On the Absence of Conscience in Man, or, My Life Among the Heathens

 

Human beings generally lack conscience in any real form. Conscience can only arise from real suffering; and until a person is unified within being, there is no real suffering. 

Real suffering is a force that applies itself only to real being. The casual suffering that we encounter as an automatic and ordinary fact of life is real within the limits of its own actions; but its action is always an external one and not the result of a struggle within one’s own will, one’s own identity and one’s own existence. It forms itself exclusively around outer things, and the ego takes it personally.

We all know how this is. Yet for as long as we’re divided inside, it’s impossible to see the action or to understand the difference between the action of outer suffering –which needs to be allowed to take place as it is, along with ordinary emotional reaction — and the action of inner suffering, which must not be allowed to take place casually and in the absence of our participation. 

Inner suffering is the place where the soul is formed.

From this point of view, we don't even know what a soul is — and yet we profess to have one. The soul is not a casually acquired entity. It is clawed and sorted out from the soil of our lives fragment by fragment, and refined in a fire that only we ourselves can tend. Of course every entity acquires something of this kind by the end of its life; yet it is the way that it’s formed that makes a difference, and we don’t see that when we’re alive.

If human beings had real conscience, none of what takes place on the planet would go as it goes now. Real conscience, properly formed, contains a respect for other beings within it which no other force can provide. All of the outer forces mankind has invented to regulate its behavior are ersatz forces, substitutes that one wallpapers over the real situation with. It’s like thick plastic duct taped over a window in place of glass; it keeps the wind out and lets a little light in, but one can’t see in through it; and what is inside equally can’t see outward. All of the seeing of truth that conscience might provide is reduced to a simulation in which only imagination is functional. We imagine we are compassionate; we imagine we care about others and feel this way or that way. In reality, all of these forces in us are terrifically weak, first of all because there is no transparency.

The emphasis on acquiring real being is essential because conscience — real conscience — cannot be based on anything other than real being. The results of one’s manifestations and the consequences thereof must become absolutely real to a woman or a man in order for them to do any real suffering; and everything in us is arranged to avoid seeing our manifestations and their consequences. Everything becomes a rationalization; everything is an excuse. If we were to truly look these things in the eye, we would see how awful the situation actually is. This would disturb us; and we are arranged inside to avoid every kind of disturbance. We hypnotize ourselves with the sense that we are okay and everything is okay. We Disneyland everything by turning life into a theme park. Okay-world. La la land.

Gurdjieff asked his pupils to examine the past with care and to begin to suffer, instance by instance, with the truth of how we have behaved and the way we’ve been in the past. The aim of this isn’t to destroy ourselves through negative criticism and destructive introspection; rather, the aim is to engage emotionally with the truth, which can become a therapy for the soul whereby it has at least a chance to heal itself through truth. This is the opposite of buying into the lies we tell ourselves, the comfortable lives we would like to lead.

It doesn’t mean that there is no tranquility available; merely that we cannot understand tranquility as we are.

I refer to life among the heathens. The word is derived from the German Heide and approximately means, life among the open countries, the heath. Conventionally, the word indicates those who are members of pantheistic religions or who have no religion at all.

This can be easily likened to those who believe whatever they want, or whatever other people tell them. Gurdjieff advised his students to recognize that 2×2 = 4; but in the world of the heathen, 2×2 equals anything you want it to — or anything the next person says it does. It is, in other words, an entirely subjective realm; an open country in which you can wander in all directions without obstacles, but which has no features to distinguish it. The heath is a big, beautiful open space, but there’s no food for real humans there. For bees, insects, perhaps; but for the purposes of life and of humanity, it serves little. 

It isn’t quite barren: plants grow there, so we can’t equate it to the desert. The desert would be a better place, because at least there the severity and austerity, the lack of water, the presence of nothing but rocks and sand, plants with thorny exteriors, would serve as a stunning reminder of our lack. The heath puts us to sleep with a sweet scent and a lovely field of colorful tiny flowers. We forget that there isn’t much real there for us. It allows us to project our imagination onto it and pretend that it can serve us well.

Leaving the meadow analogy aside, I refer to the lack of conscience as “life among the heathen” because I am a member of an organized religion – Christianity. Those who would prefer to expunge this element from Gurdjieff’s teaching are bound to misunderstand it, because it’s central. It just bears far more relationship to the transcendental Gnostic mysticism of Meister Eckhart’s Christianity than that of the religion that renders God, as Gurdjieff calls him, as “an old Jew with a beard.” The phrase is reminiscent of Zen Buddhism’s reference to “red-bearded barbarians.” 

Personifications. Opinions.

The question arises here of whether conscience can arise or exist in the absence of a form. It cannot; feeling arises in context, and real feeling must arise in real context. The difficulty here is that if we have no real context, no real being, there is no real feeling. The form is not an exterior form; it is created within us by ourselves. We must become wholly responsible for it if we have a real wish. 

This is a very practical activity that has nothing to do with philosophy. It is the tension of bone against bone and the infusion of blood by marrow that brings us to this activity: the living, breathing sensation of our own being, which alone can remind us both of our existence as we are here, now, and our mortality in the brief light of our rather short existence. 

Those things might remind us of something true; and from there, we might begin to know something and feel something real, rather than believing in that which is not—but for the fact that we pretend it is so.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.