Meditations on Responsibility, Part V: A Single World

   

There’s a passage in In Search of the Miraculous where Gurdjieff discusses the meaning of the word “world” with Ouspensky. He points out that the word has different meanings to different people.

What he doesn’t point out is that the word actually has a single meaning from an esoteric point of view. The “world” consists of the entire sum total of all the impressions that a single human being takes into themselves over the course of a lifetime. This encompasses every definition of the word that Gurdjieff explores in the passage; everything that a human being can think of, every concept they encounter, every taste they taste, every bird and cloud they see, every symphony they hear, every man or woman they love or hate, every philosophy they espouse and all the information they learn over the course of a life.

Over the course of a lifetime, we have to become responsible for our world. This is critical to understanding Gurdjieff’s adage, “use the present to repair the past and prepare the future.” It’s meant to indicate our relationship to our world within the present moment.

We are vessels into which the world flows. “The” world is the entirety of our impressions; and this includes our impressions, both inner and outer. I’ve explained on numerous occasions that our being is a solar system into which material falls. Over the course of a lifetime, this material accretes; and eventually, presuming one is properly prepared, one must turn towards it in a comprehensive manner and become responsible for all of it. That is to say, I become a custodian of my own world, my own life, in its entirety; and I have two principal factors which must be engaged in that act of custodianship. Those two factors are conscience and remorse. They’re the only properties in my psyche and my soul that can help me to digest the food of my life and incorporate its raw material into Being in a meaningful way.

While the aim of the organic sensation of Being — and the development of Being itself — are essential aims at the beginning of work, they are by a wide measure not enough. They’re only the foundations of an action to be undertaken by remorse of conscience. That action is comprehensive; it must involve everything; because absolutely everything that has taken place in one’s life and one’s inner world has to be dealt with in the process of understanding. Not knowing: one can know just about anything, but this is done almost exclusively with the mind. Understanding is a quite different thing that takes place within feeling, which binds the mind and the body together into the single whole which Gurdjieff called three-brained being.

One of the difficulties with understanding spiritual work in general, and the Gurdjieff work in particular, is that people always want to gain understanding through one part or another, and skip the rest; it’s believed that to know through feeling can lead to understanding, or that to know through the body can lead to understanding. 

To support this contention, we must confess that there is no doubt that great understanding can arise within a single center. For example, I’ve been listening to recordings of piano music by Mahani Teave, a very talented piano player from Easter Island, and it’s clear that she has great understanding of the piano and of music itself within moving center. A professional tennis player has equally great understanding within the context of their own form. Yet this is singular understanding; and singular understanding is a form of overdevelopment that often comes at the expense of understanding in the other centers. 

We seek rather to develop a balanced understanding; and this requires work within the “whole world,” not just on “one continent.” 

In the context of responsibility, I owe my attention to the whole world, not part of it.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.