher, 1999), uncorrected page proofs, p. 110.
7 Black Elk, through Joseph Epes Brown,
“Hanblecheyapi: Crying for a Vision,” TEACHINGS
FROM THE EARTH: INDIAN RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY,
edited by Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock
(New York: Liveright Publishing, 1975), p. 20.
Tanah Lot, Bali
FALL 2011 | 13
 All that glitters may not be
gold . . . or very old . . .

Illusions
James Opie

NEXT TO MY DESK is a small painting of an intimate nativity

scene. Angels float above shafts of light, looking at each other,
looking off at the distance, and at us. Around the manger, only
haloed Mary looks down at the baby Jesus. The eyes of figures
clustered around the infant turn this way and that. The eyes of
only one figure turn toward us. This man’s face bears a quizzical
look, as if he is uncertain and intrigued by what we make of all
this, here on our side of this miracle, and this painted image. If
he is not intrigued in this way, then perhaps he should be. What
my eyes and heart first saw in this painting and what they see
now are quite different. A shift occurred in the two years I have
owned it.
I bought the painting from a local dealer who told me, cor-
rectly, that it was painted “on copper” and “. . . obviously is old.”
He said it was “unsigned” and “probably student work,” allowing
me my own guesses as to its exact age, who may have painted it,
and why the artist created it. Aside from the price, I didn’t ques-
tion him and, in fact, did not want to question him. A nativity
scene painted on copper suggested real age and real value. And
“student work”? Could this possibly be true? This fine painting
was surely not the work of a neophyte. I reflected that the dealer
who owned it specialized in modern work and was not drawn to

14 | PARABOLA
FALL 2011 | 15
 the painting’s religious theme. Could he
be making a significant mistake?
Inspecting it more closely, it became
clear that the style and subject matter
were not from the nineteenth century.
Eighteenth century? No, not eighteenth,
either. Could this be a seventeenth- or
even a sixteenth-century painting to
which someone had applied the term
“student work”? It was quite good, and
priced at only $2,500.
I knew that experienced Oriental rug
dealers can make big mistakes. I have
made several, and not solely during my
early years in business. The notion that
the dealer was mis-pricing this old paint-
ing fixed itself in my mind as the itch to
buy it seized hold of me. By a slight mar-
gin, shallow reservoirs of restraint held me
back for one week. Then I returned to the
dealer, worried that the painting was
gone. I was in luck; it was still there. I
quickly wrote a check for twenty-five hun-
dred dollars and took the painting home.
Month by month, I appreciated the
painting more and more. My “apprecia-
tion” was for the work itself, but also for
the fact of having acquired a real bargain.
What the painting was really worth, I
didn’t know—surely much more than
twenty-five hundred dollars.
The more I looked, the more value
I saw. The postures of the figures were
a bit stiff, and the baby looked like a
miniature adult. Along with the fact of
being painted on copper, everything fit
with an “early” age for this piece, much
earlier than the dealer could have known.
Student work or not, this painting was
quite good!
A year later, my brother, who paints,
saw the piece and admired it. Not want-
ing to say aloud how old I thought it was,
I said, “It’s on copper.” He said, “It’s
good, and certainly in great condition.”
16 | PARABOLA
Inevitably, as months passed, I looked
at the painting less often. Then one day,
gazing into the scene for a moment, I
focused on the sole figure who looks out
at the viewer. Once more, I felt puzzled
by the expression on his face. Why wasn’t
he looking down at baby Jesus, or at
Mary, or perhaps Joseph, or at the cow
brushing against him? He looked straight
at me with an expression that seemed
incongruous in the sacred scene around
him. I couldn’t guess what he was think-
ing, or feeling.
For months, whenever my attention
settled on the painting my eye kept
going back to him. One day, submitting
to the light interrogation of his look, I
awoke to a realization: I really didn’t
know anything about this painting. I
remembered a few words the seller had
spoken. All the rest was supposition. At
that moment I decided to take the work
to an art dealer in our city who I know
possesses an excellent eye. I promised
myself to be totally open to whatever he
might say.
The last moments of an enjoyable
illusion connecting me with this painting
were spent in my car as I drove to this
dealer’s shop, parked, and walked to his
door. Handing the painting to him,
waiting for him to speak, I experienced
the final seconds.
I said, “It’s on copper. The man I
bought it from said it was student’s
work.”
“The style is fifteenth century, perhaps
sixteenth,” he said. “Could it possibly be
that old?”
Something in his voice suggested
that it couldn’t be and, hearing him, a
crack began to appear in my illusion,
though it was not yet broken. The
hypnotic illusion was still there, though
not for much longer.
My friend took off his glasses and
reached for a magnifying lens.
“If it was painted in the fifteenth or
sixteenth century, could it possibly be in
such excellent condition?”
His question lingered in the air and
the crack within me expanded. Was he
breaking the news gently? Anyone in his
business or mine has to deliver “bad
news” at times: “I’m sorry, but your
rug is actually thirty years old and from
Pakistan, not one-hundred years old
and Persian. There must have been
a misunderstanding.”
He added, “The frame looks right
stylistically for an earlier period but . . .
[looking at the back] it couldn’t be
remotely as old as the style and theme of
painting suggest.”
He pointed. “Look, it’s been stained
on the back, and the gold leaf on the
front appears to have been fussed with.
Why would they do that? The wood has
some age, but isn’t at all what we see in
frames from three or four hundred
years ago.”
He then gave it to me straight.
“There have always been painters who
could pull off work of this quality, which
is rather high. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, when people
from England and America began visit-
ing the Continent in numbers, paintings
like this were produced by quite capable
painters to be sold to tourists. The sums
changing hands for them were probably
modest, as a rule. I doubt if they were
sold as earlier work, but who knows?
The arrangement of subject matter in
this painting could be original, and I
don’t view it as a fake. Sellers back then
may have been entirely honest in describ-
ing this as new work. Or, perhaps they
allowed tourists to see whatever they
wished to see and think whatever they
wished to think. As these things go, this
piece isn’t bad.
“Did you pay more than fifteen
hundred dollars for it?”
“I paid twenty-five hundred.”
“It could be worse. It’s a hundred-
year-old painting with strong subject
matter, on copper. It’s well done. A
retail customer might pay that much
for it. Acquiring this for inventory, I
would be safe at a figure close to a
thousand dollars. So, you didn’t go
too far overboard.”
I didn’t speak with him about the
larger “price” at hand, the piercing of an
illusion, the deflating shift of vision and
feeling accompanying the bursting of a
hypnotic bubble.
From that moment, my relationship
with this painting began to change. It is
still changing. I now accept the fact of its
real age and no longer see it through
avarice-tinted glasses. Now when I look
at the painting, I relate less to the angels,
or to Mary, or to the baby Jesus, and
more to the man who looks out at me—
at all of us—quizzically, wondering what
we see. Is this the face of the artist him-
self, wondering if we are still caught, or
perhaps have managed to escape from at
least one level of illusion?
FALL 2011 | 17
 CHERRY TREE
BLOSSOM
Photography by
James Whitlow Delano

18 | PARABOLA
FALL 2011 | 19
 TOKYO — I stood in Ofunato, in Iwate Prefecture, with
a photographer friend. We were mesmerized by a scene that seemed
too outlandish even to imagine. She told me how her grandmother
described clothes, reduced to rags, hanging from trees after Tokyo
was bombed to the ground in World War II.
The realization that we were standing before a natural disaster
on a similar scale — one that had happened in minutes, not hours —
drove us into silence.
I decided then to return later when the cherry trees bloomed.
Cherry blossoms are so important to the Japanese people on a
symbolic and emotional level. In winter, plum and apricot trees
bloom sparsely and last for months. Cherry trees, on the other hand,
blossom in a riot of flowers but only last one week before petals fill
the wind with organic snow, which accumulates — white — on the
ground beneath them. They represent the transience of life and also
the return of life after a long winter.
Black and white removes the obvious, removes the botanical
ostentation and lets us enter the spiritual, shadowy side of the
rebirth on a grey day. I am after something more important than
pinks and greens.

20 | PARABOLA
FALL 2011 | 21
 The realization that we were standing before a natural
disaster on a similar scale — one that had happened in
minutes, not hours — drove us into silence.

22 | PARABOLA
FALL 2011 | 23
 The Unseen River
Joyce Kornblatt

IN BLACKHEATH, high in the Blue Mountains of Australia, we

live in the clouds. Often the mist is so dense that the village
becomes a dream I cannot quite recall. On such a morning, a
kilometer from our house, the Grose Valley canyon has
dissolved like a wafer in water—forest, cliffs, paths, and flowers
as invisible as if they had never existed. Through the haze,
I’ve walked the vanished footpath from home to escarpment’s
edge, led by the sensation of foot on road. Here in the Blue
Mountains National Park, leaning against a phantom guardrail,
I can hear tourists disembark from ghostly buses whose engines
quiet behind me. Shoes crunch on gravel and grass. These
visitors are ready to take photos, but I have never known
anyone to be upset when the mist hides the valley from view.
Cloud-cloaked, the tourists record the cloud that has swallowed
them. Invisibility is its own natural wonder.

24 | PARABOLA
 Haze, fog, moonless night, the blizzard
white-outs I remember from my life in the
northern hemisphere: The unseen arrives
as a mystery, a teaching and a provocation.
Incline your attention as the blind do, we
are instructed, toward what the eyes can
never know. Here at the look-out—an
ironic term now for a place where so
little can be seen—the guardrail is pure
sensation: icy solidity meeting the warm
vibration of flesh. At my back, I sense the
energy of the eucalypt that rose like an
ancient guardian in yesterday’s light. This
morning it’s a spirit-tree watching over
the memory of a world.
For a time, the tourists and I are silent
witnesses to this vanishing. Speech
belongs to form, and we are absorbed
into the formless here. The mist
obliterates all we take to be “self and
other,” offering us the Buddha’s central
teaching: “Nothing whatever is to be
clung to as ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ ” There is
comfort in this undifferentiated space
that subsumes distinctions. Paradoxically,
this blinding heightens my experience of
connectedness with my fellow humans,
reminds me of the truth that none of us
stops at our skin and that the felt sense of
affiliation does not depend on how we
FALL 2011 | 25
 look to others and they to us. Perhaps,
as well, we are bonded here by fear. I
can’t deny the flutter of anxiety that
accompanies this disappearance of form,
the reminder of what physicists and
mystics observe is the true nature of the
material world: flux and silence.
As if in a gesture of reassurance, the
mist moves toward dissolution. Slowly a
landscape hundreds of millions of years
old emerges again. This must be what
photographers in the darkroom
experience as an image gathers
resolution—a replay of Creation itself. I
hear the digital cameras whirring like a
new species of Australian bird along the
guardrail. The folds of forested gorge
appear to our human eyes as a spectrum
of greens, and the shadows of the cliffs cut
dark geometrical swathes across the soft
tops of these gum trees into which we
peer. The cliffs arise out of pre-history
again: the layers of ancient Gondwanaland
sandstone, the dark mudstone band
marking Australia’s slow separation from
Antarctica, and the newer rust-hewed rock
that followed that great continental
schism. It is like looking at stars whose
light originated eons before, this intricate
valley of deep geological time that just
moments ago seemed not to exist at all.
When the Blackheath cloud-cover
clears and the wilderness at whose edge I
stand is available again as a magnificent
visual display, the dazzle of detail might
obscure the fact that, even in this clarity,
concealment is everywhere. Wilderness
invites us into an environment as hidden
as it is visible. The made world—what we
call civilization—stays lit even at night, as
if a secreted life were an affront, as if
scrutiny were a currency more valuable
than dollars or yen. Neon, LED displays,
office towers never darkened, sensor lights
that turn a sleeping house ablaze when
26 | PARABOLA
the smallest vibration—a breeze, a moth, a
possum on the porch—impinges on their
sensitive radar: We’ve turned the unseen
into something suspect and forbidding,
the setting of the sun itself an adversary
we work to defeat. When I enter the Blue
Mountains National Park, when I gaze
into the Grose Valley, when I walk one of
its winding trails, I am in a realm in which
hiddeness is as natural as revelation.
I don’t have to leave the lookout to
be aware of the unseen. River, birds,
animal life, insects, plants, hikers on the
valley floor—an entire ecology suggests
itself by sound and inference. The poet
Mark Strand says: “Is there something
down by the water keeping itself from
us, / Some shy event, some secret of
the light that falls upon the deep . . . ? ”
I learn to trust what I cannot see.
Atheist or believer, we all live on faith.
From this lookout, the Grose River is a
murmur whose waters I can only
extrapolate. Hidden beneath a canopy
of eucalypts and angophera, this
powerful river carved through millennia
of rock until the earth collapsed in on
itself, and cliffs and gorges and canyons
emerged. I see the river’s work, but not
the river. The endangered platypus
makes its home there, that wonderful
Australian egg-laying mammal few ever
see—it is a secretive animal, mostly

nocturnal, virtually silent, and even
conservationists can’t say for sure why
their number is dwindling. And yet
Australia has numerous conservation
organizations dedicated to the well-
being of this rarely viewed creature.
The same valley is home ground for
birds whose names alone are choir and
song: fan-tailed cuckoos, lyrebirds, scrub
wrens, pilot birds, origami, spotted
pardalote. Occasionally their music rises
from the valley floor, or a creature wings
from one cliff to another, above the trees
into which I peer. But mostly these birds
are invisible from the look-out’s vantage
point. I trust the guidebooks that testify
to their presence. I trust the reports from
the climbers who make their way down to
the river’s edge. Why wouldn’t I believe
in what I cannot see? All I ever have is a
limited point of view, a tiny pinhole
through which so-called “reality” offers
me a glimpse, at most, of what manifests.
This visit to the Grose Valley, in
obscuring mist and then a so-called
clearing that maintains more secrets than
it will ever reveal, is fact and metaphor at
once. Every spiritual tradition, theistic or
not, locates itself within the invisible.
Jews embrace a God who never appears
in form and a sacred text in which
meanings are hidden, coded, cross-
referenced, and encrypted. Christians
trust a Resurrection only a few are said to
have witnessed, the return of Jesus to a
Father none have seen. Thomas Merton
deepens the mystery of the sacred:
“There is in all visible things an invisible
fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek
namelessness, a hidden wholeness.”
In the Muslim faith, the faithful bow
down five times a day to a deity whose
invisibility is so central that no image
must be made to represent Allah.
Buddhists turn to the material as the
site for meditative inquiry which yields,
paradoxically, the dissolution of the seen
world: “Form is emptiness and emptiness
is form.” Aborigines in Australia walk
the intangible Songlines, and Native
American peoples communicate through
ritual and art with an invisible spirit world
that guides and guards the human realm.
The unseen is a gift that opens the eye
of the heart. Theodore Roethke writes:
“I wake to sleep and take my waking
slow. / I learn by going where I have to
go.” Released from the eye’s material
evidence, we deepen into sight that
accepts mystery as ground, that enters
dream as a landscape palpable as any
terrain we can measure, sample, and
mark. Who doesn’t wake to mist and
move through obscurations day by day,
whatever the weather? Antoine de Saint-
Exupery says it clearly in THE LITTLE PRINCE:
It is only with the heart
that one can see rightly;
What is essential is
invisible to the eye.
As radiant as the view might be—
from the lookout at Govett’s Leap, from
a roof-top garden in New York, from a
monastery high in the mountains of
Nepal—it is the hidden that illumines
our way, asks us for our trust and takes
us home.
FALL 2011 | 27
 EPICYCLE

Nomad Girl White Tara

Retold by Barbara Helen Berger
Anonymous | Tibetan Buddhist

n eons past, before the divine lady Tara was known by the

I name of Tara, she sat at the Buddha’s feet and listened to his
teachings, made countless offerings, and meditated deeply.
Finally the monks of the great assembly told her, “You are so close
to enlightenment, if only you would pray to be reborn as a man.
Then you, too, could awaken and become a Buddha.”
But she said to them, “In the enlightened mind of wisdom, there is
no male or female.”
Then she made a vow. “Since no one wants to become enlightened
as a woman, I will do so. Out of compassion for all beings, I vow to
fully awaken and always appear in the body of a woman.”

28 | PARABOLA
ONE DAY ON A HIGH MOUNTAIN PLATEAU, a traveler stumbled and fell and
could not get up again. He was alone, no more than a speck in the vast
land. On his way home from a distant place, he had run out of food and his
last strength. He lay where he fell. And a bitter wind swept over him.
He felt two hands grabbing his legs and dragging him over the ground.
Surely the Lord of Death had come. All senses left him, and the traveler did
not feel the cold anymore. Nor did he know how many nights passed into
days before he stirred awake, a hand touching his cheek.
It was a warm, human hand.
He opened his eyes and saw the face of a girl who lifted his head and
brought a steaming bowl to his lips, urging him to drink. Never had a
broth of tea churned with butter and salt tasted so good.
Through a haze of smoke from a small fire, he saw only a dark cloth
above and around him. Then the traveler knew he must be inside a nomad
tent, sheltered from the wind.
While he drifted back to sleep, warm under a blanket of yak hair, the
nomad girl went about her chores. She kept the fire lit and her eye on the
traveler. Whenever he woke she came with more hot butter tea to sustain
him. Soon, she hoped, he would be strong enough to eat.
Each morning early, she went outside with her bucket to milk the female
of the yak herd. She made some of the dri’s milk into yogurt. And she
stood at a tall wooden churn lifting and plunging the paddle to make the
rest into butter.
Every day she led the yaks to another grazing place, and came back into
the tent, her long braids dusted with snow, bringing more fuel for the fire.
She roasted barley in an iron pan and ground it between two stones. The
traveler woke to the good smell of tsampa. He ate hungrily. Then the girl
smiled, assured he would be well.
Day by day as she fed and cared for him, the man grew stronger. In the
evenings they talked and laughed together. He was happy listening to her
voice as she hummed softly, spinning her prayer wheel into the night.
Then at last, the traveler was well enough to be on his way. With a broad
smile, the girl gave him a woolen bag she had woven herself, filled with
provisions. But he had nothing to give her in return, no way to repay all her
kindness. He could only set out on his journey again, filled with gratitude.
Not far along his way, he turned for a last glimpse of the tent he had left
behind. He saw no trace of it now in the vast land. But could the nomad
girl have packed everything up, loaded the yaks, and moved so quickly to
another grazing ground? Maybe a mist had come over the plain, hiding her
tent from his view like a dream. Would he ever find her again?

FALL 2011 | 29
 Pondering as he walked, he thought of the girl’s eyes glowing in the firelight.
How strange—he had never seen anyone else there, no parents, no brother or
sister to help with the herding. This one girl did the work of a whole family.
Alone, she had saved his life. She had nursed him back to health. Even now she
provided for him whenever he stopped to eat, for she had filled the bag with
tsampa and yogurt and hard white cheese.
As he sat under the infinite sky he wondered, for the bag never seemed to run
out. Every time he stopped to eat he found it as full as before, until at last he
came to his home valley.
But he did not stop in the village. He turned and went up the hill to the
temple first, to see the lama. There he made prostrations and sat at the lama’s
feet and told him all that had happened.
The lama said, “Without any doubt, it was Tara who saved you.”
The compassionate Tara herself? If only he had recognized her! In all the time
he was in her tent, he had never thought to honor the girl. He could have bowed
to the ground and asked for her blessing, her wisdom.
Now he looked up at the lama and asked, “What can I do?”
The lama said, “If you ever hope to find her again, you had better clear the
ignorance from your mind.”
Then he taught the traveler how to contemplate the divinity, Tara, to recite
her mantra, and dissolve her image into himself, like a rainbow melting into the
sky. Then to sit quietly in the empty stillness.
So the traveler went home and did this.
He prayed for all beings who wander and fall in ignorance, like himself.
Day by day his heart grew lighter, his mind more clear. He began to see his
mother, his sisters, his brother's wife, his aunt, his little nieces, his old grandmother,
all with new eyes. How could he be sure who was Tara and who was not?
He began to see her everywhere in the village. People noticed how respectful
he was, how loving and kind. There was a peace about him.
“Ah la la,” said his lama, “you have found her.”
Then the traveler felt a radiance flooding his heart, like the smile of the nomad
girl herself in the tent of his own mind.

This story comes from Tibet, the land where Tara is most known and loved. I found the
seed of it many years ago in TARA’S COLOURING BOOK, by Jonathan Landaw, Andy Weber,
and Nigel Wellings (Wisdom Publications, 1979). The essence of that seed stuck with me
and grew, in time, into this retelling.

30 | PARABOLA
Tara statue near Kullu, India

FALL 2011 | 31
 The Infrared Universe
Light from 1.6 million galaxies
reveals the structure of the local universe.

The Cosmic
Metabolism of Form
Christian Wertenbaker

IT IS FAIRLY OBVIOUS by now that life on earth forms a vast

interconnected and interdependent network. Organic molecules
are recycled over and over, those of one organism providing
food for another. Bacteria transform our waste into soil. Carbon
dioxide is taken in by plants and oxygen released; in animals the
reverse process occurs, in an endless cycle of energy exchange,
ultimately fueled by the sun.
Ecosystems depend on a delicate balance of mutually
supportive interactions, forming a greater organism. For that
matter, any given organism is itself an ecosystem: birds keep the
hippopotamus clean, our intestinal bacteria help us digest. Even
the subcellular organelles that power our cells, the mitochondria,
were, it is thought, once independent organisms. The boundaries
of selfhood become blurred and somewhat arbitrary.
These interrelations extend out to the entire universe. The
Sun, besides providing the energy that fuels life on Earth and
keeping the Solar System in place with its gravity, also interacts
with the Earth and other planets through the solar wind,
shaping the Earth’s own magnetic body and influencing the
weather, which in turn affects all Earth’s creatures. There are
certainly other crucial interactions at this electromagnetic level;
the more we look, the more we find a complex and delicate
order. And the basic elemental building blocks of our world and

32 | PARABOLA
of organic life—carbon, oxygen,
nitrogen, and the rest—were formed in
the nuclear furnaces of stars and
distributed by the explosions of
supernovae, as part of vast cosmic cycles
of stellar formation, growth, and death.
IN CONSIDERING THESE THINGS, we
generally think in terms of substances
being endlessly recycled and
transformed, in large and small metabolic
cycles. But the consequence of all these
transformations is to preserve form. An
organism or an ecosystem is a form,
whose elements are constantly changing
while its structure is preserved for a time:
its lifetime. It is estimated that every
single atom in the human body is
replaced in at most seven years. Most
cells, with the exception of many of the
cells of the nervous system, are also
replaced during the lifetime of the body,
some more rapidly, like skin and
intestinal cells, and others more slowly.
Similarly, the organisms in an ecosystem
live and die, to be replaced by others, but
the ecosystem has a longer lifespan.
A subtler, often unacknowledged,
materialistic bias in our thinking appears
in the assumption that form is simply the
result of the properties of matter. Atoms
form molecules, molecules cells, cells
organisms, etc., because the basic
properties of the smaller constituents
determine how they organize themselves
into the larger assemblies. Given the
physical laws that govern the
fundamental particles and forces, and
time for evolutionary processes to work,
everything has become what it is now,
culminating in self-aware organisms that
happen to be able to contemplate these
matters. It is certainly true that quarks
and the strong nuclear force must have
the properties they have in order to form
nuclei, and that oxygen, carbon,
nitrogen, and hydrogen can join in the
molecules they form only because of
their specific chemical properties, and so
on at every level. But fundamentally,
what is matter? Physics has long since
reached an impasse in defining it with
any kind of bricks and mortar, or even
whirling particles. Picture: atoms are
mostly empty space, and the subatomic
constituents of everything are both
waves and particles, but not both at the
same time, or perhaps neither, but with
properties of both. Ultimately, the only
reliable descriptors of the constituents of
matter are mathematical equations, the
abstract mathematical forms of group
theory. So form underlies substance, as
Plato taught, rather than the reverse.
If this is so, perhaps intelligent beings
such as ourselves, who are capable of
resonating with (and therefore
discovering) the mathematical forms that
govern external reality, do not have these
capacities merely as an accidental
byproduct of being the fittest organisms
in the evolutionary struggle, but have a
A silicon atom
FALL 2011 | 33
 Kepler's Supernova
more fundamental role in the universe.
Just as our bodies transform substances in
metabolic cycles of varying complexity,
and take part in the larger ecological
metabolic cycles of organic life on earth,
our minds take in and manipulate,
transform, break down and build up, in
short metabolize, forms—as impressions,
perceptions, concepts, memories, and
plans. And we take part in a larger ecology
of form: culture, literature, art, science.
One could say that everything in the
universe has three aspects: a physical or
material aspect, an energetic aspect, and
a form. We share with other creatures
the ability to participate in the
metabolism of matter and energy, but
seem uniquely endowed by our
consciousness to participate in the
metabolism of form.
IN THE VIEW OF the traditional religious
teachings, human beings have a special
place in the cosmos:
34 | PARABOLA
“And God said, let us make men in our
own image, after our likeness: and let
them have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon
the earth…. And God said unto them, be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it.”1
One of the main concerns of the
ecologically minded is that humanity is
despoiling the Earth and disrupting the
web of life. But even this capacity
implies its converse: “to replenish the
earth.” This is not simply to populate it,
but to care for it, and maintain it, by
virtue of our understanding, in ways that
are obvious and perhaps in other ways
that we now only dimly perceive.
Human intelligence provides us with a
unique relationship to time: we are not
confined to the relentless march of our
bodies through linear time, but are able to
remember the past, foresee the future, and
contemplate all of their possibilities. We
can look at a tree and see planks and
beams and a bridge, look at mud and see
adobe bricks and a house. We can create,
repair, and maintain to a degree and with a
flexibility unknown to other creatures. We
are, at our best, anti-entropy machines.
This capacity of our consciousness is
evident in all our artifacts, and whether
ultimately it will serve to replenish the
earth or to destroy it is still in the balance.
But it is possible that our awareness has a
purpose on another level as well. Some
religious and mystical teachings hold
that human consciousness, in reflecting
reality, also helps to bring it into being.
According to the Islamic mystic Ibn
‘Arabi, man acts “as the eye through
which God can see His own creation:”2
“He praises me (by manifesting my
perfections and creating me in His form),
And I praise Him (by manifesting
His perfections and obeying Him).
How can He be independent when I
help and aid Him? (Because the Divine
attributes derive the possibility of manifes-
tation from their human correlates).
For that cause God brought me into
existence.
And I know Him and bring Him into
existence (in my knowledge and
contemplation of Him).”3
A similar concept, though with a less
hierarchical emphasis, appears in Hindu
teaching as Indra’s net:
“In the Heaven of Indra, there is said to
be a network of pearls, so arranged that if
you look at one you see all the others
reflected in it. In the same way, each
object in the world is not merely itself but
involves every other object and in fact IS
everything else.”4
Perhaps the most detailed, though still
incomplete, elaboration of this idea is
contained in the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff.
According to Gurdjieff, humans take in
three kinds, or levels, of food: ordinary
food, air, and impressions. These consist of
substances of increasing fineness, but each
is metabolized according to the same
general laws. The three foods and their
metabolites interact with each other,
helping each other’s digestion: the clearest
example is the necessity of oxygen for the
complete metabolism of ordinary food,
which is well known to ordinary
physiology and biochemistry. On first
encountering this idea, the analogy
between the metabolism of ordinary food
and the taking in and processing of
impressions by the brain may seem far-
fetched, but there are clear parallels.
The food we eat consists mostly of
macromolecules—proteins, carbohydrates,
and fats—which themselves are
compounds of smaller molecules: amino
acids, sugars, and fatty acids. These in turn
are made up of different configurations of
atoms, mostly carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
and hydrogen. The process of digestion is
a progressive breakdown of these large
macromolecules, which contain energy
stored in their atomic arrangements, into
much smaller molecules, primarily water
and carbon dioxide, the atomic
arrangements of which are in a much
lower energy state, thus releasing the
energy of food for use by the body. Some
of the molecular constituents of food are
also recycled by the body and built up
again into the proteins, carbohydrates, and
fats of the body itself. So the metabolism
of food has at least two results: one on the
same level, which is the maintenance of the
body by producing substances, just like
those in food, which make up our flesh;
and one on a “higher” level, which is the
production of energy to maintain the life
of the body.
FALL 2011 | 35
 Impressions also consist of larger
configurations of smaller elements. A
visual scene is made up of many shapes
and colors, which in turn are made up of
lines and boundaries between patches of
differing contrast and hue. Colors
themselves can be thought of as consisting
of mixtures of primary colors and different
amounts of white, gray, and black, and
ultimately different combinations of
wavelengths of light. Complex sounds are
ultimately combinations of fundamental
frequencies varying over time. In
processing impressions, the brain breaks
them down into more fundamental
components. In the visual cortex,
individual cells are activated by the
elementary components of the visual
scene: oriented lines and edges, spatial
frequencies, binocular disparity conveying
depth, basic colors. A wealth of
information is known about these
processes (and a great deal remains to be
known), which I cannot go into here, but
the analogy is clear: impressions are also
metabolized via a process of breakdown
into smaller and simpler elements.
Subsequently, impressions are, so to
speak, reconstituted into our perceptions.
Something has been added, our
awareness and our interpretations, based
on experience. The capacity to perceive
depends on a long process of learning in
early childhood. Our brains are partly
Mitochondria
36 | PARABOLA
formed, or tuned, by our environment of
impressions. People born blind whose
sight is restored later in life typically do
not learn to see properly, although the
eye is transmitting all the information to
the brain; at best they are like people
using a dictionary to speak in a foreign
language, painfully correlating their
visual impressions with their learned
perceptions in other sensory modalities.
The reconstituted perceptions are
internal representations of the external
stimuli, analogous to the reconstituted
macromolecules that make up our bodies.
What do these internal representations
consist of, in material terms? This is an as
yet unresolved question scientifically, but
evidence suggests that their physical
correlates may be complex patterns of
electromagnetic vibrations in the brain.
Visual configurations are conveyed to us
via patterns of electromagnetic vibrations
—light—and our internal perceptions
may be of the same materiality.
According to Gurdjieff, our impres-
sions are not fully metabolized in our
ordinary state of relative unawareness.
For metabolism to proceed further, we
must be conscious of ourselves in the act
of receiving impressions, just as oxygen is
necessary for the full metabolism of food.
The full metabolism of food releases
much more energy than that released in
the absence of oxygen (anaerobic metab-
olism). What kind of energy is released
by the full metabolism of impressions?
Perhaps the energy of consciousness.
Although consciousness is required for
this process to take place, acting like a
catalyst, the result is the production of
even more consciousness. Or more pre-
cisely, it is the addition of consciousness
to the impressions, just as the energy of
life is added to the macromolecules of
our bodies.
 This vivification of impressions feeds
our inner life, which needs conscious
impressions to grow, and may also serve
a larger purpose, enabling God to “see”
his own creation through us and other
conscious observers throughout the
universe.
THE GREAT PARADOX of quantum theory
is that the form of what we observe in
looking at the smallest constituents of
matter, for instance whether they consist
of waves or particles, depends on the kind
of observation that is conducted. Some
argue that the “decision” is made when a
conscious observer appears, others that a
measuring apparatus is sufficient, but in
any case, the measuring apparatus was
made by a human being.5 Perceptions
have a similar property, for when we see
something we are making decisions. This
is made evident in the perception of
ambiguous figures such as the Necker
cube (Fig.1), but is going on all the time.
So perhaps, in an as yet unclear fash-
ion, we are, or can be, part of a great
cosmic ecology of consciousness, main-
taining the form of the universe against
the entropy of linear time, because of
our potential capacity for metabolizing
form, made possible by our flexible and
encompassing relationship to time itself.
In this process, we become part of
everything on a conscious level, just as
we are part of everything on the level of
gross materiality. Just as our bodies are
made up of atoms that once were created
in supernovae, and passed through a vari-
ety of inorganic and organic entities, the
material of our inner lives consists of all
our perceptions—of other beings, of
earth, sea, sky, and stars, and of the fun-
damental laws that govern it all—and we
are thereby connected to everything on
both levels, and to the Whole.
Fig. 1. The Necker cube can be seen in two ways,
as either the lower face forward, or the upper face.
Each way results in a distinct three-dimensional
interpretation of the cube. One can easily switch
from one perception to the other, but not see both
at once, or easily fail to see either. This is a simple
example of the difference between the external
pattern that falls on the eyes and the resulting
perception, involving a perceptual decision.
“He through Whom we see, taste, smell,
feel, hear, enjoy, know everything, He is
that Self.
“Knowing That by Which one perceives
both dream states and waking states, the
great, omnipresent Self, the wise man goes
beyond sorrow.
“Knowing that the individual Self, eater of
the fruit of action, is the universal Self,
maker of past and future, he knows he has
nothing to fear.
“Born in the beginning from meditation,
born from the waters, having entered the
secret place of the heart, He looks forth
through beings. That is Self.
“That boundless power, source of every
power, manifesting itself as life, entering
every heart, born with the beings, that is
Self.”6
1 The Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis
1:26–28.
‘ RABI (London,
2 R. Landau, THE PHILOSOPHY OF IBN A
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1959), p. 74.
3 Ibn ‘Arabi, with commentary in parentheses by
‘Abdu ‘l-Razzaq al-Kashani, quoted in ref. 2, p. 74.
4 Charles Eliot, quoted at www.cs.kent.ac.uk/
people/staff/saf/networks/
networking-networkers/indras-net.html.
5 There are other theories, and the question of how
the wavefunction “collapses” is not really resolved.
6 Katha Upanishad, edited by the author based on
multiple translations.
FALL 2011 | 37
 Looking with Your
Whole Body
A Conversation with Jane Rosen

38 | PARABOLA
The first look is a word, a name.
To me anything that is attached to
words and names is a mental looking.
SUCCESS IN THE ART WORLD is a
wildly relative term. And no one
would say that Jane Rosen has not
been successful. But something
happened that took her away from
the kind of success she might have
found had she continued to pursue
her fast start in Manhattan. She
visited the Bay Area, where she
lived on a horse ranch south of San
Francisco. The exposure to the
beauty of the place—the coast, the
hills, the redwoods—made a deep
impression. One day, as she
stepped out of her house, she
looked up and saw a red-tailed
hawk soaring above her. “As I
stood looking up at the hawk, in a
voice as clear as day, I heard these
words: ‘Tell my story’.” RICHARD WHITTAKER: I agree, we don’t see very
Rosen’s drawings and sculptures are much, but what is it when someone stops
born from the perennial questions: What and keeps looking and then starts to see
can nature show us? And what is seeing? more, literally?
Her work shows us something about that. JR: That means they kept looking. And
—Richard Whittaker that shifts what I would call cognitive
gears—so there comes a new moment.
The first look is a word, a name. To me
JANE ROSEN: Seeing isn’t what we think it is. anything that is attached to words and
What we call seeing is “looking.” names is a mental looking. Then, I think
Looking is when you go out and you there is a looking with your whole body
look at something. You have a number of as if there were tentacles that sense and
facts about that thing and you put them touch the totality of the thing you’re
together as a mental construct. When looking at so that the tree stops being
students in my class look at the model leaves, branches, roots. It starts becom-
often they are not seeing it. Paul Klee ing a clustering, a gathering, a drooping,
said to his students, “Yes. I want to draw a lifting, a turning.
what I see, but first you must see what
you draw.” RW: I wonder if there are levels of seeing.

FALL 2011 | 39
 JR: What if the dialogue we’re having
revolves around finding the right word
so that we both know the experience
attached to that word? As a teacher,
there’s a huge difference, for example,
between a sketch and a study. They can
be called the same thing. A sketch is
something that’s sketchy. Looking is
sketchy. A study is where you’re studying
with your body, let’s say the dog [point-
ing to her dog]. You’re observing the
various movements and states and ges-
ture, the presence of restfulness. You’re
then translating what you see from this
study to a piece of paper with the physi-
cal marks you’re making. And you’re also
mentally using the laws you understand
about drawing to create an illusion on
that piece of paper. To me, seeing is
having all of these things simultaneously
in place that open a feeling for the life
of the thing you’re observing.
RW: The word “seeing”—what is it?
JR: You say, “I see what you mean.”
So that’s not a visual thing.
RW: No, not at all.
JR: It’s an understanding. To me, the act
of seeing is coming into an understanding
of the whole of what’s occurring. Like
when I’m struggling, for instance, with
that drawing of the coyote I did. First, I
saw a lone coyote on the hill, and the
coyote is standing next to a young deer.
RW: Really?
JR: Yes. I have a photograph. The young
deer is hanging out with the coyote, and
I become very interested. The coyote is
there day after day on the hill at about
2 p.m. So now, I’m looking until I can
see what is happening.
The only way I can come to an under-
standing is by drawing it. See those two
40 | PARABOLA
drawings? I figured it out. I took the
photograph, which is as abstract as this
drawing, the silhouette of a coyote and
the bambi! So then I start to draw the
coyote and I start to understand that
he’s an older coyote. He’s alone and
not interested in the deer. He’s more
interested in eating gophers. There’s a
little bit of his former life, but he’s
been rejected from the pack. He’s quite
beautiful, and he has more of the presence
of a dog. So now I begin to see who the
coyote is, and I’m looking to try to do a
drawing of the essence of that coyote. So
learning to see is learning to put together
my sight with my sensation, which can
take in a much larger view.
RW: So this is a seeing that is really coming
into contact with what’s there, and
“looking” isn’t really connecting with
what’s there.
JR: No. And what’s there is never what
you think is there. It just never is that.
One of the things I find remarkable hap-
pened from that amber drawing I did of
a hawk—the falcon is Horus in Egyptian
art. The falcon was considered to be the
highest energy because it is that which
sees in and out simultaneously, which
was the energy of the sun. So I thought,
okay, I’m going to learn about the hawk,
and I’ve been drawing hawks a long
time. So that amber drawing of the
hawk, Dave Nelson, the hay farmer ...
RW: This is your neighbor. He’s not an
artist.
JR: Right. He grew up on this land. He
goes to pick up his mail at the post office,
where Leana had put up a little
announcement of my show with the
hawk on it. Dave calls me up and says,
“That’s a damn good drawing of a hawk!
If you don’t mind, if I could get me one
FALL 2011 | 41
 of them announcements I’d like to take it
to Kinko’s. I’m going to blow it up and
make me a poster of that hawk. I spend
all day with those hawks cause I’m on my
tractor, and those hawks follow my tractor
to eat the mice that get pulled from the
haying.” He said, “I know hawks.” And
he did. “Damn good hawk!”
I said, “Dave, I’ll give you a drawing
of a hawk.”
He said, “I don’t have any money,
Jane.”
I said, “Well, you’ve got hay. I’ve got
horses. I’ll trade you a hawk for the hay.”
He said, “Okay. That’s a good deal! I’ll
take that deal.”
So I’m drawing this hawk for Dave,
and Gus Gutierrez—who takes care of the
property—comes into the drawing room
and looks at the hawk. He doesn’t know
anything about this deal. He says, “Jane,
if you don’t mind me saying, if you put
glasses on that hawk it’ll look just like
42 | PARABOLA
Dave Nelson!” So without me knowing it,
my seeing of Dave on the tractor and just
knowing Dave, somehow it got into the
drawing of the hawk and damned if it
didn’t look just like Dave Nelson!
RW: What are the modalities of knowing
or receiving the world?
JR: A couple of things. One is the word
“attend,” attendez, to wait. Attention is
to wait.
RW: If you are waiting with attention,
there is an openness, right?
JR: Right. So when you talk about seeing
what is real, to me, there is an invisible
reality behind the visible reality. What I
think it’s supposed to look like, I have to
let go of, in order to see what it is. That
demands attending to it—in other
words, waiting—allowing the impression
of the bird to come in, rather than going
out to it. It’s a really subtle shift.
 I keep thinking of working yesterday
on that big bird and just seeing myself
literally start chiseling away at something
that looked right, like it was supposed to
be there. But I was listening, and it’s as if
the stone started to speak to me rather
than me imposing on it—even to a point
where under the chin, unhh, get this off!
Then it just started chiseling while I’m
thinking, “What the hell are you doing,
Rosen?” I started using the tooth chisel,
and I saw Alex hold his breath—because,
with the beak, one mistake and it’s over.
And sure enough, a piece of the beak
came off. All the Provencal limestone has
lots of fossils and shells in it. So it’s
inconsistent to carve.
RW: So you can’t count on how each piece
will break off.
JR: You don’t know what part is
attached to what part. And it came off,
and I looked at it. It was exactly what
was needed, and I never would have
figured it out.
RW: Can we say there was a seeing there?
JR: You’re serving something else.
You’re not in charge. In fact, if I can be
so bold—best case scenario—you’re an
objective bystander. You’re just there and
it’s moving through you, and you’re not
in the way.
RW: What is the deepest way of being here?
It has occurred to me that when one has
gotten down to the almost metaphysical
place of our being here, that this is a place
simply of witnessing.
JR: We almost always have a vested inter-
est in the outcome of a sculpture or an
idea, or an idea about how we want the
world to be or how we want ourselves
to be and, as a result, we don’t see the
sculpture, the coyote, the world, or
ourselves. So if you let go, which is what
FALL 2011 | 43
 happened to me yesterday, and you
follow it, there is a moment where this
other kind of reality becomes visible.
That’s what I think seeing is.
RW: Our thoughts and desires are always
interfering—but not always.
JR: But not always. Because here’s the
most shocking thing. Often the largest
silence I experience is in the midst of
noise. All my ideas and the cacophony
actually pull something out of my belly
because of the absurdity of it, and there’s
a double experience. This is where the
quote from the Mundaka Upanishads is
appropriate: “Like two golden birds in
the self-same tree, intimate friends, the
ego and the Self dwell in the same body.
While the former eats the sweet and bit-
ter fruits of the tree of life, the latter
looks on in detachment.”
44 | PARABOLA
Sometimes—I’ve seen this with stu-
dents—if I can keep them mentally occu-
pied by giving them three conflicting
directions of what to do with their draw-
ing tools, their minds are so busy trying
to figure it out, that something more
essential can come out and it goes I’ll
try. It’s like our personalities can blow up
so much, sometimes like a balloon, that
they burst and the little impartial guy liv-
ing in the belly, who hardly ever gets a
chance to come out goes “I’ll draw that.
I’ll try.”
RW: I almost want to ask how can one see
without being present?
JR: You can—on the rare occasion, as I
was saying. If there’s so much cacoph-
ony, it brings up something so fierce in
terms of a desire be free, it can give rise
to a presence to the cacophony. And the
cacophony, like any good mouse when
you turn the light on, disappears!

RW: Who sees?

JR: It’s a conference. It’s not a “who.”
When I speak of seeing, I feel that the
mind is open and in a relationship to the
hands working, which opens a feeling of
being more fully alive. That is what I call
seeing.
More than one part of you needs to
see. You can’t see with your head alone.
You can’t see with your heart alone,
because it’s very partial. You can’t see
with your body alone because, basically,
I don’t want to put down the cigarette
or the cake.
One day I heard the dogs barking in the
living room. Not a bark like, “Someone is
here,” which is an announcement. Not a
bark like, “Get away from my stuff.”
That’s a territorial thing. Not a bark of fear
like, “Oh, my God there’s a bobcat on the
deck!” It was a bark I wasn’t used to, a
kind of “What are you doing?”
I walked into the living room and could hurt me. I’m going to pet your
there was the raven underneath the chair back and if you don’t try to peck me or
at the dining room table. I looked at this claw me, I will get you out from under
big raven with huge claws and this huge the chair. If you try to peck me or claw
Roman beak. The raven somehow had me, you’re on your own.”
walked into the house before we had She looked at me, cocking her head
become friends and had gotten stuck like she was thinking about it. It wasn’t
underneath the chair. I believe it was a like she understood my words or I
mom and she was coming in looking understood hers. There was something
or food. in my tone that was explaining to her
I looked at the raven and the raven that I was about to make a move. So I
looked at me. She had these beautiful pet the back of the raven and not only
eyes and she blinked at me. It was clear does she not claw me, she pulls her claws
she said to me, “I’m stuck. I don’t know into her belly and tucks her beak into her
how I got under this chair. I can’t get chest. I pick her up and I hold her like
out, and you’ve got two pretty big dogs. this [cradled in her arms] and she is
I’m in a situation here.” perfectly still. I put her out on the picnic
So I looked at the raven and said, table figuring she would make a beeline
“Okay. Here’s the deal. You’re big. You out of there. She turned around, she
have sharp claws and this beak. You looked at me, and she nodded.

FALL 2011 | 45
46 | PARABOLA
Seeing is an act
Jeanne de Salzmann
not what to do
T
HE QUESTION IS
but how to see. Seeing is the most
important thing—the act of seeing.
I need to realize that it is truly an act, an
action that brings something entirely new,
a new possibility of vision, certainty and
knowledge. This possibility appears during
the act itself and disappears as soon as the
seeing stops. It is only in this act of seeing
that I will find a certain freedom.
So long as I have not seen the nature
and movement of the mind, there is little
sense in believing that I could be free of it.
I am a slave to my mechanical thoughts.
This is a fact. It is not the thoughts
themselves that enslave me but my
attachment to them. In order to
understand this, I must not seek to free
myself before having known what the
slavery is. I need to see the illusion of words
and ideas, and the fear of my thinking
mind to be alone and empty without the
support of anything known. It is necessary
to live this slavery as a fact, moment after
moment, without escaping from it. Then I
will begin to perceive a new way of seeing.
Can I accept not knowing who I am,
being hidden behind an imposter? Can I
accept not knowing my name?
Seeing does not come from thinking.
It comes from the shock at the moment
when, feeling an urgency to know what is
true, I suddenly realize that my thinking
mind cannot perceive reality. To understand
what I really am at this moment, I need
sincerity and humility, and an unmasked
exposure that I do not know. This would
mean to refuse nothing, exclude nothing,
From The Reality of Being, by Jeanne de Salzmann. Reprinted by permission.
For more about Jeanne de Salzmann, please visit www.realityof being.org.
and enter into the experience of discovering
what I think, what I sense, what I wish, all
at this very moment.
Our conditioned thought always wants
an answer. What is important is to develop
another thinking, a vision. For this we have
to liberate a certain energy that is beyond
our usual thought. I need to experience
“I do not know” without seeking an
answer, to abandon everything to enter
the unknown. Then it is no longer the
same mind. My mind engages in a new
way. I see without any preconceived idea,
without choice. In relaxing, for example, I
no longer choose to relax before knowing
why. I learn to purify my power of vision,
not by turning away from the undesirable
or toward what is agreeable. I learn to stay
in front and see clearly. All things have the
same importance, and I become fixed on
nothing. Everything depends on this
vision, on a look that comes not from any
command of my thought but from a feeling
of urgency to know.
Perception, real vision, comes in the
interval between the old response and the
new response to the reception of an
impression. The old response is based on
material inscribed in our memory. With
the new response, free from the past, the
brain remains open, receptive, in an
attitude of respect. It is a new brain which
functions, that is, different cells and a new
intelligence. When I see that my thought
is incapable of understanding, that its
movement brings nothing, I am open to
the sense of the cosmic, beyond the realm
of human perception.
FALL 2011 | 47
 A horrific accident . . .
an unexpected blessing

Awakening Sight
David Ulrich Photography by David Ulrich

AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-THREE, I suffered an impact injury

while chopping wood that could have cost me my life. A small
branch, approximately three-quarters of an inch in diameter and
over three feet long, with a fractured tip, flew up and struck me
in the face, directly under the eye. Thankfully, I lived; tragically
(especially for a photographer), I lost the vision of my right and
dominant eye. It was the most traumatic and disabling event of
my life—and by far the most enlightening and life-enhancing.
I did not realize the seriousness of the injury at the time of the
accident. In the emergency room, the physician on duty urgently
consulted an ophthalmologist. At that point, I understood that
my eye had been seriously damaged, and I became terrified of
the possible consequences. The doctor emphatically informed
me that I needed surgery immediately to see if the eye could be
repaired. I implored him to do his absolute best to save my
vision—that I was a photographer and needed my eyes. Fears of
a completely altered life entered my mind. Would I ever be able
to drive again? To photograph? To live a normal life? Would I be
disfigured? He then said something that has burned itself into
my memory of that day. He said calmly and with great assurance:
“You will be as good a photographer with one eye as you were
with two.”

48 | PARABOLA
 After seven or eight hours in surgery—
in which the surgeon removed the
fragments of wood, repaired my crushed
eyeball, tried to repair my massively torn
retina, and performed cosmetic surgery to
rebuild the lost tissue on the right side of
my face—I was sent to the recovery room.
The next week was pure hell. I
underwent multiple tests and
examinations to determine whether any
useful vision could be returned to my eye.
I had no light perception whatsoever due
to the retinal damage, and was told that I
would not see at all with my right eye for
the rest of my life. Medical technology
was many years away from transplanting a
retina, and mine was far too damaged to
repair. My doctor explained that the risk
of sympathetic ophthalmia, in which the
good eye follows suit with its injured
neighbor and also loses the ability to see,
was far greater than the chance of seeing
out of that eye ever again—and that it
should be removed.
My darkest hours of self doubt
followed upon receiving his diagnosis.
Many questions arose for me about the
role of fate, or accident, in our lives. Was
this event fated? Or was it simply an
accident? Could it have been avoided? I
recalled an acute memory of a night
when I was nineteen years old,
contemplating my unknown future and
feeling much hope and promise, in which
an intuitive feeling persisted—one that I
could not shake from my consciousness
at the time—that I might someday lose
an eye. When I reached my friend and
longtime teacher, Nicholas Hlobeczy, he
said simply, “Thy will be done.”
My mother, my girlfriend, and a select
group of friends gathered at my home
prior to the second surgery, with a bottle
of excellent Armagnac, to drink a
poignant toast to the thirty-three years of
vision my eye had faithfully provided me.
I did a small series of self portraits of my
damaged face and eye, and went to bed
wondering if I would—or could—ever
again feel like a complete human being.
THE VERY NEXT MORNING, I checked
myself into the hospital to have my eye
surgically removed. After settling into my
room, several hours before surgery, I was
asked if I wanted a sedative. “Not yet,”
was my answer. It felt important to
experience this moment as fully as
possible. My anxiety was mounting. I
didn’t know what to do or where to
turn. I decided to take a walk to the
hospital chapel to try to digest the
experience. I never knew such
depression, fear, and despondency—it
was completely paralyzing. I was scared
to death of the future—and of the finality
of the soon-to-be-performed surgery.
Then, in the chapel, came a moment
of realization, in a burst of insight, that
changed my attitude toward this event
and gave me great strength and an
unshakable sense of courage. A question
unexpectedly arose in my mind: If I
cannot let go of something as relatively
insignificant as one eye, one small part of
my body, what will happen when I have
to completely let go of my entire body,
when I die? If I cannot withstand this
shock, I will never be able to gracefully
and consciously withstand the moment
of death. This experience was a kind of
test—a foretaste of letting go. From that
moment on, my experience of losing my
eye changed—and the fear and
depression never returned with
anywhere near the same intensity.
Quite to the contrary; after the
realization in the chapel, the entire
experience of having the eye removed,
of learning to see again, and going
FALL 2011 | 49
50 | PARABOLA
Above: Lower Calf Creek Falls, Escalante, Utah, 1974

Opposite page
top: Strafed Rock, Kaho‘olawe Hawai‘i, 1994
bottom: Kealaikahiki Point, Kaho‘olawe Hawai‘i, 1994

FALL 2011 | 51
 through the inevitable psychic
transformation, became my personal
creative quest. A quest that, more or
less, I welcomed, and of which I tried
to make the best possible use.
Something had changed in me. I felt
less under the dominion of my ego, and
more open to life, to people, and to the
changes inherent in our lives. I learned
much about myself from questioning
why such a massive injury had been the
necessary catalyst to deliver me to the
threshold of this new state of being.
A transformation had occurred on
many different levels, physical,
emotional, psychological, and spiritual,
due to the ongoing effects of the injury.
It served to break down many of the
unquestioned and crystallized attitudes
my psyche had developed as an armor;
and provided an opportunity for
renewal, for a regathering of my energies
under different conditions.
First, I needed to relearn ordinary
physical tasks: driving a car, pouring
liquids into a glass, avoiding collisions
with doorways or people on my right
side, safely crossing streets, discovering
where I needed to sit at a table or in a
restaurant in order to see my companions
and not just the wall, and acquiring a
different sort of respect for my one and
only good eye. It gave me the
opportunity to prune my life down to
the essentials, and to give up superficial
interests and nonessential activities. One
central goal was added to my life’s
purpose: to die seeing, on both a literal
and metaphorical level.
As I learned to face the challenges of
living with one eye, I received help from
an instructive guidebook: A SINGULAR VIEW:
THE ART OF SEEING WITH ONE EYE. Written by
Frank Brady, an airline pilot who lost an
eye when a large mallard smashed the
52 | PARABOLA
windshield of his plane, the book is an
important reference manual for the
newly one-eyed, full of helpful hints and
tricks for navigating through the process
of learning to see with reduced
capabilities. But for any interested reader,
it returns the act of seeing to an art, to
regarding human vision as an intentional
activity, one full of potential and with
perceptual possibilities we have long
forgotten or glossed over. The imperative
of learning to see again is an unusual
opportunity for an adult; most of us,
though genuinely appreciative of our
vision, thoroughly take the act of seeing
for granted and are mostly untrained in
the banquet of gifts that seeing offers.
Observe carefully a young child in
the act of seeing and note the sense of
wonder, joy, and curiosity that
accompanies this adventure. A child
can become completely absorbed in
examining the world through vision—
through any of the senses, for that
matter. Seeing is truly a form of magic,
a perceptual pleasure, a source of real
learning and questioning, and a doorway
to invisible worlds. As adults, we have
much to relearn.
I offer here the initial realizations
gleaned through the process of
recovering my vision in the several
years following my accident.
We do not see
through our eyes alone
PHOTOGRAPHER EDWARD WESTON
described the process of his own creative
work as “Seeing through one’s eyes, not
with them.” And Walt Whitman wrote
in LEAVES OF GRASS, “I am not contained
between my hat and my boots.” In other
words, we see through our entire body.
To focus only on the seeing of our eyes
is misguided, and represents a common
fallacy. Every cell, every part of our body
is a sensitive receiving apparatus, and all
are connected to the eyes. I remember
sitting on a beach years after the surgery,
on the island of Kauai, looking at the
different colors in the world around me,
and feeling each color, locating with
precision where the particular hue
resounded in my body. It was
symphonic, the way in which colors
touched different inner regions, and
stimulated different thoughts, emotions,
and sensations.
When I am attentive, I can sense,
especially on my right side, when
something or someone is there, and can
sense the amount of space separating me
from the object or person. I am surprised
while driving to realize that I do not
always need to look on my right side. I
simply seem to know or feel when
something is there. But this requires great
care; it happens only when I am attentive.
Otherwise, my lack of finely tuned depth
perception causes clumsiness and errors
of visual judgment. Attention is the key. I
can sometimes sense the character or
thoughts of another person by loosely
resting my gaze on them, and staying
within my own body, which provides
insights and empathetic realizations.
I have consciously experimented with
this phenomenon in order to understand
it. Probably the most vivid impressions
came on a number of occasions while
riding the subway in Manhattan. I
discovered that by empathetically
looking at individuals on the train, I
could place my attention inside their
body, so to speak; to feel and sense their
posture and weight with my own body,
and understand what that posture felt
like, from the inside out. From feeling
the weight and shape of their posture,
other realizations about what they may
have been experiencing in that moment
presented themselves. This division of
attention, where we maintain a measure
of our awareness within ourselves while
simultaneously directing some toward
and into the object of our perception,
stimulated many key experiences for me.
It was a remarkable discovery. My
understanding was no longer limited to
looking at the outside of things—the
inner world is within the capabilities of
our seeing.
It Is the braIn that sees,
sImply makIng use of the eyes
THE BRAIN, as I have learned, is a
remarkably adaptive instrument. Over
the course of six or eight months after
losing binocular vision, the brain learns
to adapt to the monocular cues of
perspective, such as the way objects
appear to change size in relation to
distance, and the way motion is
perceived relative to space (for example,
bushes in the foreground appear to be
passing by faster than mountains in the
background as we walk or drive), and
depth perception is slowly regained.
I also discovered that other senses—
especially hearing—become sharper and
more acute when I need to locate
objects or persons on my right side.
Although I suspect that my physical
capacity to hear has not increased at all,
sounds are now more within my field of
awareness, as I must depend on them to
drive, walk, and navigate through space.
I now have difficulty getting around
adroitly and being attentive in noisy
environments, or having background
music or the television on while engaged
in activities that require judgments of
depth and spatial relationships.
FALL 2011 | 53
 Listening and seeing are interrelated,
as are all of our senses. Our physical
vision perceives the light reflected from
objects and our hearing perceives the
vibrations of sound that emanate from,
or are reflected by, objects or people. I
believe there is a reciprocal relationship
between all of our senses that can be
encouraged and developed if we wish—
and this is true for all sighted, partially
sighted, or nonseeing individuals.
seeIng Is a dIrect experIence
and represents a Way of knoWIng
THIS MAY BE stating the obvious, but we
do see what we want to see. What we call
“seeing” is generally a reflection of our
inner dialogue, which is constant and
unceasing. Our inner dialogue tends to
support our particular world view, our
image of ourself, and our subjective
beliefs. We know too much; we can name
and provide a label for everything under
the sun. We have our own agendas, our
predisposed attitudes, and our own
cultural biases. We rarely see the world in
a fresh way or question the numerous
and often unconscious filters that
influence the nature of our perception.
Moments of real seeing are beyond the
labeling propensity of the mind, beyond
what we think we know. Seeing is a step
into the unknown and requires some
degree of intention and awakening. Real
seeing—of ourselves, of others, and of
the world—contains three defining
characteristics: simultaneity, a direct
perception in the present moment;
objectivity, seeing things as they are, as
best we can; and impartiality, freedom
from judgment. For most of us, governed
by our subjective attitudes and cherished
opinions, such moments of direct
perception are rare and depend entirely
54 | PARABOLA
on our inner state of mind, feeling, and
body. But they are possible. Most of us
have experienced moments of inner
accord in which, by chance or intentional
effort, we are open, sensitive, and wholly
present. The first step on the Buddhist
Eightfold Path is “right seeing,” which
serves as a fitting foundation for our
journey. In my mind, “right seeing”
implies not only a positive, life-affirming
attitude, but also a genuine effort toward
direct, conscious perception.
The nature of our perceptions is
relative and depends on our state of
awareness and state of being. Suspending
the internal dialogue, maintaining a dual
attention that embraces both ourselves
and the perceived object, and trying to
be fully present to the moment in front
of us are exercises that assist in the
process of seeing.
Seeing is an exchange of energy that
takes place between ourselves and the
perceived objects of our attention. In
losing the sight of my eye, I learned to
depend to a greater extent on efforts
toward self-awareness and connecting
with my own body and feelings. I clearly
observed how the objects of my
perception registered their impressions
on my being and stimulated widely
varying inner sensations and feelings.
Although I do not fully understand this
process, perhaps the larger potential of
seeing is found in these moments of self-
awareness and the recognition that all
impressions we receive register
themselves within us. Seeing comes from
within ourselves, not from the vague
“out there” of the outer world.
SEEING CAN BE CULTIVATED, indeed
must be, if we wish to live full and
productive lives, sensitively receiving and
richly giving to ourselves and others. It

must always be born in our hearts and
minds that we are the primary medium
of the creative act—not film or clay,
paints or words. Learning to see,
learning to be, and learning to come
into accord with the deeper sources
within and without—these are,
Bryce Canyon, Utah, 1974
undoubtedly, the greatest challenges
given us, the most potent tests of our
creative aspirations and capabilities.
Adapted, with permission, from THE
WIDENING STREAM: THE SEVEN STAGES OF
CREATIVITY, by David Ulrich, Beyond Words
Publishing, 2002.
FALL 2011 | 55
 parabola
O
Vanishing Point E
How am I a self
when I am
T
constantly disappearing?
A traveling venue
R
of water
and sinew.
I am a story
Y
I made up
in my head:
Looks good in hats. Stories –
Won’t eat oysters. Just when you think
Fears infirmity. you could not take

Touch me, I am fluid. one more

here comes another.
In all my transparency You keep right on
my body is
betraying me, living –
just as piling up
the plot your stories
demanded.
I would deny this like cordwood
distant progression and the lying-self
of time and cells keeps pace
if the mirror
were not with daily duties:
such a talker. meals to prepare,
pills to take.
Kiss me, I am corruptible.
How could you
So what keep on if you did not
are we deny your vanishing point?
made of ?
Look at me, I won’t last long.

—Tina Schumann
56 | PARABOLA
Spring for Edwin
I went out to meet
the wind half-way;
something new is always
turning up,
though the crows complain.

When Mom died

Daddy went to the ocean
to meet the tossing—
the change halfway.

It should be winter
longer than this.
For a very long time
I should be buried
in snow.

It seems wrong
that the very day
you were buried
change should ripple
out in such a way—

Everything blooms in shock.

The spring equinox has come

and someone else will
be the teller of the seasons
since you are strangely silent.

Yet the master of language

you are, now speaks
in perfect metaphor—wind,
the red-bud tree, the deer
in the back yard . . .

You continue,
evenso,
my heart is in some
snowy place.

—Linda Ann Suddarth

FALL 2011 | 57
 Ancient French Art History Lessons
in Glass-Encased Pool
The shift has happened. I would like to tell you, that this image, this illusion, this
roar is compensation for all you don’t see. Improbably you have on one hand the
resurrection of Jesus and on the other hand Buddha, lighted within and without,
meditating on the Body Tree. As Hollis says, we are all in this subjective trap of
trying to reflect objectively on an always changing supposedly objective world. I am
entangled. And when the clock chimes I expel resounding and fantastical roundness.
I dream about the changing clay shapes in this room and the felt and profound
compilation of 13, 12, 1.5.
Bee-a-trice
I think I will see you again, but not for one hundred years. I feel the distance love
makes and the unseemliness of transcendence.

What are you feeling?

The elegance of rhizomes.
And now?
The letter A
And now?
The sound ur
And now?
The essence of rhizomes.

The past is still, dark, and unperturbed. To navigate change, there is always yellow,
succumbing in wind to the quality of prayer—the nowing, the bowing, when she goes,
I go. If I may give perhaps one suggestion, it would be an eternal growth of authentic-
ity, prosperous thriving, and closets of existential phenomenologies. In one second the
laundry and in the next, fluorescent pink fish. Your soul is a deep purple coral reef your
body no different than ocean—limitless, vast, full of deep emotion. I sail on the boat
of now to then and into the forests brown makes in your hair, in your eyes, and all over
your skin. Your old life will die—you will jump into the water and drown—you will
probably drown in the infinite and infinitesimal guidance that love offers silently and
without warning to every moment of wanting—wanting the world, wanting creativity,
wanting and succumbing. You are a wordless abandoner of the conscious and ever-
striving abstraction. When spirit becomes unveiled and the great soul revels in the
deafening chime of dark and foreboding earth, you will know the triumph of will,
cloudiness, cloudlessness and forgiveness. The heron has made her way among the
palm fronds to fish and you are the wordless rememberence of virtue, cherries ripened
in light soaked orchards and picked to rose your cheeks, giggling dolls—crumbs,
quills, quails and sobbages.

—Anna Roach
58 | PARABOLA
 ~ Refraction~
Listening is the
Cue to your heart's unfolding
A silent gateway to being reborn~ Some
Unseen element blossoming~ Becoming its
Own garden of seasons~ I meet you here...Still
Within all movement~ Untouched within a haze
Of time~ I would stand here behind the curtain
Of your eyes~ My slipping silhouette a sweet
Scented breath~ The bending refraction
Of your night within my light~ Why
Must we be stillborn within
This prism of life? Let
Me touch you
~Here~
Where
There are no
More mirrors to reflect
What can only be seen within
The tunnel of eyes~ Racing directly
To the heartline~ The pulse within the
Bounty of your blood~ My finger print
Against your tender swell~ To press
To my lips some kind of eternity~
The sanguine seal whet
With a promise of
A different
Kind
~

—Leila A. Fortier
FALL 2011 | 59
 ARCS

I Looked Up
hen I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about
T beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I
saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing
in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all
shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred
hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight
and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all
the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.1
BLACK ELK

our vision will become clear only when you

Y can look into your own heart. Who looks
outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.2
CARL JUNG

looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-
“I foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted
heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling
yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it’s
impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly
got up and began running down the mountain after him doing the exactly the
same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about
five minutes I’d guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of
my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn’t care any more I was so
anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain
goats or I’d say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago….”3
JACK KEROUAC

60 | PARABOLA
 he “spark” which is my true self is the flash of
T the Absolute recognizing itself in me.4
THOMAS MERTON

hen I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature,

W I am reminded by the serene and retired spirit in
which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible
privacy of life—how silent and unambitious it is. The
beauty there is in mosses will have to be considered from
the holiest, quietest nook.
* * *
My truest, serenest moments are too still for emotion; they
have woolen feet. In all our lives we live under the hill, and if we
are not gone we live there still.5
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

1 From BLACK ELK SPEAKS, by John Neihardt (1932)

2 From the letters of Carl Jung
3 From THE DHARMA BUMS (1958)
4 From LOVE AND LIVING (1965)
5 From a journal entry by Henry David Thoreau, June 22, 1851

FALL 2011 | 61
 Digging
Deeper:
A conversation with
Mark Boal

Mark Boal is the screenwriter and producer of THE HURT LOCKER, which
won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2009. Boal himself
won two Oscars for his work on that film: for his screenplay and for
producing. He is also a veteran journalist. Although hard at work on
a new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, he took time to
answer a few questions about seeing.
—Jeff Zaleski

JEFF ZALESKI: Earlier this year you published a piece in ROLLING STONE that
reported on illicit killings by American soldiers in Afghanistan. In effect,
you allowed the reader to see certain realities and truths that had been
hidden from view. What is the value of this? What kind of value do you
put on seeing? And what is it in us, do you think, that draws us toward
(or away from) seeing reality?

62 | PARABOLA
MARK BOAL: On a macro level, it seems self-
evident that an informed public is better
off than an ignorant one, and although I
have no concrete proof of that statement,
I suppose I try, in my own small ways, to
add bits of information and data, and even
stories, to the collective culture. Having
said that, I don’t know that I’m in any
position to assess the value of my
reporting. A writer, I think, never really
knows what his work does to other
people. I do know that I’m very grateful
to have the job, and doing it gives me a
great sense of satisfaction. As for “seeing,”
I suppose journalists try to look deeper
into the pond; sometimes they find
ancient, brutal fish down there, sometimes
they just see a reflection of themselves.
JZ: It’s easy to understand how journalism
can aid seeing. But as a screenwriter, you tell
a story—you create “fiction,” which some
think of as unreality. How can storytelling
allow us to see better what is real and true?
What myths or classic stories helped
shape your understanding of storytelling?
MB: Orwell was a big influence on me. He
showed me a way that fiction, and even
science fiction, could be used to illumi-
nate a social order. To your point, even
though fiction is by definition not real, it
can paradoxically create an environment
of truth-telling on a metaphysical scale.
JZ: It’s difficult to say how the protagonist of
THE HURT LOCKER has been changed by all he
sees; at film’s end, he does what he does when
he first appears: he defuses bombs. How has
seeing certain realities changed you, and, in
particular, changed how you go about explor-
ing (seeing) things, for better or for worse?
MB: Spending time in Iraq was an eye-
opening experience. It inspired me to
dig deeper into the war in a fictional
setting than I had as a reporter, to
explore the psychological contours of
working a high-risk job on the bomb
squad, its psychic burdens, its morbid
FALL 2011 | 63
 Far left: Mark Boal. Woman pointing: Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker
allure. My ticket to doing that was an
invented character, Sergeant James—an
everyman who, like all men, is unique,
and who represented to me the rough
position of the volunteer Army.
JZ: Back to journalism: Today more
than ever, in order to gain an audience,
journalism must entertain even as it
informs. What are the particular
challenges that arise in today’s culture
regarding the seeing of what is real
and true?
MB: I’m not very receptive to hand-
wringing over today’s culture. The chal-
lenges to telling a story that is good, in
the broadest sense of the word, and
true, in the broadest sense of that word,
seem to me to be more or less the same
as they’ve always been: the same obsta-
cles and barriers that writers and story
tellers have always faced. Bizarre as it
might sound, I bet there’s a lot about
today’s culture, except perhaps for the
ever-increasing decibel level, that a
town crier from Roman times would
find recognizable.
64 | PARABOLA
JZ: In THE HURT LOCKER, much of the
seeing is done via technology: via
sighting scopes and binoculars, through
video screens and cameras. How do you
think technology is affecting the way we
view the world?
MB: I’m not sure digital technology is
having a fundamental effect on the way
we “view the world.” One of the biggest
technological changes impacting the
visual side of things was, of course, the
invention of electricity, and the gigantic
shift in lifestyle habits that came when
light bulbs replaced candles in the home,
and when cities were built with electri-
cally illuminated side-walks. It’s hard to
say where the personal computer stacks
up against that sort of watershed devel-
opment…. Maybe the digital age is not
as radical as it seems at the moment….
As for the use of scopes and different
cameras in THE HURT LOCKER, that was due
partly to a desire to be faithful to the
technology soldiers actually deploy in the
field, and partly it was due to a series of
aesthetic decisions made by director
Kathryn Bigelow.
FALL 2011 | 65
 “Seeing” by Zen Master Dogen
Kazuaki Tanahashi

T
he view on “seeing” by Dogen, a thirteenth-
century Japanese Zen monk, is rather
unique. He uses the word “dream”
to describe the enlightenment of the
Buddha, and the meditative experience
of all practitioners. Counter to the
common notion that dreams are
unreal and actual phenomena are
real, he asserts that the awak-
ened ones’ profound wisdom is
concrete, the source of all
teaching, while actual phe-
nomena are transient and
unreliable.
Dogen presented this
short essay titled “Within a
Dream Expressing the Dream”
to the assembly of the Kannon-
dori Kosho Horin Monastery in
Uji County, south of Kyoto, on the
twenty-first day, the ninth month,
the third year of the Ninji Era [1242].
The following text is translated by
Taigen Dan Leighton and myself.
(Excerpted from Treasury of the True
Dharma Eye, Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo
Genzo, Shambhala Publications, 2010, with
permission by the publisher.)

THE PATH OF ALL BUDDHAS and ancestors arises

before the first forms emerge; it cannot be spoken of
using conventional views. This being so, in the realm of
buddha ancestors there is the active power of buddhas going
beyond buddhas. Since this realm is not a matter of the passage
of time, their lives are neither long nor short, neither quick nor slow.

66 | PARABOLA
Every dewdrop manifested in
every realm is a dream.

This cannot be judged in an ordinary manner.

Thus, the dharma wheel has been set to turn
since before the first sign of forms
emerged. The great merit needs no
reward, and becomes the guidepost for
all ages. Within a dream this is the
dream you express. Because awak-
ening is seen within awakening,
the dream is expressed within a
dream.
The place where the dream is
expressed within a dream is the
land and the assembly of buddha
ancestors. The buddhas’ lands
and their assemblies, the ances-
tors’ way and their seats, are awak-
ening throughout awakening, and
express the dream within a dream.
When you meet such speech and
expressions, do not regard them as
other than the buddhas’ assembly; it
is buddha turning the dharma wheel.
This dharma wheel encompasses all
the ten directions and the eight facets of
a clear crystal, and so the great oceans,
Mt. Sumeru, the lands, and all buddhas
are actualized. This is the dream expressed
within a dream, prior to all dreams.
Every dewdrop manifested in every realm is
a dream. This dream is the glowing clarity of the
hundred grasses. What requires questioning is this
very point. What is confusing is this very point. At this
time, there are dream grasses, grasses within, expressive
grasses, and so on. When we study this, then roots, stems,
branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits, as well as radiance and color
are all the great dream. Do not mistake them as merely dreamy.

FALL 2011 | 67
 However, those who do not wish to
study buddha dharma believe that
expressing the dream within a dream
means speaking of unreal dream grass as
real, like piling delusion upon delusion.
But this is not true. When you say,
“Within confusion is just confusion,” still
you should follow the path in the vast
sky known as “delusion throughout
delusion.” You should endeavor to inves-
tigate just this thoroughly.
THE EXPRESSING OF THE DREAM within
a dream is all buddhas. All buddhas are
wind and rain, water and fire. We
respectfully maintain these names of
buddhas, and also pay homage to those
names of other buddhas. To express the
dream within a dream is the ancient
Without being within a dream, buddhas do not
emerge and turn the wondrous dharma wheel.
buddhas; it is to ride in this treasure
boat and directly arrive in the practice
place. Directly arriving in the practice
place is riding in this treasure boat.
Meandering dreams and direct dreams,
holding and letting go, all freely flow
like gusting breezes.
The dharma wheel is just like this;
turning the great dharma-wheel-world is
immeasurable and boundless. It turns
even within a single particle, ebbing and
flowing ceaselessly within the particle.
Accordingly, whenever such a dharma is
turned, even an antagonist nods and
smiles. Wherever such a dharma is
turned, it freely circulates like the flow-
ing breezes.
Thus, the endless turning of dharma
traverses the entire land. In the all-
68 | PARABOLA
embracing world, cause and effect are
not ignored, and all buddhas are unsur-
passable. Know that being present in all
situations, the guiding way of all bud-
dhas in the amassing of expressions of
dharma is boundlessly transforming. Do
not search for the limits of dharma in the
past and future.
All things leave and all things arrive
right here. This being so, one plants
twining vines and gets entangled in twin-
ing vines. This is the characteristic of
unsurpassable enlightenment. Just as
enlightenment is limitless, sentient
beings are limitless and unsurpassable.
Just as cages and snares are limitless,
emancipation from them is limitless. The
actualization of the fundamental point is:
“I grant you thirty blows.” This is the
actualization of expressing the dream
within a dream.
Thus, a tree with no roots, the ground
where no light or shade falls, and a valley
where no shouts echo are no other than
the actualized expressions of the dream
within a dream. This is neither the realm
of humans nor of heavenly beings, and
cannot be judged by ordinary people.
Who could doubt that a dream is
enlightenment, since it is not within the
purview of doubt? Who could recognize
this dream, since it is not related to
recognition? Since unsurpassable enlight-
enment is unsurpassable enlightenment,
so the dream is called a dream.
THERE ARE INNER DREAMS, dream
expressions, expressions of dreams, and
dreams inside. Without being within a
dream, there is no expression of dreams.
Without expressing dreams, there is no
being within a dream. Without express-
ing dreams, there are no buddhas.
Without being within a dream, buddhas
do not emerge and turn the wondrous
dharma wheel. This dharma wheel is no
other than a buddha together with a
buddha, and a dream expressed within a
dream. Simply expressing the dream
within a dream is itself buddhas and
ancestors, the assembly of unsurpassable
enlightenment. Furthermore, going
beyond the dharma body is itself express-
ing the dream within a dream.
Here is the encounter of a buddha
with a buddha. No attachments are
needed to the head, eyes, marrow, and
brain, or body, flesh, hands, and feet.
Without attachment, one who buys gold
sells gold. This is called the mystery of
mysteries, the wonder of wonders, the
awakening of awakenings, the head top
above the head. This is the daily activity
of buddha ancestors. When you study
this head top, you may think that the
head only means a human skull, without
understanding that it is the crown of
Vairochana Buddha. How can you real-
ize it as the tips of the bright, clear hun-
dred grasses? Who knows that this is the
head as it is?
Since ancient times the phrase “the
head top placed above the head” has
been spoken. Hearing this phrase, foolish
people think that it cautions against
adding something extra. Usually they
FALL 2011 | 69
 The expression of the dream within a dream can
be aroused by both ordinary people and sages.
70 | PARABOLA
refer to something that should not occur
when they say, “How can you add a head
on top of a head?” Actually, isn’t this a
mistake?
The expression of the dream within a
dream can be aroused by both ordinary
people and sages. Moreover, the expres-
sion of the dream within a dream by
both ordinary people and sages arose
yesterday and develops today. Know that
yesterday’s expression of the dream
within a dream was the recognition of
this expression as expressing the dream
within a dream. The present expression
of the dream within a dream is to experi-
ence right now this expression as express-
ing the dream within a dream. Indeed,
this is the marvelous joy of meeting a
buddha.
We should regret that, although the
dream of the buddha ancestors’ bright
hundred grasstops is apparent, clearer
than a hundred thousand suns and
moons, the ignorant do not see it. What
a pity! The head that is “the head placed
above the head” is exactly the head tops
of a hundred grasses, thousands of types
of heads, the ten thousand kinds of
heads, the heads throughout the body,
the heads of the entire world uncon-
cealed, the heads of the entire world of
the ten directions, the heads of teacher
and student that join in a single phrase,
the head top of a one hundred foot pole.
“Placing” and “above” in “placing the
head top above the head” are both
heads. Study and investigate this.
THUS, THE PASSAGE “All buddhas and
their unsurpassable, complete enlighten-
ment all emerge from this [Diamond]
Sutra” is exactly expressing the dream
within a dream, which has always been
the head placed atop the head. This
sutra, while expressing the dream within
a dream, brings forth buddhas with their
unsurpassed enlightenment. These bud-
dhas, with their enlightenment, in turn
speak this sutra, which is the established
expression of the dream within a dream.
As the cause of a dream is not
obscure, the effect of the dream is not
ignored. This is indeed one mallet strik-
ing one thousand or ten thousand blows,
one thousand or ten thousand mallets
striking one or half a blow. As it is so, a
thing of suchness expresses the dream
within a dream; a person of suchness
expresses the dream within a dream. A
thing beyond suchness expresses the
dream within a dream; a person beyond
suchness expresses the dream within a
dream. This understanding has been
acknowledged as crystal clear. What is
called, “talking all day long about a
dream within a dream,” is no other than
the actual expression of the dream within
a dream.
AN ANCIENT BUDDHA SAID, “Now I
express the dream within a dream for
you. All buddhas in the past, present,
and future express the dream within a
dream. The six early generations of
Chinese ancestors express the dream
within a dream.”
STUDY AND CLARIFY these words.
Shakyamuni Buddha holding up the
flower and blinking is exactly the expres-
sion of the dream within a dream. Huike
doing prostrations and attaining the mar-
row is also the expression of the dream
within a dream.
Making one brief utterance, beyond
understanding and beyond knowing, is
the expression of the dream within a
dream. As the expression of the dream
within a dream is the thousand hands
and eyes of Avalokiteshvara that function
FALL 2011 | 71
 by many means, the power of seeing col-
ors and sounds, and hearing colors and
sounds, is fully maintained. The mani-
festing body is the expression of the
dream within a dream. The expressions
of dreams and of myriad aspects of
dharma are the expression of the dream
within a dream. Taking hold and letting
go are the expressions of the dream
within a dream. Directly pointing is
expressing the dream; hitting the mark is
expressing the dream.
WHEN YOU TAKE HOLD or when you let
go, you need to study the common bal-
ancing scale. As soon as you understand
it, the measuring of ounces and pounds
will become clear and will express the
dream within a dream. Without know-
ing ounces and pounds, and without
reaching the level balance, there is no
actualization of the balance point.
When you attain balanced equilibrium,
you will see the balance point. Achiev-
ing balance does not depend on the
objects being weighed, on the balancing
scale, or on the activity of weighing, but
just hangs on emptiness. Thus, deeply
consider that without attaining balance
you do not experience solidity. Just
hanging on its own in emptiness, the
expression of the dream within a dream
allows objects to float free in emptiness.
Within emptiness, stable balance is
manifested. Stable balance is the great
way of the balance scale. While suspend-
ing emptiness and suspending objects,
whether as emptiness or as forms,
expression of the dream within a dream
brings level balance.
There is no liberation other than
expression of the dream within a dream.
The dream is the entire great earth; the
entire great earth is stable. Thus, the
inexhaustibility of turning the head and
72 | PARABOLA
pivoting the brain [actualizing freedom]
is just your awakening of the dream
within a dream—identifying with and
actualizing the dream within a dream.
SHAKYAMUNI BUDDHA said in a verse [in
the Lotus Sutra]:
All buddhas, with bodies of golden hue,
splendidly adorned with a hundred
auspicious marks,
hear the dharma and expound it for others.
Such is the fine dream that ever occurs.
In the dream you are made king,
then forsake palace and household
entourage,
along with utmost satisfaction of the five-
sense desires,
and travel to the site of practice
under the bodhi tree.
On the lion’s seat
in search of the way, after seven days
you attain the wisdom of the buddhas,
completing the unsurpassable way.
Arising and turning the dharma wheel,
you expound the dharma for the four
groups of practitioners
throughout thousands of millions of
kalpas,
expressing the wondrous dharma free of
flaws,
and liberating innumerable sentient
beings.
Finally you enter pari-nirvana,
like the smoke dispersing as the lamp is
extinguished.
If later in the unwholesome world
one expounds this foremost dharma,
one will produce great benefit,
like the merit just described.
STUDY THIS DISCOURSE of the Buddha,
and thoroughly investigate this buddha
assembly of the buddhas [in the Lotus
Sutra]. This dream of buddhas is not an
analogy. As the wondrous dharma of all
buddhas is mastered only by a buddha
together with a buddha, all dharmas
awakened in the dream are genuine
forms. In awakening there are aspiration,
Hearing the dharma is hearing sounds
with the eye, and with the mind.
practice, enlightenment, and nirvana.
Within the dream there are aspiration,
practice, enlightenment, and nirvana.
Every awakening within a dream is the
genuine form, without regard to large or
small, superior or inferior.
However, on hearing the words in
the passage, In the dream you are made
king, people in the past and present mis-
takenly think that, due to the power of
expounding this foremost dharma, mere
night dreams may become like this
dream of buddhas. Those who think
like this have not yet clarified the
Buddha’s discourse.
Awakening and dreaming are from the
beginning one suchness, the genuine
reality. The buddha dharma, even if it
were an analogy, is the genuine reality. As
it is not an analogy, made king in the
dream is the reality of the buddha
dharma.
Shakyamuni Buddha and all buddhas
and ancestors each arouse the mind, cul-
tivate practice, and attain universal true
awakening within a dream. This being
so, the Buddha’s path of transforming
the Saha World throughout his lifetime is
indeed created in a dream.
In search of the way, after seven days is
the measure of attained buddha wisdom.
As for what is described, Turning the
dharma wheel . . . throughout thousands of
millions of kalpas . . . liberating innumer-
able sentient beings—these fluctuations
within a dream cannot be traced.
All buddhas, with bodies of golden hue,
splendidly adorned with a hundred auspi-
cious marks, hear the dharma and
expound it for others. Such is the fine
dream that ever occurs. These words
clearly show that this fine dream is illumi-
nated as all buddhas.
There is the ever occurring of the
Tathagata’s words; it is not only hun-
dreds of years of dreaming. Expounding
it for others is manifesting the body.
Hearing the dharma is hearing sounds
with the eye, and with the mind. It is
hearing sounds in the old nest, and
before the empty kalpa.
As it is said that All buddhas, with
bodies of golden hue, splendidly adorned
with a hundred auspicious marks, now
we can directly realize beyond any
doubt that this fine dream is itself all
buddhas with bodies. Although within
awakening the buddhas’ transforma-
tions never cease, the buddha ancestors’
emergence is itself the creation of a
dream within a dream. Be mindful of
not slandering the buddha dharma.
When you practice not slandering the
buddha dharma, this path of the tatha-
gatas is immediately actualized.
Presented to the assembly of the Kannondori
Kosho Horin Monastery, Uji County, Yamashiro
Province, on the twenty-first day, the ninth
month, the third year of the Ninji Era [1242].
FALL 2011 | 73
 Dionysos:
The Mysteries
Made Visible
George Latura Beke

Figure 1. Planetary stairway along the zodiacal light:

bright Venus at the bottom, reddish Mars
in the middle, Saturn at the top

IF YOU’VE BEEN SHOWING a youngster ancient coins that evoke

“the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” or
if you’ve taken him or her to a planetarium, or to an observatory
to see Saturn with a large telescope, be prepared for exponentially
multiplied challenges.
A short while ago, my twelve-year-old grandniece asked: “How
come we can see Jupiter and Venus, but Dionysos is not visible,
like other ancient gods?”
That question had been in my mind for quite some time, and
her query ignited a surprising remembering, which according
to Plato is the process of learning. As it turns out, Dionysos is
linked to a celestial phenomenon, but one so rarely seen that, in
antiquity, it spawned the Mysteries and remains a mystery for
most people today.

74 | PARABOLA
 In his BACCHAE, the Athenian playwright
Euripides has Dionysos manifesting a
visible light reaching from the earth to
the sky, while in ANTIGONE, Sophocles
claims that the god leads the dance of the
stars, which indicates that Dionysos does
have a connection to phenomena visible
in the firmament.
Dionysos cried out: Maidens,
I bring the man who makes a mockery
of you
And me and my orgies; take vengeance
on him!
As he addressed them, a light of
awesome fire
Was fastened on the heaven and the earth.
–Euripides, BACCHAE
God of many names . . .
O Bacchos . . .
O leader in the dance of the stars
That circle in the night . . .
Come, O Lord . . .
–Sophocles, ANTIGONE
Even amateur astronomers know that
the stars do not dance. They are station-
ary, fixed in their position relative to
each other due to their great distance
from us. The “stars” that do dance are
the “Wanderers” of our planetary sys-
tem, the seven visible bodies that course
along the ecliptic and mark out the con-
stellations of the zodiac. For Dionysos
to lead the dance of the Wanderers, he
too would have to travel along the
ecliptic and soar along the zodiac.
Thank heavens, there is a celestial
phenomenon that fits what Euripides
and Sophocles revealed, an awesome
light in the night sky that follows the
ecliptic: the zodiacal light. Composed of
myriads of dust particles that circle the
Sun along the path of the planets and
that, like the planets, reflect the solar
glare, this magic dust becomes visible at
specific times of the year and at particular
hours of the night, revealing to the initi-
ated a golden pathway to the heavens.
And when planets are propitiously
located along this visible path, we wit-
ness the celestial stairway leading up to
the divine abode that formed the basis of
ancient astral religion (Figure 1).
The Greek poet Pindar painted the
glowing heavenly staircase in his ODES
(c. 400 B.C.), while the description of
this phenomenon hundreds of years
earlier by the greatest Greek poet would
become famous as the Golden Chain
of Homer.
First did the Fates in their golden chariot
bring heavenly Themis, wise in counsel,
from the springs of Ocean to the awesome
stair that marks the shining way to
Olympus….
–Pindar, ODES
Hangs me a golden chain from heaven,
and lay hold of it all of you, gods and god-
desses together—tug as you will, you will
not drag Zeus the supreme counselor
from heaven to earth.
–Homer, ILIAD
In the TEN BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE of the
Roman writer Vitruvius (which inspired
Leonardo’s VITRUVIAN MAN), we also find
the planetary staircase, while the Greek
philosopher Celsus gave his understand-
ing of the Mysteries of Mithras, a cult
that attracted many adherents from the
Roman army and promised the ascent of
the soul through a planetary ladder
(Figure 2).
The Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, as
well as Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, differing
from one another in the magnitude of
their orbits as though their courses were at
different points in a flight of steps….
–Vitruvius
In that system there is an orbit for the
fixed stars, another for the planets, and
a diagram for the passage of the soul
FALL 2011 | 75

Figure 2. Mosaic path at Ostia Mithraeum,
showing the planetary ladder to heaven
through the latter. They picture this as a
ladder with seven gates, and at the very
top an eighth gate….
–Celsus, ON THE TRUE DOCTRINE
The symbol of the planetary ladder to
the heavens was carried at the forefront
of Roman legions on standards that bore
circles, disks, and crescents representing
heavenly bodies (Figure 3, top). The first
Roman emperor, Augustus, adopted the
zodiacal sign Capricorn as his personal
symbol and, after he was deified, this sign
would appear atop legion standards hun-
dreds of years later (Figure 3, bottom).
The promise of a heavenly ascension
inspired legionnaires as they marched
into battle, with Divus Augustus
(Capricorn) ready to welcome them
into the celestial abode.
76 | PARABOLA
MONOTHEISTIC RELIGIONS
tried to stamp out all evidence
of ancient planetary cults, but
traces survived. The Great
Menorah of the Temple of
Jerusalem that was carried off
by Roman soldiers (as seen on
the Arch of Titus in Rome)
had seven branches, and the
Jewish writers Josephus and
Philo of Alexandria assert that
these seven lights stood for the
planets. The consecutive light-
ing of menorah candles over
days at Hanukkah replays the
ascent through the planets,
with the first candle to be lit
named Shamash, the ancient
mid-Eastern Sun god.
Mirroring this symbolism,
many Christian churches
today have seven lamps before
the altar, from the REVELATION of John of
Patmos, seven lights that represent the
planets. And when Muslim pilgrims
arrive in Mecca, their first duty is to
circumambulate the Ka’aba: briskly
for the first three circuits (the inner
“planets”: Moon, Mercury, Venus), and
then more leisurely for the remaining
four circuits (the outer “planets”: Sun,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), paralleling the
ancient ascent through the planets.
In PARADISO, the fourteenth-century
Italian poet Dante describes a climb
through the planets, proving that this tra-
dition lived on for many generations. But
the most amazing survival of the planetary
ascent to the heavens is our week, the
seven-day voyage through the planets.
The Roman historian Dio Cassius reveals
that the order of the days of the week is
based on musical intervals, and so if we
follow the classical planetary sequence of
Vitruvius, we start with the Moon
(Monday, the first day of the week), skip
three planets (the musical interval of the
fifth) and arrive at Mars (French:
Mardi). Repeating the procedure,
we circle back to Mercury (French:
Mercredi), then on to Jupiter/Jove
(French: Jeudi), to Venus (French:
Vendredi), then to Saturn (Saturday), and
finally arrive at Sunday. Then we repeat
the uphill climb through the planets all
over again, much like Sisyphus.
The Roman encyclopedist Pliny
ascribed the Music of the Spheres to
Pythagoras, while hundreds of years
later the jurist Martianus Cappela
described an allegorical harmonic ascent
through the planetary spheres. Figure 3. Top: Denarius of Marc Antony,
showing standards with Moon crescent at the bottom,
Occasionally Pythagoras draws on the topped by circles or orbs. BoTTom: bronze coin of Gordian
theory of music, and designates the III; on the reverse, Capricorn, the astrological sign of
Augustus, sits atop the flanking standards.
distance between the earth and the moon
as a whole tone, that between the moon
and Mercury as a semitone, between
Mercury and Venus the same, between her What is this great and pleasing sound that
and the sun a tone and a half, between the fills my ears? “That,” replied my grand-
sun and Mars a tone, between Mars and father, “is a concord of tones separated by
Jupiter half a tone, between Jupiter and unequal but nevertheless carefully propor-
Saturn half a tone…. tioned intervals, caused by the rapid
–Pliny, NATURAL HISTORY motion of the spheres themselves….
Gifted men, imitating this harmony on
Philology ascended rapidly from here and
stringed instruments and in singing, have
flew by a half tone as far as the circle of
gained for themselves a return to this
Venus…. Soon she was eager to make the
region, as have those who have devoted
toilsome journey to the sun’s circle—an
their exceptional abilities to a search for
ascent rendered toilsome by its distance of
divine truths.”
three half tones, or a tone and a half.
–Cicero, DREAM OF SCIPIO
–Martianus Capella,
MARRIAGE OF PHILOLOGY AND MERCURY In the sphere of Saturn it [the soul]
obtains reason and understanding … in
In his ON THE REPUBLIC, the Roman Jupiter’s sphere, the power to act … in
orator Cicero mimics Plato’s REPUBLIC and Mars’ sphere, a bold spirit … in the sun’s
invokes a return to the celestial regions, sphere, sense perception and imagination
… in Venus’ sphere, the impulse of pas-
a return because the soul supposedly
sion… in Mercury’s sphere, the impulse to
descends from the heavens acquiring
speak and interpret … and in the lunar
different attributes through the planetary sphere, the function of molding and
spheres (according to Macrobius), increasing bodies.
attributes it will relinquish in reverse –Macrobius,
order once free of the material body. COMMENTARY ON THE DREAM OF SCIPIO

FALL 2011 | 77
 The return of the soul to the celestial
regions along the planetary path was the
great secret of ancient mystery religions,
whether the Mysteries of Mithras or the
Mysteries of Eleusis, and since the planets
must travel beneath the earth, this journey
inevitably encounters Death (Hades).
Dionysos descended to the
underworld and returned, just as
Herakles came back with three-headed
Kerberos, and for this they were called
soter, or savior, as guarantors of the soul’s
safety in the afterlife (Figure 4, top). Just
skirting sacrilege, Aristophanes comically
re-invented Dionysos’ otherworldly
journey in FROGS, where Dionysos asks
Herakles for advice on how to reach
Hades. Prior to his voyage to the
underworld, Dionysos was initiated into
Figure 4. Top, coin of Thrace: Ivy-crowned head of
Dionysos; on reverse, Dionysos Soter (Savior). Middle,
coin of Metapontum: Head of Dionysos; on reverse,
the ear of grain of Demeter flanked by the four-headed
cross torch of Eleusis. Bottom, silver denarius of the
Roman Republic: Head of Liber (Dionysos); on
reverse, Demeter searches for her daughter,
brandishing torches in a chariot drawn by serpents.
78 | PARABOLA
the Mysteries of Eleusis (as was Herakles),
and the connection between the
Eleusinian goddess and Dionysos
would survive for centuries.
God of many names,
Glorious child of Thebes,
Whose mother was bride
To Zeus’ deep thunder!
It is you who guard the fame of Italy,
You who look after the embrace, at Eleusis,
Of Demeter, all-welcoming goddess.
O Bacchos …
–Sophocles, ANTIGONE
When the Greeks colonized southern
Italy (Magna Graecia), the city of
Metapontum minted coins that show
Dionysos on one side, while the reverse
has the ear of grain of Demeter flanked
by the four-headed torch of Eleusis
(Figure 4, middle). Similarly, silver coins
of the Roman Republic show Liber
(Dionysos) on one side, while Ceres
(Demeter) carries torches on the reverse
as she searches for her abducted
daughter (Figure 4, bottom), a pairing
that cements the mystical relationship
between Demeter (grain, bread) and
Dionysos (grape, wine).
The influence of the Mysteries of
Eleusis on the Roman world was so
pervasive that Octavian asked to be
initiated there after his victory over Marc
Antony at Actium, acquiring the right to
be called Augustus and to be deified after
his death. Later Roman emperors and
empresses, in order to join the visible
gods in the heavens, would often make
the pilgrimage to the village outside
Athens where the mystic rites were held.
In his ELEUSIS, Carl Kerenyi amply
documents Dionysos’ link to the
Eleusinian Mysteries, rites that were
celebrated in the spring (Lesser Mysteries)
and in the fall (Greater Mysteries), rites
celebrated at night. It is precisely at these
times of the year that the zodiacal light is
best seen from temperate latitudes, either
after sunset or before sunrise.
Pindar had pointed to the visible “ The work off A. H. Almaas
A
manifestation of Dionysos at harvest places him among the gr greatest
eatest
time, while dithyrambs and cultic hymns psychologists alive today
today.”
.”
implored the god to appear, often in a
—Jack Kor
Kornfield
nfield
stellar context:
May Dionysos, bringer of joy, foster the
grove of trees, Diamond
D iam o n d H
Heart
e a rt
The holy light at summer’s end.
Book Five • Inexhaustiblee Myster
Mystery
ryy
Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come, A.. H
A H.. A
Almaas
lmaas
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come …
Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair,
She Thyone, once to Zeus did bear.
The stars danced for joy.…

How could the god possibly

appear when the stars are dancing?
By manifesting himself as a holy light
across the night sky that only those
initiated into the Mysteries would
recognize and understand. In PHAEDO,
Plato alludes to the esoteric content of
these rites: “Many carry the thyrsus,
but few are Bacchi.” The dance of the
followers of Dionysos, like the dance of
the Whirling Dervishes, is the dance of
the planets along the ecliptic, along the
Paperback $18.95
mystic light that appears only at specific
times of the year.
In order to witness this ethereal light I n the long-awaited fifth—
and final—installment in the
Diamond Hear t series, A. H.
for myself, I flew down to Arizona where
Almaas challenges us to explore,
the desert night skies are still dark at
with curiosity and love, our infi-
some distance from light-polluting cities. nite potential as human beings,
An hour after sundown, as I drove along and in doing so to understand
pitch-black roads searching for my bed- profound new things about
and-breakfast, I realized that this was the ourselves, one another, and the
witching hour. Pulling over and turning reality we inhabit.
off all lights, I waited for my eyes to
adjust to the darkness. And there, ever
Shambhala
S hambhala
so faint but undeniably visible, arched
on high the zodiacal light, the celestial
w ww.Shambhala.com
www.Shambhala.com
pathway along which Dionysos leads the
dance of the whirling planets.

FALL 2011 | 79
 Hugh Brockwill Ripman
80 | PARABOLA
HUGH BROCKWILL RIPMAN (1909–80) was the founder of the Gurdjieff
Work in Washington, D.C. He met the Gurdjieff teaching through P.D.
Ouspensky in London in 1934, and with his wife, Mildred, continued to
work with him and Mme. Ouspensky in England until 1946. Then they
were able to follow the Ouspenskys to America, Hugh having been
appointed First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington. A year
later he took a position at the World Bank and continued to work there
until his retirement in 1972, a job that gave him the opportunity to
travel to many different countries and meet spiritual teachers in other
traditions, Zen and Taoist, Hindu, Tantric, and Sufi.
G.I. Gurdjieff himself returned to America in the winter of 1948, his
first visit since before the war. Although Ouspensky had received the
teaching from Gurdjieff, he had separated himself from his teacher in
1924. From that time on he taught on his own, without mentioning
Gurdjieff, so that his pupils surmised that this teacher was dead or in
some way no longer able to teach. After Ouspensky’s death in 1947,
Mme. Ouspensky, who had never ceased to regard Gurdjieff as her
teacher and through all this time had kept herself informed of his
condition and ongoing teaching, advised her pupils to go to New York
and meet him.
In the book SEARCH FOR TRUTH, Hugh describes the powerful impact
his first meeting with Gurdjieff had on him: “Then Gurdjieff came in—
and instead of there being seventy-one people in the room, there was
one man and seventy two-dimensional figures.... This was a man whom
one could never forget.”
After Gurdjieff left New York in February of 1949, Mme. Ouspensky
gave her pupils the task of gathering a few people who might be
interested in Gurdjieff's ideas and preparing them to meet him when
he returned the following October. But Gurdjieff died in Paris on the
29th of that month and never returned.
Hugh felt a responsibility toward the people he had gathered in
D.C. and was given permission to try to share with them what he had
understood of the teaching. He began with seven or eight people, but by
1980 there were more than two hundred members in the Washington
group and more in groups Hugh had established in nearby cities.
The following selections are from two books that, after years-long
labor, the Washington group first published privately and are now
offering for general distribution.
SEARCH FOR TRUTH is a spiritual autobiography Hugh wrote in 1961 but
did not offer for publication at that time. To this work its editors have
added several essays he wrote between 1949 and 1961.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ALONG THE WAY consists of selections from Hugh’s
meetings with his groups between 1968, when the meetings began to
be taped, and 1980, the year of his death.
—Martha Heyneman
FALL 2011 | 81
 Hugh Brockwill Ripman

THERE WAS A MAN WHO DIED. Among other things, he left to his only
son a sealed package, and a letter that read thus:

This package came into my hands in Central Asia many years ago. One night,
as I lay beside a stream, which wound between barren hills, I had a dream.
When I woke in the morning, the vividness of the dream remained with me,
and inner compulsion led me to make my way to the source of the stream.
There I found an old man, who had figured in my dream.
He entrusted this package to my care and died in my arms a few hours
later. He told me a strange story. To most people it would have sounded
merely fantastic, but there was something in the old man’s face and in his
voice that carried conviction. This is the story that he told me in the hours
before he died:
“This package contains a carpet. This carpet is woven entirely of human
hair. Its weaving was spread over a period of six generations, and the planning
of it and the gathering of material took three generations, so that between the
first conception and the final stitch nearly three hundred years elapsed.

82 | PARABOLA
 “There are four kinds of knowledge,
each valid within its sphere, and each the
aim of effort among men. Knowledge of the
body is learned by hand and foot and eye,
by imitation and by training. Knowledge of
the brain is gained from books, from teach-
ers, from the exercise of thought.
Knowledge of the heart springs from the
experience of emotion. Knowledge of the
soul is the only one of the four that is
knowledge of reality, of the mystery which
lies behind the things of sense.
“At different times one or another of
these kinds of knowledge is valued and
sought more than the others—knowledge
of the brain, today. In other times—espe-
cially in the first flowering of the great reli-
gions—knowledge of the soul was the aim
that shaped men’s lives. It was during such
a period that this carpet was planned and
made. The men of that time knew that
their culture, like every other culture on
earth, had its life span, and would one day
be a memory, and then not even that; and
they decided to leave behind them a sign
and symbol of their knowledge of the soul.
“This carpet is their memorial. Each of
the hairs woven into its fabric has been cut
from the head of a man or a woman whose
life was spent in strenuous and unremitting
endeavor to achieve the knowledge of real-
ity, and who had achieved that knowledge
before the body returned to earth. The
design of the carpet conveys no meaning
to the eyes of the body; only the eyes of
the soul may read what is written there.
“You have heard of the virtue that
emanates from holy relics, how they are in
some way saturated with a power. Power
of this kind flowed into the carpet through
generations of men and women dedicated
to the knowledge that it symbolizes. Its
power is greater than that of lightning.”
You may understand why I have never
made any attempt to open the package. It
is for you to decide whether to leave it
untouched, as I have done, or not. But
know that if you do open it, and there is
anything in your heart but the desire for
the knowledge of reality, then you put
yourself in danger. What danger I do not
know—perhaps of insanity, perhaps of
death.
THE SON OF THE MAN who had died
pondered over this letter for many days.
He considered what he knew of the
world and of men. He saw that most
men never wondered what meaning life
had, what part they played in the pattern
of life, what mystery lay behind the
things of sense. Their world was
bounded by the limits of their own
affairs. If they thought at all of larger
issues, it was only to repeat parrot-like
what they had heard or read.
There were some men whose life was
shaped by ambition, which, like a mag-
net, drew them along a certain course.
They sought wealth, or power, or fame.
Some emerged from the struggle broken
and beaten; others, stronger or more
cunning, attained their goal. But the
prizes which fell to the successful were
ephemeral things, their grasp of these
prizes a precarious one. There was no
wealth so great that it could not be lost
by theft, by natural disaster, by decay;
there was no power so secure that it
could not be overwhelmed or under-
mined by conquest, by revolution, by
corruption; there was no fame so well
established that it might not fall into
oblivion, or even turn to infamy. Even if
such things could be retained during life,
the hand of death was always poised,
ready to fall in its time without respect
for rank or possessions.
Such men as these sought knowledge
not for its own sake, but as a means to
their ends.
There were others whose life was also
shaped by an aim, but of a different kind:
those who struggled to express, through
the arts, symbols of the experience of
FALL 2011 | 83
 mankind. Many lacked the talent that
can give form to such symbols. Many
developed the techniques of their art,
but lacked the vision that can distill
the eternity of the symbol. Many were
corrupted by fame or wealth, or by the
desire for such rewards. A few, during
the centuries, produced masterpieces
which lived after them.
Some men did seek truth for its own
sake, along the paths of science or philos-
ophy. For them knowledge was the goal.
All their efforts were aimed at the discov-
ery of reality. Step by step, building on
the foundations laid by others before
them, they elaborated and embellished
the achievements of intellect.
Finally, there were some who claimed
to possess the knowledge of truth,
84 | PARABOLA
attained by the path of religion. But
there were many religions, each claiming
that it was the sole possessor of the truth.
The followers of these religions quarreled
and persecuted one another in the name
of truth.
After many days the son of the man
who had died came to a decision. He
placed his affairs in the hands of trust-
worthy advisers and embarked upon a
search for knowledge. He read many
books, studied under learned professors,
and travelled widely, for he wished to
discover whether the knowledge of
reality could be achieved by the brain.
He sought out men famous for their
erudition, and listened to their teaching.
To each he finally put the question:
“What do you know with certainty about
reality?” Some gave one answer, some
another. Most of them admitted that
there was no certainty, that all their
learning rested on assumptions which
could not be proved.
He came to realize that the scope of
science is limited to the discovery of cer-
tain patterns in the behavior of material
things and natural forces. What these
things and forces were, and why their
behavior followed such patterns—these
questions science either did not face or
could not answer.
The knowledge of reality eluded his
search, and his desire to attain it grew in
strength.
In the course of his studies he came
into contact with men and women of all
sorts. In his relations with them he was
possessed, and saw them possessed, by
love and anger and pity and sorrow, by
hate and fear and lust and joy, by pride
and envy and shame and a host of other
emotions. Many times he was led astray
by this possession from the search for
knowledge.
Pondering over these experiences, he
saw that this possession by emotions,
though it had taught him much about
man, did not seem to lead to the knowl-
edge of reality which he sought.
Nevertheless, there were certain
moments, most of them connected with
the consummation of a pure love, which
had a character different from any ordi-
nary experience. They were fleeting
moments, and the memory of them was
never complete. Always it was as though
in darkness the sun had suddenly shone
for a moment, but disappeared at once,
leaving in the memory a sense of glory
unknown, touched but not grasped, and
in the heart a deep feeling of peace.
Only once, and then with great diffi-
culty, was he able to express for himself
something of what he had felt, and even
then he knew that there lay hidden in his
words meanings which he no longer
understood.
This is what he wrote:
There is a citadel, inviolate,
The inmost hidden kernel of the heart,
Changeless, eternal, imperturbable,
A rock unmoved amidst the storms of life,
Girdled by veils of purifying flame,
Through which the questing soul, in
search of peace,
Must pass, and passing suffer, till the spark
Which struggles, all but snuffed, within
this clay,
Has blossomed into lightning radiance,
Has shriveled every cinder shred of self,
And borne aloft on phoenix pinions
Can over-breast the battlements, and sink
Tenderly down to silence fathomless.
Here once I came—and yet not I, not I,
But that in me which strives and seeks
and yearns,
Hungers and fiercely thirsts to break its
bonds—
And deeply drank the silence. Time stood
still,
And space’s farthest outposts ceased to be.
An hour—a day—a century passed by,
And suddenly a pang, an agony,
Unutterably deep, shot through my
soul—
A blackness so intense that light
seemed dead,
A brilliance which paled the lightning flash,
A silence sharper than the deepest wound.
In that eternal moment life was death,
Death life. Within my spirit’s riven core
A door was opened; but to pass that door
I was not worthy—nor indeed to stand
Before it. Arrow-fast my spirit fled,
Seeking with trembling wings familiar
Time
And friendly Space. Body returned to me;
I saw the light we know, I heard the sounds
Which fall upon the outer ear. I wept,
And felt the warmth of tears upon my
cheek.
FALL 2011 | 85
 HE FELT SOME RELATION between these
moments and certain states he had
reached in his search for knowledge.
Sometimes he had persisted for a long
time in directing his attention to a
problem that required him to hold
many things simultaneously in his
mind’s eye. After making this effort for
a long time, he had felt himself per-
vaded by a vivid sense of expectancy, a
feeling of being upon a threshold
beyond which lay he knew not what—
but something vitally important and
significant, something which called to
him with a sense of enormous adventure
and at the same time frightened him by
its unknown immensity.
Feelings of like nature were some-
times produced by impressions reaching
him through eye or ear—a sunset or a
symphony, the flash of a bird’s wing
against the blue of the sky, the voice of a
mother crooning to her child. At times
for a whole week he would be filled by
this sense of expectancy, of being on the
verge of revelation. At such times all his
senses were unusually sharp, as though
stripped of a covering which normally
muffled them, and he felt an emotion to
which he could give no name. It was a
kind of pleasant melancholy, painfully
intense under the stimulus of certain
impressions, as though he were a musical
instrument, the strings of which lay in his
heart and were plucked, and in the pain
of the plucking was born the beauty of
the note.
In his mind and in his heart the mem-
ory of these experiences was burned
deep, and there came to him a growing
conviction that he was nearer to his goal
at such times than he was in any other
state, as though the mask of appearances,
which hides the mysterious face of real-
ity, had almost become transparent. But
86 | PARABOLA
he had no control over these states, he
could not by an effort of will reach that
threshold, and he always felt that he had
been given a gift of which he was not
worthy.
Fifteen years after his father’s death,
he inspected his heart in order to see
whether there was in it the pure desire
for knowledge of the soul. He was not
satisfied with what he found, and contin-
ued his travels, searching for knowledge.
One day, when he was weary and dis-
couraged, he fell into conversation with a
stranger, and spoke of his desire to attain
the knowledge of reality. The stranger
listened with interest and drew him on to
tell the story of the carpet, and of the
years he had spent in travel and study.
They talked through the night, and as
the sky was growing pale the stranger
told him to go to a house in a certain
town where he would find a teacher.
He went to this town, but when he
called at the house he was told that the
teacher was away. He called again, only
to be told that the teacher was busy and
could not see him. A third time he
called, and this time he refused to leave
until he was admitted.
He knew at once that this teacher was
a different kind of man from all the pro-
fessors and other learned men he had
met. His teaching concerned the way
that led to the knowledge of reality, and
the price that had to be paid for the
transformation of the whole man, which
was necessary for progress on that path.
For ten years he studied under this
teacher, and he came to understand
many things about himself and about the
world. He came to realize that there was
no possibility of his attaining the knowl-
edge of reality so long as certain obsta-
cles existed within him. Only when he
began to struggle against these obstacles
did he discover their strength and their
persistence. He was torn many times in
acute inner conflict. Sometimes for
weeks on end the teacher refused to see
him. Sometimes he was sunk in despair.
But he persisted, and gradually his atten-
tion began to obey his will, and his
understanding became deeper and more
organic.
Some ten years after he first met the
teacher, he at last turned his steps
towards his fatherland, with the hunger
for the knowledge of reality a white
flame in his heart. And he took the pack-
age containing the carpet, and opened it.
And he sat before the carpet without
sleep or food for three days and three
nights. The familiar sense of being upon
the threshold grew stronger and stronger
until his heart was near to breaking in
him. And towards the end of the third
night, when the intensity of his desire to
cross the threshold was such that he
thought he must die, the eyes of his soul
were opened, and he achieved the
knowledge of reality.
FALL 2011 | 87
 The Silent Witness
Hugh Brockwill Ripman

Like two birds of golden plumage, inseparable companions, the

individual self and the immortal Self are perched on the branches
of the selfsame tree. The former tastes of the sweet and bitter fruits
of the tree; the latter, tasting of neither, calmly observes.
—Upanishads

I SPOKE LAST TIME about the first step in getting to know oneself bet-
ter.… I spoke about a method of observation of self—of one’s thoughts,
one’s emotions, one’s sensations, one’s actions—which requires a special
effort with attention: a division of attention into two parts. One of these
parts is directed towards whatever activity it’s engaged in, whether it be
thought or action or whatever, and the other is directed to the experi-
ence of a point of awareness of what is going on.
I call it the Silent Witness. It’s an impartial, unjudgmental witness to
what goes on. It is extremely difficult to do this, and you will find at first
that you can only do it for a split second, and then you find yourself with

88 | PARABOLA
your attention wholly drawn into what
you’re doing; but with practice it
becomes more possible.
Q: Could you say more about the Silent
Witness?
HBR: Well, you start with the fact that it is
silent. It is not talking or thinking about
what you are doing, but it is aware of
what you are doing. You know, for
instance, that you can be absorbed in a
book and be absolutely unaware of your
posture or the sensations of your body
because you are lost in the book. You
also know that if I call your attention to
that, you become aware of the posture
and the sensations which are there all the
time.
The Silent Witness pays attention to
what goes on in the centers: to what goes
on in the head, to what goes on in the
heart, to what goes on in the body. It
simply pays attention. It’s like listening
to music. You don’t have to manipulate
the impressions you receive from music;
you just receive them. This Silent
Witness just receives impressions from
your behavior. She hears your voice,
both your inner and your outer voice;
she is aware of what happens in you. You
have to struggle towards this. But at any
rate, be sure that it’s not thinking or
internally talking about what’s going on
in you. It’s simply being aware, as
though each function had a mirror
placed in front of it.
Q: What is this part that watches me?
HBR: For the time being, you will not
gain anything by having that defined.
The thing to do is to experience the
Silent Witness. It may not be exactly the
same thing with everybody. We’re all
trying to do the same thing, to have a
Silent Witness whose function is just to
be aware, but it may be different for dif-
ferent people. So I feel at this stage that
it wouldn’t be helpful to put any words
to it. I could do that, but it wouldn’t
make you any wiser. The thing to do is
to gain more experience of it for your-
self, to find how it feels different from
the ordinary condition when your
thoughts are experienced as “I,” when
your feelings are experienced as “I,”
when your body is experienced as “I.”
This is a little different.
Q: I have a hard time differentiating the
Silent Witness from my mind.
HBR: Yes, and if you don’t do that, you
don’t understand what the Silent
Witness is. You see, in the ordinary way,
we live in the state which is called “iden-
tification.” This means that I feel myself
to be my functions. It may be a thought,
it may be a feeling, it may be a sensa-
tion—but it is felt to be myself. I am
hammering a nail—I hammer my fin-
ger—“Oh, I hurt myself.” Or we
become angry and say, “I am angry,”
instead of saying, “Anger is rising in
me.” And the Silent Witness is exactly
something that is not a function: not a
thought, not a feeling, not a sensation.
One of the great difficulties of main-
taining this special kind of attention is
that when one is for a moment aware of
something, one immediately starts
thinking about it, judging it, or what-
ever. And one’s sense of oneself slips
into these feelings, these judgments of
it, and one is lost. The Silent Witness is
no longer there. It is very difficult to
realize for oneself that this isn’t a think-
ing effort. It is a naked awareness. It
takes some people a couple of years to
get it absolutely clear inside themselves,
by experience, what this Silent Witness
really is.
FALL 2011 | 89
 But I wish to emphasize that it isn’t
thinking about oneself. When you talk
about being drawn back into yourself,
you are being drawn back into thought
about yourself, which is not the same
thing at all. You are tempted the whole
time to react to what you observe, but
the moment you do that you are no
longer observing. And experience shows
that it is extremely difficult not to react.
Something immediately begins to think
about it and a running commentary sets
up, or one is pleased that one has
noticed something, or one is disgusted
with what one has seen, or whatever.
These reactions draw one’s attention
away from the naked experience of
oneself.…
90 | PARABOLA
Q: This Silent Witness—is it something
which is innately within us that we don’t
recognize?
HBR: This is a question which always
comes up: What is the Silent Witness? I
don’t think it’s very useful to give a ver-
bal label of some kind. What is important
is to know the difference in oneself
between the times when it’s there and
the times when it’s not. It is simply a wit-
ness at this stage, a witness which is able
to be a witness because part of my atten-
tion is in the witnessing. It doesn’t really
help to label it. What matters is that you
experience it. You feel the difference
between the state when something is
separate and looking on and experienc-
ing, and the state in which that is not
there—the state in which the candle
is lit, and in which the candle is out.
The Silent Witness can be consid-
ered to be the germ of something that
can in time, if it grows in strength and
grows in frequency, exercise some
controlling influence and bring some
order into the chaos of the psyche.
Q: I’m not sure of the Silent Witness. I
may have it and I may not.
HBR: It’s not a thinking effort; it’s
simply an effort of witnessing what
goes on in the organism. The
moment you think about it, you’re
not having the direct experience of
it. Think of the Silent Witness as a
naturalist who is trying to observe a
rather elusive animal. Most of the
time, he only catches sight of the
tail disappearing around the corner.
Think of this organism being the
animal you’re observing and the
Silent Witness being the naturalist
who really wishes to find out how
this strange creature leads his life,
to find out by direct observation.
Q: I would like to learn to
observe myself simply, as I
would a daisy or a butter-
fly, without analysis, with-
out judgment, without try-
ing to understand the
whys.
HBR: Well, before you can
begin to understand the
whys, you need to
observe simply, because if
you try to analyze as you
go along, it is mostly
based on previous notions
about yourself. You don’t
take in a pure impression
of what is happening. You
see, this is constantly at
work in us, whether it is
impressions of ourselves
as we act or whether it is
impressions of other peo-
ple—our impressions are
constantly affected by
previous notions. So it is
indeed desirable and nec-
essary to observe oneself
with the same impartiality
as a naturalist observes a
creature he is trying to
study and to understand its habits. But into comment, one has lost the pure
the trouble is, you see, it is very difficult impression.
to adopt the same stance vis-à-vis oneself One just has to go on trying, and it is
because always something in one feels not an easy thing to do. But one is sim-
that one knows oneself and finds it very ply seeing, in relation to this process of
difficult to look at just what happens and observing oneself, what goes on the
nothing else. whole time when one is observing other
What happens, you see, time and time people and things: one is constantly (and
again, is that for a moment one can cannot help it) interpreting and analyz-
stand aside and impersonally experience ing. It is very difficult indeed, but possi-
what’s happening, but very quickly and ble, to get away from this.
imperceptibly observation changes into
comment, and comment into emotional Q: Isn’t there movement in observation? I
reaction to what one has observed. And don’t see how it could observe without
the moment the observation changes being in motion.

FALL 2011 | 91
 HBR: This quiet thing that observes has
been likened to a mirror in which things
are reflected; a mirror doesn’t have to
move to reflect movement. You see, it
depends on how you understand the
word “observe.” I can understand that
you find in your own experience that you
can’t observe without reacting, but it is
the reaction which you experience as
movement. The observation and the
reaction are actually quite separate. You
understand?
This is the way one normally func-
tions: one observes and then something
reacts. When we try to observe our-
selves directly, then it is almost impossi-
ble to prevent some kind of feeling or
thought about what we observe from
arising in us; but one has to keep the
feeling or thought about what we
observe quite separate from the act of
observation.
The act of observation sets off the
emotional and intellectual centers com-
menting, feeling and thinking about
what one has observed. And it’s very easy
to get caught in the illusion that this feel-
ing and thinking about what one has
observed is observation. It isn’t. It’s
reaction. And very often, of course,
when it sets up, it catches one’s attention
so that one’s sense of oneself goes into
thinking, and one ceases to have the
Silent Witness.
Q: I don’t know if I am ever truly present,
especially when speaking.
HBR: Speaking is always difficult. It’s
been recognized for centuries as one of
the most difficult things because one
identifies with what one has to say. So
we start with less difficult things such as
physical chores. If we practice enough
being present to ourselves with simple
things that don’t in themselves make a
92 | PARABOLA
demand on the mind or the emotions—
things that the body has learnt to do—if
we practice during those times feeling
ourselves separate from our actions, then
gradually, gradually it begins to become
possible.
You can use certain techniques.
Before you are able to talk and remain
conscious of yourself, you can listen and
remain conscious of yourself; it is not so
difficult to listen as it is to talk. And if
you wish to stay present to yourself when
you are talking, you can use an anchor
for the attention—awareness of breath-
ing or something like that—which is
quite possible to maintain when you are
listening, but much more difficult when
you are speaking.
So it’s a question of practice and of
seeing these simple activities, which are
not important in themselves, as practice
grounds where you can develop the psy-
chological muscles which you will need
when things are more difficult.
AS A HELP in maintaining this Silent
Witness for a little longer, take the
physical task this week of keeping the
soles of both feet flat on the floor when
you are standing or sitting. Of course,
you will come to yourself many times
and find that they are not on the floor.
This will show you how much is
required to keep present to yourself and
how quickly this awareness goes. See
how this connects with the idea that we
cannot do. You cannot do this; there is
certainly not one of you who can do
this. So how can we expect to do many
other things which are much more diffi-
cult? One of the objects of the task is to
bring home to you the dangers, the
precariousness, of your present position,
so that your wish to escape grows
stronger.
FALL 2011 | 93
 Exploring an ancient teaching
on liberation

Seeing
and the Yoga Sutra
Dolphi Wertenbaker

THE YOGA SUTRA of Patanjali is the foundational and earliest

text on yoga. Dating from about the fifth century BCE, it
reflects an oral tradition in existence long before. The Yoga Sutra
defines yoga as a state of sustained voluntary attention (YS 1:2).
Many practices are suggested; however, an individual is meant to
follow one. The ultimate goal of yoga, Patanjali says, is freedom
or independence (kaivalya) of seeing (YS 2:25).
Freedom of seeing. This is such a striking concept: what does
it mean? Why freedom of seeing rather than freedom of the seer?
Patanjali speaks of a fundamental confusion and entanglement
between the perceiver and the perceived, intrinsic to human
nature, and the cause of our suffering (YS 2:17). He says that
the experiences of life are given us so that we might learn to
distinguish perceiver and perceived (YS 2:18, 23). According
to Samkhya, the system of thought commonly accepted in
Patanjali’s time, in every living being there is something
unchanging called purusha. Everything else is prakriti. Purusha
represents the “master” in ourselves. Prakriti, according to
Patanjali, has a dual role: to be experienced, and to help towards
liberation (YS 2:18). Among the synonyms for purusha is
drashta, the perceiver. Thus, what Patanjali calls the perceiver is
an aspect of this something deep inside that never changes (and
does not die). Other synonyms for purusha, or the perceiver,

94 | PARABOLA
Patanjali statue,
Hardiwar, India
show that it is pervasive throughout
the being (atma), gives life (jeeva), and
is the energy behind knowing (chit).
These ideas take us to a subtle realm.
Ordinarily, we think of what is perceived
as external and the perceiver as ourselves.
Science has elucidated a great deal
about how perception takes place: the
functioning of the sense organs and the
many levels of processing in the brain.
Yet, for Patanjali, all of this, no matter
how fine, is still in the realm of prakriti.
The perceiver is other.
The perceiver is by nature free and
independent. Not so the seeing, because
the seeing passes through our mind and
senses (YS 2:20). The perceiver is of a
different order from both the perceived
and the instrument of perception. The
instrument of perception is ourselves—
body and mind. We think we distinguish
perceiver from perceived, e.g., I am not
that chocolate; or perceiver from
instrument, e.g., I am not my body; or
even: I am not me. Yet that is not how we
live. Furthermore, we all know of the blind
spot in our vision, yet we never notice it:
the mind routinely fills in what is missing.
This is true metaphorically as well. Patanjali
says that when we are in the state of yoga,
the perceiver appears and we see reality as
it is (YS 1:3). Otherwise, what we see are
the projections of our own mind, which
we take for reality (YS 1:4). The implica-
tions are important for our lives, because
how we see determines our understanding,
which is the basis for action.
How do we move towards true
perception? In the beginning, Patanjali
says, our “seeing” is a mixture of
memory and imagination (YS 1:42). In
Sanskrit, memory refers to everything we
know from the past, along with habit and
cultural conditioning. In order to have a
(continued on page 98)
FALL 2011 | 95
 WELCOME TO THE

PARABOLA BACK ISSUE LIBRARY

CHOOSE FROM 140 BACK ISSUES TO INFORM, INSPIRE, AND GUIDE YOU ON YOUR JOURNEY.
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1:1 THE HERO In quest of the meaning of Self 12:1 THE KNIGHT & THE HERMIT Heroes of action and reflection
1:2 MAGIC The power that transforms 12:2 ADDICTION The prison of human craving
1:3 INITIATION A portal to rebirth 12:3 FORGIVENESS The past transcended
1:4 RITES OF PASSAGE Symbols and rituals of transformation 12:4 THE SENSE OF HUMOR Walking with laughter
2:1 DEATH Beyond the limits of the known 13:1 THE CREATIVE RESPONSE To represent the sacred
2:2 CREATION From formlessness, something new 13:2 REPETITION & RENEWAL Respecting the rhythm of growth
2:3 COSMOLOGY The order of things, seen and unseen 13:3 QUESTIONS The road to understanding
2:4 RELATIONSHIPS Our interwoven human experience 13:4 THE MOUNTAIN A meeting place of Earth and Heaven
3:1 SACRED SPACE Landscapes, temples, the inner terrain 14:1 DISCIPLES & DISCIPLINE Teachers, masters, students, fools
3:2 SACRIFICE & TRANSFORMATION Stepping into a holy fire 14:2 TRADITION & TRANSMISSION Passages from wisdom into wisdom
3:3 INNER ALCHEMY Refining the gold within 14:3 THE TREE OF LIFE Root, trunk, and crown of our search
3:4 ANDROGYNY The fusion of male and female 14:4 TRIAD Sacred and secular laws of three
4:1 THE TRICKSTER Guide, mischief-maker, master of disguise 15:1 TIME & PRESENCE How to welcome the present moment
4:2 SACRED DANCE Moving to worship, moving to transcend 15:2 ATTENTION What animates mind, body, and feeling
4:3 THE CHILD Setting out from innocence 15:3 LIBERATION Freedom from what, freedom for what?
4:4 STORYTELLING & EDUCATION Speaking to young minds 15:4 HOSPITALITY Care in human relationships
5:1 THE OLD ONES Visions of our elders 16:1 MONEY Exchange between humans, and with the divine
5:2 MUSIC, SOUND, & SILENCE Echoes of stillness 16:2 THE HUNTER Stalking great knowledge
5:3 OBSTACLES In the way, or the Way itself? 16:3 CRAFT The skill that leads to creation
5:4 WOMAN In search of the feminine 16:4 THE GOLDEN MEAN Balance between defect and excess
6:1 EARTH & SPIRIT Opposites or complements? 17:1 SOLITUDE & COMMUNITY The self, alone and with others
6:2 THE DREAM OF PROGRESS Our modern fantasy 17:2 LABYRINTH The path to inner treasure
6:3 MASK & METAPHOR When things are not as they seem 17:3 THE ORAL TRADITION Transmission through spoken word and silence
6:4 DEMONS Spirits of the dark 17:4 POWER & ENERGY The stunning array of atom and cosmos
7:1 SLEEP To be restored, or to forget 18:1 HEALING The return to a state of health
7:2 DREAMS & SEEING Visions, fantasy, and the unconscious 18:2 PLACE & SPACE Seeking the holy in mountain, sea,and vale
7:3 CEREMONIES Seeking divine service 18:3 CROSSROADS The meeting place of traditions and ideas
7:4 HOLY WAR Conflict for the sake of reconciliation 18:4 THE CITY Hub of the human world
8:1 GUILT The burden of conscience 19:1 THE CALL To ask for help, to receive what is given
8:2 ANIMALS The nature of the creature world 19:2 TWINS The two who come from one
8:3 WORDS OF POWER Secret words, magic spells, divine utterances 19:3 CLOTHING Concealing and revealing our inner selves
8:4 SUN & MOON Partners in time as fields of force 19:4 HIDDEN TREASURE Value, hope, and knowledge

9:1 HIERARCHY The ladder of the sacred 20:1 EARTH, AIR, WATER, FIRE Essential elements of all things
9:2 THEFT The paradox of possession 20:2 THE STRANGER Messenger or deceiver, savior or threat
9:3 PILGRIMAGE Journey toward the holy 20:3 LANGUAGE & MEANING Communication, symbol, and sign
9:4 FOOD Nourishing body and spirit 20:4 EROS Human sexuality and the life of the spirit
21:1 PROPHETS & PROPHECY Seeing beyond the veil
10:1 WHOLENESS The hunger for completion
21:2 THE SOUL Life within and beyond our corporeal existence
10:2 EXILE Cut off from the homeland of meaning
21:3 PEACE Seeking inner and outer tranquility
10:3 THE BODY Half dust, half deity 21:4 PLAY & WORK Struggle and relaxation in the
10:4 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS The mystery of goodness search for meaning
11:1 THE WITNESS Silent guides and unsleeping eyes 22:1 WAYS OF KNOWING Different avenues to truth
11:2 MIRRORS That which reflects the real 22:2 THE SHADOW Cast by the light we follow
11:3 SADNESS The transformation of tragedy
22:3 CONSCIENCE & CONSCIOUSNESS Inner guides to
11:4 MEMORY & FORGETTING What we remember and why understanding one’s being

96 | PARABOLA
22:4 MIRACLES Enigmatic breaks in the laws of nature
23:1 MILLENNIUM To what end, to what beginning?
23:2 ECSTASY Joy that transports us outside of ourselves
23:3 FEAR Sign of weakness, or of strength?
23:4 BIRTH AND REBIRTH Journey toward renewal
24:1 NATURE Exploring inner and outer terrain
24:2 PRAYER & MEDITATION Petition, praise,
thanksgiving, confession
24:3 NUMBER & SYMBOL Languages that disclose the real
24:4 EVIL The duality within us, within the world
25:1 THRESHOLD Neither here nor there, real nor imaginary
25:2 RIDDLE & MYSTERY Questions and answers
25:3 THE TEACHER One who shows the way
25:4 FATE AND FORTUNE Inevitabilities that speak to us
26:1 THE GARDEN Cultivating within and without
26:2 LIGHT That which illuminates our inner and outer darkness
26:3 THE FOOL In search of divine innocence
26:4 THE HEART Where the quest begins and ends
27:1 THE EGO AND THE “I” Which one is real?
27:2 DYING Ending or the beginning of transformation?
27:3 GRACE Gifts bestowed from above
27:4 WAR Violence as a means to an end
28:1 COMPASSION Actions that embrace others
28:2 PRISON Inner and outer confinement
28:3 CHAOS AND ORDER The interplay of creative forces
28:4 TRUTH AND ILLUSION Seeking clarity amidst confusion
29:1 MARRIAGE Union with the Other
29:2 WEB OF LIFE The interrelationship of being
Order ONLINE at WWW.PARABOLA.ORG
29:3 THE SEEKER In search of the Way
29:4 FRIENDSHIP Companions on the path
30:1 AWAKENING Casting off slumber
30:2 RESTRAINT The power of not doing
30:3 BODY AND SOUL Two mysteries
30:4 FUNDAMENTALISM Getting out of the box
31:1 COMING TO OUR SENSES Shaking our senses free
31:2 ABSENCE AND LONGING The path of yearning
31:3 THINKING Thinking as prayer
31:4 HOME The homes of great spiritual leaders
32:1 FAITH Seven great acts of faith
32:2 SEX Spiritual teachings on sex
32:3 HOLY EARTH Our sacred planet
32:4 THE NEW WORLD Frontiers of the spiritual
33:1 SILENCE The place of not speaking
33:2 GOD Approaching the Unknown
33:3 MAN & MACHINE Traditions and technology
33:4 JUSTICE The Divine measure
34:1 IMAGINATION The story issue
34:2 WATER The sacred element
34:3 THE PATH Finding the right way
34:4 THE FUTURE The way ahead
35:1 LOVE The divine energy
35:2 LIFE AFTER DEATH Beyond the known
35:3 DESIRE What compels our lives?
35:4 BEAUTY What transports us; where do we look?
36:1 SUFFERING To be with it, and to let it be
36:2 GIVING & RECEIVING Gift of life, flow of mediating energies
FALL 2011 | 97
 clear perception of a chosen object,
memory must be completely purified of
its own content (YS 1:43). Rarely this
happens in a moment of epiphany; more
often a process is involved. For example,
if I want to understand breathing, at first
there is the image of everything I have
been taught about lungs, and various
personal associations. Gradually, if I
return to the study again and again,
I may have a direct perception of a kind
of subtle circulation throughout the
body. For Patanjali, the functioning of
the mind must remain intact, yet not
bring in extraneous material.
The fundamental problem, according
to Patanjali, is avidya, a kind of “non
knowing.” He defines this as taking things
for their opposites, for example mistaking
the temporal for the eternal, or non-self
for self (YS 2:5). We live our lives as
though we would live forever: this is
avidya. We are not generally aware of
avidya, but we can recognize its offshoots,
especially false identification, ego, reactivity,
and fear. Under the influence of avidya,
we go about our lives in ways that get
us into trouble. Thus, avidya leads to
suffering. Yet this suffering is what
motivates us to do something. Recognizing
our pain and our true situation is the first
step on the path of wisdom. The moments
of recognition create a sense of space, a
foretaste of the freedom of seeing.
If yoga is a state of sustained attention
and its purpose is freedom of seeing,
what is the path of yoga? Patanjali lays
out an eight-part path. First is a set of
ideals in our attitude toward others: non-
violence, telling the truth, not stealing,
faithfulness in relationship, and non-
grasping. Second, in our attitude toward
ourselves: cleanliness, contentment,
effort, self-study, surrendering the results
of action. The virtues are familiar, yet for
98 | PARABOLA
Patanjali, the purpose is not salvation
or goodness. The purpose is to help
cultivate a certain quality of mind. Then,
there is asana or work with the body,
what we generally think of as yoga in the
West. The aim here is to develop the
qualities of stability and ease (YS 2:46).
Then there is conscious breathing, which
results in a turning inward and a lifting of
the “veils which obscure our inner light”
(YS 2:52, 54). Finally, concentration is
possible, and then the deeper states of
meditation. The essence of the eightfold
path is also contained in a single practice,
the yoga of action. Here, one tries to
bring to all the actions of life three
aspects: effort, self-inquiry, and an open
attitude about results (YS 2:1).
Patanjali says that states of attention
and disturbance fluctuate in us from
moment to moment. Furthermore, what
is present in a part of us tends to spread
throughout the whole system (YS 3:9).
This is why thoughts and feelings affect
health and also why doing something
with the body affects the mind and
emotions. For example, I may be upset
by some offensive interaction with
someone, and unable to shake the
agitation. Yet if I do a short practice with
yoga postures, I might feel much lighter
about it afterward. Similarly, attending to
one’s breathing may change everything.
In Samkhya thought, the states we
experience, like all prakriti, are made up of
three qualities, called gunas. The gunas
are: rajas (expansion, movement), tamas
(mass, rigidity), and sattva (illumination,
lightness). What is essential for perception
is predominantly sattva guna. We ourselves
can be thought of as the “container” in
which perception takes place. The guna
quality of this container is affected by
everything in our lives, including food,
thought, activity, and so on. In order for
perception to be true, this “container”
must have an appropriate guna quality.
The practices of yoga take us in this
direction, using a variety of approaches.
Ultimately, Patanjali speaks of change
in ourselves occurring indirectly. He
describes what needs to happen as being
like a farmer who simply opens a gate in
his irrigation system to let water flow
(YS 4:3). We do not bring the water
where it needs to go, nor even command
it to go there. Through the practice of
yoga, somehow an obstacle is removed
and the water is allowed to flow.
In a similar way, freedom of seeing can
appear.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra shows that the The Enfolded Universe
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difficulty we have in seeing clearly and
freely is part of being human. Moreover
Lynn Fawcett Whiting
SCULPTURE
it is the cause of suffering. However, MEDITATION • CONTEMPL ATION • PRAYER

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inherent in our nature.

FALL 2011 | 99
 TA N G E N T

“God As a Verb”
WITHOUT BUDDHA
I COULD NOT BE A CHRISTIAN
PAUL F. KNITTER. ONEWORLD (WWW.ONEWORLD-PUBLICATIONS.COM), 2009. PP. 336. $22.95
PAPER
Reviewed by Ron Starbuck

IN HIS BOOK WITHOUT BUDDHA I COULD NOT BE A CHRISTIAN, Paul F. Knitter,

the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture
at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, helps Christians and
Buddhists participate in an interfaith dialogue, expanding their
spiritual vocabulary. He does so by placing into words, ideas, and
concepts many of the thoughts running through our own hearts and
minds, and opening up for us new ways of understanding “God as a
verb.” In this process, he helps us feel truly comfortable engaging in
an interfaith dialogue and practice.
In this deeply engaging, honest book Knitter honors and
recognizes the complex differences between two traditions while
showing how closely related they are in their approaches to
compassion and loving-kindness. As for the seemingly very different
ways they view ultimate reality—non-theistic and theistic—he reminds
us that all our words about God are symbols. Language itself is
composed of symbols, and when we use words for God, they are
fingers pointing at the moon.

100 | PARABOLA
 Knitter, who holds a licentiate in
theology from the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome and a doctorate from
the University of Marburg, Germany,
passes from his own struggle with a
dualistic Christian belief to how a
Buddhist may deal with these questions,
then passes back again to what he has
learned from Buddhism, which has
helped him to retrieve and deepen his
own Christian belief. Professor Knitter
isn’t alone in his journey. Many of us are
“double belongers,” a phrase he uses for
people drawn into an interfaith dialogue
that embraces two faiths.
“In the future Christians will be
mystics, or they will not be anything,”
Knitter states, quoting his seminary
teacher, the twentieth-century Christian
theologian Karl Rahner. Christian
mystical experiences are unitive,
allowing the experiencer to begin to feel
“connected with, part of, united with,
aware of, one with, something or some
activity larger than oneself.” God is an
experience. Knitter explains: “Christian
saints and mystics have described this
encounter with God as putting on the
‘Mind of Christ,’ and Christian literature
includes such expressions as ‘one with
Christ,’ ‘temple of the Holy Spirit,’ ‘the
body of Christ,’ the ‘Divine indwelling,’
‘participants in the divine nature.’ ”1
This is an understanding of the non-
duality of God that begins for Christians
with kenosis, the Greek word for emptiness.
It is a way of understanding Christ as the
“Incarnate Word.” The second chapter of
Philippians, known as the Kenosis Hymn,
describes the kenosis of Christ:
“Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form
of God, did not regard equality with God as
something to be exploited, but emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave, being
born in human likeness.”
FALL 2011 | 101

This is an encouragement to empty
ourselves, to become as servants to one
another, and to enter into the fullness
of our humanity, and our full human
potential. This practice of kenosis, of
putting on the “Mind of Christ” and
emptying our self, is one way a
Christian may come to understand
Jesus as redeemer, revealer, reconciler,
and to accept him as savior. Knitter
touches on kenosis when he explains
that the “ideal of Christian life is to
lose one’s own self-centered identity
in the wider activity of the risen
Christ-Spirit. It is to step back and
let this Spirit live in and as us.”2 This
stepping back or emptying ourselves of
ourselves resonates with the Buddhist
102 | PARABOLA
bodhisattva, who develops universal
compassion and a spontaneous wish to
attain Buddhahood not for his or her
own sake but for the benefit of all
sentient beings. It is also in the Bible,
in Romans 8:26-27, 38-39 (RSV):
26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our
weakness; for we do not know how to
pray as we ought, but that very Spirit
intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
27 And God, who searches the heart, knows
what is the mind of the Spirit, because the
Spirit intercedes for the saints according to
the will of God.
38 For I am convinced that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else
in all creation, will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
Stepping back, letting the Spirit live
in us, allowing the Spirit to pray in and
through us, practicing meditation as a
“Sacrament of Silence”3 as Professor
Knitter suggests, emptying and letting
go of the self,4 offers a way to nurture
and grow within ourselves the
graciousness of spirit that God gives to
each of us in ways that are known only
to God. Knitter’s work offers a way in
which the mystery and light of Christ
may become known through dialogue
and practice with other sacred traditions;
here the Holy Spirit of the Christian
Trinity becomes boundless, without
boundaries, without limitations, infinite
in love, infinite in acceptance, infinite in
potential, endless in compassion and
wisdom.
The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
Christian mystic Meister Eckhart expresses
kenosis often in his writings: “God must
act and pour himself into us when we are
ready, in other words when we are totally
empty of self and creatures. So stand still nor an adjective. God is a Verb! God is
and do not waver from your emptiness.”5 much more an environment in which
Elsewhere the great German master writes: ‘we live and move and have our being’
“Therefore discard the form and be joined (Acts 17:29), or God is ‘above all things,
to the formless essence, for the spiritual through all things, and in all things’
comfort of God is very subtle.”6 And (Eph. 4:6).”
famously: “Only the hand that erases can To this reader, it seems that the more
write the true thing.”7 awake we are to this presence and this
On the Buddhist side, there is the mystery, the more we will come to know
experience of nirvana—sūnyatā or God is here in this very moment, in the
emptiness—and the related concept of eternal now. This to me is the central
dependent origination or arising. Knitter message of Jesus when he teaches us that
affirms that God is best understood his relationship with God the Father
as the “Ground of Being,” an idea (Abba) is intimate, eternal, and within.
introduced by the twentieth-century This presence “above, through, and
theologian Paul Tillich, and through in” constantly calls us into relationships
our relationships. He points out that the of knowing and loving one another all
contemporary Vietnamese Zen Master through our lives, filling us with the
Thich Nhat Hanh “translates Śūnyatā deepest joy when we empty ourselves
more freely and more engagingly as (kenosis) for the sake of others, seeing
InterBeing, the interconnected state of and finding ourselves in others. This
things that are constantly churning out presence is what we feel when we are
new connections, new possibilities, new loved and accepted, when we love and
problems, and new life.”8 accept others, and when we open and
Understanding God through
relationships is critical to Knitter. The
source and power of our relationships
are driven by the presence of the “Holy
Spirit.” The importance of this concept
is summarized by his statement that
“behind and within all the different
images and symbols Christians use for
God—Creator, Father (Abba),
Redeemer, Word, Spirit—the most
fundamental, the deepest truth Christians
can speak of God is that God is the
source and power of relationships.”
Knitter continues: “To take this
concept even further, up to the next level
if you will, God as a verb is the activity of
giving and receiving, of knowing and
loving, of losing and finding, of dying
and living that embraces and infuses all
of us, all of creation. If we’re going to
talk about God, God is neither a noun

FALL 2011 | 103

 give of ourselves selflessly. As it says in
Luke 17: 20-21:
And when the Pharisees had demanded
of Him when the Kingdom of God should
come, He answered them and said, “The
Kingdom of God cometh not with outward
show. Neither shall they say, ‘Lo, it is here!’
or ‘Lo, it is there!’ For behold, the Kingdom
of God is within you.”

Knitter tells us, “A better image of

creation might be a pouring forth of God,
an extension of God, in which the Divine
carries on the divine activity of interrelating
in and with and through creation.” This
pouring forth of God is the engine or fuel
of creation, but we as a “People of God,”
created in the “Image of God,” are also a
part of this pouring forth. How this all
works is also part of the mystery.
Another way to say this might be:
God as the Trinity is the silence and the
stillness before all things, out of which all
creation arises from the nothingness and
emptiness that is without form and void,
an image taken from the first chapter
of Genesis—when there was nothing
except God. It is out of this nothingness
(no-thing) or emptiness that we all arise.
As a lifelong Christian, I have been
taught my whole life that “the way of
Christ” is a way that calls me to love
others unconditionally with great
compassion and loving-kindness. For
myself, this is a call that I must answer by
loving others in all their diversity of
beliefs and ethnicity, even in all their
suffering, and in showing them through
that love how Christ lives and dwells
within my own being.
In the sermon JESUS, THE WAY THAT IS
OPEN TO OTHER WAYS, Knitter quotes John
Cobb, another Christian theologian,
stating: “Jesus is not the way that
excludes, overpowers, demeans other
ways; rather he is the way that opens us

104 | PARABOLA
to, connects us with, and calls us to 1 Paul F. Knitter, WITHOUT BUDDHA I COULD NOT BE A

relate to other ways in a process that can
best be described as ‘dialogue.’
“If Jesus really is the Way that is open
to other Ways, then dialogue with other
religions and other believers, should be
part of what it means to be a Christian.
As many Asian bishops and theologians
CHRISTIAN (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), p.
14–23.
2 Ibid., p. 88.
3 Ibid., p. 153.
4 See Roger Corless and Paul F. Knitter, eds.,
BUDDHIST EMPTINESS AND CHRISTIAN TRINITY: ESSAYS AND
EXPLORATIONS (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990).
5 Eckhart Society–His Teachings–Letting Ourselves

are saying, today dialogue is a new way of Go–Sermon 4: http://www.eckhartsociety.org/

being in church. Today we are called to
be religious interreligiously. Committed
to Jesus and the Gospel we must also be
open to other religions and believers.”9
As a Christian—even a Christian-
Buddhist—someone grounded in Christ
and intimately involved in this interfaith
dialogue, I couldn’t agree more. Learning
to value the truth and teachings of other
eckhart/his-teachings; see Maurice O’C. Walshe,
trans., THE COMPLETE MYSTICAL WORKS OF MEISTER
ECKHART (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,
2010).
6 Karen J. Campbell, GERMAN MYSTICAL WRITINGS
(Continuum International Publishing Group,
1991), p. 91.
7 Urban Tigner Holmes III, A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN
SPIRITUALITY: AN ANALYTICAL INTRODUCTION (New York:
Seabury Press,1980) p. 151.
8 See Thich Nhat Hanh, THE HEART OF

faiths while sharing our own is another
way for a Christian to be embraced by the
risen Christ and to encounter the Holy
Spirit at work in the world.
UNDERSTANDING: COMMENTARIES ON THE PRAJNAPARAMITA
HEART SUTRA (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988).
9 Knitter, “Jesus, The Way That is Open to Other
Ways,” http://www.tcpc.org/library/article.
cfm?library_id=518, sermon.

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 A Conversation with
Paul Knitter
RON STARBUCK: From a Christian perspective,
how can an interfaith dialogue open us up
to God?
PAUL KNITTER: Dialogue is necessary in order
to be open to and learn evermore about
the divine mystery that we call God. The
whole purpose of the Christian church,
the purpose of any religious community
I would say, is to receive and to live the
very life of that which we call “Ultimate
Mystery.”
There is an awareness that this
mystery of God, revealed for Christians
through Jesus of Nazareth, whom we call
the “Son of God” as a strong, powerful,
saving, and transforming image of God,
is always going to be greater than
anything we can comprehend. As Jesus
said, the Father is so much greater than
I. In other words the Ultimate Mystery
106 | PARABOLA
is always more than we can imagine. It is
clear, therefore, that dialogue, opening
our hearts and minds to others, is simply
essential. Being a religious or spiritual
person means realizing that there is
always more to learn, always more to
respond to, always more to be surprised
by, and that those surprises can be
provided for us in our dialogue with
persons of another religion.
RS: In your role as a teacher at Union
Theological Seminary, how do you see a
new generation of graduate students and
church leadership approaching religious
pluralism?
PK: Union is an example of a growing
awareness within Christian seminaries
that other religions must be included in
various ways in the curriculum and in the
whole educational philosophy of the
school. Christian seminaries are
beginning to recognize that in order to
teach Christian theology it is no longer
sufficient to teach only the Bible, only
the history of the church, only the
teaching and doctrines of the church. All
of that, of course, remains essential.
When other religions are included,
and the dialogue is expanded to include
other traditions such as Buddhism,
Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Native
American spiritualities, it has two
primary effects. For some students this
engagement with other religions
becomes an eye opener and a heart
opener that calls them to do some
further theological homework about
how they have understood themselves.
For other students this is an opportunity
to answer so many of their own nagging
questions about their Christian beliefs
and identity, especially beliefs that hold
up Jesus as the only savior.
To summarize, there is growing
awareness among future Christian
leaders that one can continue to be fully
committed to Jesus of Nazareth as savior,
as someone who can bring about
profound changes for the good in life,
and at the same time be truly open to
what God may have to say and reveal
through other religions and traditions.
Full commitment to one’s own
identity, and true, authentic openness to
the identities of others—this balancing of
commitment and openness, this is
something that is clarifying for many
students. As it clarifies, it encourages their
explorations. It makes theology an all the
more exciting and life-giving experience.
RS: Is there a way for a Christian to be in a
relationship with God as three distinct
Persons found within the Trinity, but also
in a more non-theistic transformative way,
in a Sacrament of Silence?
PK: If we accept that God is beyond all our
conceptual understanding, then we have
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to look at all our traditional ways of
speaking about God, including the
Trinity, as symbolic. My predecessor at
Union, Paul Tillich, used to say that if you
understand what a symbol really means
you will never say it’s just a symbol. A
symbol reveals, a symbol makes known,
always suggestively. Our Trinitarian
language is trying to express the way the
Christian community came to experience
the mystery of the divine that was
communicated and embodied for them in
Jesus of Nazareth. It is how they came to
talk about the mysterious way in which
this one reality of the divine is present in
very different ways in our lives.
It includes God as the incomprehensible
source of all reality as well as the expression
of God as Word, God going out to
communicate God’s self. And then there is
the experience that the early community
had of God as this abiding inherent spirit
within our very being, that animates us,
that reveals things to us, that calls us to
FALL 2011 | 107
 love. So, there is the father, the son or
word, and the spirit or animating energy.
Yet we have to remind ourselves that
while these ways of speaking are very
important for forming Christian experience
and nurturing Christian experience down
through the centuries, they are symbols.
The mystery that they are indicating is
beyond those symbols. We have to remind
ourselves that the reality of God is more
than can be caught and captured and
stirred up in us with the image of a father,
with a theistic image. The great Christian
mystic Meister Eckhart realized this. He
said we must give up God in order to open
ourselves and experience the reality of God
beyond God, the divine reality beyond all
of our concepts of God.
I think Christians can still hold to their
images of God by recognizing that they
are symbols. At the same time, they can be
open to the experience of the divine reality
that is beyond God imagery, beyond our
way of talking about the divine mystery as
God. We need to get beyond symbols into
silence. So, yes, I think there can be a kind
of dual practice, which is especially called
forth by the dialogue between Christians
and Buddhists. Some Buddhists stress
silence, and some Christians may stress
symbols and images, and doctrines. Yet
doctrines call to silence, silence gives life to
doctrines. I think it can be a very enriching
way of carrying on one’s spirituality—
double belonging, double practice,
exploring various forms of practice.
RS: John 14:26-27 and Romans 8:26-27,
tell us: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will send in my name,
will teach you everything, and remind you
of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave
with you; my peace I give to you. I do not
give to you as the world gives. Do not let
your hearts be troubled, and do not let
108 | PARABOLA
them be afraid.” ... “Likewise the Spirit
helps us in our weakness; for we do not
know how to pray as we ought, but that
very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep
for words. And God, who searches the
heart, knows what is the mind of the
Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the
saints according to the will of God.”
When we enter into a practice of prayer
and meditation, into a Sacrament of
Silence, do you think the Holy Spirit is
waiting for us in that space as comforter
and counselor, to teach us all things, and
remind us of what Jesus taught, and to
give us his peace, God’s peace, the peace
that passes all understanding?
PK: My simple answer to your question is a
definite “Yes.” This is the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit that is present, that is active, that is
moving in ways that we cannot
understand or foresee, and which are
beyond our comprehension. When we do
follow these forms of contemplative
prayer, prayer in which we open ourselves
to the Spirit, without necessarily thinking,
without holding on to any image, when
we open ourselves in profound radical
openness and acceptance of what our faith
tells us, we have the opportunity of deeply
and personally coming to the realization
that the Spirit is part of us, that the Spirit
is given to us.
As a theologian I have read that
section from Romans often enough, but
I can also hear it within the context of
our discussion on Buddhist-Christian
dialogue. As I try to explain in WITHOUT
BUDDHA I COULD NOT BE A CHRISTIAN, when I
read those words from Romans with, as
it were, Buddhist glasses, the words
become all the more revelatory, all the
more engaging. Paul is talking about the
reality he calls Spirit. I call Spirit the
reality my Buddhist teacher speaks of
when he calls me to let go of all
concepts. To let go and to open myself
utterly to the present moment, in the
trust that this present moment contains
all that I need, that all that I need is
given to me in my very being, in my very
being lived right now, in this moment, in
this particular context. That is the Spirit.
I hope that I’m not being too quick
here but Buddhism has helped me to
appreciate and be grateful for this
wonderful, powerful image of the divine
that we have been given as Christians:
The Path of Druidry
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modern practice of this nature-based
That is a beautiful passage, and I think it tradition. Captivating Welsh myths in-
is a passage whose richness can never be troduce key concepts, while practical
exercises help you internalize Druidic
fully appreciated. But I think Buddhism spiritual wisdom.
is a way of helping Christians possibly
appreciate it a little bit more.

RS: Are the Buddhist concepts of

Nirvana-Sūnyatā and the Christian
concept of Kenosis-Self-emptying two sides
of the same coin?
PK: I would not want to say that
Nirvana/Sūnyatā and Kenosis/Self-
emptying are two sides of the same coin.
That might be a little too neat and give
the impression that there are no real
differences between them. I would prefer
to say that they are two different, but
similar, fingers pointing to the same
moon. In their different ways—
Buddhists emphasizing the practice of
meditation that leads to prajna or
wisdom, and Christians emphasizing the
practice of social engagement that calls for
compassion and justice—both of them
attain basically the same goal of a radical
personal self-emptying that brings about
the realization that our true identities are
not to be found in our selves.
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FALL 2011 | 109

 TA N G E N T

Seeing Art

HIDDEN TREASURES:
Stories from a Great Museum
A FILM BY ALEXANDRA ISLES. WWW.HIDDENTREASURESTHEMOVIE.COM.
Reviewed by Patty de Llosa

YOU MAY BE ONE of the millions of people who thrill each year
to the marvels on display in the cathedral-like halls of the Metropolitan
Museum of New York. Like me, you scarcely notice the guards
except to ask where the nearest bathroom is or how to find your way
out. It has probably never occurred to you to think about the more
than two thousand employees whose days and nights are given over
to making your museum experience a special event. What are their
lives like? What awakens their personal excitement in that magical
palace of art?

110 | PARABOLA
 HIDDEN TREASURES: STORIES FROM A GREAT
MUSEUM will take you on a journey into
the Met’s secret places. To make this
hour-long film, producer/director
Alexandra Isles has interviewed thirteen
staff members who protect, collect,
restore, move, clean, or teach at the
Met, as well as a trustee whose great-
grandfather started the Lehman
Collection. Their moving personal
accounts lead us to unsuspected corners
of one of the greatest museums in the
world as they share intimate moments,
luminous with personal appreciations of
minor as well as major works of art. And
while they relate how their favorite work
of art has influenced their lives, Paul
Koestner’s camera sweeps lovingly across
the referenced painting or objets d’art as
the haunting Middle Eastern music of
G. I. Gurdjieff, played by Laurence
Rosenthal, soothes the ear.
You’ll discover how Rembrandt’s
SELF-PORTRAIT has served as a trusted
mentor for many years and how a wish-
granting statue gathers coins and hopes
to itself every day. A metallurgist
displays a secret compartment he
himself discovered recently while
cleaning a sharp Damascus sword made
FALL 2011 | 111
 taking care of the
statue itself. There
are also personal
stories about Lucian
Freud’s portrait of
Leigh Bowery and
Ingres’s Princess de
Broglie. And did you
know what’s in the
weird pigment
recipes used to
illuminate medieval
manuscripts? Or how
one art technician
surmounted the
mammoth task of
assembling a set of
huge Art Deco glass
panels from the
sunken French
luxury liner
Normandie?
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1660
With grace and
subtlety, Alexandra
Moltke Isles has cast
more than a century ago. (It’s hidden a warm light on the lives of each of
under a large emerald.) A night guard these custodians of treasure as she
focuses on a famous landscape that has humanizes for us the enormous collec-
become a living, guiding presence tion that the Met administers. Her pas-
during his lonely early morning vigils. sion for research developed during
A tour guide describes the delight years as Assistant Curator at New
children always find in an intricately York’s Museum of Radio & Television
carved boxwood rosary bead that (now the Paley Center of Media). No
contains a whole scene of tiny people stranger to film-making, she has made a
inside. Another teacher tells how a number of historical documentaries,
dying woman found joy in her last visit most of them edited by Doug Rossini:
to the Egyptian section, where solemn THE POWER OF CONSCIENCE: THE DANISH
funeral objects informed her of that RESISTANCE AND RESCUE OF THE JEWS (1995);
culture’s belief that there is no death, SCANDALIZE MY NAME (1999) about the
only an end to pain and sorrow. black listing of African-American per-
One of the art technicians is drawn formers during the Red Scare; and
to the power of a mysterious wooden PORRAIMOS: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust
Mayan figure. Another credits the (2002).
power of a bronze Ganesha with More akin to the quiet rhythm of
getting her the job she longed for— HIDDEN TREASURES is her later film, the

112 | PARABOLA
delightful HEALING GARDENS
OF NEW YORK (2007). She
says her inspiration for Jean Auguste
HIDDEN TREASURES came Dominique Ingres,
Portrait of the
after a visit to the Freer Princess Albert
Collection in de Broglie, 1853

Washington, D.C., when

she heard a guard answer
questions from a visitor.
“He was so knowledge-
able and proud of the col-
lection,” she says, “that
from then on, whenever I
visit a museum I talk to
the guards.”
Because of the
enormous variety of its
collections, the Met
seemed the most
interesting place to make
the film she had in mind,
but it took years to find
the courage to approach
the authorities. Isles says
ruefully that while the idea of
filming after-hours and on days
when the museum is closed may
sound thrilling, she soon discovered
those were also the times the
housekeeping was done. “There
was always the rattle and hum of
heavy equipment on the move,” she
reports. “And often an unmarked door
would suddenly open and a startled
janitor would become part of the
interview!”
When asked what was the most
exciting aspect of the filmmaking,
she gave a conspiratorial smile:
“Discovering how passionate the
staff members are about what they
do! In fact, by now you’ve probably
figured out that the true hidden
treasures here at the Met are the
people themselves!”

FALL 2011 | 113

 A Conversation with
Alexandra Isles
PATTY DE LLOSA: The theme for this issue of
PARABOLA is “Seeing,” so can you tell me how
you come up with an idea and then turn it
into a visual action?
ALEXANDRA ISLES: Works of fine art have a
supernatural quality. They can evoke an
emotional response but are, after all, only
canvas, pigment, stone, or wood.
Conveying that magic was a challenge.
Midway into the editing, and after we
knew what parts of the interviews were
going to be included, we went back to
the museum to re-shoot many of the
works because they had taken on new
meanings after their stories were revealed.
In the case of Rembrandt’s self-portrait,
seeing it in its formal frame and then
pushing past the frame and into the face
gave the painting a strange animating
energy. With the Lucien Freud portrait of
Leigh Bowery, slowly moving up his
huge back toward the ear on his turned-
away head evoked a sense that Bowery
could hear what was being said about
him. The pacing of these moves was very
important. In another case, it was only in
the editing room that I saw that the
object and the person talking about it had
a strong resemblance to each other.
PDEL: Was this challenge different from that
of your other documentaries?
AI: In some films you want to see what
the person who is speaking sees, through
their filter, their point of view. In other
cases you may want to try to show how
other people see them. I did a couple of
films about prejudice and you can see
what they are up against—the Gypsies
are a particularly good example of that. I
contrasted a film of Gypsy life in
114 | PARABOLA
Germany in the 1930s with Leni
Riefenstahl’s film on the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. Viewers could easily see how
these two cultures were so different. You
didn’t have to say anything. Also, in
SCANDALIZE MY NAME, about blacklisted
black actors, I showed shots of them
from World War II in uniform or enter-
taining the troops or being patriotic, so,
although I didn’t say anything, you just
saw that and could make up your own
mind. In any case, this was their truth.
PDEL: You said you wanted to make a film
about the quiet power these art objects can
have on our lives, as opposed to the block-
buster shows and soaring auction prices
that have made art a commodity. How do
you look at art?
AI: It’s not very intellectual, but I go to
museums and galleries with the same
wish as going to a play or a movie,
hoping to be surprised and moved.
PDEL: A documentary of a museum is
usually about objects, but the storytelling
aspect of this film is very powerful. How
did that come about?
AI: My previous film, THE HEALING GARDENS OF
NEW YORK, taught me that everyone has a
story. Until then my films had always had a
historical framework and were told
chronologically. HEALING GARDENS was made
completely on intuition and, as with all my
previous films, I was incredibly lucky in
finding memorable and interesting people
who were willing to tell their stories. I
follow two rules. The first is that my
presence is invisible and silent. The film
belongs to the storytellers. The second is
to do as much research as possible, trust
the material, and never film re-creations.
PDEL: I understand the Metropolitan
recently began a yearlong series on their
website called Connections, in which staff
members reflect on their favorite works of
art. That’s an exciting result of the film,
the fact that you woke them up, so to speak.
Could you say something about that?
AI: After the showing at the museum I
was told that the film had changed the
administration’s attitude toward the staff.
That hadn't been my intention; however,
inclusiveness is always lurking somewhere
in all my films. The beauty of
documentaries is meeting people who
teach you about the human condition.
For me, the great filmmakers are the
subtle ones. A beautiful example is
SECTION 80, by John Alpert, about the area
in Arlington Cemetery where the soldiers
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.
It observes quietly and, in doing so,
taught me so much about grief.

PDEL: Can you say what person or people

influenced you most in your approach to
HIDDEN TREASURES?
AI: In September of 2007 I read Holland
Cotter for the first time. His piece wasn’t
about art. It was about a road trip he
took in the summer of 1964 when he was
just out of high school. His trip took him
into Mississippi at the height of the civil
rights killings, and there was something
so warm and direct about his style that I
made note of his name. The following
Friday The New York Times reintroduced
me to him as one of the paper's leading
art critics. Over the three years it took to
make the film, his Friday reviews amazed
and inspired me with their knowledge,
sense of wonder, and playfulness. His
writing combined a spiritual openness
with real scholarship. His balanced way of
looking at, and often loving, art made
him my guide and teacher, and gave me
the confidence to pursue this very
personal way of looking at art.

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FALL 2011 | 115

 BOOK REVIEWS

EMINENT GURDJIEFFIANS: LORD PENTLAND

BY JAMES MOORE. GURDJIEFF STUDIES LTD. (WWW.GURDJIEFF.ORG.UK), 2011. PP. 106
+ XVIII. $40
Reviewed by Stephen A. Grant

FOLLOWERS OF G.I. GURDJIEFF have long been grateful to

James Moore for the research and insights in his biography
GURDJIEFF: THE ANATOMY OF A MYTH (1991). So it is truly disappointing
that his latest offering falls so short of the standards set by the
earlier book. There are the trappings of serious biography: an
acknowledgment of extensive sources, a bibliography and index,
even photographs. But the substantive narrative, totaling a mere
one hundred pages, consists largely of insignificant facts
arranged chronologically against a background of historical
events. The subject, the famously elusive former head of the
Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, remains a mystery. This
seems a shame, an opportunity lost to examine the life of the
leading figure in the Gurdjieff movement in America for more
than thirty years.

116 | PARABOLA
 By invoking the critic Lytton
Strachey’s EMINENT VICTORIANS, Moore

$5 & (7<3$/
+
signals his purpose to challenge the
hierarchy of the Gurdjieff Work, that is, 5&+(7<3$/
the Foundations organized in Paris, New
York, London, and Caracas by Jeanne de '5 ($0:25.
5($0:25.
Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s closest follower.
Moore accuses the Work of being driven
by personal ambition and politics, a
community in which “clashes of personal
and sectional interest masquerade as
lofty distinctions of principle; cabals
and coups are danced out to celestial
melodies; and great and petty empires
of influence are ruthlessly built, then $VKHDUUGRQ
broken on Fortune’s careless wheel.” 235$+Ö6628/6(5,(6
He claims that Lord Pentland owed his 135Ö62132,17
position to his title, and rose to :(2 ))(5
2))(5
preeminence by slavishly agreeing with 2QHRQ2QH7KHUDS\5HWUHDWV
Mme. de Salzmann: “His exalted Work :RUNVKRSV%RRNV2QOLQH&ODVVHV
status throughout America relied on his ZZZQRUWKRIHGHQFRP
Z ZZQRUWKRIHGHQFRP
agreeing with Madame de Salzmann
35(6(17$7,216$1'
whatever she said.” This argument,
though unkind, would be provocative
:25.6+236
if the biographer could provide at least &+5,67$/$$1
1&$67(5
a modicum of fact or testimony to 0$5&%5(*0$1
substantiate it. But Moore utterly fails 6W)HUULRO)UDQFH6HSW
:HHNORQJ5HWUHDW
to make his case. All he does—with
/RQGRQ8.6HSW
his trademark verbal trenchancy—is (YHQLQJ3UHVHQWDWLRQ
belittle his subject by innuendo and %DUFHORQD6SDLQ6HSW
unsupported denigrations tossed off (YHQLQJ3UHVHQWDWLRQ
as though they were self-evident. 1HZ2UOHDQV/$2FW
3UHVHQWDWLRQZLWK5RGJHU.DPHQHW]
Although presumably unintended, these
%HUPXGD1RY
commentaries end up cumulatively (YHQLQJ3UHVHQWDWLRQ :HHNHQG:RUNVKRS
sounding like petty insults that, at least (VDOHQ%LJ6XU&$6SULQJ
to this reviewer, seem quite unworthy of :HHNORQJ5HWUHDW
an accomplished biographer dealing with 686$10$5,,((6&$92
a distinguished subject. %,//67&<5
At the same time, Moore says enough 2QH:RUOG)HVWLYDO
to reveal the real reason for his attack 7XVFDQ\,WDO\$XJXVW6HSWHPEHU
:HHNRI3UHVHQWLQJ
on the Gurdjieffian establishment. As
)RUPRUHLQIRUPDWLRQFDOO
) RUPRUHLQIRUPDWLRQFDOO
a serious follower of Gurdjieff, he is 6XVDQ0DULH6FDYRRU
concerned that Mme. de Salzmann failed %LOO6W&\UDW
in her responsibility to safeguard the
teaching from deformation. As stated in

FALL 2011 | 117

 earlier writings, he believes that (i) the
original English version of Gurdjieff’s
BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON was an
authentic text that should not have been
tampered with, and (ii) the “traditional
Gurdjieffian ethos of effort,” a “Stoic
legacy” of effort and struggle, even
physical “super-effort,” was undermined
by Mme. de Salzmann’s introduction of
a new “quietism” through collective
meditation. Both of these conclusions
are wrong. The original BEELZEBUB was an
inauthentic, flawed translation that had
to be revised. And “conscious labor” in
Gurdjieff’s teaching involves an inner
struggle of attention that is above and
beyond the outer exertion required in
preliminary stages of work.
The original English version of
BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON was not
an authentic text of Gurdjieff
Moore charges Lord Pentland with
failing to oppose Mme. de Salzmann’s
decision to revise the English edition
of BEELZEBUB, which Moore regards as
sacrosanct. As he wrote earlier, over
decades Gurdjieff “honed the English
text refining its nuances and cadences”
and imparted “deliberate stylistic
opacity” in order to require a special
effort on the part of the reader. Moore
accuses Lord Pentland of acting solely
118 | PARABOLA
out of ambition, and does not even
acknowledge that Lord Pentland viewed
Mme. de Salzmann as the person most
qualified to decide how the book should
be revised. This view was correct, given
the real shortcomings of the English
version, which she alone understood.
Gurdjieff’s original manuscript of
BEELZEBUB was typed and revised in Russian.
An English version was composed from
a word-by-word interlinear translation,
with each word in English placed above
the corresponding Russian word in the
typescript. This “transposition” was
finally edited by the well-known editor
A.R. Orage, who did not know Russian
and was unable to read Gurdjieff’s
original text. The word-by-word
transposition produced an awkward
result because of differences between the
two languages. Russian is a highly
inflected language. Through word
endings indicating gender, number, and
case, it smoothly accommodates long
sentences and needs few prepositions.
English, in contrast, has little inflection
and relies heavily on word order and
prepositions. However brilliantly edited,
the word-by-word English translation of
BEELZEBUB inevitably produced passages
that were unwieldy in style compared to
the Russian text. They were needlessly
complex and, for many readers,
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extremely difficult to read and
understand. Most important, the
English translation did not correspond
to what Gurdjieff had written in
Russian.
Moore, along with others, assumes
that, as the initial publication, the
English version was written or approved
by Gurdjieff, who was present when it
was read aloud. He does not realize that,
in fact, all of Gurdjieff’s work on the
book was in Russian, and that he had
never mastered the English language.
He could not have judged, much less
approved, the English text and had to
rely on Mme. de Salzmann, who was
fluent in Russian and English, for
reassurance that the meaning was
preserved. Thus the truth is that
Gurdjieff did not approve the wording
or writing style of the English
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translation, and did not deliberately
contrive such extreme convoluted
opacity to challenge the reader.
As Moore noted in his biography,
Gurdjieff acknowledged that the English
book was a “rough diamond,” and
counted on Mme. de Salzmann to revise
it after his death. They both understood
that the revisions would entail much
more than minor corrections. The
deformation here is not in the revised
book but in the original transposition
from Russian by an editor who did not
speak the language. It is the revised
edition that represents the authentic
translation of what the author wrote.
Collective meditation is based on
Gurdjieff’s work with advanced pupils
In creating the Foundations, Mme. de
Salzmann established two core practices:
Venerable Chea (front) &Venerable Pouk Khorn (behind) share tales of
rebuilding the Kampang pagoda following the war. Photo by Justin Min
FALL 2011 | 119
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120 | PARABOLA
discussion groups for exchanging on
work, and classes for doing special dance
exercises called Movements. After fifteen
years, working mostly in Paris and New
York, she introduced a directed
meditation in which participants sit in
rows facing the person in front. Moore
condemns these so-called “sittings” as a
“radical innovation in Work
methodology” based on the Zen
meditation practice in Japan. He believes
that Mme. de Salzmann’s emphasis on
meditation is a misguided departure
from Gurdjieff’s teaching on
unrelenting struggle. In fact, the sittings
have almost nothing in common with
zazen meditation and were a natural
extension of Gurdjieff’s own practice
with more advanced pupils.
In introducing the sittings, Mme. de
Salzmann did not explain their origin or
purpose. Nevertheless, many years later
several of us asked her whether there
were sittings with Gurdjieff. Her answer
was simple and direct: “Yes, but it was
not like today—not so many people.
We were only a few. It was called ‘special
work’ and we were not allowed to speak
of it to others.” Those who attended the
early sittings in New York remember it
was called “special work” and that we
were told not to speak of it to others.
Thus the sittings are the same practice
Gurdjieff used in work with Mme. de
Salzmann, only on a larger scale. Far
from being a deformation, they were
simply a form for more advanced inner
work implemented when followers
were prepared.
To understand the broader context,
it is necessary to remember that
Gurdjieff’s early teaching, from 1915–24
in Russia and at the Prieuré, was with
people who had no in-depth experience
in the inner work for consciousness. This
is why he spoke in conceptual terms,
with illustrations from everyday
experience. For example, the key relation
among mind, feeling, and body could be
expressed only metaphorically in terms of
the driver, horse, and carriage. And the
need for a “super-effort”—that is, one
beyond our ordinary functions—could
be conveyed only as an “extraordinary
ordinary effort,” like pushing oneself
beyond the point of exhaustion. To an
unprepared audience, Gurdjieff could
not speak about the inner work required
either for relating the lower centers or
for opening to the higher feeling and
thinking centers. He may, to be sure,
have intended initially to reveal more in
his Third Series, but he gave up writing
that book in 1935 and devoted himself
to intensive work with individual pupils.
We know that this later teaching was
toward what he called “conscious labor,”
that is, an inner effort to awaken and
open to a direct perception of reality
in oneself.
In charging her to carry on his work,
Gurdjieff instructed Mme. de Salzmann
to record what she brought, which she
did in notebooks, kept like diaries over a
period of forty years. The notebooks
show that, in bringing guidance for
more advanced stages of inner work, she
continued the line of direct perception
in senior groups and later refined it in
sittings to a work for conscious sensation.
This material was arranged and published
last year in her book THE REALITY OF BEING.
The book confirms her total commitment
to Gurdjieff’s teaching. In particular, she
stresses the importance of meditation
each day to return to the reality in
oneself, a practice recommended at the
beginning of BEELZEBUB. She also makes
clear that the work in meditation is for
opening to the higher centers, and
FALL 2011 | 121
 redefines inner work as calling for
continual struggle, conscious effort,
and voluntary suffering.
In conclusion, James Moore’s
concerns about the teaching are to be
respected. He did not know that the
English version of BEELZEBUB was
inauthentic, and that Mme. de
Salzmann’s advanced practice originated
with Gurdjieff. Pentland loyalists can
also appreciate Moore’s allegiance to his
teacher Mme. Henriette Lannes, who
headed London’s Gurdjieff Society from
its founding. Moore and others were
aware that before her death in 1980
Mme. Lannes had a falling out with
Mme. de Salzmann, but they never knew
what it was about. The issue involved
the Foundations’ stewardship over
Gurdjieff’s writings, and their staking
out a claim of primacy in representing
his authentic work. Mme. Lannes
proposed inserting a notice in
Gurdjieff’s books proclaiming that they
were published by the Society and other
foundations as the original centers for
carrying on the teaching. Lord Pentland
refused, rejecting the pretention that any
group could claim “ownership” of the
teaching or the Gurdjieff movement.
This was a confrontation of high
principle between the two strong-willed
leaders in London and New York. In the
end, Mme. de Salzmann agreed with
122 | PARABOLA
Lord Pentland that the foundations
could not claim to embody the teaching.
Mme. Lannes was deeply disappointed,
and the relationship between the two
women was never the same. Viewed in
this context, this book could be
regarded as an exercise in misguided
loyalty—that is, Moore wrongly assumed
a “clash of personal and sectional
interest,” and took it on himself to
discredit Mme. Lannes’s supposed
“enemies,” not realizing that at this level
they were essentially her spiritual brother
and mother.
In the end, however, neither good-
faith concerns nor sincere loyalty can
excuse this “biography”—a thinly
disguised assault by a professional writer
on a leader regarded with respect and
affection by Gurdjieffians across
America. Mme. de Salzmann and her
two closest followers in this country and
England devoted their lives to this
teaching, and to the Work that made it
available to everyone, including Moore.
Having myself witnessed their
extraordinary engagement, I cannot help
thinking how disappointed, how very
sad, they all would be with this book.
Stephen A. Grant is a member of The Gurdjieff
Foundation of New York who, with many others,
worked for years under the guidance of Lord
Pentland and Mme. de Salzmann.
   
 

      
  

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FALL 2011 | 123

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 CREDITS
P.6–7 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author:
663highland
P.8 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Gerry
Lewis
P.9 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Fae
P.10 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Walter
Siegmund
P.11 Photo courtesy of Dean Leh
(deanleh.blogspot.com)
P.12 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: John
Hill
P.13 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Viault
P.15,16 Photos courtesy of James Opie
P.18-19,20,21,22,23 Photos courtesy of James
Whitlow Delano
P.24–25, 26–27 Photos courtesy of Dale Fuller
P.28 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author:
Otgonbayar Ershuu
P.31 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: John
Hill
P.32 Atlas Image obtained as part of the Two
Micron All Sky Survey, a joint project of the Univ.
of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center/California Institute of
Technology, funded by the NASA and the
National Science Foundation
P.33 Photo: unews.utah.edu. Author: Franz
Giessibl
P.34 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author:
NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair
P.36 Photo: www.communicatesscience.eu. Author:
Dr. Henry Jakubowski
P.38,39,41, 42–43,44,45 Photos courtesy of Richard
Whittaker
MANY PATHS
ONE TRUTH
THE NEXT ISSUE OF
PARABOLA
126 | PARABOLA
P.46 Photo courtesy of the de Salzmann family
P.50,51,55 Photos courtesy of David Ulrich
P.60 Photo courtesy of Lee van Laer
P.62 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Becca
Dorstek; cropped by RanZag
P.63 Photo courtesy of Summit Entertainment
P.64 Photo courtesy of Summit Entertainment,
photo by Jonathan Olley
P.65 Photos courtesy of Summit Entertainment
P.66–67,69,70 Images courtesy of Kazuaki Tanahashi
P.74,76,77,78 Photos courtesy of George Beke
P.80 Photo courtesy of Christopher Ripman
P.84,87,90,91,93 Photos courtesy of the collections of
members of the Washington, D.C., Gurdjeff
groups
P.95 Photo: Wikipedia. Author: Alak Prasad
P.101 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Gakuro
P.102 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Uploader: Aiden
P.103 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Payal
Vora
P.111 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Cow
P.112 Photo: Wikimedia Commons
P.113 Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Source: Art
Renewal Center Museum
P.128 Top: Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Bottom
left: Photo: jeevanathigal.blogspot.com. Bottom
right: Photo: Planetperplex.com
ERRATUM
The photograph on pages 62–63 of our Summer 2011
issue was incorrectly attributed. That photo of Mount
Buffalo was by and courtesy of Roxanne Bodsworth.
Mt. Buffalo is Dordordonga, the Echidna.
BURNING
WORLD THE UNKNOWN
SPRING 2012
FALL 2012
ALONE AND
TOGETHER
SUMMER 2012
 PROFILES
GEORGE BEKE, after twenty years at Time, Inc.,
researches lost historic connections through
obscure coins, little-known texts, and ill-
understood surviving art.
BARBARA HELEN BERGER is an artist, author,
and longtime student of Buddhism. Her
books for children include ALL THE WAY TO LHASA:
A TALE FROM TIBET. She has written essays and
retellings for Parabola, and her special interest
in the feminine forms of Wisdom has led her
to collecting stories of Tara.
JAMES WHITLOW DELANO is a photographer
who has lived in Asia for seventeen years. His
work has received awards internationally: the
Alfred Eisenstadt Award (from Columbia
University and Life Magazine), Leica’s Oskar
Barnack, Picture of the Year International,
Photo District News, and others.
For more information, please visit
www.jameswhitlowdelano.com.
PATTY DE LLOSA, author of THE PRACTICE OF
PRESENCE: FIVE PATHS FOR DAILY LIFE, is an
Alexander teacher and a consulting editor to
Parabola who lives and practices in New York
City. Her new book, TAMING YOUR INNER TYRANT:
A PATH TO HEALING THROUGH DIALOGUES WITH ONESELF,
is available from bn.com, amazon.com, and
elsewhere. For more information, please visit
http://tamingyourinnertyrant.com.
JEANNE DE SALZMANN (1889-1990) was G.I.
Gurdjieff’s closest pupil. Upon his death in
1949, she led the Gurdjieff Work worldwide
until her own death at the age of 101.
MARTHA HEYNEMAN is the author of THE BREATHING
CATHEDRAL and many essays that appeared in
Parabola between 1983 and 2005. She met
Hugh Ripman in Washington, D.C., in 1952.
TREBBE JOHNSON is the author of THE WORLD IS A
WAITING LOVER: DESIRE AND THE QUEST FOR THE
BELOVED, and the director of Vision Arrow
(www.VisionArrow.com), offering journeys
worldwide that combine the mythic quest, the
search for meaning, and the exploration of
wisdom and insight through nature. In 2009
she founded Radical Joy for Hard Times, a
non-profit organization devoted to finding
and making beauty in wounded places
(www.RadicalJoyforHardTimes.org).
JOYCE KORNBLATT is a novelist, essayist, and for-
mer English professor at the University of
Maryland. She now lives in Sydney, Australia,
where she is at work on a novel and a book
about grief.
JAMES OPIE writes and also deals in Oriental
rugs in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of
APPROACHING INNER WORK: MICHAEL CURRER BRIGGS
ON THE GURDJIEFF TEACHING.
HUGH RIPMAN (1909-1980) studied under
P.D. Ouspensky and G.I. Gurdjieff and went
on to lead the Gurdjieff Society of
Washington, D.C., for many years.
RON STARBUCK is an Episcopal lay person,
author-poet living in Houston, Texas. He is
the author of WHEELS TURNING INWARD, a book of
poetry from Friesen Press. Along with his wife,
Joanne, Ron attends Trinity Episcopal
Church. He is deeply engaged in an interfaith
dialogue, holding a lifelong interest in
Christian mysticism, comparative religion,
theology, and meditation.
KAZUAKI TANAHASHI is an accomplished
Japanese calligrapher, Zen teacher, author, and
translator of Buddhist texts from Japanese and
Chinese to English, most notably works by
Dogen.
DAVID ULRICH is a photographer and writer
who teaches at the University of Hawaii
Manoa. His photographs have been
exhibited in over seventy-five one-person
and group exhibitions in museums, galleries,
and universities. He is the author of
THE WIDENING STREAM: THE SEVEN STAGES OF
CREATIVITY. His work can be viewed at
www.creativeguide.com.
CHRISTIAN WERTENBAKER, M.D., a senior editor
at Parabola, is a neuro-opthalmologist and a
musician. His interest in the nature of human
consciousness and its role in the universe led
him to study both the spiritual traditions and
the sciences, particularly neuroscience, via
formal training in neurophysiology, neurology,
and neuro-ophthalmology.
DOLPHI WERTENBAKER, M.D., works as a yoga
therapist in New York City. She is a long-time
student of T.K.V. Desikachar, who opened for
her the world of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. She is
a KHYF-certified yoga teacher and teacher
trainer.
RICHARD WHITTAKER is the West Coast editor
of Parabola and is the founding editor of
works & conversations. A collection of his inter-
views, THE CONVERSATIONS, INTERVIEWS WITH SIXTEEN
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS, is available from the
University of Nebraska Press.
JEFF ZALESKI is editor in chief of Parabola.
FALL 2011 | 127
 ENDPOINT
All Is Vanity.
C. Allan Gilbert,
1892

Gossip, and
Satan Came Also. Society, a Portrait.
George A. Wotherspoon George A. Wotherspoon

“You see, but you do not observe,” remarked Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in A SCANDAL IN
BOHEMIA. This is true of most of us, but it is always possible to see more deeply. In 1892, at age
19, the American illustrator C. Allan Gilbert created ALL IS VANITY, a drawing that changes
meaning depending on how one views it. Not long after, another American illustrator, George
A. Wotherspoon, drew two similar works, GOSSIP, AND SATAN CAME ALSO, and SOCIETY, A PORTRAIT.
Not only did Wotherspoon, like Gilbert, hide yet reveal a deeper meaning behind his works’
facades, but his drawings are so reminiscent of Gilbert’s that casual collectors, not observing
the fine differences, often ascribe them to Gilbert.

128 | PARABOLA
 Where Myth
Meets Depth
Pacifica Graduate
Institute’s Program in
Mythological Studies
WITH EMPHASIS IN DEPTH
PSYCHOLOGY is a doctoral
program designed as an integrated
M.A./ Ph.D. sequence that
explores the understanding
of human experience
revealed in mythology,
and in the manifold links
between myth and ritual,
literature, art, and
religious experience.
Special Attention is
given to depth
psychological
and archetypal
approaches to the
study of myth.

An Accredited Graduate School with Two Campuses

near Santa Barbara, California

For more information on Pacifica’s degree

programs, call 805.969.3626, ext. 308
or visit us online at www.pacifica.edu