Cultivating Emptiness To Experience Communion

This application for the 2017 Parallel Perception Scholarship was submitted by Henk.  If you would like to offer your support for Henk please leave a comment at the end of this blog post.

The Art of Stalking Parallel Perception introduced me to Lujan Matus and the knowledge he transmits. It communicated via an entirely unique and direct approach. All this fascinated my active mind and it wanted more, but what I needed was something entirely different. Reading this text is an encounter with not-doing, and one can go with it, or not.

Three years later, despite doubts due to no shortage of character assassination by several online detractors, silence beat inner-dialogue and I booked training with Lujan.

All Lujan’s books taught me many things, but none more than about the human condition and predicament, and through that also about myself. For the last three years I’ve been translating two of Lujan’s books as a means to engage the material. What a not-laugh!

I should have spent that time practicing Spiral Energetics. However, emerging myself in the semantic challenges of those long sentences that can swim with ever so nuanced variations of meaning -depending on who knows what, demanded a not-doing of reading. If all that taught me was that the answers are not in the mind, then that also was worth it.

Having spent time with Lujan I can attest that his books do not withhold information. The guidelines we need are all there. Lujan shares it also in interviews and in response to questions on the blog.

“You work with what you have,” Lujan says, and after years my mind has no counter arguments left. But something does -or thinks so. To believe in myself fully and to take full responsibility for myself still trips me up -or is it that something else that is in fact not me. But I know now that even the predator cannot be blamed, nor the social programming. I have to live how I am going to end up. That is what makes one a warrior despite whatever.

My training with Lujan was profound – and did I mention, physically more demanding then anything I had ever experienced. Sadly, all that magic did not make it home. It was not life that repeatedly beat me. It was my own lack of belief in myself. Knowing may just be a not-doing of belief. Equally paradoxically, that is what makes the warrior, since only persistence can entrain that knowing.

Spending time with Lujan exposed me to the teachings in action. That is where I learnt about magic in the mundane, this mundane world we already inhabit with what we need. This includes the challenges we face, our portals to growing into more of who we are waiting to evolve to.

Different aspects of Lujan’s teachings resonate with people differently -as is only natural. Interacting with Lujan has allowed me to experience and feel how an empty heart relates, even in the most mundane situations. It enabled me to experience communion and I can ask for nothing more. It did not merely convince me that the ‘promises’ of the teachings are real, it made this a knowing. It bears mention that what I thought I would receive was way off – in stead, I got what I need.

For me the movement practices of Lo Ban Pai ultimately amount to ‘communion in gestures’. The magic lies in the emptiness it creates inside, into which the spirit may enter to commune with the practitioner. Lo Ban Pai, then, trains the cultivation of emptiness so that one may also have such communion with others. This state of being allows another to enter one, revealing their need so that one may be of service to them. There can be no higher communion -perhaps because it makes us one. Is it not the ineffable in another that we yearn to connect with? How does one know oneself without the other who in such communion reveals one to oneself?

This and other learnings is why I urge others, and yearn myself, for interaction with Lujan.

The magic of Lo Ban Pai is only partly in the ‘formula’, the major part it is in the daily application, the practice, despite whatever. That is the ingredient the practitioner is responsible for.

These gestures can only be transmitted in communion. They can speed up one’s progress because they create a space for one to see what needs to be done -not as a mental inference, but as an embodied knowing. Not out there, not in the mind, but here in the body. I have no regret for wanting that.

Yours in communion.

Henk
South Africa