This is the second question from the meeting Wednesday 23 November 1988. Suki said: “I’m in deep depression state at the moment, because my son’s angiogram is very bad. One main artery is blocked, another sixty percent, and the other one is narrowing. An operation is needed. I’m very nervous because I’ve been through it twenty years ago. The old experience, the old fear, it all came back again hit me even more because that’s my child. I was very anxious this afternoon.”
“This is Sam, isn’t it?” Mr Adie asked. “If you want to help him, you can’t afford fear, you can’t afford it, otherwise you won’t be able to help him.”
“Yeah, I know,” Suki agreed, “but I still feel anxious.”
“So you have to attend to yourself first. You have to pay attention to your state before you go near him, otherwise you won’t do him any good. You use the conditions, and don’t complain about the conditions – use them. You have the wish, therefore you can transform your state. And he has to accept everything that is given; if he could do that, he could be envied.”
“There isn’t a problem with him,” said Suki, “the problem is with his wife.”
“Everybody has got something,” said Mr Adie, “but what I would like you to be able to focus on is the contribution of your own being-state to whatever is happening.”
Suki ignored this, it seems, opening her next comments with “anyway,” the all-purpose word of diversion: “Anyway, I was able to be very nice, and I left home, worried about that condition with his heart. Anyway, later about two or three hour later I rang his wife, and I said I was sorry.”
“Well, it’s very clear isn’t it, what you have got to do. You have to refrain from expressing negative emotion for one thing. You have to prepare for that, and it gives a meaning to your day. What else is important? The situation is a good one because you only have to go on, there is the material, it’s no good looking elsewhere.”
“You have got a special chance there, and by coming here you’ll get something which other people don’t have, and then you have to apply it. Also, see what you can pick up from the meeting tonight. Don’t identify with your own question for the next hour. Just see what comes up. Good.”
“Mr Adie,” said Tulip, “a few weeks ago, I received a lot from the weekend work. I was trying to observe my hands, and I tried to use that with my drawing at home. And the first time that I made that appointment when I was drawing, I found that it helped me to have a whole complete sense of myself.”
“And how well the hand went, without this tension without this trembling,” he replied.
“And it also helped me not identify with what I was trying or striving or in the ordinary way, an automatic part of me that tried to make the drawing look like something. And I found a great freedom in …”
“In seeing what it did do?”
“Yes. The observations haven’t been clear since the beginning and I found that, I’d find when I started to draw I’d remember my appointment and then I’d get lost again.”
“You see, you’ve got something extremely interesting there, if you can manage to benefit from it. Moving instinctive centre is extremely interesting to observe, and in drawing you’re not going at a speed in which is too quick to follow.”
I will pause to say that Mr Adie often referred to the advantage of following moving centre as it was operating, especially if not too quickly. “It is particularly useful if it’s not just sketching in, if there is a line. You’re an artist, if you could study this you see the inner use of Chinese and Japanese painting, their methods. They’re holding their instrument in the most difficult way possible, like this, and then they could do that, having prepared the paper, prepared the ink and everything, they just make that mark. They have to see what’s going to happen, what occurs with the hand. If there’s any fear there, if there’s any disturbance in the breathing or trembling in them, it will show it in the art, by the medium of the hand.”
“And then there’s the choice of the speed. There’s a tremendous amount to be gained in trying to divide the attention, on say, on moving centre and on instinctive centre, different parts, to try see two or three different parts simultaneously, particularly if you’re doing something that you’re exemplifying.” I think he meant showing or demonstrating to other people.
“You have to have something balanced and reliable here; there has to be an aim, a sustained direction, and then an observation. If you’re not actively engaged in much, if you’re sitting down, you have to be able to just turn it over to moving centre. But there’s this possibility with the mind, you can visualise say, a “circle,” and take a pencil and paper, the mind has visualised it, now, will the hand carry it out? Can it? The same sort of thing happens in the chanting: can I hear it? If I can hear it, the sound can appear.”
“And then, when I have another kind of problem, what can I do about that? Can I remember again and adopt some kind of physical attitude? Because, there’s all sorts of physical attitudes, you know how it is, children very often put their tongues out when they paint. You don’t do that, but you do something else. There are all sorts of set positions in the mouth that correspond to different efforts, and the observation of these is very, very informative, they go with different states and so forth. When you’re furious, when you’re calm, all the internal organs in the mouth are not in the same position, not at all. So, there’s a chance there in observing moving-instinctive centre in relation to your manifestation. Very practical.”
Joseph Azize, 21 March 2020
