Meditations on Responsibility: Part IV. Notes from March 4.

I hear the words duty and responsibility. But what do I really understand of them?

For as long as I remain a slave to my selfish desires, which project themselves onto the movie screen of my awareness all day long, I’m just a spectator in the seats. Life is there to entertain me. I own everything; and everything from outside that displeases me must be rejected. I understand something of owing; but everything is kept in an accounting book where I am the master. Things are owed to me. If I have a sense of owing something back, it’s always within the context of the material. I owe John $50. And so on. God — virtue, honor, higher principles — are all abstractions. So I only owe to them to the extent that I have been told to owed to them by my upbringing, the school I went to, my country.

I ‘ve never developed an organic, an inner, sense of owing anything. This because I’ve never even conceived of how things could be arranged in such a way.

It’s only with the development of being and an inner faculty that has a three-brained quality that I can begin to sense anything higher than myself. This is the only sensation that can produce an understanding of what I owe; that understanding is dependent on a set of finer sensations and feelings that, under ordinary circumstances, never touch me at all. Ordinary life has arranged me in such a way that these experiences are kept distant. Gurdjieff said that “great nature” has arranged it that way; that forces larger than us would prefer we be kept asleep to these influences. Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it isn’t. One is prompted to ask oneself whether it might be my own fault, and not the fault of “great nature.”

Have I tried hard enough to understand my life? Do I ever think from any perspective other than my own? Outer considering, after all, is in its entirety a practice of placing the locus of thought outside of the narrow range of myself and my own desires. That takes some doing, doesn’t it? Yet Gurdjieff says to do it always—not just once in a while when the random thought happens to pop back into my mind.

The point here is that the practice has to become organic. The wish for being needs to penetrate down through the flesh and the blood and the bones into the marrow of being. 

The marrow of being is where a wish is actually born; and that wish is only born by seeing where I am and understanding — as Gurdjieff always said — my own nothingness. 

Something new can be born in that place, something which we cannot write down or explain — even to ourselves.

That new thing is an organic consciousness that abides in sensation and invites feeling. 

These two faculties, once they join thought, can place me quite clearly in the place where I understand that I owe. I owe a great deal; in fact, I owe everything, and so if I wish to fulfill the fourth striving —from the beginning of one's existence the striving to pay as quickly as possible for one's arising and individuality, in order afterward to be free to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our Common Father—in fact, I discover quite quickly that I have to pay everything. This is what Christ meant when he said that we must pay to the last penny. 

This question of responsibility cannot be so easily defined, then; because what duty is, what dues must be paid, are metaphysical and consist of a complete surrender on the order of what Meister Eckhart proposes is necessary. 

That kind of action can only spring from an organic conscious awareness. And even if that awareness is developed, it only helps at first to understand how vast the debt is, and how unwilling I am to pay it. This is where struggle actually begins: not the struggle to become aware, but the struggle, once aware, to understand what awareness demands of me.

  May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.