The Voice of the Silent Mind

 

Happy Halloween. A sarcophagus (this one from the collection of the Louvre) seems appropriate to both the date and the post.

Enmeshed as we are in its action, it’s quite difficult to see how the mind interferes with almost everything.

When Gurdjieff wrote Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, his intention was that the material would penetrate beneath the surface of our conscious mind into our subconscious mind, which he called our “real” mind. This mind is quite different than our conceptualization of mind; it's not a theoretical construction. Yet our idea of it is theoretical; and thus, even though we think we know what he meant when he referred to it, we don’t. 

The subconscious mind is a highly organic entity that penetrates the whole body much like the mycelium of a fungus. Every cell is connected by it. It's so different and so unusual compared to our ordinary "thought" that we can’t even properly think of it. An experience of it is the only thing that can gain meaning.

I’ve noticed that a high percentage of folks following Gurdjieff’s ideas follow them based on widespread adoption of theories and thoughts. This is the same problem that was described by Zen master Ta Hui. The need to sit down quietly and be quite empty is forgotten in the midst of the urge to express opinions and make noise. 

In the midst of opinions and noise, the subconscious mind is buried. The intellect is the sand; and the subconscious is Egypt. Those who are confused about why Egypt was chosen as the symbol for the subconscious should read Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven, in which he explains the importance of the Egyptian understanding of correspondence and how it relates to the inner spiritual world of man. That understanding is completely forgotten in the modern world.

In any event, what is interesting to me this morning is the nature of being relative to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind isn't theoretical and has nothing of the theoretical in it. Intelligence and sensation, such as we may still experience them, are rooted in this mind which sees the world not the way I wish it was, but the way it actually is. In this sense it's a powerful organ for perception that has become completely dormant in people. Folks are so busy, in this and other works, telling each other “how it is” that the voice of the silent mind is completely drowned out. Not a whisper of it can be detected in ordinary day-to-day activity. It’s as though there were a mob of hooligans with pots, pans and wooden spoons, marching through town banging on them and shouting chants about how important their mob was.

It takes tremendous restraint to avoid participating in this activity, because it is strongly magnetic and accretive and it draws everyone into it because it looks and sounds important. Crowded places filled with people making a lot of noise seem to signify events that ought to be important because they display a crude kind of consensus; and human beings crave consensus of one kind or another because relationship is natural to us. What we don’t see is the quality of our consensus.

Think about this carefully, please, because that one last remark says everything about not just the outer conditions in which we work and live, but also about our inner Being. 

Inner Being tends to function in exactly the same way. The things that make the most noise and attract the most attention — strictly by contraction, mind you — are the ones that seem to be important. We rely on the contraction of our Being around “important” ideas, and attempt to get others to do the same. In this way we develop a correspondence of contraction that's not at all useful in experiencing our Being. Being needs to be concentrated; and this correspondence of contraction creates an ersatz concentration. It looks real. We believe it. Yet it's an aberration. Even more perversely, we refuse to let go of it because we're so convinced that it serves us.

The quality of our consensus needs to be carefully examined. When Gurdjieff speaks about “relaxing the small muscles” — something that he discusses quite commonly in the meetings of Paris groups in 1944 — he’s not just talking about the physical muscles of the body, but all of the muscles that draw intelligence and feeling together, the metaphysical muscles of the subconscious mind. Artificial contraction and tension between them eventually damages their function. Then the belief arises that the ersatz concentration is the real thing; and almost nothing can convince a person otherwise. The first thing they will do if you try to explain this to them is argue about it,  to bring useless opinions to the table which would be better left unspoken and even better still, untouched in the first place.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.