“From
the conscience of Body
to
the Body of Conscience”
by
Tiziano Grandi
Every
evolutive process has got a “stop” phase that prevents or makes very
difficult personal growth. It’s only possible to overcome this “stop phase”
with a new “shaking” that has got specific qualities because in the universe
nothing remains immovable or unchanged and the evolutive energy when arrives to
a specific moment comes back to its origin. Every human enterprises can evolve
only to a particular moment such as a string hurled in the sky that after its
initial impulse, returs to the ground. If in that inversion of the energy
follows a new conscious impulse with a “supplemental effort” – shock –
it will allow to the “ascending energy” to overcome that invisible stop,
making possible for it to go on with its rise. This ”2 stop phase” in the
arts of self- defence training, happens quite frequently and the foundumental
idea of the seminars that we organize is to encourage a specific and aware
demand of a “supplemental effort” to help yourself to overcome this barrier.
It’s not necessary to learn postures or figues but it’s important to search
what animates “spirit” that exists inside the form. The form is a servant
and not a owner, for this reason a truth from the invisible can reveal itself.
This expression can start when the physical, emotional and intellectual parts of
the body that produce movement, feelings and thoughts stop to produce agonizing
and wrong employment energy and start to work togheter in a harmonious way. In
this moment a new “quality”appears. In the same way of which the intesity of
this quality rises, the origin of our reactions and wishes, called “ego”,
come in a gradual way, accomodating and clear and in our automatic manner make
up, there will be a new space where our real personality will appear. Anyway, we
can’t change alone. We are restrained by our conditioning models. We need a
help. A teacher is necessary and there are many who appeal for our attention.
The target of some teacher is the destruction of the body rule, other teachers
want to elevate emotions to ecstatic abandonment level, others want to free the
mind. His teaching goes togheter with other parts of the psyche: mind, emotions,
body.
It
rejects the typical passivity of the children’s subjection of the teacher or
of the teaching. The teacher with the learner creates the teaching. In addition
to this interaction, doesn’t exist teaching or teacher. It’s useless to
change teacher or teaching. If we don’t value the spirit who gives life to the
situation where the teaching borns, we’re simply loosing time. This place
where everything born and live is the school. There’re two kinds of school: 1)
commercial:the target is success 2)pratical, the main target is the searching of
different experience’s forms. There’re two ways of training: 1) make art, a
sublimation of frustations 2) to be art, to enter into the life. Restart from
the beginning, cancelling problems, frustations, ideas and illusions that
prevent us “to be”. Express something that it’s not subjective, but
through us revals individual qualities, in other words our nature. There’re
two ways to do things: 1) in the right way or 2) carelessly. Art, indipendently
of its form, gives us only an incomplete situation of the hidden realities. Art
never give a steady understanding because the real value of art it’s not what
it is but what it suggests. It allows us to discover our new knowledge levels,
through them it’s possible to reach a superior conscience level where all
pictures are only shadows, if we ignore the “quality’s mistery” we see
that all the things creted by humans, from hats to cathedrals, from pictures of
the caves to art and religion, represent an elaborated defence against fear and
chaos. Spiritual experience, allows us to carry out other kind of empty. This
empty doesn’t have name, time, it’s infinite and it involves everything.
Step by step, from its complete shaking, fine energies flow to the world and to
the time. Our possibility to carry out it, is understanded by the high
and by the low and it gives life to two interconnected forms that have
completely different qualities. Such as two silents inside a great silent, the
silent animated by the conscience and the dull silent of.....”lead”. All the
possible level of our life, bornand vanish in the middle of these aspects.
It’s
possible to understand it by intuition but it has got a real meaning if it
becomes a life experience. A change of quality is never casual, but it
represents the effect of a exact process. Only this knowledge can allows us to
overcome the difference between science and mankind and it allows us to leave
the mechanicalness and welfare world to enter to a world where everybody thanks
to clarity of understanding, knows where to go. This understanding it’s not
abstract: it’s a real vision. It shows us the infinity and inevitable movement
to a new quality of life. In this new quality there’s a sense of happiness but
also a sense of suggering for the lost and deceived quality, and these two
experiences become the power that always renew our reserch. Without this vision,
we go nowhere. The teacher is the person who can encourage to know the others
and not the person who send personal vivion. Between my and your opinions
there’a an empty space that can takes life only with the ability of
understanding. To undestand what I said before I’m going to tell you an
anecdote about Gurdjieff and the arts of self-defence.
Gurdjieff
the “dancing teacher” while he was talking with his students, he said that
in Central Asia there was a very develop arts of self-defence, called
Fiz-Lez-Lou. Gurdjieff thought to introduce this kind of arts of self-defence in
Europe, for this reason he was looking for a person to instruct as a teacher.
Tcheckhovitch,
a russian student, was a Sambo and Wrestling champion and for this reason he
looked the right person. Gurdjieff told him: “Do you remember when we were
building the bathroom in the Prievrè and you wanted to break stones to make the
loom of the door? I was looking you and I understood that you could’t observe.
I was able to look very well where to break the stone, but you could’t neither
after my explanation. I decided, for this reason, to not introduce Fiz-Lez-Lou
in Europe. If we think about what I said before and if we observe the “present
Arts world” and the Arts of self defence universe, only our blidness can
impede us to a lot of mountebanks.
They
don’t have the “vision”, they don’t know what we’re talking about and
the worse thing is that they want to lead people and they don’t know where to
go! It represents the same situation of a blind who talks about colours with a
deaf who wants to teach him music..Where are teachers for the development of
intelligence? Some teachers are worried about health or welfare, others about
weakness or ugliness of our body but I don’t know any teacher who’s worried
about the fault of intelligence and the capacity “to see”. This represents a
lie that people continue to tell others and if we apply this to ourself we’ll
understand that it’s stupid to think that nobody knows us how we know ourself.
Our personal opinion is the best, above all for the mind that regards with
admiration Mind but when we talk about personal development, self complaisance
is not useful. If we analize the consequence of this, by our condition it’s
very alarming and fine because our tools for this target – thoughts,
considerations and self examination, work only for theirself. The most important
illusion that the thought creates is to believe that it thinks. In the same way
our conscience induces itself to be quick, attentive and free. The thought
imagines that it could share from itself and to examinate its nature from the
outside such as a inactive object. Indeed it’s undefinable, indivisible and
always in motion. Nowadays neuroscientists attest what the ancients declared
before. The extraordinay organism that we call brain is only a big mass who
loves, first of all, the simplification and reduction. Gurdjieff said: “ To
stop to be a machine, we have to know the machine..” Our brain (where our
adventure starts..) plays false with itself and also a sage, at the end of this
experience, claps to himself. Brain can be compared to a snail. It has a
rectractile thought that if induced it rolls up into itself in murmuring and it
forgets its targets and it begins to go slow until to stop itself. Farid Uddin
Attar in “Mantiq-Ut-Tayr” (The Conference of Birds) described very well this
situation: “Things that will stop you, they’ll become your idols”. Often
our brain bows to itself and it shows veneration to what it has created, and it
doesn’t know that in the same time it’s the idol and the adorer, the tool
and the obstacle. We can say the Mevlaa’s sentence: “To know means doesn’t
know” or the Lao Tze one: “To know means doesn’t learn”. The knowledge,
in particular of ourself, in the end, leads us to an unknown place. Mevlana said:
“We have to listen everything with our internal ear” and “If you want to
know pearls you can’t contemplate the sea, you have to dip into it”. But...how
to dip into it? Where? With an help? Is there a way? The best way is to
appreciate completely the art that wem choose to study. In the same time
intuation (that in the same case is a help) has got a danger, indeed it can lead
us to a unconscious level nearer to identification than to the reality. The
Director Peter Brook said that often the most important illusion for an actor
was to believe that an intellectual effort was enough and that he needed only of
a intellecual analysis. In this case the only task of the actor is to show with
words and body ideas that have been analized by the mind. If we consider these
ideas in terms of arts of self defence we can say that this art is
“a physical demostration of ideas analized by mind”. It’s important
that the artist of this art reaches the area where is the mistery and where the
analysis can’t enter. In a specific moment the understanding has to stop.
Above and under the artist has to protect the “good oscurity” to the light
of intelligence. Only in this way it’s possible to explore life.
All the real artist know this: when exercises and explorations are
finished we have to dip without guarantee to come back. We have to run this risk
to know very well a character and the result is a short and breaked knowledge
that lets artist astonished.
Is
it possible to find tomorrow the same situation? No, we don’t think so. In
this consideration of ourself, of
our interior levels, our energies , capacities and relation with the others,
there’re a number of useful exercises that can bring a light into our secret
part. These exercises come from far and they allow to the body and emotions to
express freely. We forget that our body have to express itself and that it’s
not only a tool or a servant. Every teacher of arts of self defence knows that
our body can protect itself, it can be creative, if prepared and respected. The
target of this exercise is to appease the body but also everything that it’s
called “myself”. The arts of self defence help us to not forget other people
that observe us with which we interplay and in every moment sensible relations
can take life. Everyday we have to begin a
new exploration. Rich or poor our exploration doesn’t have a beginnig neither
an end, it doesn’t have a structure neither a geometry. Which exploration is
long and slow and ways change. Only a friend quick and care and not cruel and
comfortable can help us. Be careful with mountebanks, teachers and inventors of
systm and of pseudo-religions. But the most important thing is to preserve from
ourself, from our thoughts, identifications and illusions. This work is
senseless if it doesn’t have life, the risk of daily life without
contradictions. Every morning that we think to be awake we don’t learned
nothing. Everything has to be open and renew. In the final fight, on the stage,
we never in the success on ourself.