Not about potatoes

 

We have a duty to think about life as we live it.

When I say it’s a duty, I mean that to think about life is a sacred task we’ve been given. We live in a universe that engages in a contemplation of itself; and each one of us is tasked with a portion of that activity.

There are those who think about life without fully living it; and those who live life without fully thinking about it. Neither one is sufficient in the end. They must be done together in order to bear fruit.

This is a universe, as well, where things bind themselves together. That’s how the forces that surround us and create us work. 

When we think, and we live, we bind life and thought together. 

Each one is an action, not a result; each one goes to a new place as it arises and continues.

I came to this observation quite simply while walking along the road at lunchtime, as I passed by a pile of very large pieces of granite, each weighing more than a car, that had been to cut into rectangles and were lying on the side of the road by the woods, awaiting a destiny that seemed to be certain when they were moved to where they are but is now in question, like everything else. 

The observation was accompanied by the sorrow of understanding. This is a natural product of living and thinking about life at the same time. Because we so rarely have an impression of it, we aren’t that familiar with it; but we ought to be. It is what lends life its sweetness.

Now, you might think that thinking is done with the brain, but this isn’t true. The whole body thinks. Every cell, every nerve in it thinks. Even the molecules in the body are engaged in the process of thought, because thought is a whole thing that encompasses the entire organism, not just part of it. If you had to look for where a thought is in you, you couldn’t locate it. It’s metaphysical, even though it appears to arise inside the body. 

It is, in other words, connected to something very subtle and refined that represents a force we poorly understand and pay much less attention to than we should. All of our sensations and feelings are part of thought about life; it’s not just the ideas we piece together from concepts and associations. Life itself is, in this way, a thought.

Unfortunately, thinking has for some strange reason acquired a bad reputation in the Gurdjieff work. Everything seems to emphasize sensation first — rightly so, in some ways, but the intellect seems to get thrown by the wayside as though it were a cheap piece of goods, whereas, in fact, it is one of the most important faculties we have. It's the best tool to bind understanding of the other centers together; and without it, let us be frank, we would not just be idiots, we would be morons. (The word is derived from the Greek, meaning foolish.)

Thought is a whole thing that emerges from Being to assemble the meaning we perceive. We can understand it, in this sense, as a product of cooperation between our intellect, our sensation, and our feeling, yet it is a legitimate emergent property in its own right. This means that it becomes a greater thing than just what the intellect provides. In real thought, intelligent elements from each of our parts are present. Our intellect, our sensation, and our feeling combine selected perceptions to create thought.

This happens all the time; but we don’t notice it, because we're generally unaware of ourselves and how we function. Yet when we have a reaction – for example, let’s say we get angry — almost instantly, all three centers participate; our intellect arouses protestation, our sensation fires us up with a rush of adrenaline that prepares us to fight about it, and our feeling becomes the trigger on a weapon. Everyone knows what this feels like.

A balanced perception is different. It does not rush to the moment unconsidered in the way that an emotional reaction does. More could be said about this, but I’m focusing for the time being on the function of thought about life.

We are capable of much deeper thoughts about life than we think we are. Life is an experiment we are meant to be deeply immersed in; and we are supposed to contemplate the contradictions, paradoxes, beauty, and mystery of this process in every way we can. Those various qualities are always combined in each object, event, circumstance, and condition; yet what is typical of our behavior is an insistence on focusing on just one thing, in an obsessive/compulsive manner. To take all of the qualities in at once requires a larger vision, a less narrow focus. Deeper thought helps to bring that possibility into Being within us.

For whatever reason — probably because it’s true — Walt Whitman comes to mind. He was a man who thought quite deeply indeed about life, and his Leaves of Grass is a record of that. The book is a call to us from the place we do not go to very often; and yet it reminds us that that place is, in fact, a home that we left when we were children and have forgotten to go back to for a very long time. 

Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.