Whether or not we agree with this vision of our organism as a microcosm of the universe, the work of self-sensing will quickly show us that the rhythms of breathing—of inhalation and exhalation—lie at the heart of our physical, emotional, and spiritual lives. We will see that it is through the sensory experience of these rhythms that we can awaken our inner sensitivity and awareness and begin to open ourselves to our inner healing powers—the creative power of nature itself. But for this to occur, our breathing must change from “normal” to “natural”; it must become free from the unconscious motivations and constraints of our self-image.

Copyright 1997, 2006 by Dennis Lewis. This passage is from my book The Tao of Natural Breathing.

Dennis Lewis

Dennis Lewis: My work, including natural breathing, qigong, tai chi, and meditation, is oriented toward helping people discover a sense of their own real wholeness. It is based on the fact that most of us lose ourselves constantly in one or another side of ourselves–in our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and so on. As a result, we live fragmented, dishonest, and disharmonious lives. And while we might agree intellectually that this is true, many of us are not convinced enough to actually undertake the demanding work of self-awareness and self-transformation, a work that begins with learning how to sense and observe ourselves sincerely, to listen impartially to ourselves in action. Since our breathing both reflects and conditions the various sides of ourselves, a vital part of this process involves work with breath.

Unfortunately, most of us take our breathing for granted. The great Taoist sage Chuang Tzu says that most of us breathe from our throats, and that real human beings breathe from their heels. One might ask here: are we real human beings? Are we exploring what it means to be truly human? If our breathing takes place mainly in the throat or the upper chest, where it does for most of us, then we can do all the qigong, yoga, and other spiritual exercises we desire but we will never experience a real sense of human wholeness.

A lot of your work is with emotional clearing, cleansing or balancing using breath work, which is something that a lot of people probably don’t connect together.

That’s true. Basically, the first step is to be present to the state that I am actually in. The foundation of my work with breathing has to do with learning how to follow the breath without any interference whatsoever. Why do we need to follow the breath without interference? Well, as Chuang Tzu says, “All things that have consciousness depend upon breath. But if they do not get their fill of breath, it is not the fault of Heaven. Heaven opens up the passages and supplies them day and night without stop. But man on the contrary blocks up the holes.” (Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, Burton Watson [New York, Columbia University Press, 1964], p. 74) Much of what we do in our lives, and even in our work with breathing, simply “blocks up” our inner breathing spaces. In learning to follow our breath, we not only begin to observe and sense the narrow self-image that ruins so much in our lives, but we also discover a deeper power of awareness that relates to our real human potentiality.

What is it in us that can follow our breath?

What we’re talking about here is the unknown. We can call it the witness, God, the Absolute, higher mind, or whatever we want, but, in general, we do not experience it. We’re looking to get in touch with the whole of ourselves, which is mostly unknown. But my emotions, especially my so-called negative emotions, very often narrow my awareness to a very tiny side of myself. For example, anxiety, anger, and fear put me into a very hyper vigilant, fight-or-flight type of state, a state that undermines both my health and my sense of wholeness. I need to observe this process in action. When I learn to follow the breath, I become convinced of what my state really is. By seeing how shallow and constricted and suffocating it is, I begin, at the same time, to become aware of my habitual emotions that are that also shallow, constricted and suffocating. A shallow breath very often goes with specific emotional states that we don’t see because we’ve taken them so much for granted.

We live in a culture in which everything is continually speeding up. This puts an ever-increasing load on our brain and nervous system. This means that our nervous systems are constantly on alert. Now the nervous system, which is extremely flexible and adaptable, eventually learns to adapt to this faster way of living and the enormous strain it puts on our perception. It adapts to this higher level of stress as though it were a normal thing. But the problem is that while this higher level of stress occurs and our nervous system adapts to it, the health of the body is being undermined and the immune system is being undermined. We need to become convinced of this fact.

When you say convinced, would aware be a better term?

Awareness, of course, is the key. The reason I use the word “convinced,” however, is that a lot of people mentally know this but they’re not actually convinced that it is happening to them. They think they are above it or beyond it. But the problem is that our nervous system adapts in such a way that it appears to us that we are living a normal life when in fact we’re living a stressed-out life and don’t know it because it feels normal. But as I begin to follow my breath and observe my self-image, and see how narrow and constricted they are, I begin to become convinced that something is not right, and that I really do need to work on myself in a new, more sincere way.

Once you have become convinced, can you then use the breath to clear or balance these states?
Well, first of all, the process of being convinced is a lifelong one, because our tendency is to confuse knowing with understanding. But yes, you can begin to work with the breath in such a way that it brings a new sense of internal balance. You don’t need work with the breath all the time, day in and day out. Even if it were possible, that would just add to your tension. But if you spend 20 or 30 minutes a day sensing and observing your breath, your tensions, and your emotions, you will begin to become ever more increasingly convinced that something is not quite right, that all of these tensions and constrictions and negative emotions disharmonize the flow of energy and keep you from living as a whole being in harmony with yourself. So you continue the work of self-observation, you continue the work of following the breath toward the unconscious aspects of yourself, to make them more conscious.

As you continue this work, you begin to discover that, from a physical standpoint, the breath can be understood as taking place in various spaces of your body, which can be called “breathing spaces.” Let’s, for the moment, assume the body has three major breathing spaces, although it has more. The first breathing space is from above the navel on down to the feet. The second breathing space is from just above the navel to the top of the diaphragm. The third breathing space is from the top of the diaphragm up to the head. Now in many of us, one or more of these spaces are constricted or clogged up. So not only is there no complete resonance possible in that space, but by clogging up that space, as Chuang Tzu would say, I’m restricting the movement of energy in that particular area through the energy channels to my vital organs, including my brain.

Is one or another of these breathing spaces more likely to become clogged?

Most of us have problems in all the spaces, but the lower breathing space, whose center is in the area of the lower tan tien, as well as the lower part of the middle space, is often the most constricted. There are many reasons for this, including the goal of maintaining a hard, flat belly, but one of the most obvious is that this is where we often experience and store our negative emotions, especially those that we have a difficult time digesting. With natural, authentic breathing the belly wants to expand on inhalation and retract on exhalation. Among many other things, this movement of the belly helps promote diaphragmatic breathing and a healthy immune system. But if my belly is locked up in tension, the movement doesn’t take place. This makes my breathing inefficient and robs me of my vitality.

So what can I do if I’m in that situation?

There are many approaches to opening up the breathing spaces of the body. Yoga, qigong, tai chi, dance, body work, and so on can all help. We must remember, however, that we’re dealing here with both physical and energetic habits and patterns. Opening up these areas physically and energetically is just the beginning. It is also important to become aware, to sense and observe, the roots of these disharmonies, what’s maintaining them in the first place. If I am habitually angry, for example, and that anger is affecting the whole area around my liver, I will most likely have a lot of tensions and blockages in my liver area, of which I may be totally unaware. But if I begin to breathe into that area, if I learn how to allow my breath into that area, these emotions will begin to become more visible to me, and instead of either suppressing them or expressing them in inappropriate, unhealthy ways, I will begin to discover that they can be transformed. But there is still much more to explore. Where is my anger coming from, for instance? What restrictions and constrictions in my perceptions and self-image are producing this anger? What is keeping me from the experience of my own wholeness? Lao Tzu says, if people “can forsake their narrow sense of self and live wholly, then what can they call trouble?”.

If people do qigong and tai chi from a narrow self-image, the practices are unlikely to have much transformative power. I often hear people talking in a fuzzy, vain way about their energies, their chi, forgetting that what is really at stake is not just some feeling of energy someplace in the body, but rather a true opening into the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of ourselves—a real sense of wholeness. But by learning to follow movements and energies of our breath and by working with the various breathing spaces of the body, we can begin to support this opening, this movement toward wholeness and integrity.

How do you work with breath? What do you teach people who come to you?

Many people today have a narrow understanding of what work with breathing is all about. They think first of breath holding, breath counting, alternate nostril breathing, and so on. But this kind of work, what is usually called pranayama, is only one tiny aspect of breathwork. So perhaps the first step is to understand what is actually possible. I have come up with a categorization of breathing work which I think not only helps to clarify certain things which are often confused both in our thinking and practice, but also makes it possible for people to work with their own breathing in a safe, effective way. I teach various practices within each of these seven categories. By the way, except for category number one, there is no particular priority in the way I have ordered these approaches.

The first category is what I would call conscious breathing, learning how to follow your breath, which we have already talked about. This is the foundation of all the other approaches.

The second category is focused breathing. Focused breathing is especially useful when you realize that you have a problem in a particular area or a particular organ. The essence of focused breathing is directing the movement and energy of your breath there into that particular area. You do not use force or willpower to accomplish this, but rather simply your attention and intention.

It’s important to understand that when I say breath what I’m really talking about is the movement and energy of breathing. Breath is movement. Life is movement. Breath is life. While the oxygen from the breath always goes into the lungs, the energetic movement of the breath can go anyplace in the body and needs eventually to encompass the whole body.

The third category is what is called controlled breathing. Controlled breathing is classically what is known as pranayama, and often involves breath holding, breath counting, alternate nostril breathing, fast breathing, and so on in order to facilitate some chemical, emotional, or spiritual change. There are many beneficial practices in pranayama or controlled breathing, but people who don’t breathe in a natural, harmonious way and do a lot of pranayama can hurt themselves, sometimes very badly. If they don’t hurt themselves physically or emotionally they can also mess up their energies. So for beginners I only recommend controlled breathing for very special kinds of issues, such as excessive tension or high blood pressure problem. Most controlled breathing exercises are therapeutic in nature and don’t really transform the breathing for the long haul.

What’s wrong with breath holding?

One of the reasons I don’t teach breath-holding practices is that most of us already hold our breath a lot . For many of us, the diaphragm does not move fully and harmoniously. Because of the excessive tension in one or another part of our bodies, and because of lack of coordination among our various breathing structures, the diaphragm often does not move in a coherent and even way. The diaphragm was made to go though its full range of motion in a very free and even way. If, under the influence of stress, you’re holding your breath a lot, or restricting the movement of your diaphragm in any way, the end result is more tension and more stress. Practicing breath holding is only going to exacerbate this situation.

The fourth and fifth categories, movement-supported breathing and posture-supported breathing are closely related, and are extremely safe yet powerful ways of working with our breath. Qigong and yoga are good examples. Our movements and postures can be very stimulating to our breath. Each movement we make or posture we take shapes our breathing in a very specific way. Raising our arms, bending over, twisting, reaching out, well-aligned standing, and so on, will call forth different breathing patterns in different people, depending on type and conditioning. Intentionally undertaking a wider range of movements and postures in our lives than we are accustomed to can help increase the range and power of our breath. This is why stretching frequently and in many different ways is so important. When we were children, for example, we kept our breathing relatively open through the many varied postures and movements we took when playing, running, swimming, jumping, and so on. Today, however, most of us live lives that put few healthy demands on our bodies and breathing.

Category number six is touch-supported breathing. Most of us don’t realize that the skin is the largest organ system of the body, constituting about 16 to 18 percent of our total body weight and providing more than one-half million sensory fibers to the spinal cord. Many of us have incomplete or faulty awareness of our skin. And this faulty awareness, which is influenced by underlying tensions in our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascia, impedes the overall functioning of our organism, including our breathing. So I use and teach various kinds of touch to awaken and influence the sensory fibers in the skin, as well as in the areas just beneath the skin. This energetic awakening of our skin and the underlying tissues and bones can have a powerful influence on our breath. The kinds of touch we might use include gentle touch, rubbing, skin pulling, tapping, and pressure.

The seventh category is sound-supported breathing. Here I use specific vowel sounds, in conjunction with special postures, movements, and so on, to help open up specific breathing spaces in the body. When we were kids, most of us sang, hummed, and shouted, and made all sorts of spontaneous sounds. As we grew older, many of us learned to be “seen and not heard” and gradually our spontaneous sounds were replaced by abstract language. And, because of comments from family, friends, teachers, and so on, many of us even stopped singing altogether, believing that we should only sing if we have a “good voice.” But making sounds is one of the most powerful ways of strengthening the diaphragm. By sounds, I mean sustained tones of some kind; I don’t mean talking. When you make sustained sounds you start to connect with your internal organs and energies, as well as with your limbic system and emotions. In this way, emotions and frustrations that close us off in some way can begin to be touched and released. To understand the great power of sound-supported breathing, it’s important to realize that healthy breathing starts with exhalation. Making sustained sounds conditions the diaphragm to move upward through its entire range of motion in an even and harmonious way, and this in turn stimulates a free, spontaneous inhalation.

What we’re exploring here is our own natural, unconditioned breath. This can occur when our exhalation is full and our inhalation comes as a natural reflex, without any kind of struggle or willfulness. The secret is in the exhalation, not in the inhalation. If you learn how to exhale in the right way, which sustained sounds, chanting, humming and so on can help you discover, then the inhalation will come in a freer, more-natural way, appropriate to the needs of the moment. Of course, there are many other benefits from this kind of work. Certain notes, tones, and rhythms can actually be used for healing. They can reach and cut through different energy patterns in us. Lao Tzu said, “The best knots are tied without rope.” This is certainly true energetically, because we have many mostly invisible energetic knots in ourselves that are difficult to untie. We don’t always know where they are, but through chant, song and sound, we can learn how to untie or cut through these knots and help open up a new, more global sense of spaciousness in ourselves.

How would you sum up your work with breath?

My work with breath is not just about better health; it’s also about the development of consciousness and being. People in today’s stressed-out world often say, “I just don’t have enough space in my life. I need more space.” My approach to the breath involves opening up the experiential spaces of the body/mind. This work really begins with the intention to be able to exhale fully, which requires that we learn how to release and let go of everything that is truly unnecessary in our lives. We’re not just talking about a physical act here; we’re also talking about a psychological and spiritual one as well. Can I let go, moment by moment, of my narrow self-image, all the things, both big and small, that I get attached to and identify with, so that I can begin to take in new, more-honest and complete impressions and perceptions of myself and others? Can I begin to live from my wholeness? This is what it is all about. Our breathing can play a vital role in this process.

Copyright 2000-10 by Dennis Lewis. This is an edited version of an interview with me that was first published in the Fall 2000 issue of The Empty Vessel, A Journal of Contemporary Taoism. Some of the approaches discussed in this interview, especially the seven categories of ways of working with the breath, are explored deeply in my book, Free Your Breath, Free Your Life.

Dennis Lewis

This viewpoint rests on several major, but interrelated, assumptions. We assume, for example, that personal problems are undesirable, and that the fewer problems we have in our lives the better off we are. We also assume that our problems are, for the most part, unnecessary, and that we should be able to control our lives sufficiently to eradicate or at least minimize them.

Our Belief in Progress
Though we may not be aware of it, these assumptions arise from a mostly unconscious, underlying belief in “progress,” a belief that in fact fuels the various industrial, technological, and social engines of Western civilization. We look around at the many industrial and technological marvels in our lives, comparing what we see with what we know of earlier generations, and assume that these marvels represent positive change. We assume that they have solved important problems, and that we are all somehow better off as a result.

When we look deeper, however, the picture changes. In his book Walden, Thoreau points out that “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.” Our so-called progress has done little to transform our being. What’s more, we see that along with the so-called material benefits this progress has brought have come a whole new set of material, social, and psychological problems at every level of our lives. Every change has brought with it consequences of which we had no comprehension, and which have frequently further complicated our lives in ways that we often take for granted. From chemical toxins in our water and air, to dangerous hormones and antibiotics in our food, to the influence of electromagnetic fields on our body, to the deleterious effects of global warming, to the threat of weapons of mass destruction, to the increasing worldwide gap between rich and poor, to the growing violence in our media and on our streets, to a growing, pervasive sense of meaningless for many people, and so on (the list is almost endless), it has become quite clear that our so-called progress, as wonderful as it may seem at first glance, is bringing what may turn out to be insurmountable problems in many areas of our lives.

Everything Is Interrelated
The problem, of course, is not change in itself. Change is always occurring. As Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The problem is rather that everything in our lives is interrelated, however subtly, with everything else. Without a global understanding of these relationships, without an effort to understand the whole of life, we cannot expect to intentionally change a part without unintended, often disastrous, results.

The same is true of our personal problems. To be sure, many of us have real problems, and some of them, especially those residing at the deepest levels of our nervous system and psyche, can in fact undermine our physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Birth and childhood traumas, powerful negative conditioning, addictions, and so on may have thrown our nervous system into such disharmony that we unconsciously spend most of our energy just trying to stay afloat psychologically. Clearly, deep problems such as these can provide formidable obstacles to awakening, since they often consume so much of our energy and attention and often keep us from seeing the larger picture.

For many of us, however, these deeper organic problems (if they exist in us) are invisible. We are often unaware of the energy imbalances and distorted perceptions of ourselves and others that they bring. The so-called problems that we do in fact perceive in our lives, which reside mostly on the surface of ourselves, are generally either the inevitable outcome of living on this earth or are merely distant manifestations of these deeper relationships and disharmonies that we don’t see. In either case, the energy that we spend attempting to rid ourselves of these problems without understanding their inevitability or their underlying causes can easily lead us down the wrong path. We may think that all that is needed is some change of thinking or manifestation or habit, when in fact what is necessary is a radically new consciousness of ourselves–a consciousness that can perceive the problem in the larger context of our being and our life on this earth.

The great spiritual teachers and traditions warn us about trying to get rid of our problems without having a broader understanding of our total situation. G. I. Gurdjieff, for instance, tells us that any effort to change something in ourselves without an understanding of our entire “machine” will most often bring unintended, undesirable results. Other traditions, such as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, tell us that our personal problems can only be fully understood in a spiritual context.

A New System of Values
In an interview that I conducted in 1993 in Moscow with Father Alexander Mumrikov, a Deacon of the Russian Orthodox Church, I asked Father Alexander about the relationship of personal problems to spiritual growth. Father Alexander replied: “In contrast to the Protestant dictum–’no problem’–we believe that Orthodoxy must have problems. The more a person is able to become conscious of problems arising in his life, the better it is; this is an indication of inner development. It is not a question of ridding oneself of one’s problems in some way, for example by going to a psychiatrist, but rather of seeing that one’s personal problems are related to one’s spiritual problems. The Holy Fathers have made it clear that though the psychology of the soul and the psychology of the spirit are at different levels, they must be connected. If the level of the spirit is not connected to the level of the soul, it is not connected to man. He receives this as a sacrament from God.” Father Alexander went on to tell me that those who want to work on their souls must, while working, simultaneously wait “for the Spirit to come down from God.” And that this simultaneous working and waiting “creates a new system of values.”

It is clear that working seriously on oneself, on one’s “soul,” for real understanding and transformation, while simultaneously remaining open for the higher to appear in oneself, does in fact bring a new, more genuine system of values, a new level of personal maturity. It is this maturity, the intelligence and willingness to see and welcome the truth in ourselves no matter how messy or terrible we may judge it to be, that can help us understand Advaita Vedanta master Jean Klein when he says that “our problems don’t have to be problematic,” or Lao Tzu when he tells us that our troubles are really the result of our narrow sense of self. When we try sincerely to perceive our problems in a more global context and resist the impulse to become identified with and lose ourselves in our psychological reactions to them, they can in fact help provide the impetus, reminders, shocks, and energy necessary to motivate our quest for awakening at a deeper, more-honest level.

I am reminded here of the great Sufi mystic Rumi, who said: “I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there.” It is this effort to rid ourselves of lying, not the effort to rid ourselves of our personal problems, that can help us awaken to who we really are.

(First published in the January/February issue of The Journal of Harmonious Awakening)

My own experience of self-knowledge, or what I often call direct self-knowing, includes not only my many sometimes “messy” manifestations of sensing, feeling, thinking, and behaving, as well as what I can observe of the relationships among them, but also, and behind all these manifestations, presence itself. Sensations, feelings, thoughts, and actions are continually changing, but the presence, the light, in which they are experienced (when they are actually experienced first-hand) seems somehow to be changeless. For me, direct self-knowing is intimately related to the changeless presence that lies at the heart of being.

A couple of years ago, I included on one of my websites the following experience of direct knowing—an experience that has visited me in many different forms over these past years. Perhaps this experience can help convey what I mean:

“It’s 6:30 AM. I’ve just woken up. The first sensations of my body are relaxed and comfortable as the visual remnants of my last dreams vanish. Thoughts in the form of questions and ‘shoulds’ begin to arise: what’s happening with the war in Iraq?; I should get up and go to the other room to meditate; I should get the paper and read it. The arthritic pains I have lived with for the past 20 years begin to enter my awareness. I sense the habitual urge to get up and get moving. Perhaps that will help. Somehow I close my eyes instead and allow my attention to move deeper inward, toward the unknown center without losing awareness of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations on the periphery. I touch something that I can only call Being—a subtle, pervasive, energetic sense of I Am, without being anything in particular. This energetic sense of I Am is both very familiar and very new. A direct knowing that I cannot objectify in any way. Somehow I know that that is what I am. And with it comes a new sense of freedom.”

Now, of course, this is just one of many possible ways to describe the essentially indescribable experience of direct knowing. Lao Tsu said: “The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” Once we start naming “things,” which, of course, is an inevitable aspect of being human, thought takes over and “things” seem to multiply and become more complex. There is obviously great power in naming things. The world we see around us, with all of its many tremendous problems and contradictions, is very much the result of this power. We find ourselves seduced by constant naming, judging, analyzing, and so on, by “taking sides,” and easily forget that it is from the “nameless” that all things arise, from the silent ground of being that Max Picard refers to when he says “In every moment of time, man through silence can be with the origin of all things” (The World of Silence).

To free ourselves from the power of this seduction, however, what is necessary is to allow our attention to move, to expand, in two directions at once: toward the periphery in which naming is the norm, and toward the center, toward the nameless silence and stillness that makes the experience of all things possible. We don’t have to try to rid ourselves of the tendency to name things, which for most of us would be a futile endeavor; we only have to be present to it. It is presence, the inner welcoming of impressions of what is, that brings with it the self-knowledge, the direct knowing, that many of us wish for.

]]> http://dennislewisblog.com/2009/06/02/self-knowledge-presence/feed/ 7 denlew Lao Tsu http://dennislewisblog.com/2009/05/10/an-exploration-into-reading-wisdom-literature/ http://dennislewisblog.com/2009/05/10/an-exploration-into-reading-wisdom-literature/#comments Sun, 10 May 2009 17:00:37 +0000 Dennis Lewis http://dennislewisblog.com/?p=432 ]]>

Dennis Lewis

For many of us, reading is a highly mechanical act, an automatic reflex that kicks in when we have some spare time, are bored, are excited by what we have heard about this or that latest book, or have a genuine interest in the subject. We may find ourselves reading spiritual classics while sitting on the toilet, lying in bed, standing in line, or eating a meal. On rare occasions, we may realize that reading the great wisdom literature is very much like meditating, and that it requires special inner and outer conditions.

Many of us are great believers in our own powers of discernment, and we are more than willing to share our view and even argue with others after only a few minutes or hours of reading a book that an author may have struggled for many months or years, sometimes with great suffering, to write in the truest way possible.

What we perhaps often forget is that in reading a spiritual book we are establishing a relationship with its author. We are opening ourselves to receive perceptions, insights, impressions, ideas, experiences, principles, methods, and even the joy and suffering of the person who wrote the book. And like all real relationships, listening is required, a willingness to receive what is being communicated without suggestibility and without immediately interpreting it in relation to what we think we know or understand. We need to find a silent, open place within which to receive and ponder what is being said. If we cannot find such a place, at least we need to observe, impartially, the point of view from which we are reading or listening, so as to see how it is shaping what we hear and experience.

Some time ago, I wrote a short essay entitled Reading & Silence. I am including it here to help us go deeper into this question. All the quotations within this passage are from The World of Silence, by Max Picard, itself a wonderful representation of wisdom literature.

“‘Today words no longer arise out of silence, through a creative act of the spirit which gives meaning to language and to the silence, but from other words, from the noise of other words. Neither do they return to the silence but into the noise of other words, to become immersed therein.’

Those of us who still read in pursuit of meaning are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, many contemporary writers of so-called wisdom literature today have little understanding of the relationship of language to silence, and so are little able to awaken the silence in us. On the other hand, most of us as readers have little direct experience of the ‘substance of silence’ in ourselves, and so the words we read fall only on other words and simply increase our own internal noise.

If reading is to be more than a diversion or exercise for the mind, we must find a new way of reading, a way which helps us experience the origins of language and thought both in the writer and in ourselves. For as Picard makes clear: ‘In every moment of time, man through silence can be with the origin of all things.’ Allied with silence, man participates ‘not only in the original substance of silence but in the original substance of all things.’

At its best, reading helps us to participate in a primal process of creation and discovery. In reading the great wisdom literature, the words or works of Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Milarepa, Socrates, Plato, Gurdjieff, and so on, one can hear, if one knows how to listen, an underlying call to return to this original substance of silence where deep contemplation and participation can arise. But most of us most of the time are unable to hear this call. We have little practice in listening within as we read. And so we read only words, and the words bounce off of one another and our memories and associations and seldom reveal their inherent power to awaken us to new levels of ourselves.

One might wish to undertake an experiment here, an exercise, to help us listen, and, of course, there are many useful exercises one can try. But the problem with such exercises is that we most often read and hear them in much the same way we read our books–mechanically, with little real presence.

What is presence? What would it mean to be present to ourselves not only as we read but as we do everything else that we do? There is a mystery here, another paradox. To be present, to consciously participate in the creative flow of life, I must return to the original substance of myself and all things; I must return to the unknown, to the ‘uncarved block,’ to the vast underlying silence of myself.

How will I undertake this return? Where will I turn? Am I really interested? Perhaps these questions will take on new significance as I learn to read with presence in my pursuit of meaning.”

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Lewis. This essay appeared in the review section of the March/April 2009 issue of The Journal of Harmonious Awakening, which is no longer being published.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” said Bernays, who, perhaps appropriately, is the great grandson of Freud. “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Living in a so-called free market democracy, we are besieged with choices of all kinds in our daily lives—from the products and services we buy for home and business, to the activities that we undertake for entertainment and relaxation, to the politicians and government amendments we vote for, to the ideas that bring us motivation and meaning. Bernays points out that as citizens we have “voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high‑spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”

If this was true in in Bernays’ time, it is even truer today. The ever-growing influence of the mass media, combined with the ability of inexpensive powerful computer technology to manipulate huge databases of information and images and to communicate this data almost instantaneously worldwide, has spurred the move from a industrial society to an information society. There is simply no way that any one of us can keep up with and interpret all the information that is required for sound decisions in the many arenas of our lives. Whether we like it or not, we depend on the “special pleading,” the “propaganda,” the “public relations” of communications experts, mostly invisible, to bring to our attention the products, services, people, facts, and ideas that fit in best with our own specific social, psychological, political, and economic situations. These invisible experts, who include advertising and public relations professionals, newspaper editors, book publishers, movie producers, government officials, TV editors and anchormen, and so on thus have a tremendous influence in our lives.

Though most of us would agree—at least intellectually—that this is all obvious and true, we live our lives as though it were not. We assume, for the most part, that we are the masters of ourselves and that in issues of real importance we are able to discriminate between these outside influences and our real needs and beliefs—between hype and reality. Such an assumption is questionable, however, when we realize that from early childhood on, almost everything we eat, buy, use, or read has been shaped or packaged for us by a member of this invisible government.

The fact is, Bernays takes his ideas much further than many of us would like. He states that “We are governed, our minds our molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” And he then proceeds in this and other books to lay out the formal mechanism by which propaganda can be used to meet the needs of a democratic society.

Propaganda, along with the special pleading it depends on, has been around since the beginning of time. But in the past—before the advent of the mass media—it was clear who was doing the pleading and for what purpose. Radio, television, newspapers, motion pictures, and lately computers have changed all that. Propaganda of one sort or another has become so much a part of our lives that we don’t even recognize it as such. As Lao Tzu said, “the best knots are tied without rope.”

Of course, one could easily say that we in the west are better off than people living in communist countries or under dictatorships, because their propaganda is far more rigid and insidious than our own. This argument is a misleading one, however, for the simple reason that their propaganda is more visible and easier to perceive than our own. By its very nature, a democratic society offers so many choices to its citizens that we would have neither the time nor the energy to narrow them down without a whole industry of communications professionals dedicated to just that. Our propagandists do not use rope, barbed wire, mental hospitals, and the militia to make their point; no—they use the latest communication techniques disseminated through the print and electronic media in the guise of “giving us what we really want.”

What is truly pernicious about much of the propaganda that surrounds us in the west is the very “reasonableness” of it—the way in which we are taught to believe that it somehow represents our real needs. For the goal of a propagandist—no matter what his or her stripe—is to make a sale of some kind by seeking to convince us that they understand our inner or outer needs and goals and are responding to them. In this regard, a newspaper editor or TV anchorman trying to tell the news in a way that will attract readers or watchers is no better or worse than a public relations professional attempting to improve the public’s perception of a company or product.

What is important in either case is that we, the public, begin to understand this process better so that we begin to differentiate between what we really want and what we’ve been conditioned to want by the invisible government competing for our share of mind and money. Such a differentiation is an important step on the path of  self-knowledge and in the struggle for inner freedom.

Copyright 1996-2009 by Dennis Lewis