The Gardner said:
Could this terms also explain your exposittion?
In part. By body, I mean the whole of it. We often tend to think of the body as a piece of meat, or a vessel, and in a way it is. However, the body also sustains our capacity for awareness. The brain and nervous system, are also of the body. As physical beings, we sustain a mind that is impaired if the organs sustaining it are impaired.
We can, in fact, trace psychopathy in the body, and if is safe to say that there is no psychopathy if it is not physiologically reflected. So let me use the term body/mind to include this whole.
The body (or body/mind whole) IS action, in my view. However, I need to qualify this, to make it clearer, according to my own take, of course. The body/mind can be seen to sustain five basic dynamics (there are two more, which are not within the scope of this discussion).
In the hypothesis I am presenting, you can model these dynamics in four directions around a center. The center is the essence of personal being. We can call this the soul, for lack of a better word. This soul is scattered and fragmented in most people, and I agree with Gurdjieff in that it needs to be precipitated or crystallized.
The body moderates the extention of this fundamental essence of our individualized being with the world. It does so through four fundamental dynamics one can imagine surrounding the soul, and these can be organized on two axes.
One axis represents a past/future orientation, and the other an inner/outer orientation. The past is more than temporal here, and includes our vast repository of experience, which is contained in the body through our genetic patterns. These represent the accumulation of an evolutionary process culminating in us as our genetic heritage. So the body is in one sense a hall of records that we must unlock, and repository of evolutionary experience, and yes this includes what we call karma (especially when we think of body in terms of body/mind).
The future is the void where all possibilities of expression lie. It is the realm of choices, and the unknown. It is the horizon of our learning. Although one may posit theories of existent futures, in a free will reality every future is indeterminate. There may be tendencies, and their may be purpose, and there may be blocks, but the essential nature of the future as a path that precipitates as our present is indeterminate and open-ended.
So orientation to this void is another one of the body's modes of action. An individual's capability to address this void of what is not-yet, through accessing his/her past experience in a correspondingly capable and response-able fashion is the hallmark of the warrior of essence in my view.
You can metaphorically consider this "past/future" line to be oriented in terms of back and front in spacial terms. These intersect at the present moment, which is the home of what we can call the soul.
From the soul center extends another axis, (again metaphorically) at right angles to the first (forming a cross with it). This is the axis of inner/outer. To avoid confusion, the soul is the inner world, but as the center it also acts as a lens. Through its lens we have the relationship between the world and our model of it. In the inner/outer axis as I describe it here, the "inner" part represents the model of the world we hold in our neuronic structures.
This includes thoughts, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, biases, and anything that structures what we call the world of the subjective. Its nature is coherent with the present moment, or rather the here and now presence of our individualized essence. When that essence is not crystallized the lense is either lacking, distorted, corrupted/"dirty" or something else is imitating it.
This inner direction is the universe within, and this is structured by our neuronal matrix, as Laura described in detail. Ideally, the inner world is meant to reflect or lens (acting as the retina in the eye) the universe without. When the lens is clear we call our inner world objective. Hence, a clear sense of self results in clear vision or seeing. Since this physiologically depends on our neuronal state, including its biochemistry, it is a function of that action capacity of the body/mind, and as such a warrior of essence must master it.
This internal modal of the world also stands as the basis for our "outer" orientation, which is what we would normally think of as our mode of action. This mode of action constitutes our relationship with the world at any given moment, and ideally is also a function of the central essence of being we can call soul.
What you describe through you reference to Castanenda as the discipline of the warrior most visibly pertains to our direct relationship with the world. In this sense, the clear soul lens moderates the relationship between inner and outer bidirectionally (it goes both ways).
So when our inner world is objectively structured we do not sustain judgments, nor do we hold self-pity or self importance because these do not constitute accurate reflections of reality. They are subjective infestations growing in our inner world model due to disconnection with the outer world, because of the lack of a clear soul-lens.
And it goes without saying that the axis of inner/outer is sustained by our body (contained as inner, and expressed outwardly). The task of the warrior of essence is to precipitate and integrate the essence of their central being with body/mind, so the latter is an uninhibited membrane of its action and nature, and not a rigid shell enclosing it. The task of the warrior is to, furthermore, activate, align and balance the other four dynamics I described around this center. And here, again, the field is body (or rather body/mind).
The result of this balance is objective, balanced relationship with the moment of eternity both in its relation with inner and outer orientations, and its relation to the directions of past and future.
I hope I have not veered off too much from your question in my attempts to elaborate.
