Technique

Isabel's grave.

April 30

Yes, the birds are singing.

It's gray, wet, and still raining outside—it will rain all day. Undeterred, the female redwing blackbirds are patrolling the strip of grass in front of our house, looking for breakfast victims. To us, they are small and beautiful and bring joy. To insects, they are enormous and deadly.

We are somehow able to hold these contradictions in front of us and understand both of them.

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about our current situation. It seems huge and deadly, this disease; but there is beauty and joy in life nonetheless. The bad cannot destroy the good; they come together, in the day and the night, and meet in us.

I keep hearing the phrase “… when this is over and I can get back to my life" being used to describe the wish that this ordeal with the virus were over. Every time I hear it, it sounds ridiculous, because we are already in our lives: there’s nothing to get back to.

What the phrase actually means is that I essentially identify who I am, what my life is—what life means—with the routine I’m used to and expect. Not to what's actually happening now. This pathology of perspective is so deep-seated that in a subtle and unexamined way, I consistently reject life as it is in favor of some idea I have of it.

How it ought to be.

This may not be such a big deal in a superficial way, because I suppose we all understand the phrase is what we call a 'manner of speaking.' It does, however, expose the soft underbelly of our attitude towards our life and our habits. I suspect there’s a an undercurrent in all of us that rejects life as it is. Why else would we destroy the planet in our desperate efforts to find some better future that isn't there? The present becomes an acceptable casualty. Necessary collateral damage, we think to ourselves.

This actually goes on in us every day. It is not just an outward action: it begins within us.

Few question it.

We want something different; we want something better. Above all, we want-want-want. There’s an underlying greed of ego at work here. It reminds me of Epictetus, who said in the Encheiridion, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”

The word want derives from an Old Norse word vanta, which means what is lacking. We think something is lacking with things as they are.

Epictetus’ remedy for a “tranquil flow of life”—inner peace, if you will—is to cultivate a desire for things to be as they are.

This certainly sounds like a strange twist for desire. After all, isn't desire always construed as aspirational?

How would that square as a desire for things to be as they are?

It's an aspiration for what it is. This is, in essence, a search for truth. Truth is only and ever found in things as they are, objectified and set aside from my desires.

This came up recently in a conversation where I pointed out that we live in a world of technique. The number of manuals and formulations that get published on an annual basis advising us of what techniques we should use to get better results in every area of life, from how to bake bread to our spiritual well-being, is simply astonishing. Never mind which techniques are offered; ultimately, we're trained like Pavlov's dogs to believe that technique is necessary. There is a method. Never mind what method; there is one. We can argue about the methods (a lot—after all, it’s certain my method is better in every possible way than yours!) later. But there is no doubt there's a method. A technique.

The word technique, however, betrays itself the moment we use it. It comes from the Greek tekhnē, which means art—bringing to mind the well-known phrase, "it's an art, not a science."

Art begins with a creative emotional force. It isn’t just a collection of analytics and skills: it involves imagination and intuition, feeling. If we reduce it to a set of well-executed techniques, already, it isn't art anymore.

Gurdjieff once said, when asked what method one should use to develop spiritual Being,"I know of no methods.” This from a man who seems at times (at least in the books about him) to recommend an endless stream of exercises and methods. He wrote a few books; and birthed ever more of them by proxy.

But when it came to practice, he threw them all out.

There is no book that writes down what life can bring us. We have an organism that can receive its impressions; and those—the truth—are the very selfsame things that represent Epictetus’ “things as they are.”

The art of living, not the technique of living, is to inhabit things as they are. This is where truth is located; directly around me, right now, in things as they are. Not the way I want them to be or expect them to be or plan for them to be in the future.

Just quite simply as they are now.

Life arises quite naturally without techniques; it arises naturally from within, and naturally from without. Every attempt to use force to manipulate this is not an understanding, but in a substantially misguided effort to control what is already naturally whole.

To receive what is already naturally whole within being is a whole action in itself; and it answers, if one lets it, the question of what is lacking both in myself and the world that mirrors my desires. This is a simple action that also arises naturally.

It can manifest itself with ease when I stop interfering.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.