The Listening Attention

Tag: peace

  • The Supreme Doctrine of Hubert Benoit

    This Missal takes a look at a twentieth century philosopher and doctor from France, Hubert Benoit.  Best known for his book, The Supreme Doctrine (now entitled Zen and the Psychology of Transformation), Dr. Benoit was a psychiatrist, surgeon, violinist, and writer whose understanding of Zen and Traditional Metaphysics lives on today.  Counted among the pupils of Gurdjieff,  he wrote on the subject of Zen and its masters, being one of the first to bring this ancient teaching to the West.  Born in Nancy, France in 1904 to a well-read family, he entered into the study of medicine. He studied in Paris and specialized in surgery, which he practiced until being gravely injured in the Allied bombing of the town of Saint Lo during the Normandy invasion in 1944. His injuries put a halt to his surgical career, and he became a psychiatrist, practicing for over thirty-five years.

    During his long years in a hospital bed recovering from his injuries, he had the chance to fulfill a life-long yearning to understand the human condition. His practice of psychiatry and his books on Zen brought this to fruit. Besides his book The Supreme Doctrine, he published several others including The Interior Realization, which he considered his best.  He continued to bring his work to others through his psychiatric practice and his writing until his death in Paris in 1992.

    ” Imagination does not bring realization, but only the fallacious hope of realization. –  It is in the failure to master the imagination that human servitude resides.”

    – Hubert Benoit

    Benoit’s understanding of our dilemma is explained in detail in The Supreme Doctrine. He tells us our problems with suffering are facets of our imaging process, the imagination, and never based in the outside world. They start from the misconception that we are a separate creature, an animal and/or abstract self, at risk of complete annihilation at the hands of the not-self, the world. The animal self is at odds with and the opposite of the abstract self. The abstract self lives in the imagination, in the world of ideas, while the animal self is the emotional identification with the body and its needs. One or the other of these selves is dominant in us, and the other is repressed or ignored. The animal self goes about its survival by accumulating wealth and security, using success or failure in the world to gain emotional stability. The abstract self finds its haven in the ideal, it’s ego identifying with the intellect and thought.  These selves can be either positive(preferable) or negative, depending on circumstance.

    When I awoke into my life,

    a sobbing dwarf

    whom giants served

    only as they pleased,

    I was not what I seemed.

    The Sea and the Mirror – W.H. Auden

    Benoit goes on to say that each of us covers the feeling of having been separated from our divine principle(which is not in fact the case) through compensations, tools of the ego to keep us believing our life has meaning outside our true nature. These compensations eventually wear thin, and we keep having to find ever new ways to not face the truth or facts of our mortal life and our near complete identification with it. The only way out of this trap is by the trick of letting the compensations run their course, or seeing through them at once. Through this loss of footing we come face to face with inner truth through humility. We cannot work at becoming humble directly, for that is yet another form of pride, but we can face our mistakes and humiliations, and thus see ourselves more clearly. This is another of the paths of retraction, a retreat from error rather than a gathering of ego and will. We come to see we are in reality what Benoit calls the conciliatory principle, the top point of a triangle, the base-line being our constant struggle to uphold one or another of the opposite poles. This principal is always present, regardless of our feeling of angst or loss, and comes into play when we realize our helplessness in solving the problem of life through ego and its illusory will. We have never been truly abandoned, but have become lost through identification with one of the inferior points.

    I’ve found Benoit’s The Interior Realization to be a compact work containing his major ideas, and a road map to realization if one’s intuition is able to pick up on it. The Supreme Doctrine offers much more detail, but is rather weighty, to say the least. Art Ticknor’s excellent explanation of Benoit’s compensations and general ideas is worth a look, found at: http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/bzrecap.htm

    Select Benoit quotes:

    • ” Man is of the nature of God, but in a state in which this is not apparent.
    • ” The Gospel tells us that we must be reconciled with our brother before we pray; the balancing of our being in the conditions of everyday life represents this reconciliation. This means that a man may have to work long and laboriously on his ordinary nature before undertaking the work of transcending it.
    • ” Asceticism has in itself no efficacy — at any rate where timeless realization is concerned. Nevertheless a certain asceticism may be necessary for the achievement of the inner state of maximum calm, without which the exercise cannot be properly carried out.
    • ” ‘Moral’ suffering working on the image-plane is closely bound up with the play of the imagination. It is in the failure to master the imagination that human servitude resides. – Hubert Benoit

  • Why Don’t We Get It?

    ” What I suspect we need is not any kind of path or discipline, but a collection of tricks or devices for catching the Dark at the corner of the eye, as it were, and learning how to spot its just-waiting-to-be-seen presence, combined with strategies for stopping the hyperactive survival-programmes from immediately explaining the perception away. D. E. Harding’s exercises for discovering one’s own essential ‘headlessness’ are the best ideas I’ve yet come across for the first half of this process, but, by his own admission, most people ‘get it but simply don’t believe it’.” – John Wren-Lewis

    The above quote by John Wren-Lewis points out a common conundrum seen often nowadays in seekers of the Truth. Many of us can recall times when we were strangely indifferent to our usual pattern, and the world seemed new and alive, with the noise of the mind blessedly absent. Then, the thought-pattern of personality took back the reins and the world became once more known and dimmingly familiar. Even the startling effects of Douglas Harding’s exercises can become relegated to memory, for in our everyday world the miracle of ‘seeing’ is soon lost, replaced by the usual fog of ‘knowing’. Why is this? Why doesn’t something so startling as seeing without one’s own head last? Why is the ego’s hold on us so complete, that its survival is the paramount fact of our very life, robbing us of seeing without warning?


    We may think that the problem lies in emotion. That if we were just a bit more enthused about it all, we could retain the clarity through thick and thin. We come away from a seminar pumped up, making inner promises to never forget what we’ve seen, and to try harder at every turn. Here, we may be misled once more. The act of seeing is not one of emotion, anymore than it is of thought. The memory of seeing is not the act, any more than the memory of the emotional reaction is. I can remember once listening to an intense emotional sermon by a sincere preacher. Everyone in the church came under the same spell, convinced that they would go forth from that moment on and be a better person, worthy of the glory of eternal life. Then, an even stranger thing happened. While in the parking lot after the service, I realized I could not remember anything the preacher had said, not a word. I couldn’t even remember what I had been so enthused about. By the time I got home, the mood was completely gone; the thoughts and business of the day had totally replaced it.


    Now, there is nothing wrong with becoming inspired. It’s a necessary part of the path. But, it is not the goal. Seeing is not a state of being in perpetual bliss, about our seeing. This is again the trap of living in the reaction, not the state. This trap of reaction is a clue to why no matter how intense or startling a state is, we soon lose it. We are trying to get back to seeing by looking at the reaction. We forget to see, by trying to remember to see. We look at our previous emotional or mental reaction to seeing, while our seeing, always there in the moment, every second, is overlooked.


    Let’s back up a bit, and go back to the start of the problem. When we were first brought into the world, we were taught by people, well meaning but asleep, that we are a thing, an object, living in a world of things. We were taught that some of these things, our thoughts, were more real than our very being, meaning our seeing was secondary to our thinking about our seeing. This trick was played on us until we could do it ourselves. Once we were well trained in fooling ourselves, we became ‘thinking’. The world of thought became our new home. We lost our innocence, as we slowly lost sight of our seeing. We traded it for knowing, the unquestioned belief that our thoughts were more real than our seeing of our thoughts. Soon enough, we could no longer see our very seeing, and began to believe we were our thoughts.


    Here then, lies the problem. We have become a collection of thoughts, an entity, which treats every new moment as if it were already a memory, basing each new moment on only the past and the reaction this past has to each moment. We are so wrapped up in this thought-collection, this ‘knowing’, that we even treat a moment of seeing as if it were another memory, reacting to it as if we already know all about it. A reaction can never be in the moment, for only seeing happens now. This trap of living one step behind ourselves cannot be explained away with conceptual thinking or fought with reactionary emotional thrills. It cannot be gotten rid of by changing our behavior, such as going left instead of right. What then can be done?


    Franz Hartmann gives us a clue when he says, ” There is nothing more difficult to find than one’s own self.” There is also nothing more valuable. It is our own ‘self’ that is the problem. Any plan of escape from the trap of thought-reaction is simply this self trying to survive, even if the plan is one of perpetual seeing. The self will see seeing as yet another tool to perpetuate its own continuity. This self is a collection of thoughts, an inventory of all reactions, which seeks only its own continuity as a thought-pattern. The only way to deal with such a thing, is to see it. To observe it.


    Simple observation, unbiased and without reaction or judgment, i.e. seeing, will take us farther than any clever plan or emotional outburst. A return to innocence, the initial stage of not-knowing, will give us an edge, open a crack in the ego’s armor, and return the value of our very existence to that of seeing, rather than to the reaction to seeing. By beginning to watch what we do, we start a pattern of return to the state of a free attention. Once we are able to watch our ‘selves’ as we go about our daily tasks, we may soon see that we can watch our thoughts as well. We all have moments where seeing is spontaneous and personal. If we come to value these moments, we begin to switch our meaning from the world of thought back to that of awareness. We can take the tricks we learned at meetings and seminars and put them to use in every moment: while driving, working at our desk, and even while watching TV.


    We may soon notice a strange thing happening in our head, while we watch our watching. We may see that as soon as a moment of seeing fades, a familiar mood or state has returned, which is in fact the reason for the cessation of the seeing itself. This vaguely familiar pattern is our own state of mind. The collection of thoughts we feel to be ‘us’, has slipped back. The old pride in ‘knowing’ as reactive thought, our personal dogma, will slide in like a fog bank, and then we are our old self again, and the seeing is now incorporated into this ‘self’s’ inventory. “It” has survived, and we are back asleep.


    Only through the simple process of self-observation can this thing called the ‘self’ be seen. We may need years of looking at it, seeing why it does what it does, thinks what it thinks, until we know it well enough to cease to believe in it. All of our energy, for all of our life, has been poured into this thing: our personality, the little self, the ego. A few moments of seeing, while of momentous importance, will not cause its complete demise. This demise is what we fear most; for it is seen by the thought-pattern we call `us’, as death. At some point, the initial joy of seeing will turn to the pain of ego-death, as the Truth becomes known. It will not be pleasant. In fact, the pain and horror felt by the ego as it faces its own death, will be felt as yours. Hartmann’s words again ring true: “Conquer the pains resulting therefrom”. While all this may be just words to you for now, know that after you have gone beyond this realm of thought, beyond this self-surviving collection of reactions seeking nothing but its own continuity, ‘seeing’ will still be there. You will then have no more need of thought or reaction to give you meaning and value, as the simple act of seeing will once again be enough. The world of thought will no longer be your home, having become a movie, a dream, as much a comedy as a drama, wherein the bit character you used to call your ‘self’ is merely another player. Your interest will be only in a pure amazement at your own unknowable Being, … and perhaps the need to help another find freedom from the trap of reaction, the world of ‘self’.

    Bob Fergeson

  • Notes on the Journey Within

    Tolstoy said there are two fundamental stories in all great literature: “a man goes on a journey” or “a stranger comes to town.” When you examine them, both are really about change. They show that our comfortable routine—sitting safely in the village, wrapped in familiar habits, everything staying the same—is about to be disrupted in a major way.

    We have a choice in how we meet that change. It is far better to embark on the hero’s journey deliberately, with eyes wide open and a “yes” attitude—a positive, receptive state of mind—than to passively wait for the stranger to arrive. If you wait, you may learn nothing; worse, the story could turn dark. The stranger might be a dragon or a demon. It is preferable to confront such a force in the wilderness than to let it ravage half the village first. If we wait, the stranger eventually will come, and shatter the pattern. Real change—and real damage—will certainly follow. It is a risky chance.

    For the journey to be a true hero’s adventure rather than just more routine, certain conditions are essential. As Huxley observed, “experience only teaches the teachable.” If the hero sets out only to criticize and take offense at everything unfamiliar—judging new events against the narrow habits and thinking of his old life—little good will come of it. He will grow miserable, assign blame, and keep his small self firmly at the center. Nothing can truly change. But if he meets experience with an open-eyed, clear attitude, wonder becomes possible—wonder in the sense of questioning, and also in the sense of amazement and mystery. With this inner posture, he may begin to see the mysterious patterns that constitute him, reflected back in the events he encounters. He may come to know something real about himself.

    Courage, self-honesty, and being tested in different environments help keep the eyes wide open so he does not simply drag his old baggage along. The journey then proceeds with an open state of mind—what we might call “Yes” instead of “No.”

    For most of us, the journey begins by leaving the nest and stepping into life. Change often arrives first in seemingly ordinary things. Being open-minded—not merely in a polite, social sense—means being capable of truly seeing and listening rather than reflexively judging. This is not just a slogan; it is a practice. When we look to observe what is actually happening, non-critically and non-judgmentally, then marriage, raising children, building a home, starting a family, launching a business, pursuing a career, developing a talent or skill—any of these can become the journey, the path. We keep an open mind and refuse to force our life into something that only chases money or to adopt the bitter attitude that everything always goes wrong, that the world is against us, and that only we are right.

    If we can reclaim our innocence, we become capable of something different. We can develop real skill, a direct way of engaging the world. We can become a parent, a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a leader, a reliable colleague—identities profoundly different from who we were as teenagers or toddlers. For those who complete this phase and later feel a nostalgic pull, a remembering of something greater than ordinary life can offer, the journey can turn inward. It becomes an exploration of what we are truly like and whether something real lies beneath the surface.

    This inward turn must also be undertaken with a sense of mystery, wonder, and eyes wide open. Otherwise, we risk simply rationalizing and blaming what we find inside. But if we observe inwardly in a universal, neutral way—true, non-judgmental observation—then we can learn from it and gradually free ourselves from the emotional hot spots and knots accumulated over a lifetime. This, too, is the hero’s journey: an adventure of stalking oneself, of coming to know oneself.

    Richard Rose pointed out that we must get to know the self precisely because it is the thing we know least about. Most of us assume we already know ourselves, but honest, non-critical self-inquiry often brings real surprises. It can be deeply depressing and profoundly enlightening at the same time. Yet it remains an adventure as long as we maintain the eyes-wide-open, non-judgmental attitude. Beating ourselves up, blaming parents, society, or some other group so we can feel right—these are not productive. Pure observation is what matters.

    This non-judgmental approach works equally for the outward journey and the inward one.

    Once we understand how “going within” operates, nostalgia—or what Rumi calls “a longing”—becomes our guide. This longing is not sentimental. It has nothing to do with sitting on the porch of the old farm, drinking lemonade, and drifting into fond childhood memories. We are seeking an entirely different set of guideposts, a different environment, a different version of ourselves—one we only vaguely remember. We carry faint memories of heaven, and if we follow this thread of longing, it can lead somewhere Real.

    Richard Rose also discovered through his dreams that life is dominated by three main moods. The two primary ones are opposites: seduction and fear (or desire and fear). Desire pulls us outward toward things; fear drives us back toward security. Neither leads the soul inward or upward beyond this dimension—they simply make us chase or flee. But nostalgia—the remembering of who we were before we came here—is different. It is the thread that can guide us Home, toward something eternal.

    Bob Fergeson

  • On the Turning of Heads:

    First there must be enough trauma or suffering to turn us away from the belief in life as an end in itself.  If we are lucky enough to be thrown into the unknown, through sheer desperation or misery, we may find that we emerge ok, that something took care of us.  This forced surrender gives us renewed Faith.   We begin to trust something greater beyond life and the world of the five senses. This shift in meaning is usually synchronistic with a teacher ‘ringing our bell’.  There is an inner connection established between our inner self and this ‘God incarnate’, the Guru. Something in us awakes and our head turns towards a new view. The old values of the rat race and mundane pleasure are no longer enough, and we see our new-found teacher as proof that there is something else worth doing.


    Somewhere along here we will begin to see in a real, personal way that we are mechanical, a robot.  That as personalities, or egos, we are nothing but accidental associative reaction patterns.  We don’t exist.  But our heads are locked on this robot, identified with it in an almost absolute hypnosis. This includes inherited and learned states of mind and moods, that are precursors to reaction patterns.  Seeing this gives us a shock, and we begin to learn the hard way that no amount of tinkering with the associative pattern will give us real being: the realization that endless analysis of the robot is a dead end.  We begin to look within.  This acceptance and the following ability to turn the head inward only comes after every mental avenue has been exhausted.   We can no longer place a high value on states such as ‘happiness’, justified negative emotions, mundane pleasures, or even elevated ‘spiritual states’ or feelings of well-being, such as ‘being a good boy’, a do-gooder, etc. Confrontation, whether in a group setting or from being engaged with everyday life, helps us to see our mechanical nature and the uselessness of putting our faith in its eventual perfection.  It also helps to bring up real conscience, which enables us to have compassion for our fellow man, as we see he cannot change either, and is also not a conscious being.

    Continuing to go within, as there’s nowhere else to go, we begin to see the value in listening.  We begin to develop and place value on the ‘Listening Attention’.  We realize that we don’t know, but that knowledge is available.  We begin to hear Higher Centers and value their help.  This leads to a return of faith in the inner self and begins the inner relaxation and loosening of energy knots(egos) formed by implanted erroneous beliefs.  Given this new mental freedom, we can see the dualistic nature of the mind, with its penchant for ever increasing the subtlety of its ego through cleverness. We sooner or later separate from it and thereby realize the observing awareness that is our true self, “This I know is me”,  the self that realizes its own nothingness.

    This receiving of the experience of ourselves as awareness also leads us to see that this awareness is the same in everyone. We have become Universal after our long-lost voyage in the particular and find ourselves back Home, where we’ve always been.

    Bob Fergeson

  • The Painful Journey: How Nostalgia Leads Us Home

    Much of the deep restlessness we feel—the persistent inner ache—arises at some point in a seekers life. The child, once immersed in a state of unseparated innocence and being within, gradually emerges into a world that severs that direct connection to the inner self. Parents and society, themselves already disconnected from this inner ground, feed the feeling of loss, of  separation. The child becomes dependent on them for security, love, and identity, and in doing so loses touch with his own true self.

    This loss creates the ache, the ‘ longing’ of Rumi and CS Lewis. At first the child cannot clearly see this separation, for the parents appear as God, almost divine in their role, and the external world seems to hold promise of what was once felt inwardly. When the parents fail to live up to their divine status, the child looks to society for meaning. His restlessness leads him ever outward; the sense of lack deepens. The  search for that lost reality turns ever outward, ever farther into relationships, possessions, status, and distractions; always in the wrong direction.

    Only when the accumulated suffering becomes unbearable, when the outward path reaches its limit in sickness, depression and ennui, does the seeker turn inward occur. Through necessity and grace the mind’s attention reverses. In returning to the inner self, however this may occur, the bottomless longing is found to be simply the pain of separation from one’s own true nature—the same separation that characterized the parents and those before them.

    Stalking the Inner Self
    Stalking the Inner Self

    Had a parent remained inwardly connected, the child might have picked up on it, been positively imprinted, and returned to his inner self through a natural path. But this is rare and easily misunderstood. Strangely enough, this pattern of disconnection followed by re-connection appears necessary. Without having lost the sense of oneself, one would not see the contrast earned through the separation. Once reestablished, the entire preceding struggle appears almost absurd. We emerge from unconscious struggle into conscious being.

    What I’ve found resolves the longing and sense of separation is not formal psychological analysis or tracing chains of past events. Such investigation can become another form of avoidance. The intense nostalgia which leads us finally within, can be seen as a remembering. Nothing is really created, but we find the thread back to what we covered up, the real, with ego-centered feelings and thoughts. The key is not conceptual understanding as much as a direct seeing, looking at the little life created ‘self’, what I have called the ‘little man’. The difficulties and lost feelings we carry as this little man are present in every moment, not only locked in childhood memories requiring excavation. Ask yourself the hard questions, in the now, without rationalization. What does it feel like? What does it want? Why does it hurt? You may find instead of incidents and words, hidden knots in one’s being.

    The direct approach is to turn toward the present feeling itself, in the here and now. Sit with the ache as it is right now, without fleeing or explaining it away. Watch the pain regardless how much the ego wants to run away into distraction and pleasure. Observe it openly, allowing the quiet awareness within—the inner self—to regard it plainly and honestly. What does this sensation reveal about the longing and pain? What is it truly seeking? The cause and the resolution are embedded in that immediate experience, accessible only through unmediated seeing in the present, not through retrospective analysis. It hurts, yes. But avoiding the pain feeds the knot, which continues to live in the unconscious. Facing it until we have removed the pain through patient acceptance can eventually bring peace and understanding.

    That seeing, when sustained, is where the separation between what we have become and what we truly are, ends. The ache itself proves to be a pointer, not an enemy—quietly directing attention back to what was never truly absent.

    – Bob Fergeson