Being crabby

We live in a world in which everyone says, “I am this. I am that.”

That is to say, folks identify themselves with some defining feature and glue it on to who they are as people in the same way that some crabs glue bits of coral to their hard carapaces to disguise themselves.

We all do this. When I was relatively young, I decided I was an artist. This was my persona for most of my adult life, up until I was 46 years old. I went to school to study art, got an art degree, produced a lot of art. Some of it was even decent enough, by average standards. But in my own eyes, I was never really that good; and on June 6, 2001, exactly 19 years ago, I woke up in the morning—

and I wasn't an artist anymore.

So you see, this is a bit of an anniversary for me. Which is why I'm speaking about something I almost never mention to people.

This event is kind of hard to explain. What happened is that the night before, a great light came down into me. We'll just leave it at that for now.

The next morning I woke up completely different inside; nothing about me was the same as it had been when I went to bed the night before.

I'd been transformed.

In that process, everything that had decided I was an artist was sheared off and left behind. I still have a strong interest in art, especially art history, but I have done very little art since then. I stopped identifying myself as an artist. I have, for that matter, stopped identifying myself as a writer, photographer, poet, businessman, or what have you. I do all those things. But they are not who I am.

I am just a human being. All the other features come after that.

Incidentally, I've pointed out to people on many occasions since then that it turns out I spent more than 35 years believing I was an artist, and it turned out I was completely wrong.

If I was that wrong about something that important to me for that many years...

what else am I wrong about?

Gurdjieff taught his pupils to say, “I am.” It comes with various exercises in sensing the body and so on; and the presumption is that some special kind of consciousness may arrive if I do this enough. (Beware of confirmation bias in such things.) But it could be that that presumption is wrong; wrong in the sense that what the exercise may be intended for is simply to remind me that my Being comes before all the things I glue onto it.

I am.

I’m not this.

I’m not that.

I’m just a human being.

The analogy of gluing things onto ourselves so that we can disguise ourselves and adopt a persona that seems to us to be impressive and important is, I believe, an accurate one. We want to be important. This is a motivating factor in almost everyone’s life. I want to be important and respected too.

Yet, paradoxically, it galls me when people praise me for anything. I want to be recognized, not praised. I want to learn how to be a decent human being, not one who excels at things and is better than others at them. I’d just like to be properly, respectfully ordinary, to be good enough to acquit myself honorably in this life. To fulfill my duties to God, to others, and myself. To treat others decently and with respect — something I so often fail at. This is the awkward truth. I talk a good game, but it’s always a struggle for me to come back to the basics and just be decent and mindful of others. It’s true, there’s part of me that has a gift for Being: but the parts in me that don’t have that gift mess around with everything constantly.

I mean constantly.

So I’m like a crab, scuttling around on the ocean floor with bits of things glued to me that make me look important and keep others from seeing who I actually am. Unconsciously, with everything I do, I’m always keeping an eye out for new bits to glue to myself: things that are glittery and impressive, that set me apart, so others will be impressed. What a fine carapace I have! I think to myself. I must add to it.

The difficulty there is that the things I glue to myself also prevent me from seeing who I am.

One of the things that changed inside me 19 years ago is that my organic sensation awakened. This is not an event described in the science literature about human psychology or physiology; and it isn’t discussed in most spiritual disciplines. The one discipline I know of where we study this question is the Gurdjieff work.

That doesn’t make it better than other spiritual disciplines, but it does give a relatively unique perspective on this particular understanding of human nature. If I sense myself, with this capacity, there's a second intelligence within me that serves as a center of gravity. It doesn’t fix me or make me better than others; definitely not. It simply inserts an objective "fact" of Being at the root of my perception. (I capitalize this word quite frequently to distinguish it from our ordinary sense of being.) Gurdjieff told his pupils that the organic sense of Being, should we have it, creates our individuality.

This can be a distinctly uncomfortable experience, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here; but the point is that it reminds me that I am.

I am, before all the other things happen.

One of the things that changed in me is that I see it with this second mind, this part that perceives organically. We *are*—before we claim we're artists, or lawyers, or teachers or whatever it is we say we are.

In fact, we all precisely inhabit a very important, precious, beautiful and intelligent pre-events Being that Gurdjieff called “I am.”

The difficulty is that we forget it because there’s so much stuff glued to our shell that we can barely move. We stagger from one event to the next in our lives covered with all the stuff we use to identify ourselves, buried under the weight of it. If the real “I” — the part of me that just is — manages to get a glimpse through the rubble glued onto my Being a few times a day, I’m a lucky one. Most of the time there's so much rubble glued to my shell that I barely see what is going on around me. I identify other things and people by bumping into them. I react in fear because I can’t see them clearly. I lash out. I have pretty good claws; and the first thing I do if I bump into something I can’t see very well is whip them out and threaten.

Much exchange of information, unfortunately, is mediated almost exclusively between our mutual sets of claws. Because of our relative blindness, we always keep them extended. It's how we meet each other—claws out.

Safer that way, you know.

In addition to my intelligence and this second mind which I refer to as organic sensation — sometimes I also call it the molecular sense of being, because the intelligence is embedded in our cells, not the head brain we value so very highly —there’s a third intelligence of feeling which is also organic. Everyone also has this capacity in them. The human organism is built with the capacity for organic sensation and organic feeling by default. They're just buried under all the rubble, waiting for us to notice them. Organic feeling brings an honest, as opposed to obscured, quality of feeling to my life.

There's no doubt that I'm frequently going to do the wrong thing; but when my parts, that head brain I was speaking of and my organic sensation, get together, they create a condition that invites organic feeling to arise. There are no guarantees here, but it vastly increases the chances that I will actually exercise some humility in a situation, instead of insisting that I be right and that I get my own way. I have to lay myself down, take the rubble off my crab shell (yes, stop being crabby!) and expose who I actually am to the facts. This is a painful process I’ve had to go through many times in life since I changed inside. I was very lucky; I’m a recovering alcoholic and already I had practiced this kind of self-examination when I got sober, so there was some prepared ground to work in. But that’s just sheer luck.

It turns out that we never finish picking all the little bits of rubble off the hard shell of our personality, which separates us so decisively from the world. Personality tends to pick new bits of rubble up and glue them to the shell as fast as I peel them off. It’s just the way it is. Part of me wants to hide. There's some intelligence behind this as well; the world is a dangerous place and I do need some protection. The question is, what kind of protection do I need? And do I see it, or do I think I am actually the things I glue on to my being?

No one ever gets conclusive answers to these things. It’s an ongoing investigation. It’s very helpful, however, to begin with this idea that I am. That I am not this, or that, but that I just am. In a simple way, without all the complications of the rubble.

Along the way, please don't forget to take a look at my friend Patty Llosa's new book, Awakening Body Consciousness.

It's all about not being crabby.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.