Struggle and Intensification

 

March 31.

My ordinary parts and the parts that have a wish are different. 

The whole point of work is to intensify the consciousness, the awareness, of the difference between these two parts. At first the part that has the wish is weak and can barely be seen. Everything about it is philosophical, theoretical. It has taken root in the mind but it has no substance, no material that makes it a solid thing in the body.

One can live one’s whole life in this way. To have the wish take root in the body is a matter of the right soil, the right temperature, the right amount of moisture. The first thing that’s needed is to create those conditions; yet if I don’t know anything about them, I'm stumbling around in the dark.

Suffering can help. In point of fact, the whole effort of work is directed towards intensifying the struggle, because for as long as one is alive, one inhabits the territory between these two natures, the inner and the outer nature. During the course of 1944, Gurdjieff repeatedly told his Paris groups that they had to focus on developing the inner nature and understanding it as distinct. 

Group members repeatedly bring outer material about ordinary things, and he repeatedly dismisses it as uninteresting and absolutely worthless relative to group work.

This question of struggle is essential. One cannot engage in struggle until one is relatively free of the outer influences, to the extent that they manifest but one is not identified with them. They don’t go away. It means we're there with them and we struggle with them. We're increasingly confronted with our own contradictions; and the more we develop, the more intense that confrontation becomes. We have to suffer our location between these two eventualities of being. The worse it gets, the better. As Gurdjieff says in one meeting, he sometimes derives enjoyment from watching someone who has so far spent their life in roses fall into the thorns.

The worst of it, perhaps, is when we begin to see that playing a role absolutely depends on our being exactly as we are, with every bit of filth that's in us active and busy doing what it does, while we stay with it and see it. This is not an act for the faint of heart. Inevitably, the human instinct is to either be the filth and forget about real Being, or try to “use” real Being to exterminate the filth. In addressing either case, great restraint is necessary, and this can only be exercised using will. First, the mechanical will to be as one is; second, the conscious will to stay there within it. This is, in one of the senses of the term, conscious egoism, because the “I am” has a demand put on it to make bedfellows with the mechanical nature of the outer ego.

Is this “liberation?”

I can’t tell you. 

I’ve had experiences that enlightenment aficionados would call “liberation”; not just momentary ones, but experiences that lasted for days and weeks and months. It turned out they weren't for me. 

What I can tell you is that the demand that the Gurdjieff work puts on us is quite different than this “liberation,” which in my own estimation serves only as an illustration of one side of what we are. Gurdjieff demanded that we inhabit both sides; and this makes him unique, because in his work there is no escape from the fact of our subjectivity. Only conscious immersion in it puts us at the axis of Being; and it’s only from that locus that anything objective might result.

In this sense, this work isn’t for everyone. It doesn’t “produce” anything like what one expects or what the ordinary parts desire or what one has read about and been told by the “magical beings” who serve as spiritual guides who will help us calm down, achieve bliss, and be nice to everyone. It invites us to sit between the angels and the devils and suffer the condition.

This is in fact a very rich place; Gurdjieff described it as purgatory. In the general sense of the word, it’s quite certain that he saw this action as a means of purification, whereby we could eventually express (that is, extract by pressure) the selfish elements of our being so that they don’t contaminate our awareness or judgment. Struggle and suffering, remorse of conscience, are essential to this process. 

Don’t come here if you don’t want to work in this way. It’s not the place for you. 

They are passing out halos over there, and on the other side they are passing out pitchforks. Go collect one if that’s where you feel you belong. Lots of people get along just great by doing this. It is the fashion.

Just remember that if you pick up a halo or a pitchfork, you are done for. 

There is no change after that.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.