Meditations on Responsibility, Part VII: Pondering

 

 It’s possible to develop to quite a high level, even one of conscious being, without fully shearing off the selfishness in us. In fact selfishness can become more concentrated and defended as one becomes more aware, because it retreats into a citadel when it sees the threat of self-awareness developing around it. Hence Gurdjieff’s Hasnamusses, creatures who obtain objective reason but are still contaminated with ego. The only antidote to this is to see one’s own nothingness; and ego has a way of deceiving us in order to make us think we are doing that, when in fact nothing of the kind is taking place.

Ego wants to pay for nothing. Au contraire. Ego is a miser; and it wants others to pay it.

Well, then, this is been a rather long excursion into some of the metaphysical infrastructure of the questions surrounding responsibility and payment. That wasn’t intended when I began the essay, but things seemed to inevitably lead in the direction they’ve taken us. 

The original point of the essay was about sensing our lives in a new way and becoming more responsible for them. To become responsible for everything. 

This requires pondering: it is a weighing, a critical re-examination of every event in life, the throwing away of all the assumptions I’ve ever had about my life and what it means. I need to throw away my attitudes and opinions about my life, things that are formed from simple thoughts and simple emotions. Instead I'm called to feel and to sense them in a new way, and only after I get the taste of my world through those two centers of being — only then, after —to bring thinking to the matter. To bring it only with a critical and skeptical eye, “I,” in which I doubt everything, fault everything I have ever done. This, mind you, not with the aim of tearing myself apart and breaking things down, but with the aim of finding every weakness in the structure and reinforcing it with something better than what it has now. This repairing the past can only be done through ruthless self-examination and ruthless self-criticism.

In this action, I’m inevitably forced to the present moment where I still (as always) engage in various indelible actions of ego and self-satisfaction. This moment is “the present.” But I can’t be passive in the present — I must use it. Using it means to engage in this comprehensive self-critical action of remorse; and in that already I prepare the future, because in the action of contemplating the entirety of my life, within the present, already my center of gravity relative to the acts of ego and self-satisfaction that are currently taking place in me is different. 

In that very difference lies the future I prepare for. It’s a future in which my conscience and my remorse leverage my selfishness; and the longer the lever, the further out of myself and into something higher I am lifted.

All of these ideas and concepts relate in deeper ways to the things that Meister Eckhart says about the action of the soul and the search for the good; and every one of them is related in one way or another to Gurdjieff’s practice and Swedenborg’s cosmology. These are not separate things; and each one of them contains an essential part of what is needed. If I were to liken them to the three centers, I would say that Gurdjieff’s practice is the body and the sensation of inner work; Swedenborg’s teachings are its intellect; and Meister Eckhart brings us its feeling. 

But these are just my opinions and represent theoretical positions. In reality, the teachings are part of a single whole.

Perhaps the reader will understand that much of what I speak of here is impossible to undertake when young. There’s by no means enough material in the average person under the age of 40 to begin contemplating the kind of inner action discussed here; even if one is attracted to this work at an early age, it can’t truly be undertaken until there’s enough material to work with. And it isn’t until the age of 60 or older that that material begins to reach a critical mass in which more real things might become possible. 

In the end, only the humility imposed upon us by the realization of our mortality can provide enough force, enough heat and enough pressure, to begin to weld these elements into a more durable entity.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.