Disobedience and Its Folly

A lot of one’s inner work turns out, for one reason or another, to be a struggle with one's self over parts one perceives as being disobedient. 

Nonconforming. 

This has, as it happens, a great deal to do with the passage from Beelzebub’s Tales as quoted in the last post. 

Keep my simplified translation in mind:

…no matter who they are, if people are able, in the midst of all external circumstances, whether favorable or unfavorable, to weigh the collision between their expectations and what actually happens, they can correctly evaluate how important they are, and what their place in the world is.  

The question of obedience, of what conforms and what does not, rises precisely in this collision between our expectations and what actually happens. We expect ourselves to be good, then discover we aren't; or we expect the world to be good, and then it isn't. Of course, the converse is true as well in both cases. That is not the point. The point, as Gurdjieff draws our attention to it, is that we have a set of expectations in the first place; the world collides with it – inevitably, because the world has, in objective measurement, precisely zero to do with our expectations—and then we find out.

Er, what do we find out? 

Precisely that. That the world has nothing to do with our expectations.

Yet our ego and most of our life is formed in a very hardened and rigid kernel around our expectations. Gurdjieff suggests that we ponder how important we are and what our place in the world is according to the weight of our observations—our objective observations—about what is. 

In the end, it adds up in simple English to an act of seeing our own nothingness.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise readers that we find out that in the end, Gurdjieff used 145 words to say, in what I’m pretty sure is the most very complicated way possible, that we should see our own nothingness 

– four words. 

In the last essay, we reduced Gurdjieff's excess verbiage by a lightweight 60%. In these four words, seeing our own nothingness, one has actually removed 97% of his single-sentence paragraph and thereby reduced it to an adage famous in his work. If that trend is extrapolated, it turns out the book has the potential to be only 34 pages long. 

Worth pondering.

All humor aside, I actually intend to make a point about obedience. The dilemma in front of us is whether to obey our own ego, or obey the facts about the world. Despite the insistent perspective of my all-controlling ego, I actually have no control over the disobedient world—or my disobedient parts. 

Yet both inwardly and outwardly I too often find myself in a pitched battle with one, or both of them, same time. This is a battle I'm not going to win.

As I suggested to someone recently, a more productive approach might be as follows: 

Don't focus on what is disobedient and resist it. 

Find what is obedient and train it.

Not all of us is in rebellion. We can perhaps work more productively with what is, rather than what isn't.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.