Zen Process DYNAMICA Interview with Glen River by Irene McGarrity Irene: Welcome to an interview with Glen River on Zen Process Dynamica. Glen, about how long did it take for all of this information to accumulate and then culminate into Dynamica? Glen: Well actually, it started a long time ago. I got interested, when I was a teenager, in Harry Houdini because he was working with illusion. And so, I was interested in things that appeared to be something but weren’t. So you had to take a closer look at them. Most of his illusions were made possible because he was like a yogi, only it was sort of like self-hypnosis. He could hold his breath underwater for an incredibly long time. He could contort his body into positions so he could escape from handcuffs and stuff. But a lot of it was tricks, and so I learned a lot of the tricks he was using in his illusions. He was actually interested in spiritualism, but he was like a big spiritualist fake buster. He would disprove people who were using trickery to pull the wool over other people’s eyes. So then I got interested in hypnotism and in learning systems which were based on trying to access the deep mind. And then I think there was, like, a qualitative change where I started knowing I was developing my own system. It happened when I started reading a book by Ouspensky called In Search of the Miraculous. It was based on the teachings of Gurdjieff. So then I read a lot more of those, and then I also got interested in the Sufi masters and got my hands on a book called The Enclosed Garden of Truth. I was also influenced by Rudolf Steiner and his ideas. So all of it was leading in a direction of looking at conceptual spiritual models, learning processes, and the way we relate to our deep mind. It didn’t come out in terms of the Zen Process Dynamica until, I would say, the late eighties. Irene: Okay, so you were interested in Houdini initially. Were you also interested in Physics, the natural world, and Zen? Or were those things that came into your process later on as you were developing Dynamica? Glen: No, it all started earlier. Houdini was practicing a kind of Zen. He could control his heart rate; he could control his fear. One of the things that he talked about a lot was controlling fear because he had a limited amount of time in which he had to escape a box that was thrown into a lake or something. So he had to defy this fear process in order to function successfully. And this is a basic concept of Zen. Like in Zen archery, for instance, the concept is that you have to be totally calm all the time. The same thing with a warrior discipline like Bushito. The whole concept is that in the midst of battle, in the midst of conflict, in the midst of a situation where a fight or flight impulse would send your adrenaline through the roof, you have to remain calm so that you can function. Irene: It sounds like a lot of people could benefit from learning how to control their fear. I mean, not just real life fears, like Houdini escaping from a locked box underwater but, everyday anxiety. Zen Process Dynamica could probably help them remain calm through it. What other things do you see people getting out of going through the Dynamica workshop? Glen: Well, the basic concept is to know yourself better. That’s at the heart of the whole thing. So, controlling fear, getting to know what your fears are better, is like a way of knowing yourself. And then being able to sort out what’s real and what’s not. Fear is a great teacher, if it’s correct. If it’s an appropriate fear, then it can save you from danger. So then, getting to know yourself better, even if fear is not like an overwhelming concern for you, if you’re a creative person who needs to have clarity in their creative path, then it’s a big benefit to understand what kind of mechanisms exist in your deep mind. A mechanism is something that’s enabling your creative process or blocking it. So if it’s blocking it, you want to be able to understand it and identify it so you can either work around it, if it’s something that’s too heavily entrenched in your childhood, or remove it if it’s something that’s manageable. Irene: So it’s not just about getting rid of the “bad” traits that block you. Part of the process is learning about them and learning how to deal with them. So would you say that acceptance is a part of it too? Glen: Yeah, there’s a lot that you can’t change. So you have to accept things and work with them. It’s like, I have a friend who had limited vision in one eye. He couldn’t change the ability of that eye to see better, so he had to do a work around. He had to figure out ways to compensate for that limitation. There are times when you’re just not going to be able to change yourself so dramatically. It’s commonly referred to as a work around. It’s a way of still figuring how to achieve the success your looking for in spite of an obstacle. Irene: Part of Zen Process Dynamica is what you call “the language of resonance.” Could you explain that a little bit? Glen: If you have an instrument which has sympathetic strings, lets say, the most obvious is a sitar which has a number of strings that someone can play, then it has what are called resonant strings. They just vibrate because of the vibrations of the other strings. In other words, the player isn’t even touching those strings, but just the vibration of those other strings are activating them. Well, we have things like that in our deep mind. We can have an association that has a vibration pattern to it. And when we have an experience that sets up a similar vibration, there’s a sympathetic resonance with that element in our deep mind. It could be associated with anything. Very often, a child associates affection and acceptance with its mother’s face. So as soon as its mother walks in the room, a child will feel more secure. It will feel accepted. That’s a resonance-based communication. Irene: Okay. What would you say is the difference between the “deep mind” and the “unconscious?” Or is there a difference? Glen: There are differences and there’s some disagreement about how to define them. Some people use brain wave patterns to define different areas of the mind. Of course some neurologists use physical localities like the cerebral cortex or the frontal lobe. People who use brain wave patterns would use beta waves lengths, alpha wavelengths, theta wavelengths, and delta wavelengths. The delta wavelengths being the deepest area of activity that the least is known about. At the theta wave length, that’s not quite a comatose area. In theta areas, you lose pain sensations. Alpha wave lengths are where most meditation goes on, and beta wave lengths are where a lot of active, hyper-active brain activity happens. Most anger produced events happen in beta wave lengths. So these are ways of looking at it. Psychologists would have a completely different division through the personal iconography of associations. When you have a machine, and you teach the machine something new, then you have to be very aware of the programming. Once the machine learns this process, then the programming can be pushed to an unconscious sub-routine. This is what happens with us all the time. We all know how to tie our shoelaces. We can do it automatically without having to think about it, so that’s become a subconscious sub-routine. But at one time in our lives, we had to work at it. We had to learn how to do that, and it was very conscious. So there’s this continuing process where we’re doing things in the conscious mind and then sending it into the subconscious to stay there and keep working. When things work well, that’s great, but when something’s not working, and we’re not sure why it’s not working, then it becomes a problem. Irene: Do you think that somebody who’s communicating enough or in touch enough with their “deep mind” would have psychic abilities? Like having the ability to predict what’s going to happen in their future or other people’s futures? Glen: There are different aspects to consider in terms of predicting the future. One individual once described predicting the future like this: Let us say you have a table which you were viewing the surface of and you had a coffee cup on it. You want to know what was going to happen in the future. Well, someone might take that coffee cup away, or they might put down a plate, or something like that. But by limiting your view and focusing on that table, you can, with much more accuracy, predict the future. That’s a completely logical process. A lot of times, people are looking for an intuitive or psychic way of generating images of their future. You can do this, but the accuracy would be something that would have to be on an individual basis. But just like with the table, if you prepare yourself for a certain future, for example, if you give yourself an education that prepares you to be an accountant, chances are you’ll be able to find yourself a job in the field of accounting. There are some completely down to earth, practical elements to this kind of thing. Irene: Would you say that the images in the deep mind are archetypal, personal and specific to each individual, or a little of both? Glen: They’re a little bit of both. Ultimately, they’re specific to each person. For one person, black could be white, red could be green. In other words, all universal symbols can be changed according to the pattern set up by the individual. Universal archetypes are things like the mother, the father, and the job. These are like things that are so similar for so many people that they become universal. And some of them, in particular, the family archetypes, are so powerful that they tend to dominate the landscape. But certainly, if you take something like a pet, you don’t really have a universal archetype. One person will have a dog, one person will have a cat, and one person will have a hamster. So the imagery relating to what they feel a pet is, is very different. Irene: Part of the Dynamica process is creating a self-portrait. During the process of developing this program, did you create your own self-portrait? And what was that like? Glen: I did. And the self-portrait is an important process. It’s an ongoing process. Basically, in the workshop, you make a book. And the book has three parts. The first part is a self-portrait, the second part is the portrait of the world that you live in, because we all live in different worlds, and the third part is the relationship between the two which we call the dynamics (hence the name Dynamica). So this resolution is an important concluding part, and it’s an ongoing process. In my own experience, it changed quite a bit during different points in time. We’re taking a series of snapshots and something that was very valid when you were in your twenties, ten years later, may not be as valid. You may have had a family, a change of job, had children. The whole outlook of your world situation could have changed significantly. So, it is an ongoing process. Irene: Another part of the Dynamica workshop is learning about seeing clearly, perception, and the way we think. Do you feel that learning about brain functioning, as far as technical specifics like neurons firing, is important in terms of understanding personal perception and cognition? Glen: Well that’s a question that has a relative answer. You don’t need to know how a radio works to get the use of a radio. But you have to know where the “on” knob is, and the volume knob, and how to tune it. So you do have to know some thing about it, but you don’t have to be an expert. One of the many realities we deal with is that you have to be your own psychiatrist; you have to be your own analyst; you have to be your own advisor. This is a reality for the simple reason that you’re the only one who’s there all the time. You have to be the one to do that work. You don’t have to be an expert in all these fields, and you don’t need to know your neurological make up of your brain, but you need to know that if there’s a problem, you need to find a solution for it. That’s only one issue. The way that your mind works is more pertinent. You don’t need to know technicalities, but you do need to be able to recognize self-defeating, automatic, embedded responses. Let’s say you really want to learn how to be a good cook, but for some reason, something’s blocking you. You can’t even take out a bowl and mix anything without having a small panic attack, or you may be putting it off and distracting yourself with a million other things, until it’s too late to cook, and you just get take out. Well, maybe you had some trauma in your childhood about cooking. Every time you tried to cook, something bad happened. That’s just an example. But the point is, you have to be able to research the way your mind works in order to get to the bottom of something like that. Irene: Do you think it’s possible to completely deprogram yourself? Or are there always going to be residual programming things that affect your behavior? Glen: I think there’s going to be residual programming that you may not be able to get at. But then, you know, there’s some programming that’s shielded from our consciousness for a good reason. For instance, our heart beat, is not accessible to us. There are some yogis who can influence their heart beat, but to simply stop your heart, or to start it again, is something which is kept out of our consciousness because it would be destructive for us to flirt with it in some frivolous way. There are several mechanisms like that, that have a very good reason for not being available to us. In other words, we don’t want to go tampering around with stuff that we don’t really know much about. But if we understand that we have something blocking us, then we need to clear it in order to get on with our creative process. It’s important to be able to understand how these things work. Irene: When you talk about reconciling between the “ego” and the “deep mind,” do you mean ego in the same sense that a psychologist would mean it? Or is your term “ego” a little bit different? Glen: The classical psychologists and psychiatrists use the “ego” as a conscious working area, which is interacted with by the “id” and the “superego.” And that’s one point of view. Since that time, there have been many other ideas as to how the mind, as opposed to the brain, works. And certainly Carl Jung came in with a much more flexible concept of the mind and had some strong ideas about a shared mind pool. But when we’re speaking about the “ego,” we’re speaking about your conscious self. “I am this. I live on such and such street, in such and such town.” That whole process of identification comes from the ego. And the ego is what says, “I think I’m tired. I think I’ll go to sleep.” That’s all in the conscious, working, momentary consciousness. So the idea is to get the ego and the deep mind to harmonize in terms of self-image and cooperation. Irene: What are “probable match” and “cross-matching?” Glen: There’s a process called “pattern recognition” which is one of the most common ways that our mind works. Let’s say we see someone approaching us, and we say, “oh, that looks like a man. No, maybe that’s a woman.” So we match it up from our past experiences and as the person approaches, we say, “Oh, yes. It’s a woman.” That’s an identification of a type. It’s through a matching system that’s taking this new image and cross referencing it with our past images of similar situations, and we’re trying to make a match so that we can recognize a pattern. It’s the same thing with the face of the mother. We’re matching the face as it comes into the room with our past experiences in which it’s been the mother, and then we have this resonant response at having made that match, a match that associates with all of our past experiences. Irene: When you say “The key to the door of the ‘deep mind’ is earned by respect and worthiness,” do you mean respect for the natural world, respect for the deep mind, personal integrity, self-respect, or a combination of all of these? Glen: I mean a combination of those. One of the ways that you can enter a level of the deep mind is to think of it as a secured area. If you were working at a company, and you had only been working there for three weeks, they wouldn’t necessarily want you to have access to all of the secrets that the company has. So there’s certain areas that they don’t let you into. And certainly with computers, that’s true. But as they gain confidence that you are an honest person, someone who would deal with them in an honest way and not steal their information, then they give you a higher security rating. You can gain access to more information. So this is what earning respect is about. If you have a friend, your friend is not going to tell you all of her personal secrets after three days of knowing you. But if she’s known you for a long time, and you’re a good friend and she trusts, then she’ll tell you things that she wouldn’t tell someone else. It’s the same thing with accessing the deep mind. The system of chivalry is based on this. In order for warriors to be strong, they had to be honest. And if they weren’t honest, God would be against them. Not only God as an external icon of an omnipotent force, but also their own mind. If your deep mind disapproves of what you’re doing, if what you’re doing is somehow self-destructive or against your basic nature, than you’re gong to have less cooperation from the deep mind. This is the process of gaining respect. By becoming dependable, you’re establishing a relationship where the deep mind knows what it can expect from you. Irene: So if you’re doing things that are self-destructive, or against your nature, does the deep mind begin to play tricks on you to try and get you to stop, or does it just kind of shut down and stop communicating with you? Glen: Well, shutting down is the quickest response, but it depends on degrees and kinds of activity. I think that a lot of law enforcement people believe that criminals have a subconscious urge to get caught because they’re unhappy with their activities. However, they may also be unhappy with the results of being caught, so there’s a lot of internal conflict. Internal conflict is usually the result. Another example is if your best friend has trusted you with the knowledge that she’s hidden her life savings somewhere, and you’re really desperate for money, and so you’re thinking about steeling it. But this is your best friend. So you’re really conflicted and you’re having a lot of emotional strife considering betraying her in order to get the money but ultimately losing her friendship and trust. That’s the kind of thing that can cause a gridlock between your ego and your deep mind. This eventually becomes very debilitating. Irene: Part of the Dynamica workshop involves answering a series of questions. How do you feel the answers to these questions will help people move towards self-awareness? Glen: Well, all of the processes in the Dynamica workshop are there to create images and information for each individual person. For example, you might have an astrology chart that you look at from time to time, not because you believe that astrology is going to give you all the answers, but it’s a mechanism that’s producing information. And then you would look at that information and bring your own interpretations to it. In other words, you wouldn’t look at it as an important document that you couldn’t tamper with; you would immediately tamper with it. You would immediately throw out pieces of it that you felt weren’t resonating with you. You wouldn’t think that they were important. You would only consider what you felt was resonating directly with the issues you were dealing with. It’s the same thing with the questions. The questions are trying to create a pool of response so that you have a lot of images and information to select from. And you would only choose the images that you had strong feelings about, that you felt were relevant. The entire process is about your life and your world, so you have to be the judge. You have to make these decisions about what’s important. Irene: Do you think meditation is something that everyone should do? Or are there some people who it just isn’t right for? Glen: Well there are several parts to it. First, there’s semantics. I was talking to a friend the other day and I said, “Remember before we knew the definition of meditation, and we used to say, ‘well, you know, I think you’re thinking too much. Just try and feel it out. Don’t think so much about it.’” So there is the issue of semantics. A lot of people may do what one person describes as meditation in their natural process, but that person might just consider it being reflective. So really, I don’t think the names matter very much. And anyone who is uncomfortable with meditating certainly doesn’t have to. But I think they should find some way of being able to relax and let go of thoughts that are disturbing. There are some thoughts that we need a rest from. It’s like having a hassle that’s dogging your trail. You need a break; you need a vacation; you need to be able to relax and refresh yourself. Then you can come back to whatever it is that’s bothering you with a rested outlook. So basically, for people who are uncomfortable with a process described as meditation, maybe they can find some other way to take a little break. Irene: Could you explain what “Models” and “Molds” are? Glen: Yes. A model is an image we use. You’ve heard the expression “a role-model,” such and such person is a role-model.” That means he is a person that others look towards to emulate. A model is an icon of becoming. How are we going to become? We use this model to help us create a vision of what we want to become. A mold is a tool for creating copies. When we find a mold or an icon that we like, that’s when we use a mold to make copies of it. So, in our personal iconography, if we had this icon that we thought was working really well for us, we would want to mold it. Irene: What is a “multi-faceted image?” And how does that fit in with molds and models, the deep mind and Dynamica? Glen: A multi-faceted image is an image that has a lot of sides. Sometimes we can see the sides and other times we can’t. You’ve heard the expression, “Oh, that person is two-faced.” That’s two-faceted. That means that person is lying or misrepresenting something because they have another side to them which is very different. Well, many things that we discover and that we try to deal with have many sides. One of the things we learn is that the world is not linear. The world is spherical. And part of that understanding is that there are many sides to everything. In order to have an image that’s going to work for us, not only now in the moment, but in the future, it’s better to understand the many sides to this image. It’s important to understand the different facets, so that we’re not just stuck with this one image that isn’t going to work for us twenty minutes from now because the environment has changed a little bit. Irene: How can we use the spiral as a structural tool for our own life? Glen: The spiral is taken as a basic concept. The universe is based on a spiral orbital path, and we take this concept into our own lives. Think of the way we grow and mature. We start out on this orbital path which goes through time, but it doesn’t go in a straight line. We go through cycles of expansion and contraction, periods of time when we’re more gregarious and when we’re more private. The same thing is true for the seasons. They come and go, but they’re never quite the same. They’re not on a circular path, they’re on a spiral-orbital path. They are similar because they go through the same cycles and the same seasons, but each one is different, and each one is part of the evolution that’s going on in time. It’s the same thing with our lives. Our lives are similar because we are who we are, and we bring our selves to new experiences, but the experiences keep changing. We evolve and change as time goes on by going through these cycles and seasons, and bringing ourselves again and again to each new experience. This is how we form the concept of the spiral-orbital path. Irene: What do you think is the hardest part of the Zen Process? Glen: Actually, there’s sort of a contradiction in terms there. I think for myself, in the early stages, I had an idea of a degree of difficulty. That dificulty is defigned as being able to work hard and achieve a certain goal. Sometimes in Zen Process, this may not be completely appropriate. For instance, in order to achieve something that’s difficult, you’re better equipped than you necessarily think. So, sometimes in accepting the difficulty, you’re sort of creating problems for yourself; where as, if you relax and sort of take things as they come, it’s much easier. You can get better results and actually achieve a difficult goal. It’s sort of like a baseball player who’s really great at hitting home runs. And someone says, “how do you do it?” And then he starts thinking about it ... then all of a sudden, he can’t hit the ball anymore. So, allowing a process to go on, on an unconscious level, and trusting that process, and having an intuitive relationship with it, as opposed to feeling like you have to understand every aspect of how it functions, can sometimes pose a difficulty for people. Irene: Do you think it’s possible for us as humans to reach the speed of light? Glen: Well, I think the speed of light is something which exists. It’s there; it’s in our world; it’s part of our lives. But the idea of getting into a car, and going faster and faster until we reach the speed of light is probably not very practical. But I think you might do better with thoughts. If you had thoughts that became pure energy, they might be more apt to attain the speed of light than putting your body in a vehicle. Irene: What do you see as the point where thought, energy, soul, matter, and God come together? Glen: The idea of all directions coming together, and all forces, has been described as the “axis munde” by the Eastern thinkers. And this would be a point where all directions come together. That’s used as a conceptual definition to allow us to form ideas that transcend polarity. One of the things, one of the events that governs our lives, is polarity. It starts almost as soon as we are conceived by the union of the sperm and the egg. As soon as the fetus is fully formed, it starts being divided into polarities. There are sexual polarities, genetic polarities, and the genetic chain is a spiral- orbital information event. So the fact that we’re living on something that’s a spinning magnet, something which has momentum, centrifugal force, gravity, and all of this affects our spirol-orbital world. So, the idea of us transcending these forces and arriving at a vision of unity, which goes beyond these experiences, is very often described as a religious or transcendent concept leading to God or a similar enraptured experience. Irene: What are “energy field forms?” Glen: Energy field forms can be explained by thinking of striking a match. Suddenly there’s a light, and a flame. This is an Omni-directional field form. Suddenly, in all directions, it flares out and light up. And then it’s effected by the atmosphere and gravity. Little bits of the sulfur will fall to the earth, the smoke will rise up in the air, and suddenly all the forces governing the environment of this field form start shaping it so that it’s no longer Omni-directional. And then the flame continues. So this natural event of this field form is Omni-directional, but it’s immediately shaped by its environment. We use this model to understand what happens to us when we have a thought that we want to bring into the real world. It can be perfect in our imagination, where there is no gravity or atmosphere. A form like this can exist in perfect symmetry. But as soon as we bring it into the real world, it’s shaped by these defining qualities, and it changes. This is an example of the Dynamica between a field form and its world. We use this to understand our portrait, the portrait of the world we live in, and what happens between the two. Irene: What’s a proto-structure? Glen: A proto-type is something you start working on in order to arrive at a structure. It’s like the original. Whenever a car manufacturer makes a car, they begin by making one car, and that car is a proto-type or proto-structure. Then they start modifying it. And through these modifications, they come to a model which they might like. And this model would be molded and that mold would be sold as the finished product. So the proto-type is the original form that we’re working with. It’s still an abstract form and it’s still in the creative process. It’s not been implemented yet, and it’s not been put on the assembly line. So that’s where we do most of our work. Our research and development is on a prototypical form. Irene: Is there anything you do during the workshop to help people continue with the process after the workshop, or is that pretty much up to them? Glen; No. Continuing the work is the point. The workshop is a jumping off place to get people to a point where they can continue the work. They are the only ones that can do it, but this is one of the things the workshop is actually addressing. It’s about yourself, your world, and where you want to go. That’s also why we make a book. We like to say, “we do things by the book.” The book is our tool, our method of understanding, and we need it to keep doing the work. So when someone comes to their first workshop, they start working on their first book. Then they take that book home with them, where they can continue the work, and update it at a later time. If they came to another workshop, they would bring that book with them. Then they would either start a new book, or start a new chapter within that book, or go through a review process. Like I said, this is an ongoing thing. The whole process of self-awareness is a cycle of continuation. A process of continuing to do the work in order to gain insight and improve the quality of life. Irene: Thank you for joining us on this interview with Glen River about Zen Process Dynamica. © 2004 Glen River Publications ~ Reprint permission is granted to members of the press.