Okay, the section to look at is on page 2. The Fragment. Let us start with Eric if you will and each in turn in clockwise direction let us type in for others who don't have book at moment.

Eric: One word, or sentence?

The Fragment. One line at a time. If you don't have the book then don't type in a line.

Workshop participants using their books typed in one line at a time from Chapter One, "The Fragment".

The Absolute is in need of a special activity called Prayer Absolute, which no other being but man, which is to say a three-centrum being with an awakened biological machine, can perform.

For some unfathomable reason, we of our generation do not know why, all throughout the history of human beings, a certain type of prayer was held to have some definite value to the Absolute.

And even though we today do not know exactly the purpose of Prayer-Absolute or of what value this activity may be to the Absolute, we know how it was performed and we have some serious indication that many saints and messengers have thought it so important that they risked their lives to reintroduce it into the life of man.

...but the Absolute is not in need of ordinary subjective prayer, which is to say supplication, for some personal favor to be granted by the Absolute for the gratification of the supplicant, but the prayer which is the reverse of what is ordinarily understood. No Prayer ordinary man performs in any ordinary way will suffice to alleviate the suffering of the Absolute.

Real prayer is a technical activity, not necessarily enjoyable or understandable. Ordinary ideas about prayer have no reality.

Prayer-Absolute is an entirely different activity in an entirely new category, requiring the temporary passage of those performing this service into much higher dimensions for the sake of the Absolute.

The exact technical method for Prayer-Absolute begins as fol...

In objective theatre it is a practice to get the momentum of the "play" up, get a running start as it were and continue one or two lines past the point of ending from the previous run-through adding a line or two each time and going until the thread of "on-ness" is lost. In this way theatre was more than an indulgence or method of pacifying the masses it was a method used to penetrate the unknown. More on that at another time -- another workshop.

There was a part early on in the fragment that I would like to go back to, the part about a three-centered being with an awakened machine. Not a trivial accomplishment. But, before I finish that thought let me tell you a little history about the Institute.

In early 1980s, EJ was giving talk after talk about how to use the attention to awaken the machine. The instruction was a simple one: "turn the blazing attention of the being upon the machine." It will awaken in reflex.

He kept giving this talk in various ways for days, weeks and months.

"Turn the blazing attention of the being upon the machine."

(This material made it into The Popcorn Talk amoung others.) Finally one day it dawned upon EJ the nature of the problem. We were not too dense to understand the instruction -- "Turn the blazing attention of the being upon the machine." We were not ignoring him. We were not by virtue of some perverse sense of humor refusing to turn our blazing attention upon the machine.

We had no "blazing" attention.

Our weak little run-down, single AAA battery flashlights did not qualify as "Blazing".

Shortly after this Zen Basics was born -- a full gamut of attention-training exercises was developed.

The Prayer Absolute thing starts with a three-centrum being with an awakened machine. Not just any three-centrum being -- a three centrum being in which the three centrums are wired up properly.

Not like us, where the emotional centrum is all mangled because we are using the other two centrums for the wrong work.

No, we are supposed to be using the head brain for its proper function, which is not thinking. That should be done by the tail brain.

All of the details of this are available through Gateways Books or a later workshop. The point is the centrums need to be rewired.

To rewire the centrums is easy. Just do the Popcorn Exercise utilizing your blazing attention and the machine will wake up. And eventually the head and tail brains will flip, automatically rewiring themselves, turning on the emotional center, allowing the organ of conscience to be resurrected and then you are on your way to being the aforementioned "simple three-centrumed being with an awakened machine."

THAT is the starting point for Prayer Absolute.

Is it any wonder that few of us blab on about how to do Prayer Absolute? We are strung out along the trail working our way up the mountain toward the starting point. Most are still at the beginning of getting a blazing attention.

What does IDHHB stand for? The acronym? Anyone?

That's right. The Institute for the Development of the Harmonious Human Being. And those of you that know the Institute, do you think Harmonious means "cool and groovy"?

No. (was the resounding response from the workshop attendees)

That's right. Harmonious is like in a chord of music in which several notes are struck at the same time.

That is because we can not afford to disregard other subjects, even subjects we are in no way prepared for, while we develop the preliminary. Even though we don't have a properly functioning three-centrums nor the awakened machine, nor the properly flipped head and tail brain, nor the attention required to do any of this, we can not afford to wait to deal with the other subjects while we work on attention.

It is not our way to stop everything else until the attention is developed. Even before you develop the mouth position required to play a proper note on a sax you still try to play scales and songs, inspite of the fact that you are totally unprepared.

Unfortunately in the case of Prayer Absolute, before one is prepared, it is impossible to know, to see, to feel, to sense, to in anyway know if one is doing it.

But that should not stop one. One must be willing to be a chump. Chump in the con sense - the one taken advantage of and made to be a fool.

I'm not saying you will be made a chump or taken advantage of and made a fool. One just needs to be willing to have that happen without getting all bent out of shape. Because one needs to be able to recognize and allow the recognition of your changing motivations as you move along the path toward your current (and almost impossible to imagine) goal of getting to the starting point of doing Prayer Absolute.

In the beginning it is inevitable. It is absolutely the way it is that you are trying to accomplish something other than Prayer-Absolute. You can't really have Prayer-Absolute as your goal because as we are we can't even dream of really seeing what it is or knowing what it is.

So like a sail boat on the water, when you sail you have to head toward some point. An outcropping of rocks, a lighthouse, that funny-looking tree on the other side of the lake, that cloud over there -- something.

You can't just sail toward nothing. In order to steer we need something to steer toward. All I'm saying at the moment is that the things we are able to see in order to steer toward them are inevitably not THE destination.

Was the tree or the cloud or the outcropping of rocks the destination in the metaphorical sailing example?

No. (was the response from the attendees)

That's right. But you don't see a sailor getting all weirded out because he or she comes to the horrible realization that the outcropping of rocks that he was so convinced was the TRUE destination of sailing was only one point in the more or less right direction. It is not a big deal for the sailor once they get close to the rocks to look around and pick another point to head toward.

So I say that we must be willing to be chumps in the sense that we allow ourselves to believe in the utter, absolute necessity of heading toward an outcropping of rocks, heading toward something that with enough thought we could determine was not possibly the real destination.

We have to be willing to be fools in THAT sense -- to allow ourselves to be duped, duped by our selves for the simple reason that we need to be able to have very important and very real goals. Because without some goal, some very visible goal, it is not possible to judge the simple question "am I still on course?" Without a goal there is no course.

So for the moment, even though I know it is totally stupid in the overall picture, I am spending time working on websites and other equally trivial endeavors. But in this sailing trip…

Attendee: Isn't showing up most of it?

Yes, I've heard it said that 90% of 'our' work is to "just show up".

Actually, it is a 100% of your work to show up because if you don't show up nothing is possible. But just showing up is not enough. And then again "just showing up" is something so impossible that one must "jump over one's own knees" to just show up.

There is one and only one thing that I know of that can see one through all of this. How can you proceed when you are subjected to the fact time after time that what you thought was your goal is wrong? Even when you get to the point of having "Alleviating the suffering of the Absolute" as your goal, you are still putting a relative understanding onto what that means. And any relative understanding you have is doomed to change. That is the nature of relative understanding.

So you are doomed to have the carpet pulled out from under you many times.

So, as I sail I know of only one thing that can see one through this. That something is a love for the Work.

A love for the Work is like a thread that you can throw back through time. Throw it back through your whole history forming a path that you can follow.

Love for the Work. You might not even be able to recognize it. You will undoubtedly call it something else if in fact you call it anything. It becomes an indefinable something that won't allow you to let go.

Even when you might find yourself standing at the tiller of the sail boat, lost with no clue as to direction -- the wind might be too harsh, too cold, too scary, too uncompromising, too unfeeling, it doesn't understand me, it doesn't support me in the custom I am comfortable with, the waves are too high -- all this and everything else can be going against you and it will be your "love of the work" that will not let you give up.

Sometimes I use a different visual image to bring this point across. Suppose I say to you, "Hey drop what you is doing and go pick up that thing lying in the street. There is a car coming and it might hit the thing lying in the streen. You might say, "I'm too busy. Go ask someone else." Or you might say, "So what, let the car swerve around it."

But if I tell you that "something" is a baby lying in the road you can not stop yourself from acting. Without time for consideration you will find yourself responding to the necessity of the moment. You don't have to go to workshops in order to learn to get up and go help that kid. I'm relaying that "love for the work" is the only factor that can keep one going.

It's the thing you have to stop everything else for....

That's right. But what if the kid needed something you didn't understand how to do? Then your drive to help might push you to work to find a way. Maybe you even go to medical school for 7 years or spend 20 years developing attention and presence so that your three centrums can be rewired so that you can do Prayer-Absolute. 

In the Institute, you will see a collection of many different lines of work all happening seemingly at once and you are invited to participate in all of those even though it's impossible that you are prepared. As you can imagine is this quite confusing to some folks. The question is often asked, "why are you always changing the trip?"

We are never changing the trip. There is only one "trip" That trip is to help alleviate the suffering of the Absolute. But what that means and how it manifests is never the same -- not even once. So the trip looks like it changes. You have within yourself a certain something that can hopefully act like a thread from Artemis helping you find your way through the Labyrinth. This thread is your "love of the work".

Poet: (Ariadne) I stand corrected. Thank you Poet.

Poet: Ariadne saved Theseus...from the Minotaur.

Thank you for also serving as an example of my next point. Very well timed Poet. The next point being: it is the companionship of other souls on the path that can help one to follow this thread. And they can help one do more, a certain something that is not possible alone. That happens to be the subject of the later chapters of "The Hidden Work".

I know Lily has a workshop waiting to be given that is in my opinion a beautiful step toward a gentle penetration of this subject. It will require that we retire to a different room.

And so ends the opening address.

General Xxaxx