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Running Time: 01:42:06
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Here is the transcript:
Harrison: Welcome back to Mind Matters everyone. Today we are pleased to have joining us, Alan Francis. Alan has been in the Gurdjieff Work for decades. He is the author of this book Secrets of the Fourth Way published by Beech Hill and he has started a school in Valencia, Spain, I believe, the International School of the Fourth Way. So we are going to be talking to Alan about his book and his studies in his school and an assortment of other topics.
So first of all, welcome to the show Alan. We're pleased to have you here.
Alan: Very nice to be here with you.
Harrison: Let's start out with your school, the International School of the Fourth Way and maybe how your background plays into that. One thing I didn't mention was that you also started the first Gurdjieff school in Russia to be open since Gurdjieff and Ouspensky left Russia in the teens of the 1900s. So could you tell us a bit about your path and how it led you to this school and maybe a bit about the school?
Alan: Sure. To give a brief overview of my life, when I was - and I know I'm starting way far back - but when I was about five or six months old I went through a situation where my father had been drunk and was left alone with me at home and I virtually died. I turned blue and stopped breathing for a period of time. We don't know how long. Fortunately I mother had a precognition experience and rushed home from where she was and resuscitated me but it affected what's called the reptilian part of the brain, the instinctive center and I had extremely bad balance and very bad coordination and disconnection with the world around me for quite a while which I had to try to work out, not knowing actually why this was happening.
So that really had a profound effect on me and some people have said that's something connected with this process of the interest in shamanism as well. But I got through that but at a very young age I was wondering why I was here and of course other people have that experience when they're young; who am I, why am I here, why is the world so crazy around me? That was connected with something my father used to recite all the time which was Shakespeare's 'to be or not to be'. So when I was young I would think to myself to be or not to be and what that might mean.
When I was older I started to get interested in religion and philosophy studies and finally I was handed this book In Search of the Miraculous. I was 15 or 16 at the time and I started reading it and it was like immediately I said, "This is it! This is what I want." I read half of it and found it was a little too difficult for me at the time but I said, "I'll get back to it", which I did the next year.
So that launched me really, on a journey of discovery. I lived in Los Angeles at the time and I began to look for anyone that might know anything about the Gurdjieff Work and of course this was before there was any internet or advertising, etc., so it took me a few years. Finally at UCLA I found a class where Jim Flynn was there as a guest speaker. In him I found what I felt was actually a man, someone who had something and very simple, very plain and very ordinary.
Then I was to meet his wife Norma Flynn. The two of them - which I didn't know at the time of course - were the directors of the Gurdjieff Foundation in Los Angeles under Lord Pentland. So then I met his wife and found out his wife a while afterwards was studying Tai Chi with the same master that I was, Master Marshall Ho which was a curious kind of connection because on both these two sides of life, it seemed like these forces were coming together and converged so that I began working in the Gurdjieff Foundation in Los Angeles in 1969 and met Lord Pentland in 1970. There I saw somebody who was extraordinary.
So that's briefly what happened when I began. I continued to study in the Foundation. Then I started the Gurdjieff Foundation in Portland Oregon. I quickly left the Foundation after I had to deal with the politics so much and started the Russian Center for Gurdjieff Studies in 2005 and I would still be going there right at this moment but for the quarantine. But I've been going there 15 years and Gurdjieff said "Begin in Russia, end in Russia."
So I considered this the ending of a cycle and that is connected then with why I want to set up this new school of the fourth way. It isn't my school, it's Gurdjieff's school. I'm sort of hopefully the helper in continuing his vision, completing his vision which he couldn't complete at the Priory where he had his school and other people have tried from people in New York and the Bennetts and Staveley's farm which I've been to also. Right here in Arizona we have a school of architecture in Gurdjieff in Phoenix under Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright who was a student of Gurdjieff's.
So there have been many attempts and this is hopefully an attempt to bring together all the wealth of experience which has accumulated by Gurdjieff's direct disciples and their disciples over the last 100 or so years that I think could form the basis of a new understanding and in a sense a new approach with a foundation in the Gurdjieff teachings.
Harrison: I've listened to a few of your other interviews on other podcasts and the impression I got is that the structure of the school is essentially going to be as close to the Priory as possible to try to account for and include all those various modalities that were used back in the Priory and in the schools that you mentioned that have tried to recreate it; physical work, group work, mental exercises and physical work as in movements or things like that. Can you comment a bit about that? What's the standard curriculum that you're planning for what's to come?
Alan: By the way the school is not yet set up. We still have to buy land. My general manager is in Valencia now working on the legal details to start. The three pillars of our Work are to work with the presence of the body, that is to bring my attention into the body, not just to the body but into the body. So there are many levels that one wants to be able to be present to and you might begin with the structural level of the body, this vertical plane which is materialized in the spinal column.
So when we do Gurdjieff gymnastics for example and later if people learn the Gurdjieff movements, the Gurdjieff gymnastics are about the principles of how to be in the body, the correct alignment of the body which begins with the spine, goes into the central nervous system which one then is aware of through the sensations, not just the body sensations of touch, for example, but all the sensations including eyesight so that I want to live behind my eyes instead of focused out here. I want to be inside.
So we open these doors of perception connected with the body and with the presence so that I say, "I am here now" and I include my body. Also if I have the intention, can include the space around me so that outer world and inner world are both included in one. That's one of the pillars which we work with is physical work like construction work, garden work, but it can be any kind of work with the body, eating, preparing food. All these things are important. So we come more and more into the body in a very practical why, not in a theoretical way.
Then the next part of course is connecting with a self-awareness. Now many people don't know the difference between sensation and feeling. These are two very different qualities in us and they both involve being but feeling is a higher level. It's a level connected with what Gurdjieff calls two-brained beings, animal world. So I feel myself. If you look at a cat and of course cats are not all the same, but if you look at a cat you will see that they're pretty connected with what other people in the room are doing, how they feel about them. And if they get what we call a bad vibration from somebody, they react to it. They don't want to be around that person. They feel the other person. It's not a sensation. It's not like a sudden movement. Of course that could frighten them.
Now it's an emanation, it's something from themselves that the animals can feel. For example I have a lot of wild rabbits around here and when I go outside and I talk to them, they don't just run away. They almost always stop and sort of listen and not necessarily to the words but to the feeling that I'm giving to them.
So that's another level and that we work on very much in the interaction primarily with people, but it also can be with animals, also can be with plants, that we work to what we call externally consider that person, that is, put myself in their shoes for a moment. Let's say we are working together hammering together some studs for a building and we're working and I have a good hammer and the other person maybe doesn't have as much experience with building and they have a bad hammer. Maybe it's loose on the head or something and I say, "Oh, take this hammer. I can do just as well with that hammer. That's not a problem."
That would be a simple example of external consideration and by that I'm moving a little bit out of my ego, a little bit out of what we call identification with myself, with my eyes and so on. And so this is very profound working with others is called the second line of Work Gurdjieff speaks about.
The third pillar really is the direct taking in of an impression. Now of course this connects with the body and the senses. That's a way of taking in the impressions and in that second part with feeling, one can take in the impression of my breath {breathes}. I am breathing or is it that I am being breathed? I can be in question about it, what it means so that in the Gurdjieff Work breath is very important but in the beginning Gurdjieff more or less said stay away from very strong or even violent breathing exercises like you find in some yogas. He said that disimbalances the whole body because the whole body is connected with the rhythm, the depth and so on, of your breath.
Now this only takes in one aspect of breathing and I talked about this in the alchemical part, in particular, of my book, that there is a whole octave of energies, starting with the outermost energy which he calls hydrogen 192. It's not important right now to remember any numbers but just to give you an idea. As it comes in it becomes finer, 96 and 48 but it doesn't really enter the body until it gets into the bloodstream then it becomes hydrogen 24 and that begins that feeling part. So there's a process of energy transformation.
So when someone says conscious breathing is like counting your breaths, one, two and so on, that is the very crudest part of it, very, very crude. But if you want to get into where you're really creating prana or chi as we call it in Taoism, then you have to move from hydrogen 48 to 24 to feeling. Then you begin to produce another level of energy and it goes on from there. That's not the end.
So lastly, this third part of taking impressions, you can take in the impression of air and that can go at many levels, much deeper, much finer. You can take in the impression of us looking at each other right now and that, at this beginning level is like touch. It's an energy connected with the central nervous system - touch, smell - the beginning of it, eye sight, taste, etc. All that is a part of this beginning process where you consciously are there at the door of perception.
Now I'm looking out of my own eyes. Now I'm listening in here so when you hear the saying in the bible 'they have ears but do not hear and eyes that do not see', that's what they're speaking about. They're speaking about an internal psychological process and that's of course what's missing in Christianity today. They've lost this connection to the inner meaning of Jesus' words.
Corey: Do you find a lot of hunger then in Russia, in particular, where the school is, in the courses that you're offering because you're offering six week seminars, correct?
Alan: Well that's going to be for the school in Spain, yes.
Corey: Oh, okay.
Alan: In Russia I work with a regular group and we meet and we also have weekend seminars but not this full program. This is one of the things I've been really wanting to produce, is a place where we can have a full program and not just sort of a hobby level of working, to live the Work as they did at the Priory and as they did in Essentuk. They lived the Work and of course you cannot live all the time like too serious a person. You have to have fun. You have to make jokes. You have to do all kinds of things in order that the system is healthy and happy. You may not always be happy but at least you're moving in that direction.
So yes, in Spain we will have six week workshops. We'll also have longer ones. I thought that we would have a 10-month program. I like that because that's sort of at least the lunar length of pregnancy, 10 months. I didn't go to Bennett's school because I was in the Foundation and that would have been a terrible sin {laughter} to even get close to Bennett when I was in the Foundation. I have since met Ben and Cynthia Bennett and they're very nice people. But I just read about their school and I visited Staveley's school and talked to her a number of times and I visited other ones besides having a long, long apprenticeship in Los Angeles and visiting somebody related to Foundation schools.
So I've been studying what makes, you might say, a good school so now I'm going to try to apply that with other friends of mine, some people in different parts of the world that have also been in the Work a long time agreed to help with the creation of the school.
Harrison: I think that's really good. One of the things that I like to see is people collaborating. We haven't been involved in any official Gurdjieff groups or anything like that so pretty much all that I know has been from what I've read or heard from speaking to people like we're doing right now Alan. One of the things that breaks my heart reading the history is seeing the factionalization and the infighting and elitism that goes on, which is normal, because that's what people tend to do. But in my mind it would just be great if people could put all that behind them for a while and just collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other or share and network what works and what does.
So I hope that something like that is the direction that you guys can go in by sharing ideas. One of the things I found through my own experiences and reading is that aside from factionalization, there are all kinds of issues that can destroy or almost infect a group or an institution and oftentimes its just because there isn't an awareness of how these kind of processes work and the kinds of things that go wrong.
I want to read something short that I think might hint at that in your book. Let me find the page here. Page 157. This is near the very end of your book and you write,
"To be cunning and canny one must know something of the future, of the coming moves of those who stand in opposition attempting to block our way. Cunning strategies are the canning of the mind. Just as crucial, one must also have the will to overcome on the level of both physical and psychic forces."Then a couple of pages later you write, in reference to Gurdjieff,
"These gods and their offspring do not look kindly on rivals. Gurdjieff was subject to the wrath and very nearly was killed many times because he would not give up. Fortunately he had help and an indefatigable wish to create a new ark, a new teaching to this world."There's a whole bunch of levels that we could get into in what you said there. I'll give you my perspective and then maybe you can tell me if you think I'm right or wrong. There are all kinds of levels of forces that get in the way of one's own self-development and maybe even especially the development of a group. First of all there are the inner barriers and forces that we come up against, which can be our own assumptions, preconceived notions of the way things are, the false image we have of ourselves and the high opinion that we have of ourselves.
So I guess you might call those basic psychic forces that we have to overcome in development, but then there's the issues that you have when you interact with other people and that's when the interpersonal conflicts come out and those initial barriers and problems colour the way that we interact with each other and lead to a lack of external consideration. But it seems to me reading through Gurdjieff's life, it almost seems as if there is a cosmic force that doesn't like seeing - maybe to speak in a metaphor - to see the sheep trying to break out of the pasture or the cattle trying to break out of the pasture. Do you have any comments on any of that and go as far as you want.
Alan: Well I think you're right. There are certainly the inner demons that we have and Gurdjieff says that in a sense they're even necessary. They're a part of the denying force in us. So we have a wish to be. I remember I founded a drug and alcohol program on skid row in Los Angeles many years ago dealing with addicts of all kinds, mostly coming out of the jail system but from right off the street. You see how somebody really wants to get clean from the drugs, to re-establish their life and their family and so on. You see at the same time this extraordinary pull to be under the influence of a drug or alcohol and so on.
So it becomes this dynamic that is very visible in people but of course the question is, "Can I see it in myself? Can I see this pull away from awakening as well as the pull towards awakening and I can stand in between it because it's both me?" If I were to say, "No, that's not me", I create this kind of false duality. But the true duality is yes, it is me and I need to, like some of the ancient statues you've seen with the hands up like this holding serpents and so on and so forth, that I am this center of my own cross and I have to be there in this center, between these pulls and by doing that I will draw in what Gurdjieff calls the third force or what in Christianity is called the Holy Spirit. I'll draw this reconciling principle into myself which can then transform me between these two forces and now I have a triad. Gurdjieff says nothing is made without three forces, without a triad.
So now I begin to value in a certain way this denial force and also in other people. Somebody might say, like I had said to me about starting Russia by a high personage in the Gurdjieff Foundation, I actually asked them if they would help and they said, "Well I don't think I can. That's too big a project". {laughter} So you get that and what do you do? You could spend your time saying "Well son of a bitch!" {laughter}
Harrison: Well not do anything.
Alan: "That's what I get for asking for help!" {laughter} But at the same time I could say, "Okay, I see. I see that point of view. I see what he's saying underneath what he's saying and why he's saying it. So I'm learning. Thank you for the lesson I'm learning and having read and studied Sun Tzu, the great strategist of Taoism in China and also Machiavelli, I understand a little bit about the way these things work.
So what are you doing? It's almost like Beelzebub coming to the earth. We are like that. We come down to earth and we learn. We learn something. Something we would never have learned if we didn't come down to this level and deal with these forces directly.
The last thing you were speaking about is something that I have given a lot of thought to and having a long-term interest in mythology, I look at the mythology of many, many cultures, not just the Greek culture and so on, but that has a lot of interesting things in it because it speaks about the gods primarily connected with the planetary world, the astral world and how at one point they can be seemingly helping us. These of course are forces, we're talking about, personification of forces. And sometimes they are totally against us just like in Ulysses which is a fine, fine story to study.
So I think when Gurdjieff says that he had enemies, he's talking about powers and principalities. So we work not against ordinary forces, ordinary processes. We work against powers and principalities which one could also say are the stuff of legend and myth, the gods. And these gods may be completely capricious.
Corey: Yeah, it definitely seems like it.
Alan: Sometimes, yeah. So Gurdjieff was of course in difficult situations a lot and not only had three bullets at different times put into him, but a number of illnesses and the great car crash he got into which was so mysterious. How could he have gotten into a car crash? It doesn't seem possible for this extraordinarily conscious being.
Harrison: What you were saying about the powers and principalities, just for viewers that may not be familiar with the term, the first instance I know of that specific term being used is in the letters of Paul in the New Testament and that's the reference that you quoted there. There's probably a whole bunch of different theories that we could get into there, but what that made me think of - it might be a weird association or leap to make - but Beelzebub's Tales, the range of, let's say, mundane, worldly things that Gurdjieff discusses in Beelzebub's Tales.
So even taking it at its surface level narrative, Beelzebub's Tales deals with things like war and revolutions and the operation of the cosmos and the planets and suns and how those interact with these cycles of cosmic catastrophe, warfare and mass death. You mentioned a couple of these things in the book. For me personally I find that if I want to take these kinds of ideas seriously then there shouldn't be any realm of knowledge that should be off limits or ignored. I want to understand everything, right? Or as much as possible.
So looking at all of these things together we find that Gurdjieff was actually really far ahead of his time in his analysis of a lot of these phenomena. I mentioned war and revolution. I don't know if we want to necessarily get into details about that but he's got some very insightful things to say about war and revolution and like you said, it ties directly into his life because Gurdjieff wasn't what I would call a modern spiritual narcissist who is only interested in their own kind of spirituality in exclusion to the world around them because I think what Gurdjieff realized was that in order to develop one's self you actually have to have an awareness of what's going on around you. That's why he was reading the newspapers every day traveling through Georgia and Turkey and during the Bolshevik Revolution because he needed to know what was going on and where it would be safe to go and he knew that he needed to get people out of there because people were turning into monsters.
So he had an awareness of the political situation. He had an awareness of what happens during revolutions because I think most people don't have any idea of what goes on in a revolution. They forget the previous revolutions that happened before their lifetime and then they get onboard with the new revolutionary movement, not realizing what will actually happen and perhaps even to them in this revolution that they think is so great.
I'm kind of rambling but I guess for now I just want to leave it at that. The connection I was trying to make is that with these powers and principalities, we might be individually influenced by some forces that in the past in mythological terms were called the gods, but it also seems to happen on a societal or world level whereas individually we might be caught up in a state of personal hysteria, disintegration or addiction, like you mentioned. On the social scale we can fall prey to a social illness, a social hysteria, madness or blood-thirstiness or reciprocal destruction as Beelzebub called it.
I know that I was rambling all over the place but I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on any of those meanderings.
Alan: Quite a few. {laughter} When I'm listening I try to stop thought, just listen. That's a good exercise, stopping thought. As far as this, it all comes under the law of sulianensias that Gurdjieff speaks about where there's a tension between planets, the sun, the earth and the moon and so on and that these are dynamic tensions. This is happening now, all the time and as the different planets with their different qualities - of course we know the idea that Mars is supposed to be the god of war, but it's a planet. It's a planet with electromagnetic qualities.
All the planets have them to some extent or other and as they interact with each other, these fields, they produce what he calls tensions on earth. But they're not just abstract tensions. They're not just generalized. They have different qualities. So Mars might combine with Jupiter or cross it or something like this and you get different kinds of interactions on earth in what he calls organic life, all organic life, just as the moon affects the growth of plants for example, the sap rising. Some people say that the moon affects our behaviour. Well you could try to observe that and see if that's true for yourself.
But all these dynamics that are occurring now as we sit here, this moment, we're virtually unaware of and not only that, as you were talking about in regard to revolutions and war, everybody's always surprised when it happens! When Germany was building up its incredible arsenal and going in the Sudetenland where they first invaded and they said, "Well some people have threatened German citizens so we're coming in to defend them" and Germany now had this tremendously big army for them and tanks and planes and Chamberlain in England was saying "Peace in our time". {laughter} A lot of the people were believing it. They were believing this naivety.
So today we're in a sense going through some of that same situation. We don't know how far it's going to go. I'm talking about here in America where it seems like these tensions have focused where we haven't had this really since the Civil War, that is really this kind of difficulty in America itself. We've always gone to other places to fight. So now it's in here. It's where we are and how could I become relatively free in myself, free from the hysteria you were talking about, free from mass hypnosis, mass suggestibility which was a principal concern of Mr. Gurdjieff's, probably the most important initial concern. If you are to live normally or if you are trying to grow your awareness, your consciousness you cannot be under suggestibility. This law would be considered to be for us, connected with the moon, one of the three added laws that are connected to the level of the moon.
So now I look at myself and I can remember - I don't know if you've ever had this experience - I can remember this total surprise when I was maybe eight years old and my mom used to always buy this laundry detergent called Tide. So one day, I don't know why, I said, "Mom, is this the best detergent?" And she looked - she's very practical, an extraordinarily practical person - so I expected she would have a real reason, and she said "I just like it." {laughter}
Corey: It's popular.
Alan: Yeah. So I kind of woke up then. "Oh, adults don't necessarily know why they do things!" Before that I kind of assumed they did.
So powers and principalities. As you are asleep, they don't give a damn about you. You're like the sheep you're talking about. They're all going somewhere. It doesn't matter. They're all going to go to the slaughter. This is quite clear. They can believe that they are something special, they're kings or queens, they're lions, whatever they believe, fine. Let them believe it because they're all going to the slaughter. All their life force and energy is going to be taken from them and they are not going to be moving in this opposing current.
But as soon as you begin stepping out of THAT current, the current connected to sleep, to mechanicalness, as soon as you begin to step out of that, not only are you connected then more with the law of fate rather than the law of accident, but you're also beginning to appear as separate from the larger mass of people and when you do that, if you appear enough, get enough height and you stick your neck up, you know, {laughter} then somebody's going to try up there to cut it off.
Of course that happened to Mr. Gurdjieff and it gives an idea of just how important he was, that these forces recognized him and tried many, many times I think, to do away with him.
Harrison: That even happens on a more mundane level. Again, in Beelzebub's Tales - you don't have to go to Beelzebub's Tales to know this - but in wars and revolutions it is the people of good will and the people who see what's going on and see the problems with it, who are often the first ones to be targeted and taken out of the equation.
Alan: Yes.
Harrison: You see this if you read about the great leap forward in China or the Bolshevik Revolution or any of the big violent revolutions over the past 150 years, even before that, that this is what happens. As you mentioned Gurdjieff encountered a lot of resistance and enemies but at the same time he was Gurdjieff and if anyone knows anything about Gurdjieff, one way you might put it is a master of disguise or a master...
Corey: Just a master.
Harrison: Just a master in general because he was cunning. He was smart. He was street smart I guess you'd call it today. He knew what he was doing. Corey, what was the story that you told me? This just gives an insight into his character about when he was in Paris during the Nazi occupation and he was storing some...
Corey: Oh yeah. He was hiding illegal currency under his bed and I believe the Nazis came in and found it and as they were trying to intimidate him he just looked to the people there and said, "Good hiding spot, huh?" {laughter} Just completely fearless. Completely fearless. And then he figured his way out of the situation.
Harrison: One of the amazing things about Gurdjieff is that he always managed to find the perfect thing to say in the right situation. You can look at that from one perspective and say,
"Oh wow, he was so manipulative and a really shady kind of guy", but on the other hand you watch spy movies and you see that people get into situations where you require your wits in order to save your skin, in order to live another day. Gurdjieff just seemed to be an expert at that. He seemed to be able to read any situation, read a person and know what to say to that person for whatever reason, whether it was something that they needed to hear for their own development or if it was strictly a matter of "What can I say to this person so they don't bother me?"This Nazi police officer who's coming around, how do I avoid spending the rest of the occupation in prison or how do I get through these checkpoints in the Russian empire trying to get out during the revolution? Well, are these guys white Russians or red Russians? Who do I have to pretend to be so that they don't shoot me?
That level of knowledge of one's self and knowledge of others in the pursuit of an aim is something that most people lack, like you said Alan, because most people - and we can include ourselves in most instances in life or in many ways - are sheep that are simply unaware and unfortunately that means don't know what to do.
Corey: That just leads me to a question that I wanted to ask because all the things that you're describing are situations that would instill an extraordinary amount of fear into anybody and under that kind of pressure you're not going to function in the way that you would think that you would function in that kind of situation...
Harrison: Yeah, not the way you imagine it.
Corey: In your fantasy you think, "Oh I would say something like that if I were being harassed."
Harrison: "This is what I'd tell those Nazi...
Corey: ...storm troopers. But you devote a chapter in your book, Secrets of the Fourth Way to fear and it's something that comes up in different ways throughout the book; what the meaning of fear is and the experience of fear. I can't imagine that Gurdjieff was a fearless individual in the sense that he did not feel it but that he was an individual who had attained such mastery over himself - maybe mastery isn't the right word - but the proper way to experience different parts of his machine that fear wasn't a problem. So could you just talk a little bit about fear and your experiments with fear and how it taught you in the past?
Alan: Yes. If there's one sort of subject that I spent a lot of time on from the earliest in my memory it's this subject of fear. Just briefly when I was a child, as I think most children do, I had fears of the darkness and so on. My situation was a little perhaps worse than some because my father was at times a very violent alcoholic. So there was this sort of strange juxtaposition between someone who loves you and someone who could be a monster at a moment's notice.
But when I was young, I really hated that I was afraid, really didn't like it and one of the simple things I did was at night if I was alone in this apartment I would walk backwards through this long hallway and if you watch monster movies there's always something at the end of the hallway or in the closet and I'd walk all the way back, backwards into the closet of my room and try to not be afraid. Then later I began experiments and I did things like walking down dark alleys. This was when I was 18 or 19 in Venice, California which can be a pretty rough area and I used to walk down at night and I began to find something interesting.
I began to find that if I tried to walk with a certain presence that this fear would be there but I noticed it would heighten all my perceptions. So over here maybe I heard a tiny, tiny noise and without the fear I might not have noticed it. It might not have come up through the gateways of my nervous system and said something to me. And then of course everything, almost like being under the influence of a hallucinogenic, that the fear working with these same neurohormones of course, began to expand my awareness.
So I was kind of walking in this bubble of awareness that extended out from me whenever any noises or sights or anything happened and I began to be so interested in fear and I began to actually question 'what is fear?' I realized I didn't know what fear was. Other times I walked in the midst of swarming bees and wasps. I worked on the prune harvest in Orland, California where my friend and I were handling these plums into prunes and it's so sticky and so sweet that you had wasps and bees on your arms. So I would just sweep them off very gently. Never got stung once, never, and I became very interested in this in almost a communication with the insect world that that allowed, that letting go of the fear which was blocking any kind of relationship.
Then I picked up a rattlesnake once that was in the road. I certainly don't recommend this to anybody. {laughter} I did a lot of stupid things when I was young. {laughter} I picked up this rattlesnake but I was in such a state that I was absolutely certain that this snake wouldn't hurt me. I picked it up and sort of talked to it and moved it somewhere. So things like that. From the book, you know about that situation where I was in Mexico and I was up on a cliff and I nearly died, was ready to fall off of this cliff and something from within me and perhaps without, brought me so that my body moved up by itself and saved my life.
So I became, I would say, fascinated by what fear really is and how it must have been - this is sort of the theory I started with after a little while - it must have been designed to increase my awareness, not designed to shut me down. That's stupid. That's impossible, you know. It was designed so that I'd wake up, instinctive waking up in myself and for me it's completely proven now. I've tested it many, many times.
Now I'm not talking about ordinary worries. I'm worried my boss is mad at me or some crap, whatever. That's not real fear. That's not instinctive fear. That's where I connected with the false work of the emotional center mostly and the intellectual center that identifies with some situation in life. It's not life-threatening or anything like that. So that's different and you have to use the reason of the driver to help you deal with it and not get stuck in it because it's kind of an endless circle, worrying and anxiety about things.
Harrison: That reminds me of our talk with Dr. Jim Carpenter. He's a psychologist and he's got a book called First Sight Theory and it's his attempt to create a unified theory of Psi or parapsychological research and fear plays a big part in it because according to his theory, if I can relate it accurately, one of the roles of an extrasensory perception or a more subtle perception of reality is to be aware, on a basic level, of dangers, just like we would be in the forest and seeing that snake, we want to have a quick awareness of it in order to get away but that there's something even deeper going on to the point where we might have a subtle awareness of a danger in our emotional lives, like with someone we love, when they're in a different city or on the other side of the planet.
I'd say that there is an expansion of awareness that is intrinsically a part of fear, for one reason on that very basic level, because it's so important to preserve our own bodies and our own survival in order to keep doing what we're doing or to learn even more things. That's one of the prime imperatives of life, to keep going as long as possible so that we can interact and learn what we have to learn on this planet and that one of the functions of fear is to expand the awareness and to open the eyes to see a wider sphere of reality than you are in your humdrum, ordinary existence.
So I don't know if I've yet come to the conclusion that you have Alan, that it was designed for our awakening or an individual awakening. The way I see it right now is that it might be a dual design purpose because the way I originally was seeing it was that it's not necessary but a feature that can be conveniently hijacked or hacked to use for that purpose. It's like, "Okay, I'm in that expanded state of awareness now. What if I used it not for simply preserving my own body but because I have this access, to then bring in an awareness of myself in this state of being in a fearful state and having more awareness of something. Maybe I'll leave it there. I don't know where else I wanted to go with that.
What would you say to that Alan? Maybe I'll ask you to clarify when you say that fear was designed for that purpose. Can you elaborate a bit on that?
Alan: Well I think if you reason it out that why would nature put in me - and I'm not saying nature always does the rational thing - but why would nature put in me this extremely powerful motivator, this extremely powerful energy just to close me off? Just to lessen my awareness in a sense and become sort of self-imposed isolation? Hide under the blanket. "I'll hide under the blanket and then I'll be safe". Well of course we know it doesn't help.
So to me, unless someone can have a better explanation of why fear has been put into us, then the only thing I can think of is that it was designed to help me, not to harm me but to help me. So fear is not my enemy, it's my ally sort of like Carlos would say. It's really an ally, as you were saying, to expand my awareness and maybe it would expand to the extent, yes, that somebody close to me by blood for example, a family member, I might be aware of a dangerous situation for them even far away.
Now Gurdjieff speaks about something called Hanbloodswan and that has this idea of blood in it, zwen, which is a sort of feeling for this kind of energy, almost electromagnetic energy and that that is the blood of the astral body and then there's blood of the mental body, higher Hanbloodswan and that these are literally blood for those bodies and we have some. We already have some and when we do the Gurdjieff gymnastics, for example, and do the Taoist exercises also, these Chi-Gong and Tai Chi exercises are all to help to generate this level of energy, this chi level, this magnetism. This magnetism as we know is used by healers throughout the world for millennia, laying on of hands and so on.
So we develop this other level of blood which can link us also, not just with family members. I think it's the original meaning of blood brothers where you exchange blood but you're also exchanging this chi, this higher level of energy and then you are linked to that person and if something happens to them which is very dangerous or something, you may well receive some cognition of that, just as we began this when I was speaking about my mother. My mother was in a movie theater. She never goes out because she always had to take care of myself and my brother and work at the same time, do everything, and she takes this one day to go to the movies. She just wanted to see this movie so badly. I don't know if you can imagine. She was an actress, tried to be, and she wanted to see this so badly and in the middle of the movie she got a premonition or a feeling and rushed, literally ran back with my brother in her arms, to the house and there I am dying or dead.
So these things do happen to people. I'm quite sure of it. We have such a limited awareness. It's almost scary and the more we identify, the more we become egoistic in our way of dealing with situations, the more narrow is our perception and sometimes we narrow it down so small that it almost disappears. So now we have this idea - Lord Pentland used to say you don't apply ideas to life. You must apply them. And so if we have this idea now that there's a totally different dimension of what we call fear . We almost need a different word because of all the old associations of fear, I don't know what, but some really new understanding of this emotion and how to use it for our benefit and perhaps for other peoples' benefit.
We cannot only receive, we can transmit as well. So it's possible to give and receive. That by the way was my first lesson from Lord Pentland when I first met him. He came to me after I refused some cookies and things that he was giving to eight or nine new people like myself and I said no. I was so enchanted by this man. This man was like a real Don Juan and he entered the room and was handing out these cookies and I'm the only one who says, "No thank you." He came back to me and said, "Why did you not take one?" and I said I wasn't hungry. He knew I knew that that was a lie but I didn't want to say what it was because I didn't want anything to take my concentration from this phenomenon, this man. I didn't want any kind of trick, you might say, to distract me, including taking a cookie and eating it.
He came to me and then he said, "You have to learn to give and take at the same time." My first lesson from Lord Pentland, so important and a very, very good one for me.
Harrison: Were you going to ask a question Corey?
Corey: No, go ahead. I hope that we have time to ask, but go ahead.
Harrison: I wanted to go off on something that you mentioned about Hanbloodswan. How did you pronounce it to make sure I'll match with you?
Alan: Hanbloodswan.
Harrison: Hanbloodswan. You've mentioned that there is an alchemical section in this book and it is a substantial section on Taoist alchemy and coincidentally or not, just before reading your book I'd found this one online and decided to read it by Wang Mu, The Foundations of Internal Alchemy. It's a book published in Chinese originally I think. It might have been in the 1950s or 1960s but it's an overview of, I believe, the southern tradition of Neidan, the Taoist practice. So I'd read one and it was interesting to then read your book and find some of the same ideas and practices. I want to make a couple of observations and then ask you to speak a bit about it.
One of the things that you write in the book is that, for instance, in Chi-Gong and in Taoist alchemical practice, there is a focus on energetic work I guess you could call it and breathing exercises and almost visualization but also the experience of moving certain energies along certain channels in the body and through various centers. Traditionally the Gurdjieff work has been seen as more psychological and practical in the sense that it might be a psychological principle at work in direct interaction with someone else or within one's self. So you're looking at your tendencies and the emotional programs that run, how you behave in certain situations and the way that you behave automatically and the way that you don't consider other people, etc. and that there are various practices for becoming aware of those sorts of things.
For instance in these Chinese practices it is more of a directly sensed physical and/or spiritual practice. So what I found interesting about this section in your book is that you kind of put the two together. For instance, in Taoist Alchemy there's all kinds of interesting, beautiful and enigmatic images and words to describe various energy centers or parts of the body, like the...
Corey: The jade pillow.
Harrison: ...the jade pillow, the place of the muddy pellet. I forget most of them, but there are these things called the three barriers for instance and there are names for them in this book. Again, I'm not an expert. I just read this book and that's the only experience I have in it. But in Mu's book on alchemy he talks about the barriers being the base of the spine, directly opposite the solar plexus on the spine and then the way he describes it behind the mouth, the top of the spine. So that would be...
Alan: The jade pillow.
Harrison: The jade pillow, right.
Alan: I would like to see that because I've never read that book.
Harrison: Okay.
Alan: It would be interesting if it's the same.
Harrison: You should check it out because I was just interested one day. I might have heard an interview with you where you were talking about your experience with Taoism and I'd just read a book on Sufi alchemy by Ibn Arabi after and while we interviewed an Ibn Arabi scholar, Stephen Hirtenstein. So I found this book and checked it out and found out that the publisher is Golden Elixir Press and I believe the guy that runs that is Fabrizio Pregadio and he's got a whole bunch of book on his website that he has published, translations of old Chinese alchemical texts, very interesting stuff. This is the only one I've checked out but it was one of the only modern books that was more appealing to me as an introduction into the topic as opposed to getting into the obscure poetry of the Chinese alchemical masters where they speak essentially in code as Mu mentions but without explaining what it actually refers to.
So this is the one to start out with. So on those three barriers, as I pointed out, he talks about them. There's one paragraph that really gets into the barriers. They're mentioned all over the place but describing that in this circulation of energies that you will encounter barriers and you have to approach this one in this manner and this one in the manner of an ox with a lot of force and this one in the manner of blowing air on fire or something like that, so this one gently and this one strongly. He leaves it at that.
In your book where you talk about these things you meld the energetic aspect with the Gurdjieff psychological aspect which I thought was really interesting. So you talk about these barriers. Could you talk a bit about those three barriers, or one or two or any of them, just to give an idea of what these barriers are and how you relate them to the Taoist practices?
Alan: Well first I want to say that every great teacher puts in certain things in their teaching and leaves out certain things. So it's very interesting to look at teachings of Buddha or Lao Tzu or Gurdjieff and see what they put in and what they leave out and perhaps even why they may. Often, certainly with Gurdjieff, the things he leaves out, he puts clues to. He hides the dog or hides the bone, the ordinary way of saying it. And one of the things he hid was the connection with Taoism and he speaks about these two princes that were in the Gobi desert before the Gobi became sand in maybe 6,000 BC and they traveled down the Yellow River into what is now China and they intermarried with the local people and through that they were scientists. They were investigating, for example, the law of octaves and so on and you can find the law of octaves in the Taoist system and you can find the law of three in it. It's very easy if you study a little bit.
He said that they then developed these very, very high levels of science and this is what Taoism is principally, is this science. It's a science of energy. So he is pointing to that but many people don't take that as a reason to continue the search. You see, they say, "This is what Gurdjieff said. The search is over." {laughter} You know. Repeat what he said.
Harrison: No work necessary.
Alan: But then he wouldn't write a book like Beelzebub's Tales where everything is now linking into new branches that we are supposed to research. We're not supposed to wait for roast turkey to fly in our mouths. So I've researched this particular area. There are some areas I certainly didn't research very much. I know very little about yoga, for example. I took a little bit. There are some people that are experts in yoga and really learned something through a real source. I don't mean the phony ones like Patanjali and in this case what you're talking about is looking at real sources of Taoism, not Mantak Chia, not the sort of commercially available stuff.
So if you go into Taoism, you go into this deep search into the energy of the human body and the energy of everything around us. They were keen at observation. They were keen at sensation. Now you begin to see, "Oh, that sounds a little bit like Mr. Gurdjieff." Yes, very much like Mr. Gurdjieff. So we begin to study the energetic pathways which he almost totally leaves out. If you look at my book I mention a couple of instances but then Madame de Salzmann talks about the axis of attention. Well what is the axis of attention? It's the axis of the conscious force coming down through us and so on.
So that's the central channel. But then why not speak about the branches of that central channel? In the Gurjieff gymnastics class on Saturday we have these eight main branches, extraordinary vessels, where this higher chi, this Jing Chi spreads out through our body and which we need to be unblocked for our health and also if we want to create a higher body, an astral body, we have to.
So Gurdjieff gives this very simplistic - sometimes it's almost amusing - he gives this very simplistic but interesting view of creation of the astral body. He simply says at one point, "Well, get enough of this hydrogen, this higher energy hydrogen 12 let's say, so that it not only permeates the whole body, and this is important, the whole body must be permeated, not cut off any place, not blocked, and you get enough of it then it precipitates and crystallizes out of solution and this precipitate becomes the astral body. That's wonderful! It's true! {laughter} But it's so simplistic.
So in the Taoist tradition, they really investigate this in a very, very deep way. Now in regard to Gurdjieff, Lord Pentland used to say something. When I first heard him say it I said, "What does he mean?" I used a slightly different verbiage. {laughter} "What the hell is he talking about?" He said nobody here practices the food diagram. Now if you know the food diagram it starts with food that you eat, hydrogen 768 that gradually transforms through the system all the way up to C12 which is sexual energy, the highest, most potent level of energy in our body. Then it goes on to breathing as we talked about, breathing consciously, and transforming that energy eventually all the way up to So12, the same level but different note, and then when I take an impression of myself and perhaps the world around me, I go from 48 to 24 to 12. Forty-eight is usually where it stops, right at the beginning and the reason it stops is because of what the Asians call the monkey mind. The monkey mind grabs it and won't let the impression go. We call it the formatory apparatus.
So now we have these three potent energies and he says specifically these three must go into the lower abdomen, exactly what is spoken about in Taoism, exactly! If you follow the movement of energy in let's say food, you start with Do768 which in the Taoist system is Gu Chi, that is the chi that comes out of food or out of rice. Then you go to the next level, Chung Chi. Then you continue in the food diagram with Re384 and so on and so forth, all the way down through until you get to Ching Chi, which is sexual energy.
So the Gurdjieff system follows exactly the Taoist one and you may find it somewhere else. I don't know. I'm not an expert in yoga at all so it may be some more yoga that they have this exact octave connected with digestion and assimilation of food but I don't know about it. If someone knows and could inform me I'd be interested. But it is in Taoism and he definitely points to these highest scientific minds he talks about that went into China and the creation of a school. That school eventually became connected and we know about it from the Yellow emperor's classic of Chinese medicine, the Taoist medicine I should say. I don't equate China with Taoism at all anymore.
So there is this energetic component but he didn't want us to focus too much on that right away because we have such psychological problems, suggestibility, imagination, fantasy, all will enter into this process and distort it, maybe destroy it. So he said basically what the ancient Taoist masters have always said. You don't start learning these things until you're more mature, until you're stable, until the elements in you are stabilized and harmonized. Then you begin to study this deeper subject.
So that's why I bring it in now because I think it's time and also why in our school, hopefully which will be starting at the beginning of next year near Valencia, we will include that as a part of his teaching, the food diagram and its relationship to what he calls prana. He talks about prana and doesn't use the word chi but it's exactly the same thing.
Harrison: That's a good observation I think, that Gurdjieff didn't introduce these things because we have enough psychological problems as it is to start out with. There's a couple of things I want to say about that that relate to one other chapter in your book where you talk about kundalini and kundabuffer but first is that in all of Gurdjieff's writings, like you said, there's nothing spelled out specifically about energy pathways or anything like that. There are little hints here and there. Two that come to mind are first, in Life is Real Only Then When I Am. He's giving a couple of the exercises and he's talking about the subtle sensation of something that will appear and go to the solar plexus or up and it's very subtle. If you're just reading through it like a newspaper you won't notice it or have any idea of what he's talking about.
But then in the transcripts of his talks in Paris you see a couple more explicit mentions of it and the one time he even mentions these pathways and he says, "Oh yeah, there are these pathways" and in the transcript it says "Gurdjieff traces a line on his body". Of course you don't know what it is because it's just a verbal transcript. But he says, "You have to know which way to go, left or right". {laughter} There are a couple of references like that, right? So reading this, me having the mind I do, I'm like, "Well I want to know which direction it is! Where are these pathways?!"
So what it seems to me is that one of the things he was doing in the way he taught was to leave a lot open to the discovery of the person in question, either through their own research or their own experiential practice because this will now relate to what you wrote about the kundalini, what Gurdjieff himself wrote about kundalini and his phrase for that implantation in humans that turns everything upside down, the kundabuffer.
I'll start with just the common conception. If you read any kind of new age website or if you get into yoga you'll hear about kundalini experiences as this explosion of energy that comes up from the base of your spine, up through your spine and into your head and it's presented as this great, enlightening moment where now everything's great. I'll give my impression. I've encountered a few people who say they have kundalini awakenings and I'll just say that I'm not impressed with the people who have claimed to have kundalini awakenings and I think perhaps part of the reason, aside from maybe my own arrogance and high opinion of myself...
Corey: Your own kundalini.
Harrison: Yeah, my own kundalini, {laughter} is that as you describe. Could you Alan, describe how Gurdjieff described kundalini and then what you write about it in the book regarding what it might be, from an actual traditional perspective. I know you quote one writer on kundalini yoga. Maybe you could just talk a bit about that.
Alan: Well it's certainly a complicated subject and I think Gurdjieff says, "Don't believe me. Try to understand these things and check them for yourself. Find out what's factual and what isn't." Certainly one of the things he says which I think is interesting is that Beelzebub's tribe has tails and of course at some point we used to have tails as well and lost them and he says, "What a terrible tragedy," {laughter} because the tails are the place where, if you look at dogs and cats, they manifest certain emotional things through their tails very clearly and he calls it sort of a place where your subjectivity can manifest.
Of course our subjectivity manifests in our face, in our mask, expressions. The kundalini according to Gurdjieff, is a mistranslation of something that is supposed to mean something reflecting on itself. So it's like being in a bubble or in a cave like in Plato. Instead of looking at reality, you are looking back at a reflection in a sense of something in yourself and you're projecting various fantasies upon this bubble, like a projector does. So you can't see reality, again like Plato speaks about. You can't get these people out of their cave.
So kundalini is something that is connected with this idea of kundabuffer, a buffer literally, something that buffers you from seeing things as they are. He said that this was implanted in human beings - of course this is a very strange, shocking idea - planted in human beings by these powers and principalities. Well in this case he speaks about them as archangels, who decided that human beings might reject their role at the time, which was basically what people are doing now, which is to parasitically have their life force being drawn off from them and for them to have no real possibility of growing.
He says that this organ was placed in people, in ancient ancestors, and this began to turn their reason upside down. They couldn't understand things as they are and of course this means also from an emotional standpoint, your value system so that instead of valuing your soul, let's say, you value money first, not to say you shouldn't value money but it's first. In the bible it says of course to gain the pearl of great price you have to sell everything. So it is the most important thing from the point of view of ancient esoteric wisdom, this pearl of great price which is connected with the pearl of the lotus you might say, the I, the real individuality that we should have.
So this kundabuffer then at some point was taken out, according to the story, whether you consider it a legend or a myth or whatever. Somehow it was extracted and the only way it looks like something like that could happen would be through kinetic manipulation. I don't see that you could just pin the tail on the donkey, you might say. If this is true, it's very interesting. If it's not true, there's still something that prevents us from seeing reality as it is and both Gurjieff and Patanjali say there's no kundalini. Now Patanjali to me is the most important expert on Indian yoga. Of course as I say, I'm not an expert so I don't know. But he says there's no kundalini energy. That's not there. What is there is prana. There is only prana and different levels of prana.
So if you allow this fantasy to take this prana and like someone goes to a terrible, violent movie and suddenly they're full of adrenaline but it's not natural, you can't use it in any natural way, you're sitting there so it becomes an aberration of your energy and also even affects people's minds. Some people scream in these movies. That's how real they think it is.
So it's the same with this kundalini. They are taking this energy which is the life energy and they're aberrating it and they're causing violence that perhaps causes it to really rise up through the spine into the higher centers. Well if it does, do you want that kind of poison to enter your higher centers?! There are a number of people who do this kundalini yoga and their eyes are like this. {uses hands to pull eyes wide open} {laughter} I don't know if you've seen that.
Harrison: No, I haven't.
Corey: No, it's quite a sight.
Alan: I went and visited a number of these different religious and other groups years ago. I wanted to see what each one had to offer, what they were doing. I tried to be objective in seeing it but they definitely looked like they were going through some kind of psychosis. My battery's just getting low.
Harrison: How are you doing for time Alan? Do you want to call it a day there or do you have some more time to wrap up?
Alan: Well I think maybe we should wrap up. We've covered quite a bit of area.
Corey: I was just going to ask one thing. Do you have Patreon or a place where people can support the school, the website, all that kind of stuff that we can help you out with?
Alan: Well I have this site which I've pompously named Question and Answer, The Master of the Fourth Way. {laughter}
Corey: Oh nice.
Harrison: I've got the link to that. I'll include it in the show description.
Alan: We also have a general group for people. I have a Moscow group which is separate but I also have a general group for people who want to take part in an online group. You can ask Lucy about that, what the actual title is. We are working very hard to develop this school in Spain. We consider it very, very important. It will be my last big project I'm sure, in my life. So if anybody is interested in it, contact Lucy or Colin. He's my general manager and he's in Spain now and ask him about how you might either take part or be of some help to it. I would appreciate it. It would be great.
Harrison: Great.
Corey: Congratulations Alan. That's fantastic. A lifetime achievement award, for sure. You deserve more than that.
Harrison: We'll include all those links in the show description so people can check that out and also a link to your book. I want to ask one small request before you go. You can always put it off for another time if you've got to go, but you mentioned Gurdjieff gymnastics. I've only ever read, in all the Gurdjieff books I've read, one or two references to actual gymnastics. I've seen it referenced but I've never actually been able to tell what it is. You gave a description but I've never known what it is in comparison to say, the movements. Before we did the interview when we were in contact, you mentioned that you might be able to give a demonstration. Could you show us just one example of a gymnastic?
Alan: Well yes. Let me move this table back. One second and I think I can do one perhaps. Let's see if I move it around. Just one second.
Harrison: No problem.
Alan: I've got a lot of stuff on it. How's that?
Harrison: That's good.
Alan: Now this is not what you would ordinarily call gymnastics. It's not jumping around or something like that or somersaulting necessarily although you can do somersaults. Can you see me okay?
Harrison: Can you close the blinds a little bit. The sun's a bit bright behind you. That's better.
Alan: So this is more a kind of reorientation of the body and this exercise was given to me through Lord Pentland primarily many, many, many years ago. It has many levels so we're just going to take the basic level. So here I want to be vertical. That is, there's a kind of link between gravity and my body which I'm not very aware of unless I fall down or something.
So now I want to have from this top point which Madame speaks about as the entrance for higher energy and in Taoism it's called the 100 meeting points, Bai Hui. I want this to be in a sense as if I'm drawn up and allowing the fontanelles, like in a baby, to relax and let energy pass down through me. That would be all the way down my spinal axis to the base.
Now in our system of course it goes to the base and then it comes back up the front of the body. So now we're going to include a Taoist idea which Gurdjieff doesn't speak about but the tongue should be at the roof of the mouth. Now this changes your breathing and helps to stop thought. So if my head is vertical and I can move my head just a little bit to feel the occipital joint, the connection between my head and my neck and body. And that should be relaxed and this is going to be connected with that third barrier, the crossing here of the left and right sides also.
Then as I'm drawn up like this, something happens. Your chin will drop just a little bit. You don't make it drop. This is very important. It's a kind of non-doing once you get here. You might say this doing is just drawing up but then there's a cascade of things that happen. My shoulders should relax. My face should relax. The muscles in my throat and my hyoid muscles connected to the tongue relax. My chest also is a little bit open and I begin to breathe more from my abdomen.
These are all things, including the muscles of the back, the lower back, these are all things that happen as a natural cascading effect from this central axis and letting things drop, sink down. But if I try to do this, if I put my chin down, concave my chest, this is wrong. This will not give good results. So it takes a certain patience.
Now if I come into my body and into my spine and I rock back and forth on my ischial bones at the base of my spine, just where that first barrier is, I'll give this very briefly this time although you should rock back and forth 49 times, 7/7. On the 49th or the 50th, depending on your aim, you're going to let yourself stand. Now the secret of this or the inner part of this is as I'm rocking back and forth, I'm projecting my standing through the top of my head.
So using Disney's term, "I'm imagineering." Imagineering. So I have to project. I have to be very focused, very relaxed and then I'm going to do this on the 7th one coming up, and then I rise through that projection and down.
So that's one of them. It's a very simple one in a sense, but it's very profound because it's dealing with the projection of astral energy with Hanbloodswan and then that projection, like a vacuum, is sucking you up into it. Now what if my life was like that? What if I had an aim and I could project myself even in walking down the street? Then I would be moving much more consciously.
So anyway, it's one of the many types of exercises which we explore in the Saturday class. So that was great talking to you.
Corey: Thank you so much Alan.
Harrison: Great talking to you.
Corey: That was fantastic.
Harrison: Yeah, we could do it for hours. There's all kinds of different directions we could go to. But we'll have to be satisfied this time with an hour and 40 minutes.
Alan: Oh, that long!
Harrison: Yeah, it's been a while. So thank you again. Like I said, we'll include all the links in the show description including a link to where viewers can get your book and get to all of the other websites. So thanks again Alan, for speaking with us today. Have a great time. Hopefully you'll be able to get back to Moscow sometime soon.
Corey: They've got the vaccine so they'll probably be the first ones.
Alan: Hopefully. Alright guys. I appreciate what you do. It's great. Thank you!
Corey: We appreciate what you do Alan. Thank you.
Harrison: Take care.
Corey: Bye.
I bet you guys also believe in the 'energies of nature', 'auras', 'chakras', 'consciousness', 'higher self', 'divine sparks in the heart', 'third eyes', etc, etc...
This is exactly what international jewry want you to follow: paganism, since all pagan doctrines come from the ancient luciferian cabala! If you doubt me, study the "Zohar", or 'book of splendor'...see it's doctrines, it's teachings, it's traditions.